TV & VIDEO - May 19, 1988

A controversial film debating the leadership of Josef V. Stalin premiered on nationwide Soviet television this week after censors held it back for eight months and its director was reprimanded for putting the nation’s history on public trial. “The Process” candidly criticizes Stalin’s repression of real and imagined political opponents and his mass deportation of people who resisted the spread of Soviet rule in the Baltic and the Ukraine. In the two-hour documentary, Anna Bukharin-Larina, the widow of an early Politburo member executed for disagreeing with Stalin, called Stalin “cunning, perfidious, artful, vindictive,” and said, “I consider him a criminal.”