Soviet Story, the [DVD]

 

 

Create your own review

This DVD should be made available to every school and TV station in the world. You often see the message "This is a Warning from History". Well 'The Soviet Story' is truly that.
We in the 'West' often have a lob-sided view of history and especially of World War Two having a media that forever harps on Hitler and the Nazis and gives the impression that all was rosy in the Soviet Union from 1917 until the 1990's.In fact the Soviet Union was a gigantic Concerntration and Death Camp for most of its history, killing 30 times as many people then Hitler ever did, starting in 1917 and until the 1990's. This DVD exposes the links between the NKVD (later the KGB) and the Gestapo. Who do you think had a written pact to teach the Gestapo how to torture to the ninth degree and shared their plans on building Concerntration and Death Camps? Stalin's Terror Police, and it was happening long before the War even started. Never forget Stalin was Hitler's ally 150 percent until June 1941. The Soviets invaded Poland on 17th September 1939 and took half of Polish lands and never gave them back. Its now part of the Ukraine.
I know this DVD is available and I cannot explain why Amazon don't have it. A friend loaned me his to watch and it was the latest version with numerous,in fact 30, sub-titled laguages. Was a two disc set,mainly because of the subtitles.
It is time Amazon stocked this item.

saw a polish subtitled version of this so managed to catch about 80% of it. some interviews I missed as there was no English translation on the version I watched, even so I learned many things I didnt know and saw evidence for some things I did. well worth a look to anyone interested in how the germans and russia and had worked before barbarossa. will probably buy a full english version when its released

Written and directed by the Latvian film maker and Master of Political Science, Edvīns Šnore, "The Soviet Story" is an impassioned plea, on behalf of the millions of people murdered by Stalin and the Soviet Union, for people in the West to condemn Soviet crimes as emphatically as they do Nazi crimes. After all, both regimes murdered people on an industrial scale. They had so much in common politically and ideologically that even though National Socialist Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ended the Second World War as enemies, they started the conflict as allies - which isn`t that surprising when, as this film makes clear, the ideological roots of both the Nazi and Bolshevik movements lie in a similar form of collectivist, anti-individualistic, socialism.

Being a Latvian, Šnore understands these similarities only too well. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Latvia was occupied firstly by the Soviet Union in June 1940, then by the forces of Nazi Germany in 1941 and then once more by the Soviet Union in 1944-45. Latvia did not regain its independence until 1991, meaning it was occupied by the two totalitarian powers for a total of fifty-one years. Latvians, like many other people in Eastern Europe whose countries were occupied by both the Nazis and the Soviets, have had plenty of time to reflect on the similarities between the two political systems. The Nazis murdered on racial grounds, the Soviets murdered on the basis of class. Other than that, as this film shows, the differences between the two regimes were negligible. Yet, while we in the West pore over the crimes of Nazism almost daily, remember the victims of each and every atrocity and teach our children about what happened, those murdered in their millions by the USSR seem to have been airbrushed from history and talk of their deaths made taboo. No one talks about them. No one honours them. No one does penance for them. No one apologises for having been an apologist for the system that killed them. No one is hunted down to account for their deaths. In fact many in the West, particularly those on the Left who still harbour a soft spot for Marxism, seem reluctant to even acknowledge that the `Red Terror' happened at all.

Šnore wants to change that and this powerful, 85 minute long film is an heroic attempt to shine a light on long-forgotten, hushed-up Soviet crimes and bring them to the attention of as many people as possible. The film catalogues the millions upon millions of people who died or were murdered at the hands of Soviet Communism and, consequently, there's some fairly grim photographs and film footage that some people may find disturbing. Some of this material has never been seen before in the West. Various experts on the former Soviet Union are interviewed in the film including Soviet dissidents, survivors of the GULAG system, former KGB officers and a number of leading Western and Russian historians. Between them they challenge Western ignorance about Nazi-Soviet collaboration and subsequent Soviet crimes and, in the course of doing so, expose the pro-Soviet and pro-Nazi sympathies of pre-war Western Leftists such as the French communists and intellectuals such as the Fabian socialist [and darling of the British Left] George Bernard Shaw who in 1934 was urging for research into a "humane gas" that could be used to exterminate "people who are no use in this world".

This film is well worth just over an hour of anyone's time and despite minor errors here and there [e.g. one quote attributed to Marx was actually from Engels] I think Šnore broadly succeeds in his aims of exposing the criminal history of the Soviet Union to wider scrutiny, illustrating the ideological similarities between German National Socialism and Soviet Communism and ensuring that Western audiences, having watched the film, will be more likely to equate Soviet crimes with Nazi crimes. "The most powerful antidote yet to the sanitisation of the past" is how the Economist described this DVD yet in Russia Edvīns Šnore was burnt in effigy on the streets of Moscow. If you can get hold of a Region 2 compatible copy from either the United States or Eastern Europe [it's not currently available in the UK] then you can judge for yourself the merits of this important film.

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 4 customer reviews...

 

5.0 out of 5 stars How to get a copy
Essential for an understanding of modern European history. A tip: this DVD can be acquired
via Amazon Germany (well, via reference to different dealers) - with all the... Read more

Published 6 months ago by History fan

Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

› See all 4 customer reviews...

Search Listmania!