Dead Man's Letters

The filmmakers took great care to continuously remind their viewers that what they're seeing is not happening in the Soviet Union. To ensure this, a lot of foreign items have been placed in the backgrounds which surely immediately caught the eye of the contemporary viewer. There is not a single object with Cyrillic letters, but there are plenty with English ones. Many items are Western consumer goods which were rare in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Particular examples are beer cans and a bottle of Jagermeister on a desk. The weapons the soldiers wield are also not even resembling Soviet rifles which would've been familiar to all viewers who completed their military services. They look more like a strange "crossbreed" of American M-16 and M-1 rifles. The vehicle the soldiers are using is a MAZ missile trailer truck, but the same vehicle was also built for the civilian market and sold to many countries. The helicopter that shows up in one of the scenes is a Kamov Ka-26 which was never used by the Soviet military (and in fact only one Warsaw Pact country did, Hungary). The hovercraft that is seen turning and leaving is also not a (known) military vehicle, but anyone in the 1980s should've associated the image with the air-cushion ferries on the English Channel which were a famous and novel technical achievement at the time.

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