Regards, Ivan
Posted on 10/20/2004 12:44:08 AM PDT by MadIvan
THEY are barely mentioned in Russian history books and are considered an unsuitable subject for polite conversation in the post-Soviet era.
Joseph Stalin’s purges left over 30 million people dead, created an enormous slave labour system known as the Gulag, and brought about the forcible deportation of whole nations of peoples.
Now Russians are being forced to confront their brutal past by two new television dramas which attempt to convey the full horror of Stalin’s war against the people.
The two series, one of which began broadcasting last week, aim to counter the growing perception among Russians that Stalin was a historic war leader, rather than a tyrant whose brutal policies caused the deaths of huge numbers of his people.
Millions of viewers tuned in to the first episode of Moscow Saga last week for what its makers hope will be a timely reminder of Russia’s tragic recent past; polls in the wake of the Beslan school massacre indicate a majority of the population favours greater police powers and fewer freedoms in order to guarantee security.
Audience rating agencies reported keen initial interest in the 24-part series, which opened nationwide on state-owned Channel One and will run four nights a week until late November.
Moscow Saga will be followed early next year by an adaptation of Children of the Arbat, the international best-seller by Anatoly Rybakov which first dramatised Stalin’s role in launching the purges.
Fifty years after the dictator’s death, and despite the historical record showing that upwards of 30 million perished as a result of his policies, the Stalin myth dies hard. Indeed, it may not be dying at all.
There is no national monument to the victims of the repressions, nor has there been anything remotely resembling an official apology to the victims or their families.
Dmitry Barshevsky, the director of Moscow Saga, which is based on Vasily Aksyonov’s novel Generations of Winter said: "My wife’s aunt and Aksyonov’s mother were prisoners together and shared quarters at the camp in Magadan in Stalin’s time.
"They became close friends, returning to Moscow and living in the same house till the end of their lives in the 1980s."
Mr Barshevsky’s concern to provide a comprehensive, historically-based account of the Stalin purges is shared by Andrei Esphai who has adapted Children of the Arbat, the ground-breaking novel that appeared in 1988 at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika.
Selling 11 million copies in the Soviet Union and published in more than 50 countries, the novel provided a clear sign that radical changes were under way.
Both directors are counting on fiction’s power to engage the emotions to jolt audiences into thinking more deeply about the past and, if possible, to trigger a wide-ranging public debate.
But their projects run counter to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s policy of reconciling his countrymen with Soviet history.
Last March, amid widespread indifference in the Russian media, human rights groups in Moscow issued a CD containing the names and biographical details of 1,345,769 people killed under Stalin’s regime.
It was, they said, an attempt to provide faces and restore dignity to the dead, and to counter Stalin’s cynical dictum: "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."
But Yury Samodurov, executive director of the Moscow-based Andrei Sakharov Foundation, believes that the Russian public is not in the mood for facts, faces, or even statistics.
He noted a recent poll finding that only 12 per cent of the population considers the main fact of Stalin’s rule to have been the political repression, compared with 40 per cent in a similar poll 15 years ago.
The survey found that 40 per cent of Russians now regard Stalin as the country’s most outstanding historical figure, as compared to 11 per cent in 1989.
For many, Stalin’s role as a war leader outweighs every other consideration.
Opinion shifts such as these are "catastrophic", Mr Samodurov said.
"People aren’t interested in the real Stalin, they want the myth, the great founder of a powerful state. The more truthful, rigorous and well-documented the television series are, the more they will give rise to anger and hostility. Or if they show what the viewers do not want to see, they will simply be ignored."
Mr Samodurov is doubtful that the events of the 1930s will ever be regarded in Russia as a crime against humanity.
For many older people, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a traumatic experience rather than a liberation.
"To acknowledge the victims of Stalinism would be to own up to a lot of things that they don’t want to see. The television series will not change this," he said.
"At most they may help to shape attitudes among young people, the school-age generation, towards that era, so that in maybe 15 to 20 years the situation will change."
DEATH CAMPS
IT IS estimated that about 32 million people were killed by Joseph Stalin during his reign of terror between 1924 and 1953, with his chief method of disposal being the Gulags (short for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagere), which were labour camps to house opponents of his regime.
Probably the worst of the camps was at Kolyma, in north-eastern Siberia, where temperatures dropped to minus 30F during the winter.
About a third of the prisoners at Kolyma died each year.
Those sent to the Gulags included peasants who were accused of "individualistic tendencies" and opposed the establishment of collective farms. Others such as writers and those with contrary religious beliefs were also sent to the camps.
Stalin was particularly suspicious of people who lived abroad or had relatives overseas. This included foreign communists who had fled to the Soviet Union to avoid persecution from their own governments.
Less is known about Gulags than the Nazi death camps, because of the secretive nature of the Soviet regime, but their victims were simply starved to death.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Now all we need in this country is a PBS historical drama series about the seditious behavior of the American Left. I can dream, can't I?
Yeah but Red Asner still wants to know the rest of the story about Joseph Stalin. After all, he couldn't have been "all bad", could he?
Wonder how they are obtaining that perception? Though a "progressive" leftist media, perhaps??
Prairie
The US needs to run this documentary, as this nation is ignorant about the evils of Stalin.
The Democrats will protest and sue if an anti-Stalin film is run in this country.
Yeah, they will call it 'hate speech', and trashing a religion.
Bump for later read.
When the Vietnamese get around to their communist cleansing, producedin the arts and literature, John Kerry can then flip-flop again, from Hero of the Vietnamese Communist State, to "a man who fought communists."
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