First, you should know that this film has been banned in Russia.
Putin has called the movie "ideological warfare," a type of collusion or meddling, I suppose. The filming had been given initial approval but it's persona non grata on release because Putin believes the satire is part of the West's efforts to destabilize Russia. State censorship has criminalized a point of view.
Be on your guard, America.
The Death of Stalin as directed by Armando Iannucci (Oscar-nomination for screenplay for The Loop, plus The Thick of It for BBC, and Emmys for Veep) is a black, black comedy about 1950s Soviet Russia. Joseph Stalin rules with an iron fist in his reign of terror from 1922-1953 as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Union. Now he’s dying, and the two-day scramble of power begins as the nation's leaders are overcome by mad ambition, craven self-interest and base vulgarity. And essentially, they all are trying to stay alive as heads are rolling — literally. Let the games begin.
It's a movie about the cult of personality.
It's a movie about upper-echelon government bureaucrats clueless as to how to run a country.
It's a movie about a style of leadership expressed through belittlement, bombast and bedlam. And one could say disorder, disarray, and disorganization. Additionally, turbulence, tumult, and turmoil. Let's add bumbling, brawling and back-stabbing. Anybody for confusion, commotion and chaos? Choose one from column A, one from column B, and one from column C, and you have the Soviet recipe for governance, perhaps the recipe for any and all insecure despots desperate to hold on to power.
And it's the perfect recipe for this outrageous comedy based on true events. Any similarity to present day circumstances seems purely intentional.
What did Stalin do that was so reprehensible? His reign resulted in the establishment of state collective farms, subsequent widespread famine (5-7 million deaths), increasingly rabid antisemitism, re-criminalization of homosexuality, manipulation and extortion of the churches to require their political support, mass repressions and deportations, ethnic cleansing, attacks on the press and imprisonment of journalists, disparagement and arrests of intellectuals, even a purge of doctors, show trials, warmongering penis-wagging military parades, prison labor camps, gulags, hundreds of thousands of executions, millions of non-combatant deaths.
Laughing yet?
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?
The only way to confront the grotesque hideousness of authoritarianism is to assault the cruelty and evil with its own banality. Charlie Chaplin took this exact satiric approach in his first talking film,The Great Dictator (1940), this time portraying Hitler as a clown bouncing an inflated globe on his upturned ass. Chaplin plays both leading roles, the ruthless fascist dictator with a toothbrush mustache and a persecuted Jewish barber. The barber is compelled to answer “Are you Aryan?” and he meekly replies that he doesn't know for sure, but he does declare himself a “vegetarian.”
Similarly with Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964), a political satire on the Cold War fears of nuclear war between Soviet Union and the United States. The only way to make any sense out of a potential nuclear holocaust is to ridicule it. Strangelove features unhinged generals slugging it out in Cabinet meetings (“Gentlemen, gentlemen, no fighting here. This is the War Room!”). And there’s conspiracy-theorist General Jack D. Ripper decrying the Russian intent “ to sap and impurify all of our precious [American] bodily fluids.” And then there’s Major Kong straddling the nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull when it falls and detonates while Vera Lynn sings “We’ll Meet Again.”
The darker the politics, the sweeter the absurdity.
Trust me this time: hilarity ensues.
With The Death of Stalin, Iannucci follows this well-worn path of vicious satire by highlighting Stalin and his buddies as a bunch of power-hungry, bloodthirsty, ladder-climbing, vodka-saturated, incompetent, psychopathic, parasitic, bobble-headed apparatchiks. It's the gang that couldn't shoot straight but they all still wield their Kalashnikovs.
No wonder Putin has his Bolshevik boxers in a wad.
It's a remarkable international cast, and the director has let every one of them maintain their own native speaking voice and accent, so no fake thick Russian dialect. These Rooskis look and sound like a mashup between a Monty Python troupe with their silly walks and a Les Ballets Trockadero troupe with their silly names like Irina Bakpakova or Yuri Smirnof.
Now, bring that feverish hysteria to the logistics of planning a state funeral and to the dynamics of the funeral itself and you'll see those crazy Kremlinites at work.
And thus the film is born, all based on actual historical fact and incredible but true events. The film is inspired by the graphic novels, The Death of Stalin and The Funeral, by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, and with Iannucci's experience with biting political satire (both US and UK politics), the horror of Stalinist politics became perfect fodder for farce. Just a few examples from the film that might seem to be too outlandish to be true, but are historically accurate: the opening live-radio concert had to be re-performed because they didn't have a recording, and Stalin wanted one, so peasants were dragged in off the street to provide a spontaneous audience. And Stalin would drink watered-down drinks so he would stay alert while his comrades drank themselves into a stupor, drunkenly revealing what they really thought of Joe and his policies, thus securing their own one-way ticket on the Gulag Express. Stalin was left lying overnight in a puddle of urine because the guards were too terrified to go into the room when they heard a body fall. And they dithered about getting a doctor because they were afraid of his being poisoned. And besides most doctors had been sent to the work camps already, anyway.
You can't, as they say, make this stuff up. By the way, all the historical examples above occur in the first few minutes of the film. Imagine what hysteria awaits.
Spoiler alert: it's Nikita ("We will bury you!") Krushchev who finally gets the nod after the death of Stalin, and Leonid Brezhnev succeeds him in 1964.
Lest you think the parallels are too intentional, director Iannucci comments that he had begun working on this film well before Brexit, well before Trump. Though The Death of Stalin may be set over 60 years ago, it does offer some sobering lessons for our own time. Iannucci's interests were in exploring how a country could be terrorized by an authoritarian dictatorship, how Orwell's notion of groupthink could elevate a charismatic character to heights of leadership. He admits there are weird echoes when these Stalinists talk about "false narratives," out-of-control media, and repeated insistence that those who don't support the supreme leader are enemies of the nation. Exile or execute or lock 'em up.
Weird echoes indeed.
Ben Wiley is a retired professor of film and literature at St. Petersburg College. He also was on staff in the Study Abroad Office at University of South Florida as statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are in film, books, theatre, travel, literacy programs, kayaking Florida rivers. Contact him here.
This article appears in Mar 22-29, 2018.