A young, freshly minted lawyer in the USSR in 1937 discovers that dissidents are being tortured by a corrupt NKVD, and seeks to use the ostensible rule of law to right an injustice. Knowing he can’t trust the local police, he journeys off to Moscow to file a direct report with the senior branch office.
If Only Stalin Knew: The Movie
Law & Order: USSR
We don’t get enough Russian cinema, alas, but what we do get we generally like because, while it looks Western, it really is just very, very odd stuff.
The broody opening sequence of this film has a prisoner/dissident being locked in a room, only to be freed when he has finally burnt all the mail they’ve thrown at them—every single one a complaint about being unduly tortured. One catches the prisoner’s eye, being written on I-don’t-know-what, but inked with the prisoner’s own blood.
This letter gets saved and somehow gets to the prosecutor (one of two in this movie) and starts the wheels in motion.
Dysfunction, parnaoia, terror—all the qualities one comes to expect in a Russian film (only marginally less so for recent films)—abound as Kornev, what the Russians might call a debil (moron) decides that he’s going to do the job he thinks he was assigned using the laws that he thinks he’s supposed to follow as a shield.
You can see where this is going, right? I could see it from Kornev’s first appearance, and the film’s denouement is exactly what you’d expect when the young lawyer throws his weight around and forces the prison warden to let him see the criminal in question—a criminal which the mere act of listening to is essentiall a death sentence.
Fun stuff.
Despite a complete lack of surprise and a steady, deliberaetly slowed pace, this film is enjoyable and really manages to communicate the bureaucracy, the weirdness of the totalitarian state, and the peril of having even the slightest shred of integrity during a purge.
Well-acted, well-shot, well-paced, all presenting a picture of something that looks like civilization—but isn’t.
“We’re going to a farm? Is it out this window?”
Of course, sitting there watching this in the USA in 2026, I’m reminded of how many people think this whole arrangement was good idea.
That’ll take some of the fun out of it for ya.