Excellent, underrated Soviet film.

I've meant to watch this movie for a while but only finally saw it a few days ago. I really enjoyed it, it's a great film, and I think the 6.2 rating it has on imdb is far too low.

First i'll get my few criticisms out of the way. My main criticism is the scene of Stalin going to Berlin upon the victory of the Red Army, because it never actually happened. And I don't really like the main character, Aleksey, whom I found rather boring; he didn't have much personality. Also I don't like how the lunch scene was cut out of the film, creating a somewhat disorienting effect when the film skips from Aleksey being nervous about his relationship with Natasha and then going to meet Stalin to, abruptly, Aleksey walking in a field with Natasha and feeling perfectly fine about their relationship. It was just a weird edit. Finally, the actor who played Aleksey was too old for his role. The character's mother said he was born on the very day of the Bolshevik revolution, but that would make him less than 24 years old at that part of the film (early 1941), when the actor was clearly at least in his mid-30s.

But aside from those little drawbacks I think it was a wonderful and well-made film, from the era when Soviet cinema was still revolutionary and celebrated the working class and socialist system, before it became more depoliticized under Khrushchev and (to a lesser extent) his successors, until the Gorbachev period when socialism began to be actively vilified. Also I love the use of the new medium of color film in this movie, which I think turned out beautifully and made every scene quite enjoyable to look at on an aesthetic level.

As for the criticisms of the "personality cult" of Stalin, I see little problem with it. I did find some moments a bit over the top, especially the aforementioned Berlin scene, but I don't see any problem in principle with favorably portraying a revolutionary leader, especially one who led the victory over Nazi Germany. These critics of this movie and of the Stalin "cult" would never be satisfied unless Stalin was outright vilified. They don't take into account the fact that Stalin was, and still is, genuinely popular with the Russian people. Not because the state glorified him, but because he led the socialist construction of the USSR which made tremendous gains for the working class, such as the development of modern social services like universal healthcare and free education, the industrialization of the country, the doubling of life expectancy, the promotion of women's rights, universal employment, public ownership of property, an economy that equitably distributed the wealth and resources of society and the fruits of labor so there was minimal disparity, and oh yeah, the defeat of the Nazis (which wouldn't have been possible without Stalin's industrialization program).

Stalin's critics say he killed people, but so did Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who are lauded to the skies in every Western movie that portrays them, their atrocities either being ignored, downplayed or even actively justified, such as Harry Truman's nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed 200,000 civilian men, women and children, or his carpet-bombing of Korea 5 years later which burned every city on the peninsula to the ground and killed millions of people, barely mentioned by official history. Churchill starved India, carpet-bombed German civilians, and he was a vicious racist and white-supremacist who advocated the use of poison gas against what he called "uncivilized tribes", but you never hear about that from his admirers, who paint him as one of the great leaders of human history. Roosevelt interned thousands of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps and firebombed Japanese and German cities full of civilians with napalm, killing hundreds of thousands, but those things are downplayed or unmentioned in movies portraying him. All three of those leaders are ALWAYS painted in a favorable light in Western films, magnifying their good qualities and downplaying the bad.

How is this any different from a Soviet film portraying Stalin in a positive light? What makes the situations different? Why is it "propaganda" when the Soviets do it for their leaders, but not when the West does it? The only difference I can see is that Stalin was a communist and his violence (which is dramatically exaggerated in any case) was in defense of a socialist state, whereas the far more extreme violence of Truman, Churchill and Roosevelt was in defense of capitalism. If Stalin were just another Russian tsar, there would be little mention and less complaint of any violence wielded by his government.

Now, all this is not to say that there aren't legitimate criticisms to be made of Stalin. I do think was excessively authoritarian, though not a "mass-murderer" (and I do think that authoritarianism and violence are sometimes justified, even necessary, to some extent, depending on who wields it and to what purpose). But I think people who condemn this film because of its favorable portrayal of Stalin just have an anti-communist and anti-Soviet bias and wouldn't make the same criticisms of Western films that do the same things for their wartime leaders. They can't put their hatred for communism aside long enough to enjoy a very good Soviet movie about the victory over Nazi Germany, which was no more propagandistic than Western films about the same thing, which tend to glorify their leaders and erase the Soviet role in the war from history. As a result, this great movie hasn't achieved the status it deserves among World War II films, unfairly downrated because of accusations of "propaganda" that are just as applicable to Western films on the same subject who don't suffer the same condemnation. "Pearl Harbor" was one of the most propagandistic movies i've ever seen in my life, but the only criticism it gets is for the contrived love story and overdone special effects, not for its political propaganda. This double standard all comes down to a bias against communism. It's sinister propaganda when communists glorify their political system, their soldiers and their leaders, but when capitalists do the same thing it's just "patriotism".

Anyway, in conclusion, I think this is a wonderful, well-made, enjoyable and tragically underrated socialist film, despite some minor criticisms. It deserves to be appreciated by a much wider audience than it has thus far enjoyed. I rated it 9/10, reducing it by one score for the overdone Berlin scene and the somewhat dull performance of the actor who played Aleksey.

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of history.
-Mao Zedong