Antonin Pankryshev

Taken from a Lermontov play, Sergei Gerasimov's Maskarad (1941) begins when beautiful Nina (Makarova) loses a bracelet during a masked ball. Another woman finds it and without revealing whose bracelet it belongs to, she gives it to an ardent Calvary officer admirer at the ball. This leads to deeper and deeper incisions upon the urbane social body of Tsarist Russia. A drama of pride, marital distrust, gambling, infidelity and humiliation twirls around the decaying corpse of a perverted social class.

Begstvuyushchiy ostrov

On liberation from prison of a group arrested after the defeat of the 1905 Russian revolution and workers sentenced to death.

During the Russian Civil War, pilot Sergey Sedov engages in battle with the Black Cat enemy fighter, controlled by the famous pilot Baru. In the battle, Sedov wounded Baru, but Sedov's plane fell apart in the air. Sedov was only miraculously saved. A few years later, Sedov and Baru meet in international competitions in Tehran. Baru are to defend the honor of a French company, Sedov and his student Ivanov - the honor of their country. In the end, the defeated Baru can only express hope of a rematch during a new meeting with Sedov in a future war. The film has not survived.

The film recreates the events of 1905. In the center of the picture is the struggle of the proletariat, led by the Bolshevik party, against tsarism. The demonstration of labor unrest is replaced by episodes of the Russo-Japanese war, Black-Hundred demonstrations, accompanied by a pogrom of Jews, and beating of the intelligentsia. The film paints the attitude of the Mensheviks towards armed insurrection, reproduces the picture of barricade battles, the arrest of the Council of Workers' Deputies and the brutal reprisals of the tsarist autocracy with revolutionaries.

The movie takes place in one of the Russian provincial cities during the Civil War. A local priest, together with the ex-estate manager buries count's treasures and disguises it as his nephew's funeral. And when his nephew Nikeshka Vonmiglasov, a former Wrangelian, suddenly appears, he understands that he can profit on his magical "resurrection".