How are families created? It’s easy to be born into a family; to inherit an identity; to inherit wealth; to inherit opportunities. To form a family, however, is harder, but necessary for survival.
“The Gift to Stalin,” released in 2008 and directed by Rustem Abdrashev, tells the story of a young Jewish boy who becomes lost without his family but once again finds himself in the Kazakh steppe. The film takes place in 1949, during the Soviet Era and around the time of Stalin’s 70th birthday.
The film begins with young Sasha and his grandfather on a train in the process of being deported from Moscow to Kazakhstan. During this journey, despite Sasha’s best efforts to keep him alive, his grandfather dies. In an attempt to avoid the same fate as his grandfather, Sasha escapes from the train of refugees by laying with the dead who are set to be buried at the next stop. The train stops, the bodies are removed, and the train’s journey continues east.
Upon receiving the dead, an old Kazakh rail worker, Kasym, whose job it is to bury the bodies, finds and rescues Sasha. He brings him back to his village despite warnings by his coworker of the inherent danger Shasha brings to himself and others. Once in the village, he is given a new name, thus representing his new life on the Kazakh steppe. He is known as Sabyr, a Kazakh name that translates to ‘humble.’
He is slow to take to his new life, but he eventually accepts the hand he has been dealt. He finds a new grandfather in Kasym, who gives him advice, watches over him, and disciplines him when he does wrong. He finds a mother figure in Vera, a young woman who is an inmate at ALZHIR, a gulag camp for wives of traitors of the motherland. Sabyr finds a father figure in Ezhik, a Polish doctor, who is secretly in love with Vera. Sabyr finds happiness and love in this new family.
Conflict soon arises between the members of Sabyr’s new family and the Soviet policeman in charge of their village, Bulgabi. Bulgabi abuses his state-authorized power. He bullies the men in the village and rapes the women, including Vera. Because he is an extension of the regime under which they all live, and especially because Ezhik and Vera are already on bad terms with the regime, no one can touch Bulgabi.
All of these factors (hatred toward Bulgabi, Ezhik’s love of Vera, and Sabyr’s ‘illegal’ presence in the town) combine as the central point of conflict in the film.
A recurring plot line in the film is that of Stalin’s upcoming birthday. The task set out for the youth of the USSR is to give Stalin a gift, with the best gift receiving a prize. Sabyr participates in this contest with the imagined prize being the release of his parents who were taken from him in Moscow. Unbeknownst to him, however, his parents have already been killed.
“The Gift to Stalin” emphasizes the destruction of family in the Soviet Era as well as the will of those affected by tragedies to continue their search for inner peace. The destruction of family is ever present. For example, in the first scene, Sabyr’s grandfather dies as a refugee on a train, a situation that they are put in because of the arrest of his parents. Another example is alluded to by Vera’s reason for being in the Kazakh steppe. As a prisoner of ALZHIR, she is jailed explicitly because she has a family; because she is closely associated with an enemy of the state. By the end of the film, as is common among plots connected with love, another family faces destruction. However, despite this pain, family and a search for inner peace prevail. In deciding to sneak out of the train of refugees, Sabyr implicitly continued his search for inner peace, knowing that happiness could not be found at the end of his journey on the train. It’s a deeply moving decision as well, given that the implications of his actions are that he truly has nothing to lose. Ezhik is also searching for inner peace through a romance with Vera, and it seems that by bringing Sabyr into his life, Kasym is trying to fill a void left in his heart.
This film reminds its audience of all that could be lost in Soviet times. All of the characters are stripped down to their bare bones: no family, no loved ones, and ultimately, no power over their own decisions. However, despite these injustices, they are able to find solace in each other. They are able to find happy moments in circumstances of extreme isolation and poverty. In the end, a gift to Stalin provides false hope where hope is not needed; it is a distraction from the real source of happiness.
