Stalinist regime unleashed a vast tide of oppression, tyranny, and mass murder upon various people it controlled. While historians have documented numerous communist atrocities, Stalin’s (Communist) crimes didn’t enter the global conscience for long.

For example, How many Indians will name their children after Hitler, compare that to Stalin?

This is where movies come into picture. Cinema has the ability to affect every one of our emotions and it is only this medium that can nudge us to contemplate on the extreme violence that humans are capable of. Otherwise every death is just a statistics.

Here, we take a look at the films, the storylines of which brilliantly captured terrifying reality of Stalinist terror. These films portray evil of Stalinist regime from the perspective of victims of Terror-Famine, deportation and persecution.

  1. Mr Jones (2019): This movie by acclaimed  polish director Agnieszka Holland depicts story of journalist Gareth Jones, who first publicized the Holodomor, an artificial famine ordered by Stalin and carried out in Ukraine in 1932-1933. The film follows Mr Jones’ journey and recreates the atrocities of Holodomor. (1)
  2. Haytarma (2013):  Haytarma (‘Return’ in Crimean Tatar) is director Ahtem Seytablayev’s award-winning film that narrates the tragic story of deportation through the eyes of Crimean Tatar national hero, Amethan Sultan. In 1944, more than 1,90,000 Crimean Tatars were herded into cattle cars and were shipped mostly to Uzbekistan. Half of them perished due to suffering from hunger, thirst, inhumane conditions and the Central Asian heat.
  3. Ordered to forget (2014): This Chechen movie tells how ~700 people of a Chechen village were burned alive on Joseph Stalin’s orders.
  4. A Pearl in the Forest (2008): A Pearl in the Forest depicts a love story that unfolds against a backdrop of persecution of Buryat refugees. Buryat people have left the collectivist villages of the Soviet Union, hence viewed as traitors by Soviet soldiers. Mongolia went on to reject authoritarian Communist government in 1990 through peaceful protests and adopted democracy.
  5. Eternal Winter (2018): On Christmas 1944, Soviet soldiers invaded Hungary and dragged every young woman with (suspected) German origins away from a small village and transported them to a Soviet labor camp where they are forced to work in the coal mines under inhuman conditions. Director Attila Szász has tried to present the story of protagonist Irén who met Rajmund in Gulag and their subsequent endeavor to survive.
  6. Katyń (2007): Academy Award-wining director Andrzej Wajda depicts the story of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war who were slaughtered on Stalin’s orders by Soviet troops in cold blood in Katyn forest (Western Russia, 1940). The victims of the Katyn massacre included the director’s father, Captain Jacub Wajda. Russian parliament acknowledged Stalin’s personal culpability over the Katyn massacre in 2010. (2)
  7. In the Crosswind (2014): The film is about the forced deportation of an Estonian family to Siberia in the June deportation (a mass deportation by the Soviet Union of tens of thousands of people from the territories occupied in 1940–1941). It is based on a real-life diary from the period. This movie shows sufferings of people on their way to Siberia in crowded cattle cars. (3)
  8. The Chronicles of Melanie (2016): The Chronicles of Melanie like In the Crosswind is based on the memoirs of a woman who experienced the deportation; this time in Latvia. On 15 June 1941, protagonist Melanie was deported to to Siberia as part of the historical Soviet mass deportation. Her humanity struggled in the face of horrible weather conditions, food shortages, hard labour and constant humiliation.
  9. The Excursionist (2013): This is the story of a ten year old girl (Marija) who escapes from a deportee train and goes on a 6000 km long journey back to her homeland (Lithunia), posing as a Russian and keeping her true identity secret. Like Marija, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians were deported to gulags in the Soviet Union. (4)
  10. Silent Wedding (2008): The tyrant here is dead, still his death is no less impactful in inflicting suffering. In 1953, the exuberant wedding celebrations of a young couple in a small Romanian village are forced to continue in silence to make way for the dutiful mourning of Stalin’s death.

Sources:

  1. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/red-famine-anne-applebaum-ukraine-soviet-union/542610/
  2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/26/russian-parliament-guilt-katyn-massacre
  3. https://news.err.ee/1101978/ratas-june-deportations-left-a-deep-wound-in-the-soul-of-our-people
  4. https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1069353/new-book-documents-lives-of-lithuanians-in-soviet-gulags

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