Even the preview is moving.

elcoat

I have not yet seen the film, but as a World War 2 historian just the previews hit pretty hard ... the scene dramatizing the historical photos of people pulling sleighs with little bodies on them, for example ... and I shall try to find a copy around Oslo to watch, to complete this.

The reviewer who expressed doubt the Russians would mount an unsupported infantry attack across open ground is wrong. In the first years of the war, many Russian lives were wasted in such desperate attacks, often forced at gunpoint by NKVD political commissars.

Defense Minister Voroshilov - one of only two of five prewar Red Army marshals to survive the NKVD purges of the Red Army ordered by Stalin - had been sent to Leningrad to personally defend it, and he personally led one of these desperate counterattacks.

I will be interested to see if there are any sequences of K(limenti)V(oroshilov) tanks rolling out of the Kirov tank works and directly into battle? On my CoatneyHistory webpage, I have a free little boardgame titled Leningrad 1941: the Embattled City, about the early Wehrmacht onslaught (until the Germans shifted panzer and infantry forces to the attack on Moscow), with a dedication to its people.

The theme of my webpages is "The more we learn about the Second World War, the better our chances it will be the LAST world war." We NEVER want another one, and this film looks like it inescapably shows how the innocent - especially children - suffer most.

By the way, the pretty Russian actress who played Natalia in Sergey Bondarshuk's epic 1966 War and Peace film, Lyudmila Saveleva, was born in Leningrad on 24 January 1942, during the worst of the siege and starvation.

Lou Coatney

April 2019:

I have now seen the film, checked out on interlibrary loan here in Norway, and it is exactly as grim as I had expected, showcasing the innocent ... especially children ... starving.

I suspect the improvised armored car rolling out of the Kirov tank factory (which had been evacuated in time, I understand) may have been out of a museum.

The suggestion of intimacy between the female characters recalls the lesbian portrayal of the Russian female sniper (and Eleanor Roosevelt's interest in her) in that film. Female homosexuality seems to be more tolerated in Russia, unlike male homosexuality.

I am reading that Hitler decided not to take the casualties a block-by-block (Stalingrad later) battle would have required, and instead just wanted to starve Leningrad to death. One of those who died ... of malnutrition and disease ... was Vladimir Putin's 3 year old brother Viktor, whom he never knew. Both his parents nearly died in the war - his father on a commando mission from which he was permanently wounded and his mother found by his father already in the morgue, expected to die and somehow brought back to life.

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was a racist war of enslavement and extermination, and its 27 million deaths toll, should be considered and made part of the Nazi Holocaust's total.

After such a holocaust, the Russian people fear another (from the West) just like Jewish people.

score /10

elcoat 15 December 2013

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2922670/