Komissar) is a 1967 Soviet film directed by Aleksandr Askoldov based on one of Vasily Grossman's first short stories, "In the Town of Berdychev" (В городе Бердичеве).

From the outset of the production, Goskino censors forced the film director Aleksandr Askoldov to make major changes; 1967 was the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution and the events were to be presented in the Communist Party-mandated style of heroic realism.

Until her child is born, she is forced to stay with the family of a poor Jewish blacksmith Yefim Magazannik (Rolan Bykov), his wife, mother-in-law, and six children.

At first, both the Magazannik family and "Madame Vavilova", as they call her, are not enthusiastic about living under one roof, but soon they share their rationed food, make her civilian clothes, and help her with the delivery of her newborn son.

Commissar features strong themes of feminism and motherhood in the backdrop of the Russian Civil War of 1918, and when completed was censored by the Soviet Union due to the subject topic being deemed: "a force that opposes the very essence of human existence, a phenomenon that destroys personal ties by causing alienation, despair, and uncertainty about the future.

This is best conveyed in a scene where Yefim Magazannik (the father of the family and a local blacksmith) responds to an anecdote by Vavilova about the ideal of the soviet utopia where all men are equal in work with "but what about life?"

Immediately prior to Vavilova deciding to leave, there is a particularly brutal scene where the male children chase and bind their sister, ripping her clothes as she calls out for her mother.

The Magazanniks worry that the coming shift of power there would bring another pogrom committed by the White Army, and Vavilova begins once again to abandon her motherly persona to relay the communist dream that all men will work in peace and harmony.

The stages of Klavdia’s emotional and spiritual maturation in the film reverse the symbolic "progress toward consciousness" and the ritual initiation into the "big family" that shaped Stalin-era Civil War discourse, reappearing in the late Thaw quasi-Stalinist narratives.

Askoldov’s inverted enactment of a conventional Stalinist rite of passage shows Klavdia undergo its three main phases: separation from previous environment, transition to a new system of values and incorporation into the new community.

[8]Socially, the film retrospectively propagates a feminine pride in the socialist ideal, as Vavilova is presented as an independent and powerful woman who initially is seemingly unfazed by the death of her lover.