Sex With Stalin, a newly released game by the independent Russian developer Georgiy Kukhtenkov, is incredibly boring. That’s too bad, because traveling back in time to seduce Joseph Stalin is a truly depraved idea. It promises subversive heterodoxy and cutting satire. Even just taking him for a spin through rooms that are most remarkable for their leather accessories promised at least some sort of excitement. But, though the game holds itself out as a transgressive thrill, what you get instead is a PowerPoint presentation inviting you to invest in the game creator’s incoherent ideological timeshare.
It didn’t have to be this way. As the British satirist Armando Iannucci so ably demonstrated, Stalin remains a fertile subject for reflective, meaningful, absurdist comedy. And Stalin has long been an object of romantic and carnal fascination. The Soviet archives contain thousands of letters from women to the dictator describing their fantasies about him. Now in the digital age, an edited picture of a young, hot Stalin routinely resurfaces for fresh rounds of reluctant fans to comment on how incongruous it is that someone so hot could be so evil.
