Directed by Sergei Livnev
Script by Sergei Livnev & Vladimir Valutsky
93 minutes 1994
Aleksei Serebryakov as Evdokim Kuznetsov
Country of finance: Russia
Nationality of director: Russian
Location of story: USSR
Synopsis
As part of a experiment to meet the demand by Stalin that the Soviet Union have more soldiers, Evdokiia Kuznetsova is taken from the gulag and is transformed into a man, Evdokim. He then becomes a Stakhanovite building the Moscow underground in the 1930s, marries a female fellow worker, and adopts a child, Dolores, who had been orphaned in the Spanish Civil War.
They became the models for Vera Mukhina's famous sculpture that adorned the 1937 Paris World's Fair and became the emblem of Mosfilm. The athletic male representing the Hammer (Heavy Industry). After posing for the statue, the Kuznetsovs became celebrities, living in luxury, Kuznetsov a member of the Supreme Soviet.However Kuznetsov became angry and attacked Stalin. He was shot in the scuffle. Paralysed and unable to speak, Evdokim was turned into a hero once more: he had supposedly saved Stalin's life and was exhibited as a museum piece. His wife commanded his thoughts, and even wrote his book "Hammer and Sickle."
Interpretation
- Birgit Beumers. “Myth-making and myth-taking: Lost ideals and the war in contemporary Russian cinema”. Canadian Slavonic Papers. Mar-Jun 2000. Online at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3763/is_200003/ai_n8890675/
- Aleksandr Prokhorov. “ “I Need Some Life-Assertive Character’ or How to Die in the Most inspiring Pose: Bodied in the Stalinist Museum of Hammer and Sickle”. Studies in Slavonic Cultures. 1, Jan 2000. http://www.pitt.edu/~slavic/sisc/SISC1/prokhorov.pdf
