As It Happened: USSR
SBS-TV, Thursday, March 17, 8:30pm (8 Adelaide)
Reviewed by Paul Oboohov
The events in Russia of recent years have led to the growing availability and exposure of never-seen-before archival film footage, and this series is an example. It is its only strength, as everything else about it is substandard.
Because historical film shows events as they occurred on the surface, a lot of background detail is needed to understand the context of the images before one's eyes. What you get in this show is tons of images and a superficial voice-over, not even the saving grace of a historian talking head. It is a K-Tel history.
The first episode details the period from 1905 — including the Russo-Japanese war, the failed revolution, the 1917 revolution, the civil war, the rise of Stalin — to the purges and show trials.
The images are intriguing, including, for example, a film and voice recording of Lenin exhorting people to fight the White reactionaries. Lenin is also seen in conversation with different people. I understand Russian and can say that he speaks in a measured voice, plainly and to the point.
There are also images of Trotsky speaking and reviewing the troops, and his famous armoured train. All the main figures of the period are there, including Stalin's victims. There is footage of the prosecutor in one of the show trials making his denunciations, Kirov and more.
The impression from this episode is that history just happens. The voice-over breezes along as the images flash past, with some snide remarks about communism, and twists on history.
It laments that the tsar's administration, while on the right track industrially under minister Stolypin, made its reforms too late. (Hence the episode's title, "The Stolen Revolution".) It points to "politically conscious workers" with no explanation of what politics and how they got that way. Kerensky is introduced as a sole socialist(!) in one of the early "Duma" parliaments. The show details the growth of a "kulak" rich farmer class, and alleges that the problems of Soviet agriculture were due to their passing.
Lenin is explained simply as "charismatic" and uncompromising. The 1917 victory of the Bolsheviks is due to their being able to "take advantage" of the suffering of people.
The program does point to the Bolsheviks' success in mobilising an "army of a new type", the Red Army in the civil war, being the population at large, rather than an elitist army. But even this is not true: national armies of the general population were inspired by Napoleon 100 years earlier, and by the Paris Commune of 1871.
The show, while detailing some small gains of the revolution, like electricity and medicine at the village level, then goes into a litany of woes, lamenting the dissolution of the nobility and their property, without pointing out their former role in society. It points to the reappearing of capitalist forms under the New Economic Policy without detailing why this was necessary. Stalin and Stalinism are presented as a seamless extension of the Bolshevik revolution.
My advice is, read a good book on the history of the period, especially by one of the Bolsheviks themselves, and then watch this show for the images.