In episode 6 of «TASS Is Authorised to Announce» there is a very interesting scene in a fashionable European psychiatric hospital, where the wealthy Emma Schanz, played by Olga Volkova (you will surely remember her as the waitress Violetta from «Station f

In Emma's private ward we learn of the Nazi past of her father and husband, along with other compromising particulars. To judge by Mrs Schanz's account, her husband got her hooked on drugs and shut her away in the madhouse, hoping to conceal the truth she knows about him and awaiting her death so as to get his hands on her fortune. When a visitor comes into the ward, an exceedingly entertaining dialogue ensues:

- Do you know how much money he pays the doctors to tell everyone how mad I am and to keep the FBI men away from me? Have you brought anything to smoke? Come on, come on, hand it over.
- You smoke marijuana…
- Well, give me, give me the powder
- I haven't any, not just now, but I'll see you right next time
…
- Oh, what a pity you didn't bring the powder. Pilar always used to let me have a smoke.
- Was she the first to give you marijuana?
- No, the first was my husband.

All in all, it is most amusing, even touching, that the scriptwriters of this cult Soviet television serial were convinced that marijuana was a powder and not a herb, and that it occurred to no one to check the fact. Still, such ignorance, truly a bourgeois survival of the old world, is a most endearing naivety. It recalls the blunder of the translator Liliana Lungina, who did not know what a hamburger was and asked her husband, and he replied: «it looks like a mackintosh, some sort of raincoat, I suppose».