On one of the more momentous days in human history, 23 August 1939, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin signed a mutual non-aggression treaty called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In addition to ensuring that the Red Army would not stop Hitler’s blitzkrieg through Europe (which commenced barely a week later with the invasion of Poland), the agreement contained secret clauses dividing Eastern Europe into separate Nazi and Soviet zones of influence. One of the Soviet zones was the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In 1940, with the Nazis rampaging, Stalin quietly annexed the three Baltic nations into the Soviet Union. To cement Moscow’s hegemony, he also deported most of the leading Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian intellectuals eastward to Siberian labor camps. Many of these intellectuals did not survive the ordeal and a majority of those who did took years to return to their former homeland along the Baltic Sea.
The film Ashes in the Snow provides a fictionalization of the Baltic deportations, following the family of a teenage artist forcibly relocated from Kaunas, Lithuania to the frozen steppe of the Soviet Union’s vast eastern frontier. Lina (Bel Powley), the teenage artist, is the film’s protagonist and the audience’s tour guide through the grueling conditions faced by those who were ethnically cleansed from the Baltic region. Lina bears the many physical, mental and emotional deprivations and humiliations with an increasing resilience, maintaining a level of genuine moral goodness that the conditions seem to render impossible and thereby forging, eventually, a way forward for her family.
While the plot is ultimately life-affirming – humanity, decency and personal courage overcoming the cold and faceless violence of the modern nation-state – Ashes in the Snow is neither a happy nor hopeful film. It also fails to create any narrative momentum. The viewer always knows what is coming next, and, most damning, the film generates no visual novelty. In fact, Ashes in the Snow, if watched on mute, would readily be mistaken for a Holocaust film, so wholly does it borrow from the standard portrayals of the Nazi Final Solution. There is the chilly, overcrowded train car, the degrading nudity of forced undressing, leering and inhumane guards and a dead baby added as simple scene-filler to cement the awfulness of it all. Lina is a proto-Anne Frank, albeit one who doodles sketches rather than crafts preternaturally mature paragraphs.
The parallels are so extensive that Ashes in the Snow goes beyond feeling like a lazy, connect-the-dots-to-roast-your-favorite-dictator’s-pet-policy portrayal of something genuinely terrible to feeling like an irresponsible reduction of both Baltic deportees and Holocaust victims’ trauma to some rote, milquetoast experience. Already, Holocaust films fail to capture the breadth of Jewish suffering, reducing every Jew’s story to the concentration camp even when millions were exterminated without ever entering one; when the Stalinist deportations, which victimized dozens of minority communities throughout the nascent Soviet Union, are similarly reduced to the familiar visual pattern, it becomes too reductionist. To portray the deportations and the Holocaust in the same way, to the point of using the exact same key visual markers – in addition to a faux-Frank, Ashes in the Snow gives the viewer a hanging man straight out of Wiesel’s Night and recreates several scenes from Schindler’s List – is simply wrong. It also makes for a rather boring film; it is something we have all already seen before.
Director/producer Marius A. Markevicius seems to have a particular affinity for films about the darker side of the Soviet Union, particularly Stalin’s reliance on Siberia for punishing those he deemed undesirables (The Other Dream Team, The Way Back). But Ashes in the Snow, in equating the Baltic deportations with the Holocaust, is a misstep. It simply was not the same: the former was a war crime that the US constantly held against the Soviets throughout Cold War peace talks, but the latter was the crime against humanity that so shocked the world that the world invented the term “crime against humanity.” Ashes in the Snow includes no historical context to help the viewer understand the gravity of Stalin’s crime, lazily relying on the visuals aping Holocaust motifs to do that. Instead, it gives an exceedingly vague preamble. There is no mention that Stalin’s removal of Baltic intellectuals proved extremely costly to him only a year later, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union through the Baltic states, which were much softer targets with all of their leaders digging beets from the Siberian tundra instead of fortifying the local resistance. The uninformed viewer also learns little of Lithuania’s horrible fate during the War, thrice ravaged by Soviet occupation, then Nazi takeover and occupation and finally by a “liberating” Red Army as the Nazis retreated back towards Germany.
A humanizing film might have mentioned this (or the most humanistic modern philosopher, Emmanual Levinas, a Lithuanian Jew born in Kaunas whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis), but this is not a humanistic film. A historical film might have portrayed the heroism of the Soviet Red Army and the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of World War II’s violence (20 million Soviet citizens died) or the endurance of the Baltic intellectuals, whose children eventually spearheaded the nationalist movements of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and regained those countries’ independence in the ‘90s, but, again, this is not a historical film. This is, instead, a lazy and predictable film.
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