Consider yourself very lucky

Rating: 10/10 (5 March 2018)

That you weren't walking the halls of power in Uncle Joe's day.
One wrong look, one mistaken arched eyebrow, one accidental meeting with a lightly suspected enemy of The State and you were toast.
Stalin was the figurehead of that particular Ship of State, where a murderous communist bureaucracy just grew out of the ashes of the murderous Tsarist bureaucracy.
You can't blame just Stalin himself for it all, it was a runaway train.
This, though, is Russia's fate; intrigue, suspicion, doublecross and murder are baked into the DNA of the nation ( All nations have these problems, but the penalty for getting caught in Russia has a nasty finality to it.)
And so what would you expect upon the death of leader who ran the country with a flawed ideological rule book, where death or exile was the punishment for any form of disagreement? Refer to the paragraph above and add in a bit of chaos!
Well this film shows pretty much what happened and to my mind it's brilliantly portrayed.
The members of the politbureau who stood in all their resplendent power on the balcony at Red Square proved, with one or two exceptions, that they were just Stalin's lackeys and hopelessly out of their depth when they actually had to make decisions for themselves.
Steve Buscemi plays a wonderful part as Khrushchev who is portrayed as one of the stronger members of the schemers after the Boss dies.Simon Russell Beale is superb as Beria, the ultimate hatchet man for the system.
Jason Isaacs as General Zhukov has the best part in the whole movie. A tough no-nonsense, do what's got to be done type of individual.
I thought that Molotov was unfairly cast as a bit of a bumbler when real history shows that he was a mulish, ruthless messenger who would not give up a blade of grass in negotiations.
All the rest of the cast do a fabulous job and I love the way they all have cockney type accents, especially Joe in the opening scenes.
Of course there's two routes you can go with making a movie like this, one is to tell the story as the tragedy it was with all of the emotive Russian Music that's available.
Or you can satirize it as the absolute travesty that it was.
If you take the second option, you can poke fun at the ineptitude and blind obedience. Poke fun at any crazy interpretation of the concept of communism that happened to be in favour on any particular day.
Interpretations that to most of today's enlightened minds are just ludicrous!
I like Iannucci's approach to telling the story, with just the right amount of humour injected to take the real edge off what happened and yet educate us as to the horrible and easily repeatable reality.