My parents’ generation was born after World War II, which we on the Eastern Front all knew as the Great Patriotic War. That generation was known for a peculiar and creative resourcefulness. They came up with things like “bone LPs,” bootleg records crafted using makeshift recording lathes that cut tracks into used X-ray slides. Under remaindered pictures of rib cages, bone LPs played the Beatles and other banned Western music. As a middle schooler, I remember my mother talking about these and other contraband inventions. I didn’t think much of it at the time. This was just one of many unauthorized things people did back then—like passing around illegal samizdat copies of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago on thick piles of newsprint or surreptitiously listening to Voice of America news on AM radio in communal kitchens.

I grew up in Baku, the capital of what was then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan. Just a few years before the U.S.S.R. disbanded, the kids in my neighborhood became fascinated with American movies—or, at least, the idea of American movies. I was 8 or 9 years old, one of the youngest in the mix. We would collect chewing-gum cards and stickers with pictures of action-movie stars and listen to Michael Jackson. I’m fairly certain all these things were bootlegged.

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Young or old, everyone felt the increasing cultural vacuum, a painful dissonance of Soviet-produced media and its crumbling ideology. While we still had timeless films and shows based on Russian literature, or rare genius masterpieces such as Tarkovsky’s Stalker, most Soviet cinema and television no longer made much sense, because it amounted to propaganda. Those of us born in the late 1970s and early ’80s had become particularly suspicious of most Soviet-produced entertainment and obsessed with Hollywood, although we had little firsthand experience with it.

That’s where the video van came in.

Just the sound of the word видео (“video”), a cognate recently borrowed from the English language, was distinctly American. We never referred to other things we saw on-screen as “video”; it was just “film,” or “cartoon,” or “program.” Video was something new and exciting. It had a smack of the forbidden fruit to it.

The way we consumed that video confirmed its taboo status. A typical Bakuvian video salon consisted of a minivan or minibus—usually a Latvian RAF model, or “Rafik,” as we affectionately called it—with fabric-clad windows, equipped with a color television and VCR (the latter was uncommon and considered a luxury).

Rafiks were normally used for public transit, an intermediate alternative to buses and taxicabs. A Rafik always felt bigger on the inside. The running joke went, How many people can you fit into a Rafik? One more. Rafiks made getting around town cheap and easy, and Rafik drivers maximized their efficiency through this always-room-for-one-more-passenger business model. The vans were stuffy, dark, dirty, and usually saturated with cigarette smoke. I suspect that some of these van drivers did both jobs—smoke-soaked taxi by day, smoke-soaked movie theater by night.