ABSTRACT
The wounds inflicted by the war made artists again and again revert to the events of the recent past. However, the time-lapse was probably too short; and so hypnotic was the worship of Stalin, and so loud the praise of his role in the victory, that none of the war films of those days could escape being biased and pseudohistorical in representing the events of the Great Patriotic War. Neither should one ignore the pressure from party critics which mercilessly banned anything that interfered with the loud toasts in honour of 'the great leader of nations'. But especially depressing was the fact that, in the representation of gigantic battles, attacks, and operations which filled the motion pictures of the forties and early fifties, the authentic man was lost,. the soldier, whose courage, heroism, fanatical persistence, and patriotism had actually won the war. Instead, there were caricatures, divided up into 'ours' and 'not ours', moving on the screen.
