La Mort de Staline (English: The Death of Stalin) is a series of French satirical-biographical graphic novels. The two volumes were created by artist and writer , and published in October 2010 and May 2012 by Dargaud. Walking the line between history and historical fiction, the series traces the events that followed the death of Joseph Stalin, the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, who died in March 1953 and whose death led to a power struggle for the control of the Central Committee between Lavrentiy Beria and future leader Nikita Khrushchev. Most of the story is focused on the rise and fall of Beria, narrating his struggle to hold on to power. The first volume, Agonie, won the Historia Prize in September 2011, and the second, Funérailles, won le Prix Château de Cheverny de la bande dessinée historique in the Rendez-vous de l'histoire festival in 2012. Plot The story starts in the Soviet Union in 1953. As Radio Moscow oversees a concert, one of the directors receives a call from Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, from a secure telephone line, ordering that a recording of the concert be delivered to him. Fearing for their lives, the directors order the in-progress concert to be hurriedly repeated and recorded in order to deliver it to the NKVD, but the pianist, Maria Yudina, stubbornly refuses to play because her family had been sent to the Gulag by Stalin. The directors bribe her with 20,000 rubles, but as the concert ends, she hides a note to Stalin in the sleeve of the record – to the horror of one director – as the NKVD take the record away. Stalin reads the note in his dacha; it says that Yudina prayed that God will forgive him and that she decided to donate the money Stalin gave her to the parish for restoration work. Stalin throws away the note, then suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and becomes paralyzed. When Stalin is discovered by his maid and a guard, the first to be alerted to Stalin's declining health is Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He orders a soldier to take a girl he has raped home, and to then arrest her father. Beria goes to Stalin's dacha while making preparations for the "Glorious Future" of the state. After arriving, he steals Stalin's personal documents from the safe and