Aside from the misdating, I intentionally refused to go see the movie because I saw from the reviews that Khrushchev was portrayed as a more or less "good guy". This is the exact opposite of the reality.

Khrushchev was responsible for millions of deaths, was incompetent, stupid and reckless. He was a committed communist who got rid of all his opponents ruthlessly (shooting Beria, getting Molotov and Kaganovich out of the Party altogether, then sidelining Zhukov, his moronic attack dog) in order to try to build worldwide communism.

Beria, by contrast, was trying to tear down Stalin's cult of personality from day one. Already two weeks after Stalin's death newspaper editors were complaining that Beria was forcing them to cut references to Stalin everywhere. He released 1.2 million prisoners from the Gulag a couple of weeks after that. He wanted to de-collectivize agriculture and move to a mixed system like China in the 1980s. He got Polina back for Molotov. He wanted to avoid one-person rule. He appealed to the USSR to abandon trying to build a socialist state in East Germany, saying it would cost too much and Germans didn't want it anyway.

Beria, alone among the leaders, spoke his mind. He is portrayed as the head of the secret police but he had lost that position in 1941. Since that time he ran the Soviet atomic project, which produced a bomb only 4 years after the first US test (yes, it was because they stole the plans, but Beria got them and got the program on track fast). Unlike Molotov, who only abstained from voting his wife to the Gulag, Beria actually disagreed openly with Stalin on multiple occasions (also, Voroshilov, the Minister of Defense, loaded his pistol and threatened to shoot the NKVD thugs who came to pick up his wife, forcing them to back down - they never returned...so Molotov...sorry, not courageous even by Stalin-era standards).

Beria also told the Politburo that the economy needed to deliver more consumer goods to Soviet citizens if it wanted to retain their support. They didn't listen to him, and so in the late 1970s people were still waiting years to get new refrigerators.

All of Beria's policies were aimed at stabilizing society, de-escalating the Cold War, moving to a mixed economy and making Russia a normal country. For that, he got shot by a bunch of unreconstructed Marxist fanatics. Then they turned on each other.

Oh, finally, when Beria WAS in charge of the secret police, he ended the Terror. He stopped the wholesale executions and just shot the executioners instead.

Khrushchev, by contrast, decided to reorganize the Soviet economy by creating a dual bureaucracy. Two bureaucracies are better than one! The plan was cancelled in 1965 after Brezhnev ousted him. His other big idea was to plan the "Virgin Lands" without any wind barriers. He turned millions of acres of land into useless desert. He also decided to ratchet up the heat of the Cold War, bringing the world close to nuclear annihilation on several occasions. This is why, in 1964, everyone ousted him. He was reckless, stupid and still had the blood of millions on his hands (but he never admitted that).

Khrushchev's destalinization was also not what Beria planned. Beria wanted to remove all cults of personality, denounce Stalin in broad terms and pretty much declare everything he did bad. Khrushchev decided to limit his attack to the 1937 Terror, when Stalin's wrath was turned mostly on Party members (usually because they knew the truth about Stalin's role in the Revolution, Trotsky's role in the Revolution, many other various crimes, or just had independent opinions). The 1925 massacres of priests, the 1928 "Promparty" sham trials and executions, the 1932-1933 Famine (not just in Ukraine under...Khrushchev, but also Russia and Kazakhstan), the 1939 Red Army purges, the 1945-6 arrests of former POWs and people who had lived under occupation, the 1948 Leningrad ring arrests, the 1949 cosmopolitan arrests, etc., all of that was just fine by Khrushchev.

Finally, let me say a word about Zhukov. No one liked him. He was stupid, he was a terrible military commander and he was Stalin's lap dog. He took credit for things he didn't have any hand in (like Stalingrad and Kursk, the defense of Leningrad) and then tried to disavow the things that he really was involved in (the two spectacular failures at Rzhev). His strategy was to send people forward in great numbers into suicidal frontal attacks. He threatened to shoot people (and did have them shot) for stupid reasons. He was not respected by anyone. Marshals Konev and Rokossovsky avoided meeting with him and only supported him once, when it was clear Stalin was going to have Zhukov shot for rampant marauder behavior (entire trains filled with war trophies that he was reselling on the black market through his friend Lidiya Ruslanova). They realized that if Stalin shot Zhukov, he might just decide to shoot them, too. Other than that, they didn't like him. Zhukov was (rightfully) sent to insignificant military commands after the war. The myth of his ability was started in the Khrushchev era, when his power reached its peak in 1957 (and Khrushchev realized he was probably considering getting rid of Khrushchev, so he removed him from all posts while Zhukov was on a goodwill mission to Yugoslavia).

Zhukov also thought it was a good use of tanks to send them into downtown Berlin, and shelled Konev's army when Konev tried to enter Berlin because Zhukov wanted the credit.

And I almost forgot Zhukov's testing of nuclear bombs that saw thousands of Soviet soldiers run into the bomb zone minutes later. They returned to their cities and villages and died of cancers because they couldn't tell the doctors (sworn to military secrecy) that they had taken part in the Totsky maneuvers.

As a result, the worst people possible rose in power and influence after Stalin died (aside from Stalin himself, who was of course worse than all of them).