When Gandalf met Gorbachev: how the perestroika generation fell in love with Tolkien
Painfully slow and dizzyingly manic: Khraniteli, from 1991, has just been released on YouTube Credit: Youtube For some Russians, the best way to evoke their memories of the collapse of the Soviet Union is to show them footage not of Gorbachev but of Gandalf and Gollum. In 1991, during the dying days of the USSR, Leningrad Television broadcast Khraniteli (or “The Keepers”), a dramatisation of The Fellowship of the Ring – the first volume of J R R Tolkien’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings. This production, only ever broadcast once, has taken on a fabled quality in the minds of the p...
Source: telegraph.co.uk