"Burned by the Sun" 
Rated R 
134 minutes 1994 by 
Nikita Mikhalkov

Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign film, 
"Burnt by the Sun" has a cover advertising 
"Wonderful! Sexy and involving" as the review from 
the New Yorker. The New York Post also gave it a 
rave review: "there's no more breathtakingly 
beautiful movie this year."

Until the end of the film, the film is one long 
reminder to the brainwashed Amerikkkans that 
normal people led normal and even sometimes 
comfortable lives in the Soviet Union under 
Stalin. In virtually the second scene in the 
movie, the peasants spontaneously prevent a 
military exercise from destroying the wheat in one 
field despite the orders from up high to start 
tanks rolling into the fields with planes flying 
overhead. It's hardly the image that one gathers 
from listening to theories of "totalitarianism." 
The peasants win when Colonel Kotov arrives 
unexpectedly from vacaction and intervenes to stop 
the exercise. People sing songs, swim in the local 
stream and drink alcohol. Young Pioneers go to 
camp in much the same way Boy Scouts do here. For 
an Amerikkkan people used to demonizing everything 
in the cold and dark Soviet Union of Stalin's day 
and even Brezhnev's day, the movie contains some 
pretty heady stuff.

At the end of the movie, the political police 
named NKVD arrest the father and war hero Colonel 
Sergei Kotov. His six-year old daughter gets to 
drive the NKVD car a certain distance before her 
father goes away presumably forever. As Kotov 
leaves, a balloon carrying a huge portrait of 
Stalin lifts off from a beautiful wheat field. 
Clearly the sun is Stalin/the Revolution of 1917 
and "burned by the sun" means double-crossed by 
Stalin because Kotov was Stalin's comrade-in-arms. 
The movie title could also refer to anyone 
repressed under Stalin.

The effect of the movie is to depict a placid life 
with some background strains of work and a coming 
war and then to end the movie with sudden 
interruption from the political police who 
announce in passing that Kotov is guilty of spying 
for Germany and Japan. Combined with the fact that 
the messenger is a former counter-revolutionary 
turned agent of the NKVD, the public receives the 
impression that only the most criminal people 
remain in the NKVD.

The agent who arrests Kotov is the same man who 
fingered 8 counter-revolutionary White Army 
generals who the NKVD executed. In the end of the 
movie he commits suicide, presumably after turning 
in Kotov.

It is the fact that no background for the arrest 
of Kotov appears in the movie that makes it so 
jarring. The treason charges arise suddenly and 
what appears to be a beautiful life disappears. It 
goes without saying that a Western audience will 
not question that the treason charges were false. 
The lack of political detail in the movie does not 
make it "apolitical," but it also does not make it 
convincing to anyone above substituting artistic 
impression for politics.

MIM tried to find the historical details on Kotov. 
According to the movie, the USSR rehabilitated him 
in 1956, 20 years after his execution as part of 
Khruschev's rise to power. At this time, we 
believe that this Kotov is the same one allied 
with Bukharin in 1936, and of course, MIM has 
discussed the Bukharin case elsewhere. The 
relevant struggle against Bukharin had Stalin 
putting forward his controversial thesis that 
class struggle increases under socialism, because 
of the increased resistance of the imperialists 
and overthrown exploiters. MIM would only add that 
there is in fact a bourgeoisie that arises in the 
party as well and that that class enemy is the 
decisive one in the case of a country like the 
USSR where the imperialists suffered defeat in 
repeated invasions. People in communist systems 
should not assume leadership roles and expect a 
cushy bourgeois life.