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The Death of Stalin
Vladimir Putin doesn’t want you to see this movie. And he’s right. I mean this completely sincerely. If you want to believe there is anything admirable about the Soviet Union of the 1950s or the men who led it, this movie will crush your dreams.
The story begins with a real-life incident of a Mozart concerto performance that Stalin wanted to be recorded, but didn’t bother to tell the radio producer of his desire for a copy until the concert was over. Not wanting a bullet for disappointing the man with the mustache, the producer locks the doors to prevent the audience from leaving, bribes the soloist into a second performance, and gets a second conductor (still wearing his pajamas and bathrobe) after the first one knocks himself out. (In the real incident, the first replacement conductor was too drunk to conduct.) The pounding on the conductor’s door to request his services for the replacement concert is juxtaposed with footage of the NKVD knocking down doors and arresting the people on the list handed down from on high.
We’re then treated to what life looks like on high and what a pathetic sight it is. A group of men in their fifties are drunk and horsing around like a bunch of frat boys, if frat boys were pudgy men in their fifties wearing three-piece suits. Khrushchev recounts how they amused themselves during the siege of Stalingrad by tossing grenades at German POWs; Beria slides a tomato into Khrushchev’s front pockets and smashes it to make it look like he’s wet his pants. Stalin insists that the group watch a “pony” movie, leading a cheer “To Communism and Lenin; to John Ford and John Wayne!”
After sending his bros home (with orders to Beria for the departing Molotov to be disappeared in the night), he has a cerebral hemorrhage and spends the night lying on the floor “in a puddle of his own indiginity,” as Khrushchev euphemizes the next day. (A wonderful bit of historical accuracy.)
And thus begins the plotting for power by a most unappealing quintet:
- Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor): As deputy secretary, he is the official successor to Stalin. The problem is that the only reason he was ever made deputy secretary is that he’s an incompetent, spineless toady, and everyone (including him) knows it. He’s constantly trying to hide behind consensus and the contradictory advice of the other members of the Presidium.
- Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale): As the head of the NKVD, he’s the man in charge of disappearing and murdering anyone, and he delights in the job. In a scene where he’s handing out arrest lists, his comments include “Shoot her before him, but make sure he sees. [points to another list] Shoot him and dump him in his pulpit [hands over the rest of the stack] And the rest I leave to you.” He brags about the moral Russian wives he arrests and extorts sexual favors from in exchange for promises to not kill their husbands. We’re even shown a preteen girl being escorted into a prison cell previously established as a “love nest” and her release to her parents the next day, all of which is completely faithful to the real history of this loathsome man. At the beginning of the plotting, it appears that his control over the NKVD and Premier Malenkov will enable him to win, but he makes the tactical error of making threats that galvanize the other members of the Presidium into group action.
- Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin): The foreign minister and cocktail inventor, he seems to be the only true believer in Sovietism in the Presidium. He is shaken by discovering he was supposed to be purged but throws his support to Beria when the NKVD head returns his wife who was supposed to be shot but Beria found … other uses for.
- Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi): He is the head of the Moscow Party and, as Beria puts it, “All day long I try to get people to talk; him, I can’t get to shut up.” He has his wife write down which jokes Stalin liked so he can use them again for more effective toadying (another great historical nod) and when he realizes something is up, appears at Stalin’s dacha with his suit over his pajamas to avoid any possible loss of time being seen properly weeping over Stalin’s not-yet-dead body. For all that, you do end up rooting for him, in part because he seems to have goals to make the USSR a better place, not just for his own aggrandizement like Malenkov and Beria or in seeming delusion of the high-stakes game he is in, like Molotov. He doesn’t approve of mass arrests and executions, the persecution of the church, or the various means Beria uses to take control in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death, such as closing Moscow to visiting mourners.
- Georgy Zhukov (Jason Isaacs): The Field Marshal of the Red Army and the man who “[fornicated] Germany,” to sanitize his description, he has the big brass cojones you might expect of such a man. In his first minutes on screen, he refers to the Presidium as a group of ladies, punches out Vasily Stalin for being a disgrace to the army uniform Stalin’s drunken wastrel son insists on wearing, and goes “to represent the entire Red Army at the [funeral] buffet.” He throws his support — and the Red Army — behind Khrushchev to defeat the hated Beria and his NKVD.
If you have a taste for black humor and the absurd, this movie is hilarious. Rather than taking the path of its closest narrative relative “Springtime for Hitler” (the play within a play of “The Producers”) where Hitler is shown as a clown divorced from his real character, each of the characters in The Death of Stalin are shown being mostly consistent with the personalities of their historical counterparts. It is as if the famous “Hitler finds out” scene from Downfall included Hitler having a flatulence attack (a condition he actually suffered from as a result of his vegetarian diet and living before the invention of Beano). These men really were so craven and blasé about the blood on their hands.
A great example is a sequence of summoning a doctor for the grievously ill Stalin. Beria arrives first and just finishes his swapping out secret documents when Malenkov arrives.
Beria: Should we call a doctor?
Malenkov: Um … we should wait until we have a quorum.
[Finally, enough Presidium members arrive to reach a quorum.]
Malenkov: Should we call a doctor?
Khrushchev: There aren’t any doctors left in Moscow. We arrested them all. [A reference to the Doctor’s Plot]
Malenkov: But we had to! They were poisoning him!
Khrushchev: What about that nurse who informed on them?
Beria: She gave great fellatio.
Khrushchev: She can find us some more doctors. And if they don’t work out, we can just have her shot.
[A group of doctors, one apparently straight out of med school and the others practically on death’s door themselves, are assembled.]
Malenkov, aside to Khrushchev: We should only have the best doctors treat him!
Khrushchev: These are the only doctors! If he recovers, they were the best doctors; if he doesn’t, we can have them shot and no one can blame us.
The heroes of the Soviet Union, ladies and gentlemen.
This movie is rated R for language and gun violence.
Published in Entertainment
You know who these people were. I know who these people were. I wonder how many younger people do.
In my 20s I had a Jewish boyfriend whose grandfather had escaped Stalin’s Russia as a young man by sneaking through potato fields in the dark till he reached Austria. Even when he was in his 90s, if he heard Stalin’s name it made him cry. And no, the young people have no idea. I read somewhere that a majority of millennials believe more people died in the Iraq war under Bush than died under Stalin. And judging from all the hipster T shirts, I’m betting they don’t know the half of what Che Guevara did either. What was that they said about people who don’t know their history?
I just went out and searched for that!
Wow look at you two posting the same thing at the exact same time.
The movie does a great job giving a rough outline of who these people were and what roles they played. Going in, I was familiar with Beria and Khrushchev and was familiar with the … bartending job of Molotov, but I was unfamiliar with the rest.
Interestingly, the script gives Khrushchev his most famous quote “I will bury you” and gives it the context he meant: not that he would kill and bury the person to whom he’s speaking (the man was already dead and being cremated with a fan set up to blow away, not bury, the ashes) but rather that he would so overshadow and eclipse the memory of his interlocutor that no one would remember him.
Some people say that Molotov didn’t have that much power in the Soviet Union. His wife got sent to a labor camp. Others say that Molotov had a lot of power in the Soviet Union- his wife got sent to a labor camp!
Thanks. Based on the trailer, I planned to skip it.
Eh, I will say if you don’t laugh at the trailer, you won’t enjoy the movie, as it does a good job of giving you the flavor of the movie. It’s 90 minutes of plots, intrigue, and f bombs that plays up the absurdity of life under a reign of terror.
As long as we know it’s only cute when Amy and I do it.
He’s the same Molotov who negotiated the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, isn’t he?
I believe so, as he was foreign minister.
And he invented a famous drink!
This was a very funny movie.
Molotov was on the outs with Stalin. Stalin didn’t like Molotov’s wife who was Jewish and who was a friend of Golda Meir. He tried to get Molotov to divorce her. Molotov refused. There is a good chance that if Stalin hadn’t had the good grace to drop dead, he’d have told Beria to deal with Molotov.
Sounds like the Russian characters are recreated in the image of whatever goes on inside the minds of Hollywood screenwriters. I think I’ll skip it. (Some of the recent Putin-influenced Russian docudramas about the days after Stalin’s death are really bad, too, though in a different way.)
Shows what I know; I thought he said that at the UN while banging his shoe on the table. Although as @hankrhody said while telling me about the story, photographs from a different direction show that he was wearing both his shoes.
One of the best films to portray the terror of being in Stalin’s presence is Belshazzar’s Feast, or a Night with Stalin (1989).
https://youtu.be/OZf2qBZNUAY
English subtitles do exist, but they haven’t been loaded with this video.
Valentin Gaft does a good Beria portrayal. Recent docudramas done under Putin’s influence have set about rehabilitating Beria’s reputation. Fortunately, they are so badly done as to be almost unwatchable.
Yes. Before Hitler attacked Stalin always referred to it as the Stalin-Hitler pact. Afterwards it became the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. I think there was one incident at a meeting of the Big Three in World War II, when a somewhat drunken Stalin said to Molotov, “Hey Molotov, tell them about your pact with the Germans”.
Out of curiosity, which characterizations sound wrong? Beria really did use his position to rape dozens of women; the bastard actually kept a list! Malenkov really did dither about getting a doctor until Stalin had been lying in a puddle of urine for 17 hours. Khrushchev really did have his wife keep notes of everything he said in Stalin’s presence and work with Zhukov to perform a military coup against Beria. None of these men escape the movie looking good, and to the extent one roots for Khrushchev, it is simply because he’s slightly less terrible than his competition. (Okay, Zhukov comes off like a major badass, but he actually was, even if not necessarily as hammy as Isaacs portrays him.)
Hence my comment that Putin is right to ban this film to keep the glamour of these men alive. If ridicule is a most powerful weapon, as per Alinski, this film is a nuclear warhead dropped on Putin’s heroes.
Very clever movie. Maybe a great one. I’ll have to watch it again outside of Manhattan, where the insecure panic of not laughing at all the Faberge Easter eggs can get pretty annoying.
One big issue for me: Is this humor kind of cheap culturally? Not the screenplay or the direction itself. Both are superb. But do we get to laugh and smirk at Stalin’s grotesque regime without doing any popular cultural groundwork which examines the totality of the horrors of this regime? Where are the movies, television series (the era of prestige microtargeting right?) and popular novels which examine these horrors?
Nothing comparable to our cultural approach to Nazism.
My suspicion is the modern left opposes Putin to the extent he departs from Marxism. Had he reestablished Brezhnev’s state and refunded every radical left wing political and cultural movement in the West, this movie probably doesn’t get made.
No reason not to go see it.
For a brutal portrayal of Marxist fanaticism and medicine, this movie doesn’t approach the power of To Live.
I checked and it seems that Putin’s government actually is against this film, so that gives it a little more credibility.
As to which characterizations are false, I’d say none of them. I’ve seen some of them done very well in Russian movies. There are movies that show the terror of what it was like for a woman to have caught Beria’s eye, for example. The only item in your list that I had not known about was Khrushchev’s wife keeping notes of everything he said to Stalin.
However, aside from once again being treated to the narrow worldview of Hollywood screenwriters, when I looked at the trailer I was reminded of a guy at a party who says, “Hey, everybody, listen up! I’m going to tell a joke. It’s a really good one. It goes like this: A priest, a rabbi, and a pastor go into a bar…”
But given that Putin denounced this film, maybe the trailer doesn’t do it justice.
Those characterizations of Stalin, Khrushehev, and their crews are done with good acting and some subtlety in Russian films of the 80s and 90s (but not so much since Putin got the film industry in his grip). Maybe it helps that Russians already knew most of the backstory, so they don’t have to be bludgeoned over the head with it. Instead their best films give more of a sense of how this stuff was part of real, ordinary life rather than some burlesque sideshow. The phrase, “A comedy of terrors,” is a good one, but maybe the Russians do more that could be described as, “the terror of comedy.”
I thought the trailer looked great!
Eh, I will say that the trailer does focus more on the funny lines than the scenes that portray the terror, even though those scenes also play up the absurdity.
In the beginning sequence, the radio engineer and his assistant are talking about how they’re going to give Stalin a recording of a finished concert that wasn’t recorded. One suggestion is offered and rejected with “Even Stalin …” “Is this room bugged? What do you mean ‘even Stalin’?” “Ugh … I mean, of course Stalin would know if we tried to deceive him! He has a great ear for music!” “Yeah, two of them!”
Or another scene of political prisoners being executed in a courtyard. One prisoner yells. “Long live Stalin!” *bang* Another, “Long live Stalin!” *bang* A soldier runs up. “Stalin’s dead!” The prisoner next in line yells “Long live Malenkov!” *bang* The soldier adds “And political prisoners are to be released!” At which point the firing squad packs up like DMV employees at 5:00 PM, leaving the remaining prisoners to shrug their shoulders and go home. The absolute banality of evil, perfectly captured.
Well, that sounds like good comedy, and even a good Russian joke. But in reality, when Stalin died the political prisoners were not released right away. Many of the ordinary non-political prisoners were released from the gulag, and later some political prisoners were released, too. The 1988 film, “The Cold Summer of 1953,” tells about this. Mosfilm has put this one on YouTube, and left the English subtitles there, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYOT6MvVuU
Yeah, the biggest historical inaccuracy is the time compression. The movie’s events seem to take place over about a week, when it was actually the better part of a year between the death of Stalin and the fall of Beria.
The movie has its flaws with historical accuracy — the concert in question wasn’t the night of Stalin’s stroke, the pianist who wrote a note insulting him did so years earlier, the time scale is compressed, Beria actually had a trial — and most of these choices were to make for better storytelling. The one thing it doesn’t do is try to minimize the suffering of the Russian people or whitewash the images of its leaders. Sure, it doesn’t reference every single crime committed by these terrible men, but it does show plenty enough to destroy any heroic myths.
I had wanted to see this -but it wasn’t showing anywhere nearby. This reminded me to look again -and I saw that it was showing at a nearby art theater -so I went after work.
I must dissent from the positive view of the movie. Perhaps I will do a full review at some point. I will note that the theater was fairly empty, and therefore the sound had so much reverb that in places it made the movie basically unintelligible -perhaps in a proper theater it would have been better.
The movie is not funny. All the humor is front loaded, much of it cut short. The scene where Zhukov attacks Vasili Stalin -which so many people have considered so funny -moved so quickly I barely heard the punchline (“Medic!”), and so instead there was just the whiplash of Vasili drunkenly explaining how Stalin’s brain was being given to the Americans to confused Chinese diplomats (funny), to a brutal beating with so little transition that it was shocking.
This is the microcosm of the movie. There were a lot of funny parts at the beginning, but the ending (starting at approximately Beria’s rant about how he has papers on everyone), all the humor was run over (Zhukov has great lines, appropriately funny for an action film, but we barely hear them, and never dwell on them), and by the end of the movie you are watching in confusion as Beria begs for his life and is then shot with no warning.
That is perhaps the third actual death seen in the film -and I felt sick at it.
There were a lot of things in the movie which -with proper set up, proper setting, proper music -probably could have been very funny with very few changes. Ultimately, though, the story is loses its humor over the last half hour, and becomes merely dark.