Accuracy, Licence, and the Death of Stalin

One of my favourite movies in my collection — seen three times already on DVD or Blu-ray but likely to be seen more — is the 2017 satire, The Death of Stalin, directed by Armando Iannucci. Wikipedia describes it as depicting: “…the internal social and political power struggle among the members of Council of Ministers following the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953.” That’s a bit vague; it doesn’t include the antics, the scheming, the occasional slapstick moment, the brutality of those members, nor what happens with the people outside the Politburo whose parts are also brought into play.

Having studied Soviet history for a few decades (and am still reading about it), as well as the political history of the mid-century dictators between and during the wars, I found the mix of satire, history, and artistic license delightful, but also deeply thoughtful and somewhat chilling. And, despite some artistic licence, remarkably accurate, historically, for a movie.

Plus the stellar cast of mostly British actors as well as believable period-style sets made for an excellent theatrical experience. Even if not entirely accurate, historically speaking, it captures much of the period’s Soviet and Stalinist experience, not least of all the fear and paranoia that accompanied the regime, and the internal power war that was ongoing under Stalin. That combination has made me watch it several times, each time seeing something new.*

Stalin died in early March, 1953. I was a tad too young then to be aware of his death despite the media frenzy of the time. It was also the same year the Korean War ended, the Shah of Iran was restored to power, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest, Elizabeth II was crowned queen of England, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as Soviet spies. All of which I learned about later, of course. Few of those events were commemorated in film or TV (although the TV series The Crown and M*A*S*H covered the coronation and the Korean War, respectively).

Let’s not digress too far from the film. I was immediately taken by its black humour amidst the realism. After all, it takes a considerable effort to find humour in a brutal dictatorship, and a monster like Stalin, even though he dies within the first few minutes. And if the aftermath of his death might seem equally a barren field for humour, the film manages to find it, mostly in a dark way. The antics of the aging subordinates to both be sheepishly subservient and at the same time cunning and grasping for power is both bleak and amusing.**

Although based on an entertaining graphic novel, the film goes further and is funnier than the book that inspired it. Before this, I had little affection for and less experience with graphic novels (most of that being with the Asterix and TinTin graphic novels of my long-ago youth… which we called comic books back then…), but once I saw the film, I felt compelled to get a copy and see how the two compared. And while there are many differences, it’s easy to see how and why the novel inspired the film. It is a tad more historically accurate than the film, too, and has events the film overlooks.

I have to admit being curious why anyone would create such a novel about the death of a monster, especially as a satire, and even more the genesis from that novel to film. I’ve read a dozen or more nonfiction biographies of Stalin that included the events, but clearly I lacked whatever it takes to see the history as a comedy of errors. And what The Guardian reviewer called a “sulphurous black comedy” at that. So kudos to the creators. As reviewer Peter Bradshaw wrote of the film in The Guardian:

Faced with the unthinkable demise of Stalin, so long revered as nothing less than a god, these Soviet dignitaries panic, plot and go in and out of denial: a bizarre, dysfunctional hokey cokey of the mind. Everyone is of course initially terrified of saying out loud that he is dead – a quasi-regicidal act, which could, in any case, turn out to be wrong and interpreted as traitorous wishful thinking. But dead he is, and Iannucci shows that it is like the casting, or lifting, of some witch’s spell. All these ageing courtiers and sycophants have suddenly been turned into a bunch of scared and malicious children.
The Death Of Stalin 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.

Let’s not mince words: Stalin was a monster, responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens. He expanded the Gulags to include millions of inmates, created the Great Famine that killed as many as 20 million people, and initiated the Great Terror that imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands, more. He brutalized the nations of Eastern Europe after WWII and his KGB was as vicious as the Gestapo. Even in his final months, he initiated another purge, this time expressing his deep-seated anti-Semitism against Jewish doctors. ironically, exiling or jailing the best doctors also prevented him getting the medical care that might have saved him later (a point well made in the film).

Yet many rightwing leaders and parties today consider him a hero and many politicians seek to emulate him or his methods (Trump and Putin come to mind). Bradshaw ends his review by noting,

I wonder if anyone from Vladimir Putin’s cabinet will see The Death of Stalin. They might see something awful being born.

The graphic novel (written by Fabien Nury and drawn by Thierry Robin) opens with a disclaimer that, while their book was a work of fiction,

…the authors would like to make clear that their imaginations were scarcely stretched in the creation of this story, since it would have been impossible for them to come up with anything half as insane as the real events surrounding the death of Stalin.

After seeing the film twice, I also read the book, The Last Days of Stalin, by Joshua Rubenstein, which documents that brief but intensely tumultuous period covered by the movie (curiously, I have not found a novelization of the film… which I would buy in a heartbeat). As The Guardian review of Rubenstein’s book noted:

More than half of this new book is devoted to the year after Stalin’s death, when his old gang – the Politburo members, including Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, who had worked with him for many years – took over, and, to almost everyone’s astonishment, launched immediately into wide-ranging fundamental reforms, including attempts to improve relations with the west.

The film conflates the actual events into a very watchable 107 minutes (1 hr 47 mins). There is never a moment where it feels soft, where it drags, or where it loses focus. Stalin’s stroke (Mar. 1, 1953), death (Mar. 5), and funeral (Mar. 9) took place over several days; the rise and fall of Beria (where the film ends) took three and a half months until June 26, although in the film, everything seems to happen much sooner. You don’t get much of a sense of those reforms, except for a glimpse into the struggle between Khrushchev and Beria to position themselves as “the” reformer among them.

Of all the characters, Beria, appropriately, comes across as the nastiest; Khrushchev as the most ambitious; Malenkov and most of the rest as bungling, inept clowns. Given that they were mainly yes-men and sycophants rather than innovators or advocates during their political careers, that’s not unrealistic. Molotov redeems himself somewhat by being a late schemer against Beria, and Zhukov is a loudmouth braggart but happy to help Beria’s demise. We really don’t get to see much of Stalin because he dies too early to get a sense of him.

But we don’t need to see Stalin at work in the film: we can just turn to news about Putin’s Russia to see how Stalin’s terrors are being enacted today, even including the new Gulag system of prison camps and forced-labour camps.

Why it matters

It is crucial to our political wellbeing, and to the survival of our democracy to understand how and why dictators emerge, how they take power, and how they destroy their nations by asserting control. Without that understanding, they will rise again and again, with the same horrific results: the destruction of democracy, the enslavement of populations, and the repression of freedom and rights. We most need to know how to stop them. And that means knowing history. Never forget what George Santayana presciently said (and is often mis-quoted; emphasis added):

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness… Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

We cannot afford to forget the lessons of history, yet, it seems, millions of people in the 21st century have done so, whether willingly or through ignorance of the past. What previous generations learned the hard way from the behaviour of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tojo, Kim Il Sung, and Mussolini, is being forgotten or ignored by the followers of modern-day dictators, populists, and autocrats, including but not limited to such villains as Vladimir Putin, Stephen Harper, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, Xi Jinping, Javier Milei, Kim Jong Un, and Pierre Poilievre. As a result, democracies worldwide are at serious risk of being destabilized and dismantled, including our own Canadian government (under attack from the increasingly pro-fascist Conservative Party, several of whose MPs are happy to openly meet and be photographed with neo-Nazis).***

Since the 1980s and the likes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, conservative parties worldwide have moved further and further right, some, like the US Repugnican Party, have eagerly plunged into the depths of fascism. Many rightwing politicians and their parties have also allied themselves with the pseudo-Christian nationalists (aka the Talibangelists or Christo-Fascists), pushing to replace democracy with a pseudo-theocratic authoritarian state like that pictured in Margaret Atwood’s book (and later TV series), The Handmaid’s Tale.

Electing a populist demagogue (serial adulterer, serial liar, and criminal) like Trump, who has recently admitted he will be a dictator if returned to office, will hasten the end of democracy in the USA. Yet Repugnicans seem not to recognize the threat to their own party or lives: they will be as powerless and vulnerable — and as quickly eliminated from power and position — under Trump as were the old Bolsheviks under Stalin. Given how Trump imprisoned illegal immigrants in inhumane conditions and put their children in cages, I expect a Gulag system for his opponents and critics is well within his reach.

Most readers are aware of the quotation about power corrupting, even if they are unaware of the source (a common failure of lax internet users is to cite sources), but it’s worth quoting Lord Acton’s words from his 1887 letter to Mandell Creighton, with emphasis added:

 If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

The Death of Stalin isn’t just satire: it’s parrhesia: speaking truth to power. And, as Wikipedia tells us, it also means, “the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk.” There’s a message in the film not just about power and its corrupting effects, but about the aftermath when power fails. I can only hope that after watching it, viewers go on to read more about the history it portrays to see what terrors are in store for them under modern-day authoritarians like Trump and Poilievre.

But I suspect I’m overly optimistic about the willingness and the ability of the rightwing followers of the modern demagogues to educate themselves.

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* Other favourites (and I have a lot) in my collection include Casablanca, Jurassic Park, Young Frankenstein, Fiddler on the Roof, Ice Age, Dracula, Frankenstein, John Carter, Dr. Strangelove, Shirley Valentine, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, A Night at the Opera, Star Wars, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Maltese Falcon,  The Thin Man, Godzilla (1954), The Fifth Element, Blade Runner, Forbidden Planet, and a few dozen others… I’ve never been able to reduce my list to a mere handful.

** Aside from Stalin, the main characters from the Presidium portrayed in the film are Beria, Molotov, Mikoyan, Bulganin, Khrushchev, Kaganovich, and Malenkov. Missing from the film among the leaders of the Bureau that headed the recently-expanded (late 1952) Presidium are Voroshilov and two lesser-knowns, Pervukhin and Saburov. Stalin’s son Vasily and daughter Svetlana, as well as Marshall Zhukov, are also portrayed among the main actors.

*** Okay, Polievre is merely a wannabe dictator at this point, but like his mentor, Stephen Harper, he despises our democracy and continues to do everything he can to destabilize it (helping, of course, further Putin’s agenda against the West). If ever elected Prime Minister, he will, like Harper before him, do his worst for Canada in his efforts to dismantle our public institutions. Anyone unable to recognize the threat is either a fool or blind.

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