"Checkist" and his NKVD comrade, a political instructor called "Livshits" (Konstantin Khabensky) flee and, amid the chaos and gunfire, discard their uniforms in a local laundry, knowing that German troops shoot Red Army commanders, officers, political commissars and Jews.

Livshits, "Checkist" and a young Soviet sniper Mitya Blinov (Mikhail Evlanov) decide to escape and successfully flee the German soldiers.

They stab him to death with a knife made for slaughtering pigs, push his body and bike in a river and keep his Mosin-Nagant rifle.

He leads a raid through the five villages under his control and takes a number of relatives of Soviet soldiers hostage, among them Blinov Sr's daughters, all of whom are imprisoned in a local school and threatened with execution in reprisal for the deaths of the German motorcyclists if the culprits are not produced.

Blinov Sr. sees that the negotiations have failed and returns to his village and arranges with "Checkist" and Livshits to shoot the police chief.

[2] Leslie Felperin from Variety wrote in her review: "Back in the Soviet era, WWII films were as central to Russian cinema as cabbage was to the national diet, but they have long since fallen out of fashion.

Dmitri Meskhiyev's "Us," a strong-backed meller with A-list Russian cast, retrofits the genre with a macho swagger for a new generation, but keeps plenty of moral ambiguity in reserve.