The Death of Stalin (2017) – Black comedy meets grim reality

 

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Director: Armando Iannucci

Genre: Black Comedy (true story)

Time: 1 Hour 42 minutes

Platform: Amazon Prime

Cast: Steve Buscemi. Simon Russel Beale. Jeffrey Tambor. Michael Palin. Andrea Riseborough

 

 

Three men are in a Soviet Prison. They compare notes why they are there.

 

1st Man: I am here because I supported Nikolai. And you?

2nd Man: I am here because I opposed Nikolai.

Both of them turn to the third man and ask “your crime”?

3rd Man : I am Nikolai

 

This joke perhaps best explains the  ordinary Soviet citizen’s terror and serves as an excellent context for the film.  (for those interested, check out this page which contains many anti-Soviet jokes)

 

The Death of Stalin strikes a successful balance between dark humor and the dramatic aspects of Soviet Terror during Stalin’s reign. Fabien Nury’s brilliant screenplay expertly balances all the elements without going overboard. We wonder and laugh and are even disgusted at the on-screen happenings which are based on one simple reality – succession.

 

These are the known facts

 

• On March 3,1953, Stalin had a cerebral hemorrhage and was lying in his room for over twelve hours before he was discovered, incontinent and unconscious.

 

• Given the recent “Doctor’s plot to kill Stalin,” all doctors were scared to treat him. Everyone felt that he will recover and continue the Great Terror

 

• Lavrenti Beria, the NKVD (later the KGB and now the SVR) head, responsible for both external and internal intelligence, made a grab for power, and ruled along with Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov, till June 1953, when he was overthrown in an internal power grab by Nikita Khrushchev. Beria was also an inveterate paedophile who had raped more than a hundred underage girls, during his reign as NKVD chief, usually picking them up during sorties in his car, and returning them the next morning to the terrified parents.

 

• Nikita Khrushchev was considered to be Stalin’s stooge, and therefore a political lightweight but proved otherwise by overthrowing Beria in June 1953 and ushering a new era of ‘liberalization’.

 

• Marshal Georgi Zhukov, who had been banned by Stalin, to a far-off military district, after the great victories of WW2, was brought back to deal with the unsettled situation. Stalin had banned him for ‘starting a personality cult’ – in other words, he feared Zhukov’s genuine popularity with the Soviet people. It is rumoured that Zhukov personally shot Beria and had the Red Army take command of all strategic points in the country and inside Moscow.

 

All these facts are skillfully woven together in the film, resulting in a brilliant black comedy that revolves around survival. Survival of the fittest. The key to survival in a dictatorship is simply staying alive, and the ministers are terrified of Beria, who has warned them about revealing their mistakes and immoral actions to the Presidium. They contradict themselves with first denouncing and then supporting and again denouncing ‘factionalism’.

 

Then there are Stalin’s children Svetlana and Vasily, who have to be neutralised, lest they claim their lineage as proof of ability to rule. Svetlana is smart while Vasily is a drunk who has been pushed from one post to another, as he was an incompetent.

 

These and other elements contribute to this black comedy, which is grounded in historical events. Both funny and frightening, the film is made possible by its scripted dialogues and dramatic events.

 

Example – Beria distributes ‘lists’ to the NKVD guards who swiftly go about arresting the people on the list. No one knows why. A musical conductor watches his neighbors being arrested, suspects the worst and confesses to his wife “I love you but denounce me to them”. When another man comes in and says “we want you to conduct the orchestra”, the relief to us and the man becomes evident. However, its back to the terror when the director of the radio station hands over the record to the NKVD guard who says “the time is noted. You are late” making us both laugh and quake simultaneously.

 

It is not known how many civilians died by Stalin’s Great Terror. Historians can only estimate it to be somewhere around 10 million deaths. This is besides the devastation during WW2 of 20 – 22 million.  Do check out the wiki page to get an idea of the same

 

Performances are exceptional. Given that the Soviet Cabinet were from different ethnicity, having American and British actors with their accents perhaps serves as a mirror for the Georgian (Stalin and Beria), Russian (Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov) , Ukrainian (Lazar Kaganovich), Armenian (Anastas Mikoyan) accents of the leading historical figures.

 

The Kiev and Moscow locations are mixed with well disguised UK locations to give an authentic feel.

 

 

Of the lot, Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev eats the entire cast for breakfast.  Khrushchev was more pudgy but Buscemi brings out the essence of the coarse Party Worker turned opportunist turned General Secretary.

 

 

Simon Russel Beale as Beria is chilling as he goes about the business of terrorizing the entire cabinet and his juniors in the NKVD without raising his voice or any carpet chewing scenes favored by other actors to denote an ego maniacal opportunist.

 

 

 

Also watch out for Jason Isaacs as Georgi Zhukov who steals everyone’s thunder in the three or four scenes that he appears in.

 

 

Needless to say the former Soviet Republics and Russia banned the film and denounced it.

 

Following Stalin’s death, Khrushchev took over as the General Secretary and the premier. In 1956, he shocked the world and the Soviet Union, by denouncing Stalin’s anti people purges and crimes, in a speech titled “The Personality Cult and its consequence”. Old Stalinist hardliners were discreetly replaced, leading to a period of “liberalization” where critical art and cinema, which highlighted Stalin’s excesses, thrived. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” a critique of the Gulag and whole Stalin Cult, was published in 1962 in Russia, because of these reforms.

 

The clock was wound back when Leonid Brezhnev took over from Khrushchev in a bloodless coup, in 1964. Khrushchev supposedly said “this is my greatest contribution to the Soviet Union. The predecessor wasn’t killed and was allowed to retire”. Perhaps that’s the best real world black humor (if he actually said it) and a worthy coda to Soviet way of life.

 

Real History/ Historical Background – 4 out of 5

Script – 5 out of 5

Story – 4 out of 5

Direction – 5 out of 5

Photography – 4 out of 5

 

Total – 4.4 out of 5