Sergei Loznitsa's extraordinary reconstruction of Joseph Stalin's funeral in the documentary State Funeral (available on Mubi.com) is a study of many things. Filmed across the Soviet Union for over forty hours, the material offers a disturbing insight into the intimate relationship between dictators and the societies that produce them. It throws up clues about why large numbers of people remain indifferent to horrific crimes committed by dictatorships.
History bears out that continued and shrill ideological propaganda—whether of the Left or the Right—creates interdependence between people and the very same dictators at whose hands the people suffer, directly or indirectly.
State Funeral is an artefact of the past as much as it is an observation of the contemporary. Though confined to the last rites of Stalin, on a broader level, the film offers us troubling and prescient insights into the psychology of societies in the thrall of dictators.
Unaccompanied by voiceover narration or talking heads, the footage captures faces of thousands of mourners lined up in an orderly procession, filing past Stalin's coffin. Many of them gazing into the camera and weeping, an array of apparatchiks delivering deadening speeches, deifying the dead leader and the party. Footage of scenes of ceremonial mourning in town after town, city after city, loudspeakers carrying emotional voices urging people to gather in town squares produces a surreal atmosphere. The people gathered seem, at times, not human but zombies or puppets strung on strings.
In her review of the film, Sheila O' Malley writes, "for those who find it hard to comprehend why, for example, North Koreans erupted into a frenzy of public mourning in 2011 after the death of Kim Jong Il, who wonder whether or not all that weeping and wailing was really real, understanding how propaganda works is essential."
The history of crimes committed by Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party has been publicly known for some time now. With the exception of party loyalists, few question the authenticity of these accounts. Such revelations have made airy dismissals of incarceration, fake trials, killings and starvation deaths—once labelled "bourgeois propaganda"—less easy. A note at the end of the documentary gives an idea of the extent of these crimes: "According to historical research, over 27 million Soviet citizens were murdered, executed, tortured to death, imprisoned, sent to Gulag labour camps, or deported during Stalin's rule. A further estimated 15 million starved to death."
But State Funeral is not about Stalin's crimes. It is about the soulless cultures produced by totalitarian regimes and embodied in their leaders. The film nudges viewers to contemplate the deeper societal conditions that facilitate the emergence of dictators. Once such figures take hold of popular imagination, their legacies tend to endure long after the progenitors are gone.
The film asks one to consider how the psychological effects of continuous exposure to propaganda can be undone. It asks one to think about the hypnotic spells demagogues cast on people, leaving a lasting imprint on the minds of people.
In an interview at the end of State Funeral, Loznitsa makes several significant observations. "The thought I wanted to express in this film is simple," he says: "Stalin is allegorical of all these people, who have a little Stalin in them, who share all these outlooks, and who compose little bricks of this apparatus of totalitarian human destruction." People, Loznitsa goes on to suggest, follow like "mice follow the piper, the one who plays the pipe, to their doom."
A systematic erasure of individual conscience is an important way of producing a collective hypnosis-like state. Dictatorships, past and present, have dehumanised people. There are many ways to render a person non-human. The core of this debilitating agenda lies in intimidating and subjecting dissidents to the harshest penal strictures. This includes long years in prison following flimsy or trumped-up charges.
In his book, Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, journalist Joshua Yaffa writes about Perm-36, a notorious Gulag prison launched in 1943 to jail those Stalin perceived as enemies of the state. The Gulag camps, Yaffa observes, "amounted to a death sentence."
Nor is there anything special about Stalin's brand of authoritarianism. Dictatorships are global, and dictatorial tendencies can take hold even in democracies. "In that sense, this film is not about the past. It is about how seductive this form of power is in general, including for the masses, who are magnetised by this form and are, at the same time, sacrificial animals to this form," says Loznitsa in the interview.
In India, there has been an alarming escalation in the number of people imprisoned for political reasons. Most of them, implicated in the Bhima Koregaon and northeast Delhi violence cases, face outlandish charges under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The seriously ill, elderly prisoners, are routinely denied bail sought on medical grounds and disallowed from visiting their families on losing loved ones. The most recent victim of such cruelty, Father Stan Swamy, a tribal rights activist, died in police custody this July. Despite urgent pleas, the Jesuit priest, suffering from Parkinson's disease and cancer, was repeatedly denied bail.
Sometimes, by analysing the darkness surrounding dictatorships through the prism of the individual personalities of dictators, we overlook larger patterns. While individuals do play a critical role in moulding politics and society, peoples' (active or passive) willingness to endorse or look away from violations of other peoples' rights fosters the conditions for dictatorship.
(Monobina Gupta is the author of 'Left Politics in Bengal' and 'Didi: A Political Biography')
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.
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