A Gentleman In Moscow Final Analysis (With Rare Political Commentary)

 

 

Warning: This review contains spoilers for the entire limited series

 

A Gentleman in Moscow is a superbly written, directed and acting adaptation of Amor Towles’ best-selling novel. In most retrospectives of this sort, I acknowledge what made it so good and why, as the time for awards comes closer, it deserves to contend for Emmys.

But I’m a realist and I know how exceptional the major contenders for Best Limited Series are this year and that the odds of even leads Ewan MacGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead getting acting nominations are slim to none. (The Astras are in a different story and perhaps some of the end of year awards shows like the Golden Globes and Critics Choice will make up for it.) And as good as every aspect of this series is, I don’t intend to put it in my top ten list this year: Gentleman is very good but not a classic.

Yet I think it is essential viewing for a very specific group of people and since I don’t think they will willingly search it out or dismiss it if they do, I’m going to put in terms of political criticism more than most of my artistic criticism usually is. Because those of you who remember my initial positive review of the series last month know exactly who I believe needs to see this series – and those of you who know about my political and opinion pieces will not be surprised by my attitude.

Last month I mentioned that I recently came across online Jacobin, the publication for American Marxists. Its readership is limited but its influence is not; the current editor of the left-leaning publication The Nation is a former editor of Jacobin. So to pretend that they don’t have some political influence no matter how marginal would be a folly.

I mentioned in my original review, somewhat facetiously, what the arts section of Jacobin was like. Earlier this month I actually found out. The arts critic gave a very favorable review of the original Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a utopian society that has lasted for more than half a century until recent spinoffs have taken a very different perspective. (I haven’t seen any of them so I’ll withhold comment.) The writer said that it was important to acknowledge Roddenberry’s flaws, the most critical being that he was a capitalist. I’ve read a lot of critics trying to review their work as if money should play no factor in the production; Jacobin is the first time I’ve actually seen someone argue that taking money for it is a character flaw.

If you’ve read much of my articles regarding the left over the years, you know that I find their views of history seriously flawed to say the least. People like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky have destroyed hundreds of acres of forest to write about the flaws of American empire as well as the evils of the west, and they are just the most famous of what is a cottage industry. They publish large treatises arguing that every nation in Europe is peopled by genocidal white supremacists who destroy the native population of the world in favor of god and lucre. Absent from this, mysteriously, is any mention of Russia, either when the Czar rules or when the Soviet Union was formed. One doesn’t need a road map to connect the lines.

Now I will acknowledge whole-heartedly the worst aspects of American society and I am more than willing to acknowledge that the Cold War led our government to engage in the worst aspects of our nature in the name of a global threat that may never have been as much of one as we claimed it to be. That said, I will never be able to accept the narrative that the Soviet Union was an innocent bystander in all of these events, that the regime was not totalitarian, brutal and far more abusive to human rights than the U.S was during this period and was definitely worse when it came to treating its citizens. The U.S. may never have accepted that none of the successors to Stalin were nowhere near at his level, but that doesn’t make them saints or even good people: none of them chose to dismantle the KGB or the secret police and with the possible exception of Kruschev for the next forty years all of them were more than willing to enforce all the old standards that Stalin had set up when it came to the Eastern bloc.

Much of today’s left has never truly been able to deny its Marxist leanings which has left them in a quandary when it comes to Communism in Russia and the other places it took hold. Their strategy has essentially been to either ignore it or attempt to whitewash it. The most extreme version in recent years came in Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States when he tells us in the aftermath of Yalta that Stalin was essentially a man of his word. That’s kind of mind-boggling even for the director of JFK.

A Gentleman in Moscow plays out not only as a period piece but a very blunt reminder of just how horrible the Communist revolution turned out to be. It does so in a very subtle way that makes the series unique. With few exceptions the entirety of the series is set mostly inside the luxury hotel that Count Rostov has been sentenced to live in for the rest of his natural life. He is warned by a member of the secret police that if he leaves, “I’ll be waiting.’ We see flashbacks to his past and certain times when he does leave, but most of the series takes place inside a single location. Rostov then has the perspective of being an observer to events from a great distance rather than a historic one but it is impossible to ignore them/

The series takes place over more than thirty years, from Rostov’s imprisonment in 1922 to after Kruschev’s rise in the aftermath of Stalin’s death. The hotel, it’s worth noting, is now a place where the elite in Moscow come to dine, drink and enjoy themselves but even here the walls have ears and every action that takes place can have deadly consequences. Stalin is talked about dismissively in the second episode by the Minister of Culture and by the end of the third he has taken power. As he does so the bloom of the revolution is lost and much of the old guard is eliminated. The hotel seems to be an outlier in this regard: the food is always good, the wine always first class, the furnishings always luxury. But it becomes clear that this is being done more for appearance than the reality. By the fourth episode, we learn that Stalin’s Five Year Plan has been executed and millions are starving. The hotel is to represent what the new Russia is to the outside world. The guests know the truth.

Nina as a young girl becomes Rostov’s friend as a child but her father eventually sends her away for an education. We later learn that this has been done by Palevsky, a Communist loyalist who thinks Rostov is a relic and any association with him dangerous. When Nina returns she has been ‘reeducated’ and Rostov doesn’t recognize her. In the fourth episode, Nina has gotten married and she is very aware about the lies the revolution is telling her. The last time we see her, she brings her young daughter Sofia to Rostov because her husband has been sent to the gulag in Siberia and she needs to join him. Rostov urges her not to go but she ignores him. At the end of the fifth episode, we see her body being put in a ditch in Siberia and in the penultimate episode we learn both she and her husband have long died.

By the 1940s Rostov has become a waiter in the hotel, a job he seems to almost enjoy. He has become friends with the entire staff who has always been loyal to him and seems to admire him more than so many of the other guests and elites. This may seem illogical but there may be a subtler message. When the Czar was overthrown and the rich and powerful were murdered and their wealth confiscated, it was supposed to bring about a massive distribution of wealth. But as we see from the start of the series and for its entire run, none of that ever seems to have trickled down to the staff at the hotel. All that seems to have changed for the domestics since the overthrow of the Czar is that they are waiting on a different kind of elite. What is the difference, the series seems to be saying, if you wait on aristocrat or a rich student if your own way of life never changes? Rostov is the only person in the hotel who has acknowledged that by joining them. No one else semes willing to do so.

By this point if you can’t see the parallels between the rise of Communism in Russia and the left in America today, you’re really not looking that hard. Overthrowing the wealthy and redistributing their wealth among the 99 percent? Pretty much the talking points of Bernie and AOC. Essentially beginning to turn on each other when they no longer agree to the narrative that they’ve designed? The textbook definition of cancel culture. Any form of dissent is considered tantamount to armed revolt? There’s actually a book now being published arguing that one should never ‘push back against the left’. They haven’t managed their own secret police yet, but the Internet’s basically good enough for that.

Indeed, one of the major problems with A Gentleman in Moscow some reviewers had – Mishka now being black – actually makes this point all the more relevant to the argument of the show. Mishka comes from poverty, befriends Rostov as a youth and is one of his closest friend. He is vital to the fact that Rostov is saved from execution in the opening of the series (we find out why in the penultimate episode) He and Rostov have several conversations in the first half of the series and when things begin to take a turn towards the totalitarian, Rostov calls him on it:

ROSTOV: “Is this your brave new world?”

MISHKA: “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

ROSTOV: “No, it was burned in one.

 

Eventually Mishka’s problems become noticeable and he begins to drop in the hierarchy. When he is given a job studying Pushkin and gets involved in a censorship dispute, he takes a position that defies Stalin. He makes a big scene in the lobby of the hotel and is sent off to Siberia.

In the penultimate episode, after more than twenty years in captivity, he returns to Moscow broken from a lifetime in imprisonment. The once vital and youthful friend is completely destroyed barely capable of coherent speech. Rostov offers to take care of him, but at the end of the episode he disappears into the snow without a goodbye. This action is part of what inspires Rostov to decide after more than thirty years to finally leave his imprisonment – even if it means his death.

This scene shows with crystal clarity how the left has an utter willingness to turn on its own even if they were part of the fight to begin with. From the decision of the suffragettes to spurn African-American allies in order to win the right to vote for women, to Malcolm X’s and the black power movement splitting with legends like Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin over how the civil rights movement should proceed to even how some on the left now view Barack Obama as just another member of the capitalist regime. They will view you as useful for a time but have no problem disposing of you when you no longer fit their needs.           

So much of the left’s rhetoric today is that the entire system of the world, especially capitalism and democracy, is horrific, racist and biased and needs to be torn down. A Gentleman in Moscow reminds us all too clearly that tearing things down is the easy part. You have to have more than a vision and ideals to put it in as a replacement and if you don’t, you will just as easily become a victim of the same kind of regime that you were tearing down in the first place. The Soviet Union and Communist China are among the most famous examples of what happens if you do this. Considering how massive a part of the world’s population they are it would seem impossible to ignore this lesson – and yet that is what many leftists have been doing in their versions of ‘reeducation’.

I can imagine many people -  far from just the readers of Jacobin – wishing that the Musk’s, the Gates’ and the Bezos’ would endure a fate like Alexander does, stripped of their wealth and forced to live their lives in a residence far less luxurious than the Metropol. I can hardly blame them: after the events of 2008 I imagine we all wanted some form of punishment to those on Wall Street who destroyed the world economy worse than taking multi-million dollar bonuses with their bailout money. But I know the world of the left better than to expect that they would stop with that given the power. They’ve already demonstrated that in the Soviet Union and the fact that they don’t want to admit even now it was a failure shows that they are just immune to learning from their mistakes as the rest of us. The fascist right governments in the aftermath of the Depression were little more than mirror images of those of the Marxist left – and neither side will acknowledge their own bigotry and hatred.

A Gentleman In Moscow makes it very clear even as it reaches its end the truth of this. The only way to survive a state like this is escape and the finale demonstrates just how precarious and dangerous leaving can be as it is to stay. In the finale Sofia has chosen to defect and we know just how truly dangerous that path will be. She manages to escape to America and both Alexander and Anna manage to leave the Metropol but Sofia never learns their fate. The final scene offers the possibility of hope but even Sofia acknowledges it might just as easily be her imagination – and that her surrogate parents might very well have suffered the same fate as her real ones.

A Gentleman in Moscow needs to be seen now more than ever. Not just for the power of its performances or its technical aspects or its moving writing but because in a world where the left is increasingly moving more and more towards a Marxist path we need to be aware of it just as much as of the fascist movement of the right. The left wants you to think that they are on the side of morality and equality and leveling the playing field. A Gentleman in Moscow makes it very clear that’s exactly how it started in Russia – and makes it very clear how it played out.

Note: Unlike most cable dramas and comedies, A Gentleman in Moscow is rated TV-14. It deserves the rating: there’s no profanity, the violence is implied and while there are some sex scenes between Anna and Alexander they don’t rate the level you usually see on Showtime. Mature teenagers will appreciate it – and given the path so many of them are on these days, they may need to see it the most.