Or why Stalin after rejection 50 years ago is demanded by television today

Stalin has gradually been transformed into a key protagonist of Russian television programmes. Simply press the TV distance console buttons, and he is there. Recently we have seen him in the [television sequel] In Hades. The First Circle.” ( V krugye pervom”). Here Stalin has been played by Igor Kvasha who played Stalin in Vladimir Ageyev’s production The Black Swallow Flight.

Such spontaneous Stalinism of our domestic television is quite understandable – we have begun exploring a huge layer of Soviet classics, basing our sequels on historic material. However, it is hard to imagine a sequel with its black-and-white picture and passions of a costume drama without the Main Villain – either charismatic as Bulgakov’s Voland or non-charismatic as Caiph.

An error of magnitude

Such simultaneous neo-stalinism demonstrates two remarkable features. The first one deals with blurring the difference between good and evil, as ratings never depend on quality. I don’t know if someone’s bottom can become a TV star if transmitted by all the television channels, but Stalin certainly can. He did that once, before the television era. A third-rate state official devoid of any talents and failing almost all his endeavours began to be considered Lenin’s favourite apprentice, a genius of management and a great connoisseur of linguistics. Stalin came into power in Russia when it was a country with the highest intellectual potential, the richest culture and fantastic enthusiasm of the people who for the first time were offered real vertical mobility. For 30 years Stalin converted Russia into the most boring and odious country in the world – a country where the five-year intermission of war with all
its disasters was perceived as a jolt of fresh air; however (thanks to the miracles of PR!), hanging his portraits on all corners and publishing his speeches in all the papers turned him into a historic figure of a great scale.

The real Stalin, according to his genetic and acquired traits, would have made an ideal head of a small company somewhere in the south of Russia with strong oriental authoritative traditions. Unfortunately, we won’t see such Stalin in any sequel. For a sequel – the most popular of all the arts (Ed. Allusion to Lenin’s words about cinema as “the most popular of all the arts, and thus, extremely important.”) – deals with cliches and set patterns, products of someone’s PR, history textbooks, rather than proper history. And it is written in history textbooks that Stalin was the “greatest national leader of the 20th century”, rather than “the head of a small company” or “the most boring person”.

Time “Stalin”

The second interesting phenomenon deals with dramatic over-exaggeration of Stalin’s role in Russia’s history. Stalin played a big role in a life of every individual in the USSR from 1922 through 1953. It looked as if he saw everyone and was taking part in every fate; a dimly lit Kremlin window (gossip says that in reality it was a toilet window) was portrayed as a wakeful eye.

Unfortunately, TV viewers are asked to share such a conviction. However, in the real life of the Soviet people Stalin was present only as a bust or a portrait: he was as distant as God. People even became accustomed to fear. There was life during Stalin’s rein – Stalin did not determine romantic feelings, divorces, pregnancies or a woman s periods. Stalin did not make them write denunciations. Stalin did not make fights at the kitchens of communal flats. Living during Stalin’s reign meant living in fear and alarm, in permanent tension of all the forces. However, it was life, and there was place in it for other things, not only for Stalinism or anti-Stalinism. Not a single leader, moreover in a sieve-like Russia can fill in the entire world for his people.

Therefore, sequels portraying the “leader” or “the father of the nation” make a dramatic replacement: they all talk about Stalin’s era in Soviet history.

But it is high time for us to understand that the era was not Stalin’s at all. It is high time to realize that tragedies, dramas and victories of that era did not belong to Stalin. It is high time to stop digging in and digging out, humiliate him or sing his praises: it is high time to look at ourselves and realize that Stalin was only a third-rate politician of yet another Russian period of frosts.” Many people quite optimistically regard the sequels about Stalin as the sign of our steady adherence” to a democratic way. As in one of the sequels he has diarrhea, in the second he is a fool and in the third a scoundrel.

Our painful interest in Stalin means our return to the old Russian circle. We could have escaped it, had we realized that Stalin was not the point. However, we feel more comfortable thinking that Stalin was the point; watching sequels is more comfortable than reading primary sources, moreover documents. We are lulled into thinking that Stalin alone conducted the repressions in 1930s – 1940s, and we are not to be blamed at all. Maybe the main thing is that we are striving to watch a tyrant, at least on television. And such desires are due to the filming of anti-Stalin novels.

Translated by Olga Radayeva