The harsh reality of Soviet Gulag labor camps stood in stark contrast to the Communist dream of reeducation. This essay film draws on an extensive visual archive to explore the gulf between reality and propaganda. Fragments from films by Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko are intercut with documentary material, animated films, and rediscovered footage of the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, a monstrously ambitious Stalinist project. Does this footage capture reality, or does it create its own?
The onscreen texts raise the same question, including quotations from Maxim Gorky, who long defended Stalin’s regime in his essays. He described the Gulag as a historical experiment that would lead to the birth of a new kind of human being. His words clash with those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who described the horrors of the penal camps in The Gulag Archipelago.
This patchwork of images and texts creates a disturbing, and at times almost surreal impression of the Gulag. It ends with the work of the Strugatsky brothers, for when propaganda has shaken reality from its moorings, only science fiction can describe it.
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