What a real rat race looks like

I saw the movie, The Death of Stalin, last night on Netflix, and highly recommend it. The movie takes a satirical look at the chaotic jockeying for power among Stalin's ministers after "The Boss" succumbs to a stroke, and it is shot through with the kind of dark humor that does a better job of blowing away the pretensions of the Soviet state than many far more serious films. There are wonderful performances by Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov, Michael Palin as Vyacheslav Molotov, and Simon Russell Beale in a remarkable turn as Stalin's diabolically clever and diabolically evil NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria. Just to give you a taste of the superb black humor: there is a scene in which Beria is walking briskly through a hallway somewhere in the dungeon of the Lubyanka, his attention completely focused on a conversation with one of his underlings, and he is not only completely oblivious to pistol shots and muzzle flashes occurring in the cells as they pass by, as prisoners are being liquidated, but even to a body that comes rolling down some stairs behind him. This evil was Beria's "normal", and his complacent acceptance, and, indeed, authorship, of it are as horrible as the lethal deeds, themselves.

The film was written by Armando Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin and Peter Fellows, but it is the kind of thing that puts me very much in mind of the works of the Russian novelist and short-story writer Vladimir Voinovich, author of one of the greatest comic novels of the 20th century, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. Among other themes, The Death of Stalin reveals how illusory power can be, and that dictators can go from being omnipotent one minute to (literally) something for the dust bin the next.