(This entry is an
offshoot of the previous entry, which mentioned Stalin’s filmography.)
For some reason (I think
it was an oversight), Stalin’s filmography skips Ivan the Great with his
two-headed eagle, jumping from St. Alexander Nevsky straight to Ivan Grozny,
and then to Peter the Great.
Stalin, curiously, saw
himself as a royal reincarnation of Ivan IV and Peter I, and lived his life
accordingly. Consequently, whatever I have to say in this section about these
two monarchs will be closely connected to Stalin, and fall chronologically into
Stalin’s time frame. But one special point about Ivan Grozny is about to be
made here, and it revolves around the special significance of the name Grozny,
meaning awesome and also fear-inspiring.
In the movie Ivan
Grozny, an exceptional dialogue takes place between two Russian noblemen,
during the coronation of Tsar Ivan in the Kremlin:
“Will they
(foreigners) respect us?” asks one of them, looking at the imposingly stern figure of the Tsar.
“Let them fear
us. Where there is fear, there will be respect!” replies the other one,
instantly catching the drift of the question.
One may argue that such
reasoning is nonsense, and that fear is actually the opposite of respect, but
to no avail. In so far as the Russians themselves are concerned, the little
dialogue contains the blueprint of Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War
era. The whole Red Scare thing, culminating in Khrushchev’s legendary “We shall bury you,” was never so much about
Soviet supremacy and aggression, as it was about respect!
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