Soviet Union a "Tragic Phantasmagoria"

By Thomas A. Sancton

To any Westerner who doubts that things are changing in the Soviet Union, Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance will come as a shock. The 2 1/2-hour film, which was first released in Moscow a year ago and opened in the U.S. last week, is a powerful denunciation of the Stalinist-style police state and all its horrors: personality-cult paranoia, official corruption, institutionalized mendacity, arbitrary arrests and executions, dehumanizing labor camps. That Abuladze was ever allowed to make this film is remarkable. That it has been shown to millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, many of whom greeted it with standing ovations, is astounding. And that the Soviets chose to distribute the work abroad is a shrewd advertisement for that heady mixture of public relations and public confession that Mikhail Gorbachev has popularized under the banner of glasnost.

The film, which Director Abuladze calls a "tragic phantasmagoria," uses allegory, fantasy and surrealism to evoke the terror of a totalitarian system. His central character is Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a provincial town. Varlam combines Stalin's close-cropped haircut, Hitler's mustache and Mussolini's black shirt to embody the image of a universal tyrant. Although the setting and time are undefined -- secret police appear alternately as medieval knights or spear-wielding Roman centurions -- there is no doubt that the real subject is Stalinism.

The action begins with Varlam's funeral, which is soon followed by the appearance of his corpse in the family garden. He is reinterred, but reappears several times before the authorities capture the offending grave robber, a woman whose parents had been arrested and killed by Varlam, and take her to trial. Her testimony, studded with flashbacks and Fellini-like dream sequences, tells the story of Varlam's brutal reign. There are false denunciations, mass arrests and mad ravings by the tyrant, who utters such Newspeak absurdities as "Four out of every three persons is an enemy of the people."

One particularly striking scene depicts the woman's childhood memory of roaming through a lumberyard with her mother in hopes of finding her father's name carved on one of the logs sent there from a labor camp; their search is in vain, but another woman does spot her husband's initials and caresses them tenderly. Another memorable sequence shows the defendant's artist father, dressed only in a white loincloth, hanging by his wrists like the crucified Christ. It is one of several explicit religious images that portray the struggle of good against evil in a way that unfailingly identifies the latter with officialdom and the former with its victims. Lest the viewer miss this point, Varlam appears as the devil in one scene.

Upon concluding her testimony, the defendant vows to continue exhuming Varlam's body because "burying him means forgiving him" -- a thinly veiled call for thoroughgoing de-Stalinization. Varlam's son and political heir, Avel, manages to have the woman locked up in a mental hospital. But Avel's own teenage son denounces him for lying about Varlam's crimes and shoots himself. In a belated act of repentance, Avel digs up the old tyrant's body and throws it from a precipice. The closing scene shows an old woman asking directions to a church. Told that she is on the wrong street, she replies, "What good is a street that doesn't lead to a church?" It is a powerful reinforcement of the film's religious motif.

An established Georgian filmmaker and Communist Party member, Abuladze, 63, began working on the project in 1981. That was during the twilight months of the Brezhnev era, hardly a propitious moment to launch such an iconoclastic work. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who was then serving as Georgia's party leader, is said to have encouraged Abuladze to produce his film under the auspices of the Georgian television network rather than the Moscow-run national film studios. In late 1985 Shevardnadze reportedly arranged to show the film to several Politburo colleagues, including Party Ideologist Yegor Ligachev. Although Ligachev is known as a conservative, he apparently joined the others in approving Repentance for general distribution. A number of similarly outspoken films, books and plays appeared at about the same time, including Anatoli Rybakov's anti-Stalinist novel The Children of the Arbat, which is scheduled to be published in the U.S. next spring by Little, Brown & Co.

Repentance became an overnight sensation in the Soviet Union. It was first shown to select audiences in Georgia and Moscow in October 1986 and began appearing in public cinemas last spring. By the end of August, more than 4 million people had seen it in the capital alone. The movie also began to attract attention abroad, winning the Special Jury Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

! Repentance's success in the Soviet Union is no accident. A population that grew up in the shadow of Stalin's terror must find it both liberating and titillating to see his crimes exposed. For the Gorbachev government, on the other hand, works like Repentance form the cornerstone of a de-Stalinization campaign that both proclaims the lessons of an evil past and seemingly cleanses the current leadership of any direct association with it. In that sense, Gorbachev's insistence on leaving "no blank pages" in Soviet history suggests he has accepted the wisdom of George Santayana's observation that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Still, some of the movie's themes, such as the use of mental hospitals to silence dissidents, are close enough to present Soviet practices to ruffle the complacency of the Kremlin's rulers -- and make their approval of this powerful, disturbing film all the more remarkable.

With reporting by John Kohan/Moscow