General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Dawns Here Are Quiet (А зори здесь тихие)

The Dawns Here Are Quiet (А зори здесь тихие, romanized A zori zdes tikhie) is a 1972 Soviet two-part war drama directed by Stanislav Rostotsky at Gorky Studio, based on Boris Vasilyev's 1969 novella of the same name. It follows five young women anti-aircraft gunners and their commander, Foreman Vaskov, as they fight a German sabotage detachment in the Karelian backwoods in 1941.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Production	Gorky Studio (Central Studio for Children's and Youth Films), 1972; screenplay by Vasilyev and Rostotsky; cinematography by Vyacheslav Shumsky; music by Kirill Molchanov³^•⁴
Cast	Andrei Martynov as Foreman Vaskov; Elena Drapeko, Ekaterina Markova, Olga Ostroumova, Irina Shevchuk, and Irina Dolganova as the five gunners³
Soviet release	World premiere 27 August 1972; about 66 million Soviet viewers⁵
Honors	Memorial prize at the Venice Film Festival 1972; Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film 1973; first prize at the All-Union Film Festival in Alma-Ata 1973; best film of 1972 in the Soviet Screen poll; USSR State Prize 1975³^•⁶
Later versions	A Russia–China television production (2005) and a Russian feature remake by Renat Davletyarov (2015)⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The action is set in Karelia in 1941. Five young anti-aircraft gunners, some of them not yet twenty, and their commander, Foreman Vaskov, discover that a German sabotage detachment has landed in their sector. The enemy has cut communications, so the news must be carried to headquarters in person, and the small detachment is cut off from its own forces. The Germans are trying to penetrate deeper into the Soviet rear toward strategic targets, and Vaskov and his five soldiers enter an unequal fight against sixteen heavily armed saboteurs.²

The film marks time in two visual registers: the wartime scenes are shot in black and white, while prewar and postwar material, including memories, appears in color, with the recollections treated in a conventionally romantic style.³^•⁹

From novella to film

The author arrived at his central device while working on the story: he replaced the male soldiers with young women, and the book immediately acquired its distinctive character.¹⁰ The title also changed: before publication, on his editor's advice, Vasilyev replaced the working title with «А зори здесь тихие...».¹⁰

According to the author, the plot rests on a real wartime episode he read about in a small notice on the back page of Izvestia. Seven soldiers, serving after being wounded at a station on the Petrozavodsk–Murmansk railway, prevented a German sabotage group from blowing up the line; only the sergeant survived, firing his machine gun while wounded until reinforcements arrived, and he was awarded the Medal "For Battle Merit" only after the war.¹¹

Reception of the book was broadly favorable but divided. Boris Polevoy, the editor-in-chief of Yunost, read the manuscript, made small corrections, and signed it for publication at once. Critics such as Lev Anninsky argued that the novella's emotional message mattered more than the realism of individual details, while some writer-veterans, including Yevgeny Nosov and Vladimir Bushin, accused Vasilyev of distorting front-line reality.¹⁰

Production

Rostotsky had a personal reason for the project: he said he made the film in memory of a frontline nurse who carried him, wounded, from the battlefield.³^•¹² He decided to cast only debutantes in the roles of the gunners and screened about 2,000 candidates. On hearing the script at the auditions, the young actor eventually chosen as Vaskov was moved to tears, which may have influenced the director's choice of an unusually young performer for the part.¹³

Filming took place in Karelia and in a Mosfilm pavilion; the Karelian landscape was chosen over the originally planned Moscow suburbs because it suited the novella's setting better. To look convincing, the actresses underwent basic military training, learned to handle an anti-aircraft gun, and carried several bricks in their rucksacks during shooting.³^•¹²^•¹³ After the difficult shoot, the film was kept from Soviet screens for three months before its 1972 premiere.¹³

The composer Kirill Molchanov wrote the score, including the "Tourists' Song" heard over the closing color sequence, in which tourists rest on the very spot where Vaskov had marched his German prisoners. After the film's success Molchanov composed an opera on the same subject, premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1973, with vocal parts for all of Vasilyev's characters.¹⁴

Reception and awards

The film immediately became one of the leaders of Soviet distribution and was named the best film of 1972 in the Soviet Screen readers' poll.³^•⁶ It received a memorial prize at the 1972 Venice International Film Festival, first prize at the Sixth All-Union Film Festival in Alma-Ata in 1973, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1973.³^•⁶^•¹³ In 1975 Rostotsky, Vasilyev, cinematographer Vyacheslav Shumsky, and actor Andrei Martynov received the USSR State Prize for the film; the filmmakers had earlier been awarded the Lenin Komsomol Prize in 1974.¹³^•¹⁵

Contemporary Soviet criticism was not uniformly admiring. One reviewer who praised the film's humanity and truthful characters objected that it was harmed by "a straightforward, openly didactic frame" linking the wartime story to the tourism of today's youth.¹⁶

Legacy

In the Soviet period the film was included among those recommended for school viewing, and in 2002 a poll named it the most popular film about the Great Patriotic War.³ The novella itself entered the Russian school curriculum.¹⁰

The story has been adapted repeatedly. A Russia–China co-production directed by Mao Weining appeared in 2005.⁷ In 2015 Renat Davletyarov directed a new Russian feature version; a comparative study of the English-language translations of the 1972 and 2015 films notes that, although its makers did not call it a remake, the 2015 film is an almost exact copy of the original's plot.⁸ The 1972 film remains a standard reference point in Russian-language discussions of war cinema and appears on recommended-viewing lists for film students alongside the 2015 version.¹⁷

References

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