Tenth step

Before the civil war ended, the red commander Osip Dziuba was sent to a new front of work - the chairman of the revolutionary committee in the town of Stepnyansk. With him goes his wife, a noblewoman, Anya. She also had to fight in the fields of civil war. Life in Stepnyansk is not easy. The Soviet authorities are faced with the task of collecting food, and a gang of ataman Khmara is wandering around the district. The destruction of such gangs is the tenth, final step towards the complete establishment of Soviet power.

Anna's brother, Peremytov, a former White Guard , and now a Soviet employee, receiving a reinforced rations, comes to the city with his wife. Anna goes to visit her brother, a quiet, quiet evening in her brother's family, and even reinforced by a strengthened ration, bring confusion into Anna's soul. This confusion enhances the appearance of Anna's ex-lover - Romanenko. The White Guard executioner is suspected of him, but he dismisses these suspicions, claiming that he is only the namesake. There is a discord with her husband, ending with the fact that she abandons her husband.

At this time, the head of the Cheka Linda is conducting a desperate struggle with the gang of Khmara, sending a conspiratorial agent to the enemy. This agent had to kill the food commissar and his old friend Gluzkin with his own hands. The bandits captured Gluzkin on the train and were identified by the photograph Anna gave to her brother. Anna falls under the suspicions of the Chekists, as does her husband, whom the suspicious defector had spelled out.

The bandits are going to attack Stepnyansk. Arriving in the city under the guise of delegates to the peasant congress, at night they will kill the "Reds". In one of these “delegates”, Anna recognizes the “whitewash” nicknamed “Poltoranchastva”, she rushes to Romanenko, they must inform the Cheka about the danger. Romanenko stops her and admits that he is the organizer of the attack on the city. A fight ensues and Anna kills Romanenko. She runs to the Cheka. Linda does not really trust Anna and locks her in his office, but takes the necessary steps. The city was repelled, Dziuba rehabilitated, and Anna, realizing that she became a toy in the hands of the enemy, that her naivety caused the death of Gluzkin and the storming of the city, commits suicide.

• Nelly Myshkova - Anya Peremytova-Dziuba
• Pavel Morozenko - Dziuba
• Nikolay Kozlenko - Smirnov
• Yuri Volkov - Linde
• Alexey Safonov - Gluzkin
• Ivan Marin - Saltykov
• Fedor Panasenko - Dotsenko
• Boris Mirus - Korchun
• Oleg Komarov - Giants
• Vladimir Druzhnikov - Romanenko
• Stepan Oleksenko - Peremytov
• Konstantin Stepankov - Khmara
• Vladimir Volchik - Happiness

The critic L. Anninsky from the magazine “Cinema Viewer Satellite” notes the work of actors especially playing the negative characters of Vladimir Druzhnikov and Konstantin Stepankov, they managed to convey their heroes quite realistically, although their heroes are not without some cliche. Anninsky noted that the second half of the tape is essentially a detective story. With a kind word, the critic notes the work of the director of the picture, “Viktor Ivchenko once again proved that there are no such traditional subjects in which it would be impossible to discover the depths of real drama.” ^[4]

• The Tenth Step on RUSKINO.RU