WHEN it comes to movies, the Mahogany Ridge regulars can tell you a thing or two. One film, however, that we don't have much to say about is David Lean's epic Doctor Zhivago.
It's not for want of trying. Some years back it seemed as if it was running on a permanent loop together with Stanley Kubrick's2001: A Space Odyssey on one of the TV movie channels. Many's the regular who'd return from an evening at the Ridge, collapse in front of the idiot box and tune into Lean's classic.
However, with a running time of three hours and 20 minutes and little in the way of Bruce Willis-type explosions, it tends to drag a bit. So we'd fall asleep after half an hour and wake up in the middle of 2001. One moment, we'd be wondering if Julie Christie was going to take her clothes off. Next thing there'd be this guy messing about in what looked like a bicycle wheel floating in outer space. Very confusing, I don't have to tell you, and all we could tell you about Doctor Zhivago is that is has something to do with Russia.
Doctor Zhivago's now back in the news - not the movie but the Boris Pasternak novel. According to The Zhivago Affair, a new book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée based on declassified CIA documents, it has an interesting Cold War history.
Pasternak completed the novel in the 1950s but couldn't get it published in Russia as it was deemed subversive, reactionary and anti-communist. He did however give his manuscript to several people and, in 1957, British MI6 agents learnt that a copy was in the luggage of a man flying via Malta. There, the aircraft's departure was delayed for a couple two hours while agents secretly removed the manuscript from a suitcase, photographed each page and then returned the work.
The film eventually made its way to Langley, Virginia, where according to a CIA memo, it was considered a golden opportunity to expose the intellectual repression of the Soviets. So the Americans printed thousands of copies of the novel - much to the anger of Pasternak's Italian publisher - and smuggled them back into Russia where, the CIA claimed, there was "tremendous demand on the part of students and intellectuals to obtain copies". The rest, as they say, is history and the Soviets are gone.
The great pity - and here's the thing - is that Doctor Zhivago appears to have had no such effect on the SA Communist Party. It stubbornly refuses to roll over and die but instead clings to life, stealing oxygen and giving Marxism a lousy name.
We were discussing all this, back at the Ridge, as we marked the 21st anniversary on Thursday of the assassination of then SACP leader Chris Hani, an act which twice pushed the country to the brink of disaster.
The first, the immediate threat of civil war, was effectively defused by Nelson Mandela who appeared on TV to affirm his views of a united democratic future.
The second, more insidious threat is now apparent: Hani's death, along with the departure of Joe Slovo two years later, left the SACP a rudderless hulk and thus ensured the rise to prominence of low-grade thinkers and verkrampt Stalinists like Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande, who this week laughably asserted that the Nkandla scandal was nothing more than "white people's lies".
The racism is perhaps not that exceptional. As matters stand, ours is a world in which "race quota creep" is set to become more overt in the months ahead. The delusional, self-mythologising is, however, a different story - especially as we read of how the ruling party and its alliance partners "continue to draw from the wisdom of Hani".
As the SACP's Jeremy Cronin told Business Day: "Sometimes the stories we tell of a heroic past are a little one-sided... [Hani] knew real-life organisations have their complexities and complications, and it's important to build those organisations, to respect their unity, but at the same time be principled."
And, as if to show he's no stranger to a bit one-sidedness himself, Cronin went on to claim that Hani would not have criticised the alliance from the "outside".
One of these "outsiders" is Ronnie Kasrils, a man who has difficulty in recommending that people vote for the ANC. He believes Hani would share that difficulty - and would march against the party were he alive.
So which is it? A pro-Zuma Hani or not? In or out, up or down?
No wonder Hani's daughter, Lindiwe, has warned against the "dangerous speculation" of trying to determine what her father would make of South Africa today.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
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