"THE BLACK TULIP" is a 27' meditation on the costs of war - in this case, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. I shot in Super-16 in the Fall of1987 in Kabul, Kandahar, Tashkent, and Moscow. The only complete film by a Western journalist on the Soviet side of the war, it includes a visit to a Soviet army base in Kabul, the attack helicopter support group at Kabul airport, a firefight at a Soviet firebase outside Kabul, and an outpost near Kandahar. In Moscow, there is a visit to the tomb of the Unknown Solder and to a cemetery with the graves of Russian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. The program concludes with a moving interview with the mother of one of the dead soldiers.

The film aired on PBS in 1988, and on theTV networks of 22 other countries, including the UK, Japan, Spain, Australia, France, Italy - and Russia. For Western audiences, my message was - and is - that Russians are human, that they love and grieve just as Americans or Italians do. This may seem obvious now, but in 1988, believe it or not, it came as a real surprise to American audiences. For many, it was the first time they had seen Russian soldiers as real human beings, instead of as The Enemy.

Unaccustomed to reading between the lines, Westerners miss many of the subtexts of the film. "THE BLACK TULIP" is actually the name given by the Russian soldiers to the cargo plane that carried the bodies back to the Soviet Union for burial. To call the film by that name, and to include the song about the Black Tulip in the film, made clear to Soviet audiences that the film was critical of the Afghan intervention. In 1988 I had an opportunity to show the film to an auditorium full of Soviet and Eastern European journalists. I will never forget the powerful impression the film made on them: first that it could have been made at all, and second that the film compared Afghanistan unfavorably with World War II - an untouchable subject in those days.

The scars of the Afghan war continue for the Russians. Not only was the Soviet experience in Afghanistan a key factor in Gorbachev's "Second Russian Revolution", it shaped the outlook and careers of a generation of such Russians as Alexander Lebed. Although made with the full cooperation of the Novosti Press Agency - the most committed supporters of glasnost - THE BLACK TULIP was not shown officially in the Soviet Union until after its collapse, because it was too critical. However, it was widely distributed (apparently by Novosti) in the underground *Samizdat" ('self-published') market, and influenced the increasing alienation of Russians from their Afghan adventure.

I have showed the film to many audiences since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While in one sense the film is "out of date" because history has changed so dramatically since then, I am always surprised at how deeply moved the audience is by the film. There is something about THE BLACK TULIP that transcends the particular historical moment - it is the story of every son who died for pointless ideals, and every mother who sorrows for him...