On last week’s episode of FX’s The Americans, mom “Elizabeth,” a KGB operative in the U.S. in the mid ‘80s, catches teen daughter “Paige” reading Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy. “Elizabeth” espouses how Marx wrote about “the capitalist class structure being a kind of slavery, how revolution is necessary to create and achieve a worker state so that no one is exploited. My whole country came out of those ideas.”
To which, “Paige” asks of the Soviet Union: “Is everybody equal?” Mom responds: “We have our problems.” As “FineSkyIark” tweeted: “Understatement of the century.”
Back to the April 11 episode, Elizabeth, however, immediately returns to the party line of the murderous Soviet regime, assuring her daughter: “But everybody is in it together.”
The FX drama is centered around a husband and wife KGB cell (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as “Philip and Elizabeth Jennings”) who live with their kids as ordinary Americans (travel agents) in suburban Washington, DC in the 1980s.
This season is set in 1984, seven years before the Soviet Union collapsed.
A new episode airs tonight, Tuesday, on FX.
From March 28: “FX’s The Americans Shows Socialism in Action: Barren Shelves in Soviet Moscow”
