Liberty
Stephen Cox
May 6, 2018
There is a newly released movie called The Death of Stalin. It’s not really about Stalin or his death, but you should see it anyway. One reason is that it’s been banned in Russia; the other, much more important reason, is that it’s really good and really entertaining (in a really grim way).
Stalin does appear for a few minutes at the start of the film, where we see him as a drunken clod with a low sense of humor and a proclivity for intimidating and boring his colleagues. Like Hitler, he forces people to stay up all night watching B movies from Hollywood. Then he dies, and the real story begins, as the second and third bananas battle one another to capture his authority. The movie is about the difficult process of redistributing power in an ideological regime that has become a personal regime and is now becoming a regime of bureaucrats. First came the Idea (communism); then came the Man (Stalin); now we have the Men, the party hacks and the heads of this or that, who survived long enough to start asserting their own personalities. We get to see what those personalities are, once asserted, and to study their grisly and comic clashes.
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http://libertyunbound.com/node/1847
