THE FILM, KATYN, BY ANDRZEJ WAJDA: AN APPRECIATION FOR SOUTH AFRICA
Mother Russia was the mother of all three ANC presidents of South Africa - Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma - insofar as each of them, for very different lengths of time, were members of the South African Communist Party, and Russia was the great mother of the SACP.
The greatest film ever made about Russia in the 20th century is now available with English subtitles. Shown recently to acclaim in London, it should be seen as widely as possible by South Africans so as to learn about this country's past, its present and even - to some degree - its future, when (and if) the film becomes available in South Africa. After all, how many other countries in the world (outside of Russia itself, and China , North Korea and Cuba ) continue to be governed by the residue of this linear heritage in terms of primogeniture and longevity of the totalitarian dictatorship?
There were primarily two models of the totalitarian dictatorship in Europe in the 20th century, the German and the Russian, and for a period of 18 months one oppressed nation suffered both of them at the same time, under conditions of total war: Poland.
This historically oppressed nation has now produced the best film ever made about the character of its historic oppressor to its east, Russia , during the most awful period of the 20th century. Katyn (2007), directed by the Polish master film-maker, Andrzej Wajda, strips away every lie ever told by the Communist Party and the ANC in South Africa about Russia, the great despot of the 20th century, which represented itself (not least in southern Africa) as the great friend of oppressed nations, and as the prime advocate of the so-called "National Democratic Revolution".
Yes, Poland had its "national democratic revolution" under Russia's maternal solicitude, and Wajda - author of a classic film trilogy made in Communist Poland in the Fifties, including Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) - tells us what that involved. This was: mass murder, genocide, and the Big Lie.
Stalin's Soviet Union did not come second to Nazi Germany in that trilogy of political monstrosity, which was passed off to the hundreds of patsies of the SACP who now rule South Africa as an historic achievement of democracy and socialism. Eagerly and willingly they bought the Big Lie, as they attended (if they were high enough in the Party ranks) the Lenin International School in Moscow; or (if they were considered hard or cruel enough) the Stasi school for training of the ANC Security Department, as previously led by President Zuma and is led now by his colleague in arms, Dr Siyabonga Cwele, as Security Minister of the state; or, if they were just the poor bloody infantry of the Cold War in Africa, the USSR's military training academy at Sinferopol in the warm south, in Crimea.
Andrzej Wajda - now aged 82 - has given us, in this film monument to the 20th century, which is also a personal monument, a true picture of the making of modern South Africa , a country in the hands of the authors and makers of Quatro prison camp in Angola in the bad time of exile.
Quatro, after all, was a little replica of the great machine of GULAG, by which the purveyor of the National Democratic Revolution spread sweetness and light to the nations, wherever its armed fist extended. This happened to Poland in September 1939. By agreement. With. Hitler.
When the Stalin-Hitler Pact (or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or the Nazi-Soviet Pact, whichever label one prefers) was agreed in secret, poor Poland lying between these carnivorous creatures was to be the meal. In September 1939 it was carved up, and eaten. Wajda's film, Katyn, is about the meal in the east, in which Stalin devoured the officer corps of the Polish army, as the military representatives of this historic oppressed nation. With a thoroughness not even attempted at the time by his German partner in the west, 20 000 officers in the Polish army who had surrendered to superior Soviet forces were first confined as prisoners of war in eastern Poland, then transported into Soviet-ruled Ukraine in prison transport trains (graphically conveyed in the film) and finally butchered by the Soviet Security Department in 1940 in an industrial-style human abattoir in the forest of Katyn and at two other sites, at Kalinin and Kharkov, before being buried in mass graves, their corpses covered over by bulldozers.
Stalin had nothing to learn from Hitler. Historically, Hitler learned from Stalin. One sees in the film the still living personnel (and future corpses) of the Polish officer corps being presented one by one for identification after their defeat in September 1939 to a formal panel of military/police bureaucrats, the German ones to the left, the Russians to the right. Alles in Ordnung, Kameraad!
And the Germans told the truth! ...when they discovered the Polish soldiers' bodies, hidden in shallow graves in Katyn forest, after Hitler had decided to rip up his scoundrels' deal with Stalin, and invaded Mother Russia and its empire of suffering in June 1941. Not much use to Stalin, or to Russia, was the space, or time, he had bought in that Pact of Blood in 1939, which merely served as the preface to even greater horrors of the war to come, at the cost of the Polish nation and its officers. Some friend to the oppressed nations!
At least on this occasion, fate gave it to Joseph Goebbels, as Propaganda Minister of the Thousand Year Reich, to tell the truth. He let it be known to his crushed and terrorised Polish subjects, and to the world, what a crime had been committed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , as governor of the Russian state, and the custodian of its Polish prisoners of war. Every detail recounted by the Nazis in this instance was true. They had no need to lie, or to embellish. Brother Stalin had provided Brother Hitler, gratis, with this propaganda coup.
Wajda's film includes the Germans' documentary film footage of the uncovering by their troops of the mass graves at Katyn, showing the physical evidence, skull after skull, of the murder of soldier after soldier by a single pistol shot at the back of the head, and the personal papers and effects of each - buttons, a cross, a bunch of rosary beads held in a dead hand - as they had been hastily covered over by the bulldozers, their uniforms still intact.
Wajda shows also the "documentary" film footage of Stalin's Big Lie: the forgery confected and counterfeited by the Friend of Oppressed Poland, once the Soviet Red Army had re-conquered its lost terrain at Katyn, to show that really, after all, it had been the Germans who had committed this crime, and that, really, it had taken place in the summer of 1941 and not (after all) in that cold spring of 1940, when Russia and Germany had been buddies. And then in 1944, in occupied Poland (this time, occupied by Russia in its Drang nach Westen, its drive to the west as it progressively defeated the Germans: the so-called "Liberation"), the loudspeakers in the streets of Cracow bark out to the populace the Big Lie about the murder of their own soldiers.
Wajda's father was one of them. It took Wajda well over sixty years after his father's murder, which took place when he himself was aged 13, to make this film. It took the downfall of Stalin's empire in the Soviet Union , and the end of its domination over the Poles. After the first film by which he became celebrated as a director, Pokolenie (A Generation, 1955, the earliest of the trilogy with Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds), it took Wajda another fifty years to make Katyn.
It took such a long time for one of the great cultural artists of post-war Europe to make such a film of truth. That is an indication of its revelatory power. The film's protagonist is Anna (played by Maja Ostaszewska, standing in for Wajda's mother), who arrives at Poland's eastern border in September 1939 looking for her husband, Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), in the chaos of refugees fleeing simultaneously in two opposites directions: from the Germans in the west, from the Russians in the east. Helplessly, this tide of panic-stricken people meets in the middle, on a bridge.
The domestic and the tragic are seamlessly woven together, as history is transmuted by dramatic art. The personal threads of wives, mothers and children of wartime and post-war Poland are united with the fate of the doomed men, and time moves forwards and backwards to the ultimate horror of mass executions. Time shifts to the post-war Communist government in Poland , as enforcer of the injury done to its own people. A soldier survivor of the massacre at Katyn, Jerzy (Andrzej Chyra), a friend of Andrzej, cannot bear it any longer....
The same Big Lie reigned in South Africa , and continues to reign in the inner psyche at the head of government, and in the body politic. In South Africa in 1940, when this massacre of Polish soldiers was taking place at Katyn, the Communist Party and the pro-Nazi Greyshirts stood side by side in Johannesburg barracking the pro-war meetings of the Smuts government, the Communists from the side of Stalin, the Greyshirts from the side of Hitler. Resistance to Hitler at that time, whether by the Poles or whoever, was an "imperialist war", they said.
The best-known Communist leaders of the post-war period in South Africa, including Joe Slovo, Govan Mbeki, Moses Kotane, Yusuf Dadoo, Hilda Bernstein and Bram Fischer - the founders of Umkhonto weSizwe, and of the present government - all upheld the Big Lie, and taught this method of political reasoning to their political descendants.
In this sense, Katyn is a film of truth for South Africa of today and tomorrow. For few countries does it teach such a terrible lesson.
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