OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
When Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953, a few days after suffering a massive stroke, he had maintained the undisputed rule of the USSR for three decades and built what his eventual successor Nikita Khrushchev, in his famously critical 1956 speech, called a cult of personality.
The fanaticism he demanded was reflected in a massive outpouring of grief throughout the country and among sycophantic admirers elsewhere, and in the elaborate funeral mounted by the leading members of the Politburo who had escaped his purges.
For three days the body lay in state as thousands filed past the bier, which was surrounded one after another by groups representing different segments of the military, government apparatus, and party cadres while representatives of the USSR’s allied regimes in Eastern Europe solemnly came to deliver wreaths and commiserations. On March 9 it was transported to Red Square prior to internment in Lenin’s Mausoleum.
The entire spectacle was documented with official sanction by Georgian filmmaker Mikheil Chiaureli, Stalin’s favorite director, best known for his epic The Fall of Berlin (1950). His footage of the event, mostly in black-and-white but including some sequences in color, intersperses shots of citizens standing in mourning in the streets of Moscow and across the Soviet Union with segments shot in other countries, including China and North Korea.
It was recovered from Russian archives, restored and shaped into this form by Italian actress-director Nino Kirtadze and editor Juan Condé, with an English version of the narration read over the original from the Russian State Radio, which intones endlessly about Stalin’s great achievement in establishing the foundations of a communist system that his successors—anxious as they obviously were to secure their own futures—would preserve and protect.
But a brief epilogue added by Kirtadze recounts the fates of the Politburo members—Khrushchev, Giorgi Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Lavrenti Beria, all shown delivering eulogies in Red Square—who contended for control of the country in the wake of Stalin’s demise until Khrushchev emerged victorious over his rivals three years later. The result is like an object rescued from a time capsule nearly seven decades old, a glimpse into the mindset of a twentieth-century totalitarian regime that had treated its leader with something very near to deification.
There exists, however, a delicious riposte to Chiaureli’s propaganda in Armando Iannucci’s lacerating 2017 satire The Death of Stalin, which depicts the events surrounding the preparation for the dictator’s funeral in very different terms, demolishing the façade of amity among his underlings this film is so determined to project. That film is fiction, of course, but so was the unthinking idolatry of Stalin, as post-1956 events in the USSR demonstrated. Recommended for collections in twentieth-century, and especially Cold War, history. Aud: H, C, P.