Let me start you will a stunning beautiful and heartbreaking Russian film called...
Utomlyonnye solntsem (Burnt by the Sun)
Russia, 1936: revolutionary hero Colonel Kotov is spending an idyllic summer in his village with his young wife and six-year-old daughter Nadia and other assorted family and friends. Things change dramatically with the unheralded arrival of Cousin Dmitri from Moscow, who charms the women and little Nadia with his games and pianist bravura. But Kotov isn't fooled: this is the time of Stalin's repression, with telephone calls in the middle of the night spelling doom - and he knows that Dmitri isn't paying a social call...
The French title for the movie was "Deceitful Sun", and I find it more appropriate. Although the film bathes in quiet sunlight, it deals with one of the darkest eras of Russian/Soviet history: Stalinism. In the early 1930's, Stalin decided to eliminate much of the newly arisen communist elite whom he did not trust anymore, and hired former enemies of communism, or half-criminals, to eradicate his own official allies.
I can't get enough of the pure beauty of the scenery in this film, the warmth of the characters, the pain you feel when you know what doom awaits them around the corner. Based on an a autobiography written by the character depicted as the young girl, she wrote the book as an old woman in remembrance of her father and those dark and terrible times.
