AFilotti

The film focuses on the love story between Admiral Kolchak and Anna Timiryova, in the context of the tragic events of the Russian revolution and civil war. And rightly so, the main feature is the love story, while history is left to the background.

It also does not focus on the life of Anna Timiryova after Kolchak's death - she has been arrested six times and spent long years in the Gulag. But she always remembered the two tragic years when she had been able to be with her lover.

The lyrics of the theme song are one of Anna Timiryova's poems. Unfortunately a film cannot focus on poetry, but it should be remembered that the Timiryova's poems have been compared the the poetry of Boris Pasternak.

And Boyarskaya really shows that she understood the tragism of Timiryova's fate.

The film presents the story of a terrorist attack on a Moscow theater as well as the actions taken to release the hostages. The Russian anti-terrorist forces were able to kill all the terrorists and to release the hostages, though an important number of the hostages also died. Instead of analyzing what actions the Russians could have taken to reduce the number of casualties, part of the commentary tends to justify the cause of the terrorists. The Chechen terrorists are not more justified than the Al-Qaida terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center in New York. Commentaries supporting terrorism are just bad reporting. It is sad that an interesting documentary has such commentaries.

The magnitude of the Stalingrad tragedy is concisely presented in the end note of the movie: "In the battle of Stalingrad, more than one million people were killed in action, froze to death or died of starvation: Russians, Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, Germans, Austrians. Of the 260,000 surrounded men of the Sixth Army, 91,00o were taken prisoners, of whom only 6,000 returned to their homeland, years later.

What the story does not tell was that Fieldmarshall Paulus, who surrendered, did not share all the hardship of the captivity of his men. He had a special treatment as the highest ranking prisonner taken by the Soviet army. When, during his presence at the Nuremberg trials he was asked about the fate of the 91,000 prisoners, he declared that they were fine. He was freed after the war and died in the East Germany.

The film only presents the first part of the tragedy, the actual battle of Stalingrad. However, for an entire picture, the fate of the 91,000 prisonners should also not be forgotten.