Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: 'Stalin' monster kept in check by Hollywood Date: Sat, 21 Nov 92 17:35:41 EST Message-ID: \SE B;LIFE \SS (WS) \HD 'Stalin' monster kept in check by Hollywood \BY Oliver Wates \CR REUTERS NEWS AGENCY \DT MOSCOW MOSCOW - Vladimir Lenin sits half-crippled in his Kremlin room, Josef Stalin lies dying in his dacha, and the most prominent victims of his reign of terror walk to their deaths along real KGB prison corridors. HBO's "Stalin," premiering tonight from 8 to 11 p.m., took full advantage of the arrival of democracy in Russia to gain access to some of the actual sites. Robert Duvall, who heads the international cast, slept in Stalin's bed at the dacha at Kuntsevo, the country house outside Moscow where the dictator spent his last years. Glittering halls in the Kremlin and other palatial buildings around Moscow were thrown open to the cameras. Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin were shot in the gloomy vaults of the Butyrki prison, as close to the real site - the infamous KGB secret police headquarters at the Lubyanka - as the filmmakers could get. The film received its world premiere in Moscow earlier this month . Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi was among several hundred people at the screening of what historian Dmitry Volkogonov, who advised the producers, said was "an American perspective" on Stalin's life. Covering the period from 1917 to Stalin's death in March 1953, the film focuses on his family life from the point of view of first his wife, Nadya, and then his daughter, Svetlana. "We made a deliberate choice to tell this movie through Stalin's personal life," producer Mark Carliner told a news conference. "We felt it was impossible to tell a story about a man who kills 40 million people. . . . It's too monstrous." Russian critics could find plenty to object to in the film. Secret police chiefs Lavrenty Beria, Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov seemed at times more like music-hall parodies than the butchers of millions of innocent people. Some Russians would find Maximilian Schell's Lenin, doddering and almost a figure of fun, or Daniel Massey's wild-eyed Lev Trotsky hard to believe. A well-known Moscow park was too clearly identifiable to pass for "Siberia." And the interjection of some choice Russian obscenities - the English-language film was otherwise subtitled in Russian - sent gasps through the auditorium. But despite its obvious Hollywood parentage, "Stalin" seemed to go down reasonably well. "I watched the film with pleasure," commented Rada Adzhubei, daughter of Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev. "It is very good that such films are shown because everything gets forgotten very quickly, especially by the young. "Of course, for Russians and people of our generation who lived through it and know a lot about it, it's rather primitive," she said. "If you know where they lived, what they ate, it is all a bit embellished. But in this case I don't think that matters." "For the Russian intelligentsia, well, it was a little bit funny, a collection of common old wives' tales," said her husband, Alexei Adzhubei, former editor of the daily Izvestia. "It was more complicated, more terrifying and more incomprehensible," he said. The film "is primitive for us, but it is good that the Americans have done it." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM