Saturday Night at the Movies

The film's plot is hardly new: the time is October 1917, the place is Petrograd, and the Bolsheviks are kicking the stuffing out of Alexander Kerensky's provisional government with the help of the cruiser Aurora, which is firing blanks at the Winter Palace. But what Moscow cinema fans found really new and startling at last week's premiere of Salvo of the Aurora were a couple of the bit players. For in Salvo, after nearly 40 years as an "unperson"--that ideological limbo to which the Soviets assign their villains--Leon Trotsky had returned to the Soviet scene. Also portrayed for the first time in film since his death twelve years ago was Joseph Stalin.

The movie, all three hours of it, clearly reflects the post-Khrushchevian inclination of Brezhnev and Kosygin to make Soviet history more objective and less like a Communist morality play. If anything, Salvo is likely to accelerate that trend. At least it provoked Red Star, the army newspaper, to demand still greater realism in depicting Soviet historical figures. Salvo, complained the paper, portrayed Trotsky as "a midget, whose actions were downright silly. Yet how could such a midget mislead the people?" Obviously, declared Red Star's own hatchetman, "he was an experienced and powerful demagogue"--and should be shown as such. It was also time for the truth about Stalin, who in the film has nothing to say and "just keeps puffing away on his pipe." Huffed Red Star: "The authors evidently felt that historical objectivity has thus been given its due," making it quite clear that the Kremlin thinks the old killer, for all his evil deeds, deserves more than just a quick walk-on cameo for those early years that also shook the world.

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