Anybody here seen it?

I recommend it highly.

Found it on Netflix. Will watch it tonight.

Thanks

It was a scream. Well, Beria screamed ...

Just finished it. Excellent!

Fun plugging the current players in to the various roles.

Mrs. pj and I watched it yesterday. I had seen it 1.8 times before (I started watching it on an airplane, but we landed before it was over, so I watched it all the way through on the flight back home).

The story takes several historical liberties. Beria was not the head of the NKVD at the time Stalin died and three months elapsed between his arrest and his trial and immediate execution (along with six others). The plane crash that killed all but one member of the SU hockey team was a couple years before. However, it seems the opening episode with the concert broadcast over Radio Moscow did happen.

Still, it is an important lesson in the dangers of Cult of Personality, especially when the personality is vile and unhinged.


One of my college Russian professors told a story about how years earlier he was at a small US college and a package arrived in the mail. It was addressed to "all holders of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia". It contained a printed page, a length of string, and a cover letter. The cover letter said that there was an error in the encyclopedia. The recipient was to open to a certain page, lick the string thoroughly and hold it along the spine edge of that page until it fell out, then paste the replacement page in its place. The replacement page had an usually long and detailed article on the Bering Sea. Unusually. Long. And... Detailed.

Beria had become an unperson.

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:

Fun plugging the current players in to the various roles.

I'd be interested to hear who you came up with.


Well, Vasily and Svetlana are pretty easy to map.

Bill Barria?

So many people could be Molotov. He was loyal to Stalin to his death at age 96-ish, just before the fall of the SU. (Of all of the people in that slice of history, he is the only one whose name has become part of an everyday expression... but not for something he created.)

Malinkov -- the veep? The legal successor, but not a successful successor.

It will be interesting to see who becomes Kruschev -- the new leader and the one who tries to return the party and country to a state of humanity and a path of progress. I see no one in I-1's inner circle who is ready to do that, but I can only hope there is someone in the GOP who can step forward.

Zhukov -- Maybe Mattis. Someone who can actually put country above party. If I were pres, he would be my choice for SecDef.