BURNT BY THE SUN
A film review by Fred Kreisel
Copyright 1995 Iskra Research
Stalinism Revisited
There is a new Russian film playing now in the US, and it is a must-see!
This 1995 feature film took a number of prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, and deservedly so. Nikota Mikhalkov both directed and starred in it in the role of Sergei Kotov, a Red Army officer, hero of the Civil War and a pillar of the Soviet regime.
What starts as a languorous and idyllic story describes one day in the life of a privileged family in the new Soviet Russia on a lazy Sunday in the summer of 1936, just weeks before the first of the infamous Moscow Trials broke on a stunned world. The sense of imminent danger is palpable throughout this gripping film.
Realism of this film is developed on various levels. Firstly, Mikhalkov uses vivid summer colors and a typical rural location to bring the viewer into the midst of a July countryside somewhere near Moscow. Secondly, the skilled use of choice actors: tender and talented portrayal of Kotov's six-year-old girl by Mikhalkov's own daughter, the sensuous elegance of the beautiful Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Kotov's wife, the nervous energy of Oleg Menshikov as the intruding antagonist, and so on. Thirdly, there is the masterful counterposition of quick action and peaceful periods of weekend rest.
Finally, there is the shocking reality of the Purges themselves, totally unprecedented in world history. From mid-1936 until 1939 Stalin wiped out the vast majority of the top echelons of the Soviet regime: most of the top commanders of the Red Army, the majority of the leaders of the Bolshevik Party during its heroic period of struggle for power, the leading engineers, designers and scientists, outstanding writers, artists, film and theatre directors, and so on.
Stalin's assistants in this counterrevolutionary terror directed against the organizers of Bolshevik victory and the builders of the Soviet state were in many cases individuals who resisted the October Revolution in 1917 or who stayed on the sidelines. Stalin's chief prosecutor at the Trials was Andrei Vyshinsky, a former Menshevik leader. Among the chief torturers of the NKVD was Lavrentii Beria, known to all the Caucasian revolutionaries as a tzarist agent provocateur; two of the chief stage managers of the show trials were Henrik Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, unknown during the Revolution and the Civil War, but promoted by Stalin in the fight against Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
Mikhalkov reaches towards an understanding of the reactionary aims of Stalinist purges. His protagonist Kotov begins to see the class basis for this genocide of the true revolutionaries at the hands of the power hungry bureaucrats and the former White Guards. However, the director's power of penetration is limited by the confusion and disorientation still prevailing in Russia. We hope that this film marks a new step in the search for the truth about the history of the Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky, and the Stalinist counterrevolution which followed.
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