The characters of Fetisov and Burakov were both real people who investigated the actual Chikatilo killings, yet their ranks and positions were changed in the movie. Historically, Major Mikhail Fetisov was sent from Moscow in order to investigate the killings (in the film he is already in Rostov as a Colonel heading the militia) while Victor Burakov was a civilian forensic expert (in the film he is a Police Lieutenant) assigned by Fetisov to head the investigation. There was no Central Committee comprised of Communist Party and KGB men above the two (this was a plot device created for the film to show Soviet bureaucratic methods) and the main reason why the case took so long was that the investigators interviewed over 150,000 people trying to narrow down who the killer could be. The mistaken release of Chikatilo, and the botched blood-semen test, was accurate as it occurred in the investigation.
A subtle and clever device to mark time is employed by a succession of wall photographs depicting current premiers from Brezhnev to Gorbachev.
The movie Enfant 44 (2015) is based on the same events (albeit from a fictionalized account published in 2008).
A TV movie for the HBO network.
Stephen Rea also starred in V for Vendetta where he again played a detective on a manhunt working within an authoritarian bureaucratic regime.