This is one of the films I found, trying to discover what World II looked like. In it the Soviets plan to invade Berlin and then do so. It is an amazing piece of photography and it causes your eyes to have experiences such as approach the Brandenburg Gate with the Red Army. It is called Берлин, Berlin, but I cannot tell who made it. Yes, I know about Russian excesses but this film is art.
You see people playing squeezeboxes and dancing a kind of mazurka on the streets of Berlin, hugging a beaming Zhukov and trying hoist him on their shoulders. Tattered Soviet soldiers ride around looking relieved. The film ends, of course, with the formal parade streaming back into Red Square; there is a famous photograph you have surely seen of Stalin saluting these troops, but here it is a moving picture with many shots of the absolutely exultant crowds.
The other thing I found was the Socialist Songbook, which I thought was lost. There are very many songs, including the famous one about the Hitler-Stalin Pact (“a Russian and a Prussian, writing down the Party line”), and “That Trotskyite Mammy of Mine,” but there is also this —
TO HELL WITH ACADEMIC FREEDOM
(Tune: Battle Hymn of the Republic)
Mine eyes have seen the failure of
the Student Bill of Rights,
They have trampled out its glories
with contractual delights,
They have plunged us into darkness
never more to see the light,
As reaction marches on.
–and this, which I had also never heard, on the P.O.U.M. which I did not know still existed. There is a foundation named for Andreu Nin, P.O.U.M.-ista tortured to death by NKVD agents in Alcalá de Henares, in late 1937.
THREE AGENTS OF THE POUM
We are three agents of the POUM, POUM,
POUM
We lead the workers to their doom,
doom, doom
We don't give a rap
For Stalin's crap
We are three agents of the POUM!
Corruption! Disruption! Deviation!
Left orientation!
Finally, I decided to find out what Vallejo thought of the P.O.U.M. and I have not found out exactly — but I did discover this interesting blog post about his speech at the 1937 Valencia congress, another text of Vallejo’s I have not read and which sounds quite Larrea-like, I must say. I did find out, however, quite a lot about what Arturo Serrano Plaja thought about the P.O.U.M. and a great deal more about his speech at this congress. It is fascinating.
And Arturo was our neighbor when I was a child, and walked his dog. And I have only put it together now, he met Vallejo at that 1937 congress. And reading his speech there, and the things he later said about it, I remember hearing him talk about fighting in Madrid when I did not yet understand what it meant, and I can only marvel thinking about the people I have met. So here is Arturo in 1938 with some words that could apply now:
Yo quisiera que este pueblo grave a que pertenezco,
que me ha dado su estirpe como añoso tronco
generoso conceda su sangre a un nuevo brote,
yo quisiera, yo espero que este pueblo posea,
cuando acabe la guerra funesta a las naciones
el pan que se merece.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 