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Friday, July 20, 2018

The Death of Stalin (2018)

This is flat out brilliant.  It is a movie set at the end of Stalin's life, after decades of purges of every sort imaginable.  At dinner one night, the Russian elite are drinking and telling macabre tales, and at the end of the evening, Lavrenti Beria, the sadistic head of the secret police, turns to Georgy Malenkov and tells him that he is on the most recent list of purges, and urges him to drive his car into a tree and be done with it, it will save them all time and money.  Once Stalin dies, there is the inevitable jockeying for power that would occur in any such government, and oddly, Malenkov is suddenly up on top, ever so briefly.  The back room deals, the ruthless killing of anyone who knows anything to save face is stunningly pulled off, culminating in a Red Army coup and Nikita Khrushchev somehow, almost improbably, out on top.  Crazy like a fox, he is, but the bitter laughter that pervades the movie is very similar to the tone that I got when I was a visitor in modern day Russia.  The vast corruption and the inequities that are outside of the control of most pervade the country today.

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