An NSC reader in the US sent us a Video called "L'Chaim, Comrade Stalin" to do a review.

"L’Chaim, Comrade Stalin"
Propaganda film for Zionism
By REDMOND GUERRERO

This movie, "L'Chaim, Comrade Stalin", is nothing but sick anti-communist propaganda for Zionism. Ostensibly it is about Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) created in the Russian Far East during Cde. Stalin's time. Yet it tells you little of the reasons why the Soviet government decided upon establishing the JAR. You learn little of the JAR. Instead you get mainly clichéd anti-communist rants. In red letters "The Jewish Question" flashes repeatedly in sinister fashion. What is this question we might ask?

The movie starts off with old clips of Lenin and Stalin giving speeches. Wonderful Lenin! Wonderful Stalin! Flash a clip of Stalin stating that the country is "cleansed" of the capitalists and the bourgeoisie. No context, no explanation. Then, flash clips of the Jewish ghettoes in Eastern Europe. "The Jewish Question!" Ahhhh, now we get it! Stalin means Jews! Cleansed of Jews! Stalin has the answer, it declares to "The Jewish Question" (flashing in red). A sly slide from the Russian Empire and its anti-Jewish pogroms to Stalin deciding in 1928 to solve 'The Jewish Question"!

Step one: Establish Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) in the Russian Far East. Get "idealistic," i.e., dupes, to go there and build it from scratch. Oh it was a hard life the film belabors. Then again, when is pioneering not a hard life? The film does not explain! Nothing, it declares in outrage, just tents and some equipment plus swamps when the first Jews arrive. Poor Jews, the film laments, artisans and intellectuals; thrown from the cities to a backwater area to farm! Of course, Birobidzhan should have built itself! Of course everything should have been spared for Birobidzhan even though world war loomed on the horizon. Bad Stalin! Bad Stalin! Not exercising his will despite all conditions and realities that life be easy for pioneers!!!

Yet, these "dupes" create collective farms, bring prosperity and undertake massive constructions despite war. Yet again, Yiddish culture thrives!!! What does the film say? Is it only because they are intellectuals that know the most advanced production techniques that they succeeded despite Stalin's machinations? But what about the lamentation that being poor Jews trained by generations in the ghettoes in traditional Jewish occupations, they could not have such knowledge? And they built everything only with their bare hands, it exclaims! Whole cities in so short a time! What wonders, the film fails to mention, that can be accomplished by a free people with commitment to socialism and the support of the Soviet state!

Compare their situation, their creations, with another group of Jews, those Jews in Europe or those in the Western Soviet Union who did not go to Birobidzhan, where are they now? Truth reveals itself for a few seconds in the film: they perished in the Nazi death camps. Dare I suggest that that is the reason for the Soviet Government under Stalin creating Birobidzhan, to save the lives of Soviet Jews and other Jews, to give them a homeland of their own where their culture as a people can thrive? No, of course not, suggests the film.

Why not a warm place like Palestine? Where then in the U.S.S.R.? Where other nationalities already live? Perhaps, the filmmakers with their references to Israel are suggesting that the only right solution would have been to expel other people, to put them under occupation, daily terror and humiliation, like the fate of the Palestinians.

Imagine, the film actually alleges that Stalin was so stupid as to believe that the Jews would be the fifth-column for Hitler's invading armies! That is the reason they give for the JAR. Imagine if you can the audacity and utter shamelessness of such a claim! Imagine the even more despicable accusation that in 1948 to 1953, Stalin planned on deporting all Jews in the USSR to Birobidzhan and then physically exterminating them! That would have been step two of Stalin's solution to "The Jewish Question" as the film would have it. Stalin is all to blame, even what came after his death! Stalin. Stalin. Stalin. All these accusations and more are made. But why?

You see the message of the film. First the correct equation: Stalin = Lenin = Communism = internationalism = anti-Zionism. Then the foul leap to equating Stalin with Hitler and anti-Zionism with extermination of the Jews. There you have it: one sickening anti-communist slander of a Zionist propaganda. If you love truth and hate slander, avoid this film like the plague!

Click here to return to the September 2003 index.