The Death of Stalin is a 2017 political satire black comedy film written and directed by Armando Iannucci and co-written by David Schneider and Ian Martin with Peter Fellows.

The French-British-Belgian co-production stars an ensemble cast that includes Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Paddy Considine, Rupert Friend, Jason Isaacs, Olga Kurylenko, Michael Palin, Andrea Riseborough, Dermot Crowley, Paul Chahidi, Adrian McLoughlin, Paul Whitehouse, and Jeffrey Tambor.

[4][5] On the night of 1 March 1953, Joseph Stalin calls the Radio Moscow director to demand a recording of the just-concluded live recital of Mozart's Piano Concerto No.

The performance was not recorded; not wanting to anger Stalin, the director hurriedly refills the now-half-empty auditorium, fetches a new conductor to replace the original one, who has passed out, and orders the orchestra to play again.

Once Malenkov, Khrushchev, Lazar Kaganovich, Anastas Mikoyan, and Nikolai Bulganin arrive, the Committee finally decides to send for a team of doctors.

Essentially a puppet of Beria, Malenkov further exerts control by hijacking Khrushchev's proposed reforms, such as releasing political prisoners and loosening clerical restrictions.

[3] On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 94% based on 254 reviews, with an average score of 8/10; the site's critics consensus reads: "The Death of Stalin finds director/co-writer Armando Iannucci in riotous form, bringing his scabrous political humor to bear on a chapter in history with painfully timely parallels.

[18] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 5/5 stars, writing that "fear rises like gas from a corpse in Armando Iannucci's brilliant horror-satire" and that it "is superbly cast, and acted with icy and ruthless force by an A-list lineup.

"[19] Sandra Hall of The Sydney Morning Herald gave the film 4.5/5 stars, describing it as "a devastatingly funny dissection of power politics, stripping the mystique from it and those who worship it.

"[20] Donald Clarke of The Irish Times gave the film 4/5 stars, writing that it "starts in a state of mortal panic and continues in that mode towards its inevitably ghastly conclusion".

[21] Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph also gave the film 4/5 stars, writing: "Depending on your point of view, The Death of Stalin is either a sly, wintry satire on Armando Iannucci's usual theme of squawking political idiocy, or an insidious attempt to destabilise the Russian establishment with relentless dagger-blows.

"[23] Christopher Orr of The Atlantic praised the film's humour and performances and wrote that it "seems precisely attuned to the current moment: a capricious, unpredictable leader, basking in a cult of personality; the introduction of 'alternative facts'; the swift, party-wide swerves on subjects as various as negotiating with North Korea, paying off porn stars, and even Russian efforts to subvert a U.S.

"[26] Thomas Walker, in The Objective Standard, agreed, adding that the film "dives deep into the psychology of those living under such a system and lays bare the self-destructive mind-set of those who grasp wildly for power.

"[28] Peter Debruge of Variety wrote: "If only the end result were as funny as the idea that anyone would undertake a film about the turmoil surrounding the Soviet despot's demise.

[30] Nikolai Starikov, head of the Russian Great Fatherland Party, called The Death of Stalin an "unfriendly act by the British intellectual class", and part of an "anti-Russian information war".

Several cinemas screened the film in late January, and, though they claimed they had not heard the exhibition license had been revoked, the Ministry sued these theatres.

[33] A group of lawyers from Russia's Ministry of Culture; Era Zhukova, the daughter of Marshal Zhukov; cinematographer Nikita Mikhalkov; Vladimir Bortko; and Alexey Levykin, head of the Russian State Historical Museum,[34] petitioned Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky to withdraw the film's certification, saying: "The Death of Stalin is aimed at inciting hatred and enmity, violating the dignity of the Russian (Soviet) people, promoting ethnic and social inferiority.

We are confident that the movie was made to distort our country's past so that the thought of the 1950s Soviet Union makes people feel only terror and disgust.

Among his examples in support of this are that: Overy wrote that those killed in the Great Purge or sent to Gulags "deserve a film that treats their history with greater discretion and historical understanding".

[47] In the film, Vasily Stalin and Anatoly Tarasov are seen at a practice of the Soviet Union national ice hockey team, which has been depleted by a recent plane crash.

[48] Samuel Goff of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, though opining that the film's historical discrepancies could be justified as helping to focus the drama, wrote that turning Beria into "an avatar of the obscenities of the Stalinist state" missed the chance to say "anything about the actual mechanisms of power", and argued that Iannucci's approach to satire was not transferable to something like Stalinism, and the film is "fundamentally ill-equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing marks it doesn't know it should be aiming for.