"Jolly Fellows": Stalinist Musical from 1934

[mazel schlimazel]

This movie musical is a Soviet classic from the 1930's... The time of the Great Purges, when tens of millions of innocent people were arrested in the dead of night and tortured into signing their death warrants for no reason, and entire areas in the countryside selectively starved, and one simple harmless joke at work would get you shot in the back of the head by the NKVD (the omnipresent secret police)... When no one other than Stalin was immune from the possibility of arrest and "disappearance" or shipment to the equally deadly Gulags, Soviet Cinema strived to create a jovial, idealistic portrayal of the bleak, Orwellian life of the era.


Oddly enough, the political propaganda is not so obvious here as it is in other Soviet musicals from the time, and is even very fun to watch:


(with subtitles)

[the whig]

Weird how life and entertainment diverge ...