Our documentary film, Women of the Gulag, made the Academy’s short-list
of ten documentary films contending for a place in the final five. That
Russian-American director, Marianna Yarovskaya, is the first Russian documentary
film maker in the history of the Russian Federation to make it so far in Oscar
competition has attracted considerable attention in Russian media, especially its
liberal sites. It did not take long however before it caught the attention of
Russian Gulag deniers. A writer for https://zol-dol.livejournal.com/994442.html
viewed the film and concluded that the five female Gulag survivors, telling
their story on camera were lying. Such things that they describe – the arbitrary
sentences, the beatings, and arrest of innocent fathers and husbands – were made-up
fantastic stories. Who could believe that a young woman sleeping in a tent at a
freezing logging camp could wake up with a frog in her mouth? Surely viewers
will not be taken in by such nonsense. Besides, director Yarovskaya is incompetent
– a dupe of faux human-rights organizations, like Memorial. In the same
edition, another Gulag-denier writes that the much-authenticated order 00447
that initiated the Great Terror is a fabrication of Russian human-rights
organizations. So far, Russian mainstream media is waiting and watching, asking
should Yarovskaya’s Women of the Gulag be treated as an accomplishment of
Russian film makers or an attempt to sully the greatness of Russian history?
