The Death of Stalin Review (Fabien Nury, Thierry Robin)

Stalin collapsed on 1 March 1953 and died a few days later. Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin relate the farce that was going on behind the scenes in those days before Stalin actually kicked the bucket, as high ranking communist party officials ineptly tried to help save their comrade’s life while also attempting to secure power for themselves in the vacuum of his impending exit.

It’s an incredible story that Nury/Robin have to say at the start is a work of fiction because of the intentional (the Soviets were extremely censorius) lack of historical evidence, though they have produced something as close to what likely happened and so it’s fair to assume that, as bizarre as it is, it’s probably the truth.

As Stalin was lying unconscious, party officials literally held quite casual committee meetings before deciding to send for any doctor to treat Stalin, and, even then, needed to hold further meetings to vet which doctors would see him. But that’s only the beginning of the lunacy that led to Stalin’s eventual death with drunken party officials terrorising doctors as they worked, thinking they were trying to kill him rather than treat him!

And when they finally locate a suitable ventilator for Stalin (the state-of-the-art machine was American-made - indicating that even in 1953 the Soviet Union was doomed to lose the Cold War), it was the wrong voltage and needed a generator, but it was too loud to run indoors, so they needed to put it outside and find extra cables - but it was too late. Ironically, Stalin was killed by the paranoia, fear and stultifying bureaucracy of his own creation as much as his poor health.

There are glimpses into the sad lives Stalin’s children led, especially his wretched son Vasily, and you get an idea of the pure evil that was party official Beria (although his Wiki is even more damning - he was apparently a serial killer in addition to being a serial rapist). The power plays going on while Stalin was on his deathbed are fascinating to see even if you know Khrushchev ultimately stages a coup, and the way the state funeral was handled was needlessly tragic - even in death, Stalin managed to kill even more of his own people.

I had no idea how bonkers the fallout from Stalin’s death was so this is a very informative book as well as darkly entertaining. The Death of Stalin is an utterly gripping story from start to finish, masterfully told through the perfect balance of words and art, complementing one another beautifully - a powerful look at the staggeringly high levels of incompetence and corruption at the heart of the Soviet Union represented by the apt metaphor of the death of its most famous leader.