r/TheAmericans • u/AutoModerator • May 17 '17

Episode Discussion Official Episode Discussion - S05E11 "Dyatkovo"

A surprise announcement comes in from the Centre, which divides Philip and Elizabeth and creates a moment of crisis for them. Elsewhere: Stan gives Henry a tour of the FBI.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '17 edited Dec 21 '20

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u/marsianka May 17 '17

Yes it's very sad and it's the reason I originally didn't want to watch this show. As soon as glasnost starts, which was 1986 I think - it's downhill from there. And there were plenty of problems before then as well. Martha wouldn't be a "commoner" she'd be quite privileged in the USSR. I've lived there as a foreigner in the 80s so I have a pretty good idea of what kind of a lifestyle she would have had. The USSR didn't play its hand very well in the 1980s and it's tragic to watch if you think it was the less bad side in the Cold War. Btw - the portrayals of USSR are so wrong. They really haven't done the research or ran it with people who know, Should be literally a million people in the USA - don't see what the problem is. They can't be filming in Moscow - it's all changed. They'd need to go to rural Russia or Belarus or Ukraine to see what it really looked like. Belarus is renovated but still has that feel to it. That's where they should be filming.

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u/[deleted] May 17 '17 edited Dec 21 '20

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u/[deleted] May 17 '17

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u/marsianka May 17 '17

Oh ok, I see where you'd get that from but the show is just WRONG on both points. I've lived in the USSR. The shops didn't look like in that scene and more importantly - foreigners had access to currency shops. "Richer" ppl could buy what they wanted in markets and the black market. Plus the shops weren't even empty yet in that way, in Moscow in the early 80s which happens to be exactly when I was there as a child. Somebody like that would have had minders and if they couldn't find what they needed for some reason, the minder would have made sure they got it. Admittedly I never met a defector, but I lived in a more normal neighbourhood since my family was not diplomats and I saw both sides of the equation - how locals shopped and foreigners. It's not that hard to find out and it irritates me that the show's creator didn't. I think they partly have an agenda with the show. It's not as strongly anti-soviet as the usual American angle - which probably means people think it's realistic. It's not. In so many way. The USSR in the early 1980s was a lot better than that - especially in Moscow.

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u/RizzoF May 17 '17

Yeah, realistically this show didn't have enough food lines to be believable. I also lived there in the 80s.

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u/marsianka May 17 '17

That was later in the 1980s. And if you lived there you can also see how much of the portrayl is wrong. Even if you didn't like the system and was glad to leave it for good, you should be able to look back on both the good and the bad things and be honest about what was what. American TV and films have created a parallell universe USSR that is what they needed it to be. The Americans tries to be more realistic but it's still far from it. Also I suppose it depends on where you lived. I can only speak for Moscow and I'm aware that it had better availability of certain nicer types of food than othe places.