A romantic and funny fantasy about the events occurred during the building of a first railroad in Russia.
Acting
Nikolai Karachentsov's desperate romantic energy is genuinely unhinged.
Production
Gloriously ramshackle 19th-century Russia built on what was clearly a tight budget.
Director
Alla Surikova
Nikolai Karachentsov
Rodion
Ulrich Pleitgen
Otto Franz von Gessner
Olga Kabo
Masha
Leonid Yarmolnik
Tikhon Zajtsev
Sergei Stepanchenko
Fed'ka 'Pirandello'
Natalya Gundareva
Countess
Mikhail Boyarskiy
Nikolai I, the Tsar
Aleksei Zharkov
Benkendorf
Semyon Farada
A Russian secret agent in Austria
Natalya Krachkovskaya
An agent's wife
Vladimir Mashchenko
Viktor Proskurin
Ivan Ivanovich
Vsevolod Larionov
Rosanov-Rasdorskiy
Aleksandr Shirvindt
Джордж Стефенсон
Mikhail Derzhavin
Фаддей Венедиктович Булгарин
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This was one of the last major Soviet comedies before the USSR collapsed, making its railroad-as-progress metaphor accidentally poignant.
Ulrich Pleitgen was a rare East German actor cast in a Soviet blockbuster; his character's doomed romance mirrors real GDR-USSR tensions of 1991.
SU
