Please read this piece by my colleague Paul Roderick Gregory in Defining Ideas
The December 17 Oscar short-listing of Marianna Yarovskaya’s Women of the Gulag in the documentary-short category created a stir in the world-wide Russian intellectual community. Yarovskaya, a dual citizen and a graduate of both Moscow University and USC, is the first Russian woman to be so short-listed since the founding of the Russian Federation. While official Russian media limited coverage to a brief announcement on the Kultura channel, Russia’s small liberal media celebrated.
Hopes for a historic Russian Oscar were elevated when Hollywood’s seven top gurus all predicted nomination. When Women of the Gulag fell short of a nomination, social media redirected to a discussion of Hollywood’s silence on Stalin’s genocides, which are among the worst in modern history. (By “Hollywood,” I mean L.A.’s international film community).
In the sometimes-heated online exchanges that followed, “Andrew” explained Hollywood’s leniency towards Stalin as the choice of the lesser evil—Stalin over Hitler—made back during World War 2. “Tatyana” opined that Stalin’s terror is an “internal” matter. Hitler started a world war. Stalin did not. “Yulia” ventured that Hollywood’s political inclinations prompt it to ignore the crimes of communist regimes, be they Stalin, Mao, or Fidel. In contrast to its reticence on communism, Hollywood has provided extensive coverage of the crimes of fascist regimes. (A notable exception is “The Killing Fields,” set in Pol Pot’s Cambodia with seven Oscar nominations and three wins.)
Discussion (3)
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Did The Death of Stalin get nominated? That was great.
While “The Killing Fields” provides an accurate account of the horrors of Democratic Kampuchea, it is politically bowdlerized in the sense that it refuses to acknowledge the role of Communism. By some accounts the film never mentions the word Communism. Instead, it falsely places the blame on Richard Nixon instead of the true cause, socialist revolution and demolishing the old society to return to “Year Zero” so that it can be built anew as prescribed by Sartre and Franz Fanon.
A statue of Lenin occupies a central intersection in Seattle's Freemont neighborhood. If this were a statue of Hitler would it be tolerated? Of course not, so why this incongruity? Perhaps fascist beliefs in racial/ethnic superiority are easily identified as totalitarian and a clear anathema to a multiethnic culture? But, the likes of Stalin, Lenin, and Mao also represent totalitarianism and were even greater mass murders than Hitler, so why the inconsistency? Is it because Marxism is ethnically blind and ultimately egalitarian - and the Left is all about egalitarianism? This begs the closing question, "is the Left accepting of totalitarianism so long as personal freedoms and individual asperations are equally denied" - the Fremont statue would suggest an affirmative response.