'Inner Circle' depicts paranoia, terror and naiveté of Stalin period

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"The Inner Circle," a movie directed by Andrei Konchalovsky.

Back in the 1960s, director Andrei Konchalovsky happened to meet an elderly man who worked in the screening rooms for the Soviet film censors. One day, the man revealed that he used to be employed in the Kremlin as a projectionist for Stalin himself. That moment was the genesis of a new film, "The Inner Circle."

In Konchalovsky's script (co-written with screenwriter Anatoly Usov), the projectionist at a KGB officers' club is summoned abruptly from his bed on his wedding night. He is assigned to replace the regular projectionist in the Kremlin, who has mysteriously and suddenly died.

Ivan, the new projectionist, has difficulty believing his good fortune in being in the exalted presence of Stalin, Beria, Molotov, and their cohorts. Stalin actually speaks to him.

Ivan's adulation of these figures seems woefully exaggerated, but the director, Andrei Konchalovsky, uses the naiveté of the character and his vantage point to show the contrast between the official version of Soviet society and the harsh reality.

The chief concern of the state apparatus is security. The Soviet state is supposedly beset by a host of external and internal enemies—bourgeois imperialists, fascists, tsarist remnants, and Trotskyists —who will spare no efforts to undermine and eventually destroy the achievements of the first workers' state.

The main targets, of course, are the top leaders themselves. Hence, the extraordinary precautions to safeguard their every move, including thoroughly screening projectionists and other personnel. Security becomes more than an obsession. Only Stalin and his inner circle can be trusted-and not even all of them.

In one scene, a spring breaks in the projector during a film showing. Suddenly, the future of the Commissar of Cinema, who is present, looks very uncertain. The casual repartée of Stalin and the others, seemingly gently chiding the commissar, takes on a sinister cast. The commissar begins to sweat.

In fact, the entire population of the Soviet Union is suspect. People are taken away from their homes and families in the middle of the night for having associated with foreigners. Then the KGB comes for their families. Then it comes for their friends. Then for anyone who had any contact with them.

Very few, if any, real enemies are caught, but hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens disappear into the Gulags—or worse. This is the period of the purge trials of the mid-1930s, the time referred to by Russians as the "hell-black night."

Ivan believes every word that rationalizes this paranoid world, even when it begins to affect his own personal relationships.

His wife drifts away. children whose parents ...Soviet coup?

(continued from page 20: “Is another coup on the horizon in the former Soviet Union?”)Yeltsin are not fundamental.

The various Pravda writers are usually careful to say that they are also in favor of the market reforms, it is just that they are in favor of a slower pace. Russian Vice President Rutskoi, who has been given a lot of space in former Communist Party organs lately, says that he favors the price rises but just thinks they should have been postponed, maybe to October.

In fact, in its Feb. 5 issue, Pravda ran an interview with Valery Smirnov, the very same who intoned a war song to the glory of Great Russia in the Feb. 22 issue quoted above, but who this time was introduced as a representative of the new entrepreneurs.

The piece was titled, "The entrepreneurs go into opposition." Smirnov raised some arguments whose sincerity might be doubted, such as that business depended on the prosperity of the people and thus had the same interests, and that both honest entrepreneurs and the people were opposed the bureaucrats seizing ownership of state property. But his protest against the government's new tax on profits was no doubt more genuine.

This tax, like other measures conceived by Yeltsin's economic team may be badly formulated. But the price rise has meant an enormous increase in profits, while privatization is reducing the base of the state's been charged as "enemies of the people" call him naive.

Outwardly, Ivan's faith is unshaken. He resembles, in his invincible ignorance, many supporters of Stalinism in other countries—especially those here in the United States.

What is the explanation for all of this? Konchalovsky presents a chilling picture of what life was really like for the average citizen-and the privileged few at the top but it was not his purpose to offer a political analysis.

The only thing remotely resembling an explanation for why the workers, two decades after overthrowing the tsar and capitalism, were living in a constant state of terror is when an old man who shares an apartment with Ivan tells him that Satan lives in the Kremlin. Whether he means it literally or figuratively is unclear.

It still remains for a filmmaker to combine the artistry shown in this production with the political realities that have been known since Trotsky wrote "The Revolution Betrayed" in 1937—which are being verified by events in the former Soviet Union in the present day. Ivan, played by Tom Hulce, idolizes Stalin.