If a person has lost faith in the goals of society ... and he sees around that many successful people have other goals - some selfish-personal ones, and the system of responsibility gives concessions and has no sign of inevitability, then he begins to change social goals for personal ones. Personal-initiative control by members of society has signs of conflict and high costs: psychological, physical and material. Methods of influencing the moral and ethical guiding societies - propaganda - has lost touch with life, and works in the absence of persons doing their business at the expense of society: as soon as they appear and the inevitability of punishment disappears - a person believes his eyes, and not what the responsible persons broadcast.
So, dryly you can convey the socio-political background of the plot. Because it's very accurate, just like a book. It is bitter to look at all these signs of society’s retreat from general ideals to rational and self-serving ideals. Bitter and more because the accents are correctly placed and psychologically correctly deduced and displayed by the artists of the personality of their heroes. Complex personalities. Individuals living with double aspirations. The social and personal in each hero is different. In the old party worker Kalashnikov there are no personal goals, but he hesitates with the party line, not seeing life itself. In Rogachevoi - the personal is combined with the public, leading the collective farm for a long time no longer knows how to separate one from another, in the hero of Alexander Belyavsky - the responsible district official - there are no public goals - only personal - it is clear that the "successful" people of that time have already changed everything - the result will not take long to wait: 4 years and their goals will already be replaced in propaganda by the past. From this “after-knowledge” even more cuts the ear agitation inserts in the film about the inevitability of “reforging” based on “new thinking”. We're reforging, motherfucker. In the younger Sorokin, the breakdown occurs when a person realizes the unattainability of social goals and tries not to lag behind people already confidently going to new ideals.
Although it is difficult to call them new, because throughout Soviet cinema, the authors repeatedly brought people with personal and philistine goals in life that contradict the social goal. But the understanding that over time the number of such personalities will only increase in the leadership was not. Toli has already reached "his" communism, or not being able to learn sociology at all, or maybe both. It doesn't make us much better. And the movie is more like an epitaph: I couldn't ...
6 out of 10