Russian roulette

Alexandra Wilson

A FARCICAL EPISODE UNFOLDS: A PIAnist in a Moscow concert hall plays a Mozart concerto, which is broadcast live on the radio. Stalin’s secretary calls to demand a recording but none has been made. Panic breaks out: the pianist refuses to play again, the producer tries to bribe her, the conductor drops dead of a heart attack, and a replacement — the only one left in the city who hasn’t been arrested or killed — is driven to the concert hall in his nightclothes. The anecdote, of course, is satire, a scene from Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin, yet as this engrossing new book shows, fiction is sometimes not so very far removed from fact. The Dutch journalist Michel Krielaars gives a vivid account of life in Stalin’s…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2025

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