With Adam Curtis’s ordeal-montage Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone still streaming on BBC iPlayer, and all of us goggling at his extraordinary mosaic of TV news clips about the day-to-day agony of post-Soviet Russia in psychological freefall, now is maybe the time to experience that work’s polar opposite.
This 1967 film, made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the October revolution, is an archival classic from the Latvian director Uldis Brauns and screenwriter Herz Frank: an amazingly audacious attempt at documenting the ordinary lives to be seen all across the vast Eurasian landmass of the Soviet Union, whose population was then 235 million. (The equivalent total figure for the ex-Soviet states now is about 297 million.) This film is ideological of course, celebrating everyone’s harmonious coexistence under communism, but notably without any shrill stridency, and with a distinctly pro-western, pro-American attitude.
