The Other Vladimir Vysotsky

This old legend is still alive to this day: all his life the freedom-loving Vysotsky suffocated in an unfree country… In fact, there was no freer dissident than Vysotsky in the USSR. He acted in theater, appeared in films, released records, toured around the country, and was able to travel abroad without hindrance, even though he was away from home for several months at a time. So even while he was still alive, people whispered: wasn’t the bard… an agent of the KGB? Too much of what other people would never have gotten away with was forgiven him.

Nowadays, these rumors have transformed into interviews with one of the former Chekists, who confidently stated that Vysotsky worked for them—and for that he was granted many privileges. As for the fact that he was periodically “pressed,” that was supposedly done only to lead the multimillion audience by the nose—after all, we always treated suffering people with respect. In the new full-length feature film “Vysotsky. Thank you for being alive,” you won’t even find a hint of this fact, because the film’s authors needed to preserve, at any cost, the myth of the sufferer—an artist persecuted by the authorities. And what exactly stood behind these “persecutions” is told extremely harshly by the author of the book “Another Vladimir Vysotsky.”