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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
In reality there was a warning. General Batitsky shoved a rag in Beria’s mouth because he was sick of listening to him beg for mercy.
I cannot and will not feel pity for that man. It was a hard way to go, but Beria earned it.
I did not say Beria didn’t have it coming, nor am I sad the man died in real life. I am saying that the scene made me sick to my stomach -like watching a dear be gutted by an incompetent hunter who couldn’t manage to kill it with the first shot, and then couldn’t be bothered to mercy kill it with a second. And maybe, were this a drama, that could be a good thing. But this is supposed to be a dark comedy.
You know what could have been a darkly humorous end for Beria in this movie? Show a bunch of other people (who we know are innocent) being shot while saying “long live Stalin” (for all the discussion of this, we only actually see it once -most of the time the executions are off screen). Then end the movie with Beria having a sock in his mouth grunting out “don’t kill me” so it sounds like “long live Stalin” while he gets shot.
Or just change the POV for this section to the only character actually carrying the comedic line: Zhukov. Rather than keeping the camera and POV on Beria right up until the shot.
What we actually get is disturbing as all hell.
Another case in point: this isn’t actually how the scene went. This is actually much funnier. In the movie, the sequence was:
Prisoner 1: “Long live Stalin!” *shot*
Guard 1: “Stalin is dead, Malenkov is in charge now.”
Prisoner 2: “Long live Malenkov!”
Guard 2: “STOP THE EXECUTIONS!”
*Shot*
Guard 2: “Stop the executions! All the prisoners are to be released.”
The sequence you have produced is funny -why would a prisoner about to be shot know the succession of the Presidium? And why didn’t the second guard *lead* with the important information, like -don’t shoot the prisoners. The sequence we actually got shows that the prisoners don’t know the order, they just have been Stockholm Syndromed enough to know the proper last words, and since the guard provided the name, they just slotted it in before being shot. And also, the guard didn’t care enough about what he was doing to pay attention to the person running over to him screaming to stop.
Yes, it demonstrates the banality of evil -but it isn’t comedic. It’s just dark.
I’m skeptical about a comedy but we have to start somewhere. We’ve been seeing movies about the Nazi’s for 60 years, and almost nothing about an equally evil regime. I’m also skeptical about focusing on Stalin as the source of the evil rather than a product of a system. However, the revisionists want to clean him up so it’s ok. I just wish some Russians would start writing novels the way German and Eastern European Jews did. Our kids know nothing and have to be informed about the realities of socialism.
What a cast! I can’t wait to see it. It was clinched for me by your comparison to Springtime for Hitler. A high bar!
(I wonder how millennials view it. I’ll ask my daughter’s BF, he’s a film buff.)
(edit: wait, so he’s a BF and an FB!!! 😂😂😂)
I’ll come back and read this after I’ve seen the movie. Been waiting for it to come to my local indie theater ever since I watched the trailer last year. I can finally watch it next week.
The movie is terrific. (Also terrifying at times!)
Everybody should go see it. Anti-communist films are rare, and usually do poorly at the box office.
Also, the more people see it, the more likely it is to get the slew of Academy Award nominations it deserves. (Won’t win though: the Hollywood Left still remembers that its spiritual grandparents loved Stalin.) The performances are uniformly excellent.
In The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz gives the film a positive review; but, as is often the case, he misunderstands what he sees. We have no one to root for, he says. In reality, we root for the ordinary gangsters versus the psychopathic sadist/rapist, Beria and, with them, breathe a sigh of relief at his fall.
With which the Finns toasted the Russians regularly.
I see what you did there.
Nice turn of phrase.
Had to go for the spike after @rightangles set the ball perfectly.
I read Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread not too long ago. Stalin was truly horrifying.
They didn’t have Beria’s tanks going up against Zhukov’s tanks?
And they didn’t have Putin’s grandfather as the cook?
Any mention of the doctor’s plot?
And Molotov was anything but at the top at Stalin’s death. He had been booted in 1949 or so.
Beria was a Georgian (like Stalin). He was going up against a group of Russians who closed ranks. Molotov’s star began to rise with Stalin’s death – he was back in the Presidium. And he didn’t side with Beria at all. He would have a complete break with Khrushchev as well, but it would be four years later. The person not mentioned is Bulganin and he was a big fish at the time of Stalin’s death. Also Mikoyan who had the longest life of any of them isn’t mentioned. He was never flashy and always a behind-the-scenes fixer. The wily Georgian. He spanned from Lenin to Brezhnev.
Hadn’t known about that one. I just now added it to my Kindle collection.
Thanks.
I think it was someone here who directed me to it.
A lot of Russian movies of the Show Trial era and other times show the victim getting executed with no warning. I am under the impression that’s the way it was actually done in many cases, including the ones where they’d let you walk ahead down a basement corridor. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a movie with a formal firing squad of a single victim, though when they were killing the kulaks they’d sometimes line up a bunch of them and then shoot them.
Where the movie doesn’t quite work is that tough area where the satire should illuminate the inhumanity rather than just laugh at it. I watched this a few days after revisiting The Wolf of Wall Street, and the similarities were striking: too-powerful man children indulging in absurd excesses, in the guise of rollicking comedy. However, in TWoWS, the crimes committed were not on the same level, so there needed to be a greater sense of the human carnage in The Death of Stalin. The more apt movie comparison would be with the harrowing “comedy” Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which presents the perversion inherent in fascism as a casual source of amusement, but its horrors are so stark and transgressive that the ultimate effect of attempting to pass it off as humor is profoundly devastating. (Don’t take this as a recommendation to go watch Salo; it is notoriously gross and not for most people.)
Side note: I know a woman who wanted to go see this but said that the presence in the cast of accused sexual harasser Jeffrey Tambor was something she could not support. You’d think that compared to the real life monstrosities depicted in the movie — one character routinely kidnaps and rapes children — Tambor’s alleged offenses would barely register, but not these days, I guess.
I have Movie Pass now, and am getting to this. Probably tomorrow or Tuesday, so I’ll avoid reading your post until after.
I saw In the Loop in December and found it tiresome, with only a couple of really funny lines.
They don’t call it “The Doctor’s Plot,” but yes, the difficulties of finding a doctor for Stalin when so many doctors had been exiled to labor camps is a plot point.
For this topic, there is the late, great Alexei German’s 1998 film, Khrustalyov, My Car! (Хрусталёв, машину!). Those who were familiar with the stories about Stalin’s death would have recognized the title as Beria’s words to his chauffeur on leaving Stalin’s dacha, but the film is not an actual documentary or anything like that. The guy who plays Beria probably looks less like the real Beria than any actor who has ever played him. (“Make him fart again,” is one of his lines.) The main character is a big, burly doctor with an aristocratic background and Jewish relatives who is brought down and rounded up in the so-called doctor’s plot, beaten and brutally raped on his way to prison, and brought back to tend to Stalin on his deathbed.
It was said (with some exaggeration) that German was kicked out of the Party after every film he made before the fall of the Soviet empire. But he didn’t make many, and those that he did make tended to be increasingly confusing and hard to follow. It takes more than one watching to make sense out of them, at least for me.
I can’t find a YouTube version with English subtitles right now, but I presume that’s how I watched it when I saw it a few years ago. This one is not a dialog-heavy film, though.
Good description and review of the movie. I just saw it and loved it. Oddly (to me at least) it is
only getting secondary billing and limited showings in the Seattle area.
Saw the film last night. My experience of the film wasn’t as bad as that described by Sabrdance. I’d have a hard time describing it as a comedy, although that is exactly what it is. For me that last half hour (about the power struggle between Khrushchev and Beria) was completely engrossing. I’ve always been a strong anti-communist, but this thread has shown me some areas in which my knowledge of Soviet history is superficial. Getting us to discuss the Soviet era is a valuable educational experience. Thank you Amy. I recommend the film.
First of all, it must be noted that this is not an American-style comedy. It reminded me a little of “Brazil”.
I am waiting to see what my Russian friends think of it.
I would recommend Yuri Slezkine’s House of Government if you are interested in the private lives/how they lived and their personalities. It’s more or less the history of an apartment building in which Stalin’s elite lived. There was in fact no pounding on the door late at night. The NKVD simply came through secret passage ways, appeared in your bedroom and took you away.
Ok, I’m back. I’d say I found it more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. I like that they introduced the characters the way they did, as it would be difficult to remember who was who just from conversation, especially when you’re in a theater and can’t rewind.
Thank you for making me aware of this movie, Amy. Because of your post, I decided to give it a try and was mesmerized. I can’t say why but it’s outstanding.
Re: comment 32
I agree. The movie scene of the death of Beria is disturbing (Kind of similar to the way the real footage of the “trial” and quick execution of that dictator and his wife in Romania was disturbing.) probably because, while Beria seems worse than the people who kill him, he certainly doesn’t seem much worse. At least two scenes that were cut from the movie would have made Beria so much more a monster to viewers that, had these scenes been left in, his barbaric death at the end would have been too satisfying for us to notice as much, and as uneasily, that Beria was killed hurriedly, and without any real trial, in part so that the other communist leaders could get away with blaming him entirely for crimes and atrocities he didn’t commit alone.
After all these weeks, I finally watched it tonight. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I’ve always liked Iannuci’s stuff. I love all the frantic, chaotic, plotting scenes that always occur.
I understand this kind of comedy isn’t for everyone, but it’s worth checking out. I think it’s the most entertaining way to be reminded of these horrible people.
I’d be interested in a drama of those days.
I have a copy, unwatched, of Stalin starring Robert Duval. HBO, 180 minutes. Anyone remember it?
From one of two history movie Youtube channels I follow: