Arts/Review

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THE GREAT DEPRESSION: .1929-
1939. By Pierre Berton. Published by
Pierre Berton Enterprises, 1990.
Hardcover, $29.95. Atthe People’s Co-
op Bookstore.

Pierre Berton’s latest book is based on
sound research and is a pleasure to read. It
is the dramatic story of one of the most
significant periods in the history of Can-
ada: 1929-1939,

The last paragraph of The Great
Depression sums up the irony of that
period: “On September 8, 1939, the Can-
adian Parliament declared that a state of
war existed between Canada and Nazi
Germany. On that day the Great Depres-
sion can be said to have ended. For war,
which would bring mutilation and death,
would also bring jobs .... The chronicle of
the Great Depression is a catalogue of
ironies, but that is the bitterest irony of all.”

That was the theme which hundreds of
labour and left wing speakers hammered
away at in the early post-war period.

The years 1929-39 in Canada were a
time of hunger marches, soup kitchens,
drought, grasshoppers, relief depots, sit-
ins and lockouts; of the On-to-Ottawa Trek
and the occupation of the post office and
art gallery in Vancouver. Berton deals with
all of these events sympathetically.

_This was the period in which Com-
munist leaders were jailed under the in-
famous Section 98 of the Criminal Code,

and of the mass movement which led to
their release and contributed to the defeat
of the Bennett Conservative government
and the repeal of Section 98. It was the time
of the notorious “padlock” law in Quebec,
designed to strangle the Communist move-
ment and intimidate the labour and pro-
gressive movement as a whole.

It was also the time when the Congress
of Industrial Organizations came into
Canada and helped to organize workers of
the mass production industries. It was a
period when populist demagogues came to
the fore — Premier William Aberhart of
Alberta, Premier Mitch Hepbum of On-
tario and Premier Maurice Duplessis of
Quebec.

Berton examines the personalities of
these leaders, the forces that brought them
to power and what they stood for. But he
offers more than dry political sketches. All
of them become living characters, with
their strong points and their weak points.

Although he makes it clear that he has
no ideological affinity with the Commu-
nist Party, the author writes very favourab-
ly about their public work in that decade.
Forexample: “Ata time of crisis, while the
leaders of the major political parties bab-
bled about the need for fiscal responsibility
and a balanced budget, the Communists
were the only people who seemed to care
about the impoverished. They were also
superbly organized through a network of

Berton’s Great Depression praiseworthy

mass organizations - the Young Com-
munist League, the Farmers’ Unity League
and the Unemployed Workers’ Assdcia-
tion.”

Burton presents Communist’ leaders
like Tim Buck, Arthur Evans, Tom Ewen
(later McEwen) and Annie Buller in asym-
pathetic fashion. In the same vein, he intro-
duces leaders like the Reverend A.E. Smith
who headed the Canadian Labour Defense
League, Dr. Norman Bethune and some
outstanding leaders of the On-To-Ottawa
Trek of 1935.

Ihave read much about the founding of
the Co-operative Commonwealth Federa-
tion, forerunner to the New Democrats,
and its early history. But this is the first time
I have read the details about the divisions
in the leadership when Canada declared
war against Nazi Germany in September,
1939.

On Sept. 6, the party’s national council
of 28 and 14 Members of Parliament met
in Ottawa for a bitter discussion that lasted
two days. The party was badly divided. Its
leader, James Shaver Woodsworth, was a
staunch pacifist who unconditionally op-
posed Canada going to war. He was sup-
ported by Stanley Knowles and by the
Fabians, Frank Underhill and-Frank Scott.
The “practical politicians” — Abe Heaps
and David Lewis among them — argued
that the party must support the coming war.

Angus MacInnis, married to Woods-

worth’s daughter, supported intervention.
In doing so he antagonized the strong Mar-
xist groupings in B.C. who argued that
Canada should keep out of “the imperialist
war.”

Finally a compromise was adopted, ur-
ging that civil liberties be guarded during
the coming hostilities, that the government
extend economic aid to England and pro-
vide home defence, but that no expedition-
ary force be sent across the water. With six
members forced to leave before the vote,
the compromise was adopted 15-9.
Woods worth, true to his principles, stood
up in the House and gave his personal
position opposing all wars, followed by
M.J. Coldwell, thé future leader, who gave
the official position of the party.

Readers of the Tribune will be. par-

ticularly interested in the factual account
of the unemployed struggles in B.C. during
this period and how Berton presents the
heroic’saga of the Mackenzie-Papineau
Battalion, Canadian volunteers who
fought in Spain. Here too, he is not stingy
in his praise for the Communist Party, to
which he gives credit for recruiting the
volunteers and helping to get them to
Spain.
All in all, this is an excellent book. It is
nota history in the narrow, academic sense,
but it is a good popular account of the
period 1929-30.

—Jack Phillips

Ukrainian director
discusses “The Zone’

The director says the story is true. A flock
of swans was flying over the steppes of the
Ukraine, looking for a lake. But the desper-
ately needed resting place was obliterated by
a thick fog.

Suddenly, an illumination showed
through the dense mist. Gratefully, the birds
descended and eventually splashed down in
water.

Sergei Paradjanov watched from the
shore as the swans circled on the surface,
picked out by the harsh lights of the prison.
The lake they found was smack in the mid-
dle of The Zone.

That tale is one of some 100 recorded by
the late film director and producer who spent
five years in the prison, and retold in the
latest film by his friend and renowned Uk-
rainian director, Yuri Ilienko. The story also
inspires the title, Swan Lake — The Zone,
of one of the offerings at the Vancouver
Intemational Film Festival.

“He said to me, ‘Please, make this story
of my life,”” Illienko relates during an inter-
view in the Hotel Vancouver.

“But it is not so much a story of his life,
but a portrait also of me, and our country,”
says the director in halting English, and
Ukrainian through a translator.

The film, a co-production of the USSR,
Canada, Sweden and the U.S., has already
received two prizes at the prestigious Can-
nes film festival, and the director is a veteran:
film maker in the Soviet Union with an
international reputation. But he does not
look like a major director is supposed to.

Dressed in faded jeans and a short-
sleeved sports shirt, the middle-aged, thick-
necked Illienko looks more like one of the
set-up crew. He fiddles with a calculator,
applying masking tape to hold the batteries
in place, while giving the interview.

It is not hard to like the veteran film
maker, who is, of course, an embarrassment
of sorts because he represents the disaffected

10 « Pacific Tribune, October 8, 1990

members of a society that, in the name of
socialism, suffered persecution for their ar-
tistic expressions.

Several of Illienko’s films were put on the
shelf by the censor, including his first as a
director, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. It
was made with Paradjanov, anoted producer
and director eventually imprisoned for pro-
testing suppression of artistic creativity, Il-
lienko says, and who died of cancer two
months ago.

The Zone is the name given to the place
where Paradjanov was incarcerated. Ilienko
himself escaped that fate, but he considers
the term, zone, appropriate to the entire Uk-
rainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Meanwhile, the “Swan Lake” part of the
title is used ironically. “Swan Lake the ballet
is associated with pleasant feelings because
of its beauty. The prison is the ugliest crea-
tion of the 20th Century,” Illienko explains.

“As the film develops, one is aware of the
irony — of the beauty and severity of Soviet
life.”

_In the movie a prisoner escapes, three
days before his sentence is to expire, taking
refuge in a large hammer-and-sickle monu-
ment. Here again irony surfaces: the familiar
emblem of socialism is both a symbol of the
prison anda protector. —

Swan Lake — the Zone premieres Oct.
18 in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.

Illienko says that during the Brezhnev
era, films were banned simply because they
contained “a little sign of personal freedom
of expression.”

Swan Lake was made in the same prison
where Paradjanov served time for what II-
lienko says was a trumped-up charge: homo-
sexuality. Higher authorities granted the
film makers permission to shoot in the
prison, although prison authorities at first
balked before finally relenting, he relates.

Actual prisoners were used in the film- —

ing, Ilienko says.

“According to the Soviet Union, there are
no longer political prisoners in the Ukraine.
Now, if they want to jail a dissident, they find
a (legal) reason first.”

- Harsh words for the post-Brezhnev
period, although Illienko says not as many
dissidents are arrested these days. Last year
several arrests Illienko considers politically
motivated resulted in the detainees only
being held a brief period. ’

Illienko says he had trouble releasing his
films in the USSR since he refused to sign a
letter denouncing the late Andrei Sakharov
in 1972. He was also forbidden to travel
outside the USSR, he says.

Illienko says it is easier to get films
released now. “You can film whatever you
want, but the question of finances still arises,
and where you are going to show your
films.”

It’s easier for someone of Ilienko’s
status, but then, he wishes he had the drive

and energy now that he had in his Twenties |

when his films were being banned.
Right now, his films suffer a different fate

Victor Solovyov in a scene from Swan Lake — The Zone.

at home. Glasnost has. brought a flood of
American-made films — including the in-
evitable action type — and Soviet audiences
are filling the theatres to see them, Illienko
says.

“Films like mine don’t have as much
appeal right now, because they contain a
certain message.” But he notes his films
have been seen by some 30 million Soviet
viewers.

Asked for his views on what he’d like to
see happen in the Soviet Union, and the
Ukraine in particular, Ilienko says: “The
Supreme Soviet wants to preserve the
monolithic nature of the USSR, but the em-
pire is already crumbling.”

He believes that eventually the Ukraine
will be independent. But under what kind of
system? he is asked.

“The kind of socialism in the Soviet
Union will eventually perish. But what
might come after might be socialism of the
Swedish type, based on a free market.”

—Dan Keeton