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  I had seen an ad or two for this and had vaguely heard that it was a critic's favorite, but it never made it to our local theater.  When I saw it in the Redbox this week I decided to pick it up, being a total history nerd as I am.  I was VERY impressed from the outset - this film is brilliant!

   After a very typical dinner party with his Politburo flunkies, Stalin retires to his room to listen to a recording of the Moscow symphony - and drops over with a stroke.  Panic and scrambling for position ensue as the Politburo members debate how to go about securing medical treatment, and then, when Stalin succumbs, how to conduct the funeral and who should be his successor.  Malenkov, Khrushchev, Beria, and Molotov are all brilliantly portrayed - I never would have seen Steve Buscemi as Khrushchev, but he carries the role off brilliantly.  How a movie can be so chillingly historically accurate and yet so hilarious at the same time is odd, but to the best of my knowledge they got the essential personalities and the flow of events correct.  Odd that one of the most brutal and terrifying regimes in history could have been run by such a bumbling gang of thugs and perverts, but that is the pretty well how it was.
A very entertaining film; I think I will add it to my personal collection. 5/5

In all reality,  Indy,  a brutal dictator is quite likely to surround himself with weak,  bumblibg incompetents too cowardly and\or inept to try deposing him.  This is a fairly common historical fact.  As to the obvious objection to such a practice,  that it leaves the country in a lurch when the dictator dies without a clear successor,  the brutally honest truth is that by and large brutal dictators don't give a flea's fart about their countries after they die.

Good points all. Khruschev was by far the cleverest and most competent of the lot; Beria second.  But Beria made the mistake of being hated as well as feared, and that was his downfall.  Everyone was anxious to see him killed!

I am glad STALIN is long dead. 

This makes an interesting followup to this movie.  Or a. Prelude if you wish.

https://www.historyandheadlines.com/10-reasons-stalin-might-worse-hitler/ (https://www.historyandheadlines.com/10-reasons-stalin-might-worse-hitler/)

Loved it. My vote for Movie of the Year so far.  :thumbup:

Not to dump on the OP at all,  but Mao Tse Dung murdered more people that uncle 'dolf or uncle Joe.  Why do. We. Never see him excoriated and exposed in a. Movie?  Is it because our move industry now. Kowtows to Peking for financial gain? (And yes I know the chines e government renamed Peking to Beijing,  XXXX THOSE EVIL SCUM!!!)

Mao....yes, an accomplished mass murderer, but also a boring figure. Stalin was more interesting.

Bonus fun fact: Mao did not bathe or brush his teeth.

According to THE GREAT BIG BOOK OF HORRIBLE THINGS (a very interesting read,  BTW), the two greatest butchers of all time were Chairman Mao (40 million deaths) and Ghengis Khan (also 40 million victims).  Think about that - these two men between them killed more people than perished in all of World War II!  I think Mao gets a pass in most films because the Chinese government continues to idolize him, and because most Westerners today barely even know who he was. Stalin, because of his role in World War II as Hitler's eastern nemesis, gets more and better press . . . or at least, more press!

(BTW, in addition to not bathing or brushing his teeth, Mao was a compulsive sex addict who kept a harem of girls wherever he went, some of them as young as 14 - a trait he shared with Kim Il Sung of North Korea.)

I need to see this!  :buggedout:

Yeah, man, Stalin dead, what's not to like?

I wonder what history would be like now had Trotsky defeated Stalin.

It took a tyrant of Stalin's nature to retain power under the jungle-like conditions of the formative years of the USSR, and lacking Stalin's brutal nature, Trotsky, an inept man and not the brilliant thinker or humanitarian revisionist history has made him out to be, would not have lasted long. Power struggles and wars between factions would have resulted after Trotsky's downfall and life might actually have been worse in the midst of internecine conflict than it was in our timeline with Stalin in the Kremlin. IMHO.

WTF?
(That's short for "What the f**k?")

I thought they were just alternate transliterations of the same Chinese word...

https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/11/11/beijing-or-peking (https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/11/11/beijing-or-peking)
http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2008/08/so-when-exactly-did-peking-bec.php (http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2008/08/so-when-exactly-did-peking-bec.php)

According to Wikipedia it's a French translitteration based on a different dialect of Chinese:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Beijing#Peking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Beijing#Peking)

From a disinterested perspective that's my honest opinion, not praise of Stalin. I base what i wrote up above on thinking about the power players active after Lenin's death, men who could have made a grab for power but Stalin eliminated them. Absent Stalin's purges these figures would almost certainly have factionalized a nation Stalin united through terror and ruled from the vacuum he created by mass murder.

Believing as I do that Trotsky would have been too idealistic and weak to retain power in the savage environment of Russia circa the late 1920s, it becomes almost automatic to project civil war which may (or may not) have resulted in more deaths than we saw under Stalin.

If you really need me to add this disclaimer, fine: I'm just speculating on what might have been, not saying Stalin was anything but a cruel man. History often requires its students to write dispassionately about very terrible people.

Ah, but would the inevitable war have led to a less-tyrannical government? Would such a government still be around today? And what would the benefits of said government be?

That's a question best answered by a writer of alternative history like Harry Turtledove.

from ER-

"Believing as I do that Trotsky would have been too idealistic and weak to retain power in the savage environment of Russia circa the late 1920s, it becomes almost automatic to project civil war which may (or may not) have resulted in more deaths than we saw under Stalin."

So just let the maniac take over and not the idealist? I would rather die for a belief than win with a meglomaniac.

But the end result would be the same.  Bloodshed, confusion, and death, with a strongman eventually seizing power.
Plus . . . Trotsky was not all goodness and light.  He and Lenin could be just as bloodthirsty as Stalin.
Communism is a blood-soaked and evil philosophy that has never failed to end in tyranny.

I watched this movie again tonight and was once more impressed with the stellar performances and clever screenwriting.  This really is a great film!

And I still really need to see this!
I am fascinated by this period in history-between World Wars. So much was going on.

ALL governments are blood soaked.
 I agree, to an extent.
The idea of pure Communism is bad. No one want's to live in a world that makes you a drone.
The hippies tried it- and it ended up like Manson and Jim Jones.
Human nature is not gonna let us live like 'hippies'.
But what do I know? I live in the backwoods of Michigan, all I can do is run my mouth about s**t I never lived in.

Still my #1 movie of 2018. Nothing better has come along so far.

Bride of Stalin is an intense movie not all would be ready for https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103025/ (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103025/)