Send in the Clones

For Christmas, my daughter joked about getting me an “authentic” 1960s FED – a Soviet ripoff of a Leica film camera. While I was intrigued by the retro-chic styling and thought it might be fun to shoot a few rolls of film again, I could not get past the fact that (a) the particular Leica models she showed me all sported horrendous badges extolling Lenin or the Communist Party, and (b) the FED gets its acronymic name from Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the notorious first head of the Cheka.

Call me bullheaded, but I could not see myself getting any enjoyment from using a camera so closely associated with mass murderers. Even retro has its limits.

Similarly, having lived and worked in the Soviet Union near the terminus of its tenure, I find the current nostalgia for that regime (see article, page 52) to be baffling. It’s like the awful joke: “Yes, they murdered the kulaks, yes they drove everyone into collective farms, yes they eliminated freedom of speech, the press, religion, free markets, etc. etc. But damn, they sure knew how to put on a parade!”

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against communists, per se. Some of my best friends (in Moscow 30 years ago) were communists. But the smart ones cast off that carapace when the Empire crumbled, realizing either that they had been duped or that they didn’t need to take part in the charade any longer.

I’m fine with anyone adhering to whatever political opinions they like, no matter how wrong they are, as long as they don’t try to force them on me or anyone else. Any idea, no matter how inane, should be allowed to compete in the political and economic marketplace – just without the aid of Kalashnikovs.

Soviet style communism had 70 years to make its case (with the help of plenty of Kalashnikovs, by the way) and it failed miserably on every score: economic, military, political, social. Sure, some people’s lives improved on some measures under Soviet rule, but surely by far less than they would have in a democratic, free state. And of course there is the matter of those tens of millions murdered, exiled, deported, repressed, etc.

Russia (and the entire former USSR) continues to pay a heavy price for its Soviet experiment, and so it is discouraging to see intelligent, modern leaders of that nation pay homage to the “traditional values” of that “simpler time,” seemingly forgetting that such values included spying on one’s family members, or that food rationing or censorship were the opposite of “simple.”

So, no, I do not want a FED. Yet I might consider a Kiev medium format film camera, which was a Soviet era ripoff of a Hasselblad. But only if I can discover it myself in a second hand shop in Ukraine or Russia. And preferably one not anywhere near a statue of either Lenin or Dzerzhinsky.

Speaking of the Soviet world, Russian Life Books has unleashed a Kickstarter project to fund the translation and publication of a monumental collection of over 100 years of Russian science fiction – Red Star Tales. There has never been anything like it in scale or scope, and I hope you will join with us in helping to bring it to fruition in 2015. Learn more at bit.ly/redstartales.

Enjoy the issue.