Historical accuracy
Several academics have argued there are historical inaccuracies in The Death of Stalin. Iannucci has said "I'm not saying it's a documentary. It is a fiction, but it's a fiction inspired by the truth of what it must have felt like at the time. My aim is for the audience to feel the sort of low-level anxiety that people must have [experienced] when they just went about their daily lives at the time."
The historian Richard Overy wrote that the film "is littered with historical errors", and called it "entertainment, but poor history". Among his examples are,
Molotov was not the foreign minister when Stalin died. He had been sacked in 1949, but became foreign minister again in the post-Stalin reshuffle.
Marshal of the Soviet Union (not Field Marshal) Zhukov was a local field commander when Stalin died, having been exiled to the provinces due to Stalin's paranoid jealousy of him. Zhukov became deputy minister of defence in the post-Stalin government, but he was not the commander of the Soviet Army in March 1953; that position was held by his long-time rival Ivan Konev.
Khrushchev, not Malenkov, chaired the meeting to reorganise the government after Stalin's death.
Lazar Kaganovich never served as Minister for Labor in the Soviet Government; he was Commissar of Transport (1935–1937), Heavy Industry (1937–1939), and the Fuel Industry (1939), while also holding roles as a Deputy Premier and Central Committee Secretary.
Beria was actually arrested three months after Stalin died, not almost simultaneously, and that was precipitated by the East German uprising of 1953, not a fictional massacre of mourners in Moscow, which is based on an incident in which at least 109 people were trampled to death during the funeral. He was executed six months after being arrested. Beria had not been head of the NKVD security forces since 1946.
Svetlana was not sent to Vienna. She remained in the Soviet Union working as an academic and translator before defecting to America in 1967 and becoming a naturalised citizen of the United States in 1978.
The scene showing the complete liquidation of the personnel of Stalin's dacha was fictional.
Overy wrote that those killed in the Great Purge or sent to Gulags "deserve a film that treats their history with greater discretion and historical understanding". Iannucci said he "chose to tone down real-life absurdity" to make the work more believable.
The Radio Moscow portion of the film is a retelling of an apocryphal story first recorded in Solomon Volkov's book Testimony (1979), which Volkov claimed were the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich. In Testimony, Maria Yudina is awakened in the middle of the night in 1943 or 1944, not 1953, and brought in to record, and the recording brings Stalin to tears, moving him to pay Yudina 20,000 roubles in appreciation. The story served as the loose basis for The Stalin Sonata, a 1989 BBC radio play by David Zane Mairowitz. While, like the film, the original story has Yudina send a letter to Stalin, its contents are different, as she supposedly wrote to thank Stalin for the money, adding that she would donate it to the restoration of a church and would be praying for his sins to be forgiven. While the real Yudina was fired on one occasion for her ideological disagreements with Stalin's regime, her family was not killed.
Dr. Lydia Timashuk is described in the film as a willing accomplice in the Doctors' plot, which is discussed as a past, rather than current, event, and is portrayed as an eager agent in the arrest of Moscow doctors for Stalin's care, who, in a deleted scene, dies in a minefield around Stalin's dacha after her sexual advances to Beria are rejected. In reality, she had no involvement in the events surrounding Stalin's death, and was an unwilling pawn in the Doctors' plot, after which she became embittered by the labels of informer and anti-Semite that followed her until her death in 1983.
Bogdan Kobulov is depicted in the film as being shot dead during Beria's arrest by officers acting under orders given by Zhukov. In reality, he was arrested and killed with Beria months later.
In the film, Vasily Stalin and Anatoly Tarasov are seen at a practice of the Soviet Union national ice hockey team, which has been depleted by a recent plane crash. There really was a plane crash in which 11 players on the VVS Moscow ice hockey team died, and star player Vsevolod Bobrov really did survive because he missed the flight, but the crash happened on 5 January 1950, more than three years before Stalin's death.
The NKVD was superseded by the MGB in 1946, almost seven years before the death of Stalin.
Samuel Goff of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, though opining that the film's historical discrepancies could be justified as helping to focus the drama, wrote that turning Beria into "an avatar of the obscenities of the Stalinist state" missed the chance to say "anything about the actual mechanisms of power", and argued that Iannucci's approach to satire was not transferable to something like Stalinism, and the film is "fundamentally ill-equipped to locate the comedy inherent to Stalinism, missing marks it doesn't know it should be aiming for".
On the other hand, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote that "for all its insouciance about details, [the film] captures the essential black comedy of the situation."
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