So, although it is clear how Stalinism emerged from the initial conditions of the October Revolution and its immediate aftermath, one should not a priori discount the possibility that, if Lenin were to retain his health for a couple of years and deposed Stalin, something entirely different would have emerged - not, of course, the utopia of "democratic socialism," but nonetheless something substantially different from the Stalinist "socialism in one country," the result of a much more "pragmatic" and improvisatory series of political and economic decisions, fully aware of its own limitations. (Lenin's desperate last struggle against the re-awakened Russian nationalism, his support of Georgian "nationalists," his vision of a much more decentralized federation, etc., were not just tactical compromises: they implied a vision of state and society in their entirety incompatible with the Stalinist one.)

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When Sophie Fiennes approached me with the idea to do a "pervert's guide" to cinema, our shared goal was to demonstrate how psychoanalytic cinema-criticism is still the best we have, how it can generate insights which compel us to change our entire perspective. The "pervert" from the title is thus not a narrow clinical category; it rather refers to perverting - turning around - our spontaneous perceptions.

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