Soviet Russia’s Collapse and Its Striking Parallels With Brexit Britain
The subject of an incredible documentary on BBC iplayer.
Adam Curtis is a film maker of whom very few Americans will have heard.
Curtis’s approach of excavating unappreciated insights and facts often lend the impression of a conspiracy theorist, But our man’s talents in his chosen craft are beyond astonishing.
With the approval of the Kremlin, the BBC was allowed to film the politburo and everyday Soviet people in the latter days of communism. What this does is provide extraordinary footage of the events of the mid-1980s right through to the collapse of Gorbachev’s government and the Soviet empire and the crippling effects of Russia’s adoption of market economics.
It’s one thing to read books about what led to the unravelling of USSR and it is another to watch umpteen hours of unseen footage which captured life across the various nation states in the old communist empire.
From the first episode of TraumaZone, we see communism on its very last legs; a system that had lost all legitimacy and run completely out of ideas.
It didn’t matter what ideas Mikhail Gorbachev proposed; it only sought to reinforce the inefficiencies of communism and accelerate the pace of the decline of the Soviet empire.