For years, on the evening of December 12, on the anniversary of the introduction of martial law in Poland, demonstrations have been held outside Wojciech Jaruzelski's house. On such an evening in 2000, Teresa Torańska and her film crew pay him a visit.
Hammer & Tickle: The Communist Joke Book is a 2006 propaganda documentary film about "jokes" under the Soviet Union.
They were heroes of a special kind. They came from the steppes, the sons of farmers, of factory floor women. Salt-of-the-earth, strapping young men, model husbands, who believed in communism with all their hearts. Bright futures lay ahead of them. In the name of the Inter-cosmos Program they were about to conquer space. The second they touched down, they were treated like pop stars and worshiped as heroes. And today? What do the heroes of socialism do without socialism?
The three-hour-long documentary covers 25 years in the life of Nicolae Ceaușescu and was made using 1,000 hours of original footage from the National Archives of Romania.
Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun.
The Katyn massacre, carried out by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, was only one of many unspeakable crimes committed by Stalin's ruthless executioners over three decades. The mass murder of thousands of Polish officers was part of a relentless purge, the secrets and details of which have only recently been partially revealed.