Aleksandr Chistyakov

In a series of stories about a small town and it's villagers at the outbreak of WWI. Some go to the war front while others fight for the Communist cause.

Loosely based on Maxim Gorky's novel, and, while the mother symbolizes the ideology of the revolution and the prospects of an untried utopian state, she also possesses the traditional patriarchal ideologies of the crumbled regime, which creates a unique commentary on the state of Soviet society, filled with chaos and revolutionary dreams. (SenseOfCinema.com)

In 1918 a simple Mongol herdsman escapes to the hills after brawling with a western capitalist fur trader who cheats him. In 1920 he helps the partisans fight for the Soviets against the occupying army.(imdb)

A peasant comes to St. Petersburg to find work. He unwittingly helps in the arrest of an old village friend who is now a labor leader. The unemployed peasant is also arrested and sent to fight in World War I. After three years, he returns ready for revolution. (imdb)

A wise and forgiving communist leader decides to send a young worker, Karl Renn (Boris Livanov), as an international delegate to the Soviet Union after the worker had deserted a picket-line and had expressed doubts about the methods of class struggle in in his own country. (imdb)

Maxim is now a revolutionary working to bring about the Russian revolution.

A Socialist Realist distortion of Dr. Paul Kammerer's experiments in the inheritance of acquired character(istic)s -- the (not entirely anti-Darwinian) conjecture that certain changes the environment produces in an individual may spontaneously appear in the next generation. As recounted in Arthur Koestler's The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), Kammerer (1880-1926) claimed that darkened footpads he had artificially induced in a toad had been passed on to its offspring. (imdb)

Naturally, the circus milieu of 2 Buldy 2 (1929) encourages stunts. A father and son, both clowns, are to perform together for the first time, but the civil war separates them, and the elder Buldy, tempted for a moment to acquiesce to the White forces, casts his lot with the revolution. At the climax Buldy Jr. escapes the Whites thanks to flashy trampoline and trapeze acrobatics; the gaping enemy soldiers forget to shoot. (imdb)