A young official in the Soviet government (Alik) comes to a Volga river city to oversee the completion of a dam. He delicately manages the eviction of an elderly hero (Liliya) from her home on an island. Alik’s love affair with Liliya’s widowed granddaughter is at the center of the story. This is the human side of Stalin’s hydroelectric dam on the Volga. 

SYNOPSIS:

http://www.magicalrealism.us/2014/05/18/stalins-hydroelectric-dam/ The Story of Stalin’s Hydroelectric Dam on the Volga Screenplay by Lee A. Miller Perhaps no country undertook dam-building with comparable ideological gusto as the Soviet Union. The heyday of Soviet hydroelectric development began under Stalin following World War II. Stalin’s favorite intellectual, Maxim Gorky, stated that the Soviet Union was obliged to “make mad rivers sane.” Of course Soviet planners never seemed to give much consideration to the social and personal costs of development. In the early 1950′s, Alik Novoseltsev arrives in Gorodets, near the newly constructed Nizhny Novgorod Hydroelectric Station. The dam is near completion and the reservoir is about to be formed. Mild mannered Alik has been assigned by the Soviet government, to head the removal and relocation procedure after its previous supervisor was abruptly sent to a labor camp. Alik has the responsibility for supervising the clearing of land to be flooded but must first move an elderly hero from an island on the Volga River, the last piece of property yet to be cleared by the government. The previous supervisor was unable to convince the aged Liliya Rostov, matriarch of a once large family that has lived on the island for generations, to move from the land. Liliya Rostov’s husband and three sons and a son-in-law were killed at Stalingrad. She herself was wounded and performed heroic acts. She was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union personally by Stalin. There are many photos of her and Stalin in her home and it looks like a shrine to Stalin. Everyone treats her reverently and shows a great deal of respect. However, she is a recluse and only wants to live out the rest of her life in quiet obscurity. Liliya remembers huge family dinners and celebrations; but her entire clan was devastated in the war. Liliya has only one daughter and one granddaughter remaining. The Liliya’s daughter, Tamara, has not remarried. The granddaughter, Olesya Rostov, is a widow with two children. She was 11 at the end of the Battle of Stalingrad. Her husband was an alcoholic who was buried in the concrete of the dam after a drunken accident. She is young and beautiful and does not mourn her husband’s death. He had treated her badly and Olesya simply has moved on. She has two young children to care for. In Moscow, Khrushchev is debating whether to make his “secret speech” exposing Stalin’s brutality and wants to show his “new leadership” by avoiding the use of force. Alik is sent to “kindly persuade” her to move from the island; but he must rush. The clearing of the land for the coming lake is proceeding ahead of schedule because the local officials are using a great deal of youth labor. Alik crosses to the island but Liliya, Tamara and Olesya, refuse to listen to him. He tries to reason with Olesya, but Liliya, with a gun, chases Alik out to a boat and he falls into the river. The city’s Party Secretary, Grigor Khokhlachev, comes to Alik’s room soon after to invite him back to the island for a formal apology and to speak with Liliya. Khokhlachev is the only local communist party official who is sympathetic. The other officials are more concerned how their city and themselves are seen by Moscow. Alik arrives the next day to find Liliya castigating Joseph Stalin and his electrification plan to her daughters, “They have a hydroelectric dam now to provide electricity for factories that were not even started yet.” To make her point to Alik, she feigns attempting to compel him to give up his Moscow apartment marry Olesya and move to Gorodets against his will. Alik tries to reason with Liliya, passionately laying out the benefits the dam will bring, but Liliya denounces all dams and the taming of the river as going “against nature.” When he asks Olesya what’s going to happen to Liliya, she takes him to the family cemetery plot on the highest point of the island. Olesya is blunt with Alik. Olesya states that she is a widow with two small children who moved back to the island when her abusive husband died a year before. She is also expected to marry Shura Trofimov, the manager of the grocery store in town, but Alik urges her not to if she doesn’t love him. She argues that he has an ability to find and distribute increasingly rare food and consumer goods. She walks Alik back to the boat where the anxious communist party officials are waiting. Alik invites the women to come into town to look at apartments, reasoning that when the three women leave the island, Liliya will have no choice except to live in an apartment. On an impulse, Olesya invites Alik to see her grandmother’s childhood estate (now abandoned and dilapidated). Her loneliness and attraction to Alik combine to make her beg him to spend the night with her there. The next morning, saying goodbye, it is apparent to both that they are falling in love. Back in town Alik apprises party secretary Khokhlachev, who is compassionate. He supports Alik but is warning if Liliya isn’t moved quickly then everyone is in jeopardy. Khokhlachev warns that Moscow can be burital, “Stalin wasn’t the only murderer.” Khokhlachev warns that to save their lives they might have to by force physically move her in the night, which Alik refuses to do despite insinuations that “less responsible” opponents will use harsher tactics. Party Secretary Khokhlachev and Alik plot to slow the work on the clearing of the land. The Komsomol youth are assigned to a different project. The adult workers are given vodka, hoping to slow the work and prevent the reservoir filling before Liliya can be moved. There is a local power struggle, the party secretary (Khokhlachev) vs. the other partkom members (lead by Trofimov). When the pro-dam partkom leaders appear, angry about the work stoppage and with a huge group of youth workers, Alik and Khokhlachev try to reason with them about Liliya. They don’t take it well, they don’t understand Liliya’s role as a hero, they want the work completed and the old woman moved out. They threaten to report the work stoppage to Moscow or more actual violence against Alik. To complicate things it begins to rain, which speeds up the film to crisis. Olesya and Alik are bewildered by their passion for each other but spend another night together again at her house, unaware that Trofimov has seen them. The next morning Liliya’s daughter, Tamara, packs up and leaves, But Liliya remains alone with her grandmother. Olesya loyally refuses to go. Liliya senses what Olesya and Alik have done and when Olesya begs her grandmother to join her at her in town, orders her off the island. The “less responsible” element is led by Shura Trofimov, a shopkeeper who expects to move up in the communist party by being a hardliner for completion of the dam. To scare Alik from seeing Olesya, Trofimov lures Alik back that night to the hotel, where he and some other men are waiting. However, his friend Khokhlachev warns Alik at the last minute. Alik takes a large stick into his hotel room, but doesn’t avoid a beating. The two men, Alik and Khokhlachev, get drunk together and go out to the island to talk with Liliya, to whom Alik acknowledges her fight to protect her dignity. The following day, Alik learns that the dam’s floodgates will be closed in a two days and Liliya must be evicted immediately. The partkom’s majority tell Alik that they are going to have Liliya declared legally insane and have her moved to an asylum, which Alik vehemently rejects. He reluctantly asks Party Secretary Khokhlachev to have Liliya removed the next day with the militia before any asylum can be arranged. Alik then goes to the island to use the threat of the asylum in a final attempt to persuade her to leave with her dignity still intact. She calls the partkom worthless and refuses to talk to him further. Olesya knows that Alik will be moving on to a new assignment within a few days and pleads with him to take her with him, telling him she’d be a “very good wife” to him. Alik is still trying to cope with his new feelings and doesn’t know what to say. The party secretary rushes to Olesya’s house to warn them that Shura and his men are coming to take Liliya to an asylum. Trofimov’s group are nothing more than thugs; he has persuaded them to harm Alik so he can have Olesya. They shoot a hole in the bottom of Alik’s boat, want to burn Liliya’s house, they steal Liliya’s few chickens. Refusing to allow Liliya to be taken to an asylum, Alik confronts Trofimov but is knocked out with one punch. Olesya slaps Trofimov and bites him on the face. Trofimov knocks her out too. By striking a woman Trofimov loses support and the group goes home. Liliya is not taken away. Alik proposes to Olesya and they are married that night by Party Secretary Khokhlachev. The next day, with Alik and Olesya present, Liliya leaves her island as the male youth workers cut down the trees. Liliya pulls a few onions from her garden and gets on the boat. The female youth workers take her cow and chickens are taken off the island in a separate boat. Alik has secured a very nice apartment. It has all the modern, hard to obtain, appliances. There is a modern stove and refrigerator. There is a television. At this new apartment, Liliya sits on the couch, dispiritedly refusing to speak, except to call the television an “idiot box”. Soon after, while Alik is supervising the burning of the island’s houses, Olesya tells him that Liliya has died. In the final scene of the film, before leaving for Moscow, Alik and Olesya join Tamara and the party secretary in burying Liliya on now only a small sliver of the island above water in the new lake. The island has shrunken to a very small place.

MAD RIVERS SANE

http://www.magicalrealism.us/2014/05/18/stalins-hydroelectric-dam/