The political significance of 'Repentance'; In re. arsoys' user review

The user arsoys has made a rather scathing review of this film, and it happens to be the one that pops up on the main film page.

First let me say that I understand why the reviewer might feel indifferent to the tired trope of totalitarian oppression. It is of course one of Hollywood's sappier and "purple" genres. But this is not a Hollywood film. What might be lost to viewers today (and perhaps to this particular reviewer in 1990) is the extraordinary political significance of the film when it came out in the USSR. Released in 1984 on the eve of Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost reforms, the film reopened the Stalin question for the first time since Krushchev was removed from power in 1964. The dead mayor Aravidze is of course the Stalin figure, and the constant reappearance of his corpse is an entreaty to Soviet society (and more importantly, to Soviet leadership) to acknowledge and deal with the terrible legacy of Stalin's regime, under which tens of millions died due to farm collectivization and political purges. Moreover, the film's surreal and phantasmagorical style is an attempt to recreate the conditions of living under the Stalin regime (and to some extent, under the Brezhnev regime), which were indeed surreal and phantasmagorical.

The film's message is simple: you cannot bury the past. And it is in the atmosphere of this principle during the late 1980s that the last remnants of the Soviet totalitarian system were dismantled. The USSR soon thereafter collapsed.

For more reading on the film's historical context, see Martin Malia, "The Soviet Tragedy" (1994) -- he gets everything wrong about the Revolution, but the second half of the book on Reform Communism and the fall of the regime is excellent.