The Docs Are In: After the Cold War

Five Hot Docs films delve into the legacies that linger in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe.

Through no fault of its own save for inconvenient geographical location, Central and Eastern Europe tragically became a political laboratory for most of the 20th century. The great ideological experiments of fascism and communism were both tried (and imposed) in the region and found considerably wanting. Understandably, both have left deep legacies, and perhaps for this reason humour and irony have usually accompanied pathos and suffering.

Fortunately, the former qualities have found their way into the post-communist era, even when there is usually (though not always) less collective anguish to go around. Post-communist cinema, drawing upon regional filmmaking traditions that stretch back to moviemaking’s origins, document the wry side of the past and the over-inflated hopes and expected disappointments in the rough-and-tumble transition to capitalism and democracy. It turns out there was much wisdom in the old joke: all the “truths” broadcast by the Soviets to their own citizens turned out to be false, yet all the “lies” advanced about the West turned out to be true.

Czech Dream is one of the region’s most well known documentary exports of the last decade, and it’s a must-see for determined Hot Docs filmgoers. The film follows two students of the Czech Film Academy, Vit Klusák and Filip Remunda, who, for their senior-year project, decide to create an entirely fictional marketing and public relations campaign for a fictional big-box hypermarket ironically titled “Český sen” (Czech dream).

With the help of Hugo Boss and a couple of good haircuts, the scruffy students are made over into youthful entrepreneurs who examine first-hand the power of advertising and the alluring promise of competitive capitalism when thousands of eager and soon-to-be-disappointed consumers show up on opening day for a store that is no more than a canvas façade. The elaborate hoax was front-page news in the Czech Republic and highlighted the tragic gullibility of these newcomers to a market economy. The entire affair was both debated by politicians and derided by taxpayers, who – unknowingly – funded the project via a grant from the Ministry of Culture.

My Perestroika examines the last generation to be educated and “formed” in the USSR, through the life stories of five classmates. Born in the Brezhnev era, they eagerly and innocently participated in the ersatz public life of the Komsomol and Young Pioneers, soaked up the party line, and simply enjoyed what were, in retrospect, fairly happy urban middle-class childhoods. They came of age during Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika – the policies designed to reform the Soviet Union that unwittingly unleashed the forces that would destroy it.

The very different trajectories of each illustrate the opportunity for success as well as the daily struggles to survive that characterize Moscow today. All five are remarkably open, nuanced, and thoughtful in their reflections about their past, their present, and what the country holds for their own future as well as for their kids’. They represent a unique and rather lost generation, who have had a foothold in both systems and to some degree belong in neither.

The 20 years since the fall of the Wall have seen a resurgence of nationalism across the region, with mixed results. Violence and ethnic cleansing accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, yet not a drop of blood was shed during the “Velvet Divorce” – the breakup of Czechoslovakia. In the eastern corner of Slovakia – now a member of the European Union – sits the tiny village of Osadné, populated by ethnic Rusyns, or Ruthenians. National awakening in their case has hardly brought prosperity, despite the efforts of the mayor, who has benevolently ruled the town from one regime to the next for more than 36 years.

In the film Osadné , the mayor, the village priest, and an enterprising Rusyn nationalist work together to get EU blessing – and funding – to open a nature trail, a “chapel of grief,” and a monastic retreat that will both symbolize the bridge to Europe and provide a way forward to happier times. The result is delightfully naïve, yet depressing – the village representatives who voyage to Brussels to meet the 21st century version of the “The Good Tsar” are overly optimistic. Their sincerest efforts at boosterism are bound to produce less-than-hoped-for results.

The post-communist era has brought access to archival footage and the unearthing of stories of local and international consequence about the Cold War. New national voices, transnational partnerships, and EU funding have created a veritable explosion of documentary cinema. Many filmmakers have taken advantage of their ability to visually provide new narratives, or reinterpret events that were known and accessible as propaganda, hurled by one side against the other.

Disco and Atomic War opens with the story of a Finnish boy regularly writing letters to his Estonian cousin about the television series Dallas, to inform her about life in the scandalous and exotic West. Millionaire men with shiny white teeth working in skyscrapers with beautiful, thin, yet unhappy women. It’s a parable for how Finland and Estonia became the front of the cultural Cold War, a true battle for hearts and minds. Finland was an ostensibly “free” country yet had Soviet troops stationed on its soil. Relatively independent Finnish television broadcast purposefully to the nearby Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, where television sets were converted to pick up the illegal signals. The televised diet from the West streamed in despite Soviet jamming efforts: Moscow’s counter-propaganda charged CIA involvement and derided the sexual perversion of Finnish programming. which, of course, became the most watched television station in Estonia.

In 1975 the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe brought together the states on both sides of the East-West divide to sign the Helsinki Accords. In exchange for the West’s promise to respect existing borders and not meddle politically in the Soviet sphere of influence, the East agreed to respect human rights and stop jamming “bourgeois” broadcasting. In the end, hard power was no match for soft power, explaining the incredible success of disco, punk, and Hollywood movies. The Soviets and their puppet rulers in Estonia could rail on against the cruel intentions and psychological warfare of their ideological enemy, but to no avail. Disco and Atomic War tells the entire story from the perspective of Estonian children, and the narration is laugh-out-loud funny.

Finally, War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them tells the story of the infamous Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, who for years spied for the CIA and then defected to the West with information about the fantastic plans the Soviet Union had for a potential invasion of Western Europe. He passed on more than 40,000 pages of Warsaw Pact documents detailing the alliance’s offensive plans for a rapid invasion force to take over continental Europe. For his “crime” of espionage or his “heroism” in the service of free Poland – depending on your perspective – he was sentenced to death in absentia.

The film begins with Kukliński’s return visit to Poland, only possible when his sentence was finally commuted, nine years after the fall of communism. Filmmaker Dariusz Jabłoński had secured Kukliński’s full cooperation to make a documentary about his life and his fateful decision, but he died just before shooting was to begin. Thus the film is really Jabłoński’s effort to reconstruct his subject’s mysterious past, and the journeys he took – with the colonel’s ashes literally beside him – to unlock the pages of classified history from leading sources on both sides. The result is gripping – better than a John LeCarré novel brought to life.

However, even if one takes all of the claims made about the importance of Kukliński’s revelations at face value, the fact remains that much of the Cold War, and most certainly its endgame, was not simply about the hard power of conventional forces. The allure of Europe, the West and all that capitalism had to offer, from popular music to high-quality cuts of meat in the butcher shops, was a greater offensive weapon than any NATO force could have dreamed of.

Taken together, these five films remind those of us steeped in Cold War triumphalism that we didn’t really “win” the Cold War after all. Rather, the other side collapsed under the weight of ideology, unmet expectations, and imperial overstretch. The jury is still out on whether or not the European Union, itself currently overburdened with its own democratic and economic deficits, can meet the expectations of generations to come as the continent knits itself together.