Kruty 1918 (2019)

Production values and special effects are OK except for some silly (and unnecessary) shots of toy trains on fake snow. Acting is acceptable, but the script has lethal flaws, such as the depiction of Bolshevik General Mikhail Muravyov as a ghoul that would scare a James Bond villain. The tone is as propagandistic and grandiloquent as that of some Soviet films of the thirties, with heroics deaths and flag waving aplenty.The backdrop is the short lived Ukraine’s People’s Republic = UPR, that declared independence in January 1918 and lasted until the end of Russian Civil War in 1921. The subject is the battle of Kruty, where Ukrainian forces 400 strong, consisting mostly of cadets and students with a few professional soldiers faced a Bolshevik army almost ten times its size near the railway station of Kruty, about 120 kilometers northeast of Kiev. The battle (in which half the Ukrainians were killed) ended when prospective reinforcements changed sides and there was a Bolshevik uprising in the Arsenal Factory in Kiev (the latter the subject of Dovzhenko’s movie Arsenal, 1928).The history of the People’s Republic is a tangled web and probably the movie contains some truths. It shows briefly European meddling. It also shows that the UPR was mainly supported by intellectuals, students and some professional soldiers; popular enthusiasm was scarce. There are glaring omissions; two of the founding fathers of the UPR, Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Symon Petliura are seen delivering stirring speeches, but there is no mention of Petliura’s responsibility for numerous and bloody pogroms perpetrated by the UPR army under his command. At the end, Ukrainian independence was abolished and its its territories divided among Russia and Poland with other countries (Romania, Hungary) grabbing minor spoils. This lasted until the end of WWII, when the historic boundaries of the Ukraine were restored.I found the beginning and ending particularly objectionable. We are shown one of the characters at a memorial dressed in a secondhand American uniform, which clearly seeks to link heroic deaths with the present artificial state of “war” between Ukraine and Russia. Dangerous and misleading.