Black comedy doesn’t get any blacker than The Death of Stalin, which mines laughs from one of the most brutal and frightening regimes in modern history. Adapting a graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, British writer and director Armando Iannucci dramatizes the night in March 1953 when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin—who had killed 20 million people, sent 18 million to the gulags as slave labor, and exiled ten million more—keeled over of a cerebral hemorrhage, his subsequent death setting off a power struggle between the Communist Party, led by Nikita Khrushchev, and the state apparatus, led by Stalin’s first lieutenant and head of secret police, Lavrenti Beria. Seeing Kremlin historical figures played by such British and American comic actors as Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, and Michael Palin is a little weird at first, but Iannucci’s tasteless humor might be the only way to approach a subject so epic in its terror and tragedy.

Beria’s job may have been homicide, but his hobby was rape. For years historians were unsure how seriously to credit the claims of Beria’s political enemies that he had seduced or forced himself on dozens of women, but the opening of his interrogation archives settled the matter. As Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in his book Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, Beria indulged in “a Draculean sex life that combined love, rape, and perversity in almost equal measure. . . . It is often impossible to differentiate between women he seduced who went to him to plead for loved ones—and those women he simply kidnapped and raped.” The limits of Beria’s depravity are still unknown: in 2003, 50 years after his death, the Tunisian Embassy in Moscow, which occupies Beria’s former home, reported that construction work on the cellar had unearthed human bones.

Reconciling Beria’s monstrous behavior with his liberal reforms isn’t easy, especially for Khrushchev. “You’re the good guy now?” he sputters after Beria has introduced his amnesty program. “You locked up half the nation! You beat them, you raped them, you killed them!” Beria replies, “Yes, and now I’m releasing them.” After Beria has been shot and his corpse set on fire, Khrushchev rails at him: “I will bury you in history, you hear me, you fat fucker?” He did—after replacing Stalin as general secretary of the party, Khrushchev rolled back his predecessor’s program of state terror, though he stopped well short of the goals Beria had championed. At one point Khrushchev, urging Svetlana to seek asylum in Vienna, warns her, “This is how people get killed—when their stories don’t fit.” The Death of Stalin is a priceless political satire, but what’s really impressive is how hard Iannucci tries to fit Beria’s story into the puzzle.  v

Directed by Armando Iannucci. R, 107 min.