Bread is the head! "We came a little light after each other, we were handed vouchers Komsomol Committee."
Surprisingly, for a whole decade of active development of virgin land, only two serious films were shot about it: First Echelon (1955) and It Started Like This (1956). There were other paintings, but the virgins passed in them only in the background. So why two? The answer is not so obvious, but it is clear. In February 1954, the first trains took the creators of future collective farms to a place where there was nothing - a bare field. It is about this picture "First Echelon" - to show the difficulties that the whole people had to face, and in the end - the first furrow, and happy smiles on their faces. A slightly different character in the tape “It started like this...” There is no longer the same enthusiasm, but there is an atmosphere of real difficulties. No more pictures were shot, because after 1956, the romantic aura of mastering the “unplowed” greatly faded under the yoke of reality.
"Mom, do not get bored, do not shed tears, come quickly to celebrate the housewarming."
To the 25th anniversary of the labor feat of the people, it was decided to make 4 films united by one theme. The work of Alexei Sakharov without any exaggeration can be considered an epic of mastering virgin soil. This is a large-scale film, which reflected all the bright and sad moments of those events. The main advantage of quadrology is that, writing the life of the three main characters - the director of the state farm Stepan Sechkin (Sergey Shakurov), party worker Vladimir Eroshin (Valery Ryzhakov) and agronomist scientist Sergei Ignatiev (Ernst Romanov), the director did not forget for a minute about thousands of ordinary people who were called by virgin expanses. The film novel consists of four films, the names of which reflect the main stages of virgin development.
We will be greeted by winds, cold and heat, difficult roads and overnight campfires.
Russia has always been an agrarian country, and in the best economic periods fed bread to the whole of Europe. But the war crippled the economy. Even after 9 years, there is a shortage of bread in the country. Where can I get it? “Bread and land” – the first euphoria of the rallies has long been dispelled, the first difficulties of mastering have been overcome, but a new question arises: where to put such a “breakthrough” of the harvest? There are not enough elevators, cars, people. And the hard-grown crop has to be put to feed livestock and to produce alcohol. Bread and people: Nature never forgives mistakes. She can feed, drink, clothe, and shoe, but she takes violent revenge on those who approach her from a Neanderthal perspective. And now, “black storms” are already sweeping through recent virgin lands, forcing the “conquerors” to come to their senses and look for new ways to cultivate the land. “Bread of the Fatherland” is the epilogue of the epic. It's been years. The results of what has been done are summed up, but no one is going to stop there, because with the expansion of the circle of human knowledge, the area of the unknown also increases.
Let the news run, the steppes will bloom! The party ordered - Komsomol replied: "There is!"
The film was made in 1979. Lenoid Brezhnev has been General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee for 13 years. In 1954, at the suggestion of Khrushchev, he was transferred to Kazakhstan, where he first worked as the second, and since 1955 - the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the republic. In the script there was an episode with the participation of Brezhnev, but in the screen version it is absent. But the film was released almost simultaneously with Brezhnev’s book “Celina”, so many perceived as an illustration for this book. Time puts everything in its place. Today, it is enough to look into the directories to see all the mistakes of the company called “Celina”. But it's today. And then things looked different. Then the country needed bread, and the virgins gave this bread. For what they bow down to the earth ...
"We, friends, go to distant lands, we will become new settlers and you and I!"