Is Stalin dead or lively? On the night of Saturday February 28 to Sunday March 1, 1953, the answer was very uncertain. After a well -watered dinner finished in the early morning in the datcha de Kountsevo, his close circle – the Beria, Malenkov and other Molotov – leaves the master of the USSR “Quite drunk” et “Excellent mood”.
The words are from Nikita Khrushchev himself, souvenirs recorded on magnetic strip in the late 1960s, including the remarkable documentary series from France Culture makes you hear unpublished extracts on radio.
The next day, no news from «Koba»as his friends call him. As the men of the Tcheka find him lying on the ground, marinating in his urine, all fear to wake him up in such annoying posture. A keyword is enough to send you to the gulag or the post. When they arrive, in the evening, his close collaborators have all the sorrows of the world to find a doctor, the alleged “conspiracy of white blouses” having triggered some time before a wave of arrests in the profession.
A memory always alive in Russia
Before the diagnosis of a stroke fell, it will have gone twelve hours. Stalin died five days later, March 5. “It is a very revealing moment of the system that he had createdanalyze l’er story oleg khlevniuk. And finally, this system turned against him. »»
It is this regime of terror born of paranoia and the violence established by Stalin that Déportique Marie Chartron in her fascinating documentary. She also undertakes to tell how Iossif Vissarionovitch Djougachvili, a young Georgian poet, became Joseph Staline, relentless Soviet dictator.
How he shaped his image to the point of monitoring any reproduction of his portrait through the communist block. “A portrait of dead and lively Stalin”sums up Marie Chartron, who recalls how much her memory remains alive in Russia, where, after having tumbled the statues bearing her effigy, the Putin regime erects new ones …