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neilvokey
Reviews
The Soviet Story (2008)
Why is it called 'The Soviet Story'?
Waiting for this film to end was painful, but I felt I needed to in order to prove my point. The film is titled 'The Soviet Story' when the entire argument is shaped around the totalitarian regime of Stalin. Instead of merely stating the factual evidence behind the atrocities in Stalinist Russia, 'The Soviet Story' tries to tie in his dictatorship with Communist ideology in its entirety, and even demonize the modern Russian state. Clearly the director had little sense of his story's antagonist.
Using written quotes from Marx and Lenin, the audience learns in 'The Soviet Story' about the Marxist belief that violence and death will occur in revolutionary uprisings, sweeping away masses of people as part of the process. While the film tried to make these ideas sound ghastly, one only has to turn to the modern western democracy to find its roots in the bloody French Revolution. Weren't entire sects of a society wiped out in that instance? Revolutionary tactics are not exclusive to Communism.
The film goes on to say with a negative tone that the Soviet state was content to wipe out entire nations to further the progress of it's superior nation. However this is implying that imperialism is also unique only to Soviet Russia. Did the European colonial powers not exploit and exterminate native nations around the world for hundreds of years? Once again, the totalitarian regime of Stalin and his predecessors did not commit their heinous crimes in the name of socialism, but rather, in the name of power.
While 'The Soviet Story' is a great example of government manipulation, political oppression, and megalomaniacs, it does not justify it's own doomed thesis that the entire Soviet State was founded on oppression. The short scene on fate of Trotsky (who was a Leninist) is enough to prove it was Stalin, not Lenin who was the true villain. I have only taken a high school history class, yet I have learned that Lenin was strongly opposed to Stalin being his predecessor.