I attended a screening and discussion of Soviet-era animation at the Harriman Institute at SIPA. They screened several animated shorts from the DVD, and the one I found most interesting was ‘interplanetary revolution’, where vampiric capitalists/imperialists/fascists escape the earth in little spaceships and are chased by Soviet space-proles spreading the revolution across the solar system while the Internationale plays in the background. It dates from 1924, but the beginning of the black & white clip declares that it was ‘likely to occur in 1929′ - perhaps another failed five-year plan. Another clip called ‘forward, march, time’ from the 70s was harder to interpret… I wonder if the animators had put in little easter eggs in their work, like how they painstakingly copied the little details of capitalist life in America, like coca-cola advertisements, camel cigars and model-T fords… did they live vicariously this way, escaping the communist world through their work? These are primary source documents with an authenticity that things like Red Star and Anastasia can never have. I’m looking forward to seeing ‘Hammer & Tickle‘, another documentary on Soviet-era cartoons and jokes. I had hoped more of my friends on campus would be interested in seeing these artifacts of totalitarianism, and try to know what it was like to live in a world without freedom, but none of them came with me. Anyone interested in civil liberties would want to see what the end of the road to serfdom looks like.