"The ban on our film by the Russian authorities is completely illegal. It is censorship. The film was intended for cinemas, it is a pity that people in Russia will not see it on the wide screen. But we will definitely release it and it will be free to watch. They don't want to remember the time when Russia needed help and the whole world came to save us. They want to show that the US and Europe have always wanted to destroy us. The film shows the opposite."
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Not much is known about the famine in Soviet Russia in 1921-1923, but it killed a similar number of people as the famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933. No one knows the exact number of victims, but estimates are around 5 million.
In Russia, people were starving to death in 1891, but the famine of 1921 was different for many reasons. First, the number of victims was ten times higher. This was largely due to the policies of the Communists, led by Lenin, who had just come to power. And for two years huge amounts of humanitarian aid flowed into the country from abroad, especially from the United States, but Czechoslovakia was one of the most active countries. At one point, the U.S. was feeding 10 million Russians a day, wrote the Slovak independent Dennik N.
All this is depicted in a documentary film called Golod (Famine), which is the work of Alexander Archangelsky, Maxim Kurnikov and Tatyana Sorokinova. Co-author Maxim Kurnikov is a journalist who emigrated to Germany from the banned Echo of Moscow radio station and now runs the Russian channels of the Bild newspaper. It was his idea to make a documentary about the famine.
The Slovak daily N has seen the documentary and describes it at length in its article from the end of last year. The documentary contains some stark footage of starving people or cannibalism, but otherwise there is nothing outrageous about it.
"The ban on our film by the Russian authorities is completely illegal. It is censorship. The film was intended for cinemas, it is a pity that people in Russia will not see it on the wide screen. But we will definitely release it and it will be freely available for viewing," the co-author of the documentary, journalist Kurnikov, wrote back to the Slovak daily.
In his view, today's Russian propaganda is trying to create an image of a Russia that has always been a strong country. "They don't want to remember the time when Russia needed help and the fact that the whole world came to save us. They want to show that the US and Europe always wanted to destroy us. The film shows the opposite," Kurnikov explained why he believes the authorities banned the documentary, Dennik N wrote at the end of the year.
Stanislav Makovicky, source: Bild, dennikn.sk, sme.sk, Cover photo. Photo by unknown author / Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons (Unknown author - self-made copy of images published in the book "Russia 1904-1924. The Revoutionary Years" by Eric Baschet)
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