Quantity has a quality all it’s own.
There is something ethereal, sad, and subversive about the documentary State Funeral (2019), which almost silently, and almost without commentary, conveys the awesome spectacle of the internment and edification of Marshal Joseph Stalin; dictator of the Soviet Union for twenty three years and after Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler, probably the third most murderous and evil fiend in world history. The film itself is a very smart edit job of contemporary footage from the March, 1953 mourning and procession of “the boss” himself, captured from the archives of Mosfilm. Other than snippets on the history channel, no footage of this time or event was available, and even in the Soviet Union exposure to the funeral was largely personal, as this footage was never released. What it shows is as shocking as what it does not show. Blank faces as well as mournful ones. The common people of small villages and famous people of world history. Nameless peasants cry in their town squares. Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, and Zhou Enlai act as pallbearers in a funeral of no religion yet loaded with meaning and iconography.
It is almost a silent film, loaded with foley grips recreating the shuffling of footsteps. No one speaks in the boss's presence. Even outside, conversations are peripheral and muted. You can tell no one is really speaking. Because no one’s mouth is moving. The few contemporary words used are direct from the radio Moscow announcements, written by the party and read without mistake to the people of the Soviet Union. There are also speeches in factories, no doubt vetted in much the same way. The silence itself is a character in the film, and I suspect it is for several reasons. First because there are some citizens genuinely sorrowful for the death of Comrade Stalin, who murdered their families and tortured their friends, so brainwashed are they. Stalin had been an integral part of the Bolshevik Revolution since 1915 when he slaughtered hundreds of people in Russian Georgia in a bank heist to fund the cause. He waited patiently as Trotsky fought the Civil War and Lenin died. He stewarded them through a depression, famine, and murderous rampage - all of which he started. He led them through what most historians consider to be the largest and deadliest military conflict in all of human history. For most of Russia, there was no time before Stalin. Second, I’m sure is the element of fear that resides in those cadres smart enough to know exactly what Stalin was but will never say anything knowing the cost, and those who fear what might come in the wake of the death of such an all powerful God who lorded over them for so long.
The color is shockingly brilliant for 1953, and the red especially is another character in a drama that bookends decades of blood. The coincidence cannot be lost on those who participated or those who witnessed this spectacle. The faces of the famous are striking, true believers that they are, but they are not as interesting as the individual Muscovites and Russians, Ukranians and Tajiks, the common people of the world who all look like they are hiding a different emotion. Some cry, and probably for different reasons. The eager and the interested can be seen in the crowd. This is a time when the public was more actively involved in everything, all over the world. Before the days of TV. Before the days of Twitter. We all went to Fourth of July parades. In the cities, we congregated in town squares and attended ticker tape parades for astronauts. The common and the required wanted to see the red coffin draped with black mourning cloth, as if betraying the color of his soul departed.
The words spoken about him, by radio announcers, by party hacks, by Malenkov at the procession opening, were sincere and earnest at the time, and now they are a bad joke, inciting derision and black humor. He was praised for eliminating wars, not mentioning the ones he started and lost. He was noted for eliminating racism, not for inciting pogroms against Jews and cleansing cossacks. His leadership during the jump from an agrarian society to an industrial workforce was singled out as an economic achievement unparalleled in modern times...which was true...even if you factor how many millions died in the collectives that made it possible. Some of the praise, such as when he is lauded for freeing millions of people from oppression, just seems like a sick joke. “People all of the world know Comrade Stalin,” Malenkov tells a packed Red Square, “for being the torch bearer for world peace.” This is such an enormous lie it is not worth a scoff. “Comrade Stalin dedicated his genius to safeguarding peace for the people of all countries,” he continues. The camera does not show the reaction of the Polish delegation to the funeral, who saw their country destroyed by Hitler AND Stalin at the same time. Their political faction exiled for life, their entire officer corps murdered in Katyn forest in a single day. His foriegn policy, continues the speech, was crucial for restraining foreign military aggression. The faces we see during this recitation seem to show what everyone seems to know about this line. That Malenkov, and his entire retinue, is full of shit.
When Lavrenti Beria, leader of the nefarious NKVD and the worst manifestations of the totalitarian one-party state, speaks to the people about the tragic loss of such a friend of the people of the world, we can only imagine what the people of the Soviet Union would say if they knew that Beria kidnapped young girls, including minors, raped them, murdered them, then had their bodies disposed of in the backyard of his dacha. After Beria, Molotov speaks. Molotov, who at Stalin’s command signed a peace treaty with the Nazis and sold the fascists oil and steel to kill Frenchmen and Brits. Molotov who flew all over the world as Stalin’s diplomatic lapdog. Molotov, whose wife was accused by Stalin himself, and who agreed that she should be interrogated, jailed, and then when accused himself, then berated himself “oh, what I have done to Comrade Stalin.” Molotov, who was in jail until the day after Stalin died, spent his time on the podium continuing to suck a dead man’s cock: to our glorious leader. I’m surprised he didn’t use the word ‘genius,’ which was bandied about in the first half of this film as if it were candy; probably used more than the word ‘the.’ Could anyone trust what Molotov said? Could anyone trust anything anyone had said? None of this mattered. Indeed, there was no ‘trust’ in the Soviet Union. Trust was shot in the head in 1917. Trust was just as dead as Comrade Stalin.
The hypocrisy of the time does not take away from the striking motion images of the film: some tightly choreographed, others simply planned by circumstance or patience. The village gatherings no doubt happened. The factory mourning no doubt went as planned. They were of course staged, but a staging that was paired to some sort of reality. The oceans of greenery, made of wreaths of mourning and loss, start as touching expressions of love and end as an absurd overindulgence, almost capitalist in nature. Still, dolly and tracking shots exposing the well laid arrangements were powerful in themselves.
I cannot help but wonder if the filmmakers used Leni Refienstahl’s notorious ode to dictatorship, Triumph of the Will (1935) as a blueprint for this other film of totalitarian stature. The beginning of the film, in which we watch crowds slowly shuffle across plazas, then line in the streets, then queue onto sidewalks, move down hallways, and into the presence of their passed master, is greatly similar to the opening air sequence in which we sense Nuremberg is going to be eventually visited by a God from above. Much like that film, State Funeral showcases an abundance of iconography. Like Hitler who was raised catholic, Stalin came from a heavily orthodox family and considered going into the priesthood (his favorite story of the bible, which churns the stomach of any person of reason, was the Book of Job - feel free to vomit now). Thus like HItler, Stalin knew the power of symbols, and though we are spared the overuse of the hammer and sickle like that of the swastika in the former work, State Funeral does invoke a religious ceremony that worships a cult of personality in the same way. There seems to be a sameness or a one-ness that is similar to Reifenstahl’s work. Though the look is sad rather than full of joy, there is something about the elegiac gaze that is the same in a mind control, politically programmed type of way. This film could be a film of Hitler’s funeral.
The end is solemn enough and the film correctly balances the intent of the contemporary filmmakers versus our understanding of that moment in the past. They are sincerely solemn - at least we think they are. What we make of their solemnity is most likely vastly different. The film closes with a record of Stalin’s crimes: “27 million Soviet citizens were murdered, executed, tortured to death, imprisoned, sent to Gulag labour camps or deported…a further estimated 15 million starved to death.” Then we are solemn. On purpose. With no irony or subversiveness.
State Funeral is a shining example of Soviet filmmaking. There must have been hundreds of cameramen, all of them trained to an ability that is quite frankly very impressive. Nary is there a scene that is out of focus, even inside, with limited lighting. The camera barely moves but what moves during a funeral except for the line passing by? Considering the time period, only eight years after the war, I’d be willing to bet most of not all of these cameramen had experience in the Great Patriotic War in the equivalent of the Signal Corps, and their professionalism paid off. The film stock, definitely of Russian origin, is not as superior as what technicolor and other competitors were doing at the same time, this is true, but it is not a stock to laugh at. The grain is very fine, and the coarseness of the image shows true emotion on the faces of the bereaved. The editors, too, must have done a fantastic job compiling everything together and documenting everything that had been used. Some scenes in color are picked up by the exact same footage in black and white, and it makes me wonder if there were in many circumstances two tripods set up right next to each other. The continuity is that good, and it’s not nearly as distracting as, say, the differing color schemes in Ivan the terrible Part II. Though we cannot ignore the modern producers and editors who slaved (no pun intended) over this project, we should take our hat off to the contemporary Soviet filmmakers who shot and preserved this remarkable footage for us to marvel at. They have a long important lineage dating back to before the revolution, and you can see montage and the Kuleshov effect at work in this great documentary as if in homage to these fine artists.
It’s amazing how relevant this film is to modern times. Many of us concerned citizens in the United States know the former President is 75 years of age and when he runs for re-election in four years he will be 79. In a macabre way, we hope he doesn’t make it. If he is elected, it is quite possible, if not likely, that he dies in office.
The history of our republic has shown a very bipartisan attitude when it comes to recognizing the contribution from the other side of the aisle in a time of grief. Eisenhower died before I was born, but apparently that was the last time a President died about whom no one had a cross word to say. We’d have to wait until the 90’s when the next President died - Nixon - and even then there were liberals that pointed out this was the man who signed the clean air act, the clean water act, who put more trees in North America since before the revolution, who isolated Russia, signed a test ban treaty, limited nuclear arms, the list went on. So you see, Nixon, who was the most hated man on the left, who was the epitome of everything wrong with the political right, even he, disgusting he, earned some street cred - even if it took twenty years. Gerald Ford was despised as the President no one voted for, and who pardoned his partner-in-crime Richard Nixon. When he passed away, I heard my liberal college professors admit to themselves Ford had done what was difficult for our last President to do: put the country first. Ford sacrificed his political future for the good of the nation. He knew he was risking his election and re-election. And he did it anyway. As a someone who went to college and found a job in the 1990s, and as a former member of the center-right, I’ve got a long list of nice things to say at Bill Clinton’s funeral: imagine living in a nation without FMLA, NAFTA, the Mexican bailout just to name a few. And although I detested some aspects of Obama’s legislative agenda, I never once thought the man was trying to destroy our democracy from the inside. Even Jimmy Carter, who had a one term of disaster that rivaled Ford’s, has plenty for all Americans to nod to. All of these men made their own sacrifices. They raised their families under unbelievable scrutiny, and fought opposition parties seemingly geared to only want to smear for the sake of smearing. In grief, their followers deserve their place in the sun. Even George W. Bush, as reviled as he is for the Second Gulf War, for his shared mistakes in handling what should have been a successful domestic agenda, has a list of accomplishments not too many people can shake a stick at. If it were not for George W. Bush, millions more Africans would have died of AIDS. If it were not for George Bush, the banking industry would have capsized and destroyed the housing market where tens of millions of blue collar lower middle class Americans hold their only savings. His medicare booster in his second term and obviously his leadership after September 11 do give credence to a hugely checkered career that is obviously hotly debated. When his turn comes to be placed in the Capitol Rotunda, there will still be plenty of democratic politicians and laymen who can find something good to say about the man, despite their heavy misgivings about most of his policies. But you see, those are just policies.
The only politicians and laymen who will staunchly stand by the bloated corpse of Donald J. Trump will be Fascists, racists, and imbeciles; baskets upon baskets of deplorables who wish for nothing more than the far right dictatorship of Donald J. Trump to push through an agenda that stops all immigration, stops all minorities from voting, stops all funding of social programs save a smattering of social security, and gives carte blanche to massive corporations to do whatever the fuck they want to whoever the fuck they want to make as much money as they want until the end of time. I laughed when critics called W. the ‘Enron Presidency.’ I cried with joy when people called Cheney Darth Vader because he had served as CEO of an energy contractor (not an energy company, assholes). But the followers of Trump will more closely align with the followers we see in State Funeral. This orange real estate con man, a yankee who has bewitched the former Klan and Kappa Alpha Fraternity brothers throughout the South, will have no one with scruples standing next to him. At his state funeral, only the blind, only the faithful, only those willingly suspending their belief system will go to worship a man who told foriegn emissaries to stay at his family’s hotels, who called our Allies in the developing world ‘shithole countries.’ Only deluded evangelicals, or those who know the truth but are lying to others in an attempt to convince themselves that Obama was a harvard trained Muslim spy, will go to a funeral of a man who fucked a porn star in one of his hotels while his wife was pregnant with their child. Only these solid Christians will queue to pay thier repsects to a man who frequently talked, on national television, about fucking his daughter. Only radical militants like the idiotic “3 Percenters” (whose name itself is a created illusion, a fake name about a fake idea), “Oath Keepers,” and other honorably discharged white supremacists will go worship a man who called them ‘losers,’ ‘suckers,’ disparaged Prisoners of War, who got four deferrments himself, and who attacked the parents of a fallen soldier.
In this State Funeral, we will see a decided similarity in the crowds that form at the Capitol and those at Lenin’s tomb, where Stalin’s body stayed on view until 1961. Only the true believers will go to Trump’s funeral, whereas there were plenty of non-believers at Stalin’s. Within a few days of Stalin’s death, the Central Committee of the Communist Party started rolling back measure after measure of oppression. It wasn’t a kinder, gentler, police state, don’t get me wrong, but thousands were released from prison. Thousands came back from the Gulags. Thousands more received state funds denied them. Within two years, the committee started attacking Stalin within the party organ itself, detailing his crimes against the Soviet people. No one was more jaded at the funeral than the leadership that worked for Stalin for twenty years, knew him best, and organized his funeral for the purpose of giving the masses room to breathe, grieve, and come to terms with the death of their oppressor. It was like a wife crying over the dead body of her abusive husband after he dropped of a heart attack and pissed himself. The masses, the deluded masses, showed up in droves. Those who were not oppressed only thought of themselves that way because Stalin had trained them to think that way. This is the genius and the crime of Donald Trump. He redefined agitation propaganda, and cast doubt on everything. Obama’s birth certificate, the electoral process, certain government secrets, open government dialogues with foriegn heads of state; everything. The man created a new language - newspeak - so he could define and describe the world he lived in for the press, and thus the world. And through this description, which he constantly grew and embellished, he created a lie that he and all his followers lived in. They worshipped the lie because it brought them power. With that power they intended to do all things nefarious: voter suppression of minorities, legal suppression of the opposition, de-legitimization of the media. It all reads in shorthand like Mein Kampf. Those are the proud funeral goers of President Trump, the only President since Adams to skip out on the inauguration of his successor. The leaders, the Mitch McConnells, the Kevin McCarthys, the Josh Hawleys, they will have no shame much like Beria, Krushchev, Malenkov. The masses, they will be just as deluded queuing down the national mall as the mournful did in 1953 as they queued down the side of the Kremlin Wall.
I suppose there are more differences between the two than what I can list here, but one striking difference is what we as a society have gained if we are lucky enough to have Trump die before he wins a second term. We might avoid a multinational holocaust like what happened in the Soviet Union. And if we’re going to celebrate anything when that man dies, let’s celebrate that. It doesn’t mean democracy is safe - the Soviet Union was only slightly more safe after Stalin died - but it does mean we have more of a fighting chance. The only thing that could force the situation is an assassination, because nothing moves a hated cause more forward than a martyr. No one knew that better than Stalin. The only martyr allowed in Mother Russia was the Boss. Such a martyr on the right would propel this country closer to an internal war than we have seen since 1865. In that circumstance, there will be no more State Funerals. Only mass graves.