Red Monarch | |
---|---|
Directed by | Jack Gold |
Written by | Charles Wood |
Produced by | David Puttnam |
Starring | Colin Blakely David Suchet David Kelly Carroll Baker David Threlfall |
Cinematography | Mike Fash |
Distributed by | Film4 Productions |
Release date | 16 June 1983 (UK) |
Running time | 100 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Red Monarch is a 1983 British television film, starring Colin Blakely as Joseph Stalin. It is directed by Jack Gold and features David Suchet as Lavrentiy Beria and David Threlfall as Stalin's son Vasily. [1]
Red Monarch is a comedy based on The Red Monarch: Scenes From the Life of Stalin , a collection of short critical essays by the Russian dissident and former KGB agent Yuri Krotkov. The film depicts Soviet politics and the interplay between Stalin and his lieutenants, particularly Beria, during the last years of Stalin's rule. The reading of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's "The Heirs of Stalin" [2] in the final scene supposedly warns that the threat of totalitarianism is constantly present.
Goldcrest Films invested £553,000 in the film and earned £292,000 making them a loss of £261,000. [3]
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Bolshevik and Soviet politician, Marshal of the Soviet Union and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security, serial rapist, and chief of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) under Joseph Stalin during the Second World War, and promoted to deputy premier under Stalin in 1941. He officially joined the Politburo in 1946. Beria was the longest-serving and most influential of Stalin's secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after the war. Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, he was responsible for organising purges such as the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and officials.
Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko was a Soviet and Russian poet. He was also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, publisher, actor, editor, university professor, and director of several films.
Vasily Konstantinovich Blyukher was a Soviet military commander and Marshal of the Soviet Union.
Vasil Pavlovich Mzhavanadze was a Georgian Soviet politician who served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Georgian SSR from September 1953 to September 28, 1972 and a member of the CPSU's Politburo from June 29, 1957 to December 18, 1972. Dismissed after a corruption scandal, he was replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze.
Nikolai Petrovich Starostin was a Soviet footballer and ice hockey player, and founder of Spartak Moscow.
Gaioz Devdariani was a prominent Georgian revolutionary, Soviet politician, member of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences and a victim of the Great Purge of 1937.
Colin George Blakely was a Northern Irish actor. He had roles in the films A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and Equus (1977).
Nahum Isaakovich Eitingon, also known as Leonid Aleksandrovich Eitingon, was a Soviet intelligence officer, who gained prominence through his involvement in several NKVD operations, including the assassination of Leon Trotsky, the orchestration of partisan movements during World War II, and atomic espionage. He has been described by Yevgeny Kiselyov as one of the organisers and managers of the state terrorism system under Joseph Stalin and later a victim thereof. He may have been a great-cousin of Max Eitingon, though this has been disputed.
The Mingrelian affair, or Mingrelian case, was a series of criminal cases fabricated in 1951 and 1952 in order to accuse several members of the Georgian SSR Communist Party of Mingrelian extraction of secession and collaboration with the Western powers.
Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin was a Soviet secret police official who served as the chief executioner of the NKVD under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolay Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria.
Between October 1940 and February 1942, in spite of the ongoing German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Red Army, in particular the Soviet Air Force, as well as Soviet military-related industries were subjected to purges by Joseph Stalin.
Mikhail Vasilyevich Zimyanin was a Belarusian Soviet partisan, politician, and diplomat who served as the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda, the official publication of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, from 1965 to 1976. Afterwards, he was appointed to the party's secretariat. He retired on 28 January 1987 for "health reasons".
The Fall of Berlin is a 1950 Soviet war and propaganda film, in two parts separated in the manner of a serial. It was produced by Mosfilm Studio and directed by Mikheil Chiaureli, with a script written by Pyotr Pavlenko and a musical score composed by Dmitri Shostakovich. Portraying the history of the Second World War with a focus on a highly positive depiction of the role Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin played in the events, it is considered one of the most important manifestations of Stalin's cult of personality, and a noted example of Soviet realism. After De-Stalinization, the film was banned in the Eastern Bloc for several decades.
The Battle of Stalingrad is a 1949 two-part Soviet war film about the Battle of Stalingrad, directed by Vladimir Petrov. The script was written by Nikolai Virta.
Aleksandre Mirtskhulava or Aleksandr Iordanovich Mirtskhulava was a Georgian politician who was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Georgian SSR from 14 April to 20 September 1953.
Bogdan Zakharovich Kobulov served as a senior member of the Soviet security- and police-apparatus during the rule of Joseph Stalin. After Stalin's death he was arrested and executed along with his former chief and patron Lavrentiy Beria.
The Death of Stalin is a 2017 political satire black comedy film written and directed by Armando Iannucci and co-written by David Schneider and Ian Martin with Peter Fellows. Based on the French graphic novel La Mort de Staline (2010–2012), the film depicts the internal social and political power struggle among the members of Council of Ministers following the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953. The French-British-Belgian co-production stars an ensemble cast that includes Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend, Jason Isaacs, Olga Kurylenko, Michael Palin, Andrea Riseborough, Dermot Crowley, Paul Chahidi, Adrian McLoughlin, Paul Whitehouse, and Jeffrey Tambor.
"The Plot to Kill Stalin" was an American television play broadcast on September 25, 1958, on the CBS television network. It was the first episode of the third season of the anthology television series Playhouse 90. Delbert Mann was the director, and the cast included Melvyn Douglas as Joseph Stalin, Eli Wallach as Stalin's personal secretary, and Oskar Homolka as Nikita Khrushchev. It was nominated for two Sylvania Television Awards: as the outstanding telecast of 1958 and for Douglas as outstanding actor in a television program.
Note: Except where otherwise stated, the date is that on which the individual was executed by shooting.
Wolf Messing: Who Saw Through Time is a Russian TV series about fate of Wolf Messing, based on the novel of the same name by the screenwriter Eduard Volodarsky. by the Russia-1 TV channel. The series premiered on the Russia-1 on November 15, 2009.