The Death of Stalin

To the cinema – our wonderful local one, the Phoenix – to see The Death of Stalin. Earlier this month, we’d managed to miss one of ‘my’ films, Goodbye Christopher Robin which was not in the cinemas for long (that was the one where I got to stand next to Margot Robbie; now we wait for the DVD to come out to see if that scene ended up on the big screen rather than the cutting-room floor), and even though I wasn’t an extra in The Death of Stalin I did want to see it. Well, having studied Russian history (among other histories) at university, I couldn’t have not wanted to see the demise of said blood-soaked Soviet dictator and the subsequent power-struggle as interpreted by the man behind The Thick of It.

While I’m aware that this is not a film to everyone’s tastes, I must say that I really enjoyed it. So what if it has apparently gone down badly in Moscow, and that there are some people in the West who would most likely dislike the film because even today they venerate the man (revered as ‘Uncle Joe’ during the War) whose death is the plot catalyst? Some historical events are perhaps best presented on the big screen as farce, and I’m not sure if the machinations that went with the aftermath of Stalin’s death could be presented in any other way. How else, for instance, could a situation where no-one wants to call a doctor because they’re afraid to make a decision without deferring to a higher authority, even though said higher authority is lying unconscious and incontinent on the floor, he being a man of whom they’re all scared and also a man who has recently sent many doctors to the Gulag, be interpreted? And, prior to Stalin’s demise, what of those dinners that he had those in his inner circle attend, where they were forced to sit through bootleg Westerns, drink vodka (Stalin had his own special bottle, which actually contained water so that he would be able to observe what the others said while under the influence) and dance for his amusement for no better reason than, as Khrushchev later remarked, “when Stalin says dance, a wise man dances”, and woe betide anyone who said the wrong thing or, worse still, passed out? I also liked the accents – or rather, the lack of Russian ones. Actors all trying to do the same accent can be a distraction, especially if it’s badly done (which is usually the case) and I thought it a smart move to do away with attempts at doing so here. Besides, the accents that were used here do actually work with the real-life people who are depicted. Thus, Nikita Khrushchev becomes ‘Nicky’, a street-smart New Yorker (played by the “funny-looking guy” from Fargo) and Georgy Zhukov a bluff, no-nonsense Northerner, while Malenkov sounds like what he was – weak, ineffectual, somewhat colourless and utterly unable to control events even though circumstances have left him in charge, however nominally.

There are, inevitably, several examples where Mr Iannucci is a bit economical with the actualité. Well, he did admit to as much in the trailer, which boldly (baldly?) states that this film is “loosely based on the true story”. Was there really a panic at a Moscow concert because Stalin had heard the live performance on the radio and wanted a recording, and in the absence of an actual recording they had to re-do the whole thing, making the tired performers and the audience who hadn’t already left stay, getting in extra audience-members off the street and getting a second conductor out of his bed because the original conductor had fainted, in order to perform and record a repeat-performance just for the tyrant’s pleasure? Probably not, but to emphasise from the start the paranoia that Stalin was capable of generating among his own subjects after the best part of three decades of purges, show trials and rule by terror it’s a pretty good introduction. There are a few historical liberties with the historical people shown here too, although you can understand why the changes that have been made for dramatic licence were made. Molotov, for example (here played by Michael Palin, a veteran comic actor being somewhat appropriate for a subject who was, by 1953, one of the last remaining Old Bolsheviks), had been removed as foreign minister in 1949, although he would be reinstated after Stalin’s death; that said, his wife had been consigned to the Gulag and Stalin was planning to have the man after whom that most lethal of cocktails was named sent there too, and was only prevented from carrying this out by his own death. Similarly, Marshal Zhukov (Jason ‘hello to Jason Isaacs’ Isaacs, really playing it up) wasn’t the head of the Red Army at the time of Stalin’s death, the dictator having consigned him to the provinces because he was paranoid that the famous general would be more popular than he (there being only  room for one at the top in the Stalinist cult of personality); but he too came back after Stalin’s death, and relished the opportunity to settle some old scores, especially with the secret police chief Beria.

While we’re on that subject, how come Simon Russell Beale (the actor who plays Beria) isn’t on the posters? Perhaps it is something to do with the notion, picked up on in the closing credits, about how once people were purged images of them were removed to the point of photographs being doctored, and this in a time long before Photoshop (there is, for example, a famous picture of Lenin haranguing a crowd which had the right-hand side cropped in Stalin’s time because Trotsky was standing just to the right of the podium from which Lenin was speaking). Maybe it is appropriate that a secret police chief who is very much the dark heart of this film gets the ‘un-person’ treatment.

That Beria, a man who Stalin introduced to FDR as “our Himmler”, got to Stalin’s dacha first once the man of steel’s incapacity was eventually discovered and news of it relayed to the members of the Politburo, is well-known, and his acting quickly to rifle through the contents of the safe while the tyrant lay prone on the floor (did that really happen? If so, how do we know this?) echoes Robert Harris’s treatment of the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death in his superb novel Archangel. An odious individual on many levels (Stalin himself, who had dirt on everyone, never liked the idea of his own daughter being alone in the same room as his secret police chief), Beria subsequently acted as though he had already seized control for himself even though he was really part of a triumvirate or troika with Malenkov and Molotov while consolidating his hold over the security services. That he underestimated Khrushchev is without doubt, for it was Khrushchev who with Zhukov engineered Beria’s denunciation and arrest at a Politburo meeting in June 1953 (although, unlike in the movie, the meeting in question was chaired by Khrushchev, not Malenkov, and Beria’s execution did not take place until December of that year). And it was Khrushchev who, three years later, would move to seize supreme control for himself, denouncing Stalin and Stalinism in the process. Sometimes, it’s the one you least expect.

But I digress, trying to go into the real history after enjoying myself watching The Death of Stalin (as you do, or at least as I do). I liked it. Amusing, and at times laugh-out-loud hilarious. Thought-provoking. Worth watching.