Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

In his conclusion, Etkind quotes Freud: writing after the First World War, he said that if suffering is not remembered, then it will be repeated. ‘If we do not cry for the dead, like ghosts they will continue to haunt the living. If we do not acknowledge our loss, it threatens to return in strange forms; this particular combination of the old and the strange is particularly eerie.’ [19] Etkind, Warped Mourning , p. 245. Looking at the post-traumatic landscape of modern Russian politics and culture, we observe exactly that appearance of the eerie, ‘post-Soviet haunting’ – a parade of ghosts, from children in Tyumen in Siberia, wearing the uniforms of the NKVD and standing guard at the new monument to the founder of the Soviet machine of repression, Felix Dzerzhinsky; to the veterans of the Cheka carrying out ‘lessons of courage’ in schools. The neo-Stalinists and the ‘historical revisionists’ create pirate republics in Eastern Ukraine, where they hold trials and shoot deserters and looters, based on Stalin’s actual orders from the time of the Great Patriotic War. The ghost of Stalin appears in films, on posters, tee-shirts, the covers of school exercise books and iPhone covers; columns of Stalinists, like zombies, plod to the grave of their idol on 5 March, the anniversary of his death. You can dismiss this as being mere confusion and delusion; but the bite of a zombie can be fatal.

If there is some way out of this eternal return of the dead, then it is in that very ‘crystallization of memory’, making it concrete in the form of monuments, state decisions and constitutional verdicts. The cancerous tumour of Stalinism, with all its metastases, must be cut out from all the organs of state control; the crimes of the past should be reflected in our history books, in declarations by our political leaders, decisions of the courts, national memorials and labour camp museums. The programme of de-Stalinization and the perpetuation of the memory of the GULAG are contenders for the role of that very national idea that the authorities are constantly going on about.

Without this, our dead will remain unburied, our catastrophe go unnoticed and the Solovetsky camp will slip past unrecognized on the creased five-hundred-rouble notes gradually going out of circulation.

On a frosty day in Moscow, 26 January 2018, two events took place that should never have happened, but did, nonetheless. In one of the city’s registry offices, an official legalized a marriage between two men, Yevgeny Voitsekhovsky and Pavel Stotsko. They had married in Copenhagen, where same-sex marriage is allowed, and now the official had put a stamp in their passports to say they were married. On the same day, in the Pioneer cinema in Moscow, in front of a full house, they put on the Russian premiere of the British comedy film, The Death of Stalin , despite the fact that the Ministry of Culture had revoked the screening licence. And even though these two events were not connected, for a split second it seemed as if the system had crashed and treacherous cracks had appeared in it.

Sitting in the packed hall of the Pioneer, I realized that cinema really is art for the masses, and no downloads or DVDs can compare with watching a film with a live audience. There was laughter in the hall from the very first scene, in which the pianist Maria Yudina (played by Olga Kurilenko) plays Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto, accompanied by an orchestra. In the film, the audience have already started to leave when Stalin demands a recording of the concert – and it transpires that they haven’t made one. The terrified sound director chases the audience back to their seats to try to ensure that the music and the applause sound exactly the same as in the original concert. Even given the absurdity of the situation, who can vouch for such an event not happening in those times, when heads would roll for a misplaced comma in a text or the wrong note in a music score? And when the conductor is knocked out after banging his head on a fire bucket and another conductor is sent for (looking for all the world like Gennady Rozhdestvensky), the second conductor, hearing the nighttime knock at the door, resignedly gets up, bids farewell to his wife, in passing, instructing her to disown him during interrogation, and makes his way towards the staircase in his dressing gown. Is this a black comedy? Or is it a reflection of reality? Especially in the light of Julian Barnes’s novel, The Noise of Time , where, after a crushing article in Pravda , Shostakovich is expecting to be arrested at any moment, and so every evening he shaves, gathers his belongings in a small suitcase, and goes out to the stairwell, so that his arrest won’t bother the family.

The whole film is like this: it isn’t just buffoonery, but a higher form of comedy, à la Chaplin, probing, where behind all the jokes and the gags we can see the black abyss of being. The director, Armando Iannucci, is well known for his political satires, such as The Thick of It , or the mockumentary based on it, In the Loop , and he doesn’t try to hide that he is filming a farce: there is no point in trying to find absolute historical accuracy in The Death of Stalin (deliberately, the crowds on the streets are caricatures – grandmothers in headscarves, bearded muzhiks ; the Commissar of State Security, Lavrentiy Beria, indulges in pleasures with schoolgirls in the basement of the Lubyanka, amidst the sound of shots and shouts of, ‘Long live Comrade Stalin’) – and the facts were not exactly as presented (for example, Marshal Zhukov wasn’t in Moscow at the moment when Stalin died). But the film is loyal to a different, deeper, truth: it mercilessly reflects the spirit of the times, where fear was mixed with the absurd, and laughter with death. The film is not realistic, but it is truthful, in the same way, for example, that Shakespeare is truthful. The Death of Stalin is very accurate in its assessments: again and again, it is clear that humour can reveal the essence of the era and the characters much more accurately than a historical reconstruction or a costume drama. Perhaps the best example of this was Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator , which was banned not only in the Axis powers [20] The Axis Powers before and during the Second World War were Germany, Italy and Japan. Despite formally signing the Tripartite Pact in 1940, they were united by little more than their common enemies. Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania later joined, as did Yugoslavia – for two days. but in the USSR, too, because Stalin didn’t like it.

For all the grotesque, operetta-like qualities of the characters, they have been drawn with deadly accuracy: the weak-willed Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgy Malenkov; the Jesuitical People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, betraying his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, seven times in one day; the maniacal Commissar for State Security, Lavrentiy Beria; the conceited Marshal Georgy Zhukov; Stalin’s heir, Nikita Khrushchev, who, under the mask of being a country bumpkin is really a cunning schemer. Then there’s the rude, mistrustful, cruel and lonely Stalin, suffering a ridiculous and ugly death, lying in a pool of his own urine. Each of the masks has its own authenticity and depth, but above all they are hopeless, incorrigibly ridiculous, confusedly turning in a ritual dance around the corpse in their baggy trousers, trying to hide with party slogans their Darwinian struggle for power and for their lives.

And it is in this sense that this film probably presents the greatest threat to our current leadership. It’s not just that it’s a funny film; it’s because we are used to our leaders being portrayed as great, frightening, even helpless (as in Alexander Sokurov’s film, Taurus , where the dying Lenin was shown) or abhorrent (like in Alexei German’s picture, Khrustalyov, My Car! , about the last days of Stalin’s life) – but never funny. The myth of Stalin in all its parts – apologetic, critical, statist, liberal – can’t cope with coming up against British humour. It flies into a tantrum before Monty Python . In Russia we’re not used to speaking in this way about those in power. We’ve never had a television series such as Yes, Minister ! or Absolute Power with Stephen Fry, or Iannucci’s other comedies. The legendary show Kukly (‘Puppets’ – a clone of the British satirical programme Spitting Image ), remained as a programme of the Yeltsin era, having run aground with the series Little Zaches: The Story of Putin from Beginning to End ; Putin found it insulting. [21] Like Spitting Image , Kukly parodied the politicians of the day. The programme was extremely popular in Russia in the 1990s, and President Yeltsin apparently found his own puppet very funny. Putin, however, was unable to laugh at seeing himself portrayed satirically by a puppet, and the show was closed in 2002. In time, the channel that had shown it, NTV, was also shut down. Laughter takes apart the very foundations of power, removing its sacred nature and its secret; it shows up human weakness, chance and meaninglessness. Laughter is the Achilles heel of power, which Vladimir Nabokov understood well in his pamphlet Tyrants Destroyed : ‘Having experienced all the degrees of hatred and despair, I achieved those heights from which one obtains a bird’s-eye view of the ludicrous.’ [22] Vladimir Nabokov, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975, p. 36).