Death of Stalin
How you feel about pitch-black gallows humor will deeply affect how you feel about The Death of Stalin, directed by Armando Iannucci (best known in the United States as the creator of the television show Veep). The movie is, after all, about the power struggle following Josef Stalin’s death in 1954 and all of the ensuing chaos. Cheery stuff all around. In fact, the film’s depiction of these events is so controversial in the former Soviet Union that it has been banned by Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Take from that what you will.
Many political players, all members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, fight for dominance and influence in the film, but the tense battle of wills between Moscow Party Head Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and the head of the NKVD (one of the precursors to the KGB) Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), comprises the core conflict in the film. These two pull the strings on everyone else, especially Deputy General Secretary Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), like pawns. Since this is at least nominally a historical movie, we already know how it ends, in some sense. I had never heard of Beria, but even though I would be hard-pressed to tell you a fact about Khrushchev (was he the one that banged the shoe at the UN? Just looked it up, and yes!), I can at least confidently say that he was, at some point, the head of the USSR. But the details of how that came to pass, sharply depicted in The Death of Stalin, are hilariously absurd in a horrifying kind of way.
Seeing as I am not a Cold War historian, I cannot speak directly to the historical accuracies or inaccuracies that Iannucci depicts in the film; I don’t know how true it is to life. John Gaddis might feel very differently about The Death of Stalin than I do, but nonetheless, the film makes the strikingly grim reality of its event explicit. The jokes garner laughs, but much of the time that laughter forces discomfort and reflection — there’s only so much levity that can be squeezed out of the NKVD’s reign of terror over citizens of the USSR. The Death of Stalin is funny in much the same way, unsurprisingly, as Veep: you laugh at the horrifying behavior unfolding in front of you because what else can you do? It’s not hard to see how Iannucci went from skewering the modern American political system to skewering the historical legacy of Soviet politics, especially given the obvious parallels between the Central Committee’s internal struggle for power and the power struggles playing out in our current administration. Only time will tell what The Death of Stalin’s equivalent will be in 50 years.
