Aside from the misdating, I intentionally refused to go see the movie because I saw from the reviews that Khrushchev was portrayed as a more or less "good guy". This is the exact opposite of the reality.
He's the protagonist, I suppose, but he comes across as just as venal and cowardly as all of them. The film ends with a little caption that suggests he's no improvement, and that for all his suggestions of reform, he just keeps on keeping on, while mentioning his demotions of all his allies with whom he worked against Beria.
I don't really find any of that impressive. Those are also moves that could just as easily be efforts to maintain his popularity. You tear down Stalin's cult, because it's an obstacle to your own exercise of power. Paulina Molotov was another communist. Whatever happened to her was nothing she hadn't been fine with happening to others, and Molotov was a scumbag too (The film character is an ideological purist, who's not so much "good" or "innocent" as sincere and committed to the ideals and theory, and otherwise marginalized by his more venal colleagues).
YES! THANK you. The cult of Zhukov the Military Genius, Hero of the Great Patriotic War seems to be even more difficult to root out than the myth of Stalin's competent administration. The film is kind of meh on that, he comes across as more capable than the other leading figures, but also crude and brutal. If you don't know better, you might be inclined to wonder where he's been when the terror was happening, and why he doesn't end up in charge once Beria is killed, largely by him and his men. The character trait of him being dumb and easily controlled has to be inferred simply by the fact that he essentially waits on permission to act and never takes the top slot. It doesn't help that he's played by Isaacs, instead of a more bulldog-looking thug-type. If you need to cast a Deatheater for the role, I'd have gone with Timothy Spall, first. And I couldn't help but think of the contrast between the on-screen, vigorous, irrepressible and crude Zhukov with what Western leaders who had met him during & right after the war found upon their reunion a few years later, after enduring the regime of the notoriously jealous Stalin who no longer needed him as much.
He takes credit for Stalingrad, but the plans he helped formulate for 1942 included four offensives named for planets, intended to drive the Germans entirely out of Russia. Three of the four operations were utter disasters, and the fourth came away with a single city that had already been utterly ruined and its use as an industrial center destroyed. And that only because a career staff officer in commander of the German forces bungled his handling of his armor, and disobeyed orders to surrender prematurely, precluding a relief operation. Kursk was a misnomer for the battle, since the Germans didn't give a shit about Kursk, they were trying to pinch off the Soviet salient, which would have utterly destroyed their military capacity. It ended because Hitler called off the advances in response to the Allied invasion of Italy, which in his mind, made the Balkans and Ploesti vulnerable. Since Kursk was the first town behind the final line of the German advance, the Soviet propaganda machine promptly announced that the Red Army had successfully prevented the Germans from capturing Kursk, which was credible, because Kursk DID remain in Soviet hands. Most Soviet successes came because of Hitler's prioritization of the Western Allies as the enemy, such as sending the Africa Korps to fight the British, instead of to Russia, withholding the Grossdeutschland Division in response to the Dieppe raid (which together might have made the difference at Stalingrad), or stripping Army Group Center of air & armor units in response to Overlord, enabling Bagration to succeed. The Allies threw the race to Berlin, and gave the USSR the transport capacity without which they'd have never arrived in Germany in the first place. Zhukov's military performance was about what you'd expect after Stalin had purged the military of any genuine leadership or military talent. His post-war survival further speaks volumes about Stalin's assessment of his brains and guts (specifically the lack thereof). Like Malenkov, Molotov, Krushchev, Mikoyan, Bulganin & Kaganovich, he was still around when Stalin died because he was no threat.
Well, it's called "The Death of Stalin" because these losers, and their fearful sycophancy even after his death, are his legacy. Even Beria's stipulated improvements only look good by comparison. Best case scenario, he ineptly opens the state up for a real revolution and overthrow of communism earlier, and we get to the current state of affairs a generation ago. Alternatively, he reads the writing on the wall quickly enough (or one of his underlings does and deposes him in order to act), and goes back to the brutal repression playbook to maintain his own power. Ultimately the problems with a communist state are fundamental to the nature of totalitarianism and materialism, and can't be excused by blaming them on the personalities involved. The problems with the USSR were not that Stalin and Krushchev fucked up communism, it was that communism created an environment conducive to "leadership" like Stalin's. What I took from this movie is not "what a bunch of bozos" but "this group of bozos is to whom one inevitably turns over the reins of power in any kind of materialist and statist society". It's funny, because there are no good guys here, and anyone who loses gets what's coming to him. Of all of Buscemi's roles, Krushchev's portrayal here most reminded me of Nucky Thompson in "Boardwalk Empire", a vicious petty asshole, usually overreaching in his attempt to be the biggest swinging dick in the room.
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*