The Commissar

Klavdia Vavilova (Nonna Mordyukova) is a Red Army cavalry commissar during the Russian Civil War, hard and used to giving orders, until an unexpected pregnancy takes her out of the saddle. She is billeted with a poor Jewish blacksmith, Yefim Mahazannik (Rolan Bykov), and his family to wait out the birth. Askoldov sets a soldier's discipline against a crowded household, and the film puts what a person owes the child she carries against what she owes the cause.