Man, did we watch the same movie? The very opening sequence is based on an apocryphal tale, that Stalin had been listening to a radio broadcast of an orchestra one night, called up the broadcast studio after it was finished to congratulate them on how good it was and then, in a fit of Soviet patriotism, the orchestra chose to play the whole show again in order to record it and send the record to Stalin - a story that is almost certainly made up, but the point of which is to show how much the Soviet people loved Stalin.

Meanwhile in the film, Stalin calls up to gruffly demand a recording of the show to be handed to him by the morning, so the exhausted orchestra has to repeat the performance in a new fit of terror for their lives at the implication their heartless tyrant will have them killed if they don’t. Now, aside from the film’s obvious protrayal of itself as a comedy/satire, it still claims to essentially represent the sequence of events surrounding the succession of Stalin by Khrushchev, so anti-communism-primed lib audiences would probably take this to be an exaggerated depiction of something that actually happened rather than a made-up story with the point of it completely inverted.

And that’s just the opening few minutes. The entire rest of the film has this atmosphere that, at any moment, anyone could just be arrested by the secret police or summarily executed as part of someone’s play for power, as if that’s how it really was in the USSR. I mean, there’s a scene after Stalin’s death where for no apparent reason the whole staff of his dacha is just getting executed in the background by soldiers, who then stand there and wait to be executed by other soldiers! If it didn’t market itself as a comedy it would just be a very extreme anticommunist screed.

I’m not saying the film wasn’t funny or that it isn’t worth watching, but the writer is obviously a liberal with the fundamental anticommunist brainworms that comes with. It’s really a comedy about bureaucratic dysfunction, just like many of the writer’s other works like The Thick Of It, but he still chose to set it in the USSR and indulge in all these anticommunist tropes, presenting them in a way the audience isn’t really sure if it’s an exaggeration or something that really happened. It’s the very definition of lib as fuck.