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\nIf you’ve been hanging around on my blog for a while, then you know how much I’ve written about Stalin. He used to have a whole “Category” back in the day, before I switched it to a “tag”. Yeah, because THAT’S important. And so State Funeral<\/i> comes along, directed by a director from The Ukraine – who has done an awe-inspiring job of putting together extant footage of all the ceremonies of mourning that took place across Russia – and all of its remote republics – in the week following Stalin’s death. The movie is hypnotic and mind-numbing – by design. It’s a grotesque display of a personality cult. You can’t even believe it. Joseph Stalin is laid to rest. Which is more than I can say for the millions and tens of millions of his victims who died in torturous anonymous agony. <\/p>\n
What a fascinating film. I reviewed for Ebert<\/a> – including thoughts on Mikhail Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, the letter Lenin wrote before his own death in 1924 warning everybody about Stalin, the fate of the monstrous Beria who is seen on the platform during the Moscow ceremony, Khrushchev\u2019s \u201csecret speech\u201d in 1956 (one of my candidates for Speech of the Century) and – finally – Lenin\u2019s corpse sprouting fungi in Red Square to this day (literally).<\/p>\n I feel like all the reading I’ve done since high school on this individual has finally paid off. Well, not really. I research him and the whole Soviet era because I find it interesting, not because I’m paid to find it interesting. But it is still nice to be able to call all that stuff into play for an actual writing assignment. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you’ve been hanging around on my blog for a while, then you know how much I’ve written about Stalin. He used to have a whole “Category” back in the day, before I switched it to a “tag”. Yeah, because … Continue reading