General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Agony (Агония) (1981 film)

Agony (Агония) is a Soviet two-part historical drama directed by Elem Klimov at Mosfilm, dramatizing Grigori Rasputin's rise to power over Tsar Nicholas II's court during 1916, the last full year before the October Revolution.¹ Written by Semyon Lungin and Ilya Nusinov, with cinematography by Leonid Kalashnikov and music by Alfred Schnittke, it was completed in 1974 and 1975 but shelved by Soviet censors for roughly a decade, reaching domestic screens only in 1985 under Mikhail Gorbachev.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Elem Klimov; screenplay by Semyon Lungin and Ilya Nusinov¹
Studio / format	Mosfilm, USSR; two parts, color, 1.37:1 aspect ratio³
Subject	Rasputin's influence over Nicholas II and the "agony" of the Romanov dynasty in 1916³
Principal cast	Aleksei Petrenko (Rasputin), Anatoli Romashin (Nicholas II), Velta Line (Alexandra Fyodorovna), Alisa Freindlikh (Anna Vyrubova)⁴
Completion and release	Finished 1974, permit issued 27 May 1975, Soviet release June 1985²
Awards	FIPRESCI prize, Venice 1982; Grand Prix "Golden Eagle," Rueil-Malmaison historical film festival, France, 1985³
Soviet audience	18.4 million admissions¹

Spoilers

Subject and style

The film's title refers to the condition of Russia in 1916: defeat at the fronts of the First World War, economic collapse, hunger, growing discontent among all strata of the population, and an approaching revolution. Mosfilm's synopsis describes this as the period of the Romanov house's agony, which bred mysticism at court and hope in divine providence, opening the way for the peasant Grigori Rasputin, who penetrated the imperial family, briefly rose to the summit of Russian political life, and later fell victim to a court conspiracy.³ The film opens with a quotation from Lenin on the rottenness of the Tsarist entourage, "with the monstrous Rasputin leading the pack."⁵

Klimov sought documentary effect by intercutting extensive black-and-white newsreel footage with staged scenes, and by alternating saturated and color-drained film stocks.¹^•⁶ Characters are introduced with on-screen titles giving their names and, often, unflattering nicknames. Although Rasputin is the nominal protagonist, critics have described the film as a panorama of the monarchy's final convulsions, with Rasputin one actor among many rather than a hero, and with no positive characters at all in Klimov's portrayal of a court that can neither govern nor act.⁷ Andrei Tarkovsky said that Agony had "departed from the stereotypes of the Soviet historical film."⁸

Production and censorship, 1966 to 1981

A long gestation. Mosfilm submitted the first version of the screenplay to Goskino in 1966 with positive assessments from Ivan Pyryev, Mikhail Romm, and Arnold Arnstam, and it entered the production plan for 1968. Klimov began shooting in early 1968, but on 9 April of that year the State Committee for Cinematography ordered the work stopped; on 14 April the director wrote to Central Committee secretary Pyotr Demichev, who oversaw cinema.⁹ The screenplay had earlier been titled Antichrist; after repeated rejections Klimov abandoned that name for Agony.¹⁰

Filming resumed in 1973 under the new Goskino chief Filipp Ermash, the picture grew into two parts, shooting ended in 1974, and the finished version was delivered in 1975. It received a release permit on 27 May 1975, but was not admitted to distribution and in 1978 was returned to Klimov for reworking.² Censors accused the film of "idealizing" the last emperor and of misunderstanding historical trends.¹¹ A KGB memorandum held that the film distorted historical events, devoted excessive attention to the Tsar's family and Rasputin's intimate life, and concluded that releasing it at home or selling it abroad was inadvisable.¹²

The deadlock broke through party channels. A Culture Department note to the Politburo secretaries, recording Goskino's proposal for an additional edit and limited release, was agreed by secretaries including Mikhail Gorbachev and Konstantin Chernenko, and formalized as a Central Committee decision on 9 April 1981.⁹ The final cut was made in 1981, and the film was sold abroad, shown in France, the United States, and other Western countries.²

Release and reception

After its Venice festival showing in 1982, where it received a FIPRESCI prize, the film was offered for sale to Western countries, but it entered Soviet distribution only in June 1985, after Gorbachev came to power.¹^•² It drew 18.4 million Soviet viewers.¹ In 1985 it won the Grand Prix "Golden Eagle" at the second international festival of historical films in Rueil-Malmaison, France, and in 1994 Klimov received a diploma and cash prize at the first Moscow international film, television, and video market for the film that had gained the greatest recognition abroad.³

Versions differ in length. Mosfilm lists 143 minutes for the restored two-part edition,³ while English-language catalogs list 152 minutes,⁶ and a 104-minute cut circulated in the West under the title Agony: The Life and Death of Rasputin.¹³ Klimov later said that foreign distributors cut 45 to 60 minutes from the film in France and the United States, removing all the political scenes.¹⁴ Klimov himself called the film "half my life" and said he was not fully satisfied with the result.¹⁵

Legacy

The film's fate became a reference point in the history of Soviet censorship. Klimov, elected First Secretary of the Filmmakers' Union in May 1986 after the Fifth Congress unseated Lev Kulidzhanov, set up a "conflicts" commission to review films held by censors, and Agony was cited as a work that had lain "on the shelf" for ten years.¹⁶ Even after its 1985 release, the film was withheld from general screening in Kharkov for almost a year and shown only at closed screenings for regional officials.¹⁷ Klimov, born 9 July 1933 in Stalingrad and died 26 October 2003 in Moscow, made no film after the mid-1980s; his later features were Farewell (1981) and Come and See (1985).¹⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026