Full Series Discussion Thread
Russia 1985-1999 TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy is a series of seven films created by Adam Curtis. the series chronicles the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of capitalist Russia and its oligarchs, and the effects of this on Russian people of all levels of society, leading to the rise to power of Vladimir Putin.
At the start of the 1990s the Soviet Union - one the largest empires in the world - imploded.
It was not a slow collapse like the British Empire, but one that collapsed suddenly - in just a few months.
In the west we didn’t really see or understand what then happened because we were blinded by victory in the cold war. In reality what the Russian people experienced was a profound disaster which left behind it deep scars and a furious anger - that led to what is happening in Russia now and in Ukraine.
This series of films is a record of what it felt like to live through that catastrophe.
It is also the story how a society of millions of people stopped believing in all politics. Not just communism, but democracy too. Something that no-one else has experienced in the modern world. Yet.
This project is an immersive history that takes you through Russian society as it lived through a cataclysm that wrecked the lives of millions of people and tore apart the foundations of the whole society. Because what the Russians lived through in the 1990s was not just the end of communism, but the failure of democracy too. They experienced the collapse of the two great ideologies of our time in a period of less than ten years. - Adam Curtis
Feel free to discuss your overall thoughts and impressions on the season as a whole in the comments section. For discussions around specific episodes, visit the episode discussion threads linked below. As the series deals exclusively with historical figures and events, we will not be enforcing any rules around spoilers or spoilering content.
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