Last Sunday I saw five newsreels about newly independent African nations made in the USSR in the 1960s, which were procured from the Russian State Film & Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk. The films were part of the 2010 African Film Festival at Lincoln Center.
They were of special interest to me for two reasons. Firstly, the subtitles were written by Thomas Campbell, a Marxism list subscriber based in Russia who I have high regard for. Secondly, I had more than the average interest in the problems of such countries, having been part of a Tecnica delegation that met with ANC leaders in exile back in 1990. It became clear that many of the ANC cadre had spent time in Soviet universities, especially those who had dual membership in the South African Communist Party. This was at the twilight of Soviet Communism and one of the few signs of international solidarity that had never been fully eradicated. Ironically, one of the driving forces behind perestroika was to bring such outreach programs, including substantial foreign aid without strings attached, to a conclusion. A couple of years before I made the trip to Africa, when I was working at Goldman Sachs, I was chatting with a Russian Jew who was working there as a consultant. (Eventually he lost his gig since he passed a printout of Goldman accounts to a stockbroker buddy. He liked to regale me with stories about Russian-Jewish gangsters out in Brighton Beach, including one about a guy getting shot in the knee at a nightclub.) full article: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/newsreels-about-african-national-independence-from-the-soviet-archives/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
