3:AM Top 5: Alan Kelly
Alan Kelly [centre] joins 3:AM as film editor, where he’ll be curating the ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’ spot. He has worked for a number of magazines, including Film Ireland, Pretty Scary, Penny Blood, Bookslut et al. Alan plays Brian Jones in Paul Ward’s Fur Coats and No Knickers, which premiered at the GAZE festival, […]
The Perverted Logic of High Stalinism
To convey this Szalay’s narrative switches between Aleksandr’s type-written memoir and third person in the unfolding present. The former relocates us in the Stalinist period, and its aftermath. To the purges, the manoeuvres, and the making and breaking of marriages, bounded by a country he never leaves. It begins when the earlier Bolshevik battles have been settled and state building, purging and personal advance rule. At a time in the 1930s when he joined the Feliks Dzerzhinsky OGPU Higher School in Moscow. Then the “making of Communism was something sacred for us.” Marxism, for these enthusiasts, was close to a “language of faith” of a “new heaven.” This jarring description — to say the Author knows that Marxism-Leninism was a cover for a religious commitment — reinforces an equally heavy-handed justification of killing for political, or rather millennialist, ends.
Andrew Coates reviews David Szalay‘s The Innocent.