Cinema: Love in Stalin’s Russia

Clear Skies, which took top honors for Russia at the 1961 Moscow Film Festival, will interest Westerners chiefly because it lets the light of day shine on some ideas new to the insular world of Soviet cinema. Director Grigori Chukhrai, who proved his talent with the sensitive, romanticized Ballad of a Soldier, tells a tale of illicit love—and tells it straight, without prudish apologies, against a background of post-World War II political tyranny. The off-screen villain of the piece is Joseph Stalin.

Chukhrai’s plucky heroine, Sasha (Nina Drobysheva), left alone during the war, all but flings herself into the arms of a heroic airman, Aleksei (Evgeni Urbanski, the brooding amputee of Ballad). While Aleksei is missing and presumed dead, she bears his child. Miraculously, he returns at war’s end, and when Sasha’s stuffy brother-in-law objects to their living together, she tells him to go to hell.

Soon Aleksei takes to drink, battle-scarred and bitter because his wartime honors are withheld by Stalinist officials who cannot believe that any trustworthy Red could have survived a Nazi prison camp. He will have to fight for what is due him, says Sasha. “Against whom?” rages the former hero. “In the war, we knew who our enemies were. Who? Who is guilty? What’s happening to us? Are we lying to each other? Are we splitting with the party? I am a man, dammit, and I need the truth!” At local party headquarters he tries to get his flight status restored, instead gets the run-around from a circle of blank-faced bureaucrats squatting under a statue of their leader.

Then Stalin dies. Spring is nigh, and the screen bursts with the flux of a great thaw. Glaciers move. Oppressive ice masses give way to a life-giving socialist sun, and quick as a wink all Russia is awash with sentiment. Such devices sweep Clear Skies right to the edge of a slushy cinematic wasteland. Trick effects multiply with stultifying regularity. The camera, scudding skyward, frequently pauses to record the emotional temperature, ranging from before-the-storm to lo-the-dawn.

But for all that, Chukhrai offers noteworthy compensations. His film is brimful of humanity and humor. His actors are superb, particularly Drobysheva. Meeting her hero for the first time on a snowy street corner, she turns a blind date into a glorious little ballet of girlish uncertainty. Women at a railway station, waiting for the merest glimpse of their menfolk, watch a troop train roar through at top speed, leaving behind an acre or so of stunned faces that say all there is to say about war’s anguish at home. And Chukhrai pumps irony into a sequence that has Sasha posing for a photographer beside her drill press. She is alone, an unwed mother, sick with despair, but the picture is published over the caption: “Sasha Lvova finds happiness in her factory. She has enlarged her quota 163%.” Director Chukhrai seems fully aware that pravda is stranger than fiction.