Word: bolshevik
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Ninotchka (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) reveals the moral, political and sartorial bankruptcy that ensues when a female Bolshevik is exposed to the bourgeois perils of running water, Melvyn Douglas and Paris. Unlike most pictures about Russian Reds, this one is neither crude clowning nor crude prejudice, but a literate and knowingly directed satire which lands many a shrewd crack about phony Five Year Plans, collective farms, Communist jargon and pseudo-scientific gab where it will do the most good-on the funny bone...
Garbo, who plays her first full-length comedy with iron, Bolshevik disregard for glamor, in a khaki uniform and middie blouse, succeeds in the difficult task of making her tight-lipped fanaticism funny without making it ridiculous. Even her change of heart is winning and plausible. But why she should change under the impact of Melvyn Douglas is one of those things even the genius of Karl Marx could not explain...
Nazi Hitler, many Scandinavians feared last week, may shortly begin trying to force Sweden, Denmark and Norway into vassalage to Germany by the same threatening tactics which Bolshevik Stalin has employed successfully in recent weeks to vassalize Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and is now trying on Finland. Red Russia, once she got a whip hand over the Finns, would be strategically placed to threaten Scandinavia, unless Germany exerted a counterthrust, and in Stockholm last week the talk was gloomy. Current were such wry cracks as, "We shall soon know whether we Swedes are Germans or Russians...
...Turin: "German domination gave in only after hard fighting to the victorious Russian advance of Peter the Great's armies, without, however, being completely eliminated. . . . The Germans [now] leave behind them habits of culture which can be eradicated only by violent substitution of another regime, such as the Bolshevik...
...Soviet War Commissar Kliment Voroshilov, soon to visit Berlin, Il Corriere Padano cracked: "If Lenin first, and Stalin afterward set eyes on him, it was simply because they judged him an exceptional gangster. For us, Voroshilov and his equals, like all carrion of Bolshevik Russia, do not interest us a bit. If among themselves they exalt or destroy one another, that is their affair. At worst there will be one less criminal going around the world...