Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

"Kholodnoe leto pyatdesyat tretego" (The Cold Summer of 1953, directed by Aleksander Proshkin in 1987) was seen by more than 640 million people in its first year of release. It was popular not only in the disintegrating Soviet Union, but in the fraying Soviet Empire, including drawing a larger audience than any Hollywood movie in Czechoslovakia. So why did I not hear about it many years later? American insularity is an obvious answer, though a film showing the dismal life in a Siberian prisoner colony would seem like something that would have been imported at the time.

Stalin died on 5 March 1953. His lieutenant in charge of purges, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, longtime head of the head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). was arrested at a Presidium meeting 26 June, but this was not announced until 10 July. Midway through the movie, the news diffuses to the isolated Siberian prison camp, simultaneously with news of an amnesty that Beria declared that released more than a million common criminals, but not political prisoners.

The distinction is absolutely central to "Cold Summer." With the news of Beria's fall is news that amnestied prisoners of a nearby forced-labor camp killed the commandant and half a dozen of them fled into the forest. It is not too much of a surprise when the turn up and take the whole village hostage.

The movie that Proshkin was supposed to be making was a detective story. The one he did make seems more like a western with a gang of desperadoes and one man (Valerij Prijemykhov) rising to the occasion to pick them off. Or Sanjuro or Kill! without any of the humor in them. Or "Desperate Hours" with a whole village instead of a family. The previously unheroic hero is supplied with a aged sidekick of sorts (Anatolij Papanov in his last movie). The names of the political prisoners do not occur until 2/3rds of the way through the movie, when they introduce themselves to each other and tell each other what they did before they were arrested.

The character Valerij Prijemykhov portrayed is called "Chaff" in the subtitles and English-dubbing. At the start, he has ceased to work, sitting looking out at the lake all of the time, and being flirted with by a seemingly somewhat retarded girl Shura (Zoya Buryak) much to the dismay of her mute (but very expressive) mother (Nina Usatova).

There is plenty of venality in the village before the action begins. "Cold Summer" is probably the best thriller made in the Soviet Union (or post-Soviet Russia). For me, the most powerful scenes are after the climax (I can't bring myself to use "anticlimax"; "coda"?) and set in Moscow. I feel that I have revealed too much about the plot already, so certainly cannot specify who or what is involved in the final, elegantly underplayed final part.

There is less political content than I expected (whether Beria was seeking to "liberalize" the post-Stalin USSR or to stimulate a crime wave that he could then suppress remains very controversial; that he was a British spy, the accusation that justified his death at the time, seems highly unlikely). The officials at the remote outposts are perplexed about how Beria could be labeled "an enemy of the people" after purging so many "enemies of the people," but have little information and strongly ingrained habits, particularly of treating the political prisoners as far worse than the criminals.

There is a strong critique of the Stalinist system implicit in the parts that Prijemykhov and Papanov play, but no directly stated criticism. Especially from the perspective of nearly two decades later, the dashed hopes of 1953 foreshadow the hopes of an unauthoritarian Russia (et al.) after the fall of communism that was then imminent. If the movie had been made earlier, it would have been shelved and its makers probably sent back to Siberia in a nonprofessional capacity. A portrayal of cowardice of communist officials and of unjust imprisonment frightened the new heads of film production in Moscow, but they had what turned out to be a popular hit on their hands.

Although slow to get going, I think the film stands up quite well. I found the dubbing into English to make more sense than the English subtitles. There was an astonishingly small number of words that overlapped, and I felt that by listening and reading I got more, though there were junctures in which I really wished I could resolve the differences, but knowing no Russian, I had no rational basis for choosing between what I was reading and what I was hearing. Perhaps I should have backtracked and switched to French subtitles, but I was afraid that they would match neither of the two English versions!

The DVD has an interesting retrospect from director Proshkin on the making and hesitant release of the movie.

© 2006, Stephen O. Murray




Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD