Solzhenitsyn was not interested at all in moral or political or biographical terms of reaching an understanding of Stalin's character. He was just interested in countering Soviet propaganda and belittling this figure who had been inflated the way he had been. To portray that regime's operatives, those around Stalin when he died, Beria, Malinkov, Molotov, Khrushchev, Kaganovich, to portray them as venal corrupt politicians like we would find in any major city is not very intelligent. The people who ran the Soviet regime were not geniuses, but they weren't buffoons. And so the film for me falls short as a portrait of the reality there.
Historian and author Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the historical significance of the life and work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's birth.