The new Indiana Jones movie just opened. This one, the fourth in the series, revives the franchise with a story set twenty years after the original trilogy.
The Nazis are not around in 1957, so the bad guys this time are communists, specifically from the Soviet Union. Cate Blanchett plays a KGB agent. Some people are rather upset by this.
“What galls is how together with America we defeated Hitler, and how we sympathized when Bin Laden hit them,” St Petersburg Communist Party member Viktor Perov told the Telegraph. “But they go ahead and scare kids with communists. These people have no shame.”
Perov is not the only one upset by this. Moscow lawmaker Andrei Andreyev said “it is very disturbing if talented directors want to provoke a new Cold War.” St. Petersburg’s Communist Party had this to say to Harrison Ford: “You have no future in Russia any more. Speaking plainly, it is best for you not to come here. You will be beaten and despised.”
The Soviet Union collapsed about twenty years ago. Ever since then, the U.S. has been able to act as if it was the world’s only superpower. This has not gone as well as it could have. While our attention was occupied by Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, Russia came back.
Russia is back in a very modern way. President Vladimir Putin, having run up against term limits, stepped aside recently. His hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, handily won election as the new President. Medvedev had been First Deputy Prime Minister, as well as Chairman of the Board at Gazprom.
Putin now becomes Prime Minister. That pushes Viktor Zubkov from Prime Minister to First Deputy Prime Minister. That’s okay; Zubkov will soon be named Chairman of the Board at Gazprom.
Gazprom is a Russian company that is the largest extractor of natural gas in the world. Gazprom stands behind only Saudi Arabia and Iran in terms of amount of oil reserves held. That’s Big Oil.
Looks like Spielberg and Lucas are not the only ones reviving a franchise.
Putin and Company are not communists; they belong to a party called United Russia. That might not be good news.
On March 5, 1940, Soviet authorities ordered a mass execution of Polish prisoners. The men who signed the execution order were named Stalin, Molotov, Kalinin, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and Beria. The order resulted in the deaths of more than 25,000 Polish prisoners.
A large number of the prisoners were officers and NCOs in the Polish Army that had been defeated by the combined Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. There were also several hundred doctors, lawyers, engineers, pilots, teachers, writers, and journalists who were considered a threat to Soviet security and had to be eliminated.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Polish government-in-exile said that it would form a Polish army to assist the Soviets against the Germans. The Polish general in charge of this army requested information about Polish officers who had been captured by the Soviets in 1939. Stalin told him that they had all been freed.
In April 1943, the Germans discovered mass graves in the forest near Katyn. They tried to use this discovery to discredit the Soviet Union.
The Allies, not willing to upset their Soviet partners at the time, refused to take the side of the Polish government in exile when it called for an investigation. Both Roosevelt and Churchill knew that the crime lay on the Soviet’s hands, but suppressed any investigations. Once the Soviet Union recaptured the area, it began a cover up that continued for decades.
In 1990 Gorbachev admitted that the NKVD had been involved in the executions. With the collapse of the Soviet Union we stopped thinking of Russia as a major threat. The Katyn massacre seemed less like a warning and more like a symbol of a new age of Russian openness.
Russian officials promised to transfer all the information in their possession to Polish authorities. But in the past few years, Putin has consolidated his power.
By late 2004, Putin’s government had classified most of the files gathered during recent investigations into the Katyn massacre. As far as the Russians are concerned, this was not genocide, not a war crime, and not a crime against humanity. Whatever it was, the statute of limitations had expired, and there was no need to discuss it any longer.
The Soviet Union may be gone, but we better start paying attention to Russia. Putin may no longer be President, but he is right there pulling the strings for his hand-picked successor.
I do not trust Putin and I do not trust Medvedev. We need to remember Katyn, not just for what happened, but for the way the new Russia is willing to cover it up.
The recent nonsense over Indiana Jones reminded me of Katyn, which I first wrote about here this past March. Part of this column is recycled from that March entry. But then, parts of the new Indiana Jones are recycled, too.