Nikolai Maslov

Historical film about the invasion of the Poles in the Moscow Empire (1611), the creation of Minin and Pozharsky people's militia. The beginning of the XVII century. Already the sixth year the Muscovite land under the yoke of intervention. In the fall of 1610 Polish pans in deceitfully seized the Kremlin and tried to break through to the north. Everywhere rebellions broke out, but well-armed interventionists smashed the scattered peasant detachments. The liberation movement was led by Nizhny Novgorod merchant Kuzma and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky.

Bezhin Lug (Bezhin Meadow) was to be a Soviet film about a young farm boy whose father attempts to betray the government for political reasons by sabotaging the year's harvest, and the son's efforts to stop his own father to protect the Soviet state, culminating in the boy's murder and a social uprising. Assigned to Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, the filming followed the same path as with his previous effort, "Que Viva Mexico", into cost overrun and over-shooting of footage. Furthermore, Eisenstein's usage of forbidden experimental film techniques outraged his government superiors, who ordered the film destroyed before it was even completed. All that survives are the first and last frames of each shot, preserved by Sergei Eisenstein’s wife, Pera Atasheva. The 1967 reconstruction, by Naum Kleiman of the Eisenstein Museum and Sergei Yutkevich of Gosfilmofond, places these frames in order, approximating the original film.