Yevgeni Gukov

Strangers on a train. Late in 1916, a brave and idealistic Russian officer in his 20s comes to his superiors' attention when he stands up to Rasputin at a nightclub. He's asked to carry important papers from Petersburg to Stockholm by train in the dead of winter, a dangerous mission. The first-class carriage may be full of spies, and soon after the train embarks, the man in the next compartment searches Obozow's luggage. A beautiful stranger approaches him, a woman older than he, on a concert tour; a game of cat and mouse ensues with patriotism and emotion sometimes on opposite sides. Can Obozow consummate the affair, reach Stockholm, and maintain his ideals?

The journalist becomes a victim of rape. To take revenge on the rapists, she makes a deal with the criminals. But things are beginning to unfold unpredictably...

Krasnaya strela is the special train No.1 between Leningrad and Moscow. The film is set in the 1980s during perestroika in the Soviet Union. Kropotov (Lavrov) is communist CEO of a big industrial company in Leningrad. He is crafty and successful in getting a major order from the Soviet Government; building an automated assembly line. But his style of management clashes with his subordinates, talented engineers. Their potential is strangled by Kropotov's manipulative control. The government order is not accomplished and Kropotov gets fired. He is rethinking his outdated business style while on the train No.1 to Moscow.

War correspondent Lopatin takes a 20-day-leave from his hard work at the front in 1942. He travels to faraway Tashkent to meet the family of the killed soldier and visit the film set of the screen adaptation of his war-time stories. Lopatin also manages to walk the streets of Tashkent, take part in a factory workers' meeting and have a short-lived love affair. Although with no bombings and fighting, the city dwellers breathe the atmosphere of the ongoing war.

On the formation of young Soviet diplomacy and the struggle of the mission in Kabul with the internal reaction and representatives of the Western powers for the signing of the Cooperation Agreement. A Russian diplomatic mission was sent to Kabul. The friendly relations between Afghanistan and the young Soviet republic became a real threat to traditional British rule in the East.

Soviet spy Ladeynikov learns that in one of the pharmaceutical centers in a small resort town works a former German war criminal Dr. Hass, who is finishing the creation of a deadly chemical gas RH development of which he began during WW2 experimenting on war prisoners. Since Ladeynikov doesn't know Dr. Hass's appearance, Soviet intelligence recruits an actor, Ivan Savushkin, who during the war escaped from a prison camp where Hass was testing his gas. Together they must identify and stop him before he finishes and unleashes his weapon of mass destruction.

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.