All About Latvia

RIGA – To paraphrase the forefather of the first workers country in the world, Vladimir Lenin, the most important art form for the proletariat is film. The Bolsheviks were among the first ones in the world to develop a fresh, new film industry as way to impact public opinion, rather than a source of making money as it has been in the West.

In 1924, just seven years after the October Revolution, the Soviet filmmakers released a silent film “Unusual Adventures of Mr. West in the Bolshevik Country.” In the film, frightened by the foreign press regarding the Bolsheviks crimes, a U.S. Senator Mr. West decides to visit the Soviet Union to “learn of the savages that invaded that distant land.” The Internet Movie Database says, “Through various mishaps, Mr. West discovers that the Soviets are actually quite remarkable people, and, by the end of the film, his opinion of them has changed to one of glowing admiration.”

Mr. West was a work of fiction. The Soviet Story is not. Written and directed by the Latvian filmmaker Edvīns Šnore, the 90-minute film tells a tale of the Soviet atrocities, all too familiar to eastern Europeans. The Holodomor. Katyn.

The film made the international headlines after Russian nationalists burned Šnore’s effigy near the embassy of Latvia in Moscow. The Latvian national TV showed it last night on the day commemorating the Soviet occupation of Latvia back in 1940. Then, with an agreement of the Latvian government, the Soviet tanks rolled into the small Baltic nation and launched the year of terror. While the film received a lot of positive reviews, I found it an excellent work of modern propaganda. It’s no better than any other Soviet propaganda films. In some way, it is even worse than a propaganda film as it presents itself as a documentary. It is not. With a deep voice of the narrator on the background, images of mauled bodies, shot men, dead children flashed the screen at the Occupation Museum to an audience of mostly young people this afternoon. The director chose to repeat the grueling images again and again, with a clear purpose to disturb a viewer. The images are intertwined with commentaries from Western historians and former Soviet dissidents.

Not a single time, the narrator contradicts the so-called experts during the 90-minute film. For a good measure, the infamous Putin quote about the fall of the Soviet Union being the greatest calamity of the last century is played twice. It creates an impression that the script was written ahead of time – and experts were there to provide weight to the already conceived view of history. The visual effects, the replayed images are there to manipulate the audience, not to educate them. It is on the same par as Soviet propagandists who twisted facts, interviewed a certain group of people to get a certain point of view across.

In a way, I agree with a historian Gustavs Strenga. Perhaps, Latvians – as Russians – aren’t ready yet to study history for history’s sake. Twenty years after gaining independence from the Soviet Union, Latvians would rather use history as a political tool, which differs very little from Russian “documentary” masterpieces we’ve seen in the last several years.

And Lenin was right after all - films still matter.

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