The defeated remnants of vile Ukrainian nationalists, headed by the leader of the Ukrainian liberation movement, Symon Petliura, cannot accept their historical fate and are plotting an insurrection against the Soviet regime in Ukraine. There is nothing Petliura and his cohorts would not do to win back control over Ukraine, including selling it to the highest bidder, in this case, the Polish dictator Jozef Pilsudski. A group of plotters are coordinating an insurrection in Kyiv with an attack from Poland headed by Petliura’s general Yurko Tiutiunnyk. Predictably, the invincible Red Army defeats the nationalist plotters and proves that the Soviet borders are impregnable.
Acting
Real-life loser Tiutiunnyk playing his own humiliation—method acting by necessity.
Production
Soviet Ukraine's first feature: propaganda as industrial project.
Director
Heorhiy Stabovyi
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Yuri Tiutiunnyk, the real general who led the 1921 uprising, was captured and coerced into playing his own defeat—he was executed nine years later during Stalin's purges.
This was Soviet Ukraine's first feature film, commissioned to cement the narrative that Bolshevik victory was inevitable and nationalist resistance was foreign-backed treason.
SU
