Operation White Birch – Part 4.2

Don't forget to read Part 4.1!

Operation White Birch – Part 4.1

Hello there, my excellent old and new subscribers! I'm not sure when the next OWB installment will be ready. Hopefully, before the end of July. Wish me luck!

The four of us sat down to dinner, to enjoy a delicious array of Russian and Central Asian delicacies, such as shashlik, blinis, caviar, salads and fruits.

Ms. Lebedev encouraged me to have a little sip of Armenian brandy, while trying with little success to keep Piotr the driver and the bottle of liquor as far as possible from each other. Then she picked up her guitar, and we all joined her gorgeous contralto voice in singing old romances and songs.

After a heartfelt rendition of Dark is the night¹ – a sad and nostalgic war song from the 1943 film Two Soldiers – that had moved us all to tears, especially Piotr, by then completely drunk, Ms. Lebedev ended the great evening with panache, singing us one of her evergreens – The Sassy Sailor – from her first, eponymous film.

The story behind this 1960's movie is quite remarkable. It was meant to be a musical for all the family and, like most of those films, had a rather preposterous preamble.

Little girl Sasha was born during the Second Great Patriotic War² in a family with 4 sons. As a result of a bureaucratic mishap, her full name Aleksandra has been misspelt as Aleksandr, and this makes her a boy in the eyes of the State. And so, at the age of 18, young Sasha is called up for the military service, and is assigned to the Navy. The ridiculous plot thickens when Sasha joins her unit and, instead of shaving her head, they give her a pixie cut hairstyle that makes her eyes and face even more strikingly beautiful.

The other guys are not happy, though. They think that, what with her being a girl, Sasha will avoid all the graft that being a Soviet sailor entails. They play practical jokes on her, but she stays unfussed, works hard, plays harder, and saves the day during a naval exercise gone wrong, finally becoming one of the boys.

The short-lived Women’s Naval Team, created in the Summer of 1917, after the February Revolution. It was disbanded after the October Bolshevik Revolution. Read more (in Russian). Actually, as my precious reader Larisa Rimerman noticed, this image looks too modern for a 1917 picture, and she's right. It was probably shot much later, probably in the 1920's, or even 1930's.

They all sail to an unnamed Black Sea port, where an unnamed hostile foreign power tries to do unspeakable things to their ship, but Sasha and her crew, all hands on deck, manage triumphantly to send those pesky foreigners back to their hostile Country.

Sasha is finally discharged and goes back to her village in the North, where she achieves her childhood dream of becoming a math teacher.

The action is peppered with cheeky, dazzling musical numbers, purposefully meant to distract the audience from the sheer silliness of the plot. The censors didn't notice anything untoward – no female nudity, no swearing, no love stories that could have led to physical expressions of affection (unless you count the crush that the Admiral's daughter develops for Sasha – thinking she's a young man – promptly nipped in the bud by an agnition, with Sasha giving her a similar pixie haircut to cheer her up) – but they totally overlooked the movie's subtle yet clear homosexual undertones.

When someone finally noticed them, it was too late to do anything about it: the film had become a huge success; every child all over the Country wanted a Sassy Sailor costume; even the State tobacco company The Gloriously Glowing Red Tip had produced a new cigarette pack, featuring the silhouette of a strapping sailor, uncannily prescient of Tom of Finland's men; all the songs were by then popular instant classics, especially the following one, quickly translated into the languages of the other 14 Republics of the Soviet Union, then in Polish, German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Finnish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Mongolian, Vietnamese, and now in a clumsy sort of English, courtesy of yours truly. Enjoy!

The Sassy Sailor's Song

Hello sailor! Where have you been?

I've sailed the seven seas,

Together with me mateys.

The fun is never-ending,

Sailing the seven seas.

Up, up that mast, gung-ho!

Sailing the seven seas,

Cruising with gay abandon,

Long nights, but who's complaining,

Sailing the seven seas.

Hello sailor! Have you come back for good?

A sailor's home's the sea.

I bid you farewell, girl.

Up, up that mast, gung-ho!

Sailing the seven seas.

Later that night, Katya was showing me her stylish outfits and fabulous evening gowns in her room, when she flashed me a smile and whispered: “I was supposed to spend the night with Baranov, but he's not there and I'm horny. I haven't had a sleepover with the girls in a long time. Would you mind terribly joining me in my bed?”

“Not at all, Ms. Lebedev. It would be an honour, a privilege, and a pleasure.”

“Please, darling, I'm going to devour you in a minute. Let's be on first-name terms.”

1. Listen to it, read it in Russian and English.

2. Or the Second World War for us. The First Great Patriotic War was fought in 1812, when Napoleon Bonaparte's Grande Armée invaded Russia.

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