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Maya Turovskaya, Russian critic and documentarian, dies at 94

23 March 2019 13:32 (UTC +04:00)

Maya Turovskaya, a Russian film and theater critic, once called “the Susan Sontag of Soviet aesthetic thought,” who also co-wrote a popular documentary in the 1960s that drew parallels between Stalin-era totalitarianism and Nazism, died on March 4 at her home in Munich. She was 94, ONA reports citing the NYT.

Her son, Vladimir Turovsky, confirmed the death. She had lived in Germany for more than 15 years.

Ms. Turovskaya established a reputation for writing cultural criticism that was erudite and cleareyed — and that managed not to outrage the Soviet authorities.

In making the documentary “Ordinary Fascism” (also known as “Triumph Over Violence”), which was directed by Mikhail Romm, she avoided running afoul of censors because it is substantially an anti-Nazi film.

She and the co-writer, Yuri Khanyutin, dug deeply into v2_archives, including the Soviet Union’s, for Nazi propaganda footage; film from Hitler and Joseph Goebbels’s private collections; soldiers’ amateur film; children’s drawings from the Theresienstadt concentration camp; and photographs of Nazi victims at Auschwitz.