Eternal Memory: Voices from the Great Terror

Given the sheer number of documentaries about the Holocaust, it's good to see that some filmmakers have realized that there were other genocides in our history that might also be worthy of investigation. In this case, the focus is on the Ukraine and that other despotic tyrant of the 1940s, Josef Stalin. Stalin's purges in many ways make for a more interesting study of irrational paranoia than Hitler's, for while Hitler was motivated primarily by racial and religious prejudice, this film makes clear that Stalin got to the point where he would have his secret police fabricate charges just so he could reach his established monthly quotas of arrests and murders. Beginning as a method of purging dissenters, Stalin's executions eventually moved to the point of executing people who weren't dissenters but might possibly become so down the line. And David Pultz's film lingers on the ultimate of ironies: that the Nazi invaders actually became liberators when they marched into the Ukraine and exposed the mass graves to the world. The film is most powerful when it calls for justice and an attempt to seek out the secret police from that era and bring them to trial, but is less convincing when it claims that Marxism allows for this sort of thing to happen by advocating violent revolution; it's a bit like Pat Robertson's claim that godless secular humanism allowed the Tuskegee experiments to happen. The film is narrated in appropriately somber tones by Meryl Streep, who can now lay claim to having used her clout to make a social statement. At least it isn't Tibet again.