What does Jack Ryan say to the cook in Russian?
Alec Baldwin's Jack Ryan speaks exactly one line of Russian in The Hunt for Red October. Here's the phrase, what it literally translates to, and why a CIA analyst is shouting it at a man from the galley.
It's four words, delivered in a missile compartment with a pistol raised. It's also the only Russian Alec Baldwin speaks in the entire film.
The line is "Ostav' eto v pokoye!" — Оставь это в покое. The film subtitles it as "Leave it alone!" The literal rendering is closer to "leave it in peace", which is the standard Russian way of telling someone to stop touching something. It isn't a police challenge. There's no "stop or I'll shoot". Ryan is telling the man to take his hands off the missile wiring.
Who the cook actually is
Igor Loginov, played by Tomas Arana, is a GRU officer planted aboard the Red October as a cook's assistant to keep watch on Captain Marko Ramius. When he works out that Ramius and his senior officers are defecting, he sabotages the caterpillar drive so Soviet forces can track the boat.
In the film's final act he reveals himself, opens fire on the bridge, fatally wounds first officer Vasily Borodin, and retreats into the missile bay intending to ignite a missile engine and take the submarine with him. Ramius and Ryan pursue. Loginov wounds Ramius on the way.
"A goddamn cook!" — Ryan's reaction on finding the saboteur, which is both the plot twist and the punchline.
Word by word
- Оставь (ostav') — imperative of "to leave", singular and informal.
- это (eto) — "it" or "this", pointing at the wiring.
- в покое (v pokoye) — "in peace", a fixed phrase that turns the whole thing into "leave it alone".
Russian speakers have picked at the delivery for decades. A Straight Dope thread from 2010 has one poster remembering the line as "estoffika pequoia" and guessing it meant "stop or I'll shoot", before a Russian speaker identified it correctly from the mangled phonetics alone.
Read more: How was Jack Ryan paralyzed? Season 1's MRI scene, and what actually happened to his spine
Why the moment lands
The film opens in Russian and then pulls its most famous trick: during political officer Ivan Putin's reading from Revelation, the camera pushes in and the dialogue switches to English mid-passage, on the word "Armageddon". From then on, Soviet characters speak English and the audience understands it as Russian.
So when Ryan snaps into actual audible Russian, the convention breaks. It's the film reminding you that these two men do not share a language and that Ryan, an analyst who hates flying and doesn't want to be there, has to do this himself.
He shoots Loginov three times. The man who spent the film insisting he was only an analyst finishes the job in a missile room.
One more thing the scene gets wrong
Submarine obsessives will tell you the compartment doesn't exist. On a real Typhoon-class boat, the missile tubes sit between two cylindrical pressure hulls, and the space where the chase takes place would be flooded.
For the record: The Hunt for Red October was released on 2 March 1990, took $200.5 million worldwide, and won the Academy Award for Best Sound Editing. Sean Connery joined two weeks into production after Klaus Maria Brandauer dropped out, and asked for one day to rehearse.
Earlier we wrote: Fifty-one years on, Spielberg still says he fears the sharks are angry at him for what Jaws did to them