Hollywood meets the zeks

Get hold of a video of Marina Goldovskaya's film about the genuine article, The Solovky Power: Evidence and Documents, and sit your friends down for an in-depth look at the real, original, death-through-labor Soviet archetype, where something far worse than the occasional mistreatment of Korans occurred. This distinguished film will enable everyone to get their historical bearings; moreover, it is a standing rebuke to those who would recklessly trivialize a name, and a system, that may have cost 2.7 million lives.

By strange good fortune The Solovky Power was recently shown in Los Angeles. At 7:30, on Wednesday April 13, students at the UCLA School of Film and Television, living and working in the shadow of Hollywood, were brought face to face with actual zeks—men and women who had survived ten, twenty, and up to thirty years confinement on the Solovetsky Islands, 150 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle in the White Sea, with the slogan “Freedom Through Work!” over the gate.

One can only wonder what the audience made of it. Many film students would be unable to name the year of the Bolshevik Revolution; while historically, most students planning careers in documentary stand politically to the left of the Hollywood Ten. While it’s possible that those at the UCLA School of Film and Television are better informed than most, I think it would be safe to say that an searching examination of the real Gulag, showing how Stalin’s labor camps were already up and running in 1923, accompanied by interviews with the dictator’s victims, was a campus experience that for California was something new.

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