Wordy Birds

Stalin Thought of You

Original airdate: October 23, 2009

Director Kevin McNeer talks about his documentary, “Stalin Thought of You.”

From stalinthoughtofyou.com:

“By the time he passed away in 2008 at the age of 109, Boris Efimov’s pen had churned out political cartoons for the Soviet press on just about every world event in the past hundred years. Whether in WWII, when Russia faced annihilation by the Nazis – who had orders to hang Efimov on sight – or during the super-power days of the Cold War, Efimov always had an inexhaustible supply of images and jokes to deploy against the enemy. His list of satirical casualties ranges from the Tsar to George Bush.   But behind his titanic career, his charm and his wit, is what Efimov calls “a wound that does not heal”: the execution of his older brother Mikhail Koltsov. The ambitious Koltsov was a famous journalist, pal of Earnest Hemingway, and a Soviet spy, but he always looked out for his younger brother Boris, who to his dying day worked and slept under his older brother’s portrait. The keys to Koltsov‘s fate and Efimov’s contradictory attitude toward it are bound up in their complex relationship with Stalin.  Efimov’s words, drawings and animated films are interwoven with rarely seen footage from the Russian State Film Archives in a kaleidoscopic stroll through the darker side of the 20th century.”

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The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation Vol 1 & 2

Original airdate: October 16, 2009

“The men who raised me were lords of matter, and in the dim chambers I watched as they traced the spinning of bodies celestial in vast, iron courses, and bid sparks to dance upon their hands; they read the bodies of fish as if each dying trout or shad was a fresh Biblical Testament, the wet and twitching volume of a new-born Pentateuch. They burned holes in the air, wrote poems of love, sucked the venom from sores, painted landscapes of gloom, and made metal sing; they dissected fire like newts.”

- from The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I

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