Reds in the bed - Stalin's sex drive exposed

Murdo MacLeod

He has been worshipped, feared, and even denounced. But now the sexy side of Joseph Stalin is being exposed in a controversial Russian film.

The Soviet tyrant's relationship with a woman 22 years his junior is to be turned into a steamy TV and film drama this autumn.

The production team admits it will provoke a storm of anger in Russia and reignite the debate over the portrayal of one of history's most infamous dictators who sent millions to their deaths. It comes a year after German filmmakers sparked a major row by depicting Hitler as warm and caring in the film Downfall.

Yevo Zhena, or 'His Wife', is being made as a £1.5m four-part blockbuster to be shown on the Rossiya TV Channel this autumn. There are also plans for a feature-film version to be sold internationally.

The drama focuses on Stalin's relationship with his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, and depicts the feared ruler as a passionate lover who missed the climax of the Russian Revolution because he was in bed with Alliluyeva, then a teenager.

The two first met in 1908. He was 30 and she was eight when her father, Sergei Alliluyeva, offered Stalin shelter after he had escaped from prison. Stalin's first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, had died a year earlier after four years of marriage.

Stalin and Alliluyeva married in 1919 and had an often stormy relationship until she mysteriously died in 1932.

The film shows them striking up a romantic attachment in early 1917, after he returned from exile in Siberia. One scene sees Stalin helping the nervous teenager undress, and in another he pulls her into a bath with him.

Even more controversially, the film claims that he missed the storming of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution because he was in bed with Alliluyeva. As they listen to the shooting outside, Stalin casually remarks that the Bolsheviks may or may not have taken power. Yevo Zhena is based on a book published in 2001, called The Only Women, which was based on new material from archives but which dramatised the gaps between what could be proved from research.

The film takes the scholars' view of Alliluyeva's death, saying that she committed suicide after a public row, and dismisses popular conspiracy theories suggesting Stalin murdered her or had her killed.

After Stalin insults her at a banquet, she is shown walking through the Kremlin alone, and then a shot is heard.

Mira Todorovskaya, the co-director, said: "Stalin was a devil and monster, but in our film you can't see that.

"People will say that we have beautified Stalin and made him not as he was in real life. But I think my film will have opponents from both sides."

Todorovskaya said she believed that Alliluyeva helped keep Stalin's behaviour under control, calling her "his second conscience".

Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, who wrote a best-selling book on the Soviet tyrant, Stalin: Court Of The Red Tsar, and who is now researching a volume on Stalin's early life to be published next April, said: "It's not correct to say that he missed out on the Revolution. He didn't help storm the buildings, but that's because he didn't have a military role. He was the editor of Pravda, which was a very important job because the paper was crucial in the days before radio and television.

"The producers are right to dismiss the conspiracy theories about Stalin killing her or having her killed. All the evidence points to her having committed suicide.

"Alliluyeva's death did affect Stalin, although I disagree with the suggestion that she kept him in check or acted as a 'conscience'. He was extremely brutal before she died. But losing her helped make him more paranoid and affected his views of families and spouses, such as imprisoning or torturing wives of suspects."

Dr Andrei Rogatchevski, a lecturer in Russian culture at Glasgow University, said: "It will be very interesting and will spark a lot of debate. There are still some who are nostalgic for the kind of strong leadership which Stalin gave. They don't want the gulags or terror back, but they believe that such a vast country can only be ruled by a strong man like Stalin. They won't like Stalin being portrayed as missing the Revolution to be with his lover.

"Many others in Russia will not like to see a man who caused the death of millions being seen as loving and tender. As well as the terror, many still blame Stalin for the blunders at the beginning of the Second World War which cost millions of lives and allowed the Germans to advance into Russia."

Three years after Stalin's death, the 'excesses' of his rule were denounced by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who announced a policy of "De-Stalinisation."

In the film, Stalin is played by award-winning Georgian actor Duta Skhirtladze, with Olga Budina starring as his young lover.

Budina recently played the part of Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II.

Anastasia's fate has been the subject of even more debate than Alliluyeva, with many believing Anastasia survived the murder of the Imperial family in 1918 and managed to escape to the West.

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Israel: Tourists asked about sex-trade

Michael Freund

When Devorah Leah Bandorenko went with her three-year-old son to the Israeli Embassy here earlier this year to apply for a tourist visa to visit her ailing 85-year-old grandmother in Karmiel, she did not expect to be asked whether she was a prostitute.

"I couldn't believe it," said the Orthodox Bandorenko, who covers her hair with a wig and works full-time at the Chabad-Lubavitch Center in Volgograd.

"The official at the Israeli Consulate told me I need to bring proof that I will not sell my child in Israel, and that I do not plan to work there as a prostitute," she said in an interview in fluent Hebrew, with tears welling up in her eyes.

"They told me that I was young and attractive, so they suspected that I was planning to go to Israel to make some money in a sordid and disgusting way. How can they treat people like this? And just how is someone supposed to prove that they are not a prostitute?"
Six months after submitting her application, Bandorenko has yet to receive a visa.

Although the Foreign Ministry vigorously denies that Russian Jewish women seeking visas at the Moscow embassy are subject to such questioning, Bandorenko, it appears, is not alone in having been confronted in such a manner by Israeli consular officials.

"That is a known thing, it has been going on for some time," said an Israeli official based in Moscow. "The consular staff frequently ask good-looking women seeking to visit Israel to prove that they are not prostitutes, or that they do not plan to work in the sex trade while they are there. It is completely outrageous, extremely insulting and it should be stopped."

"Consular officials do not speak that way, and I can assure you that such things do not happen," Foreign Ministry spokesman Eddie Shapira said.

According to Shapira, who served in Moscow until returning to Jerusalem last year, "Such claims are utterly baseless. Our staff meticulously follows the rules and procedures laid down by the Interior Ministry and by the consular section of the Foreign Ministry."

"Anyone who feels that a consular official has not treated them properly," he said, "can submit a complaint to the Interior Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, and it will be reviewed with the utmost seriousness."

Shapira noted that some 50,000 Russian citizens visited Israel last year, and that the consular staff at the Moscow embassy handled hundreds of requests for visas on a daily basis, largely without incident.

But Inna Chizikova, a Russian Jew with grown children who edits a Jewish community newspaper, told The Jerusalem Post about a similar experience she had when she went to the embassy to apply for a visa to attend her son's wedding in Jerusalem.

"My husband, my mother and I, together with our other son, went to request visas," Chizikova recalled. "Then, in front of my family members, the clerk told me that I was very pretty and asked if perhaps I was going to Israel to make money as a prostitute. My husband thought it was a joke, but for me it was terrible. I felt horrible afterward."

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Sex and the mobile Russian

Besides giving the world vodka and tennis ace Maria Sharapova, Russians are becoming famous for things far removed, like having sex in a moving car.

According to a poll conducted by KRC Research and Goodyear, 25 per cent Russians admitted to making out in a moving vehicle.

The poll also found that Russians, who were voted the worse drivers in over 40 European countries, do not use seatbelts, break speed limits, drive through red lights, drive drunk and have sex while driving more often than other Europeans.

Approximately 36 per cent of Russian drivers admitted to regularly exceeding speed limits, which was the highest rate in Europe, Ananova.com quoted a report from the Delovoi Peterburg newspaper, as saying. Russian natives even talk on their mobile phones while driving more often than in other European countries. And about 30% of those polled in Russia had driven drunk before. It was also found that folks of Russia do not pay enough attention to their physical condition when they are going to take charge of the steering wheel.

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