I've been thinking about this after seeing the trailer. One of the problems is that most of the really good histories on Stalin and Stalinism tend to focus on the 1920s and 30s. Most stop at the war and the immediate postwar period is one of dead zones of Soviet historiography. Sheila Fitzpatrick's On Stalin's Team is a good introduction to the various personalities of Stalin's inner circle without going into the type of gossip-mongering that characterizes popular treatments of the subject. The relevant sections of William Taubman's biography of Khrushchev is also worth reading for the inner circle's responses to Stalin's waning health and Taubman is a good read for those not familiar with the broader currents of Soviet history. Stalinist Reconstruction and the Confirmation of a New Elite, 1945–1953 by J. Eric Duskin does not deal with the inner circle, but the new white-collar class of Soviet elite. Juliane Furst's Stalin's Last Generation is a social history of the postwar youth cohort who came of age during the waning years of the dictatorship. Donald Filtzer's Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after Worl War II is an exception to the rule that scholars that focus on the 1930s tend to limit themselves to that decade. Miriam Dobson's Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin covers one of the major results of Stalin's death as well as the popular response to the release of so many inmates.