White Sun of the Desert

• 1. Introduction

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  White Sun of the Desert has a pre-launch tradition unlike any other film on earth. Before almost every Russian space mission, the cosmonauts sit down together and watch the same 1970 Soviet adventure film. It is not a documentary about space, or a tale of heroism among the stars. It is a sun-drenched, bullet-riddled story set in the deserts of Central Asia, and it has been a fixture of Russian cosmonaut preparation for decades.

  The film follows a Red Army soldier named Fyodor Sukhov, who finds himself in the Caspian desert at the end of the Russian Civil War, tasked with protecting the abandoned harem of a Basmachi warlord. It blends action, comedy, drama, and music in a way that Soviet audiences had rarely seen before. With 34.5 million viewers in its first year, it ranked among the most popular films of 1970. And yet the Soviet state almost refused to let it exist at all.

  How did a film that the authorities dismissed as mere entertainment become one of the most beloved movies in Russian history? Who were the actors who brought it to life, some of them hiding pain that the camera never caught? And why do the names of the fictional harem wives now appear on craters on Venus?

• 2. A Film No One Wanted to Make

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  Director Vladimir Motyl said openly that films such as Stagecoach and High Noon shaped his approach, and he described the result as a "cocktail" of a Russian folktale and a western. Getting there was a battle. Several directors were offered the project first, including Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky. Both turned it down. Konchalovsky believed only American actors could carry a western-style lead. The screenplay was also considered too weak to bother with.

  Motyl himself initially declined. He only agreed when it became clear that no other directing assignment would be offered to him. It was a corner he walked into rather than a project he chose.

  The first version of the script was rejected by Mosfilm, the state film studio. Two writers, Valentin Yezhov and Rustam Ibragimbekov, were brought in to rebuild it. Ibragimbekov was selected partly for his Central Asian background, though in fact he had grown up in Russia and had never visited the region in question. The pivotal story element came from elsewhere entirely: a war veteran told Yezhov about a Basmachi leader who had abandoned his harem while fleeing, and that anecdote became the backbone of the new script.

  When Motyl replaced Konchalovsky as director, he rewrote the script again from the inside. All the dialogue for Vereschagin, the former tsarist customs officer, was his work. He estimated that roughly 60% of the entire script was rewritten or improvised during filming. The letters that Sukhov mentally composes to his wife, a device Motyl invented to reveal the hero's inner life, were written by his friend Mark Zakharov. Years later, Konchalovsky called the finished script a masterpiece.

• 3. The Actors Behind the Roles

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  Anatoly Kuznetsov was not the first choice to play Sukhov. Georgi Yumatov had been selected for the lead, but was dismissed after a drunken brawl just before shooting began. Kuznetsov stepped in as the second option and went on to define the role in Russian popular memory.

  Pavel Luspekayev, who played the customs officer Vereschagin, gave perhaps the film's most physically extraordinary performance. A World War II veteran and experienced stage actor, he had both feet amputated in the 1960s because of injuries sustained during the war. Motyl wrote a version of the role for a man on crutches to accommodate him. Luspekayev refused. He insisted his character should read as a strong man who died too soon, not as a wounded one. He filmed the role walking on prosthetic legs, stopping regularly to rest because of the pain. He died in 1970, the same year the film was released. It was his final role.

  Kakhi Kavsadze, a Georgian actor, played Abdullah, the Basmachi gang leader. His character was written as a skilled horseman. Kavsadze had never ridden a horse. The film works around this: he is seen sitting on a horse, or even on the shoulders of an assistant, but never actually riding. Spartak Mishulin, who played the silent avenger Sayid, came to film with a background in television and stage rather than cinema. His preparation for the opening scene involved spending several days in total buried in a box in the sand while the crew prepared multiple takes. Nikolai Godovikov, who played the young soldier Petrukha, began a real relationship after filming with Tatiana Denisova, one of the actresses who had played the character Gyulchatai.

• 4. Desert Shoots and Hidden Accidents

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  Sukhov's dream sequences, the idyllic Russian countryside scenes where he imagines writing to his wife, were filmed near Luga in Leningrad Oblast. The harsher reality of the desert was shot in multiple locations: the bulk of the film near Makhachkala in Dagestan, the sand dune scenes in the Karakum Desert near Mary in Turkmenistan, and the museum sequences in the ancient city of Merv nearby. The distinctive Kyz Kala fortress, also known as Gyz Gala, appears prominently in those scenes.

  Working in the desert created problems that did not appear on any shooting schedule. Actors filming the dune sequences had to walk large circles around the location so their footprints would not appear in the sand before the cameras rolled. Vereschagin's house and the village buildings were temporary mockups that required constant repair because the wind kept damaging them.

  The film's stunt work carried real risk. Horse-riding scenes were handled by a specialist unit assembled for the War and Peace film series. One member of that unit died in an accident during filming. A cut visible on Vereschagin's face in the ship fight scene was not makeup: the actor had sustained it in a drunken brawl the night before. Props were stolen by local thieves on one occasion. Security tightened after Motyl solved the problem pragmatically by casting a local criminal leader in a minor role in Abdullah's gang. Both major stunts in the film, a man breaking through a second-floor window and Sukhov leaping from a burning oil tank, were performed by one stuntman: Valentin Faber.

• 5. The Song That Outlasted the Film

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  Pavel Luspekayev performed the film's central song, accompanying himself on guitar as Vereschagin. The song, known in Russian as "Ваше благородие, госпожа Удача" (Your Noble Highness Lady Fortune), was written by poet Bulat Okudzhava, with music by Isaac Schwartz. Okudzhava wrote it at Motyl's personal request; the two had worked together before.

  The lyrics turn on loneliness, luck, and the hope for love. They mirror Vereschagin's melancholy as a man left stranded by history, and echo Sukhov's longing to return to his wife Katerina. The refrain "I'm unlucky in death, maybe I'll be lucky in love" became one of the best-known lines in Soviet popular music.

  The song spread beyond the film itself. A line from it, "Nine grams into your heart, wait, don't call," was quoted as a direct homage in the script of The Detached Mission, a Soviet action film released in 1985. The tune Okudzhava wrote on request for a film the state nearly shelved became a hit that outlived the political era that almost suppressed it.

• 6. State Disapproval and Lasting Recognition

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  When White Sun of the Desert was released, the Soviet cultural establishment viewed it with suspicion. The film was nominated for the 1970 USSR State Prize but lost to By the Lake, which the authorities considered ideologically sound. The judges saw the western-style adventure film as entertainment without political content, and in Soviet cultural policy that was close to a verdict of worthlessness.

  Director Motyl believed the film was deliberately kept out of international festivals. His view was that the Soviet ideological authorities were convinced the film would win awards abroad, and that such recognition would have been politically awkward. A film dismissed domestically for lacking ideological depth winning foreign prizes was not an outcome the state wanted to explain.

  In the West it appeared only in limited circumstances. It screened in 1973 at the Little Carnegie Theatre in New York as part of a Soviet film festival timed to coincide with Leonid Brezhnev's visit to the United States. Roger Greenspun, reviewing it for the New York Times, called it "escapist entertainment" and a "picaresque adventure," grouping it with another Soviet comedy shown at the same festival.

  Nearly thirty years passed before the film received formal recognition at home. In 1998, by a special decree from President Boris Yeltsin, the film was awarded the Russian State Prize and acknowledged as a work of cultural significance. The 1997 Russian Federation State Prize in Literature and Arts went to the film's creators that same year.

• 7. Phrases, Monuments, and Craters

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  A handful of lines from White Sun of the Desert moved so thoroughly into Russian speech that many people who use them have never seen the film. "The Orient is a delicate matter" is quoted whenever anyone faces a complicated or opaque situation, with no requirement that the situation involve the East at all. "I feel sorry for the great state" is spoken when institutions fail. "Customs gives the green light" has become shorthand for any grudging approval. "His grenades are the wrong caliber" refers to any feeble excuse; the line was not even written in the script but improvised on set by the actor.

  Vereschagin, the grieving customs officer who dies on the exploding ship, became a symbol of the profession itself. Monuments honoring the fictional character were erected in Amvrosiivka in 2001, Kurgan in 2007, Moscow in 2008, and Luhansk in 2011. Statues of Sukhov followed in Donetsk around 2009 and Samara in 2012.

  The names of Abdullah's wives went further still. The International Astronomical Union assigned the names Zarina, Dzhamilya, Gyuzel, Saida, Khafiza, Zukhra, Leila, Zulfia, and Gyulchatai to craters on Venus. Characters from a Soviet adventure film about the Russian Civil War in Central Asia now mark the surface of another planet. That the cosmonauts who travel toward space still watch the film before every launch makes the connection feel, at least to Russian audiences, like something close to symmetry.