Commissar (film)
콤미사르 (영화)
A Soviet film made by Aleksandr Askoldov in 1967, from a Vasily Grossman story. A woman commissar in the Civil War gets pregnant, stays with a poor Jewish blacksmith's family, leaves her baby with them and goes back to the front. Banned over its Jewish characters, it lay buried for twenty years and came out under perestroika after a protest at a festival press conference.
In depth
What is the story?
Around 1920 or 1921 Klavdiya Vavilova, a commissar in the Red Army cavalry, oversees the execution of a deserter, Emelin. Then this hardened soldier finds that she is pregnant. She is horrified; the father, Kirill, is already dead, and she is billeted on a poor Jewish blacksmith, Yefim Magazannik, with his wife Maria, his mother-in-law and six children.
At first neither side is pleased. But the Magazanniks share their rations, sew her civilian clothes and help her give birth to a son, named Kirill after his father. The commissar slowly thaws into a mother. The children play at pogroms and make their sister the "Jew". As the front approaches and the Red Army pulls back, the Jews expect a pogrom. Hiding in the cellar, she watches Yefim dance with his children and has a vision of Jews with yellow stars, a vision of the Holocaust. She leaves the baby with the family and rushes to the front.
Why was it banned?
Pitched for the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution, the screenplay was approved, but Goskino demanded revisions. Its head Aleksei Romanov told Askoldov privately that the film could come out if the characters' nationality were changed and the Holocaust sequence removed. Askoldov refused. He shot that sequence in Kamianets-Podilskyi on the very spot where the Nazis had executed Jews. Local Jews refused to take part, and he had to write to the Ukrainian party for extras.
Editing coincided with the end of the Six-Day War, and Goskino decided on the ban on 29 December 1967. Yad Vashem reports the reason given in the documents: "the positive image of the Jew Yefim Magazannik and his family, and the dance of the Jews with yellow stars, an obvious allusion to the Catastrophe of European Jewry". Romanov for his part stated that Jewish members of Goskino found the film antisemitic. The ban took effect in July 1968, and his order of 28 July sent all materials to the state film archive. The support of Sergei Gerasimov and Mikhail Romm did not help.
Askoldov lost his job. English sources say he was charged with social parasitism, expelled from the party, exiled from Moscow and banned from features for life. Russian sources, however, have him running the Rossiya concert hall from 1981 and dismissed and expelled from the party in 1985 for financial irregularities, so the date of his expulsion is in dispute. He was told the film had been destroyed; he claimed his wife saved the cans, and another account credits Gerasimov.
How did it reach the public?
After the 5th Congress of the USSR Union of Cinematographers in 1986 the union pressed the case and the authorities ordered release, but Filipp Yermash of Goskino and others held out. At a press conference of the 15th Moscow festival on 9 July 1987, Elem Klimov announced that all banned films had been released. Askoldov took the microphone and said that Commissar was still banned. Next day Gabriel García Márquez, who had been there, met Gorbachev and asked on the jury's behalf for its release, and on 11 July a surviving print was shown. Mosfilm finished restoring it in 1988, and it won the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize in Berlin. Over 3.5 million saw it in its first year.
It remained Askoldov's only feature film. He died in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2018.
Why does it matter?
It is one of the few Soviet films in which Yiddish and Hebrew are heard, and Alfred Schnittke wrote the klezmer-based score. Nonna Mordyukova plays Vavilova, Rolan Bykov plays Yefim and Vasily Shukshin the regimental commander. The scholar Denise Youngblood calls it the first Russian film with major, sympathetic Jewish characters. Askoldov himself was sheltered as a child by a Jewish family after his parents' arrest; they were killed at Babi Yar, and he said he made the film as a tribute to them.
Praise is not universal. Olga Gershenson calls it one of the most Jewish of Soviet films, but the historian Victoria Khiterer argues that to appeal to gentile viewers it renamed Grossman's Khaim-Abram and Beila as Yefim and Maria and added New Testament symbols, churches and one ruined synagogue, suggesting the dominance of Christianity over Judaism. Yefim has also been called a stereotype out of prerevolutionary literature.
How does it differ from the story?
Its basis is In the Town of Berdichev, which Grossman published in Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1934. There the heroine joins a passing column of young cadets, leaving the child behind. The Holocaust vision is the film's addition. Askoldov also drew on Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry; the bespectacled Kirill recalls its narrator Kirill Lyutov, and Yefim takes inspiration from Babel's Gedali.