Even in post-Stalinist times, local political committees often intervened in matters of intimacy, divorce, and abuse. Partners lived in fear that their relationships might be fodder for political persecutions and that their pillow talk might be overheard or revealed. In Stalin’s own life, the unexplained suicide of his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva was surrounded by political and sexual rumor.Įven intimate life couldn’t escape Stalinism. Where they railed against the corpulent excess of the Romanovs, Stalin tolerated Lavrentiy Beria’s sadism. Where revolutionary Bolsheviks had decriminalized homosexuality, Stalin leveraged accusations of homosexuality against his political enemies. The specific scenario of sexual adventure is itself a tantalizing contrast to Stalin’s repressive paranoia. Now in the digital age, an edited picture of a young, hot Stalin routinely resurfaces for fresh rounds of reluctant fans to comment on how incongruous it is that someone so hot could be so evil. The Soviet archives contain thousands of letters from women to the dictator describing their fantasies about him. And Stalin has long been an object of romantic and carnal fascination. As the British satirist Armando Iannucci so ably demonstrated, Stalin remains a fertile subject for reflective, meaningful, absurdist comedy. But, though the game holds itself out as a transgressive thrill, what you get instead is a PowerPoint presentation inviting you to invest in the game creator’s incoherent ideological timeshare. Even just taking him for a spin through rooms that are most remarkable for their leather accessories promised at least some sort of excitement. It promises subversive heterodoxy and cutting satire. That’s too bad, because traveling back in time to seduce Joseph Stalin is a truly depraved idea. Sex With Stalin, a newly released game by the independent Russian developer Georgiy Kukhtenkov, is incredibly boring.
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