Stalin film lands satirist in the thick of it
BRITAIN: IT has been hailed as a darkly comic satire on the absurdities of Soviet bureaucracy. However, not everyone is excited by The Death of Stalin.
Armando Iannucci’s film has riled the hard left, with the Communist Party in Russia demanding that it is banned from cinemas and British communists raging against ‘‘one-sided western propaganda’’.
The film shows sycophantic members of Stalin’s inner circle competing to save themselves after his death in 1953. The British-led cast includes Simon Russell Beale as the secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, Michael Palin as the foreign minister VyacheslavAˆ Molotov and Andrea Riseborough as Stalin’s daughter Svetlana.
Iannucci, who has satirised Westminster and Washington in The Thick of It and Veep, has described his new film as ‘‘a form of nervous comedy bordering on hysteria’’. Historians disagree over how many people died due to forced collectivisation, famine and executions under Stalin but most estimates are in the tens of millions. The dictator’s few defenders in Britain have objected to the film’s mocking tone, accusing Iannucci of peddling
‘‘crude anti-communist stereotypes’’.
Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, told The Times: ‘‘The Stalin period was one of enormous achievements as well as enormous tragedies and many more millions of ordinary Russians mourned his death than celebrated it.’’
Sergei Obukhov, secretary of the central committee of the Russian Communist Party said that it was ‘‘another form of psychological warfare’’ against Russia from the West.
The fractured nature of hard- left politics in Britain makes it difficult to obtain a critical consensus. The general secretary of the New Communist Party of Britain declined to pass judgment until he had seen the film. The Communist Party of Great Britain did not respond to requests for comment.