Russian reaction to the new Indiana Jones film, including a request to ban the film and threats that the actors will be beaten if they enter Russia, should remind Americans that communism in Russia is not dead.

By the time George Lucas and Steven Spielberg decided to make a fourth installment of the widely popular Indiana Jones series, twenty years had gone by, and so they decided, with an aging Harrison Ford for the star, they should allow twenty years to elapse in the series as well. That meant the 1930s pre-World War II era had ended and the 1950s Cold War crisis had begun. Instead of evil Nazis for the villains, they could substitute the equally cold, callous, Russian Communists, in their most disturbing form as the KGB, as the enemies in the movie. This shouldn't have been the cause of any controversy since, after all, communism is dead in Russia and the KGB is a thing of the past, right? After some of the comments made about the movie, however, it looks like someone forgot to tell that to the Russians.

"What galls is how together with America we defeated Hitler and how we sympathized when Bin Laden hits them, but they go ahead and scare kids with communists. These people have no shame," said Victor Pirov, a communist party leader in St. Petersburg after the film debuted there and in 808 theaters across Russia.

"No shame," are pretty strong words coming from a member of a party that massacred over sixty-two million of its own people in one of the worlds’ largest genocides. Causing the death of untold numbers in brutal labor camps as well as creating a society in which citizens were denied the most basic freedoms, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago that the communists weren’t just to be feared, but regarded with terror.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull portrays just that. Throughout the movie a group of KGB officers plot to steal an American military secret that would supposedly help them gain world power. "[We want to] place our minds into the minds of the masses … have our teachers teach the true version of history" says the top KGB agent in the movie, Irina Spalko, played by Cate Blanchette. In their efforts to do so this KGB task force not only impersonates American soldiers in order to murder a troop of real American soldiers in cold blood, but also mercilessly slaughters a community of South American Indians armed only with primitive weapons. Meanwhile, the blatant disregard Irina Spalko shows for the life of her own men as she unflinchingly watches them meet gruesome deaths portrays the inhuman cruelty the KGB was noted for. Indeed, she is the caricature of the perfect Russian communist KGB agent, who cares only for power and sees human life as expendable, and nothing but a means to that end.

We have been told again and again by the news media and politicians alike that communism is dead in Russia. But if such were the case why did the Russian communist party try to have the movie banned, and when unable to incur such a ban, ask Russians to boycott it?

"Your work in this film is an insult to the Soviet and Russian people, who remember the difficult Fifties when our country was concluding its construction, but did not send merciless terrorists to the USA.... You have no future in Russia anymore. Speaking plainly it would be better for you not to come here. You will be beaten and despised,"  wrote the communist party ideology committee in an open letter to Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchette, the stars of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

“You will be beaten and despised.” Isn’t that what the Russian communists do in the movie?

One party member said, "Our movie goers are teenagers who are unaware of what happened in 1957. They will go to the theater and be sure that in 1957 we made trouble for the United States and almost started a nuclear war. It’s rubbish." "It is disturbing when talented directors want to provoke a new cold war," said Andrei Andreyev, a Russian Communist lawmaker.

Suddenly these supposedly reformed communists are beginning to sound like the KGB agent in the movie whose portrayal they protest. One wonders why Russian youth don’t already know about what happened in the 1950’s. Didn’t "Uncle Putin" tell them about the arms race the Soviets were involved in at that time, gaining and preparing to aim nuclear missiles at the U.S. in the Cuban missile crisis just a few years later?

As Warren Mass mentioned in his article, “Communism Not Dead in China, Elsewhere” a study showed that, "in 1996 most of the 15 former soviet republics are today dominated by communists or their re-named political heirs." In 2007, BBC news reported that "KGB influence soars under Putin," as he again and again named former KGB officers to positions of political power. "In five years Putin has abolished most direct elections, muzzled the media and filled his staff with KGB cronies," MSNBC reported. And although the KGB itself was abolished in 1991 a new, in some ways harsher intelligence agency, was soon formed to replace it. The FSB (Federal Security Service) "exercises police state powers at whim," able to invade and search just about any premises it wants to.

William F. Jasper, in his article “Putin’s Russia,” points out that we cannot assume that a group such as the communists, notorious for their deception, would have spontaneously given up the cold war and abruptly ended their quest for power. KGB defectors like Anitoly Golitsyn have told us again and again this is part of a plan of the communists to deceive the West into merging into one socialist state with the East. As William Jasper noted, "[We have] like the Trojans, fallen for one of the most obvious deceptions." Lucas and Spielberg, by producing Indiana Jones have just tapped that horse and stirred up the occupants inside.

Catherine Mullins is a freelance writer and essayist.