[One of the funniest touches is But it…]

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One of the funniest touches is But it is a very funny film, hat Stalin and his lord high exe- worth seeing. And in its main cutioner Beria, both Georgians, concerns it is essentially true to es of the people of the USSR and Eastern Europe with powers undreamed of by most mere monarchs. As Trotsky once remarked, if the absolute monarch Louis XIV of France could truly say, "L'état, c'est moi" (the state, it is I), Stalin, whose state apparatus controlled every aspect of society, could say, "Society, it is I"

The court of this 'red Monarch' , with its closed-in world of drunken debauchery and murderous intrigue, is presented in the film as a scaled-down, drabber version of the court of the lunatic Roman Emperor Caligula - the one who made his favourite horse a senator of Imperial Rome.

In fact the reports we have of Stalin and his entourage - from his ex-lieutenant Khrushchev's speeches at the 1956 and 1961 congresses of the 'CPSU', from the memoirs of Yugoslav former Stalinist Milovan Djilas, and so on — all back up this picture of life at the court of the Father of the Peoples'. Satire and caricature would seem to be redundant, and to make it funny, impossible.

'Red Monarch' makes it very funny, and in general keeps the picture essentially true to what the surviving eye-witnesses and participants have reported. It presents Stalin as a wizened old man, alternately jovial and murderous.

Funniest

are played as Irishmen, with the reality. London WC1N brilliantly realised by Irish actor Colin Blakely as Stalin and b David Suchet as Beria.

Perhaps the main failure of 'Red Monarch' is to convey any adequate idea of the social borrors on top of which Statin's grotesque court rested - a world with ten million slave labourers, mass terror, anti-Semitism ('the campaign against Zionists and cosmopolitans').

The scene of a mass execution fails to convey it. Many of the victims we see lined up against a wall, with the positions neatly numbered, waiting for a pistol bullet in the back of the neck, are known to us from previous scenes. The arbitrariness and paranoid lunacy of Stalin himself are thus conveyed. But the mass scale of the terror throughout society, the all-pervasiveness of it against the workers and farmers, simply does not come through.

And I wonder how anyone who doesn't know the sober accounts of life at the top in Stalin's Russia can fail to think the film a frivolous invention a million miles from any possible reality.

Unfortunately the politics threaded through the film are rubbish. The only clear and explicit political statement running through it is the idea expressed at the time in the official Stalinist slogan, 'Stalin is the lenin of today' The sustained terror practised for decades against the Russian people by a privileged caste of bureaucrats whose leader, personification, and scourge was Stalin, is identified with the 'Red Terror' carried out against the old ruling classes by the workers in the Revolution and then in the civil war and the wars of intervention by no less inan 14 states.

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