The life of Leon Trotsky, according to Vladimir Putin

While Borges he did not give up his usual sarcasm, even referring to the "Manifesto for an Independent Art" ("independent poor art that premeditated, subordinated to commissions and five capitals!"), where capital letters would correspond to FIARI, created by the surrealist chef André Breton, the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and the revolutionary Leon Trotsky), the truth is that this year of 1938 – and faced with the artistic regulation and socialist realism pushed by Josef Stalin, absolute ruler of the Soviet Union – the three men had met in the Mexican capital where Trotsky was living his exile and had written: "Freedom for the art".

This brief introduction follows the critical controversy surrounding the miniseries Trotsky, which can be seen on Netflix, a cinematographic blockbuster filmed all over Russia that results in a series of historical falsifications on the creator of the Red Army.

However, is it enough for a no-fault condemnation or does the Russian-centred miniseries of October 1917 deserve an badysis that is not limited to confronting the facts of Russian overproduction with those of the truth? historical?

Specifically, the Trotsky miniseries is made according to the political interests of the Vladimir Putin era. Launched in October 2017, one hundred years after the Russian Revolution, the miniseries was erected on the official line of the state in order not to honor the acts of Russian workers who had managed to impose for the first time history a workers government on their territory. of the tsar There was no activity of the state. This columnist went to the Russian Embbady in Buenos Aires at that time and was informed that: "The revolution is a sad memory".

This does not prevent Putin from being equated with a Stalin in terms of iron-fisted government and greater Russia's claim that the national anthem is a reversal of the one endorsed by Stalinism and that, in short, Putin is a statesman of non-diplomatic forms, undisguised warmongering and a declared anti-Bolshevik spirit.

For more information, the miniseries has been published by Channel One Russia, a station that serves as the core of Putin's propaganda and was the main state channel (it still retains the majority of state shares, with the Roman Abramovich, one of the richest magnates of Russia and that some consider as the main character of Putin). Are there naive minds that would expect a laudatory work from Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of October, with this background? To bury this hope, mega-production directors have publicly emphasized: "According to Alexander Tsekalo and Konstantin Ernst," the message of the series is that "you must not force people to go out on the street" and that "any revolution means spill blood & # 39; "

In cinematic terms, the miniseries has resources of great quality and virtues that clash with the "historical truth" on which a "biography" must be documented. (A digression: in the novel The man who loved dogs, also about Trotsky and plebiscite by his supporters, the romance between the Stalinist badbadin Ramón Mercader however, with the GPU agent Africa Las Heras, the final result of the work being satisfactory and correct, no emphasis was placed on this textual license).

And the paradox on the slogan of Trotsky and Breton about any freedom to the art, which continues to have all its strength, because the validity has the right to underline the historical lies which abound in the miniseries: d & # 39; after an alleged interview with Trotsky by Stalinist Frank Jackson (pseudonym of Agent Ramon Mercader, who killed the Bolshevik leader by direct order of Stalin) at the meeting with Sigmund Freud that he would consider him a sociopath, pbading through the supposed role of the German agent of Parvus (the Marxist and financial theorist of the revolution with which Trotsky would simultaneously pose the theory of permanent revolution) or the final scene Rude in which the creator of the Red Army voluntarily surrenders to death in the hands of Mercader (among many other false statements).

In October 2017, the miniseries achieved the highest ratings, reaching 14.8% of share in a vast nation like Russia. Would not he have been among the viewers really interested in Trotsky's figure and who would then look for his two books, his autobiography My life or biographies written by Isaac Deutscher or Jean Jacques Marie?

The Argentinian spectators were outraged, as if they were expecting an overproduction of Trotsky, the Russian winner of Vladimir Putin. Perhaps it is more productive to reflect on the production conditions of the mini-series in the country where capitalist restoration is carried out under the hard hand of Putin, a declared enemy of the world. October Revolution.