Produced by HBO and directed by Ivan Passer, it tells the story of Stalin's rise to power until his death and spans the period from 1917 to 1953.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Joseph Stalin, recounts her father returning from his Siberian exile to enlist in World War I, but being rejected for service.

Stalin continues to fight against the tsar, and in 1917, stands at the train platform with his comrades awaiting the return of Vladimir Lenin.

Stalin begins dekulakization and crushes all resistance with the secret police which undergoes several internal purges, eventually being headed by Lavrentiy Beria.

He pushes ahead with a massive industrialization of the Soviet Union with ever new large-scale projects in order to develop the country into a world power.

After the assassination, he uses show trials to stage the Great Purge, killing and imprisoning many of his critics and former allies, who are forced to denounce each other to save themselves.

Svetlana Alliluyeva visits her father's body lying in state, while the film notes that Stalin's crimes caused the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens.

[5] Only the chairman of the cable channel Home Box Office (HBO) Michael J. Fuchs, who had considered making a film about Stalin, agreed to take on the project.

It took two more years of research with the assistance of Soviet officials specialising in Stalin's era to access to archives and historical recordings, to write the script.

[9] Duvall had turned down the offer to play Stalin in Andrei Konchalovsky's feature film The Inner Circle three months earlier, which is said to have been due to different salary expectations.

Taking into account the different parts of the skin, the right colours, wig, nasal prosthesis,[12] false eyebrows and moustache, he eventually accomplished the task.

[15] Well aware of the propaganda value that could be made of the film against opposition critics,[16] the filmmakers were promised all support and invited back to Moscow three days after the attempted coup was over.

Having worked three days past the deadline and feeling cheated out of $13,000, Jarrico contacted the Writers Guild of America's legal department to arbitrate the dispute.

[19] Duvall surmises that to portray the dictator accurately, he had to consider the role from Stalin's point of view, in that he was nothing more than a normal person who "gets up in the morning, puts on his socks and shoes, brushes his teeth, and goes to work".

[20][10] He imagined Stalin as a Shakespearean character who "saw everywhere only deception, plotting, and perfidy", practicing "in front of a mirror to appear dismissive, stoic or passive".

[1] Duvall met with several historians,[19] including former general Dmitry Volkogonov, who gave him the key to interpreting Stalin's "blocked conscience".

However, an elderly Russian lady suggested to Ormond that she play a little more apathetically, since Alliluyeva would also have suffered psychological damage when realising that her ideals were in vain.

[25] Filming began in October 1991 and was shot exclusively in the Soviet Union at several original locations, including in Stalin's Kuntsevo Dacha,[3][26] prisons,[5] the Kyiv railway station[7] and for the first time ever, the Kremlin.

The KGB also showed little cooperation; for example, the film crew, consisting of 25 members and their equipment, had to wait more than seven hours before clearing security to enter the Kremlin.

[5] On December 21, 1991, four hours after the Soviet Union had dissolved with the signing of the Alma-Ata Protocol, the final scene was shot at Stalin's dacha.

Nikolai Pavlov, a member of the opposition leadership committee of the National Salvation Front, strongly criticized the film on the grounds that it "oversimplified everything" and there was nothing left of Stalin except a "dissolute sadist and executioner craving for power".

Tom Shales of The Washington Post praised the "impressive aspects" and "powerful scenes" of the film[28] while Lon Grahnke labelled it a "formidable epic".

He did, however, commend Duvall, who was "wrapped under acrylic makeup" and "caught in an unrelentingly evil role between The Godfather and Potemkin [...] trying to humanize Stalin".

[33] According to Variety magazine's Tony Scott, Passer's "impressive directing" and Duvall's superb acting, who as a result of the mask had to "convey essences by using shrewd body language", meant the film could fully draw on Stalin's "ruthlessness, his manipulations, [and] his disregard for friendship”, but also claimed that the attempt to understand the Georgian despot through the film failed.

He praised Duvall for struggling to find a "spark of humanity in a cold-blooded creature" and despite his comparable "passive acting" is still "more interesting than his" fellow actors.

[29] Rick Kogan said in the Chicago Tribune that the film failed to depict enough attention to Leon Trotsky and World War II, and therefore couldn't fully present Stalin and the "monster in the man".

He also writes that the film's attempt to compress long drawn-out events to create "a more intimate, and therefore more chilling portrait" was "misguided" and only partially successfully.

He praised Duvall's "mesmerizing performance" and saw Stalin's wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, as "most tragic victim" as she is the only person to whom he is devoted and shows humanity.

[23] "The film is worth watching just for Duvall's acting," Fred Kaplan writes in the Boston Globe, because the rest was just "absolutely stupid" and "trivial".

[30] In Entertainment Weekly, Michael Sauter opined that Duvall "exhibits a dominant presence as Comrade Stalin" but the human behind it remains hidden "under all the tons of makeup".