A Beautiful Lie

Last year, Oleg Vidov and Joan Borsten Vidov researched and restored an enormous trove of Soviet propaganda cartoons dating from 1924 all the way to the perestroika years. As artistically exquisite as they are politically nuts (anti-Nazi parables featuring heroic Brits sit side by side with anti-imperialist screeds showing the same Brits as power-mad monsters), these films deserve major cult status in the United States alongside, say, the Constructivist posters whose style they frequently share. It fell to noted poetry translator Julian Henry Lowenfeld to tackle the hardest and least palatable aspect of the cartoons: the words they espouse. Below, Lowenfeld on the challenges and the scary seductiveness of the task.





Can skillful propaganda, even now, make totalitarianism seem appealing? Even though I had studied Soviet history at Harvard, and had therefore read Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, Shalamov, Mandelstam, Bukovsky, Amalrik and the memoirs of numerous others who had suffered under the Soviet dictatorship, I still found something boyish inside me being charmed by the Soviet fantasy and wanting to believe in it. There was incredible wit and poetry and even spirituality in the Soviet mythology; even knowing the truth about Stalin's crimes didn't stop me from tapping my feet in rhythm to the marches in honor of him, or from being moved by images of doves dropping love letters from the Soviet people on the Kremlin, all addressed to Comrade Stalin. These films reinforce — in a way which no history book can adequately convey — just how seductive communism really was, and just how noble, in some sense, it really seemed. Communism was a religion, complete with rituals, songs, symbols, icons, and a messianic sense of purpose, which gave meaning to the lives of millions around the globe. In fact, I'll admit, as I was translating these works I sometimes found myself feeling an odd kind of nostalgia; not for the lies these propaganda films all too often espoused, but rather for the sense of belonging to something more important that they aroused. One cannot help but be moved by their passion, their belief and sense of meaning in life. In an age where rank cynicism seems to have taken the place of bankrupt ideals, there is something touching about honest belief, however deluded.

Besides, this is our history. This is what our parents and grandparents lived through, and we owe it to them to honor them by remembering. This anthology will certainly help us do that, and I am grateful to have had a chance to play a part in triggering these uniquely powerful memories.