Poor Light on the "Dark Side of the Moon": Soviet Actuality Film Sources for the Early Days of World War II

Poor Light on the "Dark Side of the Moon": Soviet Actuality Film Sources for the Early Days of World War II R. C. Raack R. C. Raack is Professor ofHistory at California State University at Hayward. He is especially interested in the history ofSoviet and Eastern European archivalfilm and in the use ofdocumentaryfilm sources in historical research. In September 1939, first the Nazi Wehrmacht, and seventeen days later, the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (RKKA) collaborating with the Germans, invaded Poland. The Polish Republic, caught, as so often in its history, between the hammer and the anvil, collapsed. Its government, suddenly close to falling into Soviet hands, took refuge abroad. Resistance by scattered units ofthe Polish armed forces continued against the Germans for a number of weeks. Against the Soviets in eastern Poland the fighting went on even longer. (1) Even while the fighting continued, German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop made his second trip in two months to the Kremlin. There he, Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov cooperatively renegotiated their unholy interests in east central Europe, among them the borders for their respective Polish conquests originally fixed just a month earlier under the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The Germans subsequently turned over to the Soviets much of the territory they had taken. The Wehrmacht then ceremonially departed to Its conquests east of the Bug River "demarcation line" through victory gates set up at the command ofthe Red Army to celebrate the common victory. (2) A month later, Molotov, obviously meaning just what he said, proclaimed that Poland, "that ugly offspring ofthe Versailles Treaty," after swift blows from the German and Soviet armies, "had vanished forever."(3) The "happy Soviet dawn," proclaimed by Soviet propaganda of the times, had come to show on eastern Poland. One writer later characterized that new ambiance, far more accurately it seems if we credit recent and more exact histories ofthe period, as "the dark side of the moon."(4) Naturally the Nazi propaganda apparatus of Dr. Goebbels, and that of Stalin's Soviet state, were each called to overtime work to explain the events surrounding the destruction of the Polish Republic. Their purposes were to brighten the picture for domestic and foreign publics of what became, in both parts of that unhappy land, the sack of a nation on a scale recalling barbarian invasions ofEurope centuries before. (5) The Soviet peoples had paid dearly over the years since the Revolution for the victory of the Bolshevik order. What they had as reward for their investment was the Stalinist system of political and economic direction, with its slogans championing the liberation of man and the achievement of economic equality and well being. In keeping with the Soviet propaganda program, it was necessary to describe to them the devious plan of their government to collaborate with Nazi Germany in the destruction of Poland as a liberation welcomed by the local population. Soviet propaganda therefore loudly greeted the return "home" of the White Russians and Ukrainians, the two largest ethnic minorities in pre-war Poland, to their "brothers and sisters" in the Soviet "republics."6 Toward this end the state-controlled Soviet film industry, whose great importance for propaganda Stalin himself underscored, was cranked up to produce documentary and 1 feature films, plus newsreel stories, to present the government's points of view. There were, to be sure, no rival domestic film enterprises to present, should anyone have been ofa mind to do so, a contrasting point ofview for the home market. (7) The historian who recognizes the value of film, particularly of documentary film, as historical source material, is usually pleased to find such historical films, and possibly preserved outtakes from the time of their shooting. They are potentially excellent historical sources for the study of those times. Such documentary materials would be especially important in this case because of the lack of wartime film footage from the Polish side of the battle fronts, and because of the failure of Western and other independent cinematographers, with one or two exceptions, to film the wartime combat on any side. (8) Unfortunately, the existing Soviet films, apparently only some of those originally planned, are of significantly less value as...