Foto Egor Belsky

I`d like to tell you about a new performance «The Great Friendship» in The Buryat Opera and Ballet Theater. It’s not only a love story, but also a dramatic play.

«The Great Friendship» was created in 1947 after the Great Patriotic War. The action took place one hundred years ago in the Caucasus, when Soviet authority was spreading in the country.

Cossack people who lived in the Caucasus were fighting against the Soviet authority. Because of that they wanted to kill Commissar. And one day they got to know that young Caucasian man Murtas had met Cossack woman Galina and had fallen in love with her.

Traditions in that time didn’t allow them to be together.

And Cossack people offered him a deal: in order to marry Galina, he would have to kill Commissar. Of course, Murtas agreed to that. But then the first Commissar saved him from shame and he couldn’t complete the deal and kill him. On the contrary, he saved him from the bullet by covering him with his body. Murtas died, but Soviet authority gave freedom to many people in the Caucasus.

After «The Great friendship» was shown to the public, government leader Stalin banned it and nobody understood why he had decided so.

And finally after so many years a theater director Vladimir Rylov staged this play on the big stage in the republic Buryatia for the first time.