This is a fairly interesting depiction of the power struggle at the highest level of the Soviet government following the death of Stalin. Evil old white men rape, conspire and murder, so yeah, there's no one to root for in this tale of political intrigue beyond a defiant young female pianist shoved into framing scenes and a small cameo in the center of the book. Also, this is a fictionalized take on events so being ignorant of the facts, I was a little frustrated at not knowing what was real and what was made up, though a disclaimer at the start implies much of it is conjecture. Bottom line: this is a well executed work whose subject matter left me cold. ( )

This graphic narrative recounts the aftermath of the death of Stalin: the party politics, the manoeuvring for power, and the moments of utter farce that arose from the circumstances. Overall, I thought the narrative did a good job of encapsulating those events and particularly keeping the atmosphere laced with an undertone of menace; after all, these were people's lives and Beria was a nightmare figure.

Having seen the movie first, I probably prefer the movie, which highlights more of the farcical side of things with black humour, and gives more speaking roles to the women. There aren't a lot of women in the story to begin with, but they are much more present in the movie, such as Nikita Khruschev's wife. Overall, though, the graphic narrative provided a good jumping-off point for Iannucci to make a great movie, and it's interesting to read the source material to compare the two. ( )

Here Be Monsters

Sometimes the most persuasive way to portray the monstrous is through the medium of fiction, whether it be the recording of Nazi atrocities in "The Kindly Ones" by Jonathan Littell or in the case of this graphic novelization of various apocryphal stories surrounding the death of the Communist dictator Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920's through to his death in 1953. A strict non-fictional listing of the brutal facts can by turns be simply repellent, too overwhelming or just a droning bore.

Fiction usually needs a hero or perhaps an anti-hero to give the reader a point of entry into the book's world. "The Death of Stalin" does provide that somewhat through the bookending use of classical pianist Maria Yudina. An infamous apocryphal story related in Solomon Volkov's "Testimony: The Memoirs" (it has been long disputed whether any of it was actually written by composer Dmitri Shostakovich) is that Stalin heard a broadcast of Yudina performing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 with the Moscow Symphony and phoned up Radio Moscow to ask for a personal copy to be delivered the next day. The broadcast had been live-to-air though and no actual recording existed. Such was the terror induced by a mere trifling request from the feared dictator that the radio station re-assembled the musicians in the middle of the night to record the album and to press a single LP copy to be delivered to Stalin the following morning. Graphic novel writer Fabien Nury takes this story a step further though and moves the night of the broadcast & recording to a few days prior to Stalin's death in 1953, although Volkov's supposed incident occurred in 1944. So a likely fictional story is made to serve as a dramatic plot element leading to Stalin's death. But the point of it is how a single incident can be used to portray the fear that Stalin induced in his people. Yudina is drawn as a feisty glamorous diva, a portrayal that will likely be accentuated further by having model-actress Olga Kurylenko in the role for the upcoming film-version by director Armando Iannucci. The real-life Yudina seems to have been more of a dour religiously-observant individual.

I've over-explained the Yudina incident here only because I had read of it previously. But it is a good example to show how Fabien Nury and illustrator Thierry Robin have taken the bare-bones facts and various rumours and apocryphal stories to illustrate the incidents preceding and following the death of Stalin. It may seem unbelievable, but it is horrifying, entertaining and persuasive. And the actual truth would likely be even more unbelievable.

Further on Fabien Nury
Looking further into writer Fabien Nury I found that many of his works have not yet (as of mid-2017) been translated from their original French. There is one other collaboration with artist Thierry Robin in "Mort au Tsar" (Death to the Tsar) in 2 parts "Le Gouverneur" (The Governer) & "Le Terroriste" (The Terrorist) which is about the 1905 Russian Revolution (not the 1917 one). Other works are the Nazis & Vampires saga "I Am Legion" which is apparently also in film preproduction and various genre series such as the WWII Occupied France story of "Il était une fois en France" (Once Upon a Time in France) and the wild west epic "W.E.S.T." ( )