Propaganda for Russia

 Posted by on 10 January 2006 at 6:54 pm  Uncategorized
Jan 102006
 

A few days ago, Paul and I watched Song of Russia, the 1943 pro-Russia movie discussed by Ayn Rand in her HUAC testimony. Robert Mayhew certainly portrayed the dishonest propaganda of the movie well in his excellent book Ayn Rand and Song of Russia: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood. Yet fully appreciating the unremitting horror of the movie requires actually watching it: mere description is necessarily inadequate. Nothing quite beats two hours of Happy, Prosperous, Free, Brave, And Cultured Russian Communists Building A Better World For Their People. Better propaganda for Soviet Russia could not have been commissioned by “Uncle Joe” Stalin himself.

Paul was semi-watching the movie with me. (He was more interested in his blogging, I must admit.) Just before the American conductor arrives in Nadia’s village, it showed the peasants working out in the fields, including some stunningly beautiful women on tractors. Paul looked up and said, “Look, it’s hot happy Russian peasant chicks.” That pretty much captured the moment.

Yet nothing compared to the moving final speech given by a Russia peasant, encouraging the conductor and his Russian wife to go to America to tell of the brave Russians fighting those vile Nazis. The peasant tells them that in doing so they will not be abandoning their fight for Russia against the Nazis, but rather “fighting side by side with us, all soldiers in the same army, fighting to bring a new light to our children, for that great day of victory when the world will ring with a new song of freedom, for you will be bringing our great countries closer together, in this fight for all humanity.”

Blech. Blech. Blech. And More Blech.

   
Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha