Ya sluzhil v okhrane Stalina, ili Opyt dokumentalnoy mifologii

After watching this documentary, one can safely acknowledge that Joseph Stalin was human. He loved music. He was knowledgeable of the theater. He enjoyed going to the Bolshoi Ballet. Yes, the man was human. And a lot of people even admired him. After all, didn't children sing for him? Wasn't he lavished praise? Did not the Bolshoi Ballet welcome him with open arms and even take advice from him? Yes, Stalin was just another man, and if you believe this documentary, there was nothing sinister about him, nothing at all. For instance, in one scene there is Stalin, Khrushchev and Mao sitting at a table politely listening to the accolades of children expressing their joy and thanks for being given the opportunity to become a doctor or tractor operator in the socialist paradise. And then there is the bodyguard himself, a one-time interrogator who is now a retired music teacher. A man who wouldn't hurt a fly; who was a patriot, who protected his master by making sure that Bolshoi Ballet was secure. An official just doing his job, directing a team of informers, mostly women, planted in the audience, armed with handguns, acting as his eyes and ears. No discussion of why such extreme measures had to be taken. It was just business as usual in the Soviet Union. Yes, Joseph Stalin was human.

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.