Secret and Explicit (The Aims and Acts of Zionists) (1973)

On November 8, 2021, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation included the film Secret and Explicit (The Aims and Acts of Zionists) in the Federal List of Extremist Materials (based on the decision of Syktyvkar City Court).

The screening of the film was carried out by the Festival organisers for educational and research purposes on the basis of the permission of the Russian State Archive of Sound Recordings dated September 29, 2021, before the corresponding entry appeared in the Federal List of Extremist Materials.

Regional support for anti-Israeli governments was part of the Soviet foreign policy strategy in the 60s and 70s. Film Secret and Explicit (1973) is a so-called exposing work by the documentary filmmaker Boris Karpov and was supposed to become an ideological justification of that strategy in the eyes of the Soviet viewers. This quasi-documentary picture reveals that the Zionists allegedly collaborated with Nazi Germany and have left massive traces in the history of the 20 century. The film opens with an obviously fake piece of footage (which is falsely claimed to portray the staged Zionist demonstration by the Soviet Embassy in London) and continues in the same vein. The conversations about an openly anti-Jewish film that was being made at the CSDF began during its editing stage. The World War II cameraman Leonid Kogan spoke against the film. In a letter addressed to Leonid Brezhnev, he wrote that Secret and Explicit uses material from the Nazi anti-Semitic films and called it Black Hundreds inspired. Ultimately, this work caused such a resonance in the party and cultural circles at its production stage, that the film was banned from being released into distribution in the Soviet Union.

Today this film can be regarded as a historical document, which confirms how simple and dangerous could the transition be from an attempt to justify anti-Zionist views to openly expressed Antisemitism.