Soviet Film ‘Cold Summer of ‘53’ Focuses on Legacy of Stalin Era

They are political prisoners, branded “enemies of the people” under Stalin. They have been banished to a ramshackle fishing village in the Soviet north, where they live alongside but apart from the villagers.

Their names are Luzga and Kopalych, and they are the heroes of a new Soviet film that illustrates the country’s confusion after the death of Joseph V. Stalin in March, 1953, and its continuing attempt to come to grips with his legacy.

In “The Cold Summer of ‘53,” produced by Alexander Proshkin, the two exiles are the only village dwellers who do not submit when their settlement near the Finnish border is seized by six common criminals who were freed in a prison amnesty that followed Stalin’s death.

The others, including a mustachioed old captain whose cabin is decorated with a portrait of Stalin, allow themselves to be put under lock and key, or even cross the line between obeying their armed captors and seeking to help them.

The film, shown to Moscow-based journalists recently at the Foreign Ministry Press Center, seems an apt summary of the terrible paradoxes of the Stalin era.

“Cold Summer” is the latest Soviet artistic work dealing with the Stalinist legacy to emerge under Communist Party chief Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s loosened restrictions on depicting the often troubled Soviet past.

Proshkin was 13 when Stalin died, and said he hopes his film will deliver a political message about the Stalin era to the country’s youth.