Sergei Eisenstein, Judeo-Bolshevism, and Genocide Denial

In my life, I have seen my fair share of deranged and perverse films. Whether it be some sick film from Japan involving naked women and eels or the artistic necrophilia of Jörg Buttgereit, I feel that I have desensitized myself to the artistic depravity of notable subversive artists. I must admit that none of these films have remotely disturbed me or even really shocked me. It wasn’t until I saw Soviet revolutionary director Sergei Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow (1937) did I question the morality of a filmmaker. The content of Bezhin Meadow is not what makes the film morally irresponsible but what the film neglects to tell you historically.

A Deranged Kulak from Bezhin Meadow

Bezhin Meadow portrays the Ukrainian Kulak farmers as Christian patriarchal parasites who suffer from a certain monstrous derangement. Sergei Eisenstein shows the Kulaks as Christians that utilized their religion to beat their women to death and physically abuse their children. Eisenstein once even stated that the murder of a young revolutionary named Stepok by his father was "reminiscent of Abraham's sacrifice of Issac.” Eisenstein portrays the children in Bezhin Meadow as liberators who support the good Bolshevik fight of “liberation” and destroy their own fathers. The young Bolsheviks also take their local church and turn it into some child fantasy Bolshevik clubhouse. What really happened to the Kulaks, however, is a much different reality than Sergei Eisenstein portrays.

Victims of Holodomor

What really happened to the Kulaks was not a “joyous” and “progressive” revolution but a Soviet executed famine that killed millions of innocent people known as Holodomor that took place 1932-1933. The chief architect of this genocide was a Jewish Soviet politician Lazar Kaganovich. Kaganovich was notorious for killing tens of millions of people and burning every Christian church he could find. Keep in mind not one synagogue was burned down or destroyed during the Russian revolution. After burning down the great Cathedral of Christ the Savior Lazar Kaganovich boasted, "Mother Russia is cast down. We have ripped away her skirts."

Lazar Kaganovich
"Butcher of the Ukraine"

Unlike the child revolutionaries of Bezhin Meadow, the children were the first to starve to death during Holodomor. Cannibalism was also prevalent and it was not unheard of for children to go “missing.” Ukrainian born Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo’s older brother was supposedly eaten by his starving neighbors. Despite being one of the most horrific events of human history, the average American has never heard about this event or the killers that executed it. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the killers were Jewish and to admit this even happened would be deemed as anti-Semitic. Despite contemporary claims that the Soviet Union was “anti-Semitic,” Jews were overrepresented in the Soviet leadership. After the famine, Jewish Yiddish culture thrived in the Ukraine whereas the Kulaks were all but destroyed. Lazar Kaganovich even admitted that Holodomor was payback for centuries of “Ukrainian Anti-Semitism.”

A Leon Trotsky lookalike from Bezhin Meadow

Like Lazar Kaganovich, Sergei Eisenstein was a Judeo-Bolshevik revolutionary. Eisenstein had the anti-proletarian luxury of growing up in a prosperous and cosmopolitan family. His ancestors were successful German Jews who eventually relocated to Latvia. In Eisenstein’s masterpiece The Battleship Potemkin, an evil bourgeois states, ’Down with Jews.’ Obviously, Sergei Eisenstein was not going to ignore the anti-Semitism within the repressive bourgeois Slavic majority. Eisenstein’s Jewish pal Isaac Babel would also help him co-write Bezhin Meadow. In Babel’s story How It Was Done in Odessa, a character states in a Woody Allen-esque manner, “Wasn’t it a mistake on God’s part to settle Jews in Russia so they suffer in Hell?” Sergei Eisenstein was also a huge fan of Yiddish slang and Yiddish humor.

Sergei Eisenstein also did a stint in Hollywood, like many other Jewish Bolshevik filmmakers who immigrated from the Soviet Union. Eisenstein completed a script in 1930 for an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy but paramount studios was not too keen on the script so Eisenstein left Hollywood for Mexico. In July 1941, Eisenstein once again appeared in America to speak on a radio program called ‘To Brother Jews of All the World’ as a Soviet Jew. One could say that Sergei Eisenstein did more for Jewish international propaganda than Steven Spielberg ever could. Spielberg may have invented the modern cinematic interpretation of the holocaust, but Eisenstein was able to cover up a Jewish executed Holocaust via Bezhin Meadow.

Bezhin Meadow is now forever lost in it’s complete form. The film now only exists in a “silent film-cum-slide show.” Essentially, the film is just now clips from the actual film with the film’s original score intact. The modern day film school student is introduced to Sergei Eisenstein and usually looks at the director as a boring old fossil. If film schools actually put Eisenstein’s work in context with the socio-political elements that surround them, maybe Eisenstein would still be more of interest to new filmmakers. Also, one can’t forget that Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet montage editing style that Hollywood has made no lie about utilizing is probably responsible for the so called ADHD epidemic that has plagued the United States.

Works Cited

Bergan, Ronald. Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in conflict. New York: Overlook Press, 1999.

MacDonald, Kevin. The Culture of Critique. Long Beach: 1st Books Library, 2002.

Seton, Marie. Sergei M. Eisenstein. New York: A. A. WYN, INC, 1960.


-Ty E