The first and only film written and directed by Aleksandr Askoldov is based on a story by Vasiliy Grossman, set in his native Berdychiv. Grossman was an author disliked by Khrushchev and his masterpiece,Life and Fate, was seized in 1960 and narrowly escaped being destroyed (adventurously smuggled out of the USSR, it was first published in Switzerland only in 1980). The same thing happened to Komissar, which, like many other films, fell victim to the Era of Stagnation and was released only after Gorbachev’s Perestroika. It is not hard to see why: the accusations of pro-Zionism that led to its suppression for two decades actually conceal the echoes of a bitter Stalinist anti-Semitism. After it was eventually “thawed out”, it was screened at the Berlinale in 1988, just before the fall of the Wall, where it won the Silver Bear. The prize was political, undoubtedly, but not entirely, since the parable of Comrade Vavilova who, during the civil war with the Whites, is left to give birth in the house of the poor Jewish craftsman Efim, is a universal story: of violence and suffering, of the illusions for which we live and the ideals for which we die. Disillusionment is the principal emotion in the film: the disillusionment of the regiment’s soldiers, a Babelian red cavalry; the disillusionment of Efim, aware that one regime is simply replacing another and that blame often lands on the same scapegoats; above all, the disillusionment of the protagonist, full of political rhetoric in public but ever less sure of it in private, despite her final sacrifice. Too symbolic, oneiric and mystical and too much in debt to the western new waves to find approval amongst those nostalgic for Soviet realism; too explicit and sincere in its description of reality, above all, the poverty of the small village, to satisfy party rhetoric. And (even today) too current not to move us, with its children playing at being soldiers and its only slightly older child soldiers patrolling the contested border between Russian and Ukraine.

Gianluca De Santis