Volga-Volga

13 September 2020

My previous blogpost was about the newly-restored North River Terminal in Moscow. One of its smart new restaurants is called ‘Volga-Volga’, after a popular film which came out the year after the Terminal was built and which features the building in its finale.

Here’s a description of the film – which is a favourite of mine as well as of Stalin’s!

‘Volga-Volga (Russian: Волга-Волга) is a Soviet film comedy directed by Grigori Aleksandrov, released on April 24, 1938. It centres on a group of amateur performers on their way to Moscow to perform in a talent contest called the Moscow Musical Olympiad. Most of the action takes place on a steamboat travelling on the Volga River. The lead roles were played by Alexandrov’s wife, Lyubov Orlova, and Igor Ilyinsky.

According to Orlova, the name of the film is taken from a popular Russian folk song, Stenka Razin, that Alexandrov sang while rowing with Charlie Chaplin in San Francisco Bay. Chaplin jokingly suggested the words as a title for a movie, but Alexandrov took it seriously and named his new film Volga-Volga.

The feature was said to be Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s favourite film. Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs says that in the pre-war period Stalin laughed at him since he resembled a character from the film.’

You can find the whole film on YouTube, including English subtitles. Apologies for the blurry nature of these screen-shots, but I hope they give a flavour of the film. The story ends with a chaotic but ultimately uplifting ceremony at the Moscow North River Terminal, including a patriotic song praising the Motherland and the River Volga.

On board the ‘Joseph Stalin’