Jeremy Humphries, the cameraman on Stalin: Inside the Terror, explains how he left his footprints on history.
Russians know the meaning of winter. Dressing before we leave our Moscow hotel each morning is a carefully orchestrated manoeuvre. Thermals first, then a pair of thin salopettes. On top of that goes a good, thick rugby shirt, a pair of cord trousers, three fleeces and two pairs of socks. A pair of Arctic boots is next. A rabbit fur hat and two pairs of gloves later and you are ready to head out.
We are lucky at Lenin's dacha at not having to shoot much outside.
So far, access on this film has been superb. At one archive I held Stalin's love letters in one hand and the lists that determined who he sent to the Gulags in the other.
Here at Lenin's old country residence lie the domestic detritus of the early days of Bolshevism. A heavily worn leather sofa that Stalin had sat on, Lenin's desk, unchanged since he had a photo taken sitting at it reading Pravda. Across the corridor, Lenin's old wheelchair waits under a staircase. A handrail on the stairs, fitted to help the ailing man up to his bedroom, is worn at the end from a hand grasping it a thousand times. A Russian curator lets us walk, sit or look wherever we please in this history buff's paradise.
The curator smiles when our actor playing Stalin, an uncanny look-alike, lies prostrate under my tripod breathing his last. She is more than happy too when Lenin's double passes away in the old man's real bedroom. If this was not surreal enough, the entire crew laughs and jokes, alas in Russian, when I have to stand in Lenin's bath to get my best shot.
Standing in stocking feet I am aware that people used to wait for hours outside Lenin's mausoleum to glimpse his embalmed corpse. Only 50 or so years ago, your average Russian would not have known where Lenin's dacha even was, and here I am a Westerner and non-communist balancing in the revolutionary leader's bath. Then sensing the history around me, I hop out, quickly replace the thermal boots and check that the curator is still smiling.
