Word: mikhalkov
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...debate: whether to move Lenin's body out of the mausoleum and bury it. Georgi Poltavchenko, an aide to President Vladimir Putin, recently called for Lenin--the cause, he said, of all of Russia's troubles in the 20th century--to be removed. That was echoed by Nikita Mikhalkov, a Soviet-era film star who bemoaned the fact that "a corpse" had been turned into a "pagan spectacle" for, as he put it, miners from the Arctic city of Vorkuta. While Putin avoids expressing a firm opinion on the issue, he's probably too savvy to ignore the fact...
...perhaps not surprising that the two figures leading the push to move Lenin's corpse want to distance themselves from their pasts. Poltavchenko spent his career in the KGB but now maintains he was always secretly religious--once a crime that would have landed him in a labor camp. Mikhalkov's father Sergei established the family fortune by writing chilling verse about enemies of the people at the height of the Stalinist purges. And he composed the words to his country's national anthem--three times. In 1944 he hailed the "Great Lenin" and Stalin. In 1977 he wrote...
Might have imagined, that is, if he had lived in the age of Stalin. For the year is 1936, and the central figure of Nikita Mikhalkov's marvelous film, which won this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is an old Bolshevik at terrible risk, Sergei Kotov (played by the director himself). Lost in contentment with his radiant young wife and adorable child, he does not see that, far from protecting him, his stature as a beloved hero of the revolution is precisely what makes him a threat to paranoid tyranny. He knows their visitor, Dimitri, works...
...extract Sergei from his happiness quietly, without alarming anyone, and politely conduct him to prison, humiliation, death. This Sergei does not know until it is too late. And neither do we. Like him, we are disarmed by the sweetness of this life, so richly detailed by Mikhalkov. The genius of his film lies in his refusal to foreshadow, for it makes the outcome more chilling. This is how evil often comes to us, masked in geniality, on a day when the sun is shining, the music playing. And the way Sergei clings to his ordinariness even as he's carried...
...Serguei Kotov, the central figure of Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov's film, which won this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar, is an aging hero of the Bolshevik revolution now living quietly on a country dacha with his beautiful young wife and adoring child. Into an almost unbearably beautiful day suffused with golden sun comes Dimitri, former lover of Kotov's wife and now member of the secret police. What Kotov doesn't learn until it's too late is that Dimitri has come not to steal his wife, but to conduct him to prison, humiliation and death. The genius...