Chairman (film)

After demobilization, having conquered on the battlefields of World War II, the front-line soldier Yegor Trubnikov returns to his native village to restore the ruined collective farm economy.

Film-certificate of the restoration of agriculture in the postwar years . The film shows the harsh reality of the post-war Russian village, when a front-line soldier, a disabled veteran, becomes the chairman; the collective farmers, for the most part, are women and widows who have remained without husbands after the terrible war; post-war devastation and, as a result, terrifying poverty. In these difficult conditions, Chairman Yegor Trubnikov assumes responsibility for restoring normal life to the villagers.

"Chairman" is a film that is very dramatic in its intensity, thanks to the storyline and the cast. The decisive role is played by monologues and dialogues, scenes of general meetings, the composition of performers, and their level of skill. Superbly plays the main role in this picture, actor Mikhail Ulyanov.

“In work on any role, I am primarily interested in the social orientation of my hero’s actions. I’m interested in why my hero is fighting, what thoughts torment him. I don’t like to lay out the character traits of my heroes on the shelves: this is“ positive ”, this is“ negative ”. I don’t like it because it doesn’t happen in life. Everything is much more complicated in life. Sometimes the most controversial traits coexist in the same person. That was Yegor Trubnikov, "Ulyanov wrote in his book Returning to Himself.

Front-line worker Trubnikov found it difficult to get used to the everyday life of peaceful life, at first he tried to solve collective farm life issues on the front, where there was a risk of death every day and hour, and where there were “four steps to death”. On the collective farm, bullets did not whistle and shells did not burst, but to live and work in the post-war period was not easier, and in some ways even harder and harder. In the war, there was only an enemy before Trubnikov, the goals and their solution were clearly defined. In civilian life, I had to "fight" on many "fronts." The hero of Ulyanov-Trubnikov had to not only fight the established ideas and orders, but also with the bosses, who managed to acquire a stable habitual look at human grief and misfortune. To change his usual way of life, to raise the collective farm to his feet, Trubnikov repeatedly applied decisive measures to his fellow villagers, and in relation to his superiors he resorted to tricks, sometimes even deceit, which for him was a lie to save.

A poor, hungry, ruined village impresses Yegor Trubnikov, and he decides to return people to normal life by all means. He behaves like a commander, raising people to work, as an attack, to save them, not to let them die. This justifies the episodes of the film with unprintable vocabulary, with a gun in his hands - to tear people off the ground, raise them, although this is not according to the canon of printed editorials in newspapers and not within the framework of films showing a well-fed village life (“Kuban Cossacks”) not according to the charter , does not correspond to the concepts of humanism. Yegor’s rigidity and inflexibility in everyday situations is full of front-line logic, although critics condemned her - they wrote that the chairman in the film was not a humanist at all, and his strong-willed decision was more likely to be a negative character than a positive one. He single-handedly decides whom to let go to study in the city, and who is not, but at the same time, he sees who sincerely wants to study further, and for whom study is a way to escape from difficult village everyday life.

Initially, the image of the chairman was difficult for Mikhail Ulyanov, he later admitted that he had not been given the role until he saw a photograph in the magazine “Ogonyok” and read an article about Kirill Orlovsky, a famous partisan and collective farm chairman in the village of Myshkovichi (Belarus). Orlovsky was a prototype for Yuri Nagibin, when he wrote the script, she helped Mikhail Ulyanov in creating the image of Yegor Trubnikov.

The director of the picture, Saltykov, for whom it was the first independent directorial work, was amazed at how much the actor was able to reincarnate. The created image was so piercing that the director several times and talked with the actor. He asked him to slightly weaken the influence of Yegor Trubnikov on the audience - both were afraid that the picture would be put on the shelf.

The film became a sharp dissonance in a series of laudatory paintings about the village of that time, and people enthusiastically accepted it, because it was true, there was real life, there lived characters like people from a real village, it answered the pressing problems of that time.

The premiere of the film was to take place on December 29, 1964. Before that, the picture was severely censored and especially sharp episodes were cut out. The Art Council still made a negative decision on the rental of the film, and already pasted up posters in the capital had to urgently be removed from the pedestals.

The “Chair” appeared on a wide screen in 1965, in the first week of rental it was watched by approximately 7 million people, and Mikhail Ulyanov became one of the most beloved actors among millions of viewers. Critics fiercely debated around the image of Trubnikov, and a year later the film received the Lenin Prize. ^[one]

• Mikhail Ulyanov - Egor Trubnikov, chairman of the collective farm, veteran of the Great Patriotic War
• Ivan Lapikov - Semyon, Egor's brother
• Nonna Mordyukova - Donya, wife of Semyon
• Kira Golovko - Hope, Yegor's second wife
• Valentina Vladimirova - Polina Korshikova, milkmaid
• Antonina Bogdanova - Praskovya Sergeevna, milkmaid
• Sergey Kurilov - Vasily Kochetkov, friend of Yegor
• Mikhail Kokshenov - Misha (first movie role)
• Vyacheslav Innocent - Pavel Markushev
• Nikolay Parfyonov - Klyagin, Secretary of the District Committee
• Varvara Popova - Samokhina
• Vitaliy Solomin - Valezhin, doctor
• Arkady Trusov - Ignat Zakharovich, agronomist
• Vladimir Etush - Kaloev, Head of the Regional Directorate of the Ministry of State Security
• Sergey Golovanov - correspondent
• Vladimir Gulyaev - instructor of the district committee
• Nikolay Khryashchikov - member of the bureau of the district committee
• Vera Burlakova - Secretary
• Elizaveta Kuzyurina - Motya Postnikova
• Sergey Blinnikov - Serdyukov
• Tamara Nosova - the bride of the Pasha’s brother (not in the credits)
• Vladimir Marenkov - Kostya Markushev
• Alexander Lebedev - episode
• Zinaida Vorkul

• Mikhail Ulyanov received the Lenin Prize ( 1966 ) for playing the role of Yegor Trubnikov.
• The State Prize of the RSFSR named after the Vasilyev Brothers "For the creation of female images in the cinema" Nonne Mordyukova (1973).
• The second prize to the creative team of the film on the section of films reflecting the life and work of Soviet people (Alex Saltykov) at the All- Union Film Festival (1966). ^[2]

• For the role of Yegor Trubnikov, Mikhail Ulyanov was recognized as the best actor of 1965 (according to a survey by the magazine " Soviet Screen ")
• Mikhail Ulyanov impressed Marshal Zhukov as chairman; when they selected the performer of the role of the marshal in the movie epic “ Liberation ”, Zhukov spoke in favor of Ulyanov, although he did not know his name (“Let the one who played the chairman”). ^[3]
• The prototype of Yegor Trubnikov was the famous Belarusian partisan Kirill Orlovsky ^[4]
• Field shooting took place near Mozhaisk, including in the village of Myshkino, pavilion - in Riga.
• The religious anthem, " Close, my God, is to you " in the film is sung by the poor old man and old woman. This is a famous church hymn, which is played in many foreign films.

• About the film "Chairman"
• 100 lectures with Dmitry Bykov. Yuri Nagibin. "Chairman", 1964 - TV channel "Rain"