The Death of Stalin

Farcical imagining of the 1953 goings-on in Moscow in what can be seen as the absurdity of the real life actions of the main players, those actions albeit horrific. Having led the Soviet Union in terror for thirty years with the power of his NKVD security forces to carry out that terror for the last twenty, Joseph Stalin, still relatively healthy and after listening to a live musical broadcast on Radio Moscow for which he wants the non-existent recording immediately, surprisingly drops dead, or so those around him believe as the Party has no expert to tell them so having previously killed all the doctors in Moscow. Those in the inner circle of the Party, while preparing for the State funeral according to Party policy, jockey for position, sometimes openly and sometimes behind the scenes, for their preferred place in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, the worst of those places proverbially six feet under as much of that jockeying is in direct opposition to someone else in that circle. That inner circle is comprised of: Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Moscow Committee; Vyacheslav Molotov, Foreign Secretary; Georgi Malenkov, Deputy to Stalin; Lazar Kaganovich, Minister for Labor; Anastas Mikoyan, Minister for Trade; Nikolai Bulganin, Minister for Defense; and arguably most terrifying Lavrenti Beria, Head of the NKVD. In that jockeying, the players try to curry the favor of: Stalin's two adult children, Svetlana Alliluyeva and Vasili Stalin, who are also not only looking for their future place, which could easily be the way of their father without his protection, but are looking for answers as to what happened; and Field Marshal Georgi Zhukov, Head of the Soviet Army, who has the manpower of the said army behind him.