Press Release, 23.06.2023

On June 22, the Moscow office of the Yabloko party hosted a screening of the documentary film Pogostiye (Burying Ground), based on the book Memories of War by Nikolai Nikulin. Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov told about filming this documentary.

Nikolai Nikulin was an art historian, researcher at the Hermitage, custodian of the collections of German and Dutch paintings, an associate member of the Russian Academy of Arts. In 1941, right after finishing school, he went to the front and ended the war in Berlin. He was wounded four times and shell-shocked. In 1975, he wrote his memoirs, but because of his frankness and criticism of the official point of view, they were published only at the end of 2007 – two years before the author’s death. The book became one of the most famous documentary evidence of the Second World War.

“It happened so that I read Nikolai Nikulin’s memoirs in June. And last Sunday we went to Pogostiye, the places mentioned in the book, where the author fought most of his front-line life. This fragment of the film is an attempt to convey to people the horror of any war, complete absence of any “trench romanticism”. If you have not read this book before, then while watching it you will understand why we decided to make this film right now. Why it is so relevant today. And why this book should be read, discussed, handed on to friends and relatives,” Rybakov said.

The film was made as part of the Yabloko party project “Say YES to Peace!” and is the next stage of work which will result in a large documentary about peace.

After the screening, the participants read out excerpts from “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy, “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo, as well as Vladimir Soloukhin’s poem “Star Rains”.