n the summer of 1992, Canadian director Paul Haggis took a film crew to Riga, to make his first feature film, Red Hot, about four young musicians coming of age in late-1950s Soviet Latvia. Balthazar Getty played the lead, a baby-faced music student with ducktailed black hair and a slim-cut suit who discovered rock ‘n’ roll via Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis records smuggled into the country by his uncle, a musician repressed under Stalin’s regime. Now all but lost to history — good luck finding a copy in your local video store — the film is part love story (the hero falls in love with the wrong girl, the daughter of a high-ranking Communist Party official) and part KGB intrigue (the albums are discovered, and a KGB agent traces them to the party official’s daughter). It culminates in an underground rock concert at an abandoned warehouse, which of course ends badly when the KGB arrives and the venue goes up in flames. The hero is last seen in handcuffs on a train, most likely en route to the gulag.

Red Hot takes a stereotypically Western view of the Soviet period, but what it lacks in accuracy it makes up for in visual authenticity: you can practically smell the refined air in the party official’s palatial art nouveau home, or the must of the hero’s dilapidated communal apartment. Not Haggis’s best film — he went on to direct the Oscar-winning Crash — but something of a coup for a Toronto props master named Ken Coontz.

I met Coontz one February afternoon after coming across a huge, silver-coloured bust of Lenin perched on top of a building at the corner of Woodbine and Gerrard in Toronto. During more than three years of living in the former Soviet Union, I’d grown accustomed to encountering Lenin in unexpected places; statues, busts, portraits, bas-reliefs, and murals all still clung to the landscape. Sometimes they were there because of nostalgia or simple affection, other times because there was no reason nor money to remove them (notably in villages that had dwindled to the very old and the very drunk). But a Lenin head this large and well crafted, in metropolitan Toronto? It didn’t take me long to track down the bust’s owner. I just knocked on the door of the building and invited him out for a coffee at the mom-and-pop place across the street.

“It was a crazy time,” Coontz told me, taking a sip before launching into what was clearly one of his favourite topics. “Of course it was dangerous. We were staying in the Hotel Latvia. I’m pretty sure the floor below us was a brothel. On the third night I was there, I was rushed by a gang in my hotel room. They stole money, equipment. I don’t think they realized we were going to be there for four months — what we were adding to the economy. We were the first Western crew to shoot an independent movie at the Riga Kino Studio. There was a French porno in production at the same time, but we were definitely the first Westerners to be doing what we were doing.”

One afternoon, Coontz got a call on set. His translator and fixer, Signe (a “smart, sassy it-girl, not a communist but a good German Latvian”), had found something he had to see. The crew’s driver brought him to the city’s Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Stalin-era neoclassical building, where he met Signe and a man he refers to as the Curator.

They entered a large room full of potential props, a graveyard of Soviet paraphernalia that included tapestries, statues, and busts of Lenin — the detritus of a rejected ideology. The Curator led them to one corner of the large shipping and receiving area, where he dramatically pulled aside a tarp to reveal a massive aluminum bust of Lenin. About a metre tall, it was planed in the strongly stylized lines of socialist realism: the forehead broader than in real life, the Asian-looking Kalmyk eyes more Slavic, the lips curled into the hint of a smile.

The Curator turned to Coontz and jokingly asked, “Perhaps you’d like to take that Mr. Lenin back to Kanads?”

“Okay. How much? ” Coontz responded.

There was a moment of confusion. The Curator looked to Signe and asked her if this crazy Westerner was serious.

“Of course he is serious. He is from Canada,” she replied.

Raw materials were scarce in Riga at the time, and the metals trade was hot. The Curator had to make a few calls before he could quote a price. A number was stated, Signe was consulted, Coontz and the Curator shook hands, and Mr. Lenin was his.

By the time I came across the bust, it had been in Toronto for more than fifteen years, far from the country that had birthed it, and increasingly distant from the historical events that had infused it with meaning. When the bust was constructed, it was a tribute to Soviet ideology, leadership, and (as any good Marxist historian would emphasize) industrial might. To those who suffered under the excesses of Lenin’s regime and its aftermath, it would have meant something very different: an unwelcome reminder of a brutal, authoritarian political system that destroyed hundreds of thousands, even millions, of lives. Nearer that time and that place, the statue was rooted in something tangible, inescapable.

But hovering above Woodbine and Gerrard, it was little more than a curious decoration on an otherwise nondescript street corner. Across many decades and 7,000 kilometres, it had gone from living artifact to decorative souvenir — a giant, metallic analogue to the Che Guevara and “Chairman Mao is my homeboy” T-shirts on display in any hip North American neighbourhood. Its journey seemed to me a perfect metaphor for the cultural process through which we avoid confronting difficult histories by turning them into consumable kitsch. When I met Coontz’s Mr. Lenin, he was well on the way down that road, and as it happened he was about to go farther still.

oontz is in his fifties, and his face bears the marks of a battle with cancer in his thirties that cost him the use of one eye. But he spoke energetically about his work and his collections, tracing his interest in military paraphernalia to his heritage as a navy brat. He told me his great-grandfather was US Navy Admiral Robert Coontz, who had a ship named for him. “Look him up on the Internet,” Ken advised. (Turns out it was two ships.)

He referred to himself as a “multi-generational hoarder,” and indeed he had made a career out of this tendency. The job of a props master is part curator, part collector: a good one finds and selects objects that are both aesthetically attractive and recognizably representative of a given locale and time period.

“I brought back other things, too,” he told me. “Uniforms, small statues, oil paintings, other art. I’m an antique dealer. And a history buff.”

I could see the Lenin from our spot in the coffee shop. Coontz’s front window was covered in red foil, gold letters spelling out “Happy Holidays” in a neat arch, a gold hammer and sickle in the corner lending the display the effect of a Soviet flag. Lenin was similarly festive: a Santa Claus hat sat atop his bald pate.