Opinion
Where are all the good Gulag films? Where’s the Schindler’s List of Communism? The Sophie’s Choice of the Great Leap Forward? The Salo of the Cultural Revolution?
They exist, of course, but in vanishingly small numbers and almost totally unrecognised by the cinematic world’s awards complex. Almost without exception, the cinematic world has obsessed with Nazism in direct proportion to its willfully blind eye turned towards the horrors of Communism.
A search for a list of “Gulag films” turns up some curious results: of a list of 36 films about the Gulag includes nearly a dozen that are tangentially (at best) about the gulags (Artemis Fowl, for instance, a children’s spy caper fantasy), or not at all (Schindler’s List). Almost all of the Gulag films are from either Russia or the former Soviet states; clearly, the former Soviets are far more willing to confront the evils of Communism than Western filmmakers.
This is, of course, because the Western cinematic world, principally Hollywood, was and is overwhelmingly sympathetic to Communism. Or, at least, Communism for other people. The same people who railed against capitalism were only too happy to live fat and easy on the fortunes their services to the capitalists of Hollywood showered on them. Not even Dalton Trumbo showed the slightest willingness to actually live up to the Communist ideology he so assiduously promoted.
It’s difficult to argue that they were ashamed in retrospect of their Communist sympathies. Trumbo, who had gone so far as making propaganda films supporting the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in order to keep America out of the war on Nazism, never renounced Communism and, in fact, retained his official affiliation with the Communist Party well into the 1950s.
The only regret he publicly expressed was reporting to the FBI those who, sensing a fellow traveller in the Nazi cause, wrote him letters denouncing Jews and using his novel, Johnny Got His Gun, to support an immediate peace with Nazi Germany. Lest anyone be inclined to consider that a redeeming act, bear in mind that Trumbo’s regret was nothing more than self-pity that his own finking brought him to the Feds’ attention.
Trumbo, as Pat Buchanan notes, was no useful idiot: “he was the real deal, a Bolshevik who followed every twist and turn in the Moscow party line”. Trumbo spent the early years of the War trashing the conquered French, the British, and even Roosevelt, and pooh-poohing the reports of Nazi brutality. Trumbo, as Buchanan says, “had it coming”.
Yet, this is the sort of Communist Hollywood still wants us to weep over.
For a moment it might seem superficially plausible to object that Western Communists were merely misguided, that Communism sounded good “in theory”, and Communists were unaware of its very real horrors. But even that poor argument is demolished by the fact that the enormities of Communism were known from almost the beginning. As early as 1919 the British Parliament published a voluminous report of eyewitness accounts of terror and repression under the new Bolshevik regime. Throughout the teens and 1920s, even Anarchists and Socialists published pamphlets detailing “the ill-treatment of Anarchists and other political opponents by the Bolsheviks”, and the “raging terror” perpetrated “by the ‘Tcheka’ in concert with the ‘Moscow G.P.U.’”
Western Communists thus had the facts at their disposal: they just chose to willfully deny them.
They’re still at it. It’s just that, since the fall of the Soviet Union, they’ve taken to denial by studious silence. Even at the time, of course, Western Communists did their best to suppress anything criticising the Soviet Union: Orwell’s Animal Farm faced a concerted, if clandestine, campaign by Communists in the publishing industry to try and prevent its publication. Today, a Western cinema industry still sympathetic to Communism continues to avoid criticism of its favourite ideology.
It’s not as if Hollywood hasn’t been able to make a fortune from telling the stories of human suffering inflicted by monstrous ideologies. In the last decade alone, on the other hand, there have been at least a dozen Holocaust movies from Hollywood alone. But the crimes of the Communists, even by sheer body count, dwarfed even those of the Nazis: at least 100 million dead, to the Nazis’ six million. Nor were the Communists any less lacking in brutality than the Nazis.
With roughly 700 films released by Hollywood every year, there’s more than enough room to tell the stories of the crimes of Communism without neglecting the Holocaust.
So… where are all the Holodomor, Great Terror, or Gulag films? Where, I ask again, is the Schindler’s List of Communism? Hell, where’s even the equivalent of exploitation dreck like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS?
There have been precisely zero films from Hollywood in the last decade about the gulags, let alone horrific crimes like the Holodomor. The closest Hollywood has come to condemning Communism has been The Death of Stalin, though in this case it’s both played for laughs, and as though Stalin was the aberration, not “real” Communism itself.
Chernobyl might be the sole exception: remarkable for the fact that it exists at all. In that respect, it’s the exception that proves the rule.
Even a great movie by an Oscar-winning director with a stellar cast, Peter Weir’s The Way Back, starring Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, and Saoirse Ronan, sank with barely a trace. Its sole Oscar nomination saw it beaten by a remake of The Wolfman.
A more recent film is the 2023 Romanian film, The Pitesti Experiment. Like many of the films most openly critical of Communism, it hails from a former Communist country. It’s as if the only country to make Holocaust movies was Germany.
The Pitesti Experiment, perhaps like Pasolini’s Salo, deals uncompromisingly with Communist brutality: “a no-holds-barred depiction of the methods used to ‘reeducate’ supposed enemies of the new regime by means of humiliation and severe torture, turning them in turn into torturers themselves of other supposed enemies”. Like Salo, it graphically depicts the tortures inflicted by the Communists – all based on documentary evidence.
Torture-porn? Perhaps: and, like most torture-porn films, the first instinct is to look away in revulsion.
And looking away from the horrors of Communism is something of which we’ve already had far too much.