Communist Smurfs

Space Cadet, 20/07/2000

When I was younger, I went to Smurf Land in a Canadian theme park. In my naivety, I had no idea that when I won a Papa Smurf in a game of throw-the-hoop-on-the-bottle and gave the cute little guy to my big sister (because I was a nice brother, back then), I was assisting the spread of communist propaganda. My sister was also guilty because she bought the Smurf Song.

There is a wealth of evidence on the internet that the cartoon was in fact created by the Russian government to indoctrinate the youngest members of western society with communist beliefs and ideals. Indeed, I did a search on "Communist Smurfs" which found 40,731 hits. The most convincing was Papa Smurf is a Communist (a site that's now gone; but see instead The Smurfs were Communists). Wisely, the capitalist author of Papa Smurf is a Communist does not reveal his name. We'll call him Bill.

According to Bill, SMURF is an acronym for "Socialist Men Under Red Father". The society's leader, Papa Smurf, with his Marxist beard and his little red hat and trousers, was a cuddly clone of Stalin, assuming autonomous power in the Smurf Village without election.

The Smurfs had no currency and everything was shared equally among them; all Smurfs dressed in the same uniform, demonstrating total equality; all were made to look happy; there was no poverty or crime; and all worked for the benefit of the communist Smurf state. The anti-capitalism theme was reinforced by the negative portrayal of Greedy Smurf and Vanity Smurf. Greedy took for himself and liked to eat a lot. Vanity, the Smurf who wore a flower in his hat and looked in a mirror all day, represented the homosexual male who was oppressed during the communist rule. And the most valued Smurfs in the society were the hard working, proletarian Smurfs who questioned nothing, like Hefty and Handy Smurf.

Brainy Smurf, the one with glasses, closely resembles Trotsky (who also wore glasses). A high ranking official under Lenin, Trotsky was later exiled for being a traitor because his ideas clashed with Stalin's. Bill observes that Brainy also thought too much for his own good. He was alone in his willingness to question the ideals of Smurfism, his own ideas at times getting him into trouble from Papa Smurf, leading to occasional exile from the Smurf Village. Bill believes that, had the television show continued, Brainy would have met with the same fate as Trotsky (a swift ice axe through the bald patch).

And then Bill points the finger at Gargamel, the evil nemesis of the blue bolsheviks, who wanted to catch the "good happy little Smurfs" and boil them to turn them into gold. His Semitic features are a reference to the Stalinist persecution of the Jews for, among other things, the perception of their love of money. Gargamel's bumbling cat, Azarel, represented, quite literally, the "fat cat" American politician.

It's surely no coincidence that communism fell in Russia around the time that The Smurfs was lost from syndication. And my sister's Smurf Song record is truly as vile and heinous a piece of music as anything else I've heard from Eastern European pop.