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ACF Stalin Lecture at Victims of Communism on Wed
This Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET, Flagg Taylor and I are going back to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to talk about cinema and totalitarianism—you’ll be able to stream it on Zoom or in other ways, as well as watch later. Our friends at VoC have a Museum of Communism everyone in D.C. should visit, but if you’re not in town, they also do a lot to help teach people about communism through digital technology. This is where Flagg and I come in—we will be talking about two movies about Stalin—we invite you to join us via streaming.
One is The Death of Stalin, a 2017 comedy made by Armando Iannucci, (the creator of the Veep TV show, a sarcastic vision of Washington D.C.) The other is The inner circle, a 1991 drama made by Andrey Konchalovsky, whose recent film Dear comrades Flagg and I have talked about on the podcast. Trailers below:
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Published in General
The Inner Circle was excellent.
The Death of Stalin is a terrific movie with a great cast: Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev and Jason Isaacs as Gen. Zhukov are standouts; Simon Russell Beale makes a creepy Beria, as if Harvey Weinstein were head of the secret police.
I saw it when it first came out and then waited a few weeks and saw it again, as it was leaving the theaters.
It’s based on a well-regarded French graphic novel, which I intend to look up.
I haven’t seen The Inner Circle again in many years, but some moments have always stayed with me.
After the projectionist (Tom Hulce) runs a newsreel about Hiroshima, Stalin gets up from his chair, visibly shaken by the fact that after all the country had been through in WWII, it was still vulnerable–in fact, until the USSR got the bomb, more vulnerable than ever.
A typical moment of everyday Soviet terror: the projector has a mechanical fault, and Hulce’s character innocently/carelessly implicates a frightened bureaucrat whose ministry made the machine and its faulty part.
Stalin appears in his dreams, as he did for so many Soviets, as a stern guardian and guilty conscience. The very face of creating fear.
Of course, Stalin needn’t have worried.
One group of traitors had handed over to the Soviets all America’s hard-won nuclear secrets.
While another group of traitors controlled the foreign policy of the Truman administration.
The Stalin dream, right after the “Satan in the Kremlin” conversation is quite striking!
One tiny observation about The Inner Circle: When a Chekist’s car pulls up, there’s a subtitle, “KGB Headquarters”, IIRC, even though the lettering on the building entrance, in Cyrillic, clearly reads NKVD. (“National Committee for the People’s Defense”) That’s not really a mistake; few Western audiences would recognize the old name of the agency, so “KGB” (State Security Committee)tells us the essence of what we need to know.
Yeah, I don’t think most people know the KGB was the version of the intelligence & security police created after the fall of Beria. The movie’s obviously made for Westerners…
The Cheka changed its name more frequently than its thugs changed their underwear.
Underwear is in deficit until the Synthetic Elastic Chemical Plant Named for V.I. Lenin fulfills its responsibilities under the Five-Year Plan.
I see quite a lot of that in movie subtitles.