Radio Moscow’s director panics when comrade Josef Stalin phones his office, asking for a recording of the concert he had just broadcast. The director says no problem, but there is a problem: The performance went out live without a recording. Rounding up an uncomprehending audience from the streets and rousing the conductor, still in his bathrobe, from bed, he forces the orchestra to recreate the concert as a private recording session for the Soviet Union’s music fan number one. To do less—and even to admit that this wasn’t the actual recording of what Stalin had heard earlier in the evening—might cost the director a prison sentence—or worse.
Whether or not the incident at the start of The Death of Stalin actually occurred, similar things really happened under the watchful eye of the Soviet dictator. In this droll satire of tyranny and intrigue at the top, Stalin’s sudden incapacitation from a stroke precipitates a crisis in the Communist Party’s central committee. All the best physicians had recently been shot or sent to the Gulag. Stalin is left unconscious and unattended for many hours. And the incapacity of their leader leaves some committee members emotionally paralyzed while others see their chance to seize power.
The two contenders in the film by Scottish writer-director Armando Iannucci, adapted from a French graphic novel, are the feared secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria and Moscow party chairman Nikita Khrushchev. Simon Russell Beale, a Beria lookalike, exudes a sinister edge polished with unctuous charm. As Khrushchev, Steve Buscemi plays off his familiar cinematic persona as a well-intended bungler. This isn’t inappropriate given Khrushchev’s unexpected ascent to power and proclivity for clownishness.
The dark humor inherent in the murderous reality of Stalinism will resonate with anyone familiar with the dictator and his inner circle. All of them were imbued with a warped version of an already bent ideal—the Leninism that conquered Russia after the catastrophe of World War I. For some of Stalin’s associates, their version of Marxism was a surrogate religion held by faith alone. In particular, the grandfatherly Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) refuses to lose faith even after Stalin imprisoned his beloved wife. The first servant of the people must have his reasons! Molotov is shown comically squaring Bolshevik ideology with the menacing reality at hand. Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), the central committee’s secretary, is shown as spineless and vain. He was, in truth as well as on screen, swiftly swept aside.
None of Stalin’s ministers trusted each other; each was willing to throw the others under the grinding wheels of history. All had blood on their hands, yet none was worse than the monstrous Beria, a sexual predator and sadist who glowed with the energy he derived from inflicting fear and suffering. As he strides through his headquarters at the Lubyanka, dead bodies tumble down the stairway behind him. He runs a sloppy murder factory.
As for Khrushchev, Buscemi depicts a comical commissar pulling his trousers over his pajamas in his haste to arrive at Stalin’s dacha. But beneath his perennial fluster is a clear mind, a knack for backroom bargaining and at least a dim vision for reform.
While taking artistic license, The Death of Stalin gets at the larger truth and is composed from plausible accounts of Stalin’s demise and the machinations in his wake. The film’s characterizations bear striking resemblance to the real-life thugs that controlled the Soviet Union. The Death of Stalin has been banned in Putin’s Russia, a nation having difficulty coming to terms with its history and its future.
