Samuel Goff, at the Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge, while admitting that the film′s numerous historical discrepancies could be justified inasmuch as they helped focus the drama, found the grotesque way "Beria and the NKVD" are portrayed in the film less forgivable.[25] Contrary to what both the film and Goff's essay say, the NKVD did not exist in early 1953, the secret police being a separate ministry headed by Semyon Ignatyev, while Lavrentiy Beria was appointed the Minister of the Interior on 5 March 1953, on the day of Stalin's death. Goff believed 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".[25]