Siberiade

The epic story of a Siberian village, from before the Soviet revolution to the 1960s.

I’ve long been interested in Russian film, including films from the Soviet era. But I’ve only recently begun to explore the work of one of the giants of Russian cinema, who is still with us at the age of 87—Andrey Konchalovsky. He started as a screenwriter in the ‘60s, then moved to directing. And he reached the peak of this phase of his career in 1979, with Siberiade, an epic 4-hour achievement released in two parts, originally for Soviet television.

Siberiade tells the story of two families, through three generations, in a Siberian village, from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s. The title evokes Homer, and of course we also think of Tolstoy. But they wrote about princes—Siberiade is an epic of the common people: rough and ungainly, romantic and sentimental, yet refusing to celebrate history, grieving instead.

One of the families in the story is well off, in a small town way, and the other family works for them. The patriarch of the poor family becomes obsessed with chopping through the thick forest to make a path to a legendary swamp nicknamed “The Devil’s Mane,” dreaded by the superstitious villagers.

This man’s young son Nikolai encounters by chance an escaped revolutionary, who is soon recaptured, but not before influencing the attitude and thinking of this boy forever. When he grows older, he falls for a beautiful member of the prosperous other family, stealing her away and causing permanent hostility between him and that clan. Then the revolution arrives, and the power balance changes.

The story coalesces in Part 2, when Nikolai’s son Alexei (played by Konchalovksy’s older brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, a director in his own right) returns to the village in the 1960s, having survived the horrors of World War II and its aftermath, to drill for oil and thus obliterate his home in the name of progress. It is here that the cumulative emotional effect of the multigenerational saga meets bitter historical irony. The socialism of the Soviet Union is not portrayed here as a great blessing, but as a destructive impersonal force that threatens connection to the past. The censors eventually had trouble with this when the film was set to be released in theaters.

The point of view in this later part of the film is shared by the man who was the rival lover with Alexei’s father for the hand of the young beauty back in the beginning of the film. Filipp, played by Igor Okhlupin, has become an important Party official in Moscow. He is sent to his Siberian homeland to find out how the search for oil is going, and if it doesn’t look promising, to direct the entire area, including the village, to be flooded as part of a plan for a massive hydroelectric power station. Like Alexei, he has mixed feelings about all this.

The women in the story are its heart, and they suffer the most. The men are violent and contentious, and they frequently misbehave. Historically, the film presents a pessimistic critique of the Soviet experiment, right in full view, but too subtle for the censors to understand. Yet the substance of this film is the texture of people’s lives, mysterious and ungovernable, always greater than the theories meant to confine them. Siberiade is clamorous and messy. It’s also a real epic.