this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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chapotraphouse

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The level of anticommunist bullshit you could just fabricate whole-cloth before the internet was truly on another level. In this obituary we get the following claims/fuckups:

  • "Stalker portrayed the Soviet Union as a mass concentration camp" ???????
  • she makes up an actor in Stalker who as far as I can tell does not even exist: "Ivan Laptev"
  • an assertion that the principal character and whatever character would be played by the fictional actors "represented the country's conscience" and WHO is the country's conscience you might wonder? That's right ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSN!!!! and antinuclear activist Andrei Sakharov
  • it was apparently so obvious that these characters represented these two people that the film was banned in the USSR (it wasn't)
  • it was based on Picnic on the Road by Stanislaw Lem and came out in 1980 (actually based on Roadside Picnic by The Strugatsky Brothers and came out in 1979).
  • because the Strugatsky Brothers wrote such a reactionary script they struggled to find publishers after the release (they continued to publish until Arkady Strugatsky's death)
  • similarly, the principal actor Alexander Kaidanovsky couldn't get any more acting work in the Soviet film industry (he continued to work in the Soviet film industry until the collapse of the USSR)

I'll stop here - it's genuinely impressive how densely packed the fantasy is here, an interesting document of how free to lie anticommunist expats were before the internet.

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[–] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 5 points 5 hours ago

how free to lie anticommunist expats were before the internet.

If you graduated high school before 2010ish, basically everything you heard about the Eastern Front in WWII was wrong. That's because most accounts we had came from Germans, who made up all kinds of reasons for why they lost, which was then taught to your history teachers as fact. Straight-up Holocaust denial, even.

Around 1991 with the Soviet Archives being opened up to western historians was when neo-nazi and Holocaust denier David Irving was finally caught red-handed. It wasn't until the 2000s that schools finally pulled his books from their libraries. There's still a ton of stuff, however, written by German officers about Judeo-Bolshevik hordes, Hitler didn't listen to his generals, "the Holocaust siphoned away too many resources and we totes didn't know it was happening," etc. etc.