Mother Russia’s posh orphans do not deserve the pity of movie-makers, says zsuzsanna clark
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Beautiful Russian aristocrat loses everything when communists take power in 1917. Flees to Shanghai. Works as a taxi dancer. Meets blind US diplomat. Romance blossoms. Aristocrat's family despises her for the way she has "sold herself". The film industry's obsession with dispossessed Russian aristos shows no sign of abating with this week's British premier of The White Countess, starring Natasha Richardson (right). As always our sympathies are supposed to be with "those who have lost everything" and who are reduced to scraping a living in Paris, London, or in the White Countess's case, Shanghai.
My sympathies however, are elsewhere. When White Russians, such as the Belinskys, were in their palaces and country houses, the majority of Russians lived in abject poverty. The horror of the gulag should not make us
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| While the Belinskys were in their palaces and country houses, most Russians lived in abject poverty |
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forget that Tsarist Russia was a brutal police state, one which carried out regular pogroms of Jews, assassinated political opponents and exercised strict press censorship.
For many ordinary Russians, Communism meant an improvement. The Bolsheviks introduced education and healthcare for all, gave land to the peasants and granted women the legal and labour status of men.
The film industry's obsession with "Whites" means that we seldom get to hear the stories of those who benefited from the revolution. I was born and brought up in Hungary, a country which, like Russia, had been run by a reactionary, aristocratic elite. Before the Second World War, secondary education in Hungary was the preserve of the wealthy; under Communism, those who had missed out, like my parents, were given a second chance to resume their studies as adults.
No one will deny that crimes were committed under Communism. But ordinary people got rather more back from the "Reds", than they ever did when the film industry's beloved "Whites" ran the show. 
FIRST POSTED APRIL 3, 2006
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