One of the most famous quotes attributed to Karl Marx (who in turn was commenting on Hegel) is the one that claims that history and its personalities repeat themselves twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Marx (Karl) did not live to see the invention of the cinema, but the genre of film comedies – parodies, satires, farces – dealing with the darkest characters and moments of history seems to be one of the exemplifications of this phrase. Cinematic versions in comic registers of tragic periods of the past have not infrequently generated interesting films and more often also controversies. This is also the case with ‘The Death of Stalin‘, the 2017 film by Armando Iannucci, a screenwriter and director who is not afraid to satirically attack taboo subjects or monsters of history. The script is inspired by a French comics book and the production is a collaboration of the Gaumont studios with other European and North American film houses. The result is a film that cannot help but spark discussion, bringing one of the turning points of 20th century history into the debates of the present.
The last evening of Stalin’s life and his agony after the cerebral attack he suffered, alone in his room due to his own order not to be disturbed under the threat of death, are known facts and recounted in numerous documentary and fiction books. Quite a lot is also known about the events that followed, about the internal struggles in the Politburo between Khrushchev and Beria that ended with the latter’s arrest, conviction and execution, and about the de-Stalinization process that would culminate with Khrushchev’s famous speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956. The script of ‘The Death of Stalin‘ preserves the essential lines of the conflict, but compresses the entire story into a few days, from the evening fateful to the dictator to the day after the lavish funeral. Released from the permanent terror in which they lived, the characters around Stalin wake up to the new reality sooner or later and begin the struggle for power in parallel with the preparations for the official ceremonies. They are all products of the system of corrupt and violent dictatorship that Stalin had built during the 30 years he was at the helm of the USSR. The psychological profiles, as they appear in the film, are diverse: Beria is a sadistic and cunning psychopath, Khrushchev is an opportunistic arriviste, Malenkov is indecisive and half-senile, Molotov is weak, blackmailed for years by the arrest and deportation of his wife, and Marshal Zhukov with his chest laden with decorations looks like a caricature of militarism. They all fear everyone else, hypocritically embrace each other while planning criminal alliances to eliminate their opponents before those eliminate them, mime democracy while setting the apparatus of repression in motion. Meanwhile, terror, arrests, executions continue outside the Kremlin walls. Until a certain moment, when everything stops. But even this sudden change is unreal, as it is impossible to erase the traumas, the sufferings, the deaths.
Approaching such tragic moments of history in a satirical register cannot but arouse controversy. Nostalgics of the Soviet system and its successors may be outraged. Victims and their descendants may question the approach. Armando Iannucci could not avoid controversies, nor does he seem to have intended to. He mostly kept (to my knowledge) the gist of the events, but changed their timeline to create something close the temporal unity of classical drama. He thickened the characters as or historical farce, but not as for cheap parody. The words spoken by them sometimes resemble absurd theater texts, but many are actually extracted from transcripts of historically attested meetings or scenes. The cast is international, most of the actors are English or American, and they were asked to use their native English accents and not imitate a Russian accent. Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev and Simon Russell Beale as Beria are far from the physiognomy of the historical figures, and no make-up effort was made to change them. Jeffrey Tambor as Makenkov was the only one I found excessively caricatured. I thought the background was very well presented, with some real-life scenes that set the historical farce in the context of the tragedy that the peoples of the Soviet Union were experiencing, in the empire of fear. One of the scenes is downright brilliant. A KGB-style execution is depicted, in which the convicts are gunned down one by one. In the middle of the line comes the order to stop mass executions. Four men among those condemned to death remain standing as the executioners flee. The four will be the first survivors of the terror.