L'Ombre de Staline

Sixty years after his death, the cult of Joseph Stalin, one of the cruellest dictators in the history of mankind, has been revived by the Russians who, ironically, suffered so much at his hands. The film director seeks to solve the mystery of this ambivalence. Through the work of historians and volunteers of the human-rights organisation Memorial over the past twenty-five years, he tells how, by mitigating the sense of terror in history, Stalin’s ghosts are not only haunting minds and the powers that be, but they are blocking democratization attemps. By gathering testimonials from the last survivors of the Gulag, the purpose of the film is to contribute to the discussion on the difficult, yet necessary task of deconstructing the totalitarian system, which culminated in the twentieth century in the USSR and elsewhere, in order to perhaps finally learn how to avoid falling into its traps…