Andrzej Wajda’s new film Katyn opens with an archetypal
image from World War II in Poland. Hundreds of Polish refugees are
crossing a bridge over the River Vistula. Behind them can be heard
the guns of the advancing German Wehrmacht. On the other side the
Red Army approaches. The better off Poles decide to take their
chances with the Nazis, while the Jews and the proletariat continue
toward the advancing Red Army troops. The obvious significance of
the scene is that the choice between totalitarian systems is no
choice at all.
Later, as German and Soviet officers meet to toast one another,
Polish prisoners are rounded up and marched off to God knows where,
the officers with the Red Army, the foot soldiers with the
Germans.
Katyn is easily the equal of Wajda’s great war films
Canal and Ashes and Diamonds, and is doubtless
the 81-year-old director’s most personal work. Katyn, as every Pole
knows, was the village near Smolensk, where in 1940, more than
21,000 Polish officers were massacred in the surrounding forest by
the Soviet NKVD (for Poles NKVD stood for “Nie wiadomo kiedy wroce
do domu,” or “Impossible to tell when I will return home”). Partly
this an act of revenge for the Bolsheviks’ embarrassing defeat in
the 1920 war, and partly to eliminate the Polish intellectual elite
or any one else that might resist the implementation of Communism
and Soviet occupation.
The rest of the story is not as well known as it should be, save
to Poles and the better historians: The Germans invade Russia, find
and unearth mass graves near Katyn, and use this discovery as a
propaganda tool to turn the Poles and the West against the Soviets.
At length the Red Army gains the upper hand and drives the
Wehrmacht back to the River Oder, while they unearth the graves yet
again, this time blaming the atrocity on the Nazis. While most
Poles knew better, the British government parroted the Soviet line
during the Nuremberg Trials. And there it stood. Until Gorbachev in
1990 acknowledged the atrocity, Poles who attempted to blame the
Soviets quickly disappeared. Today, under V. Putin, the Russian
government seems to be backtracking. As Anne Appelbaum reported in the New York Review of
Books, following the film’s release last year a
government-owned Russian newspaper declared that Soviet culpability
for Katyn was “not obvious,” and questioned the sincerity of
Gorbachev’s admission and the reliability of archival
publications.
I say this is Wajda’s most personal film because the director’s
own father Jakub, a Polish Army captain, was one of those murdered
in the forest at Katyn. Wajda knew the story “had to be told” on
film, completely and honestly, but the director also knew this
would have to wait until there was enough emotional distance
between himself and what Poles call “the Katyn lie.” And obviously
there could be no such film as long as Poland remained under the
Soviet Union’s boot. Finally, he was waiting for a script he felt
did justice to the memory of the Katyn dead. He found it finally in
the book “Postmortem: The Katyn Story” by Andrzej Mularczyk.
Mularczyk’s book (and the screenplay he helped write) is the story
of the aftermath of the massacre, and the Soviets’ lies and
cover-ups that those who survived the war were forced to live —
and in some instances die — with.
WAJDA’S FILM WAS POLAND’s submission for this year’s Academy Award
for Best Foreign Language Film, it failed to win an Oscar.
No one who has followed the history of American filmmaking would
be surprised. The plain fact is that anti-Soviet or anti-Communist
films not only do not win Academy Awards in the U.S., they do not
even get made. More than six decades since the commencement of the
Cold War there has yet to be a single made-in-the-USA film about
the Katyn Forest massacre, the Soviet gulags, the Great Terror, the
Moscow Show Trials, the Hungarian Uprising, or the Ukraine Famine.
It’s not as if these wouldn’t make interesting stories. Arguably
the subject matter is at least as absorbing as that of Che
Guevera’s motorcycle diaries.
Instead one has to turn to European or Canadian cinema to find
first-rate films dramatizing the Soviet terror that cost an
estimated 2.7 million lives. Specifically films like director
Casper Wrede’s 1971 adaptation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One
Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a joint Norwegian-British
production. Of course, “first rate” is just my opinion. Most
American critics simply dismissed Wrede’s film as pure “torture”:
“The trouble with making a movie about tedium and hopelessness is
that it runs into the danger of being itself tedious,” wrote the
critic Toni Mastroianni.
Mastroianni certainly knew his audience. After all, what
self-absorbed American wants to sit through a hopelessly depressing
film about starving and freezing Russian political prisoners, a
film in which there can be no happy ending, and no thrilling escape
to break the monotony? Perhaps Stalin was on to something. His
terrors were so banal, so tedious that instead of turning away in
horror, most Westerners simply yawned. Call it “The Tediousness of
Evil.”
The same year that witnessed the declaration of martial law in
Poland which crushed the Solidarity Movement saw the release of
Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), a gorgeous love song to
Bolshevism. Reds is the biography of the American
journalist John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the
World, a comrade of V. I. Lenin, and the only American to
enjoy the dubious distinction of being entombed in Red Square.
However, the true face of Bolshevism was captured in director
Agnieszka Holland’s To Kill a Priest (1988), which
premiered just as the revived Solidarity Movement was toppling the
Communist government in Poland. The film tells the true story of
the young, populist chain-smoking priest Jerzy Popieluszko, a
supporter of Solidarity murdered by the secret police in 1984.
Tellingly Holland had to secure funding from four international
production companies to complete the film, in particular Columbia
Pictures during the brief, 12-month tenure of Englishman David
Puttnam (The Killing Fields, Chariots of Fire,
Midnight Express). But on the whole it was a French
production.
The reason for this want of anti-Soviet films has been well
documented in Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley’s Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the
American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s. The 1930s and
'40s, writes Billingsley, saw thick veins of Communist influence
running through the Hollywood studio system. Studio Stalinism, the
underground movement to smuggle Communist ideology into American
cinema, found a surplus of useful idiots in Hollywood, many of them
disillusioned with capitalism and enamored with the so-called
Russian Experiment. Hollywood was then the equivalent of a
one-party state, or, as screenwriter Budd Schulberg put it, the
Communist Party “was the only game in town.” The party’s stratagem
was surreptitiously to include five minutes of the Party line in
every script, and such was the influence of the Communist Party USA
that they were able to hire pro-Soviet story analysts to read
incoming scripts, weeding out the anti-Communist material.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo openly bragged that among the works kept
from reaching the screen were Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at
Noon and The Yogi and the Commissar; Victor
Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom; and James T. Farrell’s
Bernard Clare by James T. Farrell. (This couldn’t have
been easy, considering Sidney Kingsley’s adaptation of Darkness
at Noon had won the 1951 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award
and the Tony Award for Best Play.) As Billingsley notes, it wasn’t
what the Party put into Hollywood films that mattered, but the
anti-Communist, anti-Soviet material it kept out.
In the postwar years Hollywood’s pro-Communist screenwriters
went back on the attack. Indeed, so successful were they in
scripting films that depicted the inequities of American capitalist
society that many screenwriters were perceived as being Stalin’s
hirelings. This perception initiated the infamous congressional
investigation undertaken under the direction of the House
Un-American Activities Committee.
As the Cold War dragged on Hollywood radicals, nursing the
wounds of the McCarthy era, believed they had a moral obligation to
the memories of the blacklisted writers to ridicule the
“exaggerated” fear of Communism: the result were a series of black
comedies best exemplified by Doctor Strangelove: Or How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Later, the
studios turned out films like The Front (1976) and
Guilty by Suspicion (1991) in which blacklisted
screenwriters achieved a kind of ideological martyrdom.
The Hollywood communists, writes Billingsley, knew that any film
depicting Soviet atrocities would force some to conclude that HUAC
was right, and worse “would violate the legend of the blacklist.”
In the end the CPUSA succeeded at keeping all mention of Stalinist
atrocities out of the theaters — up until and including today. Had
the rest of the Russian experiment been as successful as the
Hollywood portion, the Soviet Union might still be around
today.
Dalton Trumbo may lay moldering in the grave, but he would no
doubt be glad to hear that to date there is no English-language
distributor for Wajda’s film, and no plans for its U.S.
release.
