Before the enemy: the kolkhoz farm

A Soviet kolkhoznik on a collective farm in Ukraine watches, in the autumn of 1941, the front line draw nearer to his village, where the German army is advancing. He has spent his life on this kolkhoz and knows every silo, every head of livestock entrusted to the collective.

Forcibly collectivized in the 1930s, often at the cost of famine, he keeps a bitter memory of the regime yet also dreads the occupier. His family depends on this year's harvest, already gathered in or still standing.

On 3 July 1941, over the radio, Joseph Stalin proclaimed the policy of scorched earth: in any withdrawal, the enemy was to be left "not a single locomotive, not a single railway car, not a kilogram of grain, not a liter of fuel." Local authorities pass down the order to destroy crops and installations, to evacuate or slaughter the livestock, and to organize resistance behind the lines.

The Germans are a few days' march away. The kolkhoznik must decide the fate of his farm: burn the crops and buildings as the order demands, bury grain and spirit away animals to feed his own, or take the road east driving the collective herd.