Russian Film On Lenin - Criminal Or Mad?

[Cheerful Charlie]

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/11/criminal-or-mad-russian-film-and-tv-debunk-lenin-myth/

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The makers of the 12-part series titled “Lenin,” spent four years delving into the archive of the FSB secret service, the successor to the KGB.
Its research team was led by the FSB former chief archivist, General Vasily Khristoforov.

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“It turns out that the legend of good Lenin versus the bad Stalin is absolutely false, because it was Lenin who started the Red Terror,” said Lipin of brutal purges after the 1917 revolution of those in ideological opposition.
The documentary shows a letter Lenin wrote in 1918 calling for the “death” of two million prosperous peasants known as “kulaks”, who were targeted with bloody repressions.

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A month later, he began building concentration camps to isolate members of the “hostile classes.”
– Mentally ill? –
The series’ creators say they will also show documents revealing that Lenin had mental health problems.
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One of Russia’s top stars, Yevgeny Mironov, plays Lenin in Khotinenko’s film and does not take a kind view of his character, especially given suspicions that he funded the Revolution with German money.
“Lenin wasn’t fond of Russia and didn’t like Russians at all — they were ‘lazy peasants,'” Mironov told pro-Kremlin Izvestia daily.
“For him, the country was just the first step in a plan whose aim was the whole world.”
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I wonder if there will ever be an English subtitled version done?

 

[PyramidHead]

The kulaks were leftovers from the Tsarist days who decided that they didn't want to give up their privately owned tracts of land. They burned their grain stocks, broke machinery, murdered state officials and peasants, and slaughtered their own livestock to prevent anything from falling into the hands of the proletarian revolutionary state. They were not a pre-existing group of people that were indiscriminately killed; the word 'kulak' just means something like 'tight-fisted'. Prior to the revolution, they comprised about 10 percent of the population and produced over half the food.

They were primarily the equivalent of large agribusiness owners today, but since capitalism was not as developed in Russia at the time, they relied on lending money to peasants for a large portion of their income. Using this as leverage in small towns and villages, they would basically decide who got food and who didn't. The kulaks were the beneficiaries and administrators of the feudalist system that had lorded over the poor for centuries, creating shortages and depriving them of necessities to keep them subservient. Their resistance to collectivization was partly responsible for the famine that occurred in 1932.

Expropriating the accumulated wealth of the ruling class and distributing it to the masses always encounters resistance. Unless you believe that the feudal lords and subjects of the Tsars in Russia were entitled to the wealth they extracted from their landlocked serfs, you will regard the fate of the kulaks as scarcely different from the fate of the slave-owner class in America during the Civil War. Some cooperated and found a way to be prosperous under the new system, which had abolished their previous way of life on the grounds that it was unjust. Others didn't go quietly, and were met with violent repression. The angle that Lenin was a bloodthirsty tyrant who committed wanton executions for no reason is only worth making into a documentary if you sympathized with the people who had more for themselves than they could ever eat despite not doing any work, instead of the people who worked their whole lives and still didn't have enough to eat. Your documentary is the equivalent of "The Empire Did Nothing Wrong" for the Star Wars movies.

 

[PyramidHead]

Appropriately, today is the 102nd anniversary of the Russian revolution in 1917.