Mr. Biden Goes to Moscow
Mr. Biden Goes to Moscow
In a new Russian TV comedy, the American president falls in love with Russia.
JOE BIDEN’S POLITICAL CAREER in the United States might be coming to a close, but he’s about to begin a career as a TV comedy star in Russia. Not the actual Joe Biden, of course. Played by veteran Russian actor/singer Dmitriy Dyuzhev, the American president is about to appear as the main character of a series called Goodbye (not a translation; the title is the English word transliterated into Russian), which is going to air on the national entertainment channel TNT.
The premise: Biden travels to Russia incognito to find out why U.S. sanctions aren’t working, then gets stranded in enemy territory after losing his papers—and is befriended by a patriotic Russian P.E. teacher who eventually opens his eyes to the wonder and goodness that is Russia. Meanwhile, in a classic (or hackneyed) “doubles switching places” plot twist, the Russian lookalike whose identity Biden is using, a retiree named Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, is flown to the United States by the hapless CIA agents who lost the real Biden, and so ends up in the White House.
Dyuzhev is not exactly a nonpolitical figure. He was critical of Russian aggression in Ukraine in 2014, but later moved into the pro-war, pro-Kremlin camp; Ukraine, Latvia, and Canada sanctioned him for participating in war propaganda events and performing in occupied territories in Ukraine. Now, he describes Goodbye as a “bold experiment.” He also notes that it’s “not a documentary” and that his hero will “differ somewhat from his real-life prototype because of the specifics of the genre.” Among other things, the genre requires the Biden character to speak Russian like a native—which he reveals he “learned during the Cold War, just in case”—and even to be perfectly fluent in the rich vocabulary of Russian mat, or profanity.
To hear series producer Aleksandr Baldin, Goodbye is practically an exercise in Russian-American bridge-building. His goal, he says, is “to show that even in the most difficult situations, one can find something that makes people laugh and brings them together”; also, “to explore cultural stereotypes and prejudices in a humorous and light-hearted way, with no hurt feelings.” Dyuzhev, in turn, promises that the story will be “kindhearted and funny.”
“Funny,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder. The script for the pilot episode, posted online and even translated into English by the independent Russian website MediaZona, reveals that it opens quite literally with a “Sleepy Joe” joke—Biden has dozed off in his chair while the CIA director is giving him the latest on U.S. sanctions against Russia, requiring the chief of staff to wake him up by throwing candy at him—followed by a transgender joke:
Joe looks at the chief of staff (a well-groomed, beautiful woman).
Joe: Looking beautiful, Mr. Morgan! Your new gender becomes you.
(Ha . . . ha?)
Oh, and that’s followed by a “transracial” joke later on, when Biden tells the chief of staff to “stick your plan up your white—formerly black—ass.” I tell you, the humor is scintillating.
There’s also this standout bit when Biden, who is passing himself off as a Russian coming back after thirty years of life in America, gets a cab at the airport with his new friend the P.E. teacher:
Cabdriver: You know, quite honestly? I wish Biden good health from the bottom of my heart.
Joe (on autopilot): Thank you.
Cabdriver: The longer the old fart stays in power, the sooner America is done for.
P.E. Teacher and the cabdriver laugh.
P.E. Teacher: That’s for sure. But from the way it looks, Bye-Byeden shouldn’t be sitting in an oval office . . . but . . . lying in a rectangular one. (Laughs hysterically) Well, grandpa, did you get the funny joke?
I guess so.
To be fair, the pilot does poke some fun at Russian life as well: When the P.E. teacher offers Biden a look at the “real Russia” outside Moscow and takes him to the suburban town of Lobnya, it turns out that the run-down “best hotel” in town is the only hotel and the best room—the “presidential suite,” the mention of which momentarily makes Biden think his cover has been blown—is the only one that has a shower. Also, there’s a hotel manager who moonlights as a hooker and who also turns out to be the P.E. teacher’s girlfriend. (Joe thinks she’s only in his room to use the shower and falls asleep on the bed, so nothing happens.)
In subsequent episodes, Biden, stuck in Lobnya in a shabby Soviet-era apartment building, has to work as an English teacher in the local school to save enough money to make his way back to the United States. Along the way, presumably, he comes to appreciate Russia.
COMMENTING ON THE SHOW—which was initially announced for 2025 but is apparently now scheduled for a debut next month—in a YouTube interview, exiled Russian writer Dmitry Bykov pointed out that Goodbye continues a Soviet-era tradition in which uppity foreigners stuck in Russia learn valuable life lessons.
In 1960, prominent Soviet film director Grigory Aleksandrov, best known for the Stalin-era comedies Jolly Fellows and The Circus, made a movie called Russian Souvenir in which a group of Westerners on a flight to China get stranded in a Siberian town after their plane is forced to make a crash landing. The motley group includes an American millionaire writer fascinated by the question of whether Russia can transition to capitalism and a British pastor trying to figure out how Russia can get by without God. By the end of their stay, they are deeply impressed by the Soviet Union’s commitment to peace and progress, and the millionaire resolves to write an explosive book telling the beautiful truth about the USSR. (Soviet reviewers in the relatively liberal Khrushchev era widely panned the film for overly crude propaganda, prompting the director to cancel its release.)
Before that, there was the 1933 poem Mister Twister by the hugely popular children’s poet and translator Samuil Marshak, in which a rich American family visiting Leningrad learns valuable lessons in racial tolerance and humility.
What’s truly striking about Goodbye, says Bykov, is the evidence of Russian culture’s enduring American fixation. However much Russian propaganda may affirm Russian spiritual superiority, rail against the decadent West and especially America, and sing the virtues of isolation, official Russian culture-makers still have America on the brain. As Bykov put it: “What’s Hecuba to them? What’s Biden to them? . . . Why does poor old Biden bother them so much? No, they still think they must show [the Americans] that Russian souvenir.”
For all the jokes about Sleepy Joe and his transgender staffers, the ultimate message of Goodbye seems to be: Just you wait, we’ll show you how good we are and make you love us.