Sergei Selyanov

Left in the dense thicket of Brezhnev's sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan, the term "cargo 200" was given to soldiers who found their way back to the motherland in zinc-lined coffins. Fitting, then, is the opening scene which sees a discussion of the cultural climate between two phantoms of a de-Stalinized USSR: two brothers, one a high-ranking member of the Party (Yuri Stepanov) and the other a professor of scientific atheism at a local university (Leonid Gromov). It's the latter's trip to Leninsk that finds him on the side of the road, garnering help from God-lovin' distillers (Aleksei Serebryakov and Natalya Akimova) and their Vietnamese servant (Mikhail Skryabin).

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Once his ex-comrades are gone, he tries the obvious: shooting the chain. But the metal is too hefty for his bullets, so a quick escape is out of the question. MacGyver-like, he sets about to employ material within reach, which turns out to be a blast of gunpowder collected from his bullets, and the burning of lichens to gradually wear down the rock with expansion and contraction. It's a credit to the filmmaker's sense of reality that the job is not made to look trivial. In fact, it goes on long enough to exhaust Veiko's food, his strength, and a bit of our patience, though Veiko doesn't lose his confidence for a moment and we get a sense of the man's perseverance.

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