"The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed"
Stanislav Govorukhin
350 minutes
1979

The setting for this combined whodunit/cop-show 
is the end of World War II with soldiers coming 
back and the Soviet state preparing to do battle 
with a Russian mafia that had arisen during World 
War II. The no-nonsense cop played by Vladimir 
Vysotsky reminds one of straight-forward U.$. 
cops as played on television by "Officer Friday" 
with his "just the facts ma'am" attitude.

One of the tensions in the movie is between legal 
and illegal means of handling criminals. 
This struggle manifests itself between the arguably cynical
main character played by Vysotsky and a newly
returned hero-soldier who respects the law.
Westerners are also absorbed in the relationship 
between criminals and police that appears in the 
film. Some critics noted that the film gives a context
for why people imprisoned by the Stalin regime in
many cases respected Stalin and the people who
imprisoned them.

MIM respects the Soviet police of that era and the 
film director obviously intended not much blatant 
Western-style criticism either, just some tension 
over "issues," as we say today. Brezhnev's regime 
approved the film and there are many historical 
aspects of the film that MIM also has to approve.

One thing we do not see in the film is anyone 
going over the connection between the mafia and 
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. However, 
we have to admit that Stalin would not 
have covered that aspect either. He only would have
addressed Liberalism
and how it lets the enemy off the hook, thus possibly
justifying tough police tactics in this case.
At the very least Stalin would have said there were
"enemies" in the party that would have made it easier
for the mafia.

In the final, climactic scene, the Soviet police 
arrest the mafia-gang, and call out the head 
"Gorbaty." Since this whole film became an element 
of pop culture, it found its way into songs and it 
became a way of criticizing Gorbachev to mention 
the final lines of the movie when the mafia-boss 
gets called out of hiding by the name "Gorbaty."

The band "Lyube" wrote the following lyrics of 
note: "There is no bread but there is plenty of 
shoeshine cream/ And the hunchbacked boss (Gorbaty 
glavar) is humiliating us." Typical of the mess in 
Russian politics, the band as if marketing in the u$a 
went on to support Yeltsin and said it did not 
mean to support communism. Such inconsistency is 
the hallmark of the petty-bourgeoisie, one minute 
appealing to proletarian sentiments and the next 
kow-towing to imperialists.

When the mafia came out of hiding in the Soviet Union,
it became openly capitalist. There was no crackdown by
proletarian-minded police. As a result of a lack of
proletarian repression, the life expectancy of Russian
men plummeted; imprisonment rates more than doubled and
millions of orphaned children became homeless. That's not
to mention the pensioners freezing to death in their homes and
not obtaining their stipends.

Note:
http://heiwo.net/fbj/showlog.asp?cat_id=31&log_id=398 in Chinese
http://russia-in-us.com/Music/Rock/Lyube/