The original author of ‘fake news’ was Goebbels.
He was the one who said “If you tell a lie big enough […] people will eventually come to believe it”
A lie must be great enough that people believe in it.
Those two systems have altered our perception of trust.
A film by Inna Kurochkina
Written by Alexander Morozov
Inna Kurochkina, producer
This is an unfinished Rally Grounds of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, designed by Franz Rudolf Ruff, under the guidance of Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect, and Reichsmimister of Germany.
In order to demonstrate the unity of German nation, marble blocks used were brought from eighty German quarries.
However, gigantic monuments weren’t the only tool of the Nazi propaganda machine.
Mass production of lies became a major interest of the government, with a whole new ministry assigned to it.
So, the very first day of the Reichstag fire, to the last days of Nazi regime people were assured that there was nothing scary going on.
Here’s a note from Himmler’s older daughter Gudrun:
‘Dear dad, today, Aunt Lydia, mother and I went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau.
We saw everything […] afterwards we had a lot to eat.
It was very nice.’
‘What a wonderful patriotic project it is (concentration camps)’
The young lady also seems to be impressed by “all the pictures painted by the prisoners.”
Episode 3: The Teachings of Hitler and Stalin
Irina Lagunina, journalist
The biggest fake in history, is that the Soviet Union ‘has joined WWII on the 22nd of June 1941’. This fake takes its origins from a
This fake takes its origins from a Stalin’s speech on the 3rd of July 1941 (I think), when he announced that Soviet Union has joined the war.
In reality, though WWII has started in 1939, with the invasion of Poland, with Russia, USSR, Moscow, Kremlin, being an ally to Hitler.
Soviet Union has been on Hitler’s side, during WWII.
In order to conceal this awkwardness, they’ve created the term “The Great Patriotic War” beginning on June 22nd 1941.
This fake is present to this day.
Nicolas Iljine, art historian, curator
I’ve been working on a book once, about the difference of German and Soviet propaganda during WWII.
There were leaflets thrown over the front lines using guns or airplanes.
German ones were better quality.
The text was in Russian or Ukrainian, warning of death and horror, that awaits a poor Russian soldier, if he refuses to switch sides and join the German army.
It was an invitation to become a turncoat.
Troops were forbidden to even touch such leaflets.
Such leaflets were also produced by Russians although worse in quality and softer.
Those were passes to the enemy side.
I’ve seen one from Finland for Finnish soldiers.
The book is called “A pass to paradise”
Alexander Morozov, political scientist
Along with Nazism and Stalinism, emerged a new époque and scale of political provocation and fakes.
We have Goebbels and the famous fire of Reichstag (that everyone knows about) on one side of the scale,
and fake show trials organized by Stalin against his own party allies on the other.
Both practices have been thoroughly studied by now.
In case of Hitlerism, a fake was a consequence of political provocation.
If there were marginal political provocations, that were easily spotted and opposed the public, Hitlerism has changed that.
Let’s look at the fire of Reichstag.
It was organized by Nazis and blamed on Communists (as we know).
We can clearly see in Sebastian Haffner’s “Defying Hitler”.
He was just an observer, able to describe how German society was reacting to fakes.
A ‘fake’ forms ones perception, when a person realizes that Communists didn’t really ignite the Reichstag, however, but because the communists were posing too much threat to German wealth and nobility.
There has already been some uprisings and violence in Europe, in 1918 and 1919, not just in Bavaria, but also in Hungary.
So, the Germans took it with a pinch of salt while realizing it wasn’t the communist’s fault, they had hopes of getting them punished by the police.
The police didn’t get involved.
So, the public began to accept this fake slowly, without too much thought
German public has come to a conclusion that since they didn’t really know what happened in the first place, they were ready to agree with any version.
Olga Romanova, journalist, TV host
They’ve found a 23 old, by the name of Erich Hartmann.
He was appointed with the rank of Major.
Erich Hartmann had blue eyes, blond and was a true Arian.
He was chosen to become a hero.
He was nicknamed ‘The Blond Knight of Germany’.
Erich Hartmann – The Blond Knight of Germany, great.
His combat career resembled The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Friday, 10:00 takeoff.
Make an act of bravery, down 28 enemy aircrafts.
Best Aces of Germany were ‘working’ for his success, with all their achievements recorded as Hartmann’s.
After the war, he has worked for Bundeswehr in West Germany.
At Bundeswehr they knew very well the real price of his wartime ‘achievements’, he stayed a Major, and started to develop drinking problems.
With his deterioration due to alcohol, he has spent his final years in nostalgy over his fake career, that he once became a voluntary victim of.
Maya Turovskaya, screenwriter
To me “Triumph Over Violence” was an instrument, that would help us to determine what was happening to us.
It was a working tool, so to say.
It all began, when someone brought me a book from abroad. Siegfried Krakauer’s ‘From Caligari to Hitler’.
It was a German film from 1920s.
It told a story of a little man facing with his fears, during the inflation and Great Depression of end of 1920s and beginning of 1930s.
Later we’ve watched through two million meters of footage, that was captured as a trophy.
The Soviet Union wasn’t yet a member of the Geneva Conventions, so it was just lying around.
We were taking a ‘marathon’ at it.
It was very hard work.
When you are faced with so much footage, what’s captured on it becomes your own experience, weather you want it or not.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was keeping up, with its grand scale of Stalin’s palaces.
Lies became the nature of a Soviet citizen.
No mass repression could ever make a Soviet citizen question the infallibility of its supreme leader.
People were glad to entrust their lives to this cannibal and murderer.
Yevgeny Ilyich Ukhnalyov, heraldic artist and author of modern Russia’s coat of arms, remembers:
‘They thought, we were digging a tunnel from Leningrad to Moscow, all the way up to Kremlin and the Mausoleum.
But how? (Said I) Its impossible! Why is it impossible? (gently asked the investigator)
There are special machines for it now.
Yes, but, we didn’t possess such a machine! (I was answering angrily)
But you do realize that such machine exists, don’t you? (Answered he)
And if it exists, therefore it can be acquired.
He was sentenced to 25 years of labor camps.
Alexander Morozov, political scientist
During the Russian Civil War, the communists have spread this mass point of view that any lie was acceptable, as long as it served the Party’s interests and the future it was building.
This was captured in countless memoirs.
People didn’t feel they were breaching some social norms, they sincerely believed that lies have stopped being lies.
Looking at the world through the prism of ‘social classes’, emerges a term ‘interest of classes’, and if they are what they appear to be, then here isn’t any objective truth anymore.
A whole new philosophy was created based on that, in order to ‘fight the objective truth’.
From an anthropology point of view, a human being quickly accepts this new ‘frame’, allowing him to justify even the most unthinkable of events.
That’s why even the most unrealistic rumors were being accepted.
Those were rumors, fakes.
Rumors about the assassination of Kirov for example.
Or the rumors of alleged plans of assassination of Maxim Gorky, widely used by the prosecutors, and poisonings organized by Yagoda’s laboratories.
Later, with the start of trial of the ‘Doctors’ plot, when doctors at the Kremlin clinic were suspected of knowingly planning to kill members of Politburo and their children.
Its incredible to think, that a large proportion of population saw doctors as a public enemy, able to breach the Hippocratic Oath for political reasons.
Stanislav Belkovsky, political scientist
also my grandfather, Efim Ivanovich Yanov was one of the leading phthisiatrists (pulmonary tuberculosis specialists) in Moscow.
I was born at a maternity hospital; from my early days I’ve lived at the “Medic” housing estate on Novo-Peschanaya st. 3 Moscow.
A few more members of ‘Doctors’ plot’ also lived there.
Miran Semyonovich Vovsi didn’t, but Yakov Lvovich Rapoport (one of the key figures of the plot) did live there.
Rapoport is the author of the most notable memoirs about the ‘Doctors’ plot’.
My grandfather was also a figurant of the ‘Doctors’ plot’.
When they came into our flat number 51 and discovered a book by Lion Feuchtwanger ‘Moscow 1937’.
Although this book was complementing to Joseph Stalin, it was still banned in the Soviet Union.
And simply the appearance of this book in the flat served as a reason for my grandfather’s arrest.
They would have arrested him.
Suddenly Joseph Vissarionovich dies, and Gorbachev changes his mind.
The history of two totalitarian regimes, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union proved that leading a society into a state of exaltation was possible.
It was a crime.
Today, it’s hard to imagine propaganda of racial hate, inequality and xenophobia in our modern and civilized society.
It’s a fate of only the rogue states.
Will Russia really take its place in history along with ‘cannibal’ states.
With the amount of ‘fake news’ and lies produced by Kremlin run media rising, we are losing hope that Russia will soon condemn Stalinism, just like Germany condemned Nazism through colossal effort.
Maya Turovskaya, screenwriter
Why is Germany one of the most (if not the most) tolerant of countries in Europe?
Because it was the initiator of two wars, both of which resulted in its defeat.
When we were watching that footage, we were shown the American zone, where just to get a food stamp, one had to watch a documentary of Warsaw Ghettos.
The people that watched it didn’t commit any war crimes themselves, but it was important for them to see what crimes their sons, the soldiers have committed.
Obviously, it shook the country
Valery Balayan, film director
They were digging up those pits, did you know about this?
Of course, I did
They were digging up those murdered Jews, making German civilians rebury them into graves using their bare hands.
They were firing over the heads of those local villagers from machine guns and pistols, making them rebury those corpses.
This is the definition of repentance.
Some things must be explained using hands.
If you have nothing up there, you can only learn through your hands, this has changed the nation.
This work has never been done in Russia.
They still have Stalin.
As our genius Tengiz Abuladze has shown, he has foreseen this matrix of Russian mentality for years to come.
Digging this ‘corpse’ in and out again. It’s an ‘indigested story’.
No lessons were learned from this story.
As was written in the Book of Proverbs in the Bible “As a dog returns to his vomit”.
They keep returning to their vomit, they are not able to ‘swallow’, to learn their lesson.
By the way, this unfinished Rally Grounds once served as a location for a 1971 ‘Pilate and Others’ by genius of Polish cinema Andrzej Wajda.
It was based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘Master and Margarita’.
Three decades later, Andrzej Wajda creates his heartbreaking feature “Katyń”.
In 2010, “Katyń” is being aired by the Russian state TV, in prime time.
Right after the tragic death of Polish President Lech Kaczynski near Smolensk.
This is followed by questioning of the fact of an allied Russian and Nazi invasion of Poland on September the 17th 1939 and their joint effort to start WWII.
Here, in the unfinished Nazi Party rally grounds now resides the Documentation Center.
It holds thousands of documents, containing evidence of crime, committed by both the evil regimes.
So, what about Russia?
In Russia, of today any attempt to clear the nations conscience is met with a dull resistance by the government and propaganda that’s pouring out of Kremlin run TV channels.
We begin to see an enemy of the state approaching in a form of a foreign agent.
Alexander Morozov, political scientist
We all know that Stalin and company, were planning to blame the Katyn executions on Hitler.
They’ve succeeded, actually.
There’s this famous saying by Stalin, when asked by a British politician where did the thirty thousand Poles that stayed on the Soviet Union territory go.
He answered uncertainly, The Poles.
Yes, there were some Poles. They must have left through Manchuria.
Later, however Communist Party of the Soviet Union couldn’t and had no intention in hiding this fact.
This was at the end of 1980s.
They had special folders of evidence proving the mass killings of around thirty thousand Polish officers and civilians.
They were shot in a horrific way.
That wasn’t the end though.
Some left over Russian communists had denied accepting this fact, some of them deny it to this day.
Its an ongoing debate.
to prove their point, they are speculating using old pre-war documents and documents from the Nuremberg trials, trying to blame it on Germans.
Valery Balayan, film director
I still remember the faces of those Germans.
The ‘Fritzes’.
Some of them came wearing top hats.
Those faces when they came out of Auschwitz and after those reburials.
Perhaps Americans may be simple-hearted, but they did the right thing.
It was a shock therapy, a very radical gesture.
A zombified person can only be moved by very strong and radical means.
Not by blathering from a TV screen.
Come and see for yourself.
You thought it wasn’t real, so come smell it, touch it with your own hands.
That’s why today Germany is a country it is.
Olga Romanova, journalist, TV host
Both Stalin and Hitler knew very well, that a hero must be surrounded by heroes of smaller caliber.
Aviators, Stakhanovs, weavers, swimmers.
Traveling to the North Pole by plane. Scientists. Inventors.
Moreover, every Soviet person should be a hero.
Strive to be one, be like them.
In our epoch there’s only one hero. It’s Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
It’s a conscious governmental policy and the agenda of government propaganda.
Mihhail Lotman, professor of semiotic studies
It’s very tragic how Germany is still paying for the enthusiasm of 1930s.
Germany has an enormous culture.
In the XIX century most of composers were Germans. Best poets are Germans. Philosophers, generally speaking, are Germans. Scientists are Germans.
They have something to be proud of.
Nowadays It’s considered bad for a German to be proud of being German.
I don’t think that’s right, I think Germans do have something to be proud it, and I really don’t want something of that sort happening to Russia.
Mr. Putin is triumphant on one hand but is painting himself into a corner on the other.
He has no extra strategy.
He can’t leave the Kremlin; they’ll walk him out.
Boris Akunin Tengiz Ablotia Anotoly Belkin Valery Balayan Stanislav Belkovsky Peeter Volkonski Marat Gelman Renat Davletgildeev Yago Dekanozishvilli Alexey Zlobin Nicolas Iljine Irina Lagunina Yulia Latynina Mihhail Lotman Alexander Morozov Tamar Mamulashvili Petra Procházková Priit Pärn Olga Romanova Artemy Troitsky Maya Turovskaya Lyudmila Ulitskaya Yaroslav Shimov
A film by Inna Kurochkina FAKE NEWS
Crew: Andrey Kurochkin Nina Kozhevnikova Lev Kurochkin Alexey Zlobin Irina Evdokimova
Special thanks to Priit and Olga Pärn for providing materials used in this motion picture
Fragments of music scores by Bruce Maginnis and Ross Harrington were used in current motion picture
A NEP Prague production 2018
