Alexander Nevsky is a 1938 Soviet historical drama film directed by Sergei Eisenstein. It depicts the attempted invasion of Novgorod in the 13th century by the Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire and their defeat by Prince Alexander, known popularly as Alexander Nevsky (1220–1263). It was used as a propaganda vehicle to the Soviet masses in the late 1930s to motivate hate and fear of the German National Socialists under Hitler. The Teutonic Knight invaders are depicted as brutal blonde beasts under the sway of fanatical priests, their helmets bearing a striking resemblance to those used by contemporary German soldiers.
This was the time of the Popular Front, where the USSR was motivating and directing leftist forces world-wide in an anti-fascist pubic campaign directed at Nazi Germany. This period was prior to that of the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, where the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany became allies in their campaign of invading Poland and dividing eastern Europe between them, implementing the close ideological partnership of the bloody Nazi and Soviet regimes in this genocide. After the Pact, the public showing of Alexander Nevsky was forbidden.
Covertly in the 1930s, the Soviets developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is political.
The notion that – the ethical is the political – and that the highest form of ethical expression was “anti-fascism,” – with the Soviet Union as the publicly-identified, ideologically most dedicated opponent of fascism, thus holding the moral high ground.
This myth was actually built upon the basest of lies.
From the earliest days of the National Socialist regime in Germany, beginning with the Reichstag Fire less than a month after Hitler became Chancellor, a sinister covert relationship existed between Nazi secret intelligence and their Soviet counterpart.
This clandestine cooperation continued throughout the decade: Hitler’s massacre of Ernst Rohm and his S. A. leadership in the Night of the Long Knives; Stalin’s terror purge of CPSU party members, feckless intellectuals, military officers (most notably Field Marshal Tukhachevsky’s betrayal by documents forged in a Gestapo laboratory), and the murder of tens of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, reaching its culmination in the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of August, 1939.
Publicly the Soviet Union and their international Popular Front network (of what were secretly designated “useful idiots” or “Innocents’ Clubs” ) preached “anti-fascism.”
Covertly Stalin sought accommodation, appeasement, and eventual alliance with Hitler.
Treating Vladimir Putin and the present day Russian Federation as equivalent to Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s is egregious. But nevertheless there will indeed be many such efforts throughout the coming days to truly sweep much of the inconvenient history of that era into the Orwellian dust bin of history.
4:31 pm on February 25, 2022
