The palace of illusions

As the Soviet Empire breaks up before our eyes, and as history advances at breakneck speed in Moscow, “The Lost dream of Nicholas Vassilievitch Kasakov” by Daniel Leconte provides essential testimony about the lives of Soviet people during 74 years of a Communist regime.Through an account of three generations of a peasant family which emigrated to the city just after the 1917 revolution, and using archive footage never previously shown on television, Daniel Leconte tells the history of the URSS as it has never been told before.Born with the October Revolution, the first generation of the Kasakox family –who were laborers- knew the heroic period of the construction of Socialism.Their children, who became technicians, were the cold war generation. Most looked on the period, marked by the end of Stalinism and the beginning of the Kruschev era, as a period of hope and renewal. The return of the process of rigidification was a terrible disappointment to them. The administrators of socialism, they followed the path common to all –becoming “pioneers” and then members of the Communist youth –and dreamt that their children would one day be engineers.The latest generation is quite different from the others. It has never believed in the Socialist dream, and has known only the breakdown of the system with the arrival of Gorbachov, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the disintegration of the Soviet Empire.In this first part, entitled “the Palace of Illusions”, N.Y. Kasakov (aged 84) and five octogenarian friends meet at the Palace of Culture of the Zill works –where they have spent all their working lives –to celebrate the 73rd anniversary of the October Revolution.The meeting gives them the opportunity to relive their experiences, from the 1917 Revolution to the death of Stalin in 1953. From the original dream to the nightmare of the camps...

[Four parts series: 1. Le Palais des illusions. 2. La Passion selon Staline. 3. Natacha, Tatiana et Léna. 4. Les Enfants de l'utopie]