Oh, dammit. Someone call up Lenin, we need a seventh for poker. What, what do you mean He’s dead, too? Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me these things?
Speaking of stories involving the USSR (yes, right here), The Death Of Stalin (2017) is a surpriser. Advertised as a farce, this story about the end of Josef Stalin’s reign as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, which were ended by his lingering death from what appears to be a cerebral hemmorhage, features the circus which was precipitated by his illness and death. From those who were arrested the night prior and were being tortured, and now are being shot by no less a personage than Minister of Internal Affairs (think: the secret security forces known as the NKVD) Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s privileged childrens’ problematic fates, the immediate execution of all of Stalin’s servants, including the execution of the executioners, and the clownish internal political maneuverings that center around Stalin’s funeral, it does seem farcical.
But the farce is not the story so much as the suspicion that all this, within the parameters of a dramatization of a real life incident, may have really happened, and necessarily happened. That is, when society uses the measures of ruthlessness, toadying, and a personality with a substantial sociopathic, or even psychopathic, component, as the metrics to measure worth as a government official – and Stalin, Malenkov, Kruschev, and Beria certainly qualified in either or both of the latter two categories – while discounting competency, humanity, and intelligence, then a farcical element to the government may be inevitable. The ministers working directly with Stalin at the time of his death are well aware that their colleagues are similarly ruthless, yet unintelligent, which all acts like a positive feedback loop, which are never pleasant. The Soviet people, too, have their own part to play, for if they choose to ouster the successor, these ministers know that oustering is usually feet first, out a window, and usually the landing is on one’s head. Do they even want to win Stalin’s place?
The storytellers wisely added another element from real life: the appearance of General Zhukov, awarded Hero of the Soviet Union (four times), who makes an appearance at the funeral, a bottle in one hand, a gun hidden in his uniform, and, as if wearing a cloak, a decisiveness unseen among the ministers, whose plots to take power suffer from uncertainty. Zhukov, being a good Soviet, cannot, as an active Army commander, take direct power himself, but he understands the currents of power, and is more than pleased to help bring Beria to his knees, from which he’ll never arise; in a frenzy, his plans come to naught from a bullet to the brain.
Perhaps my oddest experience in this great cock-up was the sudden feeling that Trump ally Roger Stone, a self-proclaimed Nixon groupy (I’ll skip the less palatable terms), would have fit right into this group: plotting, incompetent, arrogant, and absolutely wrong about everything.
Beautiful cinematography, well acted, well plotted, and just plain fun in that way horrific, barbaric regimes that signal their own demise can only be, with that edge of inevitability that makes one uneasy about their own governments, this is Recommended.
