I decided I needed to see the movie a bit to criticize it. I immediately liked that it started with one of my favorite pieces of Classical music, the second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 (The first movement of No. 20 is phenomenal as well, and until I listened to 23 that was my favorite). Of course, they wouldn't play only the second part.

So the part about Stalin asking for a recording is based in fact, though the very British mannerisms of the people broadcasting the concerto are completely out of place. Perhaps that's supposed to be funny; I didn't think it was very funny. The notion that a pianist would take a strong stand against Stalin is totally unbelievable, as is the parodied way people are talking about Stalin.

Beria wasn't head of the Secret Police in 1953, though. First of all, the secret police and regular police were separated. Although he was in charge of the NKVD, the NKVD and the newly created NKGB split in Spring 1941. The split was halted due to the Nazi invasion but then carried out in 1943. So all the people arresting political prisoners starting in 1943 were not under Beria's control - during the war, Beria's protegé Merkulov ran the NKGB, but when the war ended he was replaced by the first of a string of Beria enemies, Abakumov. Abakumov was the one who brutally tortured soldiers and tried to get Zhukov shot. His assistant then turned on him and was in turn arrested a few months later, but Ignatiev, who survived all the purges, was collecting a huge dossier on Beria to have him shot, and Beria had absolutely no control over the MGB (as the NKGB was renamed) after the war.

Also, the MGB didn't arrest people in nearly the numbers shown in the movie. That is a parody of the 1937-1938 Terror, when a lot of people in Moscow, particularly high ranking party members, got the knock at the door at midnight. The conductor getting ready to face the Gulag only to find out he's going to the Philharmonie is in keeping with the atmosphere of the Terror. A story that has been reported as fact (I can't confirm, however) says that Stalin, Molotov and a few others (probably Kaganovich and Zhdanov) were arguing about which constellation was which in 1937, and Stalin asked them to get the Chief Professor of Astronomy from Moscow State University. When he got a knock at the door late at night, he threw himself out the window of his apartment to his death. They told Stalin he had killed himself. Stalin said to get the next senior guy. He shot himself. Then they broke down the door and grabbed the third best astronomer so that he could be taken to the Kremlin to identify the constellation that created the dispute.

As for who was likely to be killed in 1953, the answer is "all of them", but Beria first and foremost. Everyone knew Beria was a target. Molotov knew he was a target due to his wife, but in reality Ignatiev was building dossiers on all of the Politburo. Stalin was going to purge it completely in his paranoia, which had progressed following two mini-strokes in 1946 and 1949 that created scarring in his brain and made him more prone to aggression and suspicion than before (which was more than nearly anyone to begin with). Stalin was also planning a war against the US and ready to use nuclear weapons. He was going to intervene in Korea until his military planners pointed out that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was too small and delivery systems were too underdeveloped, and that anti-air defenses were insufficient to avoid a massive American response.

Beria actually helped force the ceasefire in Korea because he wanted to stop the attempt at fighting the US. Khrushchev didn't.

As for your casual dismissal of Beria's reforms, don't forget that Deng Xiaoping conducted similar reforms in China and China has become an economic powerhouse and mixed economy while not ceasing to be a heavy-handed authoritarian state (though no longer a totalitarian one). Beria's reforms could have created a Soviet economic miracle in the 1950s and 1960s without reforming the political system and without unleashing the separatism. After all, it was Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, who pushed the idea of having people from the dominant ethnic group in a republic running it, thus setting up the power base needed for every independence movement in the former Soviet states.

The whole movie was just poorly done from start to finish, though. For example, no one knew anything was "bugged" - surveillance was in its infancy. Look at Solzhenitsyn's In The First Circle. It's about a Soviet diplomat who calls the US Embassy from a payphone to warn the Americans about Soviet spies stealing atomic plans in 1949. The Ph.D. prisoners at a Soviet Gulag-administered research facility are then tasked with trying to find out who it was who called by the voice. They themselves were shocked to find out the USSR had the ability to record phone calls to the US Embassy.

The "people" they ask to come in off the streets of Moscow look like they came straight out of a Nineteenth Century play about the peasants in the countryside - no one in Moscow in 1953 would look like that. Again, maybe that's supposed to be funny, but it wasn't. It was just stupid.

I got up to the point where the main characters, apparently loosely based on historical figures, are standing around by Stalin's body and asking if he pissed himself. Then I just said, "Ok, this is stupid, I haven't laughed once, the whole thing is boring, I'm going to watch something else."