Best Soviet Film Since 'Girl from Leningrad'

Mashenka (1942)

Directed by Yuli Raizman

Lovely telegraph operator Masha Stepanova is a sanitary nurse. During a training alarm, she meets a taxi driver Alexei (Alyosha) Solovyov. He reads verses to a girl and invites her to the theater. But at the appointed time, Alyosha doesn't come, and Mashenka finds him, helps to recover. Young people fell in love with each other, but Alexei was too frivolous, and brings the girl a lot of sorrows and insults. Because of Alexei’s hobby for another girl, Masha breaks up with him. But she will be able to convey her faithful and true-hearted feeling through years of separation and the hardships of wartime, and when they meet again at the front of the Finnish War, Solovyov realizes what a gift of fate was meeting him with this girl.