History is Cinematic

In the history of Stalinist / Soviet moments of forgetting (many of which were documented in David King's excellent 1997 book The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia), perhaps none comes closest to George Orwell's vision of the function of memory in a totalitarian state than the replacement of Lavrentii Beriia with the Bering Strait in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (GSE). The 1952 edition of the GSE carried a two-page spread on the person who was then Head of the NKVD, member of the Politburo, and Deputy Premier of the USSR, Lavrentii Pavlovich Beriia. In 1954—the point by which Beriia had been arrested, tried, shot, cremated, and buried in a forest outside of Moscow—everyone who had purchased a subscription to the Encyclopedia received a letter asking them to cut out “with knife or a razor” the pages dedicated to Beriia and to replace them with a four-page layout on the Bering Strait. In contrast to the censored photographs we see in The Commissar Vanishes, whose redactions were performed by official organs of the Party, in the case of Beriia and the GSE, Soviet citizens were asked to perform the act of forgetting themselves, replacing with their own hands the picture of a man once decorated with (among others) the medals of the Hero of Socialist Labor, five Orders of Lenin, and two Orders of the Red Banner, with a picture of a large body of water. The pages were included with the letter. It is unknown how many private citizens actually went through this symbolic act of erasure, but the surviving copies of the Encyclopedia containing both the original and the insert teach us something about the power of memory and forgetting, as well as about obedience and disobedience to totalitarian rule.

Armando Iannucci's 2017 film, The Death of Stalin, opens with just such an act of individual defiance. A Mozart concerto is being played live for the listeners of Radio Moscow, when the station receives a phone call demanding that the director telephone the General Secretary of the USSR in precisely seventeen minutes. By the time seventeen minutes have elapsed, the concerto is over and Stalin's desire to have a recording of it can only be rectified by playing the full concert program a second time (a feat that requires bringing people off the streets for the purposes of acoustics, and finding Moscow's “best and nearest” conductor to conduct an already exhausted orchestra—an escapade that seems farfetched and exaggerated, but is actually based on real events—ultimately involving three conductors and the reopening of a factory in order to press the record). The pianist, Maria Yudina, initially refuses to play, and only a bribe of 20,000 rubles (an impossibly large sum of money in the post-WWII Soviet economy) convinces her otherwise. An open critic of Stalin, whom she holds responsible for the arrest and execution of half of her family, Yudina succeeds in slipping a message of hate to the Great Leader along with the recording, which, when opened, leads to Stalin's massive stroke, paralysis, and eventual death. The plot of the rest of the film follows the machinations of the members of the Politburo (and Stalin's closest associates) as they vie for succession and the future of the USSR. The film ends with yet another Radio Moscow concert, with Yudina still soloist, and Nikita Khrushchev occupying the place of Premier. Lest we think this is the end, however, the intertitle and the bushy eyebrows of the man behind him announce that Khrushchev himself is about to be displaced.

What is interesting about this opening vignette, however, is that it positions a single act of defiance (Yudina's letter, which probably did not exist, although Yudina really was Stalin's favorite pianist while being an outspoken critic of Stalin and his regime) as instrumental in bringing down a dictatorship. Stalin and Stalinism are here made fun of in the same way that Hitler and the Nazis were made made fun of in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009)—a mixture of terror and farce that prevents us from simply dismissing the film as fiction. And in both cases, the moment that we can only call “historical revenge porn” is an act of defiance by a single Jewish woman, whose refusal to play the role that has been assigned to her changes the course of history. Like the famous photograph of the one man in a crowd failing to salute in “Heil-Hitlering” Germany (as Nabokov would have it), our belief in the power of the individual flies in the face of twentieth century history and its totalitarian regimes. If only someone had stood up to Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and so on, we want to say, history could have been written differently. It is a very western belief in the power of the individual, and it goes directly against the kind of collective delirium that makes authoritarian governments with their cults of personality possible. As we know from records, millions of people came to Moscow to say goodbye to Stalin, and the (Russian language) Wikipedia page on Stalin's death carries a list of poems—written by such unlikely figures as the Blockade poet Ol΄ga Berggol΄ts and the 60s bard Vladimir Vysotskii—commemorating his death in terms that were far from negative. It is not individual acts of defiance but profound cultural shifts that take down totalitarian regimes, the same cultural shifts that allowed the regimes to come to power in the first place.

It is perhaps for this reason, and not for the official ones released by the Russian press, that Putin's Russia banned this film. Yes, seeing Stalin still alive and lying on the rug in a pool of his own urine, while the members of the Politburo discuss the rules of succession and whether or not they should summon any of the remaining (and therefore by definition, inferior) physicians in Moscow to attend to him, can be interpreted as “insulting to the memory” of the USSR and “its victory in the Great Patriotic War”—but these elements are nothing compared to what Nikita Mikhalkov hinted at in Burnt by the Sun (Utomlennye solntsem, 1994), or Aleksei German made explicit in Khrustalyov, My Car! (Khrustalev, mashinu!, 1998). But of course, the average Russian viewer (or in any case, the average Russian minister of culture) has already forgotten those films. Indeed, Mikhalkov's co-authored statement arguing that, “The Death of Stalin is aimed at inciting hatred and enmity, violating the dignity of the Russian (Soviet) people, promoting ethnic and social inferiority, which points to the movie's extremist nature,” and confidence 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,” is a textbook example of how little memory, even for his own work, a truly successful film director ought to have, of how easy it is for some people to cut out a page from history and replace it with another.Footnote ¹

Based on a French bande dessinée, La mort de Staline, created by the illustrator Thierry Robin and the writer Fabien Nury (published in two parts, in October 2010 and May 2012), the film retains the primary colors, camera angles, set decorations, and other visual elements of the graphic novel, as well as the tone that is at once humorous and grim. In creating the comics, Nury recalls that he began researching “not for a comedy, but for John le Carré-type material: KGB agents, guns with silencers, conspiracies … I was looking for The Kremlin Letter, but I stumbled on Dr. Strangelove: a top-level political crisis, handled by a bunch of lunatics, alcoholics and mass murderers. You know, the novel that Dr. Strangelove is based on was a serious, Tom Clancy-like political thriller, not a farce. So I thought, ‘This emotion you felt, it's visceral. This story is horrifying and hilarious. Why not simply try to convey that feeling?’ And I started writing.”Footnote ²

What Death of Stalin mocks is not the historical events themselves, which here are literally tragedy repeated as farce, but the people who allow them to happen. It is not Stalin who is made fun of here but those who surround him. It is their acts of cowardice, pettiness, cruelty, and blind obedience that creates men like Stalin. I think this is why the film does not aim for any real historical accuracy in its portraits, casting famous and easily recognizable British and American actors, such as Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend, Jason Isaacs, Michael Palin, Andrea Riseborough, and Jeffrey Tambor in its leading roles. And while there are a few moments of verisimilitude—such as Beriia's appearance on top of the Mausoleum, too short to peer over the wall and wearing glasses and a giant black hat that turn him into a Disney villain—and some attempts at getting the appearance of Soviet architecture (with a few exterior shots filmed on location in Moscow, though many were filmed, ironically, in Ukraine), the events of true horror, such as the nighttime arrests and the beatings, rapes, and executions conducted inside the NKVD, are all treated with an almost comical nonchalance. Iannucci is best known for his caustic HBO comedy series, Veep, and it is here I think that we need to look for the source of both the humor and the discomfort it brings. Iannucci is not simply satirizing Soviet history, he is using Soviet history to speak about politics in general, about unchecked power, self-serving cruelty, and corruption, and the degrees by which a band of comically incompetent, weak, and corrupt politicians turn from Selina Meyer, Amy Brookheimer, Dan Egan, and Jonah Ryan—or: Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Anthony Scaramucci, and Scott Pruitt—into Stalin, Beriia, Khrushchev and Malenkov.