The new model of repression of late Stalinism, pseudoscience and cinema

Abstract

If the USSR of the 1930s was dominated by massive, quota-based models of repression, the post-war period, with greater control difficulties, knew a professional and accurate machine for identifying and coercing dissidents. Pseudoscience charlatans used political culture and the new instruments of repression to impose themselves on their scientific peers, as Kojevnikov demonstrates. Marc Ferro's cinematographic socio-history allows us to understand how cinema was part of the regime's cultural war to disseminate such practices and try to unify the country in the face of internal and external enemies. For this, the films Sud chesti and Velikaya sila were selected, based on the common theme of the Court of Honor.