Stalin obsessively controlled images of himself: he was sensitive about the smallpox scars on his face, his short left arm and his diminutive stature. By 1935, Stalin was the star, with Lenin relegated to the background. In the early 30s, the iconography shifted, so that the two were shown as equals. Photograph: Jalal Morchidi/EPA-EFEĪt first, official imagery depicted Lenin as Stalin’s teacher. View image in fullscreen ‘The ideology is still there. “It’s very surprising that the Soviet Union has always been regarded as an atheist society,” says Loznitsa. He built a quasi-religious cult around Lenin, who had died in 1924, that probably would have horrified Lenin and certainly horrified many of his fellow Communists. Despite their obvious differences, they share a theme: the relentless terror and irrationality of totalitarianism – and how people function around it.įrom the beginning, Stalin cultivated his own image and myth. “Iannucci’s film is a translation of a historical event into contemporary language.” That comedy and this documentary would make a fascinating, if macabre, double bill. Loznitsa loved that film: “As a genre piece, it’s great, it’s wonderful,” he says. There will be a familiarity to this material for audiences who saw Armando Iannucci’s dark satire The Death of Stalin (2017). The sound designer Vladimir Golovnitskiy pieced together a soundtrack mixing archive recordings with new sound work, giving the often silent images a sense of life. Lithuanian postproduction and image-restoration experts cleaned up the old footage, returning it to a brilliant sharpness. There was also 24 hours of original radio broadcasts, plus recordings of the eulogies. The archive had 40 hours of footage, in colour and black and white. It’s amazing that this idea hadn’t occurred to anyone before.” It’s very surprising that the Soviet Union has always been regarded as an atheist society “I just asked the director of the archive and they were very open. How did he gain access to the raw footage, which was considered so sensitive for so long? “It was very simple,” he says. To create a new version with a distinctly critical slant, Loznitsa went to the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive at Krasnogorsk, just outside Moscow.

The Great Farewell was canned and would not be seen until after the fall of the Soviet Union, in December 1991. Nikita Khrushchev, who emerged as the leader, embarked on a programme of “de-Stalinisation”. Beria was executed with a bullet to the head in December 1953. Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s deputy, is seen here side by side with Soviet leaders who would have him arrested a few months later. Yet the subject proved awkward at a time when the leading figures in the footage were locked in a power struggle. View image in fullscreen People across the Soviet Union paid their respects to Stalin – sincerely or otherwise.

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