A little note on my Mother’s story that I remember.

Mom loved figure skating (watching on TV), athletic and rhythmic gymnastics, and tennis. In 1967, she and her older sister watched the USSR Figure Skating Championships.

In the women’s singles, the contenders for the first place were Elena Shcheglova and Galina Grzhybovskaya. Mother liked Grzybowska more, who did a very beautiful “tilt”, an extremely flexible figure skater. But my Mother also remembered Shcheglova’s performance in the free skate. The melody was powerful and beautiful, and my Mother immediately remembered that she had heard it from some of our friends, whose head of the family was a famous musician who toured abroad quite often, and in non-SOCIALIST countries, which for an ordinary Soviet person could not even be a dream (only A ONE-TIME TRIP was ALLOWED, IF ALLOWED, FOR a LIFETIME, to a capitalist country, of course, “organized”, that is, walking on a leash!)

And this musician traveled often, because he BROUGHT CURRENCY to the STATE!!!

So, he somehow brought a cassette recorder and “foreign” recordings of music, such as “Lara’s Waltz” from the film “Doctor Zhivago” (Composer Maurice Jarre) and the musical accompaniment of the film “Exodus” (Based on the novel by Leon Uris) of Otto Preminger (Composer Ernst Gold).

And the musical accompaniment of Shcheglova’s performance was precisely Gold’s music for “Exodus”.

But in the USSR, which built communism, art, as we know, belongs to the PEOPLE, and it is “national in form and socialist in content”, briefly NATIONAL-SOCIALIST!

And being such, IT was IN NO WAY POSSIBLE, within the framework of socialist realism and social internationalism (National Socialist!), to voice something bourgeois, “slimy, oh, not Marxist!”

But apparently Shcheglova really wanted to perform to THIS MUSIC, and the girl ingeniously solved the problem ..

Before her performance, the announcer told publicly: «Elena Shcheglova will perform to the music of the Soviet Siberian composer TAVRIA!”

So Gold’s music for the clearly non-Soviet film “Exodus” turned into a purely Soviet Siberian “TAVRIA”, although the latter is not geographically connected with Siberia in any way. (Shcheglova’s sense of proportion was well developed – after all, she could have attributed the music to some Chukchi or Evenk Composer!)

Shcheglova, the inventor, was not the first in such a reinterpretation (This is NOT PLAGIARISM AND SHE DID pretend to be this melody as her’s, like many Soviet composers who pretend to show other people’s melodies for their own, in natural Soviet juice).

Before her, the talented gymnast Zinaida Voronina, performing the program on the carpet, danced to the “Greek Hora Dance”, which was actually Israeli!

Such things, as my good friend used to say.

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