Genre: Drama
Duration: 100mins
Director: Svetlana Boskova
Cast: Sergei Pahomov, Vladimir Epifantsev, Viktor Sergachev, Lavrenty Svetlichniy

Controversial director and a leading oppositional voice, Svetlana Baskova explores the conflict between ruthless capitalists and the working class – New Russians and Soviet workers… The workers in a steel factory organise an independent trade union to protest against intolerable working conditions: rotten food, wage cuts and sackings. The factory owners, who have the official trade union on their payroll, seek to combat the independent trade union’s activities with every dirty trick in the book. The outcome is an inevitable bloodbath. This is a sympathetic treatment of the difficult conditions of Russian unionists after the collapse of the Soviet “worker’s paradise”. Drawing on Eisenstein’s Strike (1924) in a highly ideological portrayal of the opposing sides, this is a provocative analysis of the post-crisis economy that revitalises Marx and asks whether Marxism be repeated in Russia and how will it alter the earlier mistakes?

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