2415 – LSE Cold War Podcast – Episode 5: The Sino Soviet Split with Prof Sergey Radchenko

“This week we are joined by Prof Sergey Radchenko to discuss the of tumultuous relationship between the two major superpowers of the communist world during the Cold War. The People’s Republic of China and the USSR.

Sergey Radchenko is the Director of Research and Professor of International Relations at the University of Cardiff. He is an expert on Sino-Soviet Relations, atomic diplomacy, and has written books on Mongolian and North Korean History. He has previously served as a Global Fellow and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre (in Washington D.C.), and as the Zi Jiang Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University (Shanghai)”

I think today, during what looks like the early start of the Cold War 0.2 we tend either to exaggerate Russian-Chinese relations or collusion around the fact that after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been integrated more and more with the Chinese economy. The increasing dependency of Russia on China, after the SWIFT ban on Russian banks, has also been exaggerated. In the words of Arnaud Dubien, in spite of what governments believe it appears that “Russia Won’t be China’s vassal” (a very good article).

I think that we have to go back to the Cold War relations of the two motors of world communism: the Bolshevik Soviet Union and Mao’s China. Relations have been always changing and evolving over time – and altough friendship was always more important than enmity, one should say that from the very beginning (not covered in this podcast) there was room for a lot of misunderstandings, low points, high expectations, and a slow syncing (compounded by the all-out attack of Japan and Western imperial powers that had every interest in subverting and blocking communications and avoiding a united anti-Imperial front).

Even if letters and Telegraphs were under surveillance by the Japanese, British, Dutch, and French secret services, the two revolutionary powers of Sun Yat-sen’s Republican China and Lenin’s Soviet Union reached out to try and find a common ground in common anti-imperialist and later on anti-capitalist struggle. Some of the conflicts also arose around wordings and perceived counter-revolutionary actions (such as the invasion of Prague by Warsaw pact troops or Budapest 1956 by Soviet troops). Other arose of older wordings and perceived arrogance – such as using terms such as “infantile” or “backward” that seemed to pop up rather indiscriminately at the most inopportune moments (and that seemed to be lifted out of an imperialist and racialist vocabulary).

Advocating for a united front with the Nationalist Kuomintang (that turned out to be a major mistake), was also encouraged by the Soviets. If you want to find out more about documents that traced the evolution of the Comintern and what was to become the Third World (or the Global South today) you have to look beyond this podcast. The invasion of Prague by the Warsaw Pact country was another blow to the Sino-Soviet relations and also the way the Soviet Union seemed to retreat from the world revolutionary stage, while China seemed to ascend to that position. Also, there was a war Sino-Soviet border conflict in 1969 that tends to be forgotten nowadays.

Very early on the young Soviet power started taking the colonial question seriously (but only as a secondary priority in the fight against the Western industrial imperialist powers) – V I Lenin’s Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions (written in 1920 on the Second Congress of the Communist International) is an important document in that sense.

2223 – Infinity Pool (2023)

spacetime coordinates: 2020’s Second World seaside country of Li Tolqa

Infinity Pool is a 2023 (Canada-Croatia-Hungary coproduction) science fiction horror film written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, starring Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, and Cleopatra Coleman. The film follows a struggling writer and his wife on vacation who, after an accident, discover the country’s dark culture. (wiki)

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2121 -La tecnica e il rito (1972)

spacetime coordinates: 5th century the time of Attila the Hun.

A TV movie directed by Miklós Jancsó, the central figure is Attila the Hun.

2120 – Red Modernism: The Films of Miklós Jancsó (Red May 2022 discussion)

“One of the most acclaimed Eastern European directors of the late 1960s, Miklos Jancsó became known for his abstract long-take style which explored the intersections of power, politics, history, and myth. (“Radical form in the service of radical content,” as the Village Voice film critic, James Hoberman, put it back then.) Now that the Beacon Cinema in Columbia City is hosting a retrospective of six of his films (including Red Psalm, which won him the best director prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival), Red May has invited three film scholars–Eszter Polonyi, Zoran Samardzija, and Steven Shaviro—to discuss Jansco’s boldly stylized film language with Tommy Swenson, Film Curator of the Beacon Cinema“. (YT channel)

Among the films by Miklos Jancsó discussed:

The Round-Up (1965) The Red and the White (1967) The Confrontation (1968) Winter Wind (1969) Red Psalm (1971) Electra, My Love (1974) as well as many of his later (ignored by the Western film publics and critics) from the 80s and 90s.

short made on the occasion of the new 4K restorations of six films by the Hungarian master are touring select cities before coming to Digital, Blu-ray, and DVD.

As a person from the former East – I find it both satisfying at the same time – when one of the most important film directors to have come from Eastern Europe gets the due recognition and sparks such fruitious exchanges as the above (hosted by Red May red arts, red theory, and red politics show from Seattle) – and also frustrated by the fact that his movies are tough to find/watch on the net. I am also emboldened to post this here – as we live at a time where the East and West left seem irredeemably split around Russia’s aggression of Ukraine. There are many receptions of his Jancso’s films – both in the West (in France in particular) as well as different reception in the West than from his native Hungary (as Eszter Polonyi makes amply clear above). It is impossible to give due attention to all what’s been discussed above but here are are some attempts:

• One cannot split Jancso’s oeuvre into his modernist middle works appreciated by Western film critics (roughly 60s and 70s) from his early more social realist documentaries (one would say ‘progagandist’ 1950s work). He is not anti-system but part of the system while still continuing the negative dialectics. Although it is about two different media (one is cinema and the other painting) and different historical periods I still see here a similarity with the late-reception of Hans Matthis-Teutsch work and the selection mechanism that has somehow frozen a canonic take of him. I think that the reappraisal of the work of avant-garde Hungarian-Romanian painter Hans Mattis-Teutsch by visual artist and researcher Szilárd Miklós during a show at Scena9 BRD and Lajos Kassák Museum in Budapest comes close to how commercial galleries and art collectors have tended to separate or recover (and sell): the avant-garde core. All the questions about a (red) modernist art that has been supported by the state institutions during the Socialist times put his work apart from his modernist peers in the West. The art cinema enclave of the West modernist directors worked against and outside the Hollywood system (Godard, Antonioni, etc.). There is also – the possibility that Jancso would not have the same reception at Cannes today – considering the fact that today’s art cinema has become a sort of globalized product in itself (Zoran Samardzija).
• Miklos Jancsó’s work is not at all easy to place, even if influenced by Antonioni, it does stand on its own. It is doubly interesting because it is made not in a reactionary frame, but as a critique (Miklos Jancsó is a pessimist) from the LEFT of the Socialist project without renouncing critique by envisioning that a better or another world is possible.
• Formally he is also unique (following the points made by Steven Shaviro and others on the panel). There is nothing comparable even if one can pick on contemporary work by Lazlo Nemes or Bela Tarr. In the way he combines the fluidity of time-space Miklos Jancsó where free rhythmicities exist (“the life of matter”) with being both rigid and formalist plus having a political power structure overlay, it is hard to find similarities or attach him any labels. With his long-take his cinema work appears related to the minimalist slow cinema – yet he is doing something completely different (from Chantal Ackerman in Jeanne Dielman) because there is a lot of going on, a lot of uncontrollable (documentarian? – as Eszter put it) elements, animals going in and out of the frame and basically a lot of things happening at the same time.
• Some of Jancso’s work in Hungary comes close to the NSK/Laibach 1980s way that confronted the Yugoslav state not with its ‘humanistic’ or anti-nationalist side but with its nationalistic and authoritarian side (an edge that was later lost during the post-1989 Yugoslav wars). There is something even an ironic attitude similar to the post-modern use of irony in his later movies. These contradictions and refusal of easy closures (or synthesis) can be followed in his less known, Italian movies – that seem much less elaborate and low-budget than his Hungarian ones (La tenica del rito, Rome wants another Caesar).

1834 – Boros Szikszai aka Boros Zoltán and Szikszai Gábor Hungarian concept artist duo

here is a nice portfolio video with a small biography from their late 1970s early 1980s art studies in Budapest, their works for Hungarian SF mags (Galaktika), poster art, cyberpunk Allianz calendars, commercial work (Pepsi), coverart, gaming (WoW), matte paintings, D&D etc

Somehow I feel really pissed that there is not much to be seen by this incredible cult duo of Hungarian illustrators (one of them, Gábor Szikszai lives in LA to my knowledge working inside the gaming industry). I tried to trace as much as I could about their work – altough I do not have the least knowledge in Hungarian language I managed to dig up a few things. Both seem to embody the best of the 80s- 90s, somehow combing pulpy-glossy, realist imagery, feeling like airbrush and looking like VHS tape covers. They did some great futuristic cityscapes (including a lot of fantasy character work & magicpunk game cards). Here I want to mostly focus on their proper SF work and tell you how I found out about them.

full German series translation of Sector General from the 1990s composing a coverart panorama with artwork by Boros Szikszai (Boros Zoltán and Szikszai Gábor)

I stumbled on their work via this incredibly nice panorama coverart work for Sector General cycle in its German translation. I would love to print out this panoramic view inside my room so one could actually sit inside the station looking outside – surrounded on all side by this picture. In fact if you collected or read all the books in the series – in the end you could complete this puzzle of an orbital galactic Hospital – the centerpiece of James White’s Sector General series. James White is a Northern Irish SF author that settles the majority of his stories and novel around Sector 12 General Hospital – an immense floating hospital station located in deep space. It is widely considered the first explicitly pacifist space opera (published from 1957 onward) in a stark contrast with contemporary US space operas, which were generally militaristic. In fact the station is seen from. The start as an ideal way to make peaceful first contact possible between very different alien species. Each section of the station is like the ISS a patchwork of various habitat each ward customized to the metabolic, chemical, anatomic requirements of its patients. Taking into account gravity, atmospheric pressure, respiratory needs (if respiration is your thing). White’s hate of war and xenophobia is an important feature driving the whole series. His ability to make goodness – interesting, moving and actionable (instead of battles, destruction, invasions etc) is quite unique. In fact he loathed violence so much that the only violence was that of planetary catastrophes, accidents, surgery rooms or emergency situations. It presents us with a credible and believable version of altruistic space doctors that work towards establishing xenobiological mutualistic or symbiotic relationships.

A few notes of the Hungarian Galaktika(1972-1995) SF mag where Gábor Szikszai duo published some of their early work) – like most of the East European, ex-Socialist countries, SF was a true mass phenomenon not a niche thing. The more I find out about the specific publications and distro histories of neighboring countries of Bulgaria and Hungary (as well as what I gather from my own experience with Romanian SF publications), the more I realize how deeply enjoyed and widely spread were ideas discussed by SF mags or anthologies, how diverse the available range of translations and how wide the outreach of these magazines was. I heard an anecdote about how the Bulgarian translation of Dune became the talk of the town. From the kids at school to the ladies selling flowers or the engineers on scaffolding of construction sites (this is a story I heard from Bulgarian historians of SF). Of course a lot of these mags plummeted after 1990, and their fortunes went up and down along the years. Of course a lot of East European ‘talent’, some of its best illustrators made it way towards better payed, more prestigious venues, starting their studios or continuing to work for the US or German video gaming or card board game market. At the peak of its popularity Galaktika had a print run of 94,000 copies (for a population of 10 million).

It is really hard to track the work of Boros Szikszai online and there is not a lot of archival materials so I am thankful for everybody that scanned or made available (not least to them!) their amazing work. I appreciate their airbrush style that reminds me somehow of the best of lonf 80s and 1990s, the slick chrome artwork of Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama without the explicit pinup poses or how they pushed Syd Meadesque cityscapes towards a cyberpunk straight-to-VHS or straight-to-DVD 90s trashy kind of look. I also like the fact that they made a lot of futuristic ads using the picturesque Budapest Danube shoreline, always quite recognizable in their 90s work. They even have a pretty cool dystopian Budapest cityscape. Sadly a lot of their SF and cyberpunk work is very hard to find online (most is just magic card decks and WoW).

Hungarian UFO artwork by Gábor Szikszai

HU geek blog with their work

Official Gábor Szikszai website

An article in Hungarian about their work (had to use Google translate but has lots of links)

A cool gallery portfolio with their stuff

1756 – Outside the Wire (2021)

timespace coordinates: 2036 civil war in Ukraine

Outside the Wire is a 2021 American-Hungarian science fiction film directed by Mikael Håfström. It stars Anthony Mackie (who also serves as a producer on the film) as an android officer who works with a drone pilot (Damson Idris) to stop a global catastrophe. Emily Beecham, Michael Kelly, and Pilou Asbæk also star. The film was released by Netflix on January 15, 2021. (wiki)

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1744

timespace coordinates: Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár), Romania, capital of Transylvania (Erdély) in 1942 – automatically restored old footage using machine learning. At the time (between 1940-1944) it was part of Hungary, and the original video is from the Hungarian National Film Archives.