Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
1989
I’m sure you’ve all been reading Titus’s dispatches from Romania with the same fascination I have; if not, I commend them to your attention. But you may have overlooked an especially interesting comment from Percival on Titus’s final dispatch:
Even in a year full of surprises, the events in Romania in 1989 still stick out. It all seemed to happen so fast, even to those of us over here who were paying attention.
The DDR was less a surprise, at least to me, because I had a friend in Berlin at the time. She was living close to the Wall and told me that the protesters had stopped chanting “Wir wollen aus” (dissident emigrants) and switched to “Wir bleiben hier” (revolutionaries). The penny had dropped, the worm had turned, and nothing could ever be as it had been again. But one minute Romania seemed like it was going to hang on, and the next Ceaușescu was giving that disaster of a speech on the balcony when he realized that it was only a matter of time before it all came down.
It has always amazed me that there has never been a motion picture covering the events of that most amazing year.
I think he’s right, isn’t he? That there’s never been a major motion picture treating the events of 1989?
And if so, isn’t that extraordinary? That year shook the world more than any in our lifetimes, and certainly formed the way I view the world now — too much, perhaps; I know the imprint it left on me has led to my making analytic mistakes about the way politics and the world are apt to work. I was (without being aware of it) deeply taken in by the Whiggish notion that we really had, in some sense, reached the end of history. (Even though this is not, by the way, what Fukuyama wrote. His essay was much more subtle and indeed predicted some of what we’re now seeing. For example:
The post-historical consciousness represented by “new thinking” is only one possible future for the Soviet Union, however. There has always been a very strong current of great Russian chauvinism in the Soviet Union, which has found freer expression since the advent of glasnost. It may be possible to return to traditional Marxism-Leninism for a while as a simple rallying point for those who want to restore the authority that Gorbachev has dissipated. But as in Poland, Marxism-Leninism is dead as a mobilizing ideology: under its banner people cannot be made to work harder, and its adherents have lost confidence in themselves. Unlike the propagators of traditional Marxism-Leninism, however, ultranationalists in the USSR believe in their Slavophile cause passionately, and one gets the sense that the fascist alternative is not one that has played itself out entirely there.
The Soviet Union, then, is at a fork in the road: it can start down the path that was staked out by Western Europe forty-five years ago, a path that most of Asia has followed, or it can realize its own uniqueness and remain stuck in history. The choice it makes will be highly important for us, given the Soviet Union’s size and military strength, for that power will continue to preoccupy us and slow our realization that we have already emerged on the other side of history.)
Fukuyama’s reaction to 1989 was wiser and more complex than people generally recognize, and certainly wiser and more complex than mine. But that’s not my point; my point is that whether I or anyone else properly understood what had happened that year — and I’m still not sure that any of us fully understand it — obviously something massive did happen. One would expect it to be not merely the focus of academic study in the West, but the impetus to an enormous creative explosion. But it seems there hasn’t even been a major motion picture about the events of that year. Or none aimed at an American audience, anyway. Or at least, none that either Percival or I can remember.
Why? I can think of at least a dozen movies about the end of the Second World War right off the top of my head. 1989 was, in addition to everything else, extraordinarily cinematic — the characters write themselves, the scenes write themselves — and it’s critical to our history and to the way we see ourselves.
Why has it received so little attention, compared to its earth-shaking significance, in our popular culture?
Published in Culture, Entertainment, Foreign Policy, General
I have a colleague who was a state department official who was an attache in East Germany during that time. He said if I ever wanted to know what it was like to live there during that time I should watch that film. Years later, he acquired his Stasi file…he said the amount of detail of his life that they witnessed by monitoring him was astonishing.
As a high school social studies teacher, I can assure you that today’s students know only about the New Deal, the legacy of slavery, and America’s Jim Crow “institutional racism” than anything else about that period in world history. They know absolutely nothing about the Cold War and communism other than the Hollywood 10 and our “immoral” war in Vietnam. I’m doing my part to remedy that, but it’s like damming up the Grand Canyon by tossing a brick over the edge.
Not a major film and not such goo as ‘Good Bye Lenin’ with its social democratic government film sponsors and slick, silly lefty producers appealing to a tad of prevalent ‘Ostolgia’, but there are films, some very good ones.
You do not need subtitles for this one: Just watch the trailer of the ‘Singing Revolution’,
http://www.singingrevolution.com
made by North American Estonian émigrés and Tallinn based Estonians, get the film, support Estonia as a vanguard of stubborn, witty, hard-earned, unrelenting patriotism which is rare enough amongst your allies.
When the White House is cleaned, please make sure that you have an awake, sparse, no frills, well educated, rational and commonsensical President Fiorina take charge so that all of us can rely again on solid, trusted, leadership of the free world.
I thought they were fascinating, and especially your thoughts about Romanians alone among the people liberated from communism not really knowing how it happened, and in a sense not believing they deserve better.
I’m older than you and thus old enough to remember Ceausescu’s downfall vividly. I had the same sense that I had when Qaddafi met such a brutal end: This isn’t the civilized way to do it; it bodes ill for the establishment of a liberal democracy. (How little I knew, re. Qaddafi.)
As for “not believing they deserve better,” well, as pundits around the world try to make sense of the Turkish elections — I could enter the fray, but I’m out of that game now — those words sum it up better than any others. They don’t believe they deserve better.
I’ve heard Bucharest described as a Middle East capital that wishes it was Paris. That describes the Turkish elite, too.
I tested this myself and it seems she bought a whole page of google search results! You can go through pages and pages of search results and not find anything.
If you try 1968 – the left’s favourite year – you get street protests and so on
If you type 2001 you get the Stanley Kubrick movie and a Dr Dre album
Type in Ricochet and you get a NZ clothing company.
I didn’t get a pro-USSR message so much as a anti-Nazi/pro-Russian message. The movie is very clear about the lack of ammunition, the ridiculous power of political officers over fighting men, the near starvation. The protagonist isn’t fighting for the Soviets and hates being a propaganda piece — he’s there for fight against the invaders of his homeland. That’s an admirable trait, even when that homeland’s government is run by the petty and evil men we see in the film.
One reason why most Americans don’t have a gut-level aversion to Soviet Communism may be the lack of visuals. You can blame Hollywood for this for all the reasons cited in this thread, as well as some others. But the fact is that, while we have access to an incredibly rich archive of photographic evidence of Nazi atrocities, whatever photographic evidence there is of Communist atrocities is locked away in KGB vaults. No American troops ever liberated a KGB slave labor camp. As a result, Communist evil is fairly abstract for most Americans. I would bet that not one American in ten thousand has ever seen a photograph from the Gulag or could identify an OGPU uniform. Maybe one in a hundred has heard the word “Gulag”. Practically nobody has ever heard of Laogai. With the exception of the Nazis, we are completely ignorant of industrial-scale totalitarian evil, despite the fact that such evil is fairly commonplace.
I was in Moscow two years ago and went to see something called the “Gulag Museum”. It’s right there in the center of Moscow, just up the street from the Bolshoi. It is dedicated to a vast subject that was the defining feature of Russia in the 20th century. Yet this museum is tiny – really just a single room – run as a labor of love by a few aging survivors. Even here there were almost no photographs related to the camps themselves or to the other associated infrastructure. There were two exhibits that were visually striking. One was a small collection of paintings by former inmates, including a few made in the camps. The other was a huge wall-sized map of the Soviet Union dotted with hundreds of markers identifying the sites of the various camps, including several for wives and orphans of enemies of the people. There was only one other visitor when I was there, a guy in his 20s. I overheard him talking to one of the curators. He said he was utterly astonished by what he saw and found it heartbreaking that his generation is completely ignorant of its own country’s recent history.
It’s not a surprise, therefore, that the Nazis have a total monopoly on the iconography of evil in American pop culture. For example, when George Lucas was doing costume design for Star Wars, he made the dark side all look like Nazis, down to plagiarizing the Stahlhelm. Despite the fact that the Bolsheviks paid as much or more attention to visual propaganda as the Nazis, their visual imagery just hasn’t penetrated the American skull in quite the same way.
My Dear Dr. Berlinski,
Now you are talking. This is the most important event in the West so far. That the culture hasn’t even made so much out of it as a movie truly indicts the media as blindly captured by the left still.
The mistake we made was to forget the tenacity of the deception coming from Marxism. The Maoist interpretation of Marxism, the Castro interpretation of Marxism maintained their hold on the helpless ignorant peasant societies into which these fiendish parasites had embedded themselves.
This is why I go beyond Hayek’s pure economic explanation of Socialism. He shows us how Socialism simply can’t do what markets do and so is bound to fail. This explains the poverty and starvation that is the result of Marxist takeovers. However, it doesn’t explain the continued ability of socialism to Svengali the masses. I go beyond the economics and look to a social historical model. To me socialism is scientific feudalism. You remove the religious content of feudalism and install a pseudo-scientific ideology. Societies that are failing in their attempts to come out of feudalism to a capitalist democracy fall backwards into socialism. The socialist system is a crutch for weak societies that can’t make it to a full market system. Thus the more backward the society the more likely will be the lure of socialism. Oddly, this view inverts the prediction about the two systems. As Marxism will educate the masses they will slowly realize that their system is weaker than capitalism and less moral than democracy. Thus Marxism has the seeds of its own destruction built-in to it.
Of course, there is no reason not to try to hasten the process. Surely a movie about 1989 would help the societies now struggling with their socialist overlords to recognize that they are on the right path. It would also introduce a new generation to the experience of the end of a tyranny and the hope that was engendered by that end of tyranny.
Regards,
Jim
I’ve watched both versions of Master and Margarita, the one done in the 1990s and the one in the 2000s. Not quite sure how it’s dissident art, though, unless you mean the portrayal of repression and corruption of the 1930s. These certainly couldn’t have been done during the Soviet era.
My question, too.
Are we better off with people knowing nothing about what happened in 1989, or with people getting a completely misleading, counterfactual version of what happened? Because the latter is what will happen if Hollywood does a movie.
And some people do get their ideas of reality from movies. I remember one full professor at the U of Chicago (well, we used to spar a bit back when he was a grad student) telling me that I should watch Dr. Strangelove so I could learn from it.
This isn’t just a hypothesis, I can document it in at least one instance. Before a piece is published in City Journal, the author has a conference call with the editors and especially the art editor about how to illustrate it. When I wrote about the Stroilov archives for City Journal, the art editor was stumped: She couldn’t find any photographs that would make the opening paragraph seem visually real:
Reticulator, what did your colleague expect you to learn from Dr. Strangelove? Other than there’s no fighting in the War Room.
There are some pretty gruesome photographs in The Black Book of Communism.
I don’t actually remember.
Yes, there are. It’s not the case that no photos exist. Oblomov is overstating that. But by comparison with — as he puts it — “the incredibly rich archive of photographic evidence of Nazi atrocities,” the photographic record is scant.
There are two films that deal with the question of what to do about the Soviet/Communist past. I’ve mentioned both of them on Ricochet before, but in relation to other topics.
One is the film Repentance by the Georgian filmaker Tenghiz Abuladze. It was released in 1986, before the past was quite past (and even then was suppressed in Russia at first) but it deals with the issue of how to live with the totalitarian past. I re-watch it every year or so – my favorite version has English subtitles and Russian voiceover.
Another is Cargo 200 (Gruz 200) by Alexei Balabanov. It was released in 2007 when there was a growth of Soviet nostalgia under Putin. I’ve read that Balabanov wanted to remind people of what it was like back when the system was badly decayed and falling. It is one of the filthiest movies you’ll ever see, in reflection of the times. The credits say it is based on actual events. I wish I knew more about the actual events. At the end the Professor of Scientific Atheism goes into a church and asks… Well, that would be telling.
I hadn’t known that Balabanov died two years ago until I looked it up just now. Wikipedia says he had been planning to make a movie about Stalin’s gangsterism when he died.
My children have read Peter Sis’ children’s book The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain.
It’s a difficult but I think important book.
With one son, age 8 last year, we were studying Germany, and we read a book about die Mauer coming down, by Serge Schmemann. Reagan was mentioned as a warmonger, and Gorbachev was the hero. The Wall is also described repeatedly as being around West Berlin, creating an island, like a high-end resort, which is like looking through a telescope’s wrong end.
I made him watch Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech to counterbalance, and watch footage of the wall coming down.
We also read this book, about the Berlin airlift.
CBTakaMT: You are right ” The Candy Bombers ” ( on which this kids’ version is based) Is an excellent book; it should have won a Pulitzer. If I were wealthy enough I would finance a project to turn it into a TV mini-series.
Another book that I would strongly recommend about how Russians face the reality and the legacy of the gulag system is “It Was A Long Time Ago And It Never Happened Anyway” by David Satter. I cannot imagine what it must be like to live with that appalling legacy within living memory and how I would or even could deal with it.
“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized (stripped of a moral compass) is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Ah, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him, by force, to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camp he will refuse to believe it until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When the military boot crashes, then he will understand but not before that. That is the tragedy of this situation of demoralization.”
Soviet KGB defector, Yuri Bezmanov aka Thomas Schuman interviewed by G. Edward Griffin in 1984
A friend of mine was in Berlin shortly after the wall came down. He described walking from West Berlin into East Berlin like “walking out of a movie shot in Technicolor into a Black & White film.” Like The Wizard of Oz in reverse.
Here’s a case where Hollywood (well, conservative Hollywood in the lead, anyway) organized to honor filmmakers of eastern Europe who were already, in the late Nineties, in danger of being forgotten. Who were the heroes of European culture who dared tell the truth? Here are a few of them. Within the Wajda Prize page there’s a link to a pda of a more detailed booklet on them.
And in terms of keeping the flame lit in the dark years, the late former priest and top industry writer Ron Holloway, gone six years now, did yeoman’s work behind the scenes for hundreds of grateful filmmakers from eastern and central Europe in the communist era. He was a great guy, and he was only beginning to get some of the recognition he deserved.
Claire, your City Journal article is excellent and depressing to the point of despair and impotent rage. What on earth can be done about this???
A large part of the blame has to lie with the Russians themselves. After all, these are their archives. They were the principal criminals and the principal victims. But unlike the Germans, the Russians have not honestly confronted and come to a reckoning with their history. I guess it would take moral leadership for this happen, and maybe it’s too much to expect a people to produce more than one Solzhenitsyn per century.
There is a [anti-Nazi] “Holocaust museum” several places in the USA including Los Angeles and Washington D.C.
I am not aware of similar museum documenting the “never again” atrocities of the Soviet Union.
Perhaps it is because the Jews who survived the Nazis and came to America wanted to make sure it never happened again, while the Russians and Eastern Europeans that fled the USSR and came to America were more diffuse and isolated from each other without a common religion and ethnic heritage.
Steven Spielberg wasn’t born until a year after WWII ended. Although some of his earlier films did touch on wartime themes, he didn’t confront the Holocaust full force until he was 47 years old, and by then the most successful director in the history of Hollywood.
It’s possible that (by analogy) the filmmaker whose work will someday define communism forevermore is 25 years old today, making his or her first work for television or direct to digital media, somewhere in the “Bloodlands”–Russia and Eastern and Central Europe. It’ll be driven with the force of family hardship, stories passed on that never made Time Magazine. Right now, Mr or Ms X is part of today’s culture as it exists. In five to ten years they’ll have the power to change the culture dramatically if they choose wisely–and if they’re lucky. The “Schindler’s List” of communism hasn’t been made in English, yet, but it will be.
Here’s hoping, Gary.