Film Screening & Discussion. An Unprecedented Campaign

Please join the Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia University for a screening of director Mikhail Kaufman’s An Unprecedented Campaign (1931), followed by a discussion moderated by Professor Yuri Shevchuk. The film will be shown with English subtitles.

An Unprecedented Campaign is the prominent avant-garde Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Kaufman’s rare cinematographic documentation of Stalin’s murderous campaign aimed at destroying Ukrainian peasantry. The film is about the 25,000 workers (dvadtsatipiatitysiachniki) who were mobilized in Moscow, Leningrad, and other large cities in Soviet Russia and sent to Ukraine to collectivize villages and destroy independent peasants, who were demonized and dehumanized as blood-sucking kulaks. Millions of them were slated for destruction as a social class, and in Ukraine and Northern Caucasus, this campaign became the prelude of the genocidal man-made famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, that claimed more than 3 million lives. Kaufman presents the campaign as a revolutionary necessity, as yet another glorious battle on the road to the brave new world of communism.

This event is organized with the support of the Oleksander Dovzhenko National Film Center, Kyiv, Ukraine.