SOVIET MILK

SOVIET MILK is an incredibly powerful, fascinating story of a family trying to survive the Soviet occupation of Latvia. In many subtle and overt ways, all dramatic, the movie shows how each person is in bondage to the international socialist or communist state.

The movie opens with the family starting to have a meal when soldiers stop their truck on the road outside their front yard and start cutting down two small Christmas tree looking pine trees, even though communists are not supposed to celebrate Christmas. When the father runs out to stop the soldiers, they beat him ruthlessly and throw him into their military truck. The mother, with her baby and a suitcase, flees the house in deep snow to get to her mother’s house in Riga.

Twelve years later, the baby girl, called Astra, finds some anatomy books and spends hours studying them. At school, she’s asked to sing songs to the Soviet Union, which praise every part of Soviet society, ending with “everything is great.”

Twelve years later, her parents take her to a dance. She now has a stepfather who’s the brother of the father taken away. She doesn’t want to go to the dance, but when she does, she dances with a young boy who takes her off to an empty apartment to have an affair. She is pregnant from the affair and doesn’t want a baby because of her career in medicine and doesn’t want an abortion because she’s seen too many of them.

When the baby, Norah, is born, Astra disappears for a few days. She doesn’t want anything to do with the baby, so her mother takes care of the baby and tells the hospital she needs ration cards for the Soviet milk kitchen.

Twelve years later, when Astra is doing great work as a doctor, her superior tells her she’s recommended her for a research facility in Leningrad. At one point, he asks her do you believe in God, because she’ll have to go to the secret police to be investigated or the job. She demurs, “I haven’t met him.”

In Leningrad, Astra rents a room and is invited after her log trip to tea by her landlord and is introduced to a neighbor or names Serafina. Serafina is an outspoken Christian who wants a baby, which startles Astra.

When she’s assigned to the job at the laboratory, she’s doing research on artificial insemination. Her division of the medial collective gets together to have drinks to celebrate her joining them. On her way home, she sees Serafina and tells her that she can artificially inseminate her with her husband’s sperm. Serafina exclaims a prayer in Jesus Christ’s Name.

Serafina gets pregnant, but one day comes into Astra’s apartment having been beaten by her husband. Astra goes to the next apartment and beats the husband a constant drunk with a hammer. She’s removed from her job and sent to work at a small village. She asks her daughter, Norah, to go with her. Stuck in this dead end village, removed from her research, Astra in her depression gets addicted to alcohol and medical drugs. Norah tries to help Astra but wants to return to Riga to got to university. He mother has told her that Latvia used to be free, which contradicts the communist propaganda Norah’s been taught.

In Riga, Norah’s step-grandfather and her grandmother tell her about free Latvia and show her pictures of Latvia before the Soviet occupation. One of her teachers takes her class to an old broken down church and tells them about free Latvia. One of the boys reports the teacher, so they interrogate and get confessions from each student that the teacher took them to the church, which they to send the teacher into the Gulag prison.

Norah has to rush back for her mother. Her mother is being taken care of by Jessie, who is an actual hermaphrodite. Norah has to revive her mother, who’s unconscious. In effect, the Soviet Union is killing Latvia.

So, the questions are: Will Latvia ever regain its freedom. Will the people survive? And, will faith triumph?

SOVIET MILK is episodic, but it’s a fascinating portrait of how communism suffocates and destroys people. The communists are opposed to anybody’s freedom throughout the movie. They destroy Astra’s brilliant career just as they took off her father for trying to stand up to protect his farm and career just as they took the teacher for trying to teach the students that Latvia was once free. It has more naturalistic scenes than most Hollywood movies, including the in the dark fornication scene of the teenagers, the birth of Norah and the scenes of drug addiction. That said, none of these scenes are salacious or tempting in any way. They are a testimony against illicit sex, excessive drinking, excessive drugs, excessive smoking, and every aspect of communism from birth to the grave. So, for older audiences who want to see where collectivism, central control and socialism lead, SOVIET MILK is an excellent, worthwhile movie.