The Death of Stalin

The opening sequence of this film, The Death of Stalin, illustrates the power and the terror of a dictator.  Stalin rules all of Russian with an iron fist.  He calls the symphony house to request a recording of the program that has been broadcast this evening on state radio.  They made no recording.  The manager of the symphony house is panicked.  If he cannot produce the recording, he will lose his life.  So he prevents the players and as many of the audience members as he can from leaving, he recruits replacement audience members off the streets, and, because the conductor has taken ill, he sends for another conductor to lead the orchestra and the gifted pianist who has played and will play again a beautiful piano concerto.  The replacement conductor is roused from sleep just as Stalin’s goons are knocking on people’s doors to take away the nightly haul of fodder for the Gulag and he says what he believes may be his final good bye to his wife only to discover, to his great relief, that he is being called in to conduct, in his pajamas, a concerto.  The ruse is pulled off, the record made and delivered – a bit late – but it contains within it a note from the pianist telling Stalin what a pig he is for having murdered members of her family without cause.  Stalin reads the note and then has some kind of stroke, leaving him incapacitated and he eventually dies.

What would happen if the three stooges were running one of the most powerful nations on earth?  That ends up being the question The Death of Stalin asks, with hilarious but sobering results – and with very obvious intent to comment on the current state of leadership in various parts of the world – though the United States certainly seems to fit the bill most closely.  The presence of Michael Palin in the cast - the old cast member and writer for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, poignantly playing the role of Molotov, lets us know that we are involved in a send up that will leave us laughing but also thinking.  Other commentators have noted that this is not an historically accurate film – and it is hard to imagine that it is.  It includes too much slapstick.  But it may, therefore, as Hamilton does, get at essential truths by altering the facts – it may highlight veins of the functioning of states and of people that might be too uncomfortable to look at if we didn’t see them through a lens that distorts and therefore clarifies.

As an example of this, commentators are concerned that the portrayal of Lavrenty Beria (Simon Russell Beale) includes his being much more hands on in the killing and deporting of dissidents – and having sex with young girls – than he, in fact, was.  The point is that, as with Hitler’s operators, there was a kind of bureaucratic efficiency – Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil – that was operating.  Well, that is all well and good, and we need to understand that an apparatus can kill and protect people from knowing that they are killing – but we also need to know that people were brutally murdered and were brutally murdered on orders from the Politburo and that Beria was the ax man for Stalin.  Changing the facts allows us to see with clarity what Beria and Stalin may or may not have seen with clarity – that this was a brutal regime. 

So the movie distorts facts to make things more chilling – including distorting time lines so that events in the past are presented as occurring contiguously with Stalin’s death.  These are the tricks that dreams play, changing facts and timelines to fit the intent of the dreaming mechanism to help us address, but also to hide from us things that we can’t face.  And the underlying mechanism of the dream, according to Freud, is the intent to keep us asleep, just as the underlying intent of the film is to entertain us.  And humor is the primary vehicle this film uses to entertain us, while not so subtly carrying out an agenda of clarifying how the chaos of dictatorships is cancerous to the functioning of the leadership of countries and therefore to the functioning of the country as a whole and threatens the lives and well beings who live in countries ruled by them.  

It is the thesis of this film that Stalin’s iron fisted – and very paranoid – rule of the USSR turned the ruling group of men into a simpering group who toadied to Stalin, and then became a circus of idiots grabbing for power in the wake of his death.  The “leader” who first emerged – Stalin’s anointed - Georgy Malenkov (played with some of the gender ambiguity by Jeffrey Tambor that he portrays more directly as a transgender parent in Transparent) tries to maintain Stalin’s stated principle of consensual rule that Stalin’s behavior completely undermined and that the politburo’s machinations, to which Malenkov turns an intentionally blind eye, proves the mockery that Stalin's rules were.  Malenkov, blinded by ideology, remains above the fray, but also so completely out of touch that we know he will never be effective. 

Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), whom we know will emerge out of the pack as the next dictator based on name recognition, has been so caught up in toadying that he seems all but incapable of thinking autonomously and his efforts to advance his own cause are consistently thwarted by Beria, the brutal secret service chief who appears to be the only one used to acting.  But Beria is also dogged by his brutal past.  One of his first acts is to get the goods on all the other actors, so that he can bring them to ruin if he needs to.  This act clarifies his own guilt and feelings of vulnerability to others – vulnerabilities that do, ultimately, get exploited.

It is sobering and scary to realize that the development of nuclear weapons – and guarding against their use – was entrusted to this group of nincompoops (and terrorists).  And when we see the people who are currently responsible for such safekeeping, we realize what the “entertainment” of the dream – the humor – is supposed to protect us from and also to make us aware of – living in a world where those who are in charge represent not the best aspects of ourselves, but in many ways the worst ones.

This semester I co-taught a class on reading Freud to our undergraduates.  In it, I was impressed with Freud’s admonition to the communists in the 1920s.  He wondered what the communists would do when they had eliminated the bourgeoisie – the educated middle class.  This film hilariously plays that out when Stalin, hovering on the edge of death, needs a physician.  The politburo is mortified.  “All the good Doctors in Moscow are dead.”  Well, then, Stalin is treated by the “best” doctors in Moscow – those who were too incompetent or scared of their shadows to have shown up on his radar screen.  And he dies.

I think there may be an unintended morality play here.  The educated middle class – and the working middle class as well – those of us who lead relatively circumscribed lives focused on raising our families and doing a good job of doing what we do – those of us who dream of greatness, but vicariously live those dreams through sports or literary or political heroes – may end up being made of different stuff than those who glimpse and grasp for a greatness beyond that.  We may be constrained, hemmed in, and defined by invisible and yet unimaginably strong boundaries that we chafe and even rage against, but ultimately feel soothed and contained by.  We are drawn to and report on those – petty thieves, murderers, and politicians – who are unbound by our restraints – because they need to be watched, with fear and fascination, as they create worlds that we uncomfortably live in – and as we envy and admire the freedoms that they enact.  But these worlds, especially as we move closer to vortices of power, are increasingly vulnerable to destabilizing forces that can tip us away from the kinds of societies that we banded together to create – the kinds of societies that would protect us from the dangers “out there.”

Last fall, I visited the reluctant son in Chicago, and we went to the Art Institute.  It had a temporary exhibition on the Soviet Union.  It was 2017 – the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the great communist experiment.  I was nonplussed about the exhibit, but the reluctant son insisted and so we went – and I’m very glad we did.

The exhibit was organized into five or seven or eight aspects of communist life; something as big as the culture of a country like Russia (or ours) cannot be contained in a single narrative.  But the unifying thread was something that at first felt very American – the intent of the Leninist revolution was to have all people be equal.  Isn’t that our foundation?  But the radical revision of a country where 70% of the population in 1917 was illiterate and one in which ownership of anything was restricted to a very small percentage of the population to one in which all are equal overnight created strains – to say the least.  One of the strains was communicating with the populace.  Visual art and artists became very important figures in the propaganda of the new state because so many of the people couldn’t read (In Nicaragua, a similarproblem in the middle of the century was addressed through education).  I am curious, in the wake of this movie, about the ways in which the country moved from its idealistic roots to the crisis depicted (in condensed form) here.

But I am also curious about what outcome our country will have in the wake of a tempestuous leader who is using the reins of power – those he appears to be capriciously picking up when it suits him, while leaving others untended so that multiple mini- dictatorships may emerge in areas of the bureaucracy – and how we will weather this storm.  Does the alliance of our bourgeoisie values – and the size of our bourgeoisie class – in concert with our rule of law tradition – have the capacity to help us reinstate “rational” leadership – or do we swing towards the kind of chaos depicted here?

The final image in this film is a return to the beginning.  We are back in the symphony hall, but now Khrushchev is in power and is sitting in the front of the balcony.  The camera pans back to reveal Brezhnev hovering over his shoulder – waiting to wrest Khrushchev’s hardwon power.  We, too, have our own lurkers, waiting to assume the mantel of power.  They used to be within the governmental frame, but we are now entertaining all comers: Oprah Winfrey anyone? 

When I was in Nicaragua and talking with Dora Maria Tellez, a revolutionary who fought alongside Daniel Ortega to bring democracy to the country, only to have Ortega be voted out of power, voted back into power and then seize control as dictator – I asked her if she was disappointed by Ortega’s becoming a dictator.  She said that she was not.  People who are drawn to power want to retain it.  It is the rare figure – the George Washingtons and the Nelson Mandelas of this world – who think beyond themselves and really think of the good of the country and realize that succession is not something to be feared, but something to be fostered.  That caring for a country, like caring for a family, involves transmitting values that will guide us and help us manage the seemingly unmanageable aspects of being human and living with each other.

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