The Commissar

The civil war years, Ukraine. Klavdia Vavilova is a commissar with the Red Army: hard, decided, and not squeamish about having her own men shot. Then she finds she is pregnant. To give birth she leaves the unit and is billeted with a poor Jewish family in the town, a household full of children. She has the baby there and becomes somebody's mother for the first time. But the war goes on and one day she will have to go back. She has to decide what to do with the child. Aleksandr Askoldov directs the Soviet film; a hundred and ten minutes, with Nonna Mordyukova as Vavilova and Rolan Bykov as the head of the household. It was finished in 1967 and banned at once; Askoldov was expelled from the Party, sent out of Moscow, and never allowed to make another feature. The film sat on the shelf for twenty years and was not released until 1987. It is Askoldov's only feature.