RUSSIAN  CALVARY. XX CENTURY

Film #1: The Cross

Film #2: From non-existence

 

director

Alexei Kolesnikov

producers

Alexander Lipkov, Alexei Kolesnikov, Leonid Leonidov

production

Documentary film, 104 min, Film-video studio "Filmen", Russia, 2005

оriginal title  YA K VAM TRAVOYU PRORASTU language Russian

 

synopsis

 

The film features two love stories – of a mother and son, embracing the tragic history of the XX century. Anna Vasilyevna Timireva spent 39 years in jails, camps and exile as penance for her love for admiral Kolchak, executed by Soviet power in 1920. The shadow of her disgraced fate spread to her son Vladimir Timirev – the talented young artist was executed in 1938 in the Butovo range near Moscow on a fabricated denunciation. The denunciation was written by the mother of the girl he was in love with: she dreaded her daughter binding her life with ‘Kolchak’s stepson’. Next to Volodya Timirev on the Butovo range lie tens of thousands of victims of Stalinist terror – clergymen, officers, artists, engineers, peasants, workers – all those who are the core of what we call ‘people’. All in all in the period from August 1937 to November 1938 1.5 million people had been arrested in the Soviet Union – out of which number 700 thousand were executed. The scale of repressions comparable with only that of German Fascism.

The film unearths unique documents and testimonies, unveiling heart-rending life stories and chilling pages of history that until now were thought buried forever deep down in Lubyanka’s basements.