Indiana Jones Infuriates Russia’s Communists

The summer film season has officially kicked off, as the latest offering in the adored Indiana Jones film series opened to record-setting audiences across the globe on Thursday, including on more than 800 screens in Russia. However not everyone is so enamored of how the Russians are portrayed in the film – in fact, some are calling for Russia to ban the film outright for its alleged “ideological sabotage.” Reuters reports:

What galls is how together with America we defeated Hitler, and how we sympathized when Bin Laden hit them. But they go ahead and scare kids with Communists. These people have no shame,” said Viktor Perov, a Communist Party member in Russia’s second city of St Petersburg. (…) “Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett (are) second-rate actors, serving as the running dogs of the CIA. We need to deprive these people of the right of entering the country,” said another party member, Andrei Gindos. (…)

Other communists said the generation born after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union were being fed revisionist, Hollywood history. They advocated banning the Indiana Jones outright to prevent “ideological sabotage.””Our movie-goers are teenagers who are completely unaware of what happened in 1957,” St Petersburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich told Reuters.”They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in 1957 we made trouble for the United States and almost started a nuclear war.”

You have to credit these guys for continuing to have a pitch perfect sense of topical comments to grab headlines, but really . . .(Photo: Cate Blanchett plays a sinister KGB agent in the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – a portrayal which has infuriated some Russians.)