FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

SnoopyStyle OMG Soviets were meanies. Who knew? I thought they were all about puppies and sunshine. Pardon my stupidity. ****** end sarcasm *******If the filmmaker didn't talk down to his audience, there could be an informative documentary here. But every other word is 'NOBODY KNOWS THIS BUT...'. Know what? I knew most of this already. There's some interesting details but the general takeaway is already widely known.1. Nazis and Soviets were originally Allies. Other than stupid Middle America, who doesn't know this? They invaded a Whole Country together. At best they could say is 'It's not widely spoken of by the Russians today'. With former KGB Putin at the helm, that's a more interesting angle to take. But this film treats it's audience with such naivety. Oh the Russians won't admit to Soviet crimes. Like that's some sort of news? Guess what? Neither do the Japs. You're not breaking any ground.2. Desperately trying to link National Socialism and Communism and thereby tar all left leaning politics. At times, it felt like an academic dissertation. At other times, it felt like selective arguments. I just kept thinking of George Orwell. These are just the various justifications of the same thing. TOTALITARIANISM. The justifications is secondary to the wish for total power. They don't care about the niceties of theories. It's all about total power. Like all powerplay, allies are just enemies in waiting. This doc completely ignores that Fascists and Commies fought in Spain and in Germany. Stalin can drop his idealism for those people because its the power that's more important.3. Doc tells us there was something called Gu -lag. Whatever! It's in everyday English language, but the documentary is treating it like discovering the Fountain of Youth. Just relax. There's a little bit good info here. Again you're not breaking any ground.4. Most naive of all. The Russian aren't being put to the fire over their Soviet past. Here's the most important History lesson of all. The winners always write the history.Overall it's taking on a good subject but doing it very poorly by treating its audience as idiots.

G K From the disturbed mind of Latvian director Edvins Snore comes an evil masterpiece titled The Soviet Story. It's so bad that it has to be seen to be believed. It's filled with lies, lies and more lies. The poster alone should tell you that it's purely propaganda; the statue of the worker and the peasant on top of a pile of human corpses. The film includes a creepy narration, huge red titles, and constant footage of corpses. The Soviet Story won't be taken seriously by viewers in the future. The best Western documentary about the Second World War is titled The World At War (1973). The World At War has faults, and one can say that it's also anti-Russian. But at least it tries to provide a somewhat objective look at what happened during that war. Adolf Hitler was broken in Russia, and the Soviet Union suffered 19 million civilian deaths. This sort of information surely isn't mentioned in The Soviet Story. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did have a non-aggression pact due to convenience, but Joseph Stalin approved it only because he wanted Russia to stay out of the war at that time. Stalin knew what the British and the French were plotting, and he had good reasons to distrust the imperialists. In addition to this Stalin's critics exaggerate the number of victims of his regime to numbers beyond belief. This tells me one thing; they don't care about the dead. The several million deaths resulting from state policies are attributed to political repression and rapid industrialization. The Soviet Union lasted until 1991, and what's shown in this inaccurate horror flick supposedly happened before 1950. I wonder what results Snore would have had if he instead channeled his criticism towards Nazism and Fascism, European imperialists, or the slavery and landgrabs of the Americans. There's also the matter of Western financiers and monopolists against whom Stalin had to fight. I'm not going to go into this matter, but I will mention that they brought Hitler to power and they seriously opposed the Soviet Union ever since Stalin abandoned the project of world revolution.Reliable critics and historians already heavily criticized The Soviet Story. One of Snore's tactics is using footage of the dead and claiming that these were the victims of Communism. Can someone sink any lower? The supposed dead from the famine of 1932 here are in fact Russian and German dead from World War I. How do I know this? It's because I've seen the same footage in the acclaimed 1964 documentary series The Great War. But this doesn't bother a man like Snore. He just throws anything that he can find into the blender and hopes for an effective result. So what you get is pictures taken at Nazi concentration camps presented as pictures taken at Soviet labour camps. It's really disturbing how much false footage is used in this film. He claims that his countrymen were brutally oppressed by the Russians. Well, there was some oppression during the Stalin period, but it certainly wasn't like what Snore imagines. Snore somehow didn't mention that his countrymen joined the Wehrmacht and the SS during the war, and then hunted down and killed thousands of Jews and Socialists. Some even participated in the slaughter of civilians in Russia. At the end of the film Snore takes a stab at the second president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. Now we get to see why this film was actually released. It was released by a Russophobe to spread anti-Russian sentiment. The dissolution of the Soviet Union took place 20 years ago, and life got worse in the countries which were part of it. The Soviet government is no more, but history continues. Russia was hit hard by the economic problems caused by Capitalism and the West. But countries like Latvia fared little better. Populations in former Soviet republics have been decreasing ever since. The current Western-backed regimes of the Baltic states want to hide what really happened and instead blame and lie about Russia. Deranged people like Edvins Snore are going to praise this awful film. These poor souls need emotional healing. Those who want reliable information should find something else, preferably a good history book.

Nikitn Well.. Some documentaries are biased others are not. There is no doubt that the Soviets behaved badly in Germany, albeit they were extremely merciful, if you consider the "you reap what you sow" word of wisdom.Basically, what this documentary does is exaggerating and making claims (like the casualty figures, completely unsourced and without substance). In truth ~ 10 million people (and only 8 million "proven") died due to Stalin's rule. Vast majority (85%+) were due to starvations, which can not solely be attributed to the massive taxation and incompetence, but also to self-destroying actions by the Kulaks (burning their crops, slaughtering farm animals) as well as droughts.I'm giving it a 1 because some of the interviews were legit, but it does not show the grand picture but instead tries to distort it. Final point: Stalin was an average, human-less dictator. He just happened to rule a very big country. Though in the end, it could be argued that his brutality united the country, and him treating people as a resource, created enough industrial power to defeat Nazi Germany.

Zvesda Supported by a fringe, neo-fascist faction of the European Parliament, which includes pro-Nazi glorifiers, xenophobes, and anti-Semites of the Fatherland and Freedom (Latvia), Lega Nord (Italy), and the Law and Justice Party (Poland), this propaganda piece with lies and innuendo seeks to generate hatred towards Russia and blacken the image of progressive forces throughout the world.There is nothing new with the approach of this film. Desperate attempts to blacken the Russian Government and equate it to Nazi Germany is part of the old Cold War propaganda struggle waged by the United States Government and neo-fascist organizations like the John Birch Society. This is ironic given the fact that this film has received the enthusiastic support of the crypto-Nazis of Latvia's For Fatherland and Freedom party. Especially disturbing about the revisionism of this film is the denial of the Holocaust by seeking to shift blame from the actual criminals to Russia.To start, this piece of pseudo-history does not include contributions from any respected, qualified scholars specializing in Russian history or political science from institutions of higher education. One contributor to the film, George Watson, fabricates and misinterprets quotations from Marx and Engels. Watson, it should be noted, is not a professor of history, political science, or any field relating to the film's subject. And while this film presents itself to be some kind of groundbreaking investigation of Russian history, it is curious how not a professor of history from Russia is found in this film. Rather, the documentary features a freak show composed of degenerates from radical right-wing parties, such as Kristovskis of the the aforementioned For Fatherland and Freedom party of Lavia.Concerning the invented quotations of Marx and Engels, it is claimed in this film that Engels called Slavs "dirty" and opposed the existence of Poland. But this is a a falsification of history because Marx and Engels had long been some of the most passionate supporters of Polish independence, particularly the 1863 uprising. The film makes the outrageous claim that Marx and Engels called for a "revolutionary holocaust" against specific peoples. But Engels did not call for the destruction of what he called counter-revolutionary nations, but only predicted that such people would experience setbacks as they struggled with the progressive nations. In 1890, Engels would write positively on these backwards nations, believing in their right to self-determination: "Magyars, Romanians, Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians, Greeks, and Turks will then finally be in a position to...manage their own internal affairs according to their own judgment." It should be noted, however, that Marxism is not some kind of immutable dogma; Marx and Engels regularly revised their work and acknowledged their errors and mistakes that they previously made.The film makes the spurious claim that a famine throughout Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union constituted a genocide against Ukraine that killed 7 million. But as scholars have noted, the famine was in no way limited to the Ukraine, but affected much of the country. To talk about a "Ukrainian Golodomor" is a misrepresentation of history. Contrary to what the film and its sources claim, the death toll was nowhere near 7 million. Professor Wheatcroft, for example, estimated that the death toll amounted to an estimated 4 to 5 million throughout the USSR, including 1.5 million in Ukraine. And as Tauger proves in his research, the famine to a large extent resulted from natural disasters. In particular, Extremely dry weather had the effect of reducing crops while extremely wet and humid weather later on led to infestations. And rather than desiring the famine, the Soviet Government took measures to provide relief to those areas affected by the famine.Other monstrously false claims made in this film include the lies that Russia refused to enter into an anti-fascist alliance with the Western Powers, Gestapo staff trained the NKVD, Russia's extradition of Jews to the Gestapo, and Russia's involvement in the extermination of Jews, which I do not have the space to go into detail about.Rather than wasting your time with this pathetic excuse for a propaganda film, a better choice would be to go to college and study the work of respected scholars to learn the truth.