Ono

The film comes from a book by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. The book is called The History of a Town. The account is set in a town named Glupov. The governors who come to the town are told one after another. Each of them sets up a different kind of tyranny. The number of townspeople who die changes accordingly. The account is told in a grotesque manner. The history of the town is really the history of Russia. It starts as far back as the Varangians. It comes down to the end of the twentieth century. The heads of the town seem familiar. The old rulers of the state are easy to pick out. Natalya Gundareva and Svetlana Kryuchkova take the leads, with Margarita Terekhova and Rolan Bykov also in the cast, in Sergey Ovcharov’s Soviet film of 1989.