Kiselyov’s list – Newspaper Kommersant No. 29 (7474) of 02/16/2023

The military-historical drama “The Righteous Man” by Sergei Ursulyak, based on the true story of the Soviet partisan commander Nikolai Kiselev, who led 218 Jews out of Nazi-occupied territory in 1942, is being released. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

In Soviet historiography, the topic of the extermination of Jews during the Great Patriotic War has always been an inconvenient subject. Most often, it was simply hushed up, and the victims with characteristic names and surnames were simply ranked among the rest of the affected Soviet citizens (as, for example, at the opening of the first memorial in Babi Yar), without being singled out separately. Yes, and in the military cinema of the Soviet era, from large-scale official to quiet chamber dramas, the Holocaust, if mentioned, was casually, in one line, like, say, the parents of the “Jewish nation” of one of the heroines “The Dawns Here Are Quiet…” (1972).

Recently, Russian directors have finally begun to talk about this page of history, which is covered in Hollywood and European cinema almost every year: we can recall, for example, Alexei Fedorchenko’s “Anna’s War” (2018) or Vadim Perelman’s “Farsi Lessons” (2020) . And so the main producers of patriotic content turned to the topic of the Holocaust in the Soviet territories: the Rossiya 1 TV channel, the Central Partnership film company and the TriTe studio of Nikita Mikhalkov and Leonid Vereshchagin. Considering that the last two released The Champion of the World with a distinctly anti-Semitic flavor just over a year ago, this even looks a bit like a diplomatic gesture.

Of course, the focus of the picture is not only the suffering of the Jewish people, but mainly the achievements of the Soviet people, the embodiment of which is Nikolai Kiselev (Alexander Yatsenko), who worked as an accountant before the war and became a hero almost by force. According to good tradition, the authors of the film skip some delicate moments: for example, the fact that after the end of his mission, Kiselev was immediately arrested by military counterintelligence as a deserter and he was saved only by an appeal to the secretary of the Central Committee of the CP (b) of Belarus Ponomarenko those whom he had previously saved. Until the end of his life, Kiselev practically did not talk about his feat, and, I think, not only out of natural modesty. Nevertheless, “Kiselev’s list” was found in the archives, and in 2005 in Israel he was awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations, which is awarded to non-Jews who saved Jews from genocide.

The history of his obtaining this title (in a free interpretation) serves as a frame for the plot of the film. In 2005, in Israel, the elderly Moshe Tal (Dovale Glickman), one of 218 rescued, flatly refuses to talk to Yad Vashem staff who are considering Kiselev’s candidacy. However, their appeal makes him remember 1942, when he was a very young boy with the face of “Russian Chalamet” Mark Eidelstein. His parents (Konstantin Khabensky and Chulpan Khamatova) are faced with a terrible choice: which of the children to save by paying the policemen for the opportunity to leave the Minsk ghetto, and who to doom to death with them. The opportunity to survive falls to Moshe and his younger sister Miriam (Katie Solvay).

After going through several circles of hell and having met both with attempts to help (alas, unsuccessfully) and with betrayal, the brother and sister, who stopped talking from shock, are nailed to the detachment of Nikolai Kiselev. Having defeated the temporary camp of the Nazis, he discovers Jews in the camp, mostly women, children and the elderly, who were used as labor on the railway. The first impulse of the partisans is to let them go on all four sides, or at least to push the responsibility for them onto another detachment, because it is impossible to fight successfully with such a noisy burden on your hands. Nevertheless, having received an order to take the Jews behind the front line, Kiselev takes on this task with all his usual meticulousness and even learns Yiddish for better communication with his charges.

We must pay tribute to Sergei Ursulyak and screenwriter Gennady Ostrovsky: the film has more nuances and subtle details than in most domestic military films of recent years. The partisans here are not at all bright warriors without fear and reproach, they are not alien to everyday anti-Semitism (Kiselyov’s henchman named Queen (Eugene Tkachuk) gets rid of him before our eyes, falling in love with a Jewish girl). And the Jews do not trust the Russians – and they have every reason to do so, because along with the Soviet government, repressions also came to Polish and Belarusian cities and towns. The Nazis, however, remained caricatured: the chief SS man Schmücker (Dietmar Koenig), painted with large strokes, seems to continue the tradition of the image of the enemy, set back in The Feat of the Scout (1947). A few more false notes sound in the film: for example, the one-legged cantor performed by Sergei Makovetsky seemed to have stepped into the Belarusian forest straight from a joke, and several strong dramatic and lyrical scenes, alas, were ruined by an inappropriately pathetic soundtrack (composer Vasily Tonkovidov).

However, in general, the authors manage to strike a balance between heroism and emotionality and make most of their characters alive. First of all, Kiselev himself, not the most famous (despite the honorary titles and even a documentary released in 2008) hero who undertook to save lives not out of great philanthropy and not for the promised, but never received reward. And because that’s the only way it’s right.