Ya sluzhil v okhrane Stalina, ili Opyt dokumentalnoy mifologii (1989)

User Rating:

6.5/10   

Director:

Semyon Aranovich

Writers:

Semyon Aranovich (writer)
Yuri Klepikov (writer)

Genre:

Documentary

Plot Keywords:

Bolshevik | USSR | Bodyguard | Stalin

Also Known As:

I Was Stalin's Bodyguard

Runtime:

Germany:90 min

Country:

Soviet Union

Language:

Russian

Color:

Black and White | Color

How strange Stalin could seem when you got to know him.

Most people probably - or hopefully - know that Joseph Stalin murdered almost 20 million of his own citizens. Thus it's hard to view him as having any humanity. Here in "Ya sluzhil v okhrane Stalina, ili Opyt dokumentalnoy mifologii" (called "I Was Stalin's Bodyguard" in English), we get to meet one of the brutal dictator's confidants. Through this man's stories, Big Joe sounds almost like any other person, not the type whom you'd expect to commit genocide. But also, we get to see how the Soviet Union under Stalin became very much like Nazi Germany: the children going into training to learn how to be "good citizens", and the airplanes flying in formation to spell out "Stalinu slava" ("Glory to Stalin"). They had so many resources and they used the resources for these purposes.

Probably the main thing to derive from this is that the USSR never really had communism: under communism, the people own everything; in the Soviet Union, the state owned everything and the people owned nothing (some revolution!). But no matter how we look at it, I would certainly recommend this documentary as an insight into history.