This brief excerpt from the 1948 Soviet propaganda movie “The Young Guards” is entitled “No one will ever crush our people”.
Depicted in the movie and this extract are the ordinary young women of the fictionalized Young Guard resistance movement. The Young Guards was based on many real resistance or partisan movements on the Nazi-occupied territories of the USSR. “The Young Guards” was a breakthrough movie of sorts, as unlike the previous Soviet movies which were mostly musical-format-based propaganda or theater-play inspired ones — where actors would rigidly monologue and proclaim love to the Motherland — this was a departure towards realism. The movie was personally watched and censored by Joseph Stalin who proclaimed that – “The Soviet resistance cell can never be shown as directionless or failing.” (The original version showed a failed and directionless resistance cell at the outset, whose mere two members are arrested and executed, thus creating the setting for the resistance work).
Notably, although it focused on Ukranian resistance fighters “The Young Guard” portrayed a multiethnic Soviet state resisting a monoethnic German invader.
Highlights:
0:16 The group are caught and imprisoned in the Nazi German temporary holding cell, later one young woman is carried in, presumably from an interrogation. They talk and attempt to cheer each other up
2:16 “I will say, no one will ever crush our people, is there such a people on this earth with such goodness of their souls. Maybe we will all die, but I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid of dying, I just want to get even with all those… “
3:17 The group singing
3:57 A German officer enters the cell and attempts to stop singing by ordering them. A Cossack is seen as well, accompanying them, because Cossacks were seen as ambivalent to the Soviet Government, and effectively a number of them rebelled against it.
4:00 One of the women defies the German officer by dancing a kazachok style dance, and intimidates him into stepping back, upon which he punches her in the face
4:16 She pretends to have a grenade, so that the Germans cower to the ground in fear, then she’s dragged out by them and supposedly executed offscreen. The singing continues. The excerpt ends with a shot of their mothers standing in silence in front of their daughters’ prison.
The Young Guard is a two-part 1948 Soviet film directed by Sergei Gerasimov and based on the novel of the same title by Alexander Fadeyev. In 1949 a Stalin Prize for this film was awarded to Gerasimov, cinematographer Vladimir Rapoport, and the group of leading actors. The film was also the highest grossing Soviet film of 1948, with approximately 48,600,000 tickets sold.
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