Although I was up early I did not develop enthusiasm for writing until 11pm. I had written on and off about Christmas and this will be the basis for something about my actual day when I hope to welcome to my table the ghosts of time past, present and the future.
This evening, tired after a meal of a pizza, I was awoken again by a surprise, the 1999 Oscar Best Foreign film East West, a film which some critics savaged for being melodramatic and others for being overambitious. There have been two films, until now which, captured the epic nature of what happened in Russia immediately before and since the revolutionary period between the Two World Wars but also provided the human dimension seen through the eyes of the creative artist and individualist. The first was the idealised and romantic poet Dr Zhivago and the second Reds which featured the American journalist and poet Jack Reed who only survived until 1920. The 1999 Best Foreign Film Oscar winning East West, is not about a creative artist, but concerns a real life Russian born man who was raised in France, became a doctor, married a French woman and who accepted the 1946 invitation of Stalin to bring his talents home.
The invitation was a general one to individuals and their subsequent families who had left Russia at the time of the revolution. There appear to have been two main reasons for the temporary lifting of the iron curtain. The first was the genuine need to replace the technical skills lost through the revolution and the second World War. Those who accepted the invitation and could make the mind bending adjustment from liberalist and capitalist democracies and become good soviets as define by Stalin would be rewarded with better living conditions than the majority and gain other privileges. In the instance of Dr Alexei Menchikov he was told before disembarking that he had to rid himself of his French born and raised wife and that if he did he would immediately be provided with an appropriate Russian wife. When he declined and realised that he had placed his family in immediate peril he was softened up for the reality of post World War Russia by the brutal interrogation of his wife and the deployment as the doctor to a 2000 employ factory in the industrial city of Kiev. Had he accepted then he could have been given a more prestigious post as head of a hospital, and provided a two bed roomed apartment. There was likely to have been a more sinister motive.
It would be surprising if all those who responded had not been thoroughly investigated and carefully watched to establish their political ideology. It would be better to have potential enemies, actual and potential spies and subversives within the system where they could be dealt with one way or another. In the film the first arriving group once disembarked were met with armed troops and the political commissar divided everyone into two groups those to be imprisoned, sent to work camps or who had to be immediately killed because of their potential threat, and those who might fit in and prove useful.
It is sometimes forgotten or overlooked that while millions of Jews gypsies, the physically and mentally disabled from throughout Europe were butchered by Germany, in Russia the purging of similar numbers was indiscriminate. In both countries extensive use was made of labour camps and throughout the Soviets and German occupied countries, regimes were established in which citizens knew they could survive and better themselves if they spied on their neighbours, reported anti government behaviour and denounced. Many did this for no other reasons than jealous, spite, and the power to blackmail and extort money until themselves were denounced. It is a method used by all governments and we are openly encouraging Muslims to do this in Britain today. However the check and balances that we try and maintain to limit excess and misuse become non existent in fast moving revolutionary times and subsequent totalitarian regimes.
In the liberated Western style countries we should all be careful not to be seduced into democratically voting for or accepting the creation of the police and secret service state. The increasing widespread use of surveillance cameras, the developments in digital technology and databases which enable instant recognition and tracking, the attempts to change from the jury to a professional judicial system and the detention of individuals without charges, and then holding for increasing lengths of time without trial are as dangerous in a democracy as they are in a dictatorship.
Having failed the first test set him Dr Alexei and his wife and child then had to adjust to the post war living conditions of the working classes in Russia but which were in fact no different from the cities and towns throughout war devastated Europe, or which had been the situation for the working classes who moved away from the land in the industrial revolution.
In Dr Zhivago we learnt of the impact upon the middle class when houses similar to my present home were requisitioned and given over to families on the basis of one private room a family, with shared kitchen, bathroom and toilet facilities. In Dr Zhivago we were not shown these facilities but in East West, the toilet seat was kept outside the loo and the indoor bathroom could be used by each family for washing clothing and bathing on an allocated day each week. In Dr Zhivago a common bucket was used on the long train journey to the family's former estate when all the travellers were treated like cattle.
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However at the same time as they experienced such conditions which will have horrified younger generation cinema goers in 1999, I spent the greater part of the first decade of my life sharing a double bed with three adult women, in a house slightly smaller than my present one, full of adults young people and other children. We did not have a bathroom until after the war and had to make do with a tin bath in front of the fire. We were then allocated a flat in a requisitioned property which was not handed back to the owners until the 1950's. My mother in law lived in a council house without a bathroom or inside toilet until the late 1960's when improvements were made.
Similarly workers in the East and West were expected to work hard from early morning until bedtime with limited breaks and days off until the end of the 19th century. Before then in the US and British Colonies of the West Indies in particular, slaves were used and then indentured workers and in Victorian Britain workers lived in squalor until they dropped dead or were struck down prematurely through illness or industrial injury while those who survived such calamity, and their families, had then to rely on the workhouse. In 1963 I narrowly avoided being ejected from my professional training course after disclosing the nature of tenement housing conditions in Birmingham to Member of Parliament who I already knew and he then spoke of the twilight zones in a Housing debate which achieved national publicity and only in the past month I listened to a radio story about housing conditions in Glasgow where the new Europeans had been housed in appalling conditions in property owned by dubious shell companies registered in tax havens.
East West is not intended as a political or social statement but the political and social conditions are the backcloth to an amazing love story in which it appears that the couple separate beyond repair, and take lovers as they adjust in different ways to their new way of life while relinquishing dreams of escape., Because it is a film highly recommended and the most emotionally engaging of this year, I will not chronicle the rest of the story in case what I write is read by someone who then wishes to borrow or buy the video, If so beware that it has a wonderfully inspiring but sad ending.
This experience contrasted with two films about the reality of Christmas, first around an American parental Catholic table, and the second a British made for TV special about getting away from it all in a seaside hotel, the Riviera. I missed the start of the first and instantly forgot its title, but it was a good slice of the reality when families with come together because of parental loyalty and wishes when they lead different lives in different places and appear to have nothing in common except having been brought up in the same household as children and young people. The mother has been the dominating force within a traditional Catholic background, setting down clear rules for her children and now for their grandchildren and finding it difficult to accept any behaviour which conflicts with her own and very willing to use emotional blackmail to get her way. At one level it is possible to criticise the children for not playing the game for a few days one or twice a year. But there are two forces at work which makes this impossible. Each individual cannot detach themselves from the reality of their lives just like that, especially when hours before relationships might be ending, and work issues predominate.
I would dread the approach of the Christmas season each year for close on two decades. This was the time when I was expected to prepare a list of expenditure savings, usually involving reductions in services and staffing, sometimes their abolition, together with proposed developments and cost neutral service changes. These had to be kept secret with knowledge restricted to a handful of those required to do the costing and provide the information on the staffing implications. By the time of sitting down at the Christmas Table I had a good idea of the likely decisions which the controlling politicians would first put to their political colleagues in private and then through to the formal process of Committee, the service committee, the finance personnel sub committees, the policy and resources committee and then the Council meeting to determine the budget for the coming year and local taxation rate level. For the greater part of the period we operated in the context of zero budgeting which meant that changes were not restricted to the listed options for growth or reduction but the whole budget was under scrutiny and indeed management structures could change and departments become amalgamated as they are from time to time at Westminster. Nowadays the approach is to privatise, changing the approach to structures, wages and working conditions. Knowing what the impact would be on those dependent on services and on staff and their families made it difficult to switch off and into the family Christmas. People get ill, people die, have accidents, jobs and homes are lost, and relationships come to an end in the way that they do on every day of year, men and women are fighting in war while others provide emergency and essential services and none of this can be held over because it is Christmas.
Similarly in every family however happy and content the parental relationship, and however loving and caring the parenting there will be the disappointments, the rivalries and sense of injustices, the unfulfilled dreams, and inevitably, the family gathering becomes the opportunity to make comparisons, to remember slights and lacks of attention and consideration, sometimes with explosive and destructive consequences.
So the solution for many is to get away from it all, or from each other in some form. One way is to avoid the stress of cooking the family dinner and going out on Christmas and or Boxing Day, or go for the whole holiday with the family, or without all, or part of them to a restaurant or to a hotel at home or abroad. I missed the first hour of Riviera while experiencing East West but if the second hour was a good indication of the whole then this is also a film to see again. It had the kind funny moments which contain horrible truths although it all ends far better than each individual anticipated. The programme highlighted the difficulty of running away from ourselves and our problems and there is much to be said for the security of home. There were some great moments albeit moments which would have been unpleasant for some viewers. The couple who go for walk and encounter their child, partner and family believed to be away skiing but staying with friends because they refuse to put up with the obnoxious behaviour of the father towards them and his treatment of the mother who is also in on the deception, played magnificently by Barbara Flynn and Warren Clarke. Then there is the Vicar, divided between running off with the sexy curate and his alcoholic wife who needs to keep hold of if he is to become a Bishop.
There was also the widower and son where his wife's ashes get used for the Turkey stuffing and the stuffing becomes the ashes, and where father hits it off with a woman whose cancer prognosis is that that she might see her two year old grand child reach primary school.
The message of both films is that we cannot usually get away with trying to be a different person because it is the Christmas holiday but for the sake of others we should all at least make the effort. However I am tempted to suggest that governments should take the revolutionary step of only treating the day as a bank holiday, and special for practicing Christians, and that to qualify for the holiday they should have to get at least half a dozen non Christians to vouch for them. This would enable true Christians to make their day and the rest to continue to behave as they usually do. Of course a similar holiday would have to be granted to all other religions at appropriate occasions for them with a similar requirement to have to submit references from no believers to obtain the additional holiday. This would also help integration ay local and national level.
This is not eliminate the seasonal national holiday all together which could still be extended over a week but become spiritually and religiously neutral and take place to mark the end of the old and the new year. The rest of the commercialised business of trees, cards, lights and other decorations, gifts and sales, parties, dressing up for football matches, the shows and films designed for children and their families would also continue although the sexist notion of a Father Christmas and the damaging influence of make believe nursery stories and pantomimes should be abolished.
