TYRANTS DESTROYED
On a frosty day in Moscow, 26 January 2018, two events took place that should never have happened, but did, nonetheless. In one of the city’s registry offices, an official legalized a marriage between two men, Yevgeny Voitsekhovsky and Pavel Stotsko. They had married in Copenhagen, where same-sex marriage is allowed, and now the official had put a stamp in their passports to say they were married. On the same day, in the Pioneer cinema in Moscow, in front of a full house, they put on the Russian premiere of the British comedy film, The Death of Stalin, despite the fact that the Ministry of Culture had revoked the screening licence. And even though these two events were not connected, for a split second it seemed as if the system had crashed and treacherous cracks had appeared in it.
Sitting in the packed hall of the Pioneer, I realized that cinema really is art for the masses, and no downloads or DVDs can compare with watching a film with a live audience. There was laughter in the hall from the very first scene, in which the pianist Maria Yudina (played by Olga Kurilenko) plays Mozart’s twenty-third piano concerto, accompanied by an orchestra. In the film, the audience have already started to leave when Stalin demands a recording of the concert – and it transpires that they haven’t made one. The terrified sound director chases the audience back to their seats to try to ensure that the music and the applause sound exactly the same as in the original concert. Even given the absurdity of the situation, who can vouch for such an event not happening in those times, when heads would roll for a misplaced comma in a text or the wrong note in a music score? And when the conductor is knocked out after banging his head on a fire bucket and another conductor is sent for (looking for all the world like Gennady Rozhdestvensky), the second conductor, hearing the nighttime knock at the door, resignedly gets up, bids farewell to his wife, in passing, instructing her to disown him during interrogation, and makes his way towards the staircase in his dressing gown. Is this a black comedy? Or is it a reflection of reality? Especially in the light of Julian Barnes’s novel, The Noise of Time, where, after a crushing article in Pravda, Shostakovich is expecting to be arrested at any moment, and so every evening he shaves, gathers his belongings in a small suitcase, and goes out to the stairwell, so that his arrest won’t bother the family.
The whole film is like this: it isn’t just buffoonery, but a higher form of comedy, à la Chaplin, probing, where behind all the jokes and the gags we can see the black abyss of being. The director, Armando Iannucci, is well known for his political satires, such as The Thick of It, or the mockumentary based on it, In the Loop, and he doesn’t try to hide that he is filming a farce: there is no point in trying to find absolute historical accuracy in The Death of Stalin (deliberately, the crowds on the streets are caricatures – grandmothers in headscarves, bearded muzhiks; the Commissar of State Security, Lavrentiy Beria, indulges in pleasures with schoolgirls in the basement of the Lubyanka, amidst the sound of shots and shouts of, ‘Long live Comrade Stalin’) – and the facts were not exactly as presented (for example, Marshal Zhukov wasn’t in Moscow at the moment when Stalin died). But the film is loyal to a different, deeper, truth: it mercilessly reflects the spirit of the times, where fear was mixed with the absurd, and laughter with death. The film is not realistic, but it is truthful, in the same way, for example, that Shakespeare is truthful. The Death of Stalin is very accurate in its assessments: again and again, it is clear that humour can reveal the essence of the era and the characters much more accurately than a historical reconstruction or a costume drama. Perhaps the best example of this was Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, which was banned not only in the Axis powers[20] but in the USSR, too, because Stalin didn’t like it.
For all the grotesque, operetta-like qualities of the characters, they have been drawn with deadly accuracy: the weak-willed Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgy Malenkov; the Jesuitical People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, betraying his wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, seven times in one day; the maniacal Commissar for State Security, Lavrentiy Beria; the conceited Marshal Georgy Zhukov; Stalin’s heir, Nikita Khrushchev, who, under the mask of being a country bumpkin is really a cunning schemer. Then there’s the rude, mistrustful, cruel and lonely Stalin, suffering a ridiculous and ugly death, lying in a pool of his own urine. Each of the masks has its own authenticity and depth, but above all they are hopeless, incorrigibly ridiculous, confusedly turning in a ritual dance around the corpse in their baggy trousers, trying to hide with party slogans their Darwinian struggle for power and for their lives.
And it is in this sense that this film probably presents the greatest threat to our current leadership. It’s not just that it’s a funny film; it’s because we are used to our leaders being portrayed as great, frightening, even helpless (as in Alexander Sokurov’s film, Taurus, where the dying Lenin was shown) or abhorrent (like in Alexei German’s picture, Khrustalyov, My Car!, about the last days of Stalin’s life) – but never funny. The myth of Stalin in all its parts – apologetic, critical, statist, liberal – can’t cope with coming up against British humour. It flies into a tantrum before Monty Python. In Russia we’re not used to speaking in this way about those in power. We’ve never had a television series such as Yes, Minister! or Absolute Power with Stephen Fry, or Iannucci’s other comedies. The legendary show Kukly (‘Puppets’ – a clone of the British satirical programme Spitting Image), remained as a programme of the Yeltsin era, having run aground with the series Little Zaches: The Story of Putin from Beginning to End; Putin found it insulting.[21] Laughter takes apart the very foundations of power, removing its sacred nature and its secret; it shows up human weakness, chance and meaninglessness. Laughter is the Achilles heel of power, which Vladimir Nabokov understood well in his pamphlet Tyrants Destroyed: ‘Having experienced all the degrees of hatred and despair, I achieved those heights from which one obtains a bird’s-eye view of the ludicrous.’[22]
The present leadership’s fear of Iannucci’s comedy is twofold. On the one hand, Stalin’s myth lies at the base of Russian power as an indulgence, as the state’s ultimate monopoly of violence, deeply ingrained in the collective subconscious; however anyone in the ruling elite relates to Stalin, they know instinctively that laughing at Stalin is the most painful spot for the authorities. But on the other hand – and this is even more important – in the depth of their souls they suspect that they are just as grotesque and just as funny, and when the inevitable change of leadership happens in the Kremlin there will be exactly the same scampering around like cockroaches and tragicomic scenes. Just as it was sixty-five years ago, so now the only political institution is the body of the leader, and the question of succession is spontaneous, not predestined, and there will be just such a furious ‘bulldog fight under the rug’, as Churchill allegedly described it so accurately.
Incidentally, the local failure of the system that took place on 26 January was quickly put right. The police turned up in the Pioneer cinema and the film was hurriedly stopped. As for the young men who had had the stamps put in their passports at the registry office confirming their gay marriage: the police paid a visit to their flat. When they didn’t open the door, the director of communal services shut off their electricity and Internet, and the Interior Ministry cancelled their passports and fined the men for ‘spoiling’ them. When journalists turned up at their flat, they found miserable policemen on the staircase, who complained that they had had to sit in ambush all night, and in the morning they were having to go off and break up an opposition rally… The absurdity of these events is even stronger than the films of Armando Iannucci; and we watch these farcical comedies about ourselves every day of the week.
20
The Axis Powers before and during the Second World War were Germany, Italy and Japan. Despite formally signing the Tripartite Pact in 1940, they were united by little more than their common enemies. Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania later joined, as did Yugoslavia – for two days.
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22
Vladimir Nabokov,