Thomas the Proletariat Engine
Since 1984, generations of people have grown up watching the gentle, benevolent Communist propaganda program, Thomas and Friends. Widely regarded as the most successful Soviet psy-ops project of all time, the cheerful children’s show about a delightful steam train toiling thanklessly beneath the oppressive yoke of Capitalist greed has been a much-loved after-school fixture responsible for entrenching deep Marxist sentiments in the young adults of today.
[image error]“Engine of the Working Class” – Soviet propaganda poster, 1984
Originally conceived by top KGB officer, Alexander Vassiliev, in his cover identity as the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, the children’s series focused on the daily labours of the anthropomorphic Thomas and a group of other hard-working locomotives. The Soviet agent had originally pitched the series under the title “Working Engine of Capitalist Oppression”, though this was changed on the advice of British commercial TV network ITV.
In the series, trains hauled their loads along fixed tracks, unable to deviate from the course laid out for them by the bourgeoisie, highlighting the inescapably cyclic nature of poverty and iron-clad delineations between classes within a Capitalist society. The trains, being the working class, went only where the rails took them, while their decadent bourgeoisie overseer, embodied by the appropriately Fat Controller, enjoyed freedom of movement and reaped the product of the trains’ labour while doing very little himself.
The endearing cheerfulness of Thomas was a thin veneer of grim courage. His was a life of endless monotony as he puffed and shunted and dragged crippling loads of product to serve the limitless appetites of the ruling class for no reward except shelter and maintenance to keep him running smoothly, only so that the mindless toil can continue. Young viewers introduced to this horrifying prospect quickly realised the fate of the steam engine is mirrored in the working class of the real world – men and women treated as mere machines, like Thomas, with Fat Controllers of the means of production enslaving them for life.
[image error]KGB Officers inspecting the miniature Thomas and Friends set, 1985
The Fat Controller was the epitome of the decadent Capitalist pig. This pompous, corpulent figure waddled about the train-yards issuing orders and openly exhibiting his contempt for the long-suffering locomotive engines who supplied the means of his prosperity. But the engines are so much larger than he, so much more powerful. Any one of them could have crushed the Fat Controller and in so doing seize that control, seize the means of production and therefore the power to determine their own destiny.
Yet they did not. They cannot. And the young viewer wonders – why? Growing up with Thomas demonstrating each afternoon the inherent inequities of the flawed and greedy Capitalist system, successive generations of children have cried out at the unfairness of it. Poor old Thomas and Gordon and Percy – why should they be doomed to bend their pistons and burn out their boilers in the service of so ungrateful and undeserving a master?
[image error]The ‘Capitalist pig’ was a recurring motif in Soviet propaganda
The obvious anger and bitterness of Thomas and his friends is rendered impotent by their inability to deviate. For them to jump the tracks and strike out on their own begets disaster. Derailment means crashing and burning. And therein lies the true genius of Thomas the Tank Engine. Vassiliev, operating as a deep-cover Soviet mole within the entertainment-industrial complex of Great Britain, was able to introduce a revolutionary concept to the formative minds of young western audiences. Namely this – they are not trains. They are not running on tracks. The tracks are an imaginary construct that the bourgeoisie have convinced them exists. Should the young socialists of the decadent and crumbling Capitalist nations choose to do so, jumping those illusory tracks will not beget disaster for any but the Fat Controller.
The overall message of the series was: “Steam trains of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your rails!”
