When Bad Headlines Happen to Good Articles

The girlfriend and I took in The Lives of Others, by far the best film of the year, let alone best Foreign Language Film, and and I knew it was going to be that within about ten minues. The bloated and venal culture commissar offers a speech of congratulations to the conformist playwright whose life he's about to destroy out of sexual jealousy (he's sleeping with the playwright's attractive actress/girlfriend).

"A great Soviet once said, 'Writers are the engineers of the soul,'" the commissar says, with as much pseudo-profundity as you'd expect of someone ideologically required to think Alexei Tolstoy was a good novelist.

I thought to myself, "Now, even if they do get around to attributing that quote to Joseph Stalin, thus killing the subtlety of the remark, well done."

The Lives of Others was not cooked up by a CNN-educated fabulist of cold war moral equivalence, but by a German (albeit a West German) who knew the style and feel of real Communism. At the 'cultural' level, life was at its worst during the Zhdanovshchina, named after the horrific bureaucrat, Andrei Zhdanov, who chivvied and murdered writers and artists after World War II. His influence bled into the GDR and everywhere else the Red Army set up its semi-permanent presence outside of Russia.

I've made the Soviet Union and its history of mayhem and falsification my bag these past few years. Among Western journalists with infinitely greater credibility than I have who have done the same, there's no one I respect more than Anne Applebaum. This leads me to believe that the headline of her latest Slate essay, "Engineers of the Soul," was either intended ironically (in which case, the provenance of the quotation deserved mention in the essay) or was thought up by an editor who saw the film, remembered the line, but forgot the source.

A niggling detail, perhaps, but one that matters if the names Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Babel and Grossman mean anything to us today. And how paltry a compliment to call them "engineers" of anything!