"False narrative!"
—Lavrentiy Beria
While the film does a good job capturing the atmosphere of paranoia and terror that was omnipresent in Josef Stalin's Soviet Union, it's hardly an example of historical accuracy. The creators of the original graphic novel also point out that whatever they wrote about is far tamer than what really may have happened. Furthermore, the trailer claims the movie is based "loosely" on the true story, after all. Most of the inaccuracies were just to compress the time frame for the sake of 1) comedy, 2) getting the audience up to speed on Soviet life under Stalin.
- The popular version of Stalin's death is that the household staff of his dacha were too terrified to disturb him when he collapsed. Most historians think it more likely that the Presidium members let him die instead, as Stalin was generally friendly with his dacha staff. The film splits the difference between the two, with his bodyguards afraid to move when they hear him collapse, while the Politburo members blatantly drag their feet about getting him medical help. However, there is some truth to the guards' conduct: their previous chief, Nikolai Vlasik
, had been implicated in the Doctors' Plot and arrested at Beria's instigationnote , his replacement was currently hospitalized for appendicitis, and the next man in line who told them not to disturb Stalin was later rumored to be one of Beria's goons. - The timeframe of the events portrayed is heavily compressed. Stalin died on March 5th; Beria wasn't arrested until June 26th, and executed until December 23rd of that year. The film depicts Beria's execution as seemingly having occurred on the same day as Stalin's funeral, implying that the entirety of the film happened in under a week.
- In addition, Stalin suffered the cerebral hemorrhage on March 1st, and died four days later after extensive treatments, including leeches. In the film, his death appears to take place within 24 hours.
- The kickstarter plot of Stalin unwittingly forcing a live concert to be repeated after calling to ask for a record is based on an anecdote from Solomon Volkov's anti-Soviet book Testimony, which is not considered a reliable source by historians. According to Volkov, the incident happened in 1944 (long before Stalin's death) and only Yudina was abducted and forced to repeat a concert in a studio with a small orchestra, rather than a whole theater being held hostage; and there were three conductors, but only one could perform — the first was too scared, and the second was too drunk. In addition, Yudina did not demand a bribe: while she did hate Stalin, she wasn't selfish enough to endanger her friends and their families for her beliefs. She did receive 20,000 rubles, but the money was a gift from Stalin after he had received the recording, and she donated it to her church. She also sent a letter to Stalin, but it wasn't nearly as provocative: she thanked him for the money and explained what she did with it, and urged him to abandon his atheism and reconnect with God. Stalin's inner circle was indignant and wanted to have her shot, but Stalin was amused by the letter (that, and Yudina just so happened to be his favorite pianist) and let it slide.
- Various characters in the film hold inaccurately named or completely different positions than in real life, either for the sake of simplicity or to equate them with their most well-known office.
- Stalin had long phased out use of "General Secretary of the Communist Party" as his primary title by the time of the film, having formally abolished the position and making all members of the Party Secretariat equal (on paper only) in 1952. However, he still retained the title of Chairman of the Council of Ministers (or Premier), his official government office, and remained de facto sole leader of the Communist Party. Even then, people still tended to refer to him as "the Secretary."
- Malenkov is stated to be "Stalin's deputy". Technically speaking, Molotov was the nearest thing that Stalin had to an official deputy, as the senior First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Malenkov's post at the time was Second Secretary of the Communist Party; for all intents and purposes he was Stalin's second-in-command, but there was nothing legally designating him as such within the government.
- After Stalin's death, Malenkov succeeded him as Premier within the government and was put first on the list of members of the Party Secretariat (signaling his leadership of the Party). After only a week, however, fears of Malenkov consolidating too much power led to him being forced to resign from the Secretariat, making Khrushchev the de facto Party leader. This led to a duumvirate where Malenkov was head of the government while Khrushchev was head of the party. Khrushchev would restore the formal title of "First Secretary" in October of 1953, which his successor Brezhnev would rename to the old "General Secretary" in 1966.
- The NKVD was dissolved in 1946 and replaced by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), with Beria being replaced by Sergei Kruglov (who hated Beria's guts and was just itching for a chance to put a bullet through his face), though Beria was still the de-facto head of the Soviet Union's internal security forces.
- Molotov lost his position as Stalin's foreign minister to Andrey Vyshinsky (best known for being a prosecutor during Stalin's Great Purge) in 1949. Malenkov gave it back to him after Stalin's death.
- Similarly, Bulganin was Minister of the Armed Forces from 1947 to 1949. He was re-appointed Minister of Defense ten days after Stalin's death. Bulganin's position in the government on the day Stalin died was as First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, shared with Molotov.
- Beria and Malenkov arrived at Stalin's dacha before Khrushchev did at the latter's suggestion, as Khrushchev and the others wanted to use the two of them as scapegoats in case Stalin recovered quickly and unleashed his wrath upon anyone present.
- The "Doctors' Plot" of 1952-1953 is presented in the movie as having already culminated, leading to multiple arrests and executions of doctors, which is a karmic contribution to Stalin's own death. In real life the purge was in its earliest stages (though ironically one of the first men arrested was the chief of Stalin's own bodyguards, who wouldn’t be released for three more years) when Stalin was taken ill, all the accused were still alive and awaiting deportation to the Gulag rather than being killed at once, and they were released within weeks of Stalin's death. Admittedly there remains some karma, as those imprisoned were still of little to any use at the time; none of the Presidium wanted to bring in a competent Jewish doctor (which most of the accused were) to treat Stalin, for fear of what would happen if he recovered and learned who he'd been treated by. While they did eventually gather a team of doctors, it was already far too late.
- In his introduction, Vasily denies having anything to do with the plane crash that killed the Soviet hockey team, while trying desperately to find a replacement team; the film treats it as a very recent event. The Sverdlovsk plane crash occurred in 1950, three years prior to Stalin's death. The film also treats the crash itself as a result of Vasily's incompetence, implying that he ordered for the plane to take off despite bad weather, when it was actually due to the poor weather both at the flight's original destination and the airport that it was diverted to.
- Molotov is depicted as being absent from the Presidium gathering at Stalin's dacha after the dictator is rendered comatose. In reality, he was there, and spent considerable time sobbing by Stalin's bedside.
- Polina Molotova did not learn of Stalin's death until after she'd been released and returned to her husband. The first thing she said to him was "How's Stalin?" and when he tearfully informed her of Stalin's death, she fainted.
- Molotov's vicious slandering of his wife behind her back is pure fiction: he never stopped loving her and her arrest deeply upset him, but he was powerless to help her and he knew it. Despite this, he frequently asked Beria about her condition and wrote to her whenever he could (thus putting his own life at risk), and would have his servants cook two meals each night as a personal reminder of her dilemma. Her release was also not arranged by Beria in order to gain leverage over her husband, but was in fact arranged by Molotov himself: at Stalin's funeral, which happened to take place on Molotov's birthday, Malenkov and Khrushchev asked Molotov what he would like for a present, to which he coldly replied, "Give me back Polina," and she was returned to him a week later.
- Beria specifically ordered only non-political prisoners be released, which led to a massive uptick in violent crime across the USSR as murderers, thieves, rapists, and thugs were released back into society. Political prisoners continued to languish in the prisons and gulags until Khruschev ordered them released after Beria's arrest.
- Beria arrived at Stalin's funeral skunk drunk, made a rather upbeat speech about how Stalin was "merely sleeping", and later bragged that he had killed Stalin. Prior to that, he gloated over Stalin's corpse while the other Politburo members were openly weeping. This is all omitted in the film, where Beria appears in the funeral both sober and calculating.
- Far from being the untouchable head of the Red Army, at the time of Stalin's death Marshal Zhukov was out of favor and had been demoted. This was ironically because of the fact that he defeated Germany, as he frequently boasts about in the film; Stalin viewed him as a potential threat to his power, but not one who could be easily disposed of (the fact that, as the beloved hero of the War, messing with him would risk the wrath of the Red Army was very much Truth in Television). The death of Stalin salvaged his political and military fortunes.
- In addition, there was no position of Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army between 1950 and 1955.
- The Red Army was renamed to the Soviet Army in 1946.
- In the film, when Beria is trying to win Svetlana's support, she asks him to release her lover Aleksei Kapler the way he released Molotov's wife, but he's unable to comply because Aleksei has died in the prison camp he was sent to. The real life Aleksei Kapler survived his incarceration, was released a few months after Stalin's death, and lived until 1979. Though Beria is presented (accurately) as a dishonest, cynical sadist, so this could just be another example of him being a douchebag.
- Khrushchev claimed that 109 mourners died during Stalin's funeral, not 1500, and that this was only from being trampled by other enthusiastic mourners rather than panicking guards shooting. Then again, Khruschev's version should probably be taken with a grain of salt. What is certain is that there is no evidence for a massacre having taken place during the event.
- Malenkov pushed the red button hidden under the table — thereby signalling Zhukov and his men to come in and arrest Beria — of his own volition, having earlier been bullied by Khrushchev and his supporters into abandoning Beria.
- When Beria is arrested, three of his cronies walk into the room, look around, and try to flee, only to be killed by Zhukov's men. In reality, these men were arrested, subjected to a show trial along with Beria, and then were shot.
- The charges against Beria never included the sexual assaults. Though, honestly, it was an Open Secret and they were happy to get rid of an unfettered serial rapist anyway.
- Beria died an even uglier death in Real Life than in the film. He was stripped to his underwear before his execution and sobbed so repulsively that a sock was stuffed in his mouth to silence him before he was shot.
- The East German Uprising, which played a direct and arguably the largest role in Beria's downfall, is not mentioned at all. Khrushchev used the uprising to convince the others that Beria's liberalization policies were damaging to the Soviet Union.
- Svetlana left the USSR in 1967 through India, not 1953 through Austria. In fact, in 1953 Austria was still divided into Allied occupation zones and wouldn't be evacuated and neutralized until 1955, so leaving through it would have been theoretically as difficult as doing it through Germany. Svetlana also wasn't exiled after her father's death but continued to live and work as a translator in Moscow, and she outright defected from the Soviet Union, the impetus for which was possibly her being denied the right to marry Kunwar Brajesh Singh, who died in 1966.
- Beria is made to look uglier in the film, and is also fat. He was really of average build and looks, though he did start putting on weight towards the end of his life. Conversely, the real Malenkov was considerably shorter and more rotund than Jeffrey Tambor.
- Molotov is portrayed as being cheerful and upbeat, not far off from the roles Michael Palin usually plays. In reality, Molotov was a very serious man. note
- Marshal Ivan Konev, who presided over Beria's show trial, is reduced to a cameonote .
- Beria had little to do with the show trials of Grigori Sokolnikov, Yury Pyatakov, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, as he was still based in Georgia at the time and didn't come to Moscow until 1938. Said trials were primarily the handiwork of a combination of Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov (mostly the latter), who were both heads of the NKVD before Beria. However, this particular error could be interpreted as Khrushchev stretching the truth to bully Malenkov into going along with his plan.
- The looting of Stalin's dacha and the liquidation of its staff never happened. Many of them, including the door guards, attended Stalin's funeral, and aside from Stalin's personal governess (who may have been his mistress), they all later admitted that they hated him and were glad he died in agony.
- Kliment Voroshilov, another prominent member of Stalin's inner circle, is Adapted Out.
- Maria Yudina was a somewhat frumpy woman in her mid-50s when Stalin died. In the film she is played by the gorgeous, late-30s Olga Kurylenko.
- Vasily Stalin was a fairly competent general and fighter pilot in real life, and while his father's abusive treatment of him after the war caused him to hit the bottle, he didn't become a constant alcoholic until after his father's death.
- Molotov was well aware that he had fallen out of favor with Stalin by the time of the latter's death: the dictator had already denounced him at a Party Congress and pointedly didn't invite Molotov to his 73rd birthday celebration (Molotov showed up anyway and Stalin didn't even react). Such obvious spurns would have made Stalin's opinion clear, especially to someone as smart and observant as Molotov.
- Leonid Brezhnev is depicted as a prominent Red Army officer who was instrumental in Zhukov coup against Beria—he's the one who Zhukov nods to on the roof, as well as the one who says "I'd like the tall blonde" when grabbing an AK-47. In reality, Brezhnev had been fully on the political side of military affairs since the end of World War II, a member of the Presidium (albeit only as a candidate member), and Nikita Khrushchev's longtime friend and protege.
