The Death of Stalin (2017) on Netflix
Joseph Stalin dies, and the members of the Soviet Central Committee turn on one another. Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenti Beria and Georgy Malenkov each want to be the next leader.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb7.3/10128,367 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes95%
Trailer
Plot summary
Stalin's NKVD has enforced the Great Terror for two decades, and a name on his list of enemies means prison, exile or execution. One March night in 1953, the director of Radio Moscow is made to recall an audience and orchestra after a broadcast to record a Mozart piano concerto for Stalin. The pianist, Maria Yudina, who hates him, takes a bribe to play and slips a note into the recording. At the Kuntsevo dacha, Stalin is hosting Central Committee members. As Vyacheslav Molotov leaves, Lavrenti Beria tells Nikita Khrushchev and Georgy Malenkov that Molotov is marked for the next purge. The recording arrives, and the men posted outside Stalin's office hear the thud of a fall but are too afraid to enter.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Death of Stalin (2017)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Two days before its scheduled Russian release in January 2018, Russia's Ministry of Culture withdrew The Death of Stalin's distribution certificate after a screening attended by State Duma MPs; when cinemas screened it anyway, the Ministry sued them.
SPOILER
The film shows Beria arrested almost at once after Stalin's death, but he was in reality arrested three months later, and the film's massacre of mourners is based on a real funeral crush in which at least 109 people were trampled to death.- Timothy Dalton and Toby Kebbell were in advanced talks to join the film in 2016, but by the time filming started on 20 June, Jason Isaacs had replaced Dalton as Georgy Zhukov and Rupert Friend had replaced Kebbell as Vasily Stalin.
- The film's Radio Moscow scenes come from an apocryphal story in Solomon Volkov's 1979 book Testimony, in which Maria Yudina is woken in the middle of the night in 1943 or 1944 and Stalin, moved to tears, pays her 20,000 roubles.
- A scene showing the Soviet ice hockey team depleted by a plane crash was inspired by a real crash in which 11 players of the VVS Moscow team died; star Vsevolod Bobrov survived only because he missed the flight, but the crash happened in January 1950.
