Yesterday, I convinced The Wife to let us watch the British-made film, The Death of Stalin (2017), which, when released, was billed as a farcical dark comedy. It was free on Netflix or Amazon, or some such streaming service we have. Personally, I had my doubts about the film before deciding to watch it, as I wondered if the film was too focused on farce, and not even trying to be historically accurate. However, I sensed there was something darkly comedic about the paranoid sycophancy under Stalin's maniacal murderous regime at the moment Stalin lay dying in March 1953, and in the various ministers in the Politburo recognizing how Lavrentiy Beria posed the greatest danger of becoming the next Stalin--due to his continuing control over "internal affairs" in the Soviet Union (notwithstanding Beria's ups and downs in the whims of Stalin's horrifically murderous, paranoid regime). Beria had files on everyone, including the entire Politburo, and operated at a level J. Edgar Hoover would have envied. This suspicion and anger toward Beria's seeking to take control in the moments after Stalin's collapse, manipulating the weak leadership of Stalin's Deputy Secretary/Premier, Gregory Malenkov, who initially succeeded Stalin after Stalin's death, eventually led to Beria's arrest in June 1953, and execution in December 1953.
As the film was being released, the film received the usual historians' critique about historical inaccuracies, foremost from a prominent and respected British historian, Richard Overy, who specialized in his career in studying and writing about World War II and the post-World War II period through the dawn of the 1950s. Overy's review in The Guardian, read here, is well worth reading before proceeding further with this long film review, which also deals with the history of the Soviet Union, Stalin's rule, and post-Stalin leadership.
The reason I write this long blog post this morning, however, is because I am far less impressed with the events and information the film gets wrong, such as former Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who negotiated the infamous Nazi-Stalin pact in 1939, still acting as Foreign Minister at the time Stalin was dying, when he had been sacked in 1949. Instead, I want to focus on the many more things the film gets correct, and, in doing so, one will read spoilers. However, in this perhaps singular context, we should not concern ourselves with spoilers because, to truly appreciate this film, one must know what is true, and how brilliantly, cleverly, and sharply the story is told. I knew the spoilers and it only increased my enjoyment of the film, and heightened my admiration for the film.
What The Death of Stalin gets right, and how the film's poetic license increases overall comprehension and understanding of Soviet history
First, The Death of Stalin captures, right from the start, the paranoia and murderous ways in which Stalin ruled, and the sycophancy and hypocrisy of Stalin's deputies in the Politburo. The historian, Overy, claimed the Soviet regime's murders are whitewashed in this film for the sake of comedy. Nonsense. The haphazard, though highly systematized murders are powerfully and cleverly shown through fast and devastating montages, with the cameras just out of the view, so, for example, we see gun flashes emanating from a nearly closed door in a darkened room. We also see a teenaged son turning in his father to the secret police, people running for their lives, haplessly and pathetically knowing they will still be caught and taken away, and the fear in families and neighbors who see this happening. We see people rounded up by the score, and other related horrific events, all done quickly, and with knowing eyes and gestures, providing the viewer with a strong sense of the insanity above and beyond the murders. The tortures are also done quickly and off camera, as well as the abuse of women. If Overy did not see that, it is because he did not want to see it. The filmmakers smartly recognized we Americans and Brits already know the Soviet Union and Stalin represented a totalitarian regime that functioned on arbitrary arrests, torture, and mass murder. Also, the fact the modern Russian government banned the film tells us Putin understood the harshness of the criticism leveled at Russian totalitarianism, which includes his authoritarian government.
In this context, the film gets right details such as the previous arrest, jailing, and torture of then-Foreign Minister Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, during the 1940s--and essentially gets right Polina's first reaction when, after Stalin's death, she is told she was being released. She exclaimed, as she was told she was being released, "How's Stalin?" as if she thought she could curry favor with Stalin in return for her release. It is then she is told Stalin is dead, and now she had a worried look as to whether she was being released, or perhaps she would simply be executed. Monty Python alum, Michael Palin, plays Polina's husband, Molotov, for all the comedic pathos he is able to muster, when his Polina, who he abjectly divorced after her arrest, is brought back to him. He is shown to be still unable to utter any words of love to Polina, as long as Beria or Khrushchev are in Molotov's house with him and Polina. Beria has to openly tell Palin's Molotov, in this instance, following Stalin's death, how it is okay now for Molotov to tell his wife how he truly loves her.
The film also deftly illluminates Bernia's sexual predator behavior, through, again, off camera work, which makes the point while protecting the film's probing dark comedic narrative arc. The film shockingly, though obliquely, illuminated Beria's monstrous sexual predator behavior, where we see a young pre-teen girl, who is arrested, just as Polina is being released, and placed in the same prison room Polina has just left--and, then, when the pre-teen girl is released a few scenes later, Beria hands her a flower as she is returned to her parents outside a prison gate. Giving his rape victims a flower is something Beria did, as a matter of practice, with the scores of women he raped, including mature women who were wives of men arrested, tortured, and murdered, and not only younger women Beria happened to see on the street while being driven around Moscow.
The film also deftly illluminates Bernia's sexual predator behavior, through, again, off camera work, which makes the point while protecting the film's probing dark comedic narrative arc. The film shockingly, though obliquely, illuminated Beria's monstrous sexual predator behavior, where we see a young pre-teen girl, who is arrested, just as Polina is being released, and placed in the same prison room Polina has just left--and, then, when the pre-teen girl is released a few scenes later, Beria hands her a flower as she is returned to her parents outside a prison gate. Giving his rape victims a flower is something Beria did, as a matter of practice, with the scores of women he raped, including mature women who were wives of men arrested, tortured, and murdered, and not only younger women Beria happened to see on the street while being driven around Moscow.
Second, while the film wrongly speeds up Beria's arrest, conviction, and execution into a matter of days after Stalin's death (which had been my faulty memory, too, before I looked it up), the film gets right the details of the events leading to the arrest, from Khrushchev leading the conspiracy to take down Beria, Krhushchev cajoling the exiled military leader Zhukov into helping depose Beria, and the use of a button under succeeding Premier Malenkov's conference room desk to signal the military Zhukov, to enter with soldiers to arrest Beria. The film even gets largely correct Zhukov's boast that taking down Bernia and his supporters would be far easier than Zhukov's taking down the German Nazi army during World War II. Yes, the film makes it sound as if Beria had no trial, when, in fact, Beria did receive a trial--though it was akin to a wartime, arbitrary military court martial with a foregone conclusion. In Beria's actual rigged trial, Beria received no lawyer to help him, and the trial ended in Beria's execution and immediate cremation--which execution and cremation occur in the film.
Overall, the film expertly shows the loathing the other Politburo members had for Beria, how little respect the other Politburo men had for Malenkov as Stalin's potential successor, and how, most powerfully for those who know Stalin's road to power, how Beria had tried to replicate Stalin's earlier power moves in the 1920s and early 1930s, in politically weaving right and left. This is where, in one crucial set of scenes in the film, Bernie outflanks the already known reformist, Khrushchev, in unilaterally reversing the arrest, torture, and execution orders Beria and Stalin had themselves ordered in the weeks before Stalin's death, and portraying himself to various victims and their families, and to the Politburo, as the hero.
Overall, the film expertly shows the loathing the other Politburo members had for Beria, how little respect the other Politburo men had for Malenkov as Stalin's potential successor, and how, most powerfully for those who know Stalin's road to power, how Beria had tried to replicate Stalin's earlier power moves in the 1920s and early 1930s, in politically weaving right and left. This is where, in one crucial set of scenes in the film, Bernie outflanks the already known reformist, Khrushchev, in unilaterally reversing the arrest, torture, and execution orders Beria and Stalin had themselves ordered in the weeks before Stalin's death, and portraying himself to various victims and their families, and to the Politburo, as the hero.
See what I mean about why I say the spoilers are necessary to fully appreciate this film?
Third, the film is correct to show Stalin officially died of a cerebral hemorrhage, though there remain reports Beria poisoned him, which is fairly well hinted at in the film. The film has Stalin's son, Vasily, saying this at one point in the film, which, again, is a claim Vasily made right after Stalin's death. Also, most importantly, the film gets right how Beria and the other Politburo ministers dithered for hours after Stalin was discovered lying on the floor, having wet himself, and in an unconscious state. It also gets right the moment when Stalin, on his death bed, suddenly sat up, pointed, and struggled to say something, portending his recovery, but only collapsing into death immediately after. From the moment of Stalin's collapse, through his death, the film cleverly explains the Doctors' Plot purge Stalin had ordered a few years before. I get the director's choice in not mentioning the irony of Beria almost losing complete favor with Stalin for Beria's opposition to the purging of Stalin's doctors, and other doctors, as the idea is to show Beria as a complete villain. But overall, the film does as great a job in explaining the Doctor's Plot as any individual book would do in an upper level college course in Soviet Union history.
Fourth, the film got so many other trivial matters right, which nonetheless would be included in a serious history book to give a reader a flavor of life under Stalin. The type of trivialities that illuminate important historical points include Stalin's love for films, particularly Westerns from John Ford with John Wayne, and Stalin coercing Politburo members to watch a western just before his collapse. The film gets also right Stalin's love for classical musical performances, and inserts (out of time, yes) the story of the woman pianist who had to redo her concert performance because Stalin wanted a recording, and the performance, carried live, had not been recorded. See here for the story, and, after the film, compare how most of the story had been correctly told in the film. The pianist performance story is a powerful example of how poetic license in a work of art effectively conveys historical meaning and details in describing true events. Yes, yes, the pianist did not play at Stalin's funeral, and did not have a relationship, innocent or otherwise, with Khrushchev. But she did pen an accusatory note to Stalin about his murderous regime, and personal responsibility, and, it is also true Stalin did not order her arrested or killed, despite his deputies, always wanting to please the Dear Leader, requesting Stalin to issue such an order.
Fifth, if one wishes to be critical of the film's handling of historical figures' personalities, one may say Stalin's son and daughter were played mostly for derisive and contemptuous humor. However, the film absolutely correctly depicts Stalin's son, Vasily, with his drunken rages, his stupidity, and vacuousness (though, again, there is reason to believe Vasily was correct that his father may have been poisoned, as Vasily screams at one point in the film). The film also deftly gets into the story of Vasily being a leading person overseeing Soviet air command, his acting as if he personally owned the Soviet Olympic hockey team, and how, three or so years before Stalin's death, there had been an airplane crash that tragically killed members of the vaunted Soviet hockey team--which some say was Vasily's fault in ordering the plane to fly in a snowstorm. As for Svetlana, Stalin's daughter, another wise reviewer remarked how the film could have been more understanding regarding her character. However, the film correctly portrayed Svetlana's ability to compartmentalize living as the daughter of a tyrant--and sympathetically denotes her pain for a lost love, who her father forbade her relationship (though, that lover, Aleksei Kapler was sent to a prison camp, not executed). The one weird thing is sending Svetlana to Vienna at the end of the film, when that is not what happened at all. Svetlana stayed in the Soviet Union, but defected to the West in 1967, through the efforts of my beloved Cold War liberal, Chester Bowles, then US ambassador to India, where Svetlana had visited, after falling in love with a Communist man from India.
Sixth, the film, admittedly, overstates Khrushchev being forced to solely oversee the arrangement for Stalin's funeral, when Khrushchev was one of three ministers working that task. However, the film does this in a larger, and far more accurate, context of showing how the Politburo members were actively jockeying for power, and is nearly exactly right in the main details of the jockeying for power, only bowing to a film's time limitations through speeding up the process--which also makes for comedic moments amidst the darkness of a truly Orwellian regime.
Where is the comedy in this larger and darker narrative?
Throughout the film, the details of the dialogue are where the jokes are located, as admitted by the director, the very sharp director-writer, Armando Iannucci (a Scot from birth to Italian parents), who co-wrote the script with other British comic actors and writers, David Schneider, Ian Martin, and Peter Fellows. The dialogue is rendered in a now-classic British comedic style, part Monty Python, part Carry On, and part Goons. If Iannucci's name appears familiar to Americans, it is because Iannucci created, and was show runner, for the satirically scary American political television series, Veep, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus (yes, yes, she is distantly related to that Dreyfus), where Dreyfus plays the Sarah Palinesque, but with Hillary Clinton attributes, vice president of the United States.
Also, the coarse language the Politburo members use in the film is a British comedic add-on, but there is brilliance in having the various actors, both American and British, speak in their own voices, and allowing their regional dialects to mimic Russian dialects among the various ministers, including Steve Buscemi's sharp portrayal of the ever-scheming, reformist, but defensively uneducated Khrushchev. There are also British colloquialisms sprinkled in the film, such as "that's cheeky," and other British comedic understatement.
This film should be required viewing in Russia and the United States
The Death of Stalin is a film which works on multiple levels, and is to be carefully viewed as we laugh, and the shock we experience in recognizing the degree of rot in what seems like an impregnable political and economic system. The film should be required viewing for anyone wanting to understand the nature of Stalin's rule, the Soviet system's utter corruption, and the way in which millions were systemically tortured and murdered. The film also shows how Stalin was nonetheless revered among a significant portion of the Russian people, and people of other nationalities under Soviet control, and how people flocked to pay their respects to Stalin upon his death. Seeing this film may help modern viewers understand how Stalin remains fairly popular among Russian citizens through today.
The former, now deceased, Polish Communist, Czeslaw Milosz, understood and explained all of this, and more, in his brilliant and only largely non-fictional, The Captive Mind (1953), published just as Milosz had defected to the West. Milosz's book, when I read it in the mid-1980s, was striking to me because it was written in a broad enough manner to show how oppressive institutions, beyond the Communist government in Poland, operate, and how sycophancy and officials' hypocrisies are a major reason dictators are able to maintain power. Milosz was quite clear in an interview I once read (too bad it is not on the Internet from what I could find) how his book could apply to understanding how American corporations function, and how American institutions that corporations control also function. Victor Serge, the early Soviet dissident who I perhaps most revere, and who wrote a series of loosely connected novels about the first twenty-five years of the Soviet regime, which did the same type of poetic license in The Death of Stalin (though without bawdy farce-like humor), but, which remain brilliant to this day, may have recognized the film's brilliance for this reason. Serge died in 1947, and so we will never know. However, in fairness, Serge may also have been highly critical of the film for not showing enough of the betrayals, and, most important to Serge, Stalin's long reach of terror beyond Soviet borders (which Serge perhaps detailed best in his private notebooks). Nonetheless, Serge would likely have found wryly pleasing how former high level KGB agent Putin, and his oligopolistic cronies, banned the film, for fear of its main points being understood by Russian audiences.
Any American watching this film, particularly in this increasingly desperate and cynical time period, should be squirming in seeing Beria act so much like J. Edgar Hoover, and how Stalin, instilling fear and sycophancy within the Politburo, hints at Trump's behaviors as president, something not lost on the director-writer Iannucci. In watching this film with a thinking eye and brain, a perceptive American viewer cannot fail to consider Trump's love for dictators, including Putin, Trump's interest in reading a book of Hitler's speeches, when Trump is not one who normally read books, and Trump's disdain for his Western and Canadian allies.
The film also mischievously exposes the hypocritical class bias among the Soviet elite, including, but not limited to, the head of the Soviet radio network, the Politburo ministers, and others in elite positions in Soviet society, which should remind, again, perceptive Americans of the sharp rise in American economic class distinctions in our culture, combined with the relative decline in social mobility. This is similar to how perceptive American viewers saw the parallels of South Korean class cultural bias in the Oscar-winning film, Parasite, even as that film shed some oblique light on South Korea's military dictatorship past, and the continuation of traditional caste cultural structures within the film's present day narrative arc.
Are we exceptional, or is that another lie we tell ourselves to not see ourselves in others?
We Americans like to think of ourselves as unique and exceptional, and, in some ways, we are. For example, David Morris Potter's The People of Plenty (1954) masterfully shows how our nation's ability to subdue and murder Native Americans, and thereby control a continent, which continent had plenty of physical space for us to develop, with a sufficiently mild climate, and land amenable to the cultivation of a variety of vegetables and fruits, and the nation guided by a political philosophy that was able to flexibly (a kind word, I know) apply concepts such as "democracy," "freedom," and "liberty," led to our nation achieving an Empire on par with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Potter's book was based upon a series of lectures at the University of Chicago, and is so comprehensively brilliant that it should have replaced Frederick Jackson Turner's "Frontier Thesis" in our national historical consciousness.
However, Potter's thesis is not taught or even mentioned in public schools nor even in most college courses in political science, history, economics, or sociology. Most are not aware of the lectures or books, I must admit. However, even if the professors in these disciplines were forced to read it, they would think the then-conservative Potter's thesis is far too dangerous for popular consumption in American high school history or college courses because Potter's thesis does not have the same level of heroic subtext, which is a hallmark of Turner's admittedly hastily written theory (Turner largely wrote the thesis on a train ride, when going to attend and speak at a historians' convention). Worse, when Potter's thesis is properly analyzed, the thesis forces a reckoning of our nation's conduct at nearly all political, cultural, and economic levels, and, most profoundly, forces us to admit our open government did not arise because we are good or wise, or even unusually adventurous, but more for reasons of fairly unique physical, economic, and historical circumstances. So, we are exceptional, but not for any of the reasons we normally think when we repeat that bumper sticker term and phrase.
However, Potter's thesis is not taught or even mentioned in public schools nor even in most college courses in political science, history, economics, or sociology. Most are not aware of the lectures or books, I must admit. However, even if the professors in these disciplines were forced to read it, they would think the then-conservative Potter's thesis is far too dangerous for popular consumption in American high school history or college courses because Potter's thesis does not have the same level of heroic subtext, which is a hallmark of Turner's admittedly hastily written theory (Turner largely wrote the thesis on a train ride, when going to attend and speak at a historians' convention). Worse, when Potter's thesis is properly analyzed, the thesis forces a reckoning of our nation's conduct at nearly all political, cultural, and economic levels, and, most profoundly, forces us to admit our open government did not arise because we are good or wise, or even unusually adventurous, but more for reasons of fairly unique physical, economic, and historical circumstances. So, we are exceptional, but not for any of the reasons we normally think when we repeat that bumper sticker term and phrase.
Overall, I wish more Americans would take the time to see The Death of Stalin. The film cleverly explains what fifty history books about the Soviet Union would explain regarding the nature and operation of the Soviet regime--right down to the ending, where a relatively younger Brezhnev stares with lust for power and contempt for Khrushchev at Khrushchev's triumphant moment on the outdoor dais most Americans of a certain age would immediately recognize. However, what leads to my plaintive imperative for Americans to see the film is its implied warning to Americans that we, too, may eventually and ultimately succumb to a dictatorship, and, how, right now, with corporate media apparatuses, our current president, our rotted economic system, and rotted politics, we are being groomed for that eventual dictatorship.
