Very well-made but depressing as hell
Very well-made film, both technically and in terms of its characters' moral development. No Soviet propaganda here, there is much moral gray and anguish about what is "right" and how people are forced to make agonizing decisions in real life (as opposed to always dying nobly like in many films). This is not to say that the Germans (or their collaborators) are portrayed sympathetically (neither are they mindlessly demonized), just that the main actors and Russian villagers are seen as neither simply monsters or transcendental heroes.
Also a fair amount of Christian symbolism in the "sacrifice" of one of the characters, which I was surprised to see in a Soviet film. The film is in black and white, which seems a little outdated given the year it was made but lends the whole experience an appropriately somber tone/mood. As an aside I enjoyed the fact that the German characters spoke in perfect German even when their conversations were not part of the main scene (or translated in the subtitles).
A well-made depiction of the psychomoral realities behind some of the "partisan story" in WWII.