Lots of moments of people looking into the camera and going "how could communism do this?" which is cringe, but otherwise it's a fantastic story of human drama and how bad shit can get. Funny, I read this morning that Gorby is now dead, weird timing.
I had a similar feeling. To me, much of the show felt less about blaming communism for the disaster and more about blaming these people who were more concerned with their position and their appearance than with actual human lives. Personally I didn't think it was that unfair to the Soviet Union.
less about blaming communism for the disaster and more about blaming these people who were more concerned with their position and their appearance than with actual human lives.
I may well be misremembering it (it's been a while) but I remember it as kind of blaming communism for that mindset. Yeah, it was because selfish people did selfish things, but that's what you get with communism.... that that kind of person will rise to the top (when of course that's actually capitalism). I'm thinking specifically of all the pushback the main protagonists got from everyone above them who just didn't want to hear the hard truths as well as a specific scene near the end I won't spoil except to say it involves thinly veiled threats from a very nefarious high ranking character and the ultimate fate of the main character.
We did see it happen a bit with the ORC COVID response, where there was a couple of instances of cover-up and misreported data because regional officials didn't want to look bad to their national counterparts. Of course, once that facts of the matter were finally out in the open, they were able to demonstrate a superior response to the crisis. I think it can be an issue with ML-style communist governments that beuracracy can snag things up. Obvíously nothing about that is meant to simply that liberalism is a viable alternative in any way.
I hear you yeah. I think that in any system (esp hierarchical ones of course) you will have plenty of ambitious people trying to rise within it and unfortunately that will include a lot of selfish people. (A person can be ambitious without being a selfish sociopath obviously but selfishness can be very conducive to ambition). It's partly why I'll never completely shed my anarchist roots.
But we now have a pretty good set of examples as to which systems are more able to recognize and correct these problems as they arise. And the example you use is a perfect one as to show why China's is superior in that sense. That's absolutely not to say it's anywhere near perfect.
If I recall from the time i came out, I remember it was less directed towards the Soviets and more using the soviet backdrop to critique bad shit
I think in the director's commentary they do mention of how interesting it was that people would sacrifice a lot for the common good and it wouldn't happen in US. Also though, I wouldn't give too much credit to the show, due to showrunners literally breaking the fourth wall every 30 minutes to say "Did you know that Soviet Union is baaaaaaaad?"
That's a good catch, didn't notice that. I did see so far lots of selflessness, but my cynical side wants to believe it's framed as the soviet people being unthinking automatons. I dunno, either way it's good so far, real good.
Maybe I'm overly cynical but to me that was just the common lie regarding AES states: "the people of X nation are great! So, sad they are oppressed by brutal regime Y"; priming the public to accept efforts of intervention/warfare.
I quite liked Shcherbina and his little arc over the course of the show that was pretty emblematic of those themes, I really liked how he used the little tidbits on radioactivity he learned from Legasov on the way there to catch the two rat facility directors in their lies, and generally turns out to be a more standup guy than his initial introduction serves to show.
"Explain nuclear physics to me right now or I will have you thrown out of this helicopter" is one of the most ridiculous fucking moments I've ever seen people take seriously, even disregarding how its a (probably)unintentional "call of duty highway of death" moment again with leftists throwing people out of helicopters.
Explain nuclear physics to me right now or I will have you thrown out of this helicopter
sounds like a summary of my degree/exams :agony-deep:
I also wanna chime in with the Three Mile Island show run by Netflix. There was an incredible change on the language when the disaster was not the responsibility of the "baddies". I remember one scene where the energy company literally lies to the local government saying there's no radiation leakage. However when they're doing a press conference, the company officials just say there is. And the head of the local government is just like "Oh no, bummers" rather than, "Holy shit you guys lying about this is almost as big of a disaster as the meltdown itself"
I did have fun watching it after all. I am genuinely curious about nuclear energy, so I thought it'd be nice to see how these safety critical systems operated and failed on an engineering standpoint. But it doesn't have the show cinematography or the real life domino effect the Chernobyl had.
I was able to watch it as it aired and definitely enjoyed it but remember thinking how some of it just smacked of anticommunist tropes snuck in all over.
But I was pretty new to real, radical leftism at the time and had a ton of questions about the validity of some of what the show portrayed, but knew I wouldn't get honest answers from a general search.
So I posted on r/communism asking for people's opinions on what the show got right and where the propagandist lies began. I got told it was all lies, complete western propaganda and that I shouldn't be watching bourgeois media at all. That I was spreading liberal ideology by even mentioning the show, etc. I swear to god that (and many other) "communism" subs have been blatant astroturfed ops from the beginning. And it's gotten so much worse since then, it's hard to believe.
I wish this place had been around at the time because I would have loved a good analytical discussion on it. I think I was on the chapo sub at the time but foolishly thought most of the "communist" subs had enough crossover that I'd get the same response there.
Anyway, rambling comment nearing conclusion... I'm glad to finally see some good talk on it, what like 5 years later. Too bad I barely remember the show now.
(Also glad to see you posting again SFS, FWIW.)
The r/communism and r/communism101 subs are so fucking annoying. Like someone will come in with a question and immediately be attacked.
Most recently I saw someone on the 101 sub asking if they should join the DSA if it was the only option in their area. The top response literally started with "it depends how much damage you want to do to the world" and then went on a screed about how obviously the question was in bad faith, how the OP had already made up their mind and why even ask the question if they didn't want answers... the OP literally hadn't commented in the thread outside of their initial question.
I'm fully convinced those subs are an op to turn away budding leftists.
It's pretty sickening to watch, isn't it? And if you try to offer a more reasonable response - permaban.
I’m fully convinced those subs are an op to turn away budding leftists
Oh yeah, I have zero doubt that is exactly the case. And it fucking works. :agony-shivering:
If I hadn't already been a leftist who knew a little theory and had been exposed to genuine communist people online, I would have left the thread I mentioned above with a very low opinion of communists, modern online ones at least. Which is why the complete lack of real leftism allowed on reddit (and other social media) really concerns me. They have realized online radicalization can really work and they're working hard to shut that down immediately. There's no way a sub like the chapo sub could start, let alone grow now.
Lol, that's a pretty funny response that you got. Self criticism is important for sure, but I think something stark that I noticed was how complete and total the response to the meltdown was. I don't think the US could respond that way.
Lots of moments of people looking into the camera and going “how could communism do this?”
was talking about this with folks on discord last night when I was telling them how good The Americans is and someone said the exact same thing verbatim lol
Lots of shows about The USSR in The 80s, typically written decades later, when we need to tell ourselves that the collapse was coming because the wheels were coming off. I think that plays a big roll in the "How could communism have failed?!" narrative.
You see comparatively little about Russians from the 60s or 70s, when they were a globe-spanning Superpower dunking on us at every turn while we flailed about in Vietnam and sagged under hyperinflation.
I would love to travel back in time to 1981 and ask a Russian filmmaker to do a movie about the Kennedy Assassination or an American slice-of-life about the OPEC shock. Or maybe a modern day Chinese director could go ham and do a movie about the rise-and-fall of Japan or South Korea from the end of outright military dictatorship in the late-70s to the financial and cultural collapse of the modern era.
Someone find me the Communist Bloc Richard Linklater.
I think at the very least The Americans is a bit better about this in that it's shown quite clearly what the US and CIA were doing to try to sabotage the USSR while the Soviet spies are basically just trying to do counterintelligence and stay ahead of US aggression.
I never made it to the end, so I don't know if it every mellows out. But the first few seasons had plenty of "The central agency is asking you to do something obviously immoral in the name of state security" / "Back in Soviet Russia, we were so poor and they dehumanized us so brutally in order to prepare us for this mission" scenes. I think there's one about them kidnapping and deporting a Refusenik physicist.
There's plenty of dunking on Reagan-Era machismo and other Americana bullshit. But the underlying conceit is that smol bean Russians are struggling to keep up with the American juggernaut and failing. You're waiting with baited breath to see how the Jennings Family endures the End of Empire as foreign spies operating overseas.
Lots of shows about The USSR in The 80s, typically written decades later, when we need to tell ourselves that the collapse was coming because the wheels were coming off.
Bingo.
Even as late as 1985-86, while there were certain foundational problems in the USSR daily life was pretty OK. All the stuff about shortages and breadlines were mostly concurrent with the market reforms instituted by our dearly departed Gorby. But the propaganda did it's job, every single American is 100% convinced the USSR collapsed because communism is some inherently unstable system that is destined to collapse; and they will not be convinced otherwise because they obviously know more about it than you, you tankie.
You mean a majority Desi cast with white people only as truly evil villains? Not gonna happen in the west lol. And if it did I'm sure it would be very racist calling indians uncivilized.
peoplecan’t help but be racist against south asians, I’m content they haven’t tried making bhopal disaster content because it would probably end up being stupidly offensive
Inga Legasova, Valery Legasov's daughter had a Russian Facebook post about how the show was 90% bullshit and straight up lied about her father and others, but I don't have a link to it. An English translation was posted on here over a year ago tho
I was unable to enjoy it as the anticommunism within was pornographic
i suppose a dramatic miniseries portraying the events culminating in the FBI and EPA raid of the Rocky Flats Plant and it's generally forgotten/hidden legacy
Former grand jury foreman McKinley chronicles his experiences in the 2004 book he co-authored with attorney Caron Balkany, The Ambushed Grand Jury which begins with an open letter to the U.S. Congress from Special Agent Lipsky:
I am an FBI agent. My superiors have ordered me to lie about a criminal investigation I headed in 1989. We were investigating the US Department of Energy, but the US Justice Department covered up the truth.
I have refused to follow the orders to lie about what really happened during that criminal investigation at Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Instead, I have told the author of this book the truth. Her promise to me, if I told her what really happened, was that she would put it in a book to tell Congress and the American people.
Some dangerous decisions are now being made based on that government cover-up. Please read this book. I believe you know what needs to happen.
can you imagine how massive an institutional failure has to be by the Department of Energy for the FBI to pretend to be on an anti-terror investigation so they can surprise raid a nuclear plant and catch DOE officials off guard? that would be prestige TV.
for every Chernobyl, there are dozens of declared EPA Superfund sites and for every EPA Superfund site, there are hundreds of unrecognized, covered up catastrophes. we almost never learn of them, let alone about them, in popular media. they are something local communities might talk about amongst each other: "don't let your kids play there", "don't drink the water here.", but the community leaders don't want much hay made as it would scare off business or new arrivals. and, they or their family likely had a hand in a pocket over it way back when.
to be clear, nearabout every country with heavy industry has these places, but the closest the US has ever come to reckoning with their existence was CERCLA which was passed just before Reagan, so you can imagine how gutted and underfunded it is by now.
anyway i liked the Chernobyl series, as a TV series. the arc for the Shcherbina character was excellent. and it was pretty clear that once the scope of the situation became clear to leadership, state power was brought forward to solve it in a way that could never have happened in the US. i liked the line where Shcherbina grew frustrated with Legasov's pessimism and said something like, "tell me exactly what you need." so Legasov says something like, "500 tons of silica sand ready to be dropped by helicopters within 4 hours" or some crazy shit like that, expecting to be dismissed, and Shcherbina is like "ok" before it basically smash cuts to the material coming in. i remember thinking, "yeah, in the US, our leaders would be paralyzed by waiting on captains of industry to OK any solution, cover up the plant failure, imprison anyone who talked about it as spies, and declare the explosion in cancer rates across the entire country as an evil weapon of the chinese communists."
If you want popular media that focuses on industrial catastrophes/poisoning of communities in the US, you might enjoy the movie Erin Brockavich. It doesn't involve EPA or Department of Energy like that, but it's a true story of a lawyer successfully suing Pacific Gas and Electric corporation for poisoning Hinckley, CA through wastewater contamination.
ive seen it, it is a good flick. also, more recently Dark Waters (2019) with Mark "White Buffalo" Ruffalo is a strong pop media legal thriller about DuPont gang fucking West Virginia (and ultimately the planet) with PFOA for decades after their in-house researchers showed it was extremely fucked up. but hey... teflon!
i'm an ecology nerd so i live for this type of joints.
"for all mankind" is a similarly good in spite of its anticommunism brainworms show. Sometimes the soviets are shown in a positive light but usually it's more of an "in spite of authoritarian rule" thing. There's a North Korean storyline late in the series that really leans into the "communist Asian automaton" trope that feels real bad. Hopefully they'll humanize the character in the next season.
I was watching Atlanta S3, and the third episode can't help sneak in a zinger at North Korea at the very end. One the one hand, the arc of the plot was very obviously critical of bougie-ass white people. But god damn, even Donald Glover can't help falling for the NK tropes.
it's so baked into america, even committed conspiracy lovers get mad when you suggest that the portrait of NK presented in western media might be made up
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don't forget they also get their blonde
the way the women are treated by the show is hard to pin down, sometimes it seems pretty realistic and sometimes it's way too american exceptionalist
i kept hoping for a US -> USSR defection, like maybe a gay or black american astronaut would find the russians treated them better, but it's too brainwormed for that
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seriously, major spoiler
i kept hoping for a US -> USSR defection
There's a shot at the very end of the S3 finale which shows Margo step out on a balcony in Moscow, so I'm pretty sure we're getting something in that direction for S4 (though she could well become some kind of double agent, not fully committing to her defection or sth; we'll have to wait)
spoiler
Yeah, I guess you're right about that. I didn't really class that as a positive defection in my head since the storyline is that she was blackmailed by the ebil authoritarian commulists into handing over US space tech (which is even more :brainworms: since Russian space propulsion tech was always ahead of ours) and she's implied to have just run away and let the bombing seem like her death.
The constant "RUSHA FLYING 100% COPY OF AMERICAN THING" really gets my goat so much
spoiler
Hey, at least it's canon that the IRA got Thatcher in the FAM universe, that's gotta be worth something, right (it's hidden in one of the start-of-season headline montages but still)
Edgy negative capability reading of the show: a lot of those moments feel like they are actually closer to capitalism than communism. You're telling me the same sort of shit as the plant manager trying to run the test to get his promotion, etc. wouldn't happen under the bootheel of mr. Market? I don't know if it's the creators intent, but nearly every moment of "horror" at Communism in that show feels like a feature closer to capitalism than communism.
I really liked it overall.
Yeah I saw a lot of hate for this series on here and obviously it’s ideological slop but yeah just from a human interest perspective I found it enthralling.
Somewhere there is a post by the daughter one of the nuclear scientists involved (I think the guy who is the main character in the story) who said that most of it was bullshit, especially the presentation of the qualifications and living conditions of those involved in the initial shutdown efforts, that the record has exonerated everyone involved, and that missteps that were taken were eventually punished, but most of those missteps were due to miscommunication around the severity of the accident, not blatant coverup (aside from international reporting, which was initially covered up).
It got posted on here over a year ago, I think she posted it on Facebook or the Russian equivalent. It was inga legasova, Valery Legasov's daughter
Of course google only yields short quotes that make the USSR look bad but I think the whole thing was in Russian and someone on here translated it
How come they don’t teach this is school hmmmm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Rock_uranium_mill_spill
Aside from some woeful science and frequent hyping up the drama of "Guy goes into radiation, he doooooommmed, radiation is a mystical death curse that you can get from touching someone a week later" (the guy lived in RL, no you can't get radiation from someone with radiation sickness who's been, say, given a bath) it has a lot of good points.
