The slaughter of millions by Moscow's communist regime remains shrouded in benevolent shadow. That's due partly to the perverse aesthetics of the Third Reich but also to a disconcerting ambivalence-even now-about what was going on a little further to the east. Yet, as Hollywood's cynics understand, the swastika will almost always outsell the red star. There are many books on Soviet terror, and some have won huge readerships. Hitler's concentration camps are a Tinseltown staple, but Stalin's merit barely a mention. There have been a handful of films on this topic, but, as observed Anne Applebaum, author of a fine 2004 history of the gulag, this was the first time it had been given the full Hollywood treatment. No, what distinguished "The Way Back" was its depiction of life in Stalin's camps. The most remarkable thing about "The Way Back," the 2010 film by Peter Weir, was neither its protagonists (escapees from the Soviet gulag system who trekked thousands of miles to their freedom) nor the curious tale of the almost certainly fictional 1956 "memoir" that inspired it (Slawomir Rawicz's "The Long Walk").
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