Who Got JR?
How Texas, both factual and fictional, won the Cold War. You're welcome, America.
This Jack Hughes, the senior assistant Canadian bureau chief, Tex-splains The Experiment how Texas won the Cold War all on its own. It starts with Dallas, the prime-time soap opera, and ends with Boris Yeltsin’s visit to a Houston grocery store. The most unbelievable detail in this story is that a Randall’s convinced Yeltsin that communism had failed. Whole Foods, I’d believe. H-E-B, definitely. But Randall’s?
by Jack Hughes
While all of us were focused on the presidential election and America’s future, a dramatic revelation about America’s past was understandably overlooked. If true, the stunning new information may radically transform our understanding of the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russia.
In late October, Dave Stewart – co-founder of the 1980s pop duo the Eurythmics – was the guest on Joss Stone’s A Cuppa Happy podcast. In the final minutes of their long-ranging interview about achieving happiness, Stewart shared a conversation he had with Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1990s.
According to Stewart, Gorbachev told him that the CBS TV drama Dallas “brought down” the Soviet Union in that it “had more effect than anything else.” To date, Gorbachev hasn’t denied Stewart’s version which supports a theory long advocated by the show’s leading man Larry Hagman.
Hagman, who played J. R. Ewing, often claimed Dallas was “directly or indirectly” responsible for ending the Soviet Union and European communism. He echoed what Gorbachev told Stewart: When people saw capitalism as exemplified, or exaggerated, by the show they lost faith in communism.
There’s a fitting symmetry to all this insofar as the series finale of the original Dallas aired in late-May 1991, just six months before the Soviet Union ceased to exist. But does the story end there? Is it possible Dallas had an even greater impact on modern-day Russia than it did on the Soviet Union?
I’m in no way suggesting Putin is anything like J. R. Ewing. J. R. was a cold, calculating, and utterly ruthless character who’d do anything to anyone he saw as a potential threat to his oil empire.
Now, I can’t say for certain whether any Russian leader ever watched an episode of Dallas – but they easily could have. The CBS drama did air on Russian television in the late 1990s with Bootleg broadcasts and pirated VHS tapes were accessible behind the Iron Curtain a full decade before.
The cast and crew of Dallas, led by Hagman, even traveled to Moscow in 1989 to shoot an episode of the show. (The Chicago Tribune story about the perestroika pilgrimage contained the amazingly timeless and timely line: “If Donald Trump can visit the Soviet Union why not J. R. Ewing?”)
The episode was titled ‘Mission to Moscow,’ and offers us a heaping spoonful of ‘glasnostalgia.’ J. R. and Bobby are convinced to go to Moscow to get information about a massive oil deal. When they do, they’re surprised to learn the Soviets are the good guys who warn it’s all an OPEC plot.
J. R. and Bobby are then given a lesson about the geopolitics of oil from their Soviet counterparts (dubbed dialogue scripted by American writers) in which they’re told the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. have a shared interest in ensuring American oilfields aren’t allowed to fall into OPEC’s foreign fingers.
Think about that. The embodiment of 80’s capitalism, J. R. Ewing, getting a lecture on how global oil markets work from a communist. It seems bizarre even today, let alone back then. But imagine the pride a Russian viewer would’ve had seeing Texas oil tycoons getting schooled by the Soviets.
Dallas not only gave Russians capitalist ideas but a capitalist ideal.
The very same year those famous Texans went to Russia, 1989, a soon-to-be famous Russian went to Texas. Boris Yeltsin traveled to Houston, not Dallas, but made a random stop at Randall’s grocery store. Seeing the selection, he warned if the Soviet people witnessed it there’d be a revolution.
In his memoirs, Yeltsin said it convinced him communism had lost. It’s a Texas tale so quirky and quaint it was made into a comic opera which premiered in February at Houston’s Opera in the Heights. As its producers noted, Yeltsin was more impressed by Randall’s than he was by Trump Tower.
Yeltsin was the father of the post-Soviet Russia, much like J.R.’s father Jock was the founder of Ewing Oil. (Both had shocks of white hair and enjoyed ‘tying one on.’) One of Yeltsin’s early presidential decrees privatized Russia’s energy industry establishing oil companies such as Lukoil.
This ties back neatly to the ‘Mission to Moscow’ episode of Dallas, where J. R. is told that there’s a deal to be made that would give the Ewings access to Russian oil reserves – which proved eerily prophetic given that Hagman was to later become Lukoil’s poster boy, literally, in Romania.
When Jock retired from Ewing Oil, he made J. R. his first successor. In the years that followed, J. R. and Bobby held the title of ‘president’ interchangeably. When Yeltsin retired, Vladimir Putin succeeded him at first before swapping the title of Russian President with Dimitri Medvedev.
To be clear, I’m in no way suggesting Putin is anything like J. R. Ewing. J. R. was a cold, calculating, and utterly ruthless character who’d do anything to anyone he saw as a potential threat to his oil empire. It’s also safe – perhaps safer – for me to simply note he ain’t exactly Bobby Ewing either.
My point is simply that we can’t discount the possibility that Dallas not only gave Russians capitalist ideas but a capitalist ideal. Wouldn’t that help explain the rise of oligarchs? Most of whom are oilgarchs. Aren’t they billionaire barons in the Ewing mold or that of their nemesis Cliff Barnes?
I guess I’m saying that if President-elect Biden binge watches old episodes of Dallas between now and the inauguration he wouldn’t be wasting his time. Sure, Dave Stewart isn’t a “Missionary Man” warning “Here Comes The Rain Again” – but just maybe “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”?
Jack Hughes is a communications consultant based in Canada. His previous contributions to The Experiment include “Same of Thrones,” “Tippecanoe and Agnew Anew,” “Harris / Shuri 2020,” and “Firth and Firthiness,” among others.
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