New Russian Thriller has US State Department Working for an Independent Siberia

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 17 – In the best traditions of Soviet agitprop, a new movie is being filmed in Bratsk about a supposed conspiracy of the US Department of State and George Soros to secure the secession of Siberia and the heroic efforts of a lone journalist to expose and defeat this effort.

            The film, to be completed next year, is entitled “It Isn’t Life that is Nonsense,” and its director Artem Kim says he has chosen this subject because the issue of Siberian independence is increasingly important. He adds he is financing it on his own because the issue is too hot to handle as far as Moscow is concerned (tayga.info/137468 and tkgorod.ru/news/13790).

            Kim says that earlier he supported autonomy for Siberia but within the Russian Federation but has changed his mind because he believes that “what the Siberian regionalists are proposed is suicide” and that it is necessary to use films as well as other means to convince others and especially the young on this point.

            According to a report on the AfterEmpire portal, Kim, despite his claims of earlier sympathy with regionalism, is not to be found on any of the lists of such people that have appeared in the past.  Siberian regionalists, it says, would never think about looking to the State Department as an ally in the way that he does (afterempire.info/2017/11/16/erunda/).

            The portal suggests that Kim may simply be trying to attract attention and, despite his words, government funding for his project. But it suggests that in taking up such a theme, the film director ought to remember how dangerous it can be to go even beyond what the incumbent Moscow regime wants.

            “There was once in the USSR a major party writer Vsevolod Kochetov,” AfterEmpire points out. But he landed in serious trouble with his “odious” novel “What Do You Want?” about the machinations of the “cursed West.” Kochetov may have said what many in the party elite believed but they knew enough not to say it in public.

            As a result, the entire print run of his novel “was removed from all Soviet libraries.”