Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

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Pulling the movie from theaters and removing distribution of the movie behind the iron curtain is essentially banning it. This was 1940... there wasn't really any way for them to see the movie if they decided to not distribute it in the USSR. You couldn't VPN into American Netflix or torrent the movie to get it. It was an unofficial ban. The book hadn't been translated to Russian at the time.

The story (both movie and book) shows the darker side of capitalism and Stalin hoped it would make great propaganda to reinforce why capitalism doesn't work to make soviets grateful for communism. But instead, the people that saw the movie were just shocked that even the worst Americans were better off than the the average soviet citizen, which backfired on Stalin's intended goal.

More importantly, the ending of The Grapes of Wrath shows hope in even the darkest moments and a way that an American had the freedom to turn their luck around and give their family a fresh opportunity at life, even when they had seemingly lost everything. This showed power that the poorest Americans had, and soviets couldn't ever hope of having. That freedom was surely impactful.

This response has a lot of detail about Stalin's thoughts and feelings. I could find no attributed reference to the film version of The Grapes of Wrath being banned in the USSR. Do you have one?

The article says the reference is somewhere in here, but it does not seem to be: http://lisa.revues.org/802?lang=en#ftn2

"In 1948 The Grapes of Wrath was allowed to play in Soviet cinemas because of its propaganda value, which was presumably to heighten awareness of the desperate misery of the Okies under the most advanced system of capitalism on the planet. After several weeks, however, the film—given the unbiblical title of The Road to Wrath—had to be withdrawn. Soviet audiences were apparently extracting the wrong lesson, since they could see for themselves that even the most dispossessed of America’s rural proletariat were shown driving automobiles."

from https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/802?lang=en which you linked. That quote seems pretty clear.

I think maybe the target ("#ftn2" in http://lisa.revues.org/802?lang=en#ftn2) is confusing.

Sort of clear, except that it doesn't mention Stalin or any source for the reason the film was "withdrawn," or for the fact that it was withdrawn, or for whether that withdrawal was a government ban.

Without any of that, the story is "The Grapes of Wrath ran for weeks in Soviet cinemas."

Running for weeks is a very short run! Something happened!

And Steinbeck was famous in Russia for releasing his fairly positive "A Russian Journal" around the same time.

It's impossible to know who exactly ordered it, but it is likely Stalin was aware of it being shown.

So I pulled up what seems to be the original source for the Soviet car-envy reference. It's an April 13, 1955 bylined piece by C.L. Sulzberger in The New York Times, datelined Hollywood.

His article is really a wide-ranging essay about movie tastes and U.S perceptions around the world. The final sentences read: "The Russians managed to obtain a print of 'Grapes of Wrath' and displayed it widely behind the Iron Curtain, hoping to convey a harsh impression of the United States. But the main impression, reported by our embassies, was 'In America, even the tramps have cars.'"

Sulzberger (part of the family that owned/controls the NYT) was a well-regarded establishment journalist. So we're on pretty safe ground to assume that at least one U.S. diplomat told him what he quoted. But then it gets hazy. Was this just the diplomats' ready-loaded witty retort? Or an overheard murmur from a couple Russians? That'd be my guess. We're way short of knowing what the vast Slavic world deeply felt.

Kind of amazing how that sort of aside comes to be treated as broad-based fact nearly 70 years later.

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