Two recent films were set at the height of communism in Russia: Dear Comrades! and The Death of Stalin. The first has just come out, although it does a good job of looking dated, made in black and white on a small screen, as though it originated in 1962 when it was set. Armando Iannucci’s film on Stalin came out in 2017 but, being in English and in colour, with recognisable if not major stars, is evidently contemporary. I avoided it on release as it was advertised as a comedy and I could find nothing amusing about the bloodletting and power scrambling in it.
Stalin died as I came into the world. No-one is absolutely sure of the exact date of his demise because they were all so scared of him that they did not call a doctor until it was too late to save him. Stalin had in any case had most of the competent doctors in Moscow killed, convinced that they were out to kill him. The date is usually given as 5th March 1953, the day after I was born.
In Russia at the time, an accusation was as good as a conviction and the almost invariable sentence was death. Although you do not see it happening, plenty of people are dispatched with a single shot to the head, often shouting, ‘Long live Stalin!’ just before they are killed. You dared not show disloyalty even as you died.
The cheapness of life also came over in Andrei Konchalovsky’s ironically titled Dear Comrades! set in the town of Novocherkassk, a small Russian town where the people have rise up against the local communist officials when they impose yet another pay cut on top of a price rise and they decide that they have had enough. They rebel and are gunned down as punishment.
The heroine of the film is a woman who is one of these officials but whose daughter naively believes that she can side with the rebels. The mother is both more loyal to the system and more realistic in her approach but is reduced to desperately searching for her daughter after the massacre. She is helped in her search by an oddly sympathetic KGB man.
I will not give away the ending but you wonder if it really happened or was imagined by the mother, so at odds with the previous events in the story it is. The director seemed to be saying that, even in an era of socialist realism, the most loyal and dedicated upholders of a tyranny need an element of wish-fulfilment to survive.
While Ianucci is a British film maker (albeit with an Italian name and parentage, born in Scotland) Dear Comrades was made in Russian by Andrei Konchalovsky, who had a brief unsuccessful transfer to Hollywood, where he found the censorship imposed by commercialism harder to live with than that imposed by communism. He was fired from Tango and Cash because he did not kowtow to the Hollywood's wish to make a light-hearted buddy cop film.
Both films show how much the people of Russia loved Stalin, despite his homicidal enthusiasm for killing large numbers of them. The heroine of Dear Comrades longs for the days of certainty he offered, while the people in The Death of Stalin flock to his funeral – and 1500 are gunned down as they breach the lockdown Lavently Beria had imposed on Moscow.
Beria, who runs the secret police, comes out as the one utterly evil character amongst a bunch of generally unsympathetic ones in Iannucci’ film, everyone trying to grub their way to power while keeping in with Stalin. He is portrayed by Simon Russell Beale, an actor I admire but one who normally portrays sympathetic, almost cuddly characters. In real life, Beria was a rapist and exploiter of women, a man only too happy to carry out his boss’s orders to arrest and kill anyone named on the lists he hands out to his equally enthusiastic underlings. It is hard to feel any sympathy for Beria when he gets his comeuppance as Khrushchev gets the better of him.
Why was I put off from seeing the film when it first came out, normally being only too keen to see how communism turned so quickly into murderous tyranny, with a strong dose of corruption, privileges being granted to those successful at climbing the greasy pole of the party rather than being good at making money? The film was advertised as a comedy. While there was a certain black humour in it, none of the characters was remotely sympathetic, something you surely need to really enjoy a film. I was fascinated by The Death of Stalin but did not laugh once.
The film ends with Khrushchev in command but adds that, although he got rid of those who helped him take Beria out, he too fell from power when Leonid Brezhnev took over some years later. By that time the death sentence had fallen into disuse in Russia and those who fell from power were merely ‘retired’ and allowed to live in their comfortably-appointed party-provided dachas until they died. Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter is said to have asked why her grandfather was crying all the time after his fall. Maybe a bullet would have been preferable.
Watching films like these makes me thankful I live in a democracy in which our leaders never become too powerful simply because they have to – or are expected to – obey the law and we can get rid of them after a few years. Donald Trump had a lot more in common with those communist leaders than he would ever have admitted but the difference is that the system proved stronger than him in the long run – even if his attempt was an close run thing in the end.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
