Joseph Stalin

Using hours of found footage, ‘State Funeral’ revisits the funeral of Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin, offering “a damning critique of a… disastrous cult of personality.”

Almost a century after Stalin’s repressions, Russians complain that the atmosphere of Stalin’s hangmen seems to be returning.

As we struggle to defeat a new, lethally pervasive enemy, this is a moment to understand that enduring victory is less a moment than a process.

First they had to get rid of the Jew. Then the dictators could make their devils’ pact allowing Hitler’s blitzkrieg to begin. A lesson in the danger of tyrants and their mania.

Schoolteachers, archeologists, linguists and mathematicians worked on the Venona project breaking unbreakable Soviet code from WWII. They were heroes. But some had deep regrets.

Was a top State Department aide truly a Soviet spy? Or did Richard Nixon and the right find a convenient victim?

Igor Gouzenko was a lowly Soviet cipher clerk when he turned the world order upside down in 1945. Nobody could have predicted the espionage hysteria his defection would unleash.