Yeah, they really beat you over the head with it, which is ironically one of the very things they claim the communists did, this kind of blatant and heavy-handed propaganda where they don't let you forget for one second how "bad" and "inefficient" the "enemy" system is. No one denies that there were issues with bureaucratism in the USSR, but this movie just takes it to a ridiculous extent, and of course the minute socialism is gone everything is suddenly magically efficient. In reality, the police of capitalist Russia and the other countries of the former USSR today are legendary for their corruption and inefficiency, not to mention their brutality.
No mention of how the fall of socialism put tens of millions of people in poverty, caused the economy of all Soviet republics to collapse, millions and millions of people out of work, even those who still had work suffered crashing wages and living standards, loss of access to education and healthcare for those who could no longer afford it under glorious capitalism, tremendous explosion of corruption, nepotism and cronyism, skyrocketing crime, drugs and disease, the rise of racist and fascist movements freed from Soviet "repression", and so on and so forth. The Russian life expectancy plunged by 10 years in the 1990s. 10 years! Of course none of this has anything to do with the Chikatilo case, but so long as the movie is gratuitously vilifying the whole Soviet system and portraying capitalist "democracy" as some wonderful efficient thing, which also has nothing to do with the Chikatilo case, they might as well show some of the bad effects of the counterrevolution, for the sake of honesty.
The USSR wasn't perfect but it was a thousand times better than what replaced it in every conceivable way. The wealth of society was collectively owned by all its people, it achieved the greatest economic successes in human history (bringing the USSR from a backward semi-feudal society to one of the leading industrial, scientific and military powers on Earth in a generation), it provided all its people with security and stability. Even during the "stagnation" period of the Brezhnev time, the Soviet Union had better economic growth rates than most capitalist countries, and its people certainly were better-off than the impoverished underclasses of capitalism in even the richest capitalist countries, to say nothing of all the poor capitalist countries that the rich ones exploit. It's not for no reason that solid majorities of people in the former USSR consistently reaffirm in polls that they wish it never fell. There's no reason why the problems in the Soviet system couldn't have been worked out without abolishing the whole political and economic system. Notice how capitalist-apologists never suggest that the problems of capitalism should be resolved by revolution; in fact they reserve the greatest scorn for that idea.
The movie's portrayal of bureaucratic inefficiency wouldn't bother me so much if all the "good guys", namely Burakov, Fetisov and Dr. Bukhanovsky, weren't portrayed as "mavericks", skeptics and cynics who don't care anything about the USSR and socialism. Fact is that most Soviet people believed in their system even if they had issues with problematic aspects of it, even in the later period, until Gorbachev threw everything into chaos with his "reforms" and caused the economic system to crash into a free-fall. But of course, it's impossible to have a "good guy" who's actually a communist in a Western movie. Even when portraying communist countries, the "good guys" can never be real communists, they always have to be "disillusioned" people with Western ways of thinking. Pure anti-Soviet, anti-communist propaganda. The movie doesn't have to portray the USSR as a flawless paradise but it should at least be honest and fair, and this one wasn't.
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