I hate this film. I saw it in a Russian theater at a late-night premiere back in 1988 and has never since then had an impulse to see it again. There is absolutely nothing about it to "understand" or appreciate. It is pure kitchen-sink trash disguised as a serious social study. You really think that the Soviets were all prostitutes, drunks, delinquents, and no-goods living off their parents? You believe that life in the USSR was hopelessly drab and that literally everything was so bad it's hard to see now how people still managed to survive in such a gutter of a country? Come on! As someone who was born and raised in the Soviet Union, I can swear on the Bible that nothing can be as remote from the truth as this portrayal of everyday Soviet life.
It looks like "Little Vera" was made with two goals in mind: to defame everything Soviet and to make a big buck out of showing some insipid soft-core sex, nudity, and drug use. Admittedly, it achieved both goals. The only reason that anyone may still be interested in seeing this garbage is that it seems to have been the first of what would become a wave of similarly themed films in the late 1980s–early 1990s. Those films offered increasingly graphic depictions of nudity, sexuality, rape, and violence mixed with zoological anti-Communism and peddled sluts and mafia soldiers as role models. Don't get me wrong – I'm a big fan of Western sleaze and all things exploitation (what else one would want to watch in post-Soviet Russia?), but "Little Vera" is different. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.
It looks like "Little Vera" was made with two goals in mind: to defame everything Soviet and to make a big buck out of showing some insipid soft-core sex, nudity, and drug use. Admittedly, it achieved both goals. The only reason that anyone may still be interested in seeing this garbage is that it seems to have been the first of what would become a wave of similarly themed films in the late 1980s–early 1990s. Those films offered increasingly graphic depictions of nudity, sexuality, rape, and violence mixed with zoological anti-Communism and peddled sluts and mafia soldiers as role models. Don't get me wrong – I'm a big fan of Western sleaze and all things exploitation (what else one would want to watch in post-Soviet Russia?), but "Little Vera" is different. I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.