Word: lenin
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...movie, based on Robert K. Massie's historical novel of the same title, focuses on the giants of the revolutionary period. Lenin, Trotsky and Kerensky are set against Tsar Nicholas II, his German wife Alexandra, their four pure daughters and a son, Alexis, who is crippled by hemophilia. There is Grigori Rasputin, the Siberian starets whose mystical healing powers and divine judgment endeared him to the Tsarina. This placed him in a position of immense power within the government, despite his fanatical ambitions and licentious behavior. And there are Nicholas' ministers and advisers, his generals and soldiers. All of these...
...manuverings of the Communist leaders appear almost as footnotes to the life of Nicholas and Alexandra. And the movie succumbs to the temptation of introducing famous figures just for the shock appeal; we hardly see Joseph Stalin at all after he boyishly introduces himself to Lenin's wife at a Party meeting...
...treatment of Stalinism's impact upon individual lives. It singles out the fate of some 600 functionaries and victims of the purges, using intimate details from unpublished memoirs and monographs, deathbed testimonies and confessions, official reports unavailable in the West, and private correspondence, including previously unpublished letters from Lenin and Stalin...
Khrushchev took the line that Stalin's perversion of the Soviet system started with the purges of the '30s. Medvedev is probably the first and certainly the most distinguished Soviet historian to agree with Western critics that Stalin had already begun to corrupt the party during Lenin's lifetime. In one of his few but significant criticisms of the U.S.S.R.'s founding father, Medvedev suggests that Lenin's "natural enthusiasm for people" kept him from recognizing Stalin's villainous character until it was too late...
...film is so resolutely dull that one hungers for the vigorous vulgarity of, say, Doctor Zhivago. The film makers occasionally comply, albeit inadvertently, as when Schaffner stages the obligatory scene of Mad Monk Rasputin wenching it up in a haystack, or when Goldman has Nikolai Vladimir Ilich Lenin grouse, "Well, Stalin has been exiled to Siberia again." There is even an occasional feint at topical significance. Count Witte (Laurence Olivier), trying to persuade Nicholas (Michael Jayston) to halt the Russo-Japanese War, says, "I'm advising you to stop a hopeless war." Replies the Czar: "The Russia my father...