Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union

Part of the 3rd Annual Free Thinking Film Festival 2012

Age of Delirium:  The Decline and Fall of the Soviet UntionNovember 4, 2012, 1:15 PM
Library & Archives Canada
395 Wellington, Ottawa

Admission:  $12 or with Festival Pass.

This is the story of the fall of the Soviet Union as lived and experienced by the Soviet people. The film shows what it meant to construct an entire state on the basis of a false idea and how truthful information led to the Soviet Union's rapid and unstoppable collapse. Age of Delirium tells the story of Alexander Shatravka, who crossed the Soviet - Finnish border only to be handed back by the Finns and tortured in a mental hospital; of Nina Smirnova, a crippled girl who prayed for relief at a religious shrine and began to be persecuted by the communist authorities after she was miraculously cured; and of the young men of the city of Shadrinsk who believed in the Soviet ideology only to learn the reality of the Soviet system while fighting in Afghanistan. Other characters include Ludvikas Simutis, who fought for the independence of Lithuania after the murder of his father, Olexandra Ovdjuk, an elderly survivor of the horrific Ukrainian famine, and many others. In the end, the film illuminates the workings of an ideological society, the very type of society that would be most likely to use weapons of mass destruction. It shows how such a society creates its own fictitious 'reality' and it gives insight into the state of Russian today where the neo-Soviet leaders have again plunged the country into a moral abyss.

"Spellbinding. . . . Gives one a visceral feel for what it was like to be trapped by the communist system."
    -Jack Matlock, Washington Post




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