The most amusing aspect of the impressive, if not particularly comic, new comedy The Death of Stalin is that Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development), who earns most of the film’s laughs as Malenkov, the Soviet dictator’s sad-sack nominal successor, saw his face Photoshopped out of the movie’s poster for #MeToo reasons.
Ironically, one of Malenkov’s first acts upon achieving nominal supremacy after Stalin’s demise in March 1953 was to have Pravda publish a clumsily airbrushed photo of himself with Stalin and Mao from which he’d excised all his colleagues, such as Khrushchev, Beria, and Molotov. But Malenkov had overlooked that Stalin didn’t memory hole his rivals until after he’d killed them (nobody loved murdering Communists more than the arch-Communist Stalin), while Malenkov’s peers were alive.
And peeved.
