....this is where I recommend that everyone watch the recently released film The Death Of Stalin. It's funny as hell and incredibly ugly. A good general display of how Russian politicians carry on in private.
So I actually did see The Death Of Stalin in an audience that chuckled at first, then fell silent. If you can let the inconsistencies slide past you then the thing is truly darkly hilarious. My problem is that I know something about Russian/Soviet history and what the place looks like, so certain things were distractions.
The weather was off. I never got a feeling that it was a cold Russian March - no snow on the ground, no really grey skies, and yet all the "Red Army" soldiers are wearing fur shapkas (just to be a stickler, the official name switched to Soviet Army after the war). The trees are green. Armando Iannucci should know or attempt to depict that the Russian weather is a constant shift as spring starts - like in Britain it can rain at the drop of a hat. I got the vibe that this was a Kiev summer (because they shot most of the exteriors with actors in Ukraine.) I know this sounds minor but it adds verisimilitude if you can sell that the weather fits the clothes.
The props were off at times. They use WW II Opel Blitz trucks as stand-ins for GAZ trucks in some scenes, and they didn't stick on different grilles to hide it. If you know what a Blitz truck looks like you ask "Why are they using Schindler's List vehicles in a Stalin comedy?" One of the Central Committee members drives a Citroën Traction Avant, the rest are in Buicks that sort of look like ZIS cars. I never saw a GAZ jeep in the film, even though they would be common in 1953, as would be Lend-Lease Studebaker trucks, and Ural motorcycles. Moscow, 1953 is not Pyongyang, 2018 - there would be a ton of vehicles on the road. They have black mourning banners with the Soviet crest in the background in the room with Stalin's memorial; that is a giant error as black flags of any sort meant "Anarchism"; that's why everybody wears red armbands with black trim at the funeral. It sounds odd, but that's how Stalin's USSR was.
The actual death was off. Stalin was totally unconscious and in a bed at 1 am on March the 1st and Khruschev and the others had been called back to see Stalin at that hour. They decided to do nothing, and Stalin was out cold all of that Sunday. Yeah, it's funny watching the Central Committee lug a piss-soaked Uncle Joe to a bed at 7am, but it didn't happen. The doctors were another element; Iannucci seems to think that the bullshit "Doctor's Plot" meant all of them had been dragged off to the Gulags, that was not true. The purge probably would have happened, but Koba the Dread kicking the bucket stopped that. The "Beria poisoned Stalin" conjecture could have been used in the film, but Iannucci said no and Stalin dies here by bureaucratic ineptitude, which is fine. I don't think that Central Committee was forced to watch Stalin's brains being exposed to open air, I can't find anything about it. Also, I can't find anything on if Stalin's dacha staff was shot and all of his things carted off by the "NKVD" (which by that point was the MVD), so I'm guessing that's Iannucci again.
Khrushchev. I can't not see Steve Buscemi as Steve Buscemi even when he is made up to look like Steve Buscemi's grandfather. Nobody who has played Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev who is a name actor can get around the fact that they can't hide in the role; Bob Hoskins came closest in Enemy at the Gates. So yes, Steve Buscemi is good doing the black comedy in this but you can't get around that I kept thinking "Mr. Pink is playing a Soviet Ukrainian now." Jeffery Tambor as Melenkov can do a better job, as long as he isn't speaking because his voice is familiar to me.
No mention of Gulag economics. Speaking of Khrushchev, there should have been a scene where some functionary from an economics ministry is telling Mr. Pink that the Gulag camps are a massive drag on the Soviet economy, inefficient for mining or canal building or Siberian town construction or doing secret scientific work (Yes, they had locked-up scientists work in their fields in "special camps") for the secret police and the military. This is why they began releasing people in larger and larger numbers after Stalin died, so they could work in the regular economy....it had gotten so bad with people being forced to hang around the Gulag camps after release (because their villages and towns didn't want them back, fearing they would be re-arrested) they were made paid Gulag laborers. Khrushchev is right about reform, but not in the mealymouthed way he presents it.
"Bang Bang", the Tokarev said. Lavrentiy Beria was a teenage-raping shit, but all the shooting in the Lubyanka basement is right out of the Great Terror of 1936-38. Don't worry about them getting the name of the secret police wrong, it constantly shifted from 1918 to 1954; most Westerners only know NKVD and KGB, not Cheka, GPU, OGPU, MOOP, etc. All that said, Simon Russell Beale is very good playing the mindgamer Georgian.
B-roll. There was no way this film was going to be made in Putin's Moscow, so they sent a second unit to shoot buildings and the Kremlin. The problem is that the film makes the viewer think that the leadership lives at Moscow State University, and not the less-imposing buildings they actually lived in (one of which now has a giant Mercedes Benz logo on the roof.) They also didn't digitally remove some of the Russian eagles Putin put up a few years ago, which says "We spent all our money hiring Michael Palin."
The niggling factoids. Zhukov was no longer Marshal of the Soviet Army - he was once again disfavored by Stalin. Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov constantly ping-ponged in stature because Stalin truly didn't trust him because he was too good at his job. The man Beria tells Stalin's daughter is dead was actually alive and released in 1953; she defected in 1967 to America and wasn't sent off to Brussels in 1953. They bring up Marshal Tukhachevsky and how he wasn't given a trial by Beria, when Beria was not head of the secret police in 1937 and the Marshal was tried....and shot. I can't find mention of the mass shooting (by MVD soldiers) of mourners trying to reach Stalin's viewing; this might be another Iannucchi invention - we do know people were crushed to death in the throng to see Koba lying in state.
Speaking of Michael Palin.... he needed to play Vyacheslav Molotov more like a faker quietly desperate to get his wife back then a mostly-clueless old man.
A joke they missed. At the end the titles say that Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev. They should have continued "and Brezhnev was replaced by Yuri Andropov after he died who was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko after he died..." and then the film should have gone to the end credits.
All in all, if you know little about Russia, this film works. I personally think it was banned in Russia because of all the errors.
Also, who conduced the faux-Shostakovitch music playing through most of the film?