Art Presenting Communism Truthfully

I came across one episode of a popular series, Northern Exposure, that ran in the 1990-1995. Highly popular then, it received many accolades, and the main actors were nominated for and received several awards for their excellent performance.

The streaming episode in question, number 25, entitled Zarya, aired during season five. For me, it was shocking because the entire show advocated for capitalism and against communism. There was even a brief plug for the crowd pushing global warming caused by CO2.

I was accustomed to Hollywood supporting all socialist and communist causes, praising the tyranny that had killed one hundred million innocent people around the world, including my own dad.

I knew that public school students and college students only received a cursory introduction to the evils, misery, famine, torture, and death that all communist societies inflicted on their citizens with the Communist Party at the helm.

The communist ideology, adopted by socialist republics in lock step with the Soviet Union, originally stemmed from Karl Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. All these countries were socialist republics run by the Communist Party under the guidance and advice of the Soviet Politburo apparatchiks.

The episode presented an imaginary and secret visit by a Soviet delegation led by Lenin to Alaska post the tumultuous times when the Soviets deposed the Romanovs in Russia.

As truth has become a victim of the lies spewed by politicians, the mass media, academia, and the government, it is important to describe what some of the characters said during this highly interesting episode of Northern Exposure.

One of the Russian characters, Mikhail Borisovich, a medical doctor who accompanies the group, refuses to go back to Russia with Lenin, not because he had lost faith in the Bolshevik Revolution, but because, as a scientist, he was no longer sure that “life can be reduced to class struggle, to dialectical materialism, or any set of formulas. Life is spontaneous and it is unpredictable,” he said to the fictional Lenin.

The show ended with the fictional narrative that, “after his return from Alaska, Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy which allowed for limited private enterprise. The policy revived the Soviet economy but was scorned by hardline party members. After Lenin’s death, Stalin abolished Lenin’s reforms and returned the Soviet Union to ‘Pure Socialism.’”

The loose connection to the show’s location, the fictional Cicely, Alaska, was brought about by the fact that Tsar Alexander II had ceded Alaska, his country’s last remaining foothold in North America, to the United States for $7.2 million.

The real Lenin did propose a New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 where a mixed economy with a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control while operating on a “profit basis.” The economy was mixed when the Soviets revoked partially the complete nationalization of industry and allowed a mixed economy to exist for a short while.

The show’s storyline reveals what Lenin’s communist-controlled society wrought: confiscation of private property, total control by the state, politically and economically, hunger, starvation, and the lack of basic goods and freedoms.

A very hungry Comrade Borisovich is plied with the abundance of decent food in capitalism, and he eats the offerings on the capitalist table like the starved and hungry socialist that he was – a doctor working for Soviet Polyclinic number 6. His female interlocutor reminds him that on Nevsky Prospekt, he could not buy a new pair of socks nor needle and thread to darn the ones he has.

The fictional Lenin visits the local shop to buy bunion shields. He explains to the elderly shop owner that, “unfortunately, for all the triumphs of our Revolution, the quality of shoes has declined.” The well-informed shop owner tells Lenin that she has read about his Soviet Union. “If you remove the profit incentive, you get shoddy merchandise.”

Lenin counters that “the middlemen, brokers, like the owner of this shop, are economic parasites.” She tells him proudly that she is the owner of the shop. “You mean your husband,” he replies. “I mean me. Why would you presume otherwise?” Lenin replies, “given the subservient position of women in capitalist society.”

“You utopian social engineers are all alike,” she replied to Lenin. “If Karl Marx had made some capital instead of writing about capital, things would have been much better.” Lenin was shocked that such a “well-adjusted woman could live in a bourgeois society.”  He was accustomed to Soviet political commissars controlling everything and everybody.

Capitalism is not perfect, but it does not deny the existence of the soul, of God, of the inventive minds of people who are unique individuals with God-given rights to explore all possibilities and opportunities to become the best that they can be, not hobbled by the communist police state.

It is surprising that Hollywood produced this episode in 1993, so soon after the “fall” of the Soviet Union in 1990. It would be ideal if public schools in the 21^st century America would teach students in detail how socialism and communism had enslaved and terrorized millions around the globe. This education would dispel any positive opinions young people have about communism.