Looking at this breast-banging title and the production year one might expect a join-the-armed-forces propaganda movie. Wrong guess. The film invites teenagers to suppress their natural patriotic instinct and, rather than dying for their Country, do something useful instead: study engineering, go East, not West (the Ural Mountains, of course, are the eastern frontier of Europe) and dedicate their time to making bombs and mines. There is also a side-motif picturing a gender type reversal: while the boy is making mines in the East the girl he is in love with (played by the wonderful Janina Zejmo) volunteers, is sent to the front and becomes a war hero. The bottom line: in a war like this, there is no such thing as boys or girls and front or rear
Yuri Tsivian