Those who are concerned that once history is distorted, it often never gets corrected, can breathe easier after a startlingly accurate documentary was premiered this past Sunday at the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Toronto.

Even so, The Soviet Story, made two years ago and shown mostly in the Baltic states and Europe, has resulted in angry protests in communist quarters. The documentary’s young writer and director, Edvin Snores, a Latvian, has been hanged in effigy and denounced as a liar by some in the European Parliament.

One Russian historian publicly regretted having taken part in the film — a film in which he did not take part. Such is the outrage.

The Economist urged “those who want to ban it should try refuting it first.”

I’ve seen the film (it premiered in the U.S. six months ago) and, put bluntly, it cannot be refuted. Rejected, maybe; offensive to some sensitivities, perhaps; horrifying, undoubtedly; painful, without doubt. But refuted? Impossible.

The core theme is the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin was mentor to Hitler and the Nazis. Until Hitler turned on his ally, Stalin and the USSR were Hitler’s partners in war, with a treaty to divide Europe once the pesky problem of defeating Britain had been solved.

Most people do not realize — or have forgotten, or never knew — how closely Nazi propaganda emulated Soviet propaganda — similar images of muscular men in posters, smiling young women, all working for the improvement of mankind by eliminating human trash like Jews, Serbs, Gypsies, even Scotsmen!

The genesis for genocide to rid the world of the weak or unwanted, originated with Karl Marx who, around 1849, wrote: “Killing is justified, especially if it cleanses society.”

Lenin agreed, Stalin expanded the creed and Hitler copied it.

In the early days of the Second World War, Jews who fled Germany to the USSR were rounded up by the NKVD and turned over to the Nazis.

Where Hitler and Stalin differed in building a pure society and better human beings, was Hitler digressed from Stalin’s formula of “class warfare” and introduced “racial cleansing.” Hitler watched with envy how the NKVD eliminated seven million Ukrainians by imposing the world’s first man-made famine on Ukraine in 1932-33, confiscating all food and making record sales of Ukrainian grain to Europe.

The world paid no attention — the few journalists who did (Malcolm Muggeridge) were ignored. The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize for dodging the famine.

The film footage is ghastly but persuasive. Mountains of skeletal, starved bodies are bulldozed into mass graves. Vivid photos of victims shot in the head and tumbling into mass graves. There is Katyn Forest, where 20,000 Polish reservists were shot, some buried alive in mass graves, and our side pretended the Germans did it.

The world remembers the horrors of the Nazi death camps, but we hunger to forget, if we can, the 20-plus million who died in the Soviet Gulag at the whim of our wartime ally, “Uncle Joe.”

Among Edvin Snores’ interviews are aging women who recall the famine, the massacre of their families, the Gulag. Painful, but essential to record.

With younger generations reluctant to believe history, it’s important there be a source for unvarnished truth.

— The movie can be bought
at The Soviet Story.com

Source: Toronto Sun.com, Feb 3 2010
No refuting the hard truths in the Soviet Story: Worthington

By Peter Worthington