One of the most telling moments in Animated Soviet Propaganda, a 4 DVD set compiling over 60 years of communist cartoons from the former USSR, occurs when Igor Kokarev, a Russian film expert, says that communism was a great system – for the mediocre. If you were a lukewarm talent or had no real ambition to do anything, you fit in great. However, for the gifted, ambitious, or artistic, communism was pure hell.
To keep people that way, the Politburo saturated them with propaganda. Lenin himself had called film the most powerful art form to advance the revolution, and beginning in the early 1920s Soviet animators set to work making cartoons that were shown in cinemas all over the country.
We are planning an Anti-Communist Film Festival next year (donate here), and as part of the programming, I’d like to show some of these old Russian cartoons. Some are quite disturbing. 1933’s “Black and White” shows a white “capitalist” man beating his black servant. As the man drives away, we see a black doll dangling in his rear window. Then we cut back to the view looking out the front window, and the phone lines along the road have dangling black bodies. All the computer technology in today’s world could not replicate the ghastly palette used by directors I. Ivanov-Vano and L. Amalrik.
Most of the cartoons criticize America for racism and greed. The Politburo called America oppressive while ignoring our constitution, civil rights movement, and freedom of speech. They mocked Western wealth while censoring our charity and basic decency. Like the Nazis, they rejected jazz in favor of “traditional” songs. Many of these cartoons are inspired works of art – not surprisingly, some of the best were made not by true believers but by animators who feared for their family’s safety if they didn’t toe the line. 1972’s anti-war “Ave Maria” is like the darkest parts of Fantasia and Guernica – although it should be said that some of the other films are pure Disney or Warner Brothers.
Yet even a society as closed as the former Soviet Union couldn’t keep all Western influence at bay. In 1979’s trippy, anti-gun “Shooting Gallery,” artist-director Vladimir Tarasov gave the main character a red hat with a huge front brim. Tarasov had gotten the idea from a character named Holden Caulfield, who wore a hunting cap in a book called The Catcher in the Rye.
It is striking how much the modern Western left has come to reflect old Soviet ideology. The essay by Igor Kokarev that accompanies the DVD set has 8 points that characterize the Soviet system. Many of them, like restricting travel and prizing modesty to the point of violence towards those who dress differently, are common among Islamic immigrants to the West, and are being adopted by their leftist defenders, who are self-admitted Marxists.
Then there is point 7: “We Were Treated Like Children. “Everyone was a dependent of the State,” Kokarev writes. The state provided education, health care, funeral expenses, everything. Kokarev: “In this way, personal initiative grew weaker, self-reliance atrophied, the enterprising spirit was stifled, and the spirit of self-sufficiency was undermined. In their place, conformity grew stronger. People became less individualistic and more servile; they developed a hypocritical dual mentality, keeping their private thoughts – the unspoken truth – to themselves, and proclaiming aloud official lies.” This led to point 8: Our Language was Stilted. “The stiff, stylized, unnatural language of ideology was spoken by teachers at school, by journalists in the newspapers, by announcers on the radio, and by anchormen on television.”
The political language in America in 2025 is not so much stilted as censorious and viciously propagandistic. MSNBC anchors spend all day shouting out lies and half-truths. Literature is censored by “sensitivity readers.” There are no punk bands anymore willing to challenge the status quo. The ruling elite and our popular culture tend to reward mediocrity and shun greatness. The sad part is that our artists willingly go along. In that way, they are less like artists in the old Soviet Union and more like those who sold out for the East German Stasi. In her great book A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance, scholar and historian Allison Lewis observes that while Stalin sought to crush writers and other artists because he feared the freedom they represented, the Stasi saw writers and artists as potential allies and resources to exploit:
From its inception to its dissolution, the Ministry for State Security recruited an alarmingly high proportion of writers as informants…. [The Stasi] recruited sources from deep inside official circles, such as the consecrated spheres of the German Writers’ Guild (Deutscher Schriftstellerverband), as well as from the fringes of society. The Stasi touched the life of virtually every writer in the country. Writers, whether of poetry, novels, drama, essays, radio, television, or film scripts, belonged to the intelligentsia. Although writers were persecuted in the Soviet Union by Stalin in his cultural revolution of the 1930s, postwar-era Eastern European regimes desperately relied on them to shape Soviet-style revolutions.
Some were able to resist. A State of Secrecy tells the story of Helga M. Novak, poet and novelist. Novak was born in 1935 in Berlin. Abandoned by her parents, she was placed with an adoptive family she disliked. After studying journalism in the 1950s, Novak became a Stasi informant in 1957. Like many others, Novak’s decision was based largely on fear. “I had no family, no blood ties at all,” she recalled. The state seemed like a beneficent fairy godmother: “I thought that the appropriation by the state was right and that everything belonged to us,” she said in a 2006 interview. “I was seduced by the term ‘the people’s property’ by the community. I thought we had access to whatever it was that was being made in factories—whether cannons or sewing machines.” Novak would stop being an informant when she witnessed the anti-communist uprising in Hungary in 1956. In time, she turned against the Stasi, coming to “loathe its actions as much as she did her adoptive parents.”
Novak went on to become a great poet and author. She paid the price and avoided the mediocrity at the heart of all totalitarian systems. At the Anti-Communist Film Festival, we plan to celebrate her memory.
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