Revue (ПРЕДСТАВЛЕНИЕ). 2008. Germany/Russia. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Ma.ja.de. Filmproduktions GmbH. 83 min.
Stitching together a “golden age” of Soviet propaganda newsreels from the 1950s and ’60s, Sergei Loznitsa creates a panorama of a once-mighty empire, a vast territory that covered one-sixth of the Earth’s land mass and stretched across 11 time zones, encompassing—and sometimes brutally homogenizing—one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse populations in world history. In the aftermath of the Great Patriotic War and the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev transformed mass media from an instrument of terror and hero worship into a dynamic, though tightly regulated, tool of public persuasion. Statues and posters of Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx were rehabilitated and human interest stories in the ubiquitous series “News of the Day” projected an image of chauvinist superiority, unity, and prosperity, stories in which Homo sovieticus triumphed in industry, science, the arts, diplomacy, and space, while the bad elements of society were publicly shamed or worse. By 1974, Khrushchev’s protégé and successor Leonid Brezhnev, speaking of “developed socialism” (commonly derided as “sovok”), would extol the “Soviet way of life” in propaganda films and television broadcasts: a country of proletariat internationalism and friendship among peoples that claimed to have successfully transcended any sort of internecine conflict or cultural erasure.