Communism gets the comedy treatment

Idid an unusual thing last week: I sat and watched a recent Hollywood movie end-to-end. My passive viewing habits in the past few years have undergone a change in the direction of less television, no feature films and tons of dad-age YouTube material about car engines and the U.S. Civil War and Nordic woodland folk arts.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this. But as someone who enjoys Soviet history, and who has noticed classic communism becoming the edgy fashion choice of the 2020s, I couldn't pass up Armando Iannucci's The Death of Stalin.

Iannucci created the celebrated BBC politics sitcom The Thick of It. He then became a star in the United States by transplanting the cynicism and the operatic cruelty across the Atlantic, where they became HBO's Veep. If you're a fan of those series, it would be natural for you to wonder what Iannucci would do with the events following the 1953 death of Josef Stalin.

Iannucci's TV shows are set in a world adjacent to ours; political party identifications are heavily blurred, though easy to infer. Sometimes the major figures have recognizable family resemblances in the real world. The unhappy Alastair Campbell, the real-world New Labour spin doctor, will be shadowed by Iannucci's Malcolm Tucker into the grave and beyond.

But Iannucci has great latitude for invention; he can get away with treating Alastair Campbell sadistically by never using the name “Alastair Campbell.” The amazing thing about The Death of Stalin is that very little in it is invented. It's a comedy about the death of Stalin, which tells the story very faithfully — and yet is no less funny than Iannucci's half-invented political satires.

Nikita Khrushchev is shown staggering home from one of Stalin's brutal alcoholic late-night bull sessions and waking his wife so she can take immediate notes on which jokes worked and which ones didn't. Stalin's drunken son Vasily is seen managing an inept hockey team, most of whose good players have recently died in a plane crash that is officially not supposed to have occurred. Vyacheslav Molotov has an awkward moment when his wife, convicted of treason under Stalin, is immediately freed upon Stalin's death; she turns up without warning to reunite with a husband who had not known she was still alive.

The movie is full of comic bits and through-lines like this, and most or all are, like these, rock-solid literal history. You could show The Death of Stalin in a classroom with a very clear conscience.

This is not to diminish Iannucci's near-perfect movie, but plain facts will get you about nine-tenths of the way there if you're writing a comedy about the old Soviet Union. On Friday, the U.S. National Security Archive published some fascinating materials relating to the career of Anastas Mikoyan (18951978), the Armenian who held power in the U.S.S.R. “from Ilyich (V.I. Lenin) to Ilyich (L.I. Brezhnev).” Perhaps the most interesting item was a speech given by young Mikoyan in November of 1936 — Stalin's era.

The charming, sly Mikoyan, then people's commissar of the food industry, had visited the U.S. to study capitalist production techniques and organizational methods. What he found was that America, even in the depths of the Depression, was vastly more productive than the Soviet Union — and in many important ways, nicer and saner.

American factories weren't full of uniformed police scanning for “sabotage”; for this reason, they struck him as unnaturally empty. The eight-hour day, the ultimate dream of the militant working class, was an accomplished fact in the U.S. Mikoyan was astonished at unfamiliar sights like factory cafeterias, prepackaged foods and gas stations with vending machines.

How could Mikoyan talk about all this to the Central Committee of the U.S.S.R. without danger? Soviet politicians who made trips like this often ended up being shot as “spies,” although they had been on official business. His approach was to tell the straight truth to the committee — but to characterize elements of American superiority, at every turn, as sneaky bourgeois tricks.

In his introduction Mikoyan told the committee explicitly that he was going to concentrate on the things Americans did well. “I did not go there to see for myself that capitalism is rotten,” he said. “I wanted to seek out everything that is good, even on a tiny scale, in order to adopt this good for us.”

With the ground prepared, he was able to describe miracles of American life freely. Workers and managers in the U.S., unlike those in the classless Soviet Union, “act out a familiar, friendly, family-like relationship — just like actors.” The American working class, Mikoyan told the committee, had astonishing access to media, leisure and culture. “They fool the workers ingeniously, the bastards. They don't give them time to think: radio, movies, sports.”

Even American bathrooms were superior. Mikoyan asked in despair why no one in the progressive U.S.S.R. had thought to put sanitary-pad dispensers in the ladies' rooms. “We talk always and everywhere about how we care about people, but in reality, we provide very little care, even in these, at first glance, very small things,” he said. “There they get profit from it, and therefore they take care of people.”

This speech could make the basis of a good one-act play. A Soviet commissar returns from America, faces the Central Committee, praises the effects of the profit motive on working-class life — and gets away with it. Mikoyan (who is represented in Iannucci's movie) surely outlived almost every individual who heard him that November day. Yet one is never quite sure, reading his speech, that his pride in socialism is purely tactical.