Volga-Volga

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Film poster

VHS cover

Volga-Volga was a Russian comedy directed by Grigori Alexandrov in 1937. It centered around a group of amateur performers on their way to Moscow to perform in a talent contest called the Moscow Musical Olympiad. Most of the action takes place on a steamboat traveling on the Volga river. The lead roles were played by Alexandrov's wife Lyubov Orlova and Igor Ilyinsky.

The villain in the film is a corrupt bureaucrat, and thus at the end of the story, the characters sing to the audience that reporting such bureaucrats to allow for their removal is appropriate, and compare this action to using a mop. As this word, in the Russian language, was the same as "purge"^{[citation needed]}, and as Joseph Stalin was the dictator of the Soviet Union at the time, this musical number serves as political propaganda in favour of the Great Purges.^{[citation needed]}