Superb film, weird press reviews (no real spoilers just a bit of history)

Rating: 10/10 (17 November 2017)

This was, for me, unquestionably the best film I have seen in 2017. It was ingenious in many respects, it was beautifully filmed, and the acting was just about perfect.
As someone who has read a great deal about 20th century Russia (and much of its literature of the previous century) I was familiar with the strangeness of a country that had produced the finest artist of the past 150 years - Malevich - the greatest composer of the 20th century - Shostakovich - and some of the best poets - Akhmatova, Mandelstam - and authors - Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Bulgakov - and yet lived for 70 years under a near-continuous reign of terror where non- conformity would routinely end in death. It was also the source of much of the sharpest and most critical jokes anywhere.
It had leaders who were almost uniformly thuggish, but - at least until after Stalin's death - had a strange respect and relationship with art: it would appear that Stalin in particular regarded poets in particular, but also writers and composers as almost shamanic figures.
So it is marvellous that Armando Iannucci was able to capture the sense of dislocation and other worldliness where the paedophile torturer Beria appeared the most cultured and refined of the leaders, where one of the leaders' own spouses was in the Lubyanka but he was able to continue and function (being a senior member of the Party was probably the most risky job outside of the GULAG).
Much of the review material has described the film as a "comedy".It isn't. It is a deadly serious epic drama in which the blackest farce intrudes on a regular basis. In Soviet Russia (as in too many of our institutions today), the notions of right and wrong were utterly absent, but attribution of virtue was determined by which side you found yourself on, and - even more importantly - it was impossible to know in advance which side to be on, or what was going to be correct tomorrow, hence the glorious scene of Khrushchev having his wife record Stalin's reactions to today's conversations.
There has been much comment about the accents, but this struck me as an absolute masterstroke. Stalin was a Georgian, and I understand that the Georgian accent is both distinctive and regarded as somewhat uncivilised by (say) the Russians of Moscow. Malenkov was from the Khazakhstan border, Khruschev was born on the Ukrainian border and was of peasant stock, Beria was another Georgian, Zhukov came from a small settlement of a few thousand inhabitants. None of these were men from sophisticated societies and would almost certainly have had provincial accents, which Muscovites, and even more so, Leningraders would almost certainly have looked down on.
So if the film had been recorded with Steve Buscemi "doing" a Ukrainian accent, Iassacs "doing" a 90km south-west of Moscow accent, Simon Russell Beale trying to sound as though he came from Tbilisi and so on, the audience almost certainly not had a clue that these men had diverse or non-"Received Pronunciation" Russian accents. However, using Brooklyn for Khrushchev, Yorkshire for Zhukov and so on happily shows the diversity of background of the characters, and also show something of their social background. All this delivered with inspired economy.
One other thing that does not appear to have been noted. Khrushchev and Zhukov were the two main agents on the Soviet side at Stalingrad, which was probably the climactic battle of World War 2. That the two men primarily responsible for the turning of the tide of the German invasion should have had mutual respect and an unspoken alliance was entirely to have been anticipated (even though Khrushchev sacked Zhukov years later). The film superbly lets this alliance appear almost imperceptibly - Zhukov as a force of destiny might have supported any of the contenders - and the logic of the emergence of Khrushchev becomes inevitable.