Andrei Pleșu: An unpleasant film...
In May 2008, the premiere of a documentary film by the Lithuanian political scientist, screenwriter, and director Edvins Šnore about The Soviet Story took place in Lviv. In the same year, Romanian Television had the excellent idea to offer the film to the Romanian public. I commented on the event (in Dilema, of course) and, upon rediscovering the text, I was impressed by the persistence of a global obtuseness regarding the way the Russian-Soviet state conducts politics and history. Putin thinks now as he did then when he declared: "The USSR was Great Russia. The dissolution of the Union – the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century." Šnore's documentary is an evocation of Soviet history from the Stalinist period of the 1920s-1930s, including, among other things, the close Soviet-German collaboration at the beginning of World War II. In the USSR, "the system" killed approximately 20,000,000 men, women, and children during that period. Nazism also "competed" with its ideology and "criteria" in the race of the "purifying" homicide. On one side the Holocaust, on the other the Gulag, prolonged even after the war. The difference is that, in the states and among the ethnicities victimized by Hitlerism (including Germany), the criminal dimension of fascism was later assumed, rightly so, while in the fallen states, after the war, under Stalinism, Joseph Vissarionovich remained, for a time, on the "good" side... Hitlerism is still worse than communism. And a celebrity like Eric Hobsbawm did not hesitate to declare, among other things, that if he had been born earlier and in another country, he would probably have opted for fascism... In this context, Šnore's film is shocking because it puts into public circulation information that has generally been silenced, in order not to harm the honor of the great "ally" from the East and the triumphantly rosy effigy of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist communism.
In my text from 2008, I started from the feeling that, after the film was taken up by our television program, I was expecting prompt reactions in the central press. The film enjoyed a good audience (2.5), under the conditions in which an important football match was broadcast on other channels. And yet, the subject did not seem interesting enough, even passing as unpleasant: it puts us at odds with the Russians, with Marx and Lenin, with our Ceaușescu nostalgia, with universal leftism, with still lingering fixed ideas that we have come to cling to. Ironically, the only publication that signaled the episode was... Libertatea.
This type of boycott has also accompanied the planetary fate of the film. The only prestigious publication that applauded it was The Economist. The New York Times considered it somewhat biased, somewhat tainted, somewhat too politically colored. A Russian historian, Aleksandr Dyukov, stated that his only desire after watching the first two-thirds of the film was to kill the director and set fire to the Lithuanian embassy in Moscow. Only the Baltic countries understood to treat Šnore's documentary with sober solidarity. The Lithuanian Minister of Justice proposed that it be screened in schools, and the Lithuanian president decorated the author. Otherwise, a cautious, tenacious silence. I myself saw the film somewhat belatedly, on the Internet, thanks to Mr. Professor Radu Ispirescu from Buzău, who pointed it out to me. Soon after I watched it, I had the opportunity, in Berlin, to ask for the opinion of several notable historians and Sovietologists from Germany and America. None had heard of The Soviet Story! In short, the film is almost buried. In the context of a furious-nostalgic demonstration by some young Muscovites, director Šnore was burned in effigy! This is what it comes down to, in the East and especially in the rest of the world, the famous Vergangenheitsbewältigung ("confrontation with the past").
The Soviet Story can open an infinite front of debate. I will stop at a brief reflection on history: 1) We do not know history. We generally live our whole lives based on what we learned in high school, which, in many cases, is insufficient and manipulative. But let’s say it’s an excusable "fault." Ultimately, not everyone has to invest in researching the past. More seriously is that 2) We do not know recent history, the history of the day before yesterday and yesterday, which marked the fate of our grandparents and parents. And ours. In other words, 3) We do not know the history that concerns us. We do not want to understand the "causes," the sources, the limits of our own existence, the composition of the environment in which we were formed. Even more seriously is that 4) We do not want to know how things actually happened. The past is uncomfortable. It can contradict our conjunctural opinions, it can invalidate idiosyncrasies, theses, "principles" that seem more important to us than the bare truth. Ultimately, 5) We prefer to carry ourselves, to think and to express ourselves as we know. To soothe our competence, we do not need real facts, verification, good faith. On the contrary. We will avoid them to have, in an apodictic way, the right. This is why a film like The Soviet Story is an unpleasant product, about which it is better to remain silent, so as not to be politically incorrect...
