Anne Applebaum writes:

One night in October, a group of masked men burst into the Moscow offices of Memorial, the celebrated Russian historical society and civil-rights organization, and disrupted a screening of Mr. Jones, a film about the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33. They shouted, gesticulated, and chanted “fascists” and “foreign agents” at the audience. Police were called, but they allowed the masked men to escape. Instead of chasing the intruders, officers barred the doors of the building and interrogated members of the audience until long past midnight.

This week, as Russian troops and armored trucks are inexplicably gathering on the borders of Ukraine, the event at the Moscow theater seems retrospectively more ominous, the moment when the “normal” pressure on Memorial and other Russian civic institutions turned more sinister. Something about it also felt familiar to Irina Shcherbakova, a Russian historian who writes about Germany and is one of the organization’s original founders. That evening, she told me, reminded her of another one: In 1930, Joseph Goebbels, then the Nazi Party leader in Berlin, sent a mob of thugs to block the showing of a movie. They shouted, gesticulated, released mice into the theater, and threw stink bombs. Frightened, the audience left.

The movie Goebbels didn’t like was All Quiet on the Western Front, which graphically depicted the horrors of the First World War and thus disrupted the more heroic version of German history preferred by the Nazis. Mr. Jones, the film the Russian government doesn’t like, tells the story of a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, who was the only Western writer to report on the Ukrainian famine. Filmed by the great Polish director Agnieszka Holland, Mr. Jones contains horrific scenes of peasants who are starving to death. They are starving not because their harvest failed, but because the Soviet leadership has confiscated their food. That story disrupts the more heroic version of Soviet history preferred by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former officer of the KGB, the institution that organized the famine 90 years ago. [Continue reading…]