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Victims of Communism Museum Lecture
Flagg Taylor and I recently gave a lecture on cinema and totalitarianism at the Victims of Communism Museum in D.C., which you can, alongside more than 1,000 people, listen to at the link below. Flagg has worked with VoC before, we will be doing events with them again in the future, and we’ve both helped with their curricula for teaching teachers how to deal with Communism, the lessons intended for high-school students.
In this case, we tried to show that cinema has a much better grasp on historical problems and national character than most sources of public opinion, that the combination of talented artists and true stories is very useful for education, and that we can come to understand a lot about what made Communism evil and what the consequences are today if we look at the stories told by the best artists available.
We chose two recent works of cinematic art, partly because we’re living through a remarkable growth in very good movies about communism. The 2020 Konchalovsky movie, Dear Comrades, and the 2019 HBO mini-series Chernobyl. This way, we also tried to give a vision of Soviet history from the ‘60s to the ‘80s, to explain the staying power and the collapse of the regime.
You can watch the video at this link.
Published in Culture
This country sorely needs more of this kind of thing.
I had trouble with sound quality of the video, and couldn’t understand much of anything. Maybe with the use of forensic tools I could have deciphered it. Too bad, because it would seem to be an interesting topic.
I haven’t seen the HBO mini-series on Chernobyl, but I learned from Sergei “Sputnikof”‘s Ushanka Show YouTube channel that there was such a series. Sergei grew up in Kiev and was a teenager there at the time of the disaster. He thought the series was very good, but critiqued a few of the details. He was mostly surprised at how much the series got right. (He now lives in Michigan, USA.)
That somehow led me to Serhii Plokhy’s excellent book on Chernobyl, which in turn led me to other books by Plokhy, including Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front : American Airmen behind Soviet Lines and the Collapse of the Grand Alliance. I have others of his books in queue, but I’m currently reading his 2006 book, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
That one is helpful to understanding what a Ukrainian YouTuber meant in a video she put up shortly after the current war started: “How Russia Stole Ukraine’s History.” (Or something very close to that.)
It seems a lot of what we Americans learned, or thought we learned, about Ukrainian and Polish history was influenced by the Russian/Soviet version of events, which according to Norman Davies has a lot to do with the makeup of Slavic Studies departments or East European Studies departments at American universities.
Yeah, sorry about the problems with audio quality–it’s a real disappointment…
In a way I’m glad that it’s not just me.
I can’t remember any specific lecture, but some may like Dr Yuri Maltsev’s discussions about communism and Russia. He’s funny as hell.
When he isn’t scaring your socks off. Sometimes while he’s scaring your socks off.
He is damn good at putting American / Western big government in proper perspective.