Red Terror on the Amber Coast
The places and settings in which we choose our lives are worth describing. Remembering where and when, for instance, you decided start a book may say something about it. I use that example purposefully. But this is not about a book. This is about the decision to make a documentary about the KGB occupation of the Baltics.
Doing something really classy that you've never done before - never even dreamed in your wildest moments that you could and would do it - is a fabulous, once in a life experience. And for a guy who hadn't been in a movie theater for at least twenty years and still couldn't get a dvd player going - let alone programming it - making a movie was that fabulous event. Or maybe something like a fable after it was all done. But doing it had nothing fabulous to it. To start with it meant going even deeper in the stories of terror and death that by then cumulatively had become really depressing. Fortunately the need to start learning all the in-group words and technical talk of camera work provided an occasional and needed escape back into the California world where I felt safe.
Among other things it was or could be seen as a job. I could handle a job. And the fact that I talk about 'handling' it shows that my personal language was already there. Whatever my job - or jobs - always more than one - I had to take charge of it and get it done.\
I remember the first talk I had with the head of the camera crew we were hoping to hire and being to Vilnius for the filming. I having breakfast at a little corner place next to the Rockridge Bart Station in Oakland. Our talk was not about movies. It was about airfares, shipping the equipment and what equipment was needed, where they were going to stay, what they would need by way of a van, and how many days we needed to schedule for the filming. By chance a friend of his came along, they greeted each other and he explained that we were planning a documentary film. And he said what "This is Dave O'Rourke, he's the producer." I responded with complete disbelief - "Come on, I'm no producer, I'm just trying to pull all this stuff together and try to make it work." They both looked at me, startled. And the Camera man shot back "Well what hat the hell do you think a producer does? You produce. You make it work" Oh.' I think I laughed. Well if that's what he does, then I guess I'm it." I start here because I think it places me and my partner and the film in the setting of our unusual choices for the work that brought us to Eastern Europe, and me actually into the old Soviet Union - the Baltics were member Soviet states of the Soviet Union. Our decision the decisie out of that work - not as a surprise or a side issue but right out of our lives and why and how we were in Eastern Europe in the first place.
I will summarize this but I think it is important. Ken and I were friends and similar in that our work was personal and personally creative. In addition to our church work he is a film-maker, a painter, and a teacher, And a pro at each of these. I am a writer, journalist and editor. Back in the early 1990s he had made two short films in Utah, each one filming the Utes and their Utah lntext. He asked me to look at them which I did. They were really well-filmed, sensitive, and for me very moving. I told him that the narrative he wrote was OK but not up to the beauty of the film work.
A few years later we were at some clerical wing-ding which involved a long Mass, which we sat out - I because my heart situation has its own imperatives and he, I think, because he had to get to the airport. In any event he told me about a trip he had made to Cuba where he was able, quietly, to talk with Catholics about the repression by the Castro regime. He said that he hoped to go back during Christmas vacation and film them. I agreed to go with him. Later they told him that they could talk with him, but that talking before cameras would be really foolhardy. So we agreed that we would continue to look for opportunities to report the repression of human rights.
I think it was in the spring of the following year that we agreed to go to Eastern Europe together. Again, it was a happenstance. He had met a young Czech Dominican who had been ordained secretly after a course of studies carried out at night in private apartments. Movie maker that he is, he decided that there could be a film behind that story. He had a sabbatical coming up and decided to go to the Czech Republic and see what was there. Simultaneously I had responded to a call for help for some young Dominicans in the Baltics - just then - 1998-99 - starting to rebuild mostly from ruins after the departure of the Soviet tanks in 1993. So we decided to go together to Eastern Europe the next summer - 2000 - and go to work.
I start here because our work - his and mine - comes out of who we are and out of the contexts that have produced us and in which which we have spent years giving shape to the people we are now. Our work in the old Soviet lands played a major role in that shaping.
So with that explanatory intro I can shift into the story of the on-site life and adventures that led to the filming of Red Terror on the Amber Coast.-
I was 69 when I first flew to Lithuania, well into the years when many men are already making plans to retire. I went there because the Dominicans - the order I belong to - were trying to rebuild a presence there after fifty years of very solid Soviet repression. The Soviets as we know were anti-religious but even more important they wanted to get rid of any cultural group or practice, or historical association of whatever kind, to which people had a sense of allegiance. Political party, sports club, worker's or professionals or veterans association - any group that had gatherings that people went to as part of their normal lives. They wanted no competition. Obviously this included the family and the churches because of their importance in Eastern Europe. I was looking for an adventure, so I went there in response to an appeal from the head of the Dominican Order. He was looking for experienced men for assistance in a rebuilding effort that obviously required sensitivity to the painful history of the Baltics, which was still a very current reality. That awareness made the request appealing for me.
There is much talk about team work in the different churches these days. But in my world it is mostly just talk. Our world works of a turf system. Working to get your own turf where you can work in the ways that to you suit your interests and temperament has a high priority. And one of the realities - as true in the church as in politics and business - is that the young men can have their eyes and their hopes on the different turfs where older men have themselves and their life patterns well established. In order for the young men to do what young men have to do the old men have to get off their plots of turf and get out of the way. That, of course, as any Washington commentator watching the turf battles in the House and Senate can tell you, is rarely a neat business. When the appeal from the head of our order came through I realized right away that it was an opportunity where my background could be helpful. And it also presented a good way to get out of the way.
If nothing else the Baltics sounded adventurous. And as it turned out more of an adventure than I could ever have anticipated at any time in my life. What I have here in other articles and stories are the contexts for the adventure that making Red Terror became. The fifteen hours of filmed interviews that were the basis of Red Terror, and now available in their entirety on The Tatra Project; along with the films of Latvian documentary maker Dzintra Geka about the deportations to Siberia, and my film partner’s documentary Saving Grace about the Communist 1948 Putsch in Prague over-throwing the democratic Czechoslovak Republic all available in the Tatra Project, all describe the terrors of life under Soviet rule. There are cruel and relentless similarities running through all of them since those fifty years from the end of World War II until the collapse of the Soviet Empire. That was no accident given the univocal quality of rule from the Kremlin.
My years in Lithuania and the Baltics really were an adventure. But an adventure the way that war is an adventure. An adventure into some of the worst realities in the human spirit. Realities we need to watch for because the can and probably will be repeated. But perhaps we can with care and caution at least blunt their effects.
