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Article: Chapayev and company: films of the Russian Civil War.
- Article from:
- Cineaste
- Article date:
- September 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Cineaste Publishers, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"Beware of terrible times," wrote Anna Akhmatova in her July 1914, "the earth opening up for a crowd of corpses. Expect famine, earthquakes, plagues, and heavens darkened by eclipses." World War I is the immediate reference, but her chilling words offer poetic insight into several other blood-soaked events ill Russia's experience of the twentieth century. Scholars are still counting the number left dead by World War II (the "Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union," as it was known there), with ca. twenty-five to thirty million in the latest estimates. Precision is missing from the total body count of Stalin's terror and Gulag, but many millions is not farfetched. Then ...