The Secret Agent's Blunder

The Secret Agent's Blunder (Russian: Ошибка резидента, Oshibka rezidenta), also translated as Resident's Mistake, is a 1968 Soviet spy film directed by Venyamin Dorman.

Pavel Sinitsyn

• I am a thief with an incomplete higher education. But, to be honest, without secondary one.
• Give me five young lambs, right? I'll take three hundred grams of meat from each, right? You can't get more meat for a good barbecue! I'll soak the meat in white grape wine, right? I'll give it to you - here you go, beautiful woman, make a barbecue. And you will ruin the meat!

Dialogue

• Kazin: (shows Stupin the ring with diamond) How big is it?

Stupin: Two and a quarter.

Kazin: Carats, mind you. And what you foist me...

Stupin: Nikolai Nikolaevich...

Kazin: Okay, okay. So when will I receive compensation for my gullibility? There are a thousand behind you, as far as I remember. One thousand. But in new money. Alik, I warned you. <…> Do you want us to write off your debt? But keep in mind that I am offering this only out of love for you. You must fly to Novotrubinsk. There you still have to drive about thirty kilometers, and just take and bring back a handful of soil and a bottle of water from the Kuzovki station. There, just like that, there’s a barrier, and about three hundred meters from it there’s a bridge. Do you understand? And below it is a little river. A creek. And it contains the water, which interests us. Okay?

Stupin: So what are you doing now...

Kazin: Don't go too deep into the analysis. Figure out whether a handful of earth is worth a thousand rubles, and everything will become easy and simple. Travel and daily allowance are at my expense, of course.

Stupin: And we're even?

Kazin: Absolutely. Alik! Don't trick. Don’t even think about taking soil from your yard and water from your tap. It's clear?

---

• (Dembovich watches a TV program about 1963 trial of Nazi collaborators in Krasnodar)

Zarokov (Mikhail Tulyev): Who is being tried in Krasnodar? Your friends, relatives?

Dembovich: I didn't serve in the Sonderkommando. I worked in the Gestapo as an ordinary translator. My hands are clean.

Zarokov (Mikhail Tulyev): Why are you so nervous then?

Dembovich: I do not recognize the competence of such courts. More than 20 years have passed. Each time has its own laws. They were ordinary executors of wartime orders. And now there is peace, and the logic of peacetime cannot measure the logic of war.

Zarokov (Mikhail Tulyev): Unfortunately, Jan Evgenievich, you and I will not be asked about the competence of such courts. And in general, you seem to be wrong. Clean hands... How did you sign the paper? Cut the lemon, please.

Dembovich: I signed that paper when it became clear to everyone that the supermen would soon be finished. But, generally speaking, it's indelcate from your side to asking such questions.

Zarokov (Mikhail Tulyev): Thou art right, old man. It's indelicate. Sorry.

<...>

Zarokov (Mikhail Tulyev): By the way, how did it end?

Dembovich: They were shot!

Zarokov (Mikhail Tulyev): (with feigned horror) Uh-oh! (seriously) And rightly so.

---

Leonid Krug: This means they will interrogate me.

Victor Krug: Be sure. They'll put you through a polygraph.

Leonid Krug: What is it?

Victor Krug: Lie detector. Have you heard?

Leonid Krug: I was reading something. Propaganda.

Victor Krug: No matter what you'd read. This is a serious thing. But you can deceive it. Be cheeky, that's all.

---

Tulyev Sr. We made this legend for some people, and now you are leaving with it for others. Masters change, countries change, and everywhere we are not at home, everywhere we are strangers. If I could, I would crawl on my knees to Russia now.

Mikhail Tulyev They would pick you up, father, put you against the wall and shot you.

Tulyev Sr. What do you tell them to do? All my life I fought against them, liberated Russia, and in the end it liberated itself from us. Like whores, we went to service to one and the other, we didn’t even disdain the Gestapo, and they all didn’t care about us, about our ideals. Who are we to them? And who are we now in Russia? So you, the last of the Tulyev family, must make your way to your homeland secretly, under a false name. Oh my God... It’s better not to know, not to think about all this.

Mikhail Tulyev You and I are just not very happy people, father. You had no choice.

Tulyev Sr. I had a choice in 1917. Yes, Misha. There is always a choice.

Cast

• Georgiy Zhzhonov as Mikhail Tulyev/Zarokov/Kurnakov/Agent "Hope"
• Mikhail Nozhkin as Pavel Sinitsyn/"Snipe"
• Oleg Zhakov as Dembovich
• Yefim Kopelyan as General Sergeyev
• Nikolai Prokopovich as Colonel Markov
• Template:Interlanguage link as Maria
• Template:Interlanguage link as Kustov
• Irina Miroshnichenko as Rita
• Vadim Zakharchenko as Leonid Krug/"Lazarev"
• Nikolai Grabbe as Victor Krug
• Rostislav Plyatt as Kazin