In the digital archiving-&-distribution video epoch, no detour from the mainstream autobahn of movie culture remains a secret for long, but the ordinary semi-lost classics and eccentric psychotronica flooding the DVD market have little on the ephemera packaged as Animated Soviet Propaganda – three little words that test the educated imagination. Like advertising, most of the Socialist agitprop from the Iron Curtain decades acquires a yellowed-snapshot quaintness and naivete with time, envisioning as it does a mythical utopia of red-cheeked laborers and thriving equity. (Critic J. Hoberman labeled it "the red Atlantis.") This leaves us today, at every remove you can imagine, to take its measurements as kitsch, as totalitarian heebie-jeebies, as pure formal thrust, or as some bobble-headed conglomeration of all three. (And we do: Futurist/Socialist Realist poster art of the Soviet Union fetches big bucks as cultural art nowadays.)

In this round-up of frame-by-frame short films, the slippery imagery teeters from Politburo-inscribed slam-bang PSAs of the silent era to longer Cold War parables fashioned by obsessive artisans with more than dogma on their feverish minds. As always, the pulp of the message is veiny and dark with righteous anger. (In contrast, U.S. propaganda, beginning with George M. Cohan and Walter Lippmann, has always strained toward beaming optimism.) The dozens of hectic, bombastic cartoons were all born of power-poisoned ideology, nurtured in a culture of conflicted paranoia and despair, and pedagogically purposed by a state machine to which nothing was above or beyond the directives of Leninist-Stalinism. But they were seen by audiences...how? Surely not as corrective social surgery – but entertainment? Dystopic Popeye 'toons with an almost biblical taste for apocalyptic significance and metaphoric characterization? Or merely baloney tolerated before the main feature begins?

We'll never know. What shocks our system most is how familiar this parade of Nazi monster boars, cigar-chomping capitalists and rolled-sleeve motherland comrades seems – honest liars, the Soviets correctly excoriate the U.S. for endemic racism (1933's Black & White rips the African-American plot arc from discrimination to poverty to the electric chair so bluntly a toddler could grasp it, with the corpulent white elites echoing the P.O.V.s of both Frank Capra and Ralph Steadman), and routinely muster an infernal portrait of soulless neon commercialism with which no conscientiously liberal parent could argue.

But where's the squiggly line, anyway, between leftist satire and anti-capitalist propaganda? Well, for one thing, the Soyuzmultfilm Studio impresarios have never been known for their wit – 1942's Kino-Circus sees Mussolini, Horthy and Antonescu as Hitler's frisky, stupid-animal-trick lapdogs, while the stunningly lovely Someone Else's Voice (1949), a verdant and painterly Disney homage-parable about old-culture nightingales vs. a crassly modernist magpie, limps to its vague but apparently axiomatic conclusion. The possibility for political caricature is often scorched itself, as in the remarkable Ave Maria (1972), which features a Last Supper of Vietnamese peasants being obliterated by bombs, dares to also sympathize with the families of dead American soldiers, and in the end suggests a pulp brother to Stan Brakhage's 23rd Psalm Branch.

For more information about Animated Soviet Propaganda, visit Films by Jove.

by Michael Atkinson