Russian tale from World War 2?

[Elmer_J.Fudd]

No mention of the morgue in this article but this bit is touching:

Hermitage guides gave soldiers from the front tours of empty picture frames, describing in elaborate detail the paint-ings they had once held. Most audacious of all was a literary conference held at the height of the blockade, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the great Uzbek poet Alisher Navoi. Hundreds of starving people gathered, in the depths of winter, to listen to a poetry recital as shells shook the building to its foundations. The museum had been fortunate in having a store of lumber with which to make its evacuation crates. Afterwards, the surplus made coffins for its dead.

[Sailboat]

I see very little in the way of feature films on the battle of Kursk.

[clairobscur]

@Elmer_J.Fudd

Ordeal of the Hermitage: The Siege of Leningrad 1941-1944

I haven’t read it and the review doesn’t appear overly enthusiastic, but if there are more anecdotes like the one about boiling up joiner’s glue for food, it might be worthwhile.

Indeed, the siege of Leningrad is famous, but I’m unaware of any western movie about it.

[TriPolar]

A) It’s World War II, or the Big One.

2. There must be a least a million stories, but those with first hand experience are dying off rapidly.

III) If you want to make a movie, just make up the story. Movies aren’t made, and don’t sell because of historical accuracy.

[ElvisL1ves]

Bruce Myles’ Night Witches: The Amazing Story Of Russia’s Women Pilots in World War II desperately needs to be as well filmed as it was well written, and it’s about a topic few people even knew existed. Myles weaves together the sharp reminiscences of pilots in women’s squadrons of day fighters, day bombers, and night bombers, most of whom were just teenaged girls. The best of these young women were as good as the best of the men.

Some scenes I remember from the book that would film very well:

• Marina Raskova, who formed the regiments and recruited the women, the navigator on a flight to set the women’s distance record, Moscow to Irkutsk. When they realized their fuel was short, and they threw everything else overboard, she marked the direction on a map, handed to the pilot, put on a chute, and jumped into the forest. It took two weeks to find her but she was fine.
• The German ace being interrogated after being shot down at Stalingrad, asking to meet the pilot who finally got him. Lilya Litvyak (the best of the best) came in, told him in detail about how it happened, and he virtually collapsed from shock when he realized this giggling girl wasn’t just a clerk.
• The scenes of the pilots relaxing after a hard day of shooting down Germans by embroidering little flowers on their uniforms.
• The day bomber squadron’s celebration over the honor of being named a Guards regiment, the Red Army’s highest group honor.
• One regiment in a recently-liberated area adopting a good-looking peasant girl who German troops had gang-raped into literal catatonia, finally coaxing her back into the world
• The night-bomber regiment, spending all their nights bombing German troop encampments in their little biplanes, shutting off the engines so that the first sound the targets would hear would be the bombs going off.
• The featured night-bomber pilot on a flight away from the front, sharing a bottle of champagne with her boyfriend in the rear cockpit. And the scene where they write their names on the Reichstag, like most Soviet troops who reached Berlin did.

Sorry for going on a bit, but the book and the story did make that strong an impression on me.

[Dingbang]

Thanks for the tips, everyone. ElvisL1ives, that is a terrific summation of the dramatic points in the Russian ace story. I’ll have to get the book.

[Steken]

Well, the Russians have made plenty of excellent World War II movies already, all from a “Russian standpoint.”

Plenty of them are masterpieces, too – whether it be tear-jerking melodramas about life at home (Kalatazov’s “The Cranes Are Flying”), hellish visions of the madness that was the Eastern Front (Klimov’s “Come And See,” mentioned already – the most brutal war film you will EVER see, believe me), poetic depictions of children’s innocence in the midst of war (Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood”), yakki-ti-yakki-ti-yak, I could go on and on.

More to the point, however, let me propose the Nikolai Vavilov story, taking place during the Siege of Leningrad. Quoting from the www2talk.com forum:

“The Vavilov Institute’s seed collecting activity began in 1894, when its scientists brought back the oldest, most resistant varieties from all over the world. One major trauma in the history of St Petersburg/Leningrad was the German siege from September 1941 to January 1944, when the city remained without food for 900 days. It is invariably the first thing to cross the lips of its citizens, whatever they do and whoever they are. Thousands of people died of hunger and the only place in the city where there was something to eat was the Vavilov Institute. But the researchers religiously guarded the cultivated plant collection and the seeds: no one ate them. When rats tried, they ended up as food for the researchers. The determination not to harm the institute’s treasures was such that nine people died of hunger there. At home and elsewhere, the families of researchers also died. In those months researchers found the strength to withstand the siege without profaning the collection. In 1940, Vavilov, who was then the director of the institute, was arrested by the KGB and died in a concentration camp in 1943”.

“Tending the earth’s edible future reached its most poignant moment–certainly its most courageous–during the Nazis’ World War II siege of Leningrad. The site of the world’s largest seed bank–at which Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov and his army of ethno-botanists had stockpiled an astonishing 200,000 species–Leningrad endured 900 days of attack during which over half a million people starved to death. Surrounded by harvested seed crops, the collectors martyred themselves rather than consume the botanical future. And when liberators finally entered the besieged facility, they found the emaciated bodies of the botanists lying next to full, untouched sacks of potatoes, corn and wheat–a priceless genetic legacy for which they paid with their lives.” Christina Waters, Sep. 5-11, 1996, “Seeding the Future” in Metro Santa Cruz.

Since several Dopers have already mentioned stories taking place during the Siege of Leningrad, why not try to combine several of those stories into a single film, “Short Cuts”-style?

[Dingbang]

Love the seed preservation story, Steken. I think combining that somehow with the art curators at the Hermitage, or telling them in parallel, could really make a great story. Thanks.

[aruvqan]

Arkhangelsk.

It has convoys, combat, ice cold seas … I have heard Arcangel called the forgotten part of the war. We [US] were supplying SovUnion with valuable supplies and personnel. Everybody normally focuses on either the convoys to Great Britain, or the war in the Pacific. Everybody forgets the northern campaign.

If you want to get friskier, you can add White Death to the mix somewhere. I know, he is Finnish, but he killed a lot of Soviet soldiers. Dude took a round to the face and kept on ticking, maybe they should have called him Timex :eek:

[spikebrennan]

/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlov’s_House
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_cruiser_Krasnyi_Kavkaz#World_War_II

and, from an anti-Russian standpoint:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simo_H%C3%A4yh%C3%A4

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@aruvqan

Arkhangelsk.

It has convoys, combat, ice cold seas … I have heard Arcangel called the forgotten part of the war. We [US] were supplying SovUnion with valuable supplies and personnel. Everybody normally focuses on either the convoys to Great Britain, or the war in the Pacific. Everybody forgets the northern campaign…

ISTR that convoy duty on a run to Archangel is featured in Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea, a great WWII-at-sea novel set aboard HMS Compass Rose, a corvette.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Steken

…Since several Dopers have already mentioned stories taking place during the Siege of Leningrad, why not try to combine several of those stories into a single film, “Short Cuts”-style?

To appeal to an American audience, perhaps it would be better to change the city name to, say “Reagangrad”.

[Cheshire_Human]

@Boyo_Jim

To appeal to an American audience, perhaps it would be better to change the city name to, say “Reagangrad”.

Checked forum, can’t say what I thought about that comment. Try again. Thanks for playing. Maybe next time, try in our “Pit” forum, which was made for that sort of dumbassery…

[Punoqllads]

If I might lobby for a shift from a Russian viewpoint to a Polish viewpoint, I think that Wojtek needs his own movie.

[madmonk28]

Another vote for Pavlov’s House, this one little building saw some of the fiercest fighting in WWII, and the residents continued to live in the basement during the battle.

[Steken]

Arkhangelsk.

It has convoys, combat, ice cold seas … I have heard Arcangel called the forgotten part of the war. We [US] were supplying SovUnion with valuable supplies and personnel. Everybody normally focuses on either the convoys to Great Britain, or the war in the Pacific. Everybody forgets the northern campaign.

ISTR that convoy duty on a run to Archangel is featured in Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea, a great WWII-at-sea novel set aboard HMS Compass Rose, a corvette.

As a side note, Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin DID make a movie about Arkhangelsk, called “Archangel.” BUT it takes place during World War I, not World War II, so, yeah, just a side note.

Yet another little-noted WWII Russian campaign, by the way, would be the Manchurian one, i.e. “Operation August Storm.” Very successful. Between that and the American nukes, no wonder the Japanese surrendered lickety-split.

[DWMarch]

My earlier thread:

Why hasn’t Pavlov’s House been made into a kickass movie?

[Raguleader]

Didn’t the Russians pack up and move a bunch of their factories over the mountains to keep them from being captured or destroyed by the Germans? That could be interesting.

[Sailboat]

@aruvqan

Arkhangelsk.

It has convoys, combat, ice cold seas … I have heard Arcangel called the forgotten part of the war. We [US] were supplying SovUnion with valuable supplies and personnel. Everybody normally focuses on either the convoys to Great Britain, or the war in the Pacific. Everybody forgets the northern campaign.

If you accept Murmansk as being part of the northern campaign, Al Stewart remembered: Murmansk Run/Ellis Island:

[QUOTE=excerpted from the above link]
Your father sailed on the Murmansk run
To guide the flocks of the ships home one by one
Grey beneath the Arctic sun
Or the glow of Northern Lights

I see you have his photograph
His eyes are watching for dangers fore or aft
Trading days beneath the sun
For the cold and wintry nights of the Murmansk run

He never did come home to you
It’s long forgotten, a childhood dream or two
But something of the cold got through
And it lingers in your eyes
[/QUOTE]

[SirRay]

@Raguleader

Didn’t the Russians pack up and move a bunch of their factories over the mountains to keep them from being captured or destroyed by the Germans? That could be interesting.

That’s pretty much the heart of the National Geographic story I mentioned in post #6 from last week - “Magnetic City, (Magnitogorsk) Core of Valiant Russia’s Industrial Might” (The building and operation of one of these massive industrial facilities and support city out on the Ural - admittedly it was started as part of a Stalin 5 year plan in the mid-1930s, but was finished and played a major role in the WWII effort)
Gathering from the other posts in this thread, I’m guessing that’s not what the OP was looking for as a dramatic Russian story. Oh well…