The Death of Stalin

The title and plot stress the death of Stalin but the film’s primary thrust is the birth of another tyranny. The dictator gives way to the oligarchy. 

This film takes Stalin as a starting point to reflect upon the current advent of the community of obscenely wealthy exploiters of government office, world wide. As democracy retreats, the oligarchs advance. 

As in his earlier film In the Loop and the successful TV series he wrote, Veep, director Armando Iannucci plays a political drama for very broad satire and even broader, wildly inventive profanity. High drama plays out with astonishingly venal characters. Ideals are just something to violate. 

The film is probably accurate in its depiction of scurrilous backstabbing and manoeuvring for position in the wake of Stalin’s death. 

But Iannucci is not interested in the narrow details of that history. His real subject is the mechanics of unprincipled politics, specifically how naked self-service betrays all principle under the false pretence of patriotism. 

That’s why none off the characters make even an attempt at a Russian accent. Iannucci wants the drama to reflect Western society not just Russia.

The two lead Americans, Jeffrey Tambor and Steve Buscemi, play variations on their familiar roles — the pathetically insecure arrogant and the sour, playful killer, respectively. 

The rest of the cast is British, as are the film’s general irreverence, farcical pace and knockabout comedy. Iannucci doesn’t even try to make this seem Russian. The Russian specific points out to every other world government that uses patriotism as the lipstick on its pig hunger for power.

  The film shows more cruelty than a farce normally does. At first, the torture, assassination and mass arrests play around the margin of the action. Beria’s proclivity towards rape is tossed off by his telling a guard to bring in a mattress and to wash the girl. But his sadistic murder moves the inhumanity of the dictatorship to centre stage.  

The frightened guard speaks for all soldiers too scared to get involved in anything: “Should you shut the fuck up before you get us both killed?” The medal-heavy Marshall Zhukov speaks for all arrogant generals: “Right, what's a war hero got to do to get some lubrication around here?” 

This Khruschev actually steals a line from The Sopranos. When Stalin’s son says he wants to speak at the funeral Khruschev responds sarcastically “And I want to fuck Grace Kelly.” Uncle Junior’s choice was Angie Dickenson. Smarter. 

As in so much of the world today political disappearance and worse are a constant threat. Stalin has eliminated all the good doctors, for fear of them poisoning him. When the conductor orders the symphony to stay, to repeat their performance, he has to assure them: “Don't worry, nobody's gonna get killed, I promise you. This is just a musical emergency!”

       So too Stalin’s son’s vehement demand on his fumbling national hockey team: “Come on, play! Play better!” Zhukov’s medals evoke Kim Jong-un’s and his generals’ blinding arrays, or Trump’s glittering array of bankruptcies and lawsuits. Similarly, Andreytev reports getting a call from “The Secretariat of the General Secretariat. Of the General Secretary. The Secretary of the General….” Politics is a layering of empty authorities, pretending to values and significance. 

The chaos in this Kremlin tempts us to read it as a funhouse reflection upon Trump’s White House. That certainly works. But the film — and its source comic book — must have been in the works before Trump’s presidency was known for its disorder, corruption and incompetence. 
     If it has proved prophetic, it’s because Iannucci realized that such oligarchic dictatorship is not unique to post-Stalin Mother Russia but a world-wife phenomenon. You can find it in Putin’s Russia, North Korea, Syria, China, Trump’s ambition, indeed wherever patriotism proves the last refuge of the greedy tyrant.