The Forty-First

The Soviet cinematic genre later dubbed the “Ostern” or “Red Western” by Western observers—action‑adventure narratives set in the remote, often desert, frontiers of the young USSR during the Civil War—found its golden age in the decades following the Second World War. Yet its roots dig deeper into the silent era, and one of the earliest, arguably the very first, exemplars of this distinctly Soviet genre is Yakov Pro…