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.
