amielbjacobs

[amielbjacobs]

[amielbjacobs]

Shield and Sword Liveblog

Still kind of shocked that this plot point was allowed. A chekist having someone shot under false accusations? I guess the Party line allowed for the idea that Stalin was fucked up in the 60s. But now, somehow, if you say that then Putin and his guys are like "What, you can't even torture several hundred thousand innocent people to death in a mass moral panic? Political correctness has gone too far."

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I love how Johann's entire approach to spying is just that

whenever anyone doesn't want to do some menial task, Johann is like I CAN DO THAT

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The British translator seems to struggle with the translation of the word "chekist" - in some places he turns it into "intelligence officer" or "secret service" or "NKVD" - but then later on there's a weird bit where he just starts saying "the Cheka." (Even though he's still talking about the 1940s.) Which like, if you were going to start saying "The Cheka" with no explanation to the Western reader wtf that means, why not just say "chekist" from the beginning? You can put a footnote and then you won't have to worry about it ever again. This translation is so sloppy.

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Johann is in a German military hospital now cozying up to the Gestapo informants and doing their report-writing for them

and a Prussian corporal just came in who, it's implied, shot himself in the foot to get out of the military

anyway, he's being a jackass and bossing everyone around and hitting on all the women

and one of the Gestapo informants tried to come up to him and ask more questions about how he got shot

and he just

started feeling the Gestapo man's face up and asked him "How did you get past the racial board with ears and a nose like that?'

and the Gestapo man just slunk off

This character is going to turn out to be another Russian spy undercover as a German. Seems like Nazi Germany was 50% Russians by population!

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Everyone is admiring how he is "the perfect Aryan" and he has taken to pointing out that Johann is also the perfect Aryan

(both are Slavs)

How come no one's ever Jewish in these books

The backstory of our second Russian-pretending-to-be-a-German

I love him but also

this is a guy who is 100% getting sent to the gulag after the war is over

he got trapped behind enemy lines and just stole a uniform and papers and started acting as a German, then started like

serial killing German officers basically

and recruited a whole communist cell to support him in that

and then they all got killed and only he survived

and now he's in the hospital as a German officer

and somehow, miraculously, wound up in the same hospital as the other fake German

"I'm a solo act, no chorus" is such a badass line.

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There's a really detailed explanation here, breaking from Johann's point of view, about how Beria/the NKVD command received all these reports from Soviet agents about how Nazi Germany was going to invade, and instead of listening they persecuted the agents for being the bearers of bad news. In this book, Johann almost got purged himself, and was only saved by the protection of his patron.

I'm really surprised all of this was allowed.

You do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to them, but

but also u kinda do, I like it when it's big Fuck Stalin hours

Oh, to be a fly on the wall when the censors were going over this book . . .

I absolutely thought Lansdorf was going to be the canon gay character in this book. The way Johann does all of these physically intimate services for this able-bodied older man, who then rewards him with promotions and, in the TV show, constantly calls him "dear" - it does really seem as if Lansdorf is gay and Johann is seducing him in order to further his goals.

Original russian, via google translate:

In the morning, Landsdorf asked to massage his sore leg. And Weiss did it with amazing skill. He had solid theoretical and practical training in the field of massage. Trainers claimed that massage was not only a universal remedy for all diseases, but also a healing balm for the nervous system. Weiss had once attended lectures by a massage therapist, and after training at the Dynamo stadium, athletes often massaged each other. So Johann had sufficient experience.

Johann is the best at everything. I bet he gives great blowjobs too

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This is the point in the show where I realized the Nazis were trying to recruit Soviet POWs out of the concentration camps, which as it turns out is most of the plot of this story. I've sort of gotten used to it over the course of re-experiencing this story three times, but it's still kind of a wild plot point. These are people who are barely alive.

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This is much grimier than Seventeen Moments Stierlitz never went to a death camp, even tho he is literally SS I mean, there are pictures of dead bodies in the Holocaust in Seventeen Moments, on screen but that's always sort of seperate from the actual plot

Johann is visiting a death camp and chatting with a low-level SS man who is dumb as bricks

SS man is bored of the death camp and wants to go out on a date with Johann

his dad was a missionary in Africa who shot at black people "if they didn't behave themselves"

and wanted him to be a priest too

There's a lot of anti-religious stuff in this book

which is a sharp contrast to Seventeen Moments of Spring where we only ever see the Nazis as oppressors of Christianity

which is one of the things that made me wonder if the Nazi regime in Seventeen Moments of Spring is a metaphor for the USSR rather than being the literal Nazi regime

Johann has been assigned to select Russian POWs from the death camps to do Abwehr work and he's looking for people he can use to secretly work against the Nazi regime for him

but this is also such a horrifying task, because like, anyone he doesn't choose will be gassed, right?

I have doubts about the tastefulness of allowing this thriller novel to go to a death camp.

But I won't lie and say that fake torture isn't my favorite trope

👀

In the full scene in Russian Johann says he can't bear to hit the prisoner and the prisoner calls him a pussy

which is also 👀

“I can’t,” Johann repeated. "A weakling," the miner said contemptuously. He thought for a moment and added, "A neurasthenic."

Von Dietrichs manners are queer coded so Johann adopting them is funny

the Nazis have an informant among the Soviet POWs

and Johann questioned him in his guise as abwehr, and then told the Nazi guards to slap him across the face before they release him back into the prison population "to make it look more natural"

which is funny, but I also find it kind of disturbing. Like, I do agree that you shouldn't inform on your fellow prisoners to the SS, but I also don't really feel comfortable judging the decisions of a guy who's starving to death in a death camp, you know? I feel like I, as a guy who has never starved to death in a death camp, don't have the right to judge those people. And it feels especially icky for Johann to judge them when he is currently enjoying the privileges of a Nazi officer. You know? Like, I think we're supposed to think he's sticking it to those traitors by having the informant beaten. But functionally he is a guy using the power accorded by the Nazi state to have a concentration camp prisoner beaten, and he's still our hero and this isn't depicted as a moment of moral failing for him. It's really uncomfortable.

I think I would be more likely to give this scene a pass if it didn't take place in a propaganda story. Like, it's okay for characters in difficult situations to do bad things and for the narrative not to have to spell out for us "this is bad." But the fact is that this is Soviet propaganda; the rules of this book are that bad things will be delineated for the reader. The fact that it's not delineated here is because the creators didn't think about it.

The story is going to explore the moral complexities of Johann's relationship to the concentration camp prisoners more later on, but even at its most ambiguous, it still sits in a place where it's saying that some people starving to death in a Nazi death camp deserve it because they didn't try harder to resist the Nazis.

But I mean. I guess I knew what I expected when I picked up the authoritarian propaganda novel. Did I mention this is Putin's favorite TV show? He credits it with getting him to join the KGB. So that's another crime we can lay at this show's feet, apparently.

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I was beginning to wonder if the subtitles on the show were really as bad as I remembered, or if it was just the cuts from cramming a thousand pages of long-winded literature into a TV show, but in my liveblog I found this:

And you know what? That still doesn't make any fucking sense to me.

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Johann (as an abwehr officer talking to a bunch of Soviet POWs they're trying to evaluate for use as penetration agents): You must give a political evaluation of the Soviet system. Prisoner (sounding depressed): What for? Johann: If you try to go back to the USSR after we parachute you in, the Soviets'll hang you from the first lamppost [for writing this denunciation of the system.] Prisoner: (hollowly) They will anyway.

This is so dark. I feel like this story is not as willing to admit to the mistreatment of Soviet POWs postwar as it is to call out Beria, but it's definitely not ignoring it entirely either. But it makes me wish that we could see Johann try to grapple with the fact that these prisoners are being trapped into an inhuman situation not only by the Nazis but also by the USSR, and that Johann is simultaneously a representative of both of those evils. He is playing both sides of the board, and both sides of the board are ruining these people's lives.

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Another scene from the show:

Nazi officer, about a Soviet POW: "An interesting young man, smart, from a family of intellectuals. He may be useful for long-term work, if we can thoroughly install our values in him."

HOW IS THAT GOING TO WORK. Your values are that he is subhuman and needs to be killed! I mean, is he not a Slav?

I think it was actually Dietrichs who said that, but when I was watching the TV show I wasn't really aware of Dietrichs as a distinct character.

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Johann, who as you'll recall is a chekist posting as Abwehr, is coaching the prisoners on how to survive a chekist interrogation so the prisoners are split into pairs, one interrogator and one interrogatee, and they're mock-interrogating each other

and the protagonist is lecturing them on what a real chekist would say

lmao

this plot has so many people pretending to be other people that it makes following with subs pretty hard

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[amielbjacobs]

Shield and Sword Liveblog

Gonna try to copy my Shield and Sword liveblog here, off of Discord. Shield and Sword is a 1960s Soviet spy novel and TV show about a Soviet agent who goes undercover as a German intelligence officer named Johann Weiss during World War Two.

I watched the TV show and liked it, but I struggled to follow the plot - it's two long books in the original Russian, and the TV show is like eight hours of show, but it's still hard to pack all of that in, so a lot of explanatory stuff gets cut, and the subtitles didn't help - they weren't awful, but I wouldn't call them top tier either.

Then Monty of @fitz-higgins told me that there were canonically gay characters in the book, so I absolutely had to get a copy. I got an English translation by a guy named C.E. Bearne. I immediately found it a lot easier to parse the story in novel form, even though I still thought the translation was kind of lacking. I also found I really enjoyed it and that it moved along at a good pace where the show (as well as other Soviet thrillers) tended to lag.

Then I found out that was because C.E. Bearne cut a bunch of text out of the book in order to make two 500-page-ish books into one 400ish page book. So I started to follow along with a google-translated copy of the original Russian.

I'll start my liveblog here from the beginning, before I found out about the cuts. Tag will be "abj liveblogs" if you want to block that.

A guy got murdered by a poison ampoule shot from a gun? why would anyone do that

I think the young Latvian detective is cute, even if he is a collaborator with the Soviets (which we dont stan).

In the TV show, Johann keeps calling the Latvian detective "Mr. Investigator" and the investigator is like STOP CALLING ME THAT, I AM A WORKER JUST LIKE YOU

Lol, lmao, lol @ them being like "obviously the Soviets wouldn't suspect or persecute a worker." Do we think Vadim Kozhevnikov put that in there voluntarily, or do we think the censors made him do it?

I like that everyone thinks Johann is a snake. I mean he is, he's just a red snake not a brown snake. In the show he's also cold and reserved but we get SO little look into his inner character that it almost feels like he's not even a character, he's just a prop around which plot happens

This plot point is about a German citizen murdered in Soviet Latvia - the father of the protagonist's BFF, Heinrich. The local German agent is telling everyone that the father was killed by the NKVD to stop him/his son from going back to Germany - but of course, the reader instantly suspects that he was in fact killed by the Germans to force the son back to Germany. It is not a subtle plot twist.

The Nazis are soooo antisemitic in Shield and Sword, which is striking to me because in the most famous Soviet WWII spy film, Seventeen Moments of Spring, antisemitism is barely mentioned. All the focus is on how the Nazis hate Russians, the fact that there might be another group of people they also want to genocide is like - I'm not even sure you could glean that the Nazis are antisemitic from Seventeen Moments if you didn't already know that.

This is particularly interesting because the author of Seventeen Moments had a Jewish father, and the director of the Seventeen Moments book was Jewish herself. But both the author and director of Shield and Sword are gentile. So that makes me wonder, was it just a difference in focus, or did the creators of Seventeen Moments feel they were less free to depict anti-semitism because they also experienced it? Was it, perhaps, fine to talk about anti-semitism, as long as you weren't a Jew? Or was this just the result of some individual peculiarity of the creators?

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😭 Johann is going to Germany because the son (Heinrich) is going because "you are the only human being close to me." Cute . . . I get why everyone ships these two.

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I like how early this story starts - Seventeen Moments starts with the Soviet protagonist already embedded in the upper echelons of Nazi society, whereas this story shows us in painstaking detail how the protagonist gets into Nazi Germany and climbs his way up the ladder. Very interesting stuff.

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JFKSJDFH all the other factory workers think he's a Gestapo spy . . . close but no cigar.

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Sad little man.

This is the Gestapo man who Weiss is hoping to flatter as a route to get influence in Nazi Germany.

Gestapo guy: [while being dragged limp and drunk into bed, slurring his words] I hope to make a career on Jews.

I'm actually glad they put that in there, I do feel like these Soviet films have a tendency to erase Jewish suffering

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At this point in the liveblog, where Johann gets taken under the wing of his landlady and given her dead son's discarded clothes, I have written:

embarrassing stuff.

I like this, tho I am confused how he magically knew the sad pole needed help hiding from the Germans. In retrospect, this might be something I'd find out if I checked the original russian version - a lot of the things that confused me on first pass have turned out to be due to cuts made either by the show director or the British translator.

Aaaaaaand . . . just spent like 10 minutes looking for this bit in the original Russian. Nope! Doesn't make any sense there either. Ah well. We can't have everything.

I find it fascinating how it's only in these older spy novels that a male spy is ever shown being afraid of having to put out for a woman to get the mission done

It kind of seems like a bit of a step back in that one respect

LESBIANS????

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Poor Johann, gonna call him J cause I'm on my phone, he is terrified because he knows the Germans are gonna invade ussr and he can't get a message out to warn anyone

Oh Johann. Stalin wouldn't believe you even if you did

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there's a short wallace-y looking guy whose claim to fame is that he seduced one of the women officers to let him get in and out of the barracks whenever he wants short king also his life was saved by a - I think Jewish - doctor so he let the guy hide in a barrel "at the time of the massacres" idk fully what that means, is the short king anti-Nazi, did he just make an exception, was he massacring Jews I think not because "in the barrels" - he was a brewer, so like, he's letting this Jewish guy hide in his business, before he joined the Nazi party I really like that this show has decided to show Nazi Germany as absolutely full of good-hearted civilians willing to aid the communist war effort is it accurate? no is it waaaaayyyyyy less painful than having to sit through five thousand scenes of indistinguishably vile Nazis going on and on like in every other Soviet spy film? YES, A HUNDRED TIMES YES I love that this short chubby guy apparently goes through life getting everything he wants by seducing women

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Johann got caught drawing a sketch of an important German spy and now he has to pretend to be rly into art

He drew a bunch of pictures of the people around him and also of various nazi personages, Hitler, etc

There was fanfic of these two on Ao3. On the first read of the translation I wasn't sure if this character was or wasn't queer-coded . . . but it turns out that's because of the damn British translators. It's much more explicit in the original Russian. Here's Google Translate:

Oskar von Dietrich had never known such sorrows, but he had nonetheless experienced some. In his youthful maturity he had suffered from a painful shyness towards women, and when he tried to overcome it he found himself powerless. The girl with whom he had an affair had blabbed about his shortcoming, and Dietrich had long been haunted by the mocking pity of his peers. At the military school he became a follower of the ancient patrician depraved morals and found a patron in the person of the fencing instructor, who forced the cadets to treat Oskar with respect. However, this was not particularly difficult, because bad inclinations were common in the closed educational institutions of Germany.

This queer character is, of course, a villain and a Nazi, but I also feel pretty bad for him. More Google Translate:

Somehow Oskar's father, a distinguished officer of the Reichswehr and former adjutant of the Kaiser, found out about the intimate friendship with the teacher. A difficult conversation took place between father and son, during which the son dared to hint that the Kaiser himself had the same inclinations as his adored fencing teacher. It all ended with the father refusing his son a monthly pension. In order not to be subjected to deprivation, Oskar stole some of his mother's family jewels. And although his act was not made public, Oskar, who loved his mother, long experienced his humiliation, seeing her now always frightened, sad face. There was another incident in the life of Oskar von Dietrich, the memory of which even now, many years later, made him blush. Once a pretty little white goat wandered into the open camp firing range where the cadets were training. Delighted by the entertainment, the cadets opened fire on it indiscriminately. The wounded goat first rushed about with pitiful cries, and then crawled, dragging its broken hind legs. The cadets crowded around and watched its agony with curiosity. And then Oskar could not bear it any longer - he burst into tears. It was obscene.

At the officers' council of the school, Oskar had to listen to just reproaches that he had disgraced the school, that his outrageous behavior, unworthy of a future officer, had made the most painful impression on the cadets. They even said that he should be expelled from the school. The father was summoned; and if during the discussion of the not very decent friendship with the fencing teacher the father had only smiled ironically, and then deprived Oskar of his pension, saying that a cadet who did not pay the girls on Alexanderplatz could live more economically, now Colonel von Dietrich was screaming furiously at his son, convulsively grabbing him by the lapels of his uniform with his veiny, flabby fingers and even trying to slap him. In the end, Oscar repented and everything turned out okay.

There's a lot to unpack here, right? I think we're definitely meant to be disgusted with Oscar for being gay, but there's also this thing going on where, like. His father hated him for being not masculine enough, exemplified both by his homosexuality and by his pity for the goat. And his unmanliness in bursting into tears and in being gay, those are conflated here - by both the characters and the author, I think.

But we're surely supposed to be on Oscar's side when it comes to the goat story, right? We're meant to think that this was a display of humanity and empathy from this young boy, which was then beaten out of him as "unmasculine," which is part of what turned him into the Nazi monster he is now. So there is the idea here, that at least some of Oscar's perceived unmanliness is a good thing, for which he is unfairly persecuted by society. I feel like that creates a tiny bit of ambiguity here on how the narrative perceives queerness.

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this is 100% the best depiction of Nazi Germany I've ever seen in a Soviet film and by best I mostly mean that I am not suffering every moment a German character is on screen but also this show REALLY doesn't shy away from depicting Nazi anti-semitism which I think is kind of based for a Russian show There's a Charlie Chaplin impersonator performing for the Nazis in a club (?) and they're all shouting JEW at him and throwing things at him and laughing about it, which possibly means he will live IDK if that means that the performer is supposed to be actually Jewish, I thought they were calling Charlie CHaplin Jewish but then I googled it and no, Chaplin was Romani, not Jewish I mean not very Romani Oh but people thought he was so I guess that's it and apparently Chaplin thought that was based

This is like, the most queer-coded thing Dietrichs does in the English translation, even tho in the original Russian it's stated pretty baldly that he's gay.

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Johann sent word ahead that the Germans were going to invade the USSR and now he's like hey why did the USSR not do fuck all with that info that I risked my life for!!!!!

This is historically accurate - Soviet spies DID report to the USSR that Nazi Germany was going to invade, and the USSR simply refused to listen. I'm surprised they were allowed to include that in a book about it, tho. But I guess the 60s were a different time.

This is funny but also kind of sad. Dietrichs is a monster and a clown but it's also like, desperately sad, to a modern reader, that he's sitting there drunk with this straight guy he definitely has a crush on and fantasizing about killing everyone in the entire world, because that is the only scenario where he can imagine it being okay to be gay. Really sad.

[amielbjacobs]

Soviet thriller writer: Hmmm . . . my latest book . . . it needs something . . . what could it be . . .

The devil on his shoulder: How about a lengthy scene written from the POV of a Nazi war criminal?

Soviet thriller writer: You're SO right, Comrade, I'll put it right in

[amielbjacobs]

being a fan of a friend's ocs is actually so humiliating....... like yes my favourite character rn is tragically doomed and a pillar of humanity who i think is relevant to the current world. you can find information about them on discord dot com and sometimes in late-night conversations with this guy i know. what the fuck

[amielbjacobs]

Memorial Day for Stalin's Holodomor genocide in Ukraine.

28th November 2020

[amielbjacobs]

Did you know that there's another Chocolate Guy called Kris Zhaokai?

[amielbjacobs]

@fedko-brigand

"He knew from a childhood memory how strange and sad it is to see a familiar place after a long separation. Your heart is still bound to the place, but the unmoving objects have forgotten you and do not recognize you; it is as if they have been living an active and happy life without you, and you have been alone in your feeling -- and now here you are before them, an unknown and pitiful creature."

~ Andrey Platonov, "Soul," from Soul and Other Stories, transl. by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler, et al.

[amielbjacobs]

ALL the soviet spies pretending to be german universe is actually very funny in that regard. stirlitz in active military duty just not mentioning the two years at all uuuuuuuuuum. goldring is understandably 20 and studying at uni i get why he only got involved in 1941. but KLOSS. okay he was a prisoner in a german camp so clearly some fighting was being done. but why this guy is running to ussr for help BEFORE germany attacked them. "ooohhh if the war breaks out i wanna fight for you" DUDE THE WAR IS ALREADY GOING ON???? WHAT YOU DOING DEFLECTING TO THE COUNTRY WHO ATTACKED YOU

[amielbjacobs]

top three funniest moments in stirlitz books:

1. how there isn't any mention of anything stirlitz did in '39 and '40. we go from 1938 straight to 1941. dear readers don't look up what soviet union was doing between that ha ha....

2. how semyonov clearly didnt reread 17m before writing it's direct sequel 20 years later

3. ummm i dont actually have nr 3 right now. sorry

[amielbjacobs]

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

[amielbjacobs]

Part of the problem is that we're basically only talking about healthcare in terms of who-pays-for-what. And there's like fifty other problems that aren't being talked about on a large scale because everything is about socialized vs. private healthcare.

Sometimes I see people from countries with public healthcare systems post videos that are like “This is the reality of socialized medicine. I had to wait in the ER with my sick baby for 4 hours.” “I had to wait 8 months to see a specialist. That’s egregious.” or “They didn’t have a bed for my loved one in mental health treatment.” and it’s like. Come to America babygirl. You can experience all of this and have your insurance deny it and pay thousands and thousands of dollars for it. Like I know healthcare systems in countries with public health can be bad but when I see someone imply they’re bad because the healthcare is universal, I want to jump through the screen and put my elbow on their throat. “The NHS is deeply flawed, therefore we should abolish it and go back to private healthcare. That will definitely make healthcare in this country better!” I am going to Kill You.

[amielbjacobs]

workers & resources having politics would be great i think.

[amielbjacobs]

ian mckellen, 1968

[amielbjacobs]

Grivadiy Gorpozhaks - Jean Green - Untouchable (Bulgaria, 1976)

artist: Stefan Markov

[amielbjacobs]

not naming names but i hate this character design trope

[amielbjacobs]

The inherent homoeroticism of killing your enemy and immediately regretting it