Armando Iannucci on “The Death of Stalin”

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: Armando Iannucci on “The Death of Stalin”

Date: March 16, 2018
Host: David Remnick
Guests: Armando Iannucci (filmmaker), Svetlana Alexievich (author, via interview)

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Overview

This episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, hosted by David Remnick, dives into the creation, themes, and contemporary resonance of Armando Iannucci’s political satire film The Death of Stalin. The episode features a candid conversation with Iannucci about the balance between horror and comedy in depicting totalitarianism, the creative process behind the film, and its political reception—especially in modern Russia. The show also highlights Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s reflections on Soviet and post-Soviet life, the burden of history, and the meaning of freedom.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Stalin? Why Comedy?

• David Remnick introduces Iannucci as a master of political satire, praising his work on The Thick of It, In the Loop, and Veep (00:29).
• Iannucci explains the stakes:

  "If they make a mistake, it’s embarrassing, but, you know, there’ll be another day. In the Death of Stalin, if they make a mistake, they're dead. And it's a difference. It's a comedy of paranoia, craziness. It's a comedy of anxiety, really." (02:18)

• The real-life absurdities under Stalin's regime gave Iannucci his inspiration:

  “Even if you write the wrong musical note, it could end badly for you.” (03:02)

  • Example: Shostakovich keeping a suitcase packed in fear after Stalin’s displeasure with his opera (03:02–03:43).

2. Origins of the Movie & Approach to History

• Iannucci was drawn to the material after reading a French graphic novel about Stalin’s death, finding it “absurd, it was crazy, it was terrifying, it was horrific, and yet it was funny, it was dramatic, and it was true” (04:00).
• The movie’s opening concert scene—where a live radio broadcast goes awry under fear of Stalin—is a true story, though the film compresses real events for plausibility (05:01–06:31).

3. Structure of Stalin’s Inner Circle & the Banality of Evil

• Iannucci describes the environment around Stalin as one of deep complicity, mutual suspicion, and normalized atrocities (06:59):

  “They had all collectively signed death warrants... Some for their own relatives. They had to just live with this idea that what they had done was what Stalin wanted and therefore was right.”

  • Children of perpetrators and victims played together, blurring lines between guilt and innocence (06:59–08:42).

4. Dark Humor in Dictatorship

• The challenge: maintaining respect for victims while finding comedy in the corridors of power (10:05):

  “There’s no comedy about mass killings and shootings. That's played for real... But indoors, in the Kremlin, that's where the comedy is... they’re like a group of gangsters.”

• Circulation of underground joke books under Stalin (at great risk) signals the indomitable spirit of dark humor (10:54–11:03).

5. Relevance of Satire & Contemporary Authoritarianism

• Remnick probes the unifying themes of Iannucci’s work. Iannucci admits that tackling dictatorship is a departure from “schmucky people in Washington”:

  "No one's upset about a tweet in this movie, that's the least of problems, you know." (11:30)

• Discussion turns to Iannucci’s family history: his father, who resisted Mussolini, distrusted democracy’s permanence:

  “Last time I voted, Mussolini got in. And that was his way of saying, don’t think because you have a democracy that it’s perfect.” (11:50–12:21)

• They reflect on the rise of anti-democratic sentiment:

  “About 20%, 25% of people say democracy isn’t the only system they might be interested in... someone like Trump comes along and says, okay, I’m going to talk to you.” (12:24)

6. Satire’s Effect on Audiences

• Does comedy change hearts or minds?

  “That work is born out of a sense of frustration I found in how democracy works... how are decisions made? And therefore what does go on behind the scenes?” (13:51–14:48)

7. Making the Film & Russia’s Reception

• The film was mainly shot in England, with some scenes in Kiev and Moscow for authenticity (14:48–15:01).
• Iannucci recounts researching attitudes toward Stalin among contemporary Russians:

  “Some people say he killed millions. Other people say he industrialized us and made us a great power. You decide.” (15:01)

• In Russia, the film was licensed, dubbed, and received warmly by press—but banned just before opening, likely due to pre-election jitters (16:01–16:46).
  • Notably: “How can you ban a film these days? People are gonna see it. Somebody tweeted me a photo of them watching it on their laptop underneath Putin’s window.” (17:05)
• Iannucci jokes about pirated copies:

  “No, I’ve reported them to the Higher Authority. I mean, that has to be stamped out. Absolutely.” (17:22–17:29)

8. What’s Next for Armando Iannucci

• Iannucci discusses his upcoming adaptation of Dickens’ David Copperfield, focusing on the book’s psychological and emotional richness, not just its plot:

  “Too many adaptations pay so much homage to the story... I want it to feel rather like contemporary London... It should feel exciting, it should feel like ancient Rome.” (18:28–19:56)

• The theme continues: status anxiety, loss, and rediscovering one’s values (19:56).

9. Obscenity in Satire

• David Remnick teases Iannucci’s reputation for careful, creative swearing:

  “Is there swearing at Dickensian England?” (20:12)

  • Iannucci: “Certainly not in the novels. There won’t be swearing in the film.” (20:17)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Satirizing Authoritarianism:
  “There's a lot of comedy in The Godfather. It was just business, you know? Where's the cannoli? Get the cannoli, while they're beating someone up. There's a lot of that kind of strange dark comedy.”
  — Armando Iannucci (10:05)

• On Stalin's Circle:
  “They all lived near each other. They all lived in these apartments. So all their children played with each other, even though he might have signed the death warrant for my father and I might have signed the death warrant for her sister.”
  — Armando Iannucci (06:59)

• On Democracy’s Fragility:
  “Don't think because you have a democracy that it's perfect. You know, Hitler got in through an election.”
  — Armando Iannucci (12:21)

• On Russia’s Reaction to the Film:
  “The press applauded when Stalin fell over... Two days before the opening night, the license was withdrawn.”
  — Armando Iannucci (16:01)

• On Piracy and Censorship:
  “How can you ban a film these days? ...Somebody tweeted me a photo of them watching it on their laptop underneath Putin's window.”
  — Armando Iannucci (17:05)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:29 — Remnick introduces Iannucci, linking his earlier TV work to the new film
• 02:18 — Iannucci discusses why The Death of Stalin’s stakes are different for comedy
• 03:02–03:43 — Shostakovich anecdote demonstrating the climate of terror around Stalin
• 05:01–06:31 — Iannucci retells the true absurd concert story that opens the film
• 06:59–08:42 — Describing the psychology and relationships among Stalin’s inner circle
• 10:05–11:03 — The challenge of balancing humor with historical horror
• 12:21 — Explaining his father’s skepticism of democracy after Mussolini
• 15:01 — Researching Stalin’s legacy in modern Russian consciousness
• 16:01–16:46 — Russian ban on the film and government sensitivities before election
• 18:19–19:56 — Iannucci’s next project: re-envisioning David Copperfield
• 20:10 — The mechanics of swearing in his screenwriting

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Svetlana Alexievich on Soviet & Post-Soviet Memory (22:32–32:42)

Highlights

• On Her Method:
  Alexievich collects oral histories, cultivating a deeper, literary language out of people’s life stories (22:32).

  “Journalism deals with banalities. It picks up only the surface layer. I am also a witness of this time, and I approach another witness, and we try to talk.” (22:32)

• On Victims and Accomplices:

  “Millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested... Someone had to do all of this. To what extent is everybody from the Soviet past an accomplice?” (23:37)

• Alexievich stresses complexity and empathy:

  “From the point of view of art, both Stalin and the victim are equally interesting. We must understand, what is this? Who are they?” (24:39)

• On Russia's Cyclical History:

  “I think I try to answer this throughout the whole book. Why do we walk through this circular history? Why do we, as we say in Russian, step on the same rake again and again?” (26:17)

• On Putin’s Appeal:

  “There's no reason to demonize the figure of Putin like everybody does, thinking of him as the problem of problems. In truth, we're talking about our collective Putin. He has made himself the focal point of the desires of millions of people.” (28:10)

  • “When a national leader like Putin says that whoever doesn’t understand our politics is a national traitor, that makes me a national traitor... It’s the lexicon of Stalinist times.” (29:22)

• On Freedom:

  “I can live freely, but unfortunately, many of us don’t have that freedom... In the beginning, they built a great state. There was no individual person. ...And the person? Where is the person?” (31:16)

Segment Timestamps

• 22:32 — Alexievich on literature vs. journalism
• 23:37–24:39 — On complicity and the art of portraying Soviet life
• 26:17–27:56 — On cyclical Russian history and the search for guiding ideas
• 28:10–29:22 — The psychology of Putin’s support and use of grievance
• 31:16 — Alexievich on the definition of freedom

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Episode Tone & Language

• Iannucci’s sections are lively, irreverent, and darkly witty.
• Remnick brings intellectual curiosity and warmth, steering the conversation to both personal and societal stakes.
• Alexievich’s segment is contemplative, deeply empathetic, and literary.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Heard the Episode

This episode offers a sharp, often funny, but always thoughtful look at the absurd logic and real horror of totalitarian politics, filtered through satire and art. Iannucci describes both the surreality of 1950s Soviet power struggles and the grimly comic details that make them relatable in today’s age of rising authoritarian nostalgia. Alexievich’s reflections, meanwhile, provide a stark, moving picture of the Soviet inheritance—how people survived, how history is remembered and forgotten, and why the allure of strongman politics persists.

Whether you're interested in film, history, or the psychology of power, this episode is full of insight, laughter, and a sobering sense of how the past is never quite past.

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Transcript

[Svetlana Alexeich]

Floor 38. These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent and I.

[David Remnick]

Think it'd be interesting to really try.

[Armando Iannucci]

To unravel what his ties.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

There's this sort of country city divide.

[Armando Iannucci]

Inconvenient ends, and it's not clear where it goes next.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

From one World Trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm a pretty big movie buff and if you were to go about engineering the perfect film for me, total Remnick bait. It might be a little like this. It would be set in the Soviet Union where I lived for four years as a reporter. It would be a dark political comedy because I thrive on that stuff. And it would have actors like Steve Buscemi and Simon Russell Beale and at the same time it would be so foul mouthed that I'd be embarrassed to take my kids even though they're in their mid-20s. Now. That happens to be more or less an exact description of the Death of Stalin, directed and co written by the great Armando Iannucci. I'm not going to pretend to be impartial here. I've loved everything I've ever seen by Iannucci. The Thick of it and in the Loop, which he made in his native Great Britain.

[Armando Iannucci]

Hi, fittest boy. Lesson one. I tell you to fuck off. What do you do?

[Svetlana Alexeich]

F off, you'll go far.

[David Remnick]

And Veep, which you created for HBO starring Julia Louis Dreyfus. Jonah, don't talk, don't stay. You need to fuck off and go back to Westworld.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

But man, I mean, you need to fuck off.

[Armando Iannucci]

But man, I say fuck off.

[David Remnick]

Three fucks, you're out.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes, ma'.

[David Remnick]

Am. Yeah. In the Death of Stalin, Iannucci shifts his focus from the grubbier precincts of Western democracy and takes a look at one of the most brutal regimes in history. And like, get out. It's a horror movie that's absolutely hilarious at the same time. And maybe one that cuts a little too close to home for some, since it's currently banned in Russia. Armando Iannucci joined me in the studio. The Death of Stalin is a movie that is beyond funny and yet thematically, it seems to fit in with so much else that you've done. The Thick of It, Veep, just a hilarious corruption of power. This is your theme, isn't it?

[Armando Iannucci]

Well, it's my attempt to get away from that theme. Having done it for 10 years, I suppose, in Veep. And think of it, if they make a mistake, it's embarrassing, but, you know, there'll be another day in the death of Stalin. If they make a mistake, they're dead. And it's a difference. It's a comedy of paranoia, craziness. It's a comedy of anxiety, really.

[David Remnick]

How did you come to this idea? Stalin dies in March of 1953.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes.

[David Remnick]

And he's surrounded by his henchmen, Beria, Malinkov, Khrushchev, and all the rest. And I would have thought that you ran across this in a history book and were inspired, but that's not the case.

[Armando Iannucci]

No. I mean, I was vaguely aware of the circumstances and being a classical music fan. Is that the right word? I was very fond of the music of Shostakovich, was the premier symphonist under Stalin, and fell under Stalin's shadow for a while. Stalin criticized one of his operas, and for two years, Shostakovich genuinely thought he was gonna be taken away in the middle of the night. Had a. Had a suitcase packed and everything. So that fascinated me, that idea that even if you write the wrong musical note, it could end badly for you.

[David Remnick]

I think it was for Lady Macbeth of the Matins district.

[Armando Iannucci]

That's right, yes. Lady Macbeth.

[David Remnick]

And there was a bad review in Pravda, and that was it for sure.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes, it was an anonymous review, but everyone thought Stalin, and the headline was muddle, not music. So I was aware of that, funnily enough. I had been thinking. I knew that the fourth season of Veep, I had decided was gonna be my last one. And I was thinking, what should I do next? And I was actually thinking of doing something about a fictional dictator. Now, whether it was an American or a British, whether it was a comedy or a drama, hadn't decided. But I started reading, you know, the classics. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, all the funny stuff, all the, you know, the hall of fame in terms of tyranny. Just by coincidence, at the same time, I was sent the graphic novel the Death of Stalin, which was a French graphic novel. And I read it, and I thought, well, this is it. Because it was absurd, it was crazy, it was terrifying, it was horrific, and yet it was funny, it was dramatic, and it was true.

[David Remnick]

So the graphic novel version is funny, too. It's comic.

[Armando Iannucci]

It's not as comic in terms of. I mean, it's absurd. It's absurd. And it was that absurdity that drew me in. And it opens with the concert that we open with.

[David Remnick]

And I thought, so explain that for the unhappy few who have yet to see the movie.

[Armando Iannucci]

Well, the film opens with a concert. And this is a true story. Mozart piano concerto is being played. It's going out live in Radio Moscow. In the control booth at the back of the concert hall. They get a call. Hello, this is Stalin. Hello? Sorry, it's really noisy. I'm sorry about that. How are you? How is it? Where?

[Svetlana Alexeich]

There you are.

[Armando Iannucci]

Sorry, sorry again. Are you there? Receiving you? I want a recording of tonight's performance. I'll send someone to pick it up.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

I thought.

[Armando Iannucci]

Wonderful. Was the concerto recorded? Was it recorded? Please say yes. No one outline anything. Oh my God, I'm dead. And he runs out into the hole. Just taking your seats again, please. That would be fantastic. Take your seat. Take your fucking seats. Take your seats. Don't worry, nobody's gonna get killed. I promise you this is just a musical emergency.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

Take your seats.

[Armando Iannucci]

That's it. Nobody be alarmed. It's fine. Sit down. Do not defy me. Sit your asses down. At which point the conductor, frantic and panicking, faints. So now they need to find a conductor and they scour Moscow. They eventually pull a conductor out in his pajamas, dressing out, who comes in and conducts it. And that's a true story, except in real life, they got through three conductors. But I thought if do three conductors, people wouldn't believe me.

[David Remnick]

Now, one of the reasons I've read that people have become around the world sadly more accepting of authoritarian rule is because year by year, decade by decade, the distance between people's memories of what German fascism and Soviet and Stalinist totalitarianism were, it grows naturally more and more. It's worth maybe your describing what that circle around Stalin was like.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes, they, you know, for 20, 30 years had worked together carrying out his orders. There was actually a quarter system for rounding people up, which of course, if you think about it, maybe night one, you get the enemies. Night two, you're struggling, so you're just giving people the names of people you don't like. By night three, night four, you're just giving them the names of people you know, because otherwise they might come for you. They're carrying out these orders. Khrushchev was known as the Butcher of Ukraine in the 30s. He carried out the enforced collectivization of the farms and the deliberate famine imposed on the rural workers. It was an attempt really to rid the country of lowly laborers. Stalin wanted the to be industrialized. It was all about steel. And I'm not gonna mention tariffs, but it's about steel. Not vegetables. So they had been through it. They had all collectively signed death warrants, one of them, Kaganovich, for his own brother. They all lived near each other. They all lived in these apartments. So all their children played with each other, even though he might have signed the death warrant for my father and I might have signed the death warrant for her sister. Somehow they had to just live with this idea that what they had done was what Stalin wanted and therefore was right. So what must they have had to hide from each other and from themselves to kind of live and exist and survive through all that? Still funny.

[David Remnick]

All right, comrades, now that we're quarrit.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

I propose we call a doctor.

[Armando Iannucci]

All the best doctors are in the Gulag or dead.

[David Remnick]

Yes.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes, because they tried to kill the boss. So any doctor still in Moscow is not a good doctor. What are people's thoughts on getting a bad doctor?

[Svetlana Alexeich]

What the fuck are you talking about? That's mad. What if he recovers and finds out? Well, if he recovers, then we got a good doctor. And if he doesn't recover, then we didn't.

[David Remnick]

But he won't know.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

What was the name of the.

[David Remnick]

That woman who gave evidence against the doctors?

[Armando Iannucci]

Tomarchuk. Yes. He's got everything we require for this situation. The location of all the remaining doctors in the Moscow area, a proven desire to survive, and a talent for fellatio. Right. She gets my vote. Yeah. Good. Let her find us some doctors. Yeah, and if he goes badly, we pin it all on Lady Sucks, then we'll shoot her. Yes, that would work. You see, we're better as a committee. Let's go.

[David Remnick]

But the point I'm trying to get to, though, is just as Mel Brooks, decades ago, somehow imagined a comic turn on Hitler with the producers and Springtime for Hitler, which outraged people. How did you make the comic leap?

[Armando Iannucci]

The first thing I said when we started shooting was, look, we have to be terribly respectful about what happened to the Soviet people at the time. So there's no comedy about mass killings and shootings. That's played for real. We don't try and hide it, and we don't try and dilute it. We just let it play. That's the tragedy. But indoors, in the Kremlin, that's where the comedy is. In those apartments, they're like gangsters. They're like a group of gangsters. There's something funny about the Godfather. If you watch the Godfather, there's a lot of comedy in the Godfather. That kind of. It was just business, you know? Where's the cannoli get the cannoli while they're beating someone up. You know, there's a lot of that, of strange dark comedy. We discovered as we were searching the film that joke books were circulated under Stalin. Jokes about barrier and Stalin and torture and rape. And if you were found with a joke book on your possession, you could be shot.

[David Remnick]

That was worse than having a Solzhenitsyn years later.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because this was making fun of the leader.

[David Remnick]

But this kind of poking fun at the politically powerful is something you do in your other work. Would you admit that there's some sort of thematic unity to these big projects that you've done?

[Armando Iannucci]

Well, I suppose, yes. I mean, what I've learned from Veep has gone into the death of Stalin and also. But then I wanted to take myself out my comfort zone by taking on these themes that involve death and destruction and paranoia.

[David Remnick]

It's not just schmucky people in Washington and my dear Jobs, no, no one's.

[Armando Iannucci]

Upset about a tweet in this movie that's the least of problems, you know.

[David Remnick]

Now, a biographical thing. Your father was part of the resistance to Mussolini in Italy. Did his experience of life in a dictatorship affect your relationship with this kind of material?

[Armando Iannucci]

Well, it's interesting, yeah. I mean, at a very young age, you know, at age 15, 16, 17, he was writing for an anti fascist newspaper and then joined the resistance. And then when he came over to the UK after the war, he didn't take out British citizenship, so he couldn't vote. And I said, why don't you vote? Because, you know, you fought for democracy. And he said, last time I voted, Mussolini got in. And that was his way of saying, don't think because you have a democracy that it's perfect. You know, Hitler got in through an.

[David Remnick]

Election and now it's happening all over the world.

[Armando Iannucci]

And this is what's happening. This is why I was interested in the idea of dictatorship as my next subject, because this is what's happening. People use democracy, the guise of democracy, to then change the rules. I mean, what you were saying earlier about people who forgotten what Nazism meant or Stalinism or fascism, because they've grown up with democracy. If they get fed up with it, if they're annoyed with politicians, if they feel politicians aren't talking to them, they start to think, well, there must be something else then. And there are those bizarre, frightening statistics. About 20%, 25% of people say democracy isn't the only system that they might be interested in. And what's happened in Our democracy, this is why the likes of Donald Trump have had such success is politicians have concentrated more and more on those few who change their minds, the independents, the swing voters. More and more people have felt that they aren't being listened to and they've felt disenfranchised and therefore they don't participate. And then someone like Trump comes along and says, okay, you know, I'm going to talk to you.

[David Remnick]

So oldest question in the book though about this and your work. Is it possible that people see your work and it has some beyond making them laugh? Does it help make them see or reimagine reality?

[Armando Iannucci]

I hope so. I mean that work is born out of a sense of frustration I found in how democracy works and how, you know, I felt something like the Iraq war with the Britain's participation with America in the invasion of Iraq. Against every conceivable expert, scientific objective, non objective, emotional point of view. Everyone's saying this will be a disaster. How someone in the uk, our Prime Minister Tony Blair, could somehow bend the will of parliament, the will of his party, the will of the military, the will of intelligence to, to make this thing happen. So that was really why I wrote the Thick of it in the loop. And it's to do with that. Okay, what happened in democracy here that this could. And therefore how are decisions made? And therefore what does go on behind the scenes?

[David Remnick]

You didn't film in Russia. You filmed this in England, Right.

[Armando Iannucci]

Mostly in London and then a week in Kiev and then a couple of days in Moscow.

[David Remnick]

Oh, you did, you did a lot of research in Russia, am I right?

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes, I went out to Moscow.

[David Remnick]

And what did you learn there? What did that give you?

[Armando Iannucci]

We spoke to younger people now saying what are you told about Stalin? And they said we're taught at school. They said, some people say he killed millions. Other people say he industrialized us and made us a great power. You decide because when I lived there.

[David Remnick]

In the late 80s, early 90s, that was the period of anti Stalin.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes.

[David Remnick]

The Kremlin was speaking out against Stalin. The whole business was about de. Stalinization of society.

[Armando Iannucci]

That's right.

[David Remnick]

And new textbooks were released. And now it's moved somewhere else.

[Armando Iannucci]

It's about authority figures. It's, you know, the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. They didn't really celebrate the revolution cause that's all about bringing the government down.

[David Remnick]

Yeah, they don't want that.

[Armando Iannucci]

But they celebrated the victory in the Patriotic War, the Stalingrad. The strong leader. Stalin is a strong leader in Moscow now there's a statue To Tsar Nicholas II as well, and Peter the Great. That's the message. The kind of authority figure at the center.

[David Remnick]

Well, apparently your film was screened once or twice.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes.

[David Remnick]

And you had every expectation of there being a regular run?

[Armando Iannucci]

We were given the license. You have to get a license from the Ministry. We were given it. We did our press. We did our press screenings. The press applauded when Stalin fell over, we dubbed it into Russian. It was going well. And then two days before the actual opening night, the license was withdrawn.

[David Remnick]

What happened?

[Armando Iannucci]

Someone in the Ministry of Culture panicked, and there is an election coming up.

[David Remnick]

There is.

[Armando Iannucci]

They said it was an attempt to subvert. And we know how much a stickler Putin is for not having anyone interfere in the elections of another country. I mean, that's an absolute golden rule. It's a golden rule.

[David Remnick]

And obeyed at all turns.

[Armando Iannucci]

Absolutely. So we can see how he didn't want that line to be crossed.

[David Remnick]

So it was showed once or twice, but just to the press it was.

[Armando Iannucci]

No cinema in Moscow decides to show it anyway until it was raided by the police.

[David Remnick]

To regular folks, it was raided in the middle of the screening.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes. I say raid, which. Which makes it sound like, you know, people stormed in, some police turned up and said, what's showing here? And they said, the death of Stalin. And they went, aha. And then they walked up there. They left. But the cinema then had to withdraw it. But, you know, how can you ban a film these days? People are gonna see it. Somebody tweeted me a photo of them watching it on their laptop underneath Putin's window in.

[David Remnick]

So people are ripping illegal copies.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes. Yes.

[David Remnick]

Are you happy about that?

[Armando Iannucci]

No, I've reported them to the Higher Authority. I mean, that has to be stamped out.

[David Remnick]

Absolute.

[Armando Iannucci]

It's the worst crime of all, isn't it? Piracy.

[David Remnick]

It's terrible, terrible, terrible. You mentioned earlier that you had planned to leave Veep after its fourth season.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yes.

[David Remnick]

Why? What was driving you? Was it the commute?

[Armando Iannucci]

Well, the commute. United Airlines. Inability to apologize under any circumstances.

[David Remnick]

It is terrible, isn't it?

[Armando Iannucci]

To be honest, by the fourth series, I thought. I think I've said what I wanted to say. So my last episode was the one where it ends in an electoral tie. And that, for me, was my finale. And what I've enjoyed about it is actually becoming a viewer again and being able to watch it, not knowing what the hell is gonna happen next and what anyone is gonna say next.

[David Remnick]

Now you finish a film, you, like many other filmmakers and authors, once it's done, it's done and there's no need to dwell. What are you thinking about next?

[Armando Iannucci]

I'm doing Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, different.

[David Remnick]

And you can get all 800 pages into a two and a half hour film. Or is it a series or how do you envision it?

[Armando Iannucci]

No, it's a film. I wanted to try and remember what it is I love about the book. And it's the language, it's the characters, it's the psychology, it's the emotion. The story is very slight. I mean, Dickens stories, he was sort of Mickey up as he went along doing these monthly and weekly installments. Too many adaptations pay so much homage to the story. There's a fantastic scene in it where David, age 18, gets drunk for the first time and whole of London is swimming in front of him. Absolutely swimming. It's hilarious. It's never in any adaptation because it's not part of the story. So the idea is it's inspired by the themes within the books. It's going to be 1840s London, but I want it to feel rather like contemporary London. I want it. It should feel exciting. It should feel like ancient Rome. It's the capital city of the mightiest empire in the height of the Industrial Revolution. For any, you know, 17 and 18 year old arriving in London for the first time, it should look tantalizing, you know, exciting and yet have this cruel aspect. And I want to explore these kind of emotions. It's all about what happens. It's status anxiety. That's what it's about. One minute being rich and the next minute losing everything and how you behave then and the friends you want to try and have and then suddenly realizing that the friends that mean most to you are the ones that you started to look down on the more successful you became.

[David Remnick]

One of the funniest aspects of Ian Parker's profile of you in the New Yorker some time ago was the very careful obsession with the mechanics of obscenity and obscene speech. So much so I think you even had like an advisor on this.

[Armando Iannucci]

Yeah, I mean, I don't swear. I'm not swearing.

[David Remnick]

I don't believe a word you say. Was there swearing at Dickensians England?

[Armando Iannucci]

Well, certainly not in the novels. There won't be swearing in the film.

[David Remnick]

Well, we have small disappointments. Armando, thank you so much.

[Armando Iannucci]

Pleasure. Thank you very much.

[David Remnick]

Armando Iannucci's movie the Death of Stalin, starring Steve Buscemi and Simon Russell Beale, is just out in theaters. Ahead this hour, another view of that bleak era of Russian history from the woman who's been described as the Studs Terkel of Soviet life. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. This is kind of an experiment. This is a new show. We've never done this before. When the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded a few years ago to Svetlana Alekseich, it surprised people in a couple of ways. First of all, Alexeich, a Belarusian writer, was a totally unfamiliar name in the United States, even to big readers. Even more unusual, she's a nonfiction writer, and that's very rare with the Nobel Prize. There's no dearth of literature about life under the Soviet regime, but nothing quite like Alexei's work. She puts her books together from interviews with regular people, somewhat like what Studs Terkel did about working life and the depression in this country. But her big themes are life in the Soviet Union and the painful aftermath of its breaking apart. Svetlana Alexei has been described as a journalist, but she sees it somewhat otherwise. She actually bridles at the term.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

Is not journalism. It's a different view on things. It's the view of literature. It's a wider view. Journalism deals with banalities. It picks up only the surface layer. I am also a witness of this time, and I approach another witness, and we try to talk. I try to make it so that people speak, as Dostoevsky said, in what he called a more human language, a deeper language. And these people are the people around me. These are my neighbors, my friends. These are people I see on the streets. I didn't need to see. Enter any house, and so much suffering will be poured out to you that you'll almost. You'll hardly be able to walk out of the house. Also, this document is a living creature, and it changes. In 2000, for example, after perestroika, the women in my book war has not a woman's face, they said, we want to meet with you again, because back then we didn't tell you everything. We were afraid or we didn't understand.

[David Remnick]

There's a wealth of fascinating interviews in this book, and there's also a refusal to differentiate between the oppressed and the oppressor. For example, you're talking to an architect named Anna, who's about 59 or 60 years old. And at one point, after she's talked to you for many pages about her life and her suffering, she says that people now are all trying to put on the striped uniform of the victim of the prisoner. But somehow now everyone's the victim, and Stalin is alone to blame. But think about it. It's simple arithmetic. Millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested, interrogated, transported and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all of this. To what extent is everybody from the Soviet past an accomplice?

[Svetlana Alexeich]

The truth is, in the 90s, we really judged our parents. And I remember how I fought with my father when I went to Afghanistan and saw what the Soviet army was doing there. I came home and I said to my father, who was very much a communist until the end of his life, papa, we are murderers. And he began to cry. He didn't argue with me. That doesn't mean I don't have an obligation to give a voice to a person like my father, to cry out his life. In my work, everyone cries out their own truth. I never allow myself to say, this one's just a stereotypical Soviet. This one's part of the herd, as they sometimes say. Because, first of all, that's not the truth, that's arrogance. From the point of view of art, both Stalin and the victim are equally interesting. We must understand, what is this? Who are they?

[David Remnick]

Why?

[Svetlana Alexeich]

But that doesn't mean that the executioners and the victims are equal. To understand good and evil, portraits of their vessels must be studied and meticulously painted. I was very glad when, at a meeting in France, one young man stood up and said, I don't understand. What is the problem with your people? You got freedom and you refused freedom. What kind of people are you? But I read your book, and it became absolutely clear to me where Putin came from, why you had refused freedom.

[David Remnick]

Well, maybe you should answer that question a little bit more broadly and deeply about what comes out of this. The book is filled with stories of people whose hopes were raised, who were confused by, and yet thrilled by the late 80s and 90s, and then fell into immense disappointment, confusion and poverty.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

I think I try to answer this throughout the whole book. Why do we walk through this circular history? Why do we, as we say in Russian, step on the same rake again and again? In the 90s, I remember my generation really believed that tomorrow would bring freedom. We ran through the squares, we cried out, freedom, freedom. And then we went our different ways into our houses, and then we acted as if Yeltsin would bring freedom, Putin would bring freedom, someone would bring it.

[David Remnick]

Does this pattern of repeating history to some degree, the inability for the Russian people and people in surrounding countries to thrust themselves out of this terrible cycle of history, is this related to what people Talk about. When they talk about Russkia Sobensti, is there something about Russia, Russian history, Russian geography, character, somehow that is a kind of destiny.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

It seems to me that it's the eternal Russian dreaminess, the eternal Russian hope for a miracle, that we can go immediately from feudalism to a developed socialism. That kind of socialism could maybe happen someday. There's nothing wrong with that idea. But you can't do that right after feudalism. In 1917, when World War I had just ended, Russia was one of those backward countries. Russia had been bled dry. It wasn't the place to build socialism.

[Armando Iannucci]

And.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

And then the provocative Leninist slogans that brought out human nature, loot the looters, right? Or with an iron hand we shall drive humanity to happiness, that kind of thing, from the first years of the revolution. So I think that what happens is what always happens. Russia always needs an idea, a purpose to be obsessed with.

[David Remnick]

Now you live in the era of Putin. How do you understand Putin? What does Putin understand about Russia that Gorbachev and Yeltsin did not?

[Svetlana Alexeich]

I remember how after the 90s, all of us democrats said, why are the people silent? We talk and talk and the people are silent. And suddenly Putin arrives and after a while he takes off all his masks, is playing at democracy and speaks. He says, we need a great Russia. They are annihilating us. They are insulting us, they don't deal directly with us. And suddenly the people began to speak. And when they began to speak, it became clear. It's absolutely clear now. Gorbachev and a few of his companions created the revolution of the 90s, and the people weren't ready for it. When I was writing Second Hand time, I traveled all over Russia. I heard the hatred, the grievances of this robbed, deceived people. There's no reason to demonize the figure of Putin like everybody does, thinking of him as the problem of problems. In truth, we're talking about our collective Putin. He has made himself the focal point of the desires of millions of people. Putin is only a metaphor for that longing. He didn't come up with it on his own. What he's doing today is really what the people want. And the Kremlin has been able to redirect all of this upheaval and dissatisfaction to find an enemy outside our borders.

[David Remnick]

I have to tell you, when I watch Russian television, the number one enemy is the United States of America.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

Yeah. In some cities they burn Obama in effigy. And not very long ago, in Yeltsin's time, America was considered our best Friend Putin appears about once a year in front of some youth organization to give a kind of program speech. And the topic is always the same, that Russia is great, but America is insulting us, Europe is insulting us. It's always an outcry that they're considered politically little punks. No one takes them seriously. It's serious, even dangerous. When a national leader like Putin says that whoever doesn't understand our politics is a national traitor, that makes me a national traitor. And others, you understand? It's the lexicon of Stalinist times.

[David Remnick]

So on the one hand, your books are published, you travel freely throughout the world, and on the other hand, you are a pridatiel, a betrayer.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

When I was writing three years ago, before Putin took off all his masks, people were ready to speak. Now they're cautious. There are three forbidden themes. Putin, the church, and it's impossible to speak about the Great Patriotic War, the Second World War. So, for example, when I won the Nobel Prize, I was hounded. It turns out I'm a Russian traitor, a Russophobe. I hate the Russian people. That is Putin, right? It was endless because of the Nobel Prize. In my Nobel address, they rushed to talk about their opinions of me. What I always wanted when I wrote, was for my books to start a discussion. For a long time, we've needed to start a discussion. Who are we? Where are we from?

[David Remnick]

Svetlan Alexandrovna, a final question, and it's the question you seem to pose to all of your interview subjects in this book. And on the one hand, it sounds corny, on the other hand, profound, which is to say, what does freedom mean to you? This is the question you ask everybody, and it arouses incredible divergent answers. What does it mean to you?

[Svetlana Alexeich]

Happily, I can say that I can live freely, but unfortunately, many of us don't have that freedom. I can say what I want, I can write and do whatever I consider necessary. I consider myself to be a free person. And now I'm meeting with people and gathering material for two books. The first is about love, and the second is about age, about disappearing, about the 20, 30 years that progress has given us, about life without a governing idea. How does that work for us? What is it? I mean, without the kind of big idea that is always foremost in our culture, like communism or fascism? In the beginning, they built a great state. There was no individual person. There was a kind of collective body of people. Then they built communism. There was no person, no differentiated body. And the person? Where is the person? What is a person? Does he want to be happy? Does he want to die? Is all we have developed over all these years, a culture of death, a culture of suffering? I can only say that my father, as I said, was a communist and believed until the end. But a lot happened to him, Alzheimer's, all that. His memory totally left him. In the beginning, he talked only about the war, about the battle of Stalingrad, and about how beautiful my mother was. And when everything, when all of that left him, the last thing he talked about was how beautiful my mother was. I thought only this terrible disease has freed him to speak about human things.

[David Remnick]

Sviatlana Alekseich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize. Talia Lavin at the New Yorker translated her responses into English for us. And we heard the voice of WNYC's Emily Botin. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Armando Iannucci]

SA.

[David Remnick]

And that's it for today. Thanks for joining us. I'm David Remnick. I hope you'll join us next time.

[Svetlana Alexeich]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby Kalalea, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Mytha Lee Rao and Steven Valentino, with help from Terrence Bernardo, Emily Mann and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Torina Endowment Fund.