Thursday, August 13, 2020

Within the Whirlwind (2009)

 

Within the Whirlwind - Wikipedia



Within the Whirlwind is a historical and biographical drama (based on a true story) which premiered in 2009. It is produced by companies in Belgium, Germany and Poland. But the story is set in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and the 1940s. And the main character is Eugenia Ginzburg, a teacher at the University of Kazan, who was a victim of the Great Purge (1936-1938), which is also known as Stalin’s Reign of Terror. 


Here is some basic information about this drama:

 

** Director: Marleen Gorris

** Writer: Nancy Larson

** Based on Eugenia Ginzburg’s autobiography (first published in the west in 1967)

** Language: English

** Run time: 117 minutes

 

The cast includes the following:

 

** Emily Watson as Eugenia Ginzburg (1904-1977) – a teacher at the University of Kazan

** Benjamin Sadler as Pavel Aksyonov – Eugenia’s second husband – a Soviet official in Kazan

** Pam Ferris as Avdotya Aksynova – Eugenia’s mother-in-law

** Ian Hart as Beylin – a Soviet official in Kazan

** Ben Miller as Krasny – editor of a Soviet journal published in Kazan

** Pearce Quigley as Nikolai Yelvov – a teacher at the University of Kazan

** Radoslaw Krzyzowski as Dimitrij Dikovitsky – a man on the train to Moscow

** Jimmy Yuill as Sidorov – a Soviet official in Moscow

** Ulrich Tukur as Anton Walter (1899-1959) – a German doctor in Siberia

** Nick Dong-Sik as Confucius – Dr Walter’s assistant

 

A note on family:

 

** Eugenia’s first husband Dimitrij Fedorov is the father of her first son Alexei (Alyosha) (1926-1941)

** Eugenia’s second husband Pavel Aksyonov is the father of her second son Vasily (Vaska) (1932-2009)

 

The husband Pavel and the two boys appear briefly in the beginning of the movie. After that they disappear.

 

Since this drama is based on a true story, the basic facts are part of the public record. They are not a secret. Therefore I feel free to mention some of them in this review. Besides, I need to mention some details in order to explain my rating.

 

While this drama is based on a true story, it is not a documentary film. It is a dramatized version of events. Not everything happened exactly as shown in this movie. But the basic story is true.

 

As stated above, this drama is about Eugenia Ginzburg, but it does not cover her whole life from the beginning in 1904 to the end in 1977. 


** The first 30 years (1904-1934) are excluded

** The last 30 years (1947-1977) are also excluded

** The time frame is 1934-1947

 

In 1934, when the story begins, Eugenia lives in Kazan, located ca. 800 km east of Moscow, with her husband Pavel and her two sons. She is a loyal member of the communist party. She works as a teacher at the University of Kazan. Her husband Pavel is a Soviet official in Kazan. The family has a good life and a nice home.

 

But in 1934 Eugenia’s life is turned upside down and soon the whole family will fall apart. In the wake of the killing of Kirov in Moscow, the communist party begins a hunt for subversives, disloyal members of the communist party, who are accused of working for or with Leon Trotsky who is at this time living in exile,

 

The first local victim is Yelvov who is removed from his position. Soon Eugenia is also under suspicion. She claims she is innocent, and at first she is not arrested. For three years her life is in a limbo because she is often interrogated and barred from teaching, but still free. In 1937, she is arrested and placed in a prison in Moscow. She is tried in a court of law and sentenced to ten years in a labour camp in Siberia. She is sent to Kolyma in eastern Siberia where she serves her sentence.

 

In 1947, she is released, but not allowed to leave the region. In 1955, two years after Stalin’s death, she is exonerated, declared innocent, and she moves to Moscow where she writes her autobiography.

 

Since it cannot be published in the USSR, the manuscript is smuggled out to the west where it appears in 1967.

 

In this historical drama, we follow Eugenia from 1934 when she is caught up in the whirlwind until her release in 1947. What do reviewers say about it? Here are the results of two review aggregators:

 

36 per cent = Rotten Tomatoes (the general audience)

68 per cent = IMDb

 

As you can see, the ratings are not impressive. They range from poor to average. Is there a reason for this harsh verdict? Is it fair? I have to say yes. The topic is interesting and important, but the movie about Eugenia’s turbulent life has a number of flaws, which cannot be ignored. Let me explain:

 

# 1. The story takes place in the USSR where most people speak Russian. But in this movie, all characters speak English. It is odd to hear Soviet officials bark their orders in English when they should be spoken in Russian.

 

This is a serious violation of historical truth. All efforts to recreate the Soviet world of the 1930s and the 1940s are totally shattered whenever a character starts to talk.

 

# 2. In the movie, Eugenia is a professor of Russian literature. In the real world, she was an associate professor teaching the history of the All-Union Communist Party and later the history of Leninism. Which is not as romantic!

 

# 3. In the movie, we see Eugenia teaching. Her teaching means reading out loud lines of a Russian author with a solemn voice. Then asking student A to take over the declamation. Then asking student B to take over the declamation. And so on.

 

Reading lines of a poem out loud is not teaching. When you teach literature, you must talk about the author and his style. You must ask questions: does the author have a message? If yes, what is it? How does the author work? In this a great work? If yes, what makes this a great work?

 

Eugenia never asks questions like this. Perhaps because she never was a teacher of Russian literature!

 

# 4. In one scene, Eugenia returns essays which her students have written for class. One student did not use punctuation. When she asks him why, he says it does not matter. The reader may add punctuation if he wants.

 

Eugenia disagrees. Punctuation is very important, she says, and to prove her point she writes a sentence on the blackboard. If we put the comma in one place, the sentence has one meaning. But if we put the comma in another place, the sentence has the opposite meaning. This is an interesting observation. However, there is a problem here. What is wrong?

 

The sentence on the blackboard is Russian. The words are written with Cyrillic letters. But the characters speak English! In order to create some historical reality, Emily Watson writes the words with Cyrillic letters, but when she talks about the sentence, she speaks English which means the historical reality is completely broken.

 

Are we in a Russian world or not? Look at the blackboard, and the answer is yes. Listen to the actors, and the answer is no!

 

# 5. As stated above, Eugenia’s husband Pavel and her two sons appear briefly in the beginning of the movie. But the movie does not reveal that Pavel is her second husband and only the father of her younger son Vasily (Vaska).

 

The movie does not reveal that her older son Alexei (Alyosha) is the son of her first husband Fedorov (who is never seen).

 

Perhaps the movie-makers decided that this detail was too complicated to explain?

 

# 6. In one scene, Eugenia takes the train to Moscow. She wants to find someone who can support her claim of innocence. We see her sitting in a compartment. She is in one corner, reading a book. In the opposite corner there is a man. They do not talk. We have the impression they have been sitting in silence like this for a while. 


Suddenly the man begins to talk: “Eugenia? I think you are Eugenia Ginzburg.” 


It turns out they know each other. They were friends many years ago. She remembers his name: Dimitrij Dikovitsky. But if they know each other, why did they not recognize each other when he entered the compartment? The scene is odd.

 

In Eugenia’s autobiography, she does not meet Dikovitsky on the train from Kazan to Moscow. She meets him in Moscow outside the building where she hopes to find someone who will accept that she is innocent. This makes more sense. In the movie the meeting is moved to the train and the scene is odd.

 

# 7. When Eugenia gets to Moscow, she meets with a Soviet official Sidorov who is very helpful. Having looked at her case, he says the charge can be dropped and the ban on teaching can be cancelled. This is fine. She leaves his office and leaves the building in a good mood.

 

But when she is outside, she hears someone calling her from a window on the first floor. Sidorov is calling: “Please come back inside.” When she meets him again, he sings a different song:  

He says the charges cannot be dropped and the ban on teaching cannot be cancelled. In addition, she must hand over the card which shows that she is a member of the communist party. This change took place in five minutes! This is not realistic!

 

In the real world, Sidorov did try to help her at first, but when Beylin found out what Sidorov had done, he was so upset about it that he forced him to reverse his decision in the case. There was a change, but the decision was not changed in five minutes. Why do the movie-makers create a scene which is unrealistic?

 

# 8. Eugenia’s older son Alexei (Alyosha) was taken from Kazan to Leningrad. In 1941, Eugenia is told that her son is dead. He has died of starvation during the German siege of Leningrad. Eugenia is so devastated that she loses the will to live. In the movie, we see how she is nursed back to life by the camp doctor, the German doctor Anton Walter, who is friendly and optimistic, in spite of the difficult conditions in the camp.

 

In the real world, the person who nursed her back to life was a Russian doctor, Angelina Klimenko, who was the wife of an NKVD police officer. But Klimenko is not seen in the movie. She has been removed from history, perhaps because she was married to a member of the NKVD.

 

The German doctor Anton Walter is a real person. In the movie it is clear that he likes Eugenia. But she does not want to like him, because she regards him as part of the Soviet system of oppression. When she is told that he is a prisoner too, she changes her mind. She likes him as well.

 

Anton Walter was a Volga German who had been arrested in the 1930s and then sent to Siberia. He was the camp doctor, but he was also a prisoner. When the authorities discovered that Anton and Eugenia had fallen in love with each other, he was transferred to another camp!

 

# 9. Throughout the movie, Eugenia recites passages of Russian literature to herself and sometimes to fellow prisoners in the camp. She does this to keep her sanity. To remember the world outside the camp.

 

One reviewer (Berndt Reinhardt) comments on this aspect:

 

“In the film the continual literary recitations become boring. The theme of literature was apparently seized upon in order to fill the ideological vacancy of the film.”

 

[Source: World Socialist Website]

 

I think he has a good point here. The literary recitations are connected with the fact that she was a professor of Russian literature at the University of Kazan. But in the real world she was not a professor of Russian literature. This position was merely invented by the movie-makers. Why? Perhaps because they wanted the theme of literature to run though the movie; perhaps because they thought that this would make the main character more likeable.

 

Who wants to like a teacher of Leninism? No, this will not do. Let us make her a professor of Russian literature. This is so much better. Now she is likeable.

 

CONCLUSION

The topic is interesting and important. Eugenia may have been naïve when she decided to join the communist party. But when the party accused her of working with or for Leon Trotsky, she refused to give in. Many other party members who were accused signed a confession, but Eugenia never did this. She insisted she was innocent. In this way she was unique.

 

It could have been a great movie. Unfortunately, it is not. The movie about Eugenia’s turbulent life in the USSR in the 1930s and the 1940s has a number of flaws; some of them are fatal. This is why the poor ratings are justified. This movie is not great; it is not even good. It is just average. And therefore it cannot get more than three stars.

 

PS # 1. Eugenia and Anton found each other again once they were both released from their prison camps. Sadly, they did not have long time together. He passed away in 1959.

 

PS # 2. Antonina Aksyonova was born in 1946. In 1949 she was adopted by Eugenia. In this way she became Eugenia’s stepdaughter. She knew Eugenia well during the last part of her life. She appears in a documentary film about her stepmother made by German filmmaker Mario Damolin. On You Tube you can find a clip where she talks about her stepmother.

 

PS # 3. Ivan Panikarov has founded a small museum about the labour camps in Kolyma during the time of Stalinism. For details, see the following article: Shaun Walker, “Russia’s Gulag camps cast in a forgiving light of Putin nationalism,” The Guardian, 29 October 2015.

 

*****

Yevgenia Ginzburg - Wikipedia


Eugenia Ginzburg (1904-1977)


*****

Within the Whirlwind by Evgenia Ginzburg


The cover of Eugenia Ginzburg's autobiography


First published in 1967


*****





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