What Moscow’s banning of a film taught my kids.
WHAT VLADIMIR PUTIN’S BANNING OF A COMEDY FILM TAUGHT MY KIDS
During a family car trip last week, my 11- year- old son was asking a lot of questions about The Death of Stalin, a newly released film satirizing the brutal and absurd internal power struggle that ensued after Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s death in 1953. ( The film was screened at TIFF and released in the U.K. last fall, but just made it to North American theatres these past few weeks.) The conversation in our car soon turned — as conversations in our car often do — into my son reading from Wikipedia, this time an entry about the political comedy and its reception.
I hadn’t realized that the movie had been banned in Russia, as Wikipedia i nformed us, but the news didn’t come as a big surprise to me. I grew up during the Cold War (and during a time of heightened tensions, in the early 1980s, at that). My formative years were spent thinking of the Soviet Union as a place where censorship was strictly enforced and inconvenient bits of history were routinely erased.
My son, on t he other hand, was very confused. “How can Russia ban a movie?” he asked.
“Especially a movie that’s supposed to be funny? I thought only North Korea did stuff like that.”
It struck me then that, Putin’s authoritarianism notwithstanding, there are now multiple generations of North Americans who t hink of Russia as just another country. They may or may not have studied or been told about the Soviet Union and the Cold War, but importantly, t hey never l i ved during a time when the Soviets were the West’ s enemy No. 1 and were widely (if not universally) recognized as callous, cruel, and — not to put too fine a point on it — crazy. These post- Gorbachev generations didn’t experience the West’s nervous preoccupation with the spread of Communism; and they never turned on the news to hear that the president of the United States had declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire” (which Ronald Reagan did when I was nine years old — and justifiably so, I’m inclined to think even in middle age).
It will be interesting to see how generations such as my son’s view post- Soviet Russia in the future. For now, their glimpses of the terrors of the Soviet Union will come from movies such as The Death of Stalin (which somehow manages to put a comedic spin on the period of torture, murder, purges and rape in 1953) and such television shows as The Americans ( which in its final season is confronting the internal Soviet resistance to liberalization and reforms in 1987).
As Russia’s bad behaviour and Soviet- like transgressions seem to be gradually increasing, though, it’s possible that the country will soon regain a special place of censure and distrust in North Americans’ consciousness. Consider that Russia hasn’t banned a film the way it banned The Death of Stalin since … well, since it was the Soviet Union.
And then there’s the apparent attempted assas- sination of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal on British soil. Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in March in Salisbury by a novichok military-grade nerve agent, which landed them in hospital in critical condition. Novichok agents were developed by Soviet and Russian scientists, and CNN reports “t here are doubts that rogue agents could have carried out this attack ( on t he Skripals) without approval from the top levels of Russian government.”
Meanwhile, the Russians’ attempts to influence the past U. S. election suggest that the Soviets’ Cold War era psy-ops that seem so antiquated when depicted in The Americans are back in play.
I’m not suggesting we’re literally entering another Cold War: the military and economic equation is much changed since those first several decades following the Second World War, and as bad as Putin is, Russia is still a decidedly freer country t han was t he Soviet Union. ( It’s thankfully hard to imagine a current or future Russian leader causing anywhere near the millions of deaths Stalin did during his time in power.)
But if things keep going as they are, my son soon won’t be shocked when Russia bans a satire of itself, because his generation will have come around to thinking of the country more as mine does: as an especially aggressive, authoritarian and humourless state. Not a superpower, like during the Cold War, yet still a lot more like the Soviet Union than most of us would like, in ways that bode ill for its people and those in other former Soviet republics.
That’s not as frightening as a nuclear showdown. But it’s a lesson I’m sorry my kids will have to learn.
MORE LIKE THE SOVIET UNION THAN MOST OF US WOULD LIKE.