[lbo-talk] TV series on Stalin divides Russian audience

[Chris Doss]

I have been watching this series. The guy who plays
Beria looks just like him, and they do Stalin's
georgian accent well.

Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2007
TV series on Stalin divides Russian audience
Critics see an effort to whitewash the Soviet 
dictator. Supporters say he built a great nation.
By David Holley, Times Staff Writer

MOSCOW ­ Josef Stalin is speaking to his son 
Yakov, who has just telephoned to say that he 
will soon head off to battle the Nazi invaders.

"I sometimes was not fair to you. Forgive me. I 
devoted little time to you," the Soviet dictator 
apologizes. "Son, go and fight. This is your 
duty." He then switches to Georgian, the language 
of his childhood, and adds with even greater 
feeling: "If you have to die, do it with dignity. 
And you must be confident that your father, 
Stalin, will do everything for our victory."

The poignant scene ­ for viewers who can stomach 
it ­ is part of a controversial 40-episode TV 
drama, "Stalin Live," now airing on a nationwide 
network here. The show's structural device is an 
elderly Stalin, in the last weeks of his life, 
recalling episodes in his younger days, most 
presenting him in a favorable light.

For Stalin admirers, of whom there are many in 
Russia, the series is an entertaining and 
educational look at the man who turned the Soviet 
Union into a superpower. To critics, it is a 
dangerous distortion of history that threatens to 
misinform a younger generation about a leader 
responsible for the deaths of millions of people, 
and reinforce a trend toward greater authoritarianism
in politics.

Among the show's fans is car repairman Viktor 
Kurenkov. "Under Stalin we had the best weapons, 
the best planes, the best tanks," Kurenkov said. 
"He built the country that was the first to send 
a man into space. As for the repressions 
attributed to him, their scale was always
exaggerated."

Estimates of the number of Stalin's victims vary 
widely, but most historians say that 10 million 
to 20 million people died in purges, famines, 
deportations and labor camps as a result of his 
policies from the time he rose to power in the 
mid-1920s until his death in 1953. In addition, 
the Soviet Union suffered at least 20 million 
troop and civilian deaths in World War II. Among 
them was his son Yakov, who died in a German
prisoner-of-war camp.

Critics say that "Stalin Live" ignores the 
dictator's worst crimes and treats him far too
sympathetically.

"In the show, Stalin is portrayed as the savior 
of the people, the country and all of 
civilization, the leader who destroyed fascism," 
complained Daniil Dondurey, editor in chief of 
Cinema Art, a monthly journal. "Not for a split 
second do we see Stalin soaked in blood up to his
elbows, as he really 
was."

Opinion is roughly split

Surveys conducted two years ago on the 60th 
anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany showed a 
nation roughly divided between the pro- and 
anti-Stalin camps, with those sympathetic to the 
dictator holding a modest edge. In a poll by the 
All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center, 20% 
of respondents described his role as "very 
positive," and 30% called it "somewhat positive." 
Only 12% described it as "very negative."

Stalin's admirers insist that his achievements 
outweigh his faults. Among them is David 
Giorgobiani, the Georgian actor who plays Stalin in
the series.

"Many more years have to pass before we can make 
an unbiased judgment on that great man," he said. 
"One hundred years from now, no one will pay 
attention to the fact that so many people 
perished and the costs were so terribly high. But 
everyone will remember that such a great country was
saved."

A major obstacle

Critics say the failure of many Russians to look 
honestly at Stalin's crimes is a major obstacle to
democratic 
development.

Dondurey noted that NTV, the network carrying the 
series, which runs through April 4, is owned by 
the state-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom. Early 
episodes drew a strong rating of 19% of all 
television viewers, according to figures reported by
Itogi magazine.

Dondurey charged that by broadcasting the 
program, the government sought to encourage 
authoritarian trends in today's political life.

"The message is clear: Russia needs a wise 
leader," he said. "The main goal of this show is 
to preserve and nurture in the people the desire 
to obey a supreme leader, to take pride in having 
a supreme leader, to see no alternative to this 
model in the development of society."

Alexander Prokhanov, editor in chief of the 
nationalist newspaper Zavtra, also saw political 
implications in the show, but positive ones. The 
series promotes "a new myth of Stalin which 
replaces the ugly de-Stalinization-era myths, 
which narrowed the role of this great person to 
that primitive image of villain, small-time 
hooligan and paranoid murderer," he said.

Prokhanov expressed hope that the show could 
contribute to greater rehabilitation of Stalin's 
image, and that such a development would boost 
Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's power in a 
way that would promote a crackdown on corruption 
within the Russian economic and political elite.

Grigory Lyubomirov, the producer and director of 
the show, said the program sought to portray both 
the historical Stalin, who was born Josef 
Dzhugashvili, and the myth of Stalin that was 
promoted during the dictator's lifetime. "Our 
Stalin is not only Josef Dzhugashvili," he said. 
"It's Comrade Stalin. It's the myth that is still 
alive in the minds of Russian citizens."

Even Lyubomirov's critics acknowledge that he is 
no Stalinist. He won fame and democratic 
credentials in the 1990s as director of "Kukly," 
an extremely popular satirical puppet show that 
routinely skewered the country's top politicians. 
Instead, Dondurey said, Lyubomirov "is simply full of
cynicism."

More sophisticated game

But Lyubomirov insists that he is playing a more 
sophisticated game, and that he wants Russia to 
reject not the Stalin who slaughtered people out 
of paranoia, power lust or enjoyment of cruelty, 
but rather the Stalin who wielded dictatorial 
power in pursuit of seemingly valid goals ­ in 
particular, the survival of the Soviet Union.

"I categorically refuse to show Stalin as a 
paranoid, bloodthirsty wolf, because everything 
Stalin did had ironclad logic to it," he said. 
"Stalin was not an idiot. I want to show that 
Stalin, responsible for millions of casualties in 
the Soviet Union, was doing all that for logical 
reasons. This is the Stalin we must overcome."

Lyubomirov declined to say whether he viewed 
Stalin more as a positive or a negative figure. 
"Stalin was responsible, to some extent, for 
everything that happened in the Soviet Union 
after 1924, after Lenin's death," he said. "I 
would put it this way: Stalin was everything good and
everything bad.

"Who knows, but for Stalin, the fate of Europe 
would look different today. Maybe Hitler would 
have won that war. On the other hand, maybe there 
would have been no Hitler but for Stalin. These 
are the crucial questions we take with us into the
21st century."

Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this
report.



 
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