Холодное лето пятьдесят третьего
Mosfilm, USSR, 1988, colour, 100 mins
- Director: Alexander Proshkin
- Writer: Edgar Dubrovsky
- Camera: Boris Brozhovsky
- Editing: Yelena Mikhailova
- Design: Valery Filippov
- Music: Vladimir Martynov
- Cast: Valery Priyomykhov (Sergei Basargin, ‘Chaff’), Anatoly Papanov (Nikolai Starobogatov, ‘Spade’), Victor Stepanov (Mankov), Nina Usatova (Lydia), Zoya Buryak (Shura), Yuri Kuznetsov (Sotov), Vladimir Kashpur (Fadeyich), Boris Plotnikov (Starobogatov, Spade’s son), Vladimir Golovin (Baron)
A huge hit on its original release, voted best film of 1988 by the journal Sovetskii Ekran and second only to Vassily Pichul’s raunchy phenomenon Little Vera (Маленькая Вера) at the box office, The Cold Summer of 1953 simultaneously depicts two pivotal periods of Soviet history. Set in the months immediately following Stalin’s death and produced and released in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev’s late 1980s reforms, it implicitly criticises the Soviet system to a degree that must have been unimaginable even a few months before it went into production in June 1987.
Indeed, director Alexander Proshkin acknowledged that if the film had been shot not that much earlier, it would probably have ended up as the unexceptional thriller approved by state film body Goskino on the basis of a script called The Dance of the Ephemera. Those ignorant of or uninterested in the underlying politics should still find the film perfectly watchable as a smaller-scale Russian version of Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven, as assorted misfits band together to save their remote village from marauding bandits – it’s nowhere near the class of those two, but it delivers enough generic thrills to hold the attention.
But it’s the elements added during production that gave the film its considerable lasting value. The summer of the title saw Stalin’s rivals jockeying for power in the wake of his death the previous March. An amnesty engineered by his right-hand man Lavrenti Beria gave prison governors a heaven-sent opportunity to get rid of their worst troublemakers, though the amnesty didn’t affect exiled “enemies of the people”. Proshkin and his scriptwriter Edgar Dubrovsky had a great many discussions with lawyers and criminologists while preparing the film, as they wanted to make sure its primary message came through loud and clear – which is that the term ‘criminal’ has multiple meanings depending on who’s applying it, and in a totalitarian situation it can often become so distorted as to be essentially meaningless – much like the phrase ‘enemy of the people’, which is uttered at least three times in different contexts.
Chaff (Valery Priyomykhov) and Spade (Anatoly Papanov) have spent years in Stalin’s gulags on trumped-up charges (Spade’s ‘crime’ was to have travelled abroad, Chaff’s was to have been captured by the Nazis during the war), the prime of their lives irretrievably lost: when the film opens they still live under huge restrictions, forced to live in a remote northern village as they’re banned from travelling. They’re still serving their sentence, while the violent marauders who invade the village have a clean record. And all these events are set in train by the actions of people at the highest levels who are later denounced as criminals – Beria is the one repeatedly named, but the clear implication is that he’s just one of many rotten apples.
This theme is explored further through the village’s three authority figures: the slavishly lickspittle Fadeyich (Vladimir Kashpur), unquestioningly accepting everything state-sanctioned and rejecting all ‘unofficial’ suggestions, the increasingly embittered Mankov (Victor Stepanov), too intelligent and observant not to realise what’s really going on, and the weaselly opportunistic Sotov (Yuri Kuznetsov), who’s even prepared to throw his lot in with the bandits, not least as he’s worried about an ongoing investigation digging up aspects of what seems to be a dubious past. With all due respect to the actors, this trio is not depicted with any especial subtlety, and it’s safe to assume that even the most slow-witted audience member would have drawn numerous parallels with events and people in their own lives.
Even less subtle is the depiction of Lydia (Nina Usatova) as a literally mute slave of whichever master happens to be a part of her life at the time (past lovers, present bandits): she’s as much a prisoner of events as any of the others, and the sequence where she wordlessly gestures with increasing desperation at a boat filled with dancing revellers clearly represents the plight of the ordinary Soviet citizen, powerless to attract any kind of attention other than one entailing brutal exploitation. In turn, she takes her frustration out on her daughter Shura (Zoya Buryak), cutting short a potentially romantic conversation between her and Chaff by pouring cold water over them. Shura has dreams of studying in Moscow: had she achieved them, what would have been the chances of her ever returning? And how many people watching her in the cinema had similar ambitions?
What runs throughout the film is a sense of futility, a lament for wasted years and lives and not so much anger as resigned fatalism towards a system that not only permits such things to occur but also actively encourages and exacerbates them. Chaff pointedly refuses to do any more than the bare minimum of work, arguing that he owes nothing to anybody any more, while Spade still holds out hope that he’ll rejoin his family after his exile is over (though they took his advice to forget him, not so much to preserve their safety as their sanity). And the final shot, where Chaff briefly makes eye contact with a white-bearded professorial type, hints that former exiles come from all walks of life, and are so numerous that it’s all too easy just to bump into one.
Though the film was primarily intended hold the past up as a mirror to the then present, it also turned out to offer a grimly accurate portent of the future. No less an authority than the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko made a point of screening it in courses that he taught at American universities in the 1990s, as for him the film symbolised the agonising decision that Russians faced throughout their history: either submit to brutal totalitarian rule or allow crime to flourish unfettered. And by positing the latter as the logical consequence of removing the former, The Cold Summer of 1953 turned out to prophesy the period following the collapse of the USSR just three years after its release. As a thriller, it’s watchable but pretty standard-issue, but as a historical document it’s fascinating.
The DVD
The Cold Summer of 1953 is available on region-free DVD from the Russian Cinema Council in either PAL or NTSC video formats (though the NTSC version is almost certainly a conversion from the PAL original). The package includes a twenty-minute interview with Alexander Proshkin, short documentaries about Beria’s trial, Stalin’s funeral and Anatoly Papanov’s career, filmographies, a stills gallery, soundtracks in Russian, English and French and subtitles in those languages.
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