Part documentary, part interpolative essay, Stalin Is With Us gives voice to those Soviet citizens who still "miss the Boss." With comradely charm, active Stalinists-an elderly school principal, a taxi driver, a Cossack journalist, and a former prosecutor-bare all for director Tofik Shakhverdiev: their longing for a more disciplined era, when love for Him inspired a nation; a chilling inhumanity toward the 20 million who died; and the kind of perfect, twisted logic that says, "How can people say there were no enemies of the people in the 1930s when there are still so many today?" The logic comes full circle in skepticism towards glasnost, even though "the time has come when you can say the Leader was innocent with impunity." Shakhverdiev cleverly integrates archival footage, including films of the show trials of the thirties, as well as his own satiric visual commentary on the Stalin years and the mystique of the man we love to hate. But more than this, his film is a (self-) portrait of the Soviet Union today-where, at a rehearsal of a war-veterans' choir, one gentleman Stalinist accuses another of having turned him in to the KGB in 1947; and an inmate in a prison camp describes his regime as "true Stalin socialism: we march in file. We live simply, but cheerfully." Obviously, perestroika isn't to everyone's taste. --Judy Bloch