An Unlikely Stalin but a Great Actor

Veteran film actor Aleksei Petrenko would not have been my first choice to play "the Whiskered One". He's too tall. The real Stalin was about 5'5"

Petrenko's greatest movie role was of another legendary figure in Russian history: Grigory Rasputin. The picture was **Agonia**, released in about 1982 both in the West and in the Soviet Union during a "thaw".

Reportedly **Agonia** was actually made ten years earlier but not allowed to be seen because of its mildly sympathetic portrait of Czar Nicholas II. As Rasputin the religious mystic from a village in Siberia who exercised such evil power over the Czarina, Petrenko was really superb, giving the character a flesh and blood existence rarely realized in a film about a historical personage.













["We have all strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others./"]
--La Rochefoucault