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Casting Stalin as the devil or Antichrist has been a productive technique in Russian literary satire. Postmodern treatments of Stalin by Viktor Erofeev, the Sots artists Komarand Melamid, and the film director Semen Aranovich have begun to reconsider the myth of Stalin's demonism and to confront the dictator's humanity.
Stalin is the primary focus-indeed the obsession-of much of twentieth-century Russian satire, both textual and filmic. The reasons for this satirical preoccupation are quite obvious; Stalin as the author of the purges, collectivization, Gulag and other great evils certainly invites condemnation and mockery. Casting Stalin as the devil or Antichrist has proven particularly productive in Russian satirical practice, for it serves to render him alterior, or radically other.
Iurii Lotman and Boris Uspenskii have argued persuasively that pre-nineteenth-century Russian culture has an essentially binary structure (30-66). It is quite possible to extend their thesis into the contemporary period; we find many examples of ideological, political, and religious polarity in modern history as well. In the post-Stalin period of reconciliation, we can thus see, as grounded in Russian cultural history, the distinction drawn between healthy Russian culture and Stalinism as binary opposites of self and other. The Russian intelligentsia in particular has tended to recreate artistically Stalin and Stalinism as manifestations of otherness. Anxiety of guilt, complicity, and co-optation has been projected in images of Stalin as radically other, the symbolic personification of the intelligentsia's loss of control. The other must incorporate aspects of the self, the categories by which the self is defined, such as nationality, gender identity, or language (Todorov 21). Since the self is traditionally Christian for Russian literature and art, Stalin, cast as the binary opposite, may also be demonic or Antichrist.
As a demonic figure, Stalin becomes an outsider, an interloper and intruder, vis-a-vis Russian culture. Satire thus shows us that Stalin belongs outside the boundaries delineating what is svoi 'one's own'; as the devil or Antichrist, he is made reassuringly chuzhoi 'alien' or 'foreign.' A variety of satirical works participate in this effort to come to terms with Stalin and contribute to the cultural catharsis that went on for several decades in the pre-glasnost period.
While the folkloric "unclean force" (nechistaia sila) and other survivals of pre-Christian Russia colour modern...