Pervyi eshelon: Soviet young love set to Shostakovich

Aleksei Uzarov (Oleg Efremov) and Anya Zalogina (Izol’da Izvitskaya) in Pervyi eshelon

One of the older pieces of Kazakhstani cinema I have in my collection right now is Mikhail Kalotozov’s and Nikolai Pogodin’s 1956 film Pervyi eshelon (Первый эшелон, The First Echelon), which is a sweet and innocent story of young love set on the vast Kazakh steppes during the Virgin Lands Campaign. The film is noteworthy in one other particular respect: the soundtrack was done by famous Russian composer Dmitrii Dmitrievich Shostakovich, and features his Second Waltz, Op. 99.

Central to the story is the unrequited love of Anya Zalogina (Izol’da Izvitskaya), a tractor driver, for her local Komsomol secretary, Aleksei Uzarov (Oleg Efremov) – who are sent to the same sovkhoz in northern Kazakhstan as part of the aforementioned Virgin Lands Campaign. There is also a personality conflict between the zealous and enthusiastic Uzarov and his vodka-loving and markedly less-enthusiastic childhood friend, Evgenii Monetkin (Eduard Bredun), a John Henry-style competition between tractor drivers Anya and Troyan (Vyacheslav Voronin), and various natural barriers to be overcome – including a runaway prairie fire. Also explored are some of the generational issues between the Komsomol youth and their elders in the Party – particularly the director (Vsevolod Sanaev) – and the differences in outlook between the Kazakh and Russian ‘old-timers’ and the recently-arrived volunteers.

The central love story is unfortunately fairly ‘thin’, with most of the drama coming from Uzarov being a bit clueless and dense about Anya’s feelings for him (as, indeed, some of the female characters inform him to his face). As for Anya herself, she is something of a testament to Soviet attitudes toward womanhood, and I’m fairly certain the directors put some effort into making her so. Although she gets a fair amount of screen time in bright blouses and skirts with her hair done up to show off her classic features, she’s even more attractive when she’s shown in her baggy worksuit, her face smudged with engine grease – practically to the point where we start to wonder what the hell is wrong with Uzarov that he doesn’t notice her. Indeed, all of the young women in this film seem to have a certain ‘girl-power’ bent. They come out to the Virgin Lands to work alongside the boys – which, as in Anya’s case, they do with aplomb – but are sent to the kitchen (of which several of them duly complain). That doesn’t prevent the girls from duly pairing off with their preferred beaus. One particularly enthusiastic young couple manages to marry and even apply successfully for the first unit of communal housing built on the new Berezovskaya sovkhoz.

The various strands of the movie’s storyline all unfortunately share this same weakness, in that they don’t really thread together very well into a coherent whole. At the same time, each of them provides something of interest on its own. We get to see the various aspects of sovkhoz life, the rivalries between cohorts from different cities – with Aleksei having some differences in particular with the tight-knit workers from Rostov. We get to see some interesting shades in the farm director’s interactions with the ‘old timers’ like the grizzled Taras Shugailo (Sergei Romodanov) and Kazakh cadres on one hand, and the exuberant and hormonal new brigade youths on the other, but these get a bit glossed-over. The conflict between Uzarov and Monetkin – who are also from the same town and who have an almost foster-brother relationship – has some particularly intriguing psychological undertones (think Jacob and Esau, Romulus and Remus, Svyatopolk and Yaroslav). From the beginning when the two young men start a play-fight in the brigade dorm over Aleksei playing music a bit too loudly for Anya’s liking, their relationship takes an interesting turn as Aleksei is saddled with more responsibilities, and a jealous Evgenii begins to take to drink and shirk those he has. This makes it unfortunate that this rivalry too is resolved a bit too perfunctorily by the end of the film.

There are, of course, a lot of red flags and slogan banners in this film, which is perhaps appropriate enough for a Soviet production meant to propagandise the Virgin Lands Campaign. But on the whole, the propaganda seems to take a back seat to the various character sketches and subplots of the story. (Or perhaps it was simply that I was expecting the propaganda aspects to be even more ‘on the nose’, given my experience with Chinese cinema from the same period.) The scene toward the end with the prairie fire on the edge of Berezovskaya, though, is, from a technical and effects perspective, wonderfully done – with the workers digging trenches to control the burn and the tractors ploughing straight into the flames. The prairie fire almost seems like a boundary-pushing action-movie sequence, a good decade or two ahead of its time.

Speaking of which, it’s unfortunately fairly easy for us modern movie-goers to be a bit spoiled into thinking that production values were something pretty much invented in the eighties. But the cinematography here is excellent, whether the scene is locomotives barrelling down the tracks to a lively air, or horse riders traversing the snowbound steppe, or tractors turning up the black earth beneath a vast expanse of grassland. There are a number of admirable low-angle shots which aim to highlight the forward-looking heroism of the young protagonists. Kazakhstani cinema, even in its Soviet incarnations, very rarely seems able to avoid gazing with a longing romanticism out into its own naturally-stunning backyard (with Otyrardyń kúıreýi being a possible and partial exception) – and the results are usually spectacular. One wishes, though, in this particular case, that better attention had been paid to lighting effects, particularly indoors. Some scenes feature distinctly different lighting even between adjacent shots on the same set, lending some inadvertent comedy. At other times, the actors’ faces are frustratingly obscured by a poor lighting choice.

The score of Pervyi echelon is almost ridiculously exquisite, coming very close to a case of gilding the lily. Indeed, it was one of the primary draws of the film from the start, with Shostakovich getting top billing. Shostakovich favours the audience not only with lively allegro waltzes and folk songs (placed into the minds and the mouths of the young volunteers), but also with some moving dramatic arrangements throughout the film, including the haunting duet ‘The Tender Maiden’.

In the end, Pervyi echelon is a sweet, charming period piece and romance with a remarkably fine neoclassical score. It’s particularly good if you don’t mind the plot being slightly scattershot and ‘lightweight’. My biggest gripe, I guess – and it’s not a large one – is that there’s unfortunately not a lot about the film that’s ‘Kazakh’ despite having a distinctively-Kazakhstani backdrop and a handful of Kazakh faces particularly among the ‘old timers’. Indeed, Kazakh-ness is utterly subsumed ideologically within the building of a bright and shiny new collective future – which is completely in line with the Soviet ideology of the time. The Virgin Lands Campaign was not a long-term success, but it did leave us with this commendable feature.