PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery Deals with Communist Atrocity and UK, US Complicity
This week’s season premiere episode of the PBS drama series Masterpiece Mystery brought two very happy things. One, the return of the series Foyle’s War for a seventh season is quite welcome. Starring Michael Kitchen as Inspector Christopher Foyle, the chief police detective in a coastal English town during and after World War II, the series includes good mystery puzzles while taking quite seriously the moral implications of all of its characters’ actions.
The second good thing was the nature of the season premiere episode. “The Russian House” dealt with a very serious moral and political issue and foregrounded an atrocity committed by the Soviet Union with British complicity at the end of World War II. The brutal nature of the Soviet Communist regime is quite apparent in the episode. (The show can be found in repeats on local stations and will be viewable on the PBS Masterpiece website.)
For progressive-leaning PBS to broadcast such a program is rather uncommon and a nice change.
“The Russian House” starts out with a bang: rather than be sent home to the Soviet Union, a Russian soldier in England deliberately leaps to his death.
The narrative establishes that there are 1,200 Russian POWs in England, who fought for the Axis during the war. Inspector Foyle is assigned to find one of them, who has escaped custody and is trying to help others avoid being sent back to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a returned English war veteran finds that the job that was promised to be waiting for him after the war is not available.
We soon find out that the reason the Soviet authorities are so intent on repatriating the escaped Russian POW whom Foyle has been assigned to locate is his knowledge of a Soviet atrocity in Odessa after the Yalta agreement at the end of the European hostilities. A boatload of Russian soldiers being repatriated from England against their will was machine-gunned by Soviet soldiers — an act in which the British government was fully complicit.
That was the Conservative Churchill government, it is worth noting, which turned a blind eye to such horrors in hopes of ensuring the safe return of the 20,000 British POWs then still being held in Soviet territory. (A character notes that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt was likewise complicit in allowing the Soviet Union to perpetrate such horrors without being called to account.) Foyle correctly refers to this as a “deeply offensive little secret.” Both the Soviets and the British government desperately want to keep it under their bloodstained hats.
It’s also worth noting here that Foyle is a bit of a prig, often seeming rather smug in his moral judgments and devotion to his particular sense of what is proper. On the other hand, his forthright defense of what he believes to be the right manners and morals is commendable and rather refreshing, in addition to being very true to the time and the character. An old acquaintance of Foyle remarks that Foyle was “always a bit Bolshy,” but from a contemporary perspective his politics look rather more like classical liberalism — which probably would have looked “a bit Bolshy” to a British conservative of the time.
Yes, but previews of the next episode show foyle telling someone in roundabout terms that england isn’t like that awful racist united states.
Hold on to your hat.
Previous seasons of foyle have been some of my favorite pbs.
I am in agreement with you, I.B. Wright, about the upcoming anti-American episode of what had been one of my favorite PBS series. The producers just had to ruin a great series with an excellent cast with their PC hooey. It is ironic when one considers that it is the current president of the US who insulted the British PM with his boorish behavior. Very disappointing and I don’t think I’ll be watching. By the way, I notice the British PMs and MPs are still all lilly white.
The producers probably had to make amends for not bad-mouthing the US too much in the first episode by reverting back to form. Quite typical of MT, btw. Witness the “arrest scene” in the recent Small Island where our Jamaican hero runs into a band of big-mouth racist Yank GIs and when the “law” arrives to sort it all out they turn out to be racist American Military Policemen in a Jeep – all this in a Brit city without a Bobbie in view. Oh, yeah. That really happened in Britain during WWII. Not.
Good series…Foyle’s War….
There were a lot of sad things happening in the immediate Post war period. The Odessa operation was busy smuggling Nazi’s to South America. The Soviets were, in practice, holding Allied POWs as hostages to secure return of Soviet soldiers…for execution whether their statis was a POW or an enemy combatant. Much of Europe’s economy was the Black Market….in the last months of the war the great armies had immense rates of desertion…the basis for Post war smuggling and organized crime.
In this anarchic scenario, agents of every side…engaged in a brutal, lethal spy vs spy battle.
Anyone who thinks they comprehend the matter have not been properly briefed.
“…For progressive-leaning PBS to broadcast such a program is rather uncommon and a nice change….”
For heaven’s sake, save the partisan criticism for PBS’s public affairs programming.
It’s not like any other American television network is going to bring the pure delight (on so many levels) of “Foyle’s War” into my life. The first six years, available through Netflix, are a fascinating view of World War 2 and Anthony Horowitz deserves a standing ovation for researching, writing, and directing this marvelous television. The only American tv show that comes close is NCIS, where SA Leroy Jethro Gibbs has DCI Foyle’s moral backbone.
Greetings:
Unfortunately for me, the not subliminal enough “open borders”, embrace the immigrant, legal or otherwise, message was a bit too much butcher’s thumb on the scale.
I too am a Foyle fan, but this season so far disappoints. The KEY fact in the “Russia House” episode that was left OUT was why the Brits were holding Russian POW’s in the first place–beacause these soldiers had started out fighting with the Germans when the Hitler-Stalin PACT was in force, and were caught “behind the lines” on the “wrong side” once the two mass-murdering dictators had a falling out. THAT fact, which was never mentioned in the show AND which most modern-ill-educated viewers might not understand, was the key to why Stalin wanted them back–erasing all traces of his partnership with Hitler and, of course, why the Brits, albeit complicit in terrible atrocity here, didn’t have too much sympathy for these POW’s, finding them less honorable foes than run-of-the-mill German Army soldiers.
As for the upcoming little voyage into prejudice, I too worry about it. Looking at the promos on the website, it seems full of lefty-lib sentiments and anti-Americanism. There’s also some talk of yet more “Foyle’s War” seasons in which Foyle is involved in Cold War issues in the 1950′s…and one can only wonder what they’ll do with that.
Some shows are wonderful when they’re in synch with themselves but, if left to “cool” too long as this one seems to have had happen to it, never quite find their music again. The relationships between Foyle and his former assistants in this were off somehow, too, and I don’t blame the actors but the writer and director for losing that thread. The sudden decision to end the series allegedly made them “wind up” the WWII stuff in the prior season quicker than planned, but that doesn’t mean this new season couldn’t have gone back to mid-war action as a flashback rather than being forced, they seem to have thought, to go to after-war action with mixed results.
IF you watch these and see a glimmer but not a spark in them, I suggest you get the DVD’s (which are available via Netflix) from the original run of series and enjoy some truly great television. This new trio’s first installment, while dealing with an interesting subject for sure, misses the very high mark “Foyle’s War” has set in its prior presentations.
Um, Dan, the script went to a lot of trouble to explain why these Russians were fighting with the Germans, thus winding up in British POW camps. Because they were monarchist White Russians who opposed Stalin, hence they sought refuge at Russia House. Why the Tory artist wanted to adopt Nikolai to replace his Labor MP candidate son. Why the man from Russia House kills the shooter stalking DCI Foyle and Samantha. If all those clues were not enough, the War Office Brit, in his final exchange with DCI Foyle, explains it quite clearly as the excuse for shipping the POWs back to Stalin in order to get British POWs back from Stalin.
It was very clever of writer Anthony Horowitz to weave the thread of White Russian monarchists opposed to Stalin (even if these young POWS had no memory of the Tsar, they opposed Stalin) with the post-WW2 election issues that pitted Labor against Churchill’s Tories.
And very sad to think Americans consider PBS to be too “progressive”, and therefore dangerous somehow.
Reality TV and screaming ideologues on all cable news channels are what is wrong with American tv, not “Foyle’s War”.
Dan.. you are all wet.. where are you getting these facts from??
The fact that Russian POWs were fighting with the Wehrmacht had NOTHING to do with Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.
They were captured after the invasion of June 1941 by the millions.. and the fact that their treatment by the Germans was so bloody awful was solely due to the fact that Stalin refused to sign any POW agreements.
They were organized into fighting Wehrmacht divisions under Russian Gen Vlasov.
Many were Ukrainians who had no love for Stalin.
While Foyle’s War a high quality series, far and away superior than most TV fare, over its run a number of the episodes have contained an overlay of contemporary PC propaganda. That’s probably why “progressive leaning” PBS airs the series. On the other hand, there was an an interesting exchange in the past episode between the Foyle character and the commander of a POW camp that is applicable to the current GWOT. I wrote about it on my blog here: http://ingeneralcounsel.blogspot.com/2009/03/foiling-terrorism.html
It’s been said of actual events, “No one can make this stuff up”.
I’m glad to see that axiom proven yet again.
Dan, read about the Russians who were a part of Vlasov’s Liberation Army: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Liberation_Army
I watched the second of the series tonight, expecting to see Russian House. Confused because I read this review for the first time today. What is worth noting is not only the anti-Americanism of the second episode, but the obvious identity of the officer who kills anti-racist Mandy is Eastern European Jew–you know the ones with light red hair. He is never called a Jew of course, but he was in advertising before the war. And the actor looks as if he could be Steve Emerson’s brother. I wonder if others picked up on this.
Anyone who knows the history of Eastern Europe understands why the decision of a Soviet citizen to fight with the Nazis rather than the Soviets could be an honorable one. The Ukrainians, the Balts and others saw the Nazis as liberators at first. The Soviets held German POWs under slave labor conditions and the Germans treated Soviet prisoners the same way. At the end of the war, the Soviets treated repatriated Soviet soldiers as traitors as evidenced by the fact that they survived. Some were executed and most died in the Gulag. The role of the Americans and the British in repatriating refugees is a shameful episode in our history that is little understood. The only sense in which Bolshevik Russia was the lesser of two evils was its weakness relative to Nazi Germany.
This used to be my favorite show on PBS. This year started poorly and last night’s episode about racist, murdering American soldiers was beyond awful. There must be a new team producing this show. The writing is now preachy, the directing is flat and even Foyle and Sam have become overstated and smug.
I wish Austin Hardy or someone else would either agree that the second episode’s killer was subtly presented as a Jew or that I am simply mistaken and nearsighted. This point is crucial because one has to ask why such an episode was written at all. PBS has a sophisticated, educated audience, well versed in the history of civil rights movement, Southern obduracy, and segregation in the armed forces of the U.S. in the second world war. Assuming I am correct about the Jewish officer (recognizable as a spinmeister advertising guy), clearly they (Horowitz, the writers) wanted to present selected Brits as free of racism (compared to the awful Americans), so when the current intellectual class goes after Israel, it cannot be because of antisemitism, but because Jews are really either oblivious to all racisms except their own, or are active collaborators in perpetuating it as Zionists/imperialists/colonizing settlers.
My first sentence was garbled, for I left out some key words. I should have written that someone should argue (with evidence) that I am simply mistaken and nearsighted in identifying the killer as a Jew. I believe right now that I am correct, but hey, even I can be mistaken. I would also like to know the name of the actor.
Clare Spark: Adam James is the actor who played Major Wesker in “Killing Time”. He looked Scots-Irish to me. It’s not like American Jews were all that welcome in American advertising companies before World War 2. You are seeing something that was not there. The big mistake Anthony Horowitz made was in NOT using the white GIs with southern accents, just a throw-away line that they were mostly from the South to justofy imposing the ‘color bar’ in the local pubs and restaurants. Sergeant Calhoun was totally unrealistic as being from a town where “they lynched a black man for seeing a white woman”. David Kane wrote this script.
If anything, Major Wesker and Sergeant Calhoun were stereotypes of greedy, amoral ‘Ugly Americans’.
But, the tensions over black GIs with European women by the white GIs from some places was very real, as was the puzzlement over American racism by many people in countries like Britain, France, and Italy.
It’s a murder mystery!!!!!
Next Sunday, the episode is “The Hide”, touching on British POWs who were recruited to fight for Germany, which will undoubtedly explore the real antisemitism in Great Britain.
Dan, I think your chronology is off. Before and during the Hitler-Stalin pact there was, by definition, no fighting between German and the Soviet Union. There would thus have been no Russian POWs. In fact, if memory serves, prior to WWII the German military were sent to Russia on training missions.
Please explain how Stalin could publicly enter into the, er, Hitler-Stalin pact and then think he could erase evidence of his partnership with Hitler by repatriating the troops he sent against Hitler during that period of cooperation but who became POWs.
Birdalone, Mr. Schwalbaum, Allston, and Mr. Williams accurately describe the situation of Gen. Vlasov and his followers. Stalin executed and imprisoned even Russian partisans who operated behind German lines and seems to have been concerned that people who had seen places other than Soviet Russia would come home with inconvenient information. Moreover, Soviet troops butchered Soviet civilians who had had to live with occupying Germans. It made no difference whether their cooperation was voluntary or involuntary. Furthermore, Soviet only 4 out of every 100 POWs survived German captivity and it was, presumably, from that 4% that Vlasov recruited. Solzhenitsyn wrote of the Vlasov formations in The Gulag Archipelago.
Operation Keelhaul, which returned Russians and assorted other DPs to Soviet control, continued into 1947. The episode in question pointed shows that the 1945 election that installed Labour was in progress, hence, it was the Conservatives who were responsible for the betrayal. Sort of the dog whistle theme of the show in my opinion. I don’t know to what extent the Labour government pursued the same policy of repatriation from British soil after 1945. If it did, this fact has been deliberately omitted from FW. (As an aside, David Niven starred in a 1969 “comedy” “Before Winter Comes.” He played a British officer “in charge of assigning the displaced persons into either the American or Russian zones” per IMDB but I recall more a feeling of poignancy than anything moving me to laughter, and that was before I knew about Operation Keelhaul.)
Mr. Karnick, I don’t recall from the episode that it was Soviet authorities who were “so intent on repatriating the escaped Russian POW [because of] his knowledge of a Soviet atrocity in Odessa.” Perhaps I got it wrong but I thought it was the British government that wanted to capture that particular man because his knowledge of what was actually happening to the people being sent back by them. They feared that they would look bad if the man wasn’t captured and his knowledge became public in Britain.
Episode 2 turned out to be something penned by the reincarnation of Lillian Helman or Dalton Trumbo. The morally compromised white American major and brutal, racist white sergeant are caricatures that would pass muster only at a Farrakhan, Wright, or La Raza Uno de Mayo celebration. Puhleeez.
Mr. Foyle’s upturned nose and view that we British are above racism is rich. The British did many fine things in their various outposts of empire but one thing that was probably evident everywhere was a color bar. That was then and the episode takes place in 1945 in Britain. Even then there was as much of an informal British color bar at home as the one the American (swine) sought to have explicitly established.
It’s relatively old, but another British TV play was shown nearly 30 years ago that dealt with the same issues; Rabbit Pie Day. It’s worth a watch