Valeri Tsvetkov

One day in a life of a general during the fights of 1941...

At the beginning of the First World War, Alexander Dragovich went to the front as a teenager. The October Revolution caught the hero in captivity in Russia. Like many of his countrymen, Alexander defected to the revolution. After becoming a chekist, Dragovich was sent to Turkestan. The film tells about the heroic struggle of a special purpose unit with gangs of Basmachi, spies of various stripes and saboteurs, about the adventures of the anarchist Kolya and the tragic love of Mushtari and Dragovich.

The WWII pivotal battle of Stalingrad is shown through the eyes of the soldiers and officers on both sides of the war.

Police Major Golidze alone confronts a gang of gangsters, led by the notorious criminal Bagirov.

Young lieutenant arrives to tank regiment stationed in the Central Asia. He uses unusual for Soviet Army methods to train his soldiers. It predictably leads to tensions with superiors and subordinates. However later it pays back during live exercises.

Considering that Musakov’s Abdulladzhan (1991) was dedicated to Steven Spielberg, we might suggest that these four boys embody nothing more complicated than a conflict of youthful innocence with some ominous threat—the basic workings of E.T. (1982) or War of the Worlds (2005), say. That threat, however, is best understood not through vague nationalism or warmed-over socialism, but through the other reference-point of Abdulladzhan—Tarkovskii’s Stalker (1980). Musakov leaves his boys in a simplified radiance so bright and so overexposed that it no longer looks like the skies of sunny Tashkent, but a disturbing, borderless luminosity to match the flat tonal range of Stalker’s “Zone.” Our Uzbek boys are nowhere in particular; this is a broader domain than anything international.

Yakov Koreshnikov, a border guard with extensive experience, is leading an operation to detain a group of foreign agents. Back in the 20s, he participated in the liquidation of the Basmachi gang. Then he first met the traitor Abzal. During the Great Patriotic War, Koreshnikov again had to face him. The saboteurs sent to the Turkestan highway area were then destroyed, but Abzal managed to escape. And here is their last meeting...

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The history of Bender's hunt for the underground millionaire Koreiko develops in the 1920s. Bright characters, adventurous adventures and a light veil of a bygone era in a new version of the classic work of Soviet literature.