Saturday, June 23, 2018

The Death of Stalin - Banned in Russia


In October last year I heard about a “dark comedy” that was coming out called The Death of Stalin.  Much had been said about the movie during Brian Whitmore's Power Vertical podcasts.  I had been looking for when I could see the movie in theaters, but alas it wasn’t in the cards for residents of Northwest Florida.  The movie never made it here, so I had to wait.  Two weeks ago, my wait finally ended when I saw that it was available on iTunes. Being the Russian/Soviet history wonk that I am, I bought it and downloaded it.  Fortunately for me, the movie lived up to the hype. 

The movie doesn’t pretend to be historically accurate. However, when I saw the movie I couldn’t help but be reminded of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Some details captured in the movie were documented in Montefiore’s book, some of which include:

-        Stalin’s love of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23;
-        The color of Stalin’s dacha in Kuntsevo [dark green];
-        The giving of a bouquet of flowers to Beria’s rape victims after the deed is done;
-        Stalin’s love of Western movies and his Politburo having to endure late-night showings of them;
-        The late-night drinking and general buffoonery of Stalin’s Politburo for Stalin’s amusement [including the tomato Beria put in Khrushchev’s pocket];

As the movie begins, the NKVD is doing what it does best – the knocks on the door in the middle of the night when people were being taken away for crimes, real or imagined.  While people were being arrested in the middle of the night, there was a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, to which Stalin listened.  When the performance was over, Stalin wanted a recording of the performance.  This was where the fun in the movie began.  When told the performance wasn’t recorded, the station manager had a fit.  He had to keep whatever audience was left from leaving the building, and he dispatched his assistant to round up people from the streets to fill the auditorium, so the acoustics would be the same as what Stalin heard on the radio.  When the pianist [Olga Kurylenko] refused to play again [her family was executed by Stalin], the conductor fainted and couldn’t be revived.  The radio people had to find another conductor.  When they found one, they woke him up in the middle of the night.  Since this sort of thing was happening to his neighbors, he assumed he too was being arrested.  But they made their apologies and brought him to the radio station.  He didn’t have time to change – he conducted the orchestra while still wearing his pajamas.  As the station master handed the recording to an awaiting NKVD goon, Kurylenko’s character slipped a note into the record jacket.  The note said:

Josef Vissarionovich Stalin –
You have betrayed our nation and destroyed its people.
I pray for your end and ask the Lord to forgive you.
Tyrant!

Stalin broke out laughing.  But as he was laughing, he coughed, uttered an expletive and crashed to the floor with a ‘thud’ that his door guards heard.  They knew Stalin’s habits.  They didn’t want to go to prison for disturbing Stalin.  But there he was, lying on the floor, having been felled by a stroke.

My feeling is that Iannucci must have assumed the people who would watch this film were Russian/Soviet history buffs like me.  When Stalin had his stroke and there is a need for a doctor to treat him, Beria quipped that it was too bad all the competent doctors were locked up [a reference to Stalin’s ‘Doctor’s Plot’]. Iannucci got this point right as well – Stalin pissed himself when he stroked out.  There was a point toward the end of the movie as Beria is being arrested and taken to “trial”, Malenkov insisted that Beria get a fair trial.  Khrushchev reminded him of Marshal Tukhachevsky and how he met his own fate unfairly in 1937.  If you weren’t well read in Russian/Soviet history, you wouldn’t get the reference, hence my conclusion about Iannucci’s target audience.  These events took place 65 years ago.  It seems to me that many people can’t remember things that happened last year.

What is accurately depicted is the mediocrity with which Stalin surrounded himself.  Any potential successor with any brains could possibly replace Stalin while Stalin was still breathing, so Stalin would eliminate him.  The likes of Malenkov, Bulganin, Mikoyan, and Kaganovich weren’t exactly what one would call “the best and the brightest”.  But at least they knew how to stay alive.  In the movie, Khrushchev would do this by having his wife write down every night what did and didn’t make Stalin laugh. Malenkov was so scared shitless he couldn’t remember who was alive and still in Stalin’s good graces and who was dead and discredited. The period between Stalin’s death and that of Beria [nine months] is compressed into a single week. Armando Iannucci doesn’t bother with making his actors adopt phony Russian accents. The only “Russian” accent one hears in the movie comes from Olga Kurylenko [I know, she’s Ukrainian]. 

Three characters stand out as having a clue – Simon Russell Beale’s Beria, Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev, and Jeremy Isaac’s Zhukov.  Beale’s Beria is ruthless.  He relishes his role as Stalin’s most-willing executioner.  He gives his henchmen tips on how to kill the detainees. He makes no bones or apologies for having sex with wives willing to “do anything” to save their husbands [he was a serial rapist and pedophile]. He’s the first one to seize on Stalin’s incapacitation [and eventual death] as his opportunity to grab power. When he finds an unconscious Stalin laying in a pool of his own piss, he wastes no time in going through Stalin’s pockets to find the keys to the places where Stalin kept the execution lists. Buscemi’s Khrushchev isn’t quite as quick as Beale’s Beria to make a grab for the brass ring, but it doesn’t take him long to realize his survival depends on outmaneuvering Beria.  Once Khrushchev has this epiphany, he moves quickly to gain the support of Kaganovich [who asked him “how can you plot and run at the same time?”], Bulganin and Mikoyan [both after he lied about having Malenkov’s support against Beria], and Zhukov.  Isaac’s Zhukov isn’t afraid of anybody, most especially Beria [“I fooked Germany. I think I can take a flesh lump in a fookin’ waistcoat”.]  Both Beria and Khrushchev try to curry favor with Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva.  Vasily Stalin is an Air Force general who owed his position to his last name, and was also a drunken fool whom nobody takes seriously.

As the Politburo stood vigil over Stalin’s corpse in the Hall of Columns, Molotov asked “who invited the bishops?”  Since Molotov was portrayed by Michael Palin, I had flashbacks to a couple of Monty Python sketches [“The Bishop” and the “Dead Bishop/Church Police”].  Palin portrayed Molotov as the “true believer” in Stalinist orthodoxy.  When told by Khrushchev that he was on Stalin’s “list”, he thought he must have done something to deserve it.  Khrushchev tried to curry favor with Molotov, each agreeing with the other that Molotov’s Jewish wife was a traitor, right up until the very moment they saw Beria bring her into Molotov’s apartment.  Khrushchev immediately turned on a dime and proclaimed Molinka Molotova’s innocence.  I thought the act of releasing his wife from prison swayed Molotov to support Beria. But between that moment and Stalin’s funeral, Molotov had an epiphany [off-camera] and threw in his lot with Khrushchev.  Georgi Malenkov [Jeffrey Tambor] is portrayed as an indecisive weakling in way over his head.  History tells us Malenkov was one of Stalin’s favorites and was hip-deep in carrying out Stalin’s purges, and in life [as it was in the movie] he was close to Beria.

After Beria met his fate, Khrushchev emerged immediately as the guy in charge.  He told Svetlana she was going to Vienna whether she liked it or not.  When informed of this, she told Khrushchev “I never thought it would be you.”  Given his place in the pecking immediately after Stalin’s death, nobody else knew either.  Right before the credits rolled, Khrushchev and Kaganovich had the following exchange –

Khrushchev: I’m worried about Malenkov, though.  Can we trust him?
Kaganovich:  Can you ever trust a weak man?

The film was banned in Russia.  Moscow police raided the one cinema that dared show it.  Why was it banned?  Author Anna Aratunyan [The Putin Mystique] has a few ideas.  She spoke with quite a few Russians on the topic as relates to a Russian-produced movie called Matilda, which depicted Tsar Nicholas II as having an affair, and thus showed this canonized saint of the Russian Orthodox Church to be “human”. Her research told her that people objected to that film because it skewered a Russian “sacred cow”. In her talks with Orthodox groups about that particular film, their view is that “power is sacred”, no matter who wields it. And this kind of power that Stalin had was not institutional but personal, the only kind of power that Russia has only known. 

Additionally, she attributes opposition to The Death of Stalin to the Russian people’s inability to internalize that such a thing as how Stalin’s murderous reign could somehow happen in Russia. People can joke about their own political leaders in private, but to do so in such a public way crossed a line.  And there is one more thing to consider.  It’s ok for Russians to joke about their own leader among friends, but when a Scottish filmmaker [a foreigner] ridicules a Russian or Soviet leader in such a public way, that's not ok.  It’s REALLY not ok if that same Scottish filmmaker commits the sin of attacking a Russian “sacred cow” and getting it right.  How can one “mock” the "winner” of the Great Patriotic War?

She doesn't think the Kremlin has a strategy to ban certain things from the public as that would only to draw more attention to the thing being banned.  She posits there was some kind of massive social insecurity that fueled a backlash against The Death of Stalin.  She isn’t sure what the Russian “Deep State’s” motives were in banning the movie.  She does say the current regime has embraced the rehabilitation of Stalin, has mobilized patriotism and nationalism, so once that was let out of that Pandora's Box in the case of The Death of Stalin, the current regime feared a backlash.

The Death of Stalin mocks a part of the Soviet past, one that deserves mockery.  The movie is about succession and how one replaces a politically dominant figure.  In Stalin's time, there was no clear successor.  The same can be said about the entire Soviet experience.  But in this particular time the only political institution that mattered was one man - Stalin.  Today's political climate in Russia is similar.  Vladimir Putin dominates Russian politics like no other since...Stalin!  Sure, Dmitri Medvedev served a single term as Russian president, but the power behind that particular throne was still Vladimir Putin as Medvedev’s Prime Minister.  Once he was free from the constitutional shackles of term limits, Putin re-asserted himself at the top of the Russian political food chain.  As he enters what he himself calls his last term as president, there is no clear succession plan for Putin as there wasn't one for Stalin.  Given what has transpired during Putin's eighteen years in power [the longest since Stalin], one thing is certain that Putin will leave the Kremlin in the only way the Russians have experienced - “feet first”.  Perhaps the regime is insecure about parallels between Stalin’s rule and that of Putin.


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