One of the most astute studies of postwar Soviet cinema remains Sergej Kapterev’s way-too-little-read dissertation Post-Stalinist Cinema and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1953-1960 (2005), which despite its title, also has quite a lot to say about the years 1945-1952. Here’s a passage about Tales of the Siberian Land and The Cossacks of the Kuban: “According to Barbara Klinger, Melodrama may become ‘a crucial social barometer during times of ideological crisis […] due to its heightened visual expressiveness, the psychic and social foundations of its mise-en-scene and its ‘double-leveled’ meaning’. This characteristic can be applied to Pyr’ev’s late Stalinist works: the fantasies of comfort and prosperity in Tales of the Siberian Land and The Cossacks of the Kuban hid war-inflicted personal dramas, which were ‘incidentally’ disclosed by scores in a minor key and verbal and visual hints of loneliness and desire. One of the most striking instances of this hidden, fragmentary melodrama is a sequence in The Cossacks of the Kuban, in which the estranged heroine’s song (we hear “All through the war I waited for you”) is transformed into an anxious choral crescendo and a shot of deliriously singing young females – an image close to many in the late-1940s Soviet Union, where millions of males did not return from the war”. That nails it.