“Onwards, comrades!” is a Chinese cartoon capturing the essence of the last days of the USSR and what is to come next. This masterful animation was created in 2013 by a student of Beijing university, Wang Yilin, as her graduation work.

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You will see the title translated to English by the author as “Farewell, my comrades!” from the Russian “Вперёд!”, but that is not right, as the word “farewell” is associated nowadays with parting and not with wishing someone a steadfast journey ahead, which we have in the Russian title.

It’s difficult for a European to judge what the author wanted to say. It’s enough to know a little about Chinese culture to assume that the film contains many symbols and hidden meanings, and what a European might see as a meaningless, random fragment could actually carry a crucial semantic load. Another important feature of Chinese cultural tradition is that it’s not customary to express oneself “directly”, so a story can have multiple interpretations and layers of meaning. But which ones exactly, how many, and to what extent – it’s hard to judge. China is vast and diverse.

With that in mind, the cartoon has many levels of allegory and the viewer can perceive it as both simple and complex at the same time. There are some odd anachronisms, like the sat dish on the village house, while other imagery is true to its time.

Here is a comment by one viewer, Grigory Sinolitsky, who gives a good interpretation of the visual elements:

A very important point in the cartoon is the toy cubes, from which the girl built her house (her future plans). These are worldview, cultural, moral, etc. blocks that are formed during the upbringing of every person.

During the “Perestroika” (restructuring), the girl (essentially an image of the Soviet people) finds herself in new conditions and discovers that her old toy cubes (values) are being replaced by new bright “glamorous” toy-values, so as not to stand out from everyone else “or they’ll laugh at us”. This substitution is carried out by the girl’s mother (an image of the elite), who previously destroyed the house the girl-people was building, refused to communicate with her and forced her to move to new (civilised) conditions. The mother “sold” the books (an image of culture, ideology, and the education system – a Russian dictionary) for a pittance. The mother (the elite) continues to ignore the girl, not noticing her problems and concerns. She fixates on the unimportant (“shampoo… From America! It protects the skin very well…”).

When the girl (the people) rethought all this, she realised that her mother (the elite) had betrayed her – “I’ll tell everyone – mom betrayed us! They all betrayed us.” And she flees from the new (European-civilised) conditions and finds herself on the brink of war. She sees that those she thought were dead (symbolic images of power structures, the army, intelligence…) are alive and ready to perform their functions. She herself has to take up arms (rebuilding the army) and stand on a foundation of cubes (non-material values), including for their protection (a mountain of cubes behind the girl with an automatic weapon).

And then, there is more!

The one cube, hidden by Beriya (who, like Stalin, became demonised) can represent the hidden grain of Socialism, preserved within humanity, for it it come back after the wreck of flirting with Capitalism.

The cartoon was also prophetic. It came in 2013, a year before the US-backed Nazism reared it ugly head in the Ukraine, forewarning that in 2022 Russia will be forced to take up arms, drawing strength from the memory of the Great Patriotic War that the images in the final credits reference.

The cartoon with audio in Russian

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Raw video source on YouTube.

The images in the final credits and the photos from the Great Patriotic War that served as their models