Nearly 10 hours of Soviet trauma you can't unsee — and somehow can't stop watching.
Set around the Volga river, the story begins around 1900, when Russian peasants are let free and allowed to own their farmlands. But soon they suffer from losses during the 1917 Russian Revolution and the following Civil War. Then, the major national catastrophe is started by Stalin: his communist government kills millions of farmers and steals all their food supplies, causing the longest and deadliest famine all over central Russia during the 1920s and 1930s.
Acting
Raw peasant performances that feel excavated from actual 1930s Ukraine.
Direction
Nikulin's unrelenting gaze — no relief, no heroism, just starvation.
Production
Scale of suffering rendered with brutal period authenticity on Soviet TV budget.
Director
Grigori Nikulin
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Shot in 1988 during Glasnost, this was among the first Soviet works to explicitly condemn Stalin's terror-famine — previously unmentionable.
The Holodomor killed an estimated 3.9 million Ukrainians; this series was controversial for its Russian perspective minimizing Ukrainian specificity of the genocide.
SU
