REVIVING BITTER ANTI-STALIN MEMORIES : ‘REPENTANCE’ PACKS SOVIET THEATERS

MOSCOW —  A new film that exposes the evil of Stalin-type despotism is smashing box-office records in Moscow many weeks after its public debut.

Entitled “Repentance,” it tells through the use of allegory, symbolism and surrealism a chilling story of tyranny. But the message is clear:

“This is our history, the history of our country. This is 1937,” one reviewer said, referring to the peak of Stalin’s Great Terror that saw millions of Soviet citizens executed or sent to prison camps where many more died.

About 3 million people in the Moscow region already have seen the film and others are still jamming movie theaters where it is being shown. Audiences from Leningrad in the west to Magadan in the Siberian far east also are watching with fascination.

Although the movie was placed “on the shelf” by censors for two years, a cultural thaw that is part of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy promoting glasnost , or openness, led to its release. One thousand prints of the film were ordered.

While not everyone is enthusiastic about the phantasmagorical style of the film, directed by Georgian Tenghiz Abuladze, most people understand the boldness of his theme.

While Stalin was denounced at the 20th Communist Party Congress in 1956, his body removed from Lenin’s tomb and his statues torn down throughout the Soviet Union, he was accused only vaguely of “violations of socialist legality” and unspecified mistakes.

The message of “Repentance” for Soviet audiences, however, is that masses of innocent persons were arrested without reason by a paranoid leadership, dispatched to far-away prison camps from which many never came back.

“Of every three people, four are enemies,” the film’s main character, known as Varlam, says. “Yes, yes, don’t be surprised: One enemy is greater in quantity than one friend.” Later, in another chilling note, he says: “One must know how to catch a black cat in a dark room. Even if it isn’t there.”

Reviewer Georgy Karpalov in Pravda noted: “But behind every such ‘cat’ is the broken life of some innocent person, someone’s ruined happiness, someone’s unbearable suffering. The screen seems to swell with grief. . . . “

One of the most memorable scenes in the film shows women and children rushing to a railroad station, hoping to find the names and addresses of their imprisoned husbands and fathers on timber being shipped from the far north where the camps were located.

“Every log represents a ruined human life,” reviewer Ninel Ismailova wrote in the weekly Nedelya. “It will stay with me all my life as a symbol of human misfortune, of defenselessness before evil. Injustice is the worst sorrow; it doesn’t heal.”

The reviewer for Izvestia, Teimuraz Mamaladze, wrote in the official government newspaper that the film is a protest against efforts to bury the past.

“Such a film is needed today,” he wrote. “Its overriding task is to teach a lesson for the future, a lesson to everyone.”

Soviet moviegoers said the heavy promotion of the film through posters and lengthy reviews in the state-controlled media had encouraged discussions of the Stalin era, now rarely talked about in detail.

A few of the reviews identified the main character Varlam as a thinly disguised Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s secret police chief, who carried out mass purges and later was executed after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Director Abuladze insists, however, that his film is about all dictators in history, from the Roman Emperor Nero to the military juntas in Latin America, rather than an indictment of the Stalin era alone. Yet he adds that his childhood memories of the 1930s in his native Georgia influenced him significantly.

“Neither I personally nor my family suffered, but our relatives, our friends and neighbors and all of Georgia, a small country, suffered. The intelligentsia suffered especially. All this had an effect on my consciousness and on my attitude toward everything that happened.”

Abuladze said that “conservative forces” in the state film agency kept his picture from being shown to the public until early this year. When it was released, however, there was a citywide clamor for tickets and 700,000 persons saw it during the first 10 days.

As Vladimir Lakshin wrote, reviewing the film in the weekly “Moscow News”:

“The central question posed by ‘Repentance’ is: Do we need this bitter memory of past errors and crimes to be revived? The film answers it in the affirmative.

“We cannot get anywhere if we forget. We run the risk of once again becoming the victims of tragic errors and undigested experience.”