The Death of Stalin

The Death of Stalin is a 2017 political satire black comedy film written and directed by Armando Iannucci and co-written by David Schneider and Ian Martin with Peter Fellows. Based on the French graphic novel La Mort de Staline (2010–2012), the film depicts the internal social and political power struggle among the members of Council of Ministers following the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953. The French-British-Belgian co-production stars an ensemble cast that includes Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend, Jason Isaacs, Olga Kurylenko, Michael Palin, Andrea Riseborough, Dermot Crowley, Paul Chahidi, Adrian McLoughlin, Paul Whitehouse, and Jeffrey Tambor.
The film premiered on 8 September 2017 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was released theatrically in the United Kingdom by Entertainment One Films on 20 October 2017, in France by Gaumont on 4 April 2018, and in Belgium by September Film Distribution on 18 April 2018. It received critical acclaim and various accolades, including nominations for two British Academy Film Awards (one of which was for Outstanding British Film) and 13 British Independent Film Awards (four of which it won). There was fierce opposition to the film in Russia, where it was seen as "anti-Russian propaganda", and it was banned there, as well as in Kyrgyzstan, for allegedly mocking the Soviet past and making fun of the USSR.
Plot
On the night of 1 March 1953, Joseph Stalin calls the director of Radio Moscow and demands a recording of the live recital of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 that has just concluded. The performance was not recorded, so the director, not wanting to anger Stalin, hurriedly refills the now-half-empty auditorium, fetches a new conductor to replace the original one (who has fainted), and orders the orchestra to play again. Pianist Maria Yudina initially refuses to perform for the cruel dictator, but ultimately is persuaded to comply.
Meanwhile, Stalin is hosting a tense, but rowdy, gathering of members of the Central Committee at his home, Kuntsevo Dacha. As Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov leaves, NKVD-head Lavrentiy Beria reveals to Nikita Khrushchev and Deputy Chairman Georgy Malenkov that Molotov is to be part of the latest purge. When the recording of the performance arrives, Stalin finds a note that Maria managed to hide in the record sleeve, in which she admonishes him and expresses her hope for his death. He reads it, laughs, and suffers a cerebral haemorrhage. Despite hearing him fall, Stalin's guards, fearful of being punished for disturbing him, do not enter his office.
Stalin's housemaid discovers him, unconscious, the next morning. The members of the Central Committee each learn about the situation through their own networks and rush to the dacha. Beria, who is the first to get there, finds Maria's note. Once Malenkov, Khrushchev, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan, and Nikolai Bulganin also arrive, the Committee finally decides to send for a team of doctors. Most of the best doctors in Moscow have been arrested for being part of an alleged plot, however, so the doctors who can be found are not very impressive. After a brief bout of terminal lucidity, Stalin dies. While the members of the Committee return to Moscow, Beria's order for the NKVD to take over the Soviet Army–held security postings across Moscow is carried out.
Beria and Khrushchev vie for the support of Stalin's children, Svetlana and her unstable, alcoholic brother Vasily, and also Molotov. Beria has Molotov removed from the list of those to be rounded up, and has his wife released from prison. Although the Committee names Malenkov chairman, he is essentially a puppet of Beria, who further exerts control by hijacking Khrushchev's proposed reforms, such as releasing political prisoners and loosening clergical restrictions, while Khrushchev is relegated to planning Stalin's funeral. After Beria learns Khrushchev and Maria are casually acquainted, he threatens Khrushchev with Maria's note, so Khrushchev, to create problems for the NKVD, reverses Beria's order to halt all transportation into Moscow. The Committee wants to blame junior NKVD officers when 1,500 arriving mourners are killed, but Beria angrily dissents, believing that would amount to blaming him, and threatens his colleagues with documents detailing their involvement in various purges.
Marshal Georgy Zhukov, irate over the supplanting of the military by the NKVD, agrees to support Khrushchev in a coup against Beria, so long as it occurs after Stalin's funeral the next day and Khrushchev can get the rest of the Committee on board. With time running out, Khrushchev cannot get Malenkov to discuss his plan, but he tells everyone else that the decision is unanimous, and they commit themselves. Khrushchev gives Zhukov the green light, and the Soviet Army reclaims its posts from the NKVD. Zhukov, assisted by a group of soldiers led by Kiril Moskalenko, storms into a meeting of the Committee and arrests Beria. Malenkov does not intervene and reluctantly signs Beria's death warrant, horrified at what he had done to his victims. At Beria's emergency trial, Khrushchev accuses him of counter-revolutionary activities, sexual assault, and pedophilia, and immediately declares him guilty after evidence of the final accusation is delivered by the Soviet army. Beria is summarily shot in the head, and Zhukov has his body burned in the courtyard. Despite Svetlana's protests, Khrushchev sends her to Soviet-occupied Vienna, while keeping Vasily in Russia, where he can be watched. He concurs with Kaganovich that Malenkov is too weak to lead.
In 1956, Maria is the soloist at another performance of Concerto No. 23. Khrushchev, having triumphed over the other members of the Committee to become the new leader of the Soviet Union, is in attendance. Brezhnev, who will succeed Khrushchev in 1964, eyes Khrushchev from his seat.
Cast
(Note: At the time the film's events took place, many of the real-life counterparts of the characters did not have the jobs the film lists them as having.)
The film's credits reveal that several other historical figures are depicted in the film in small roles, among them Zhou Enlai (played by Dave Wong) and Marshal Ivan Konev (played by Daniel Fearn).
Production
During the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, it was announced that production on the film was set to begin in June, and that Jeffrey Tambor, Steve Buscemi, Olga Kurylenko, Timothy Dalton, Toby Kebbell, Michael Palin, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, and Andrea Riseborough were in "advanced talks to join the project." By the time filming started on June 20, Adrian McLoughlin and Paul Whitehouse had joined the cast, and Jason Isaacs had replaced Dalton as Georgy Zhukov, while Rupert Friend had replaced Kebbell as Vasily Stalin. Production wrapped on 6 August 2016.
Scenes were shot on location in Kyiv (exterior scenes and the exteriors of the Public Enemies building and the NKVD building), Moscow (the Red Gate Building), and the United Kingdom (Blythe House, Freemasons' Hall, Alexandra Palace, and Hammersmith Town Hall in London, and Mongewell Park in Oxfordshire).
The film's score was composed by Christopher Willis, who tried to write in the style of Stalin-era Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Release and reception
Box office
The Death of Stalin was screened in the Platform section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. It was released in theatres by eOne Films in the United Kingdom on 20 October 2017, and by IFC Films in the United States on 9 March 2018. The film grossed $8 million in the United States and Canada and $16.6 million in other territories (including $7.3 million in the UK), for a worldwide box office total of $24.6 million.
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 94% based on 254 reviews, with an average score of 8/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "The Death of Stalin finds director/co-writer Armando Iannucci in riotous form, bringing his scabrous political humor to bear on a chapter in history with painfully timely parallels." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 88 out of 100 based on 43 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 5/5 stars, writing that "fear rises like gas from a corpse in Armando Iannucci's brilliant horror-satire" and that it "is superbly cast, and acted with icy and ruthless force by an A-list lineup. There are no weak links. Each has a plum role; each squeezes every gorgeous horrible drop." Sandra Hall of The Sydney Morning Herald gave the film 4.5/5 stars, describing it as "a devastatingly funny dissection of power politics, stripping the mystique from it and those who worship it." Donald Clarke of The Irish Times gave the film 4/5 stars, writing that it "starts in a state of mortal panic and continues in that mode towards its inevitably ghastly conclusion". Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph also gave the film 4/5 stars, writing: "Depending on your point of view, The Death of Stalin is either a sly, wintry satire on Armando Iannucci's usual theme of squawking political idiocy, or an insidious attempt to destabilise the Russian establishment with relentless dagger-blows." Peter Howell of the Toronto Star gave the film 3.5/4 stars, writing: "Shifting eastwards from the Anglo-American japes of In the Loop and Veep, director/co-writer Armando Iannucci doesn’t stint on brutal truth — or lethal legend."
Christopher Orr of The Atlantic praised the film's humour and the performances of the cast, and wrote that it "seems precisely attuned to the current moment: a capricious, unpredictable leader, basking in a cult of personality; the introduction of 'alternative facts'; the swift, party-wide swerves on subjects as various as negotiating with North Korea, paying off porn stars, and even Russian efforts to subvert a U.S. election." Anthony Lane of The New Yorker wrote that the film was "ten times funnier, by my reckoning, than it has any right to be, and more riddled with risk than anything that Iannucci has done before, because it dares to meet outrage with outrage." Raphael Abraham of the Financial Times wrote: "As this coven of vampiric apparatchiks feasts on the remains of Stalinism, the unremitting blackness of the situation at times threatens a full comedy eclipse. But the discomfiting balancing act of humour and horror is precisely Iannucci's game—and only he could pull it off with such skill." Thomas Walker, in a review for The Objective Standard, agreed, and added that the film "dives deep into the psychology of those living under such a system and lays bare the self-destructive mind-set of those who grasp wildly for power."
Matthew Norman of the Evening Standard gave the film 3/5 stars, writing: "For all [Iannucci's] dream-team cast and assured direction, despite capturing the laughable sycophancy of the apparatchik the film isn't that funny." Peter Debruge of Variety wrote: "If only the end result were as funny as the idea that anyone would undertake a film about the turmoil surrounding the Soviet despot's demise."
Former U.S. President Barack Obama included The Death of Stalin on a list of his favourite films of 2018.
Russia and former Soviet bloc
Nikolai Starikov, head of the Russian Great Fatherland Party, called The Death of Stalin an "unfriendly act by the British intellectual class", and part of an "anti-Russian information war". In September 2017, the head of the Public Council of the Russian Ministry of Culture said Russian authorities were considering a ban on the film, alleging that it could be part of a "western plot to destabilise Russia by causing rifts in society". Russian online newspaper Vzglyad called the film "a nasty sendup by outsiders who know nothing of our history". The Communist Party of the Russian Federation called the film "revolting", and Alexander Yushchenko, a spokesman for the party, said it was an attempt to spark discontent.
On 23 January 2018, two days before the film's scheduled release in Russia, a screening was attended by State Duma MPs, representatives of the Russian Historical Society, members of the Ministry of Culture's Public Board, and film industry members. Two days later, the Ministry of Culture withdrew the film's distribution certificate. Several cinemas screened the film in late January, and, though they claimed they had not heard the exhibition license had been revoked, the Ministry sued these theatres. According to the results of a poll conducted by the state-run Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTSIOM), 35% of Russians disapproved of the Ministry of Culture's decision to keep the film from Russian screens, while 30% supported the ban and 35% were neutral. 58% of Russians said they would be willing to watch the film in cinemas if the ban were lifted. According to Iannucci, by January of 2019, the film had been illegally downloaded 1.5 million times in Russia.
A group of lawyers from Russia's Ministry of Culture; Era Zhukova, the daughter of Marshal Zhukov; cinematographer Nikita Mikhalkov; Vladimir Bortko; and Alexey Levykin, head of the Russian State Historical Museum, petitioned Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky to withdraw the film's certification, saying: "The Death of Stalin is aimed at inciting hatred and enmity, violating the dignity of the Russian (Soviet) people, promoting ethnic and social inferiority. We are confident that the movie was made to distort our country's past so that the thought of the 1950s Soviet Union makes people feel only terror and disgust." The authors said the film, set to be released on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad, denigrated the memory of Russian World War II fighters, with the Russian national anthem accompanied by obscene expressions and offensive attitudes, and historically inaccurate decorations.
In addition to Russia, the film was banned in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Armenia and Belarus were the only members of the Eurasian Economic Union to allow its release: in Armenia, it premiered in two cinemas in Yerevan on 25 January 2018, while, in Belarus, it premiered after an initial delay. In Kazakhstan, the film was only screened at the Clique Festival.
Awards and honours
Historical accuracy
Several academics have pointed out historical inaccuracies in The Death of Stalin. In response, Iannucci has said: "I'm not saying it's a documentary. It a fiction, but it's a fiction inspired by the truth of what it must have felt like at the time. My aim is for the audience to feel the sort of low-level anxiety that people must have [experienced] when they just went about their daily lives at the time."
Historian Richard Overy wrote that the film "is littered with historical errors", and called it "entertainment, but poor history". Among his examples in support of this are that:
Molotov was not the foreign minister when Stalin died. He had been sacked in 1949, but became foreign minister again in the post-Stalin reshuffle.
Marshal of the Soviet Union (not Field Marshal) Zhukov was a local field commander when Stalin died, having been exiled to the provinces due to Stalin's paranoid jealousy of him. Zhukov became deputy minister of defence in the post-Stalin government, but he was not the commander of the Soviet Army in March 1953.
Khrushchev, not Malenkov, chaired the meeting to reorganise the government after Stalin's death.
Beria was arrested three months after Stalin died, not almost simultaneously, and that was precipitated by the 1953 East German uprising, not a fictional massacre of mourners in Moscow, which is based on an incident in which 109 people were trampled to death during the funeral. He was executed six months after being arrested. Furthermore, Beria had not been head of the security forces since 1946.
Svetlana was not sent to Vienna. She remained in the Soviet Union working as an academic and translator before ultimately defecting to America in 1967 and becoming a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1978.
Overy wrote that those killed in the Great Purge or sent to Gulags "deserve a film that treats their history with greater discretion and historical understanding". Iannucci said he "chose to tone down real-life absurdity" to make the work more believable.
The Radio Moscow portion of the film is a retelling of an apocryphal story first recorded in Solomon Volkov's book Testimony (1979), which Volkov claimed were the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. However, in Testimony, Maria Yudina is awakened in the middle of the night in 1943 or 1944 (not 1953) and brought in to record, and the recording brings Stalin to tears, moving him to pay Yudina 20,000 roubles in appreciation. The story served as the loose basis for The Stalin Sonata, a 1989 BBC radio play by David Zane Mairowitz. While, like the film, the original story does have Yudina send a letter to Stalin, its contents are different, as she supposedly wrote to thank Stalin for the money, adding that she would donate it to the restoration of a church and would be praying for his sins to be forgiven. In addition, while the real Yudina was fired on one occasion for her ideological disagreements with Stalin's regime, her family was not killed.
Dr. Lydia Timashuk is described in the film as a willing accomplice in the Doctors' plot (which is discussed as a past, rather than current, event), and is portrayed as an eager agent in the roundup of Moscow doctors for Stalin's care, who (in a deleted scene) dies in a mine field around Stalin's dacha after her sexual advances to Beria are rejected. In reality, she had no involvement in the events surrounding Stalin's death, and was an unwilling pawn in the Doctors' plot, after which she became embittered by the labels of informer and anti-Semite that followed her until her death in 1983.
Bogdan Kobulov is depicted in the film as being shot dead during Beria's arrest by officers acting under orders given by Zhukov, whereas, in reality, he was arrested and executed alongside Beria months later.
In the film, Vasily Stalin and Anatoly Tarasov are seen at a practice of the Soviet Union national ice hockey team, which has been depleted by a plane crash. There really was a plane crash in which 11 players on the VVS Moscow ice hockey team died, and star player Vsevolod Bobrov really did survive because he missed the flight, but the crash happened on 5 January 1950, more than three years before Stalin's death.
The NKVD was superseded by the MVD in 1946, almost seven years before the death of Stalin.
Samuel Goff of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, though allowing that the film's historical discrepancies could be justified as helping to focus the drama, wrote that turning Beria into "an avatar of the obscenities of the Stalinist state" missed the chance to say "anything about the actual mechanisms of power", and argued that Iannucci's approach to satire was not transferable to something like Stalinism, and the film is "fundamentally ill-equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing marks it doesn't know it should be aiming for."
References
External links
2010s political films
2017 films
2017 black comedy films
2017 independent films
British black comedy films
British political satire films
Censored films
Cold War films
Cultural depictions of Georgy Zhukov
Cultural depictions of Joseph Stalin
Cultural depictions of Lavrentiy Beria
Cultural depictions of Leonid Brezhnev
Cultural depictions of Nikita Khrushchev
English-language French films
Films about coups d'état
Films about Joseph Stalin
Films about funerals
Films about rape
Films about Soviet repression
Films about the Soviet Union in the Stalin era
Films based on French comics
Films critical of communism
Films directed by Armando Iannucci
Films set in 1953
Films set in Moscow
Films set in the Soviet Union
Films shot in London
Films shot in Ukraine
Films with screenplays by Armando Iannucci
French black comedy films
French political satire films
IFC Films films
Live-action films based on comics
Political films based on actual events
Works banned in Russia
Films shot in Kyiv
Films shot in Moscow
Films shot in Oxfordshire
Film controversies in Russia
Film censorship in Russia
Obscenity controversies in film
2010s English-language films
2010s British films
2010s French films
Comedy films based on actual events
Films shot in Russia