James Finn
1 min readSep 25, 2021

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It’s interesting that Soviet nostalgia is big in Russia. I mean, I doubt anybody sincerely wants to go back to the way things used to be, but Russian young people often look back on the Soviet era through a sort of golden lens.

Older people like to point out how it wasn’t all bad, especially after Stalin died. (Very few Russians seem nostalgic about Stalinism.)

Reading Russian novels, poetry and plays from the Soviet era offers a peek into a society where happiness and humor often dominated in ways Americans were taught to think could not happen.

I recently watched a long-lost Soviet-era television adaptation of the first book of The Lord of the Rings. Absolutely glorious! The special effects are funny maybe to those of us used to high-tech Hollywood tricks, but the production is so joyful and so rich that it barely matters.

This TV film was not produced by sad gloomy people suffering under the yoke of oppression. Sure, parts of their society were clearly repressive, but you can’t watch the film without knowing you are watching the product of serious artists who went to work every day and did really great things.

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James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

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