COME AND SEE [russIAn: IDI I SMOTRI] 61
to kill her from the outset. Other circumstances surrounding the rape and murder
of Phan Thi Mao are also fictionalized. The assault on the riverside supply depot
is entirely fictional and quite absurd; an attack on a key enemy position by a four-
man squad, ushered in by he li cop ter airstrikes, is tactically preposterous. As the
movie depicts, Mao was stabbed and then shot, but in the bushes off a hillside trail
as she tried to crawl away, not from a cinematically spectacular bridge. Storeby’s
squad mates did not try to kill him afterwards, nor did he assert his manliness by
fending them off; they were not allowed access to him after allegations were filed.
Fi nally the film omits the fact that Storeby faced intense harassment by defense
attorneys during the courts- martial, and all the sentences handed down were dras-
tically reduced on appeal.
COME AND SEE [RUSSIAN: IDI I SMOTRI] (1985)
Synopsis
Come and See is a Soviet war drama directed by Elem Klimov, with a screenplay by
Klimov and Ales Adamovich, starring Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova. Set
during the German occupation of Byelorus sia during the Second World War, the
film follows a traumatized young boy as he witnesses a series of Nazi atrocities.
Background
As a teenager Ales Adamovich (1927–1994) fought with Belarusian partisans against
the Nazis in World War II. Some 25 years after the war ended, Adamovich and
fellow writers Yanka Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik visited the sites of many of the
628 Belarusian villages that had been razed by the Nazis after the German defeat
at Sta lin grad in 1943. Gathering firsthand accounts by survivors, the trio published
a compilation of those stories entitled Ya iz Pylayushchey Derevni [I Am from the Burn-
ing Village] (1972). Adamovich also published Khatyn (1971), a novel based on the
same topic. Commissioned by Goskino USSR, the Soviet state cinema agency, to
make a film that would commemorate the “ Great Victory” of 1945, Rus sian film-
maker Elem Klimov (1933–2003) collaborated with Ales Adamovich to write a
screenplay about the Nazi genocide in Belorus sia (present- day Belarus), based pri-
marily on Adamovich’s novel. Pyotr Masherov, First Secretary of the Communist
Party of Belarus, himself a partisan veteran, was highly supportive of Klimov’s film.
However, just before filming was slated to begin in Minsk in 1977, state censors
led by Goskino Vice President Boris Pavlenok and film critic Dal Orlov demanded
drastic screenplay revisions that Klimov refused to make. In the face of official
intransigence Klimov suffered a ner vous breakdown but persisted. After seven years
of intensive lobbying, Soviet cinema bureaucrats fi nally capitulated and authorized
production in 1984. The only change that Klimov had to make was to alter the
title, from “Kill Hitler” to Come and See, a phrase derived from the New Testament
Revelation of St. John the Divine 6:1: “And I saw when the Lamb opened one of
the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts [of the
Apocalypse] saying, Come and see.”