Plot synopsis

Sokurov made this special issue of Leningrad newsreel efficiently, just upon receipt of material from Krasnodar — a recording of a protest manifestation of mothers whose children had been summoned to serve in Russian military forces and sent to the zones of Transcaucasian conflicts. The entire film was the filmmaker's personal cinema appeal to the President Gorbachev and the authorities. The sense of this appeal certainly was not limited to this concrete aspect of a social conflict.
One of the most important for Sokurov historical motives is the following: it is impossible to meddle with other nations' business without facing the consequences, to be a buffer in the struggle between the nations. This time not aesthetical context but direct civil speech was needed. Krasnodar shots arranged together with the image of Sokurov himself against the snowy landscape of St.Petersburg — that was the filmmaker's civil self–portrait against a background of the troubled motherland, whose hardest times would be in the future, and the artist's duty was to warn about that.
Alexandra Tuchinskaya English translation by Anna Shoulgat, © 2002 http://sokurov.spb.ru