Overview

Documentary with beautiful black-and-white CinemaScope shots, which combined impressive scenes from a trip to the Ukraine with historical reminiscences. The censors criticized the "too narrow and too intimate view" of the Soviet Union; they didn't like the fact that bells were ringing, that a chauffeur from the film crew or an elderly peasant couple recalled the horrors of war or that Nikolai Gogol and Yevgeny Yevtushenko were quoted - that was considered backward-looking. Without the knowledge of the filmmakers Karlheinz Mund and Christian Lehmann, the film was shortened and mutilated; the seventeen minutes that were allowed for a public screening are only the torso of a large draft.