← Back to Directory
Bastards
Movie

Bastards

2006 • Unknown

Woke Score
2
out of 10

Plot

A "Hitlerjugend" kind of story, set in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, based on a fictitious story from the eponymous book by Vladimir Kunin.

Overall Series Review

Bastards (2006), also known as Svolochi, is a Soviet-era World War II drama concerning a group of juvenile delinquents. The plot follows 14-15 year old convicts who are recruited and trained by the NKVD for a top-secret, high-risk sabotage mission against German forces in the Carpathian mountains. They are treated as expendable assets by the state. The film, which was highly controversial upon its release in Russia, presents a bleak vision of the Soviet system’s amorality and corruption, showing the state using its own youth as human shields. The narrative is a purely secular, military-crime story focused on the boys' struggle for survival and their ambiguous moral transformation under extreme duress. The drama is primarily an indictment of the communist system’s cruelty and its disregard for individual human value.

Categorical Breakdown

Identity Politics2/10

The narrative focuses on the universal exploitation of juvenile delinquents by a brutal state, regardless of any intersectional characteristic beyond their status as "criminals." The central conflict revolves around the boys' moral choice to find heroism in a system that views them as disposable. Characters are judged on their ability to survive the training and complete a suicide mission. No plot elements rely on vilifying "whiteness" or forced diversity; the cast is historically authentic to the Soviet WWII setting.

Oikophobia3/10

The film is a harsh critique of the totalitarian Soviet regime and its NKVD, depicting the Soviet state as fundamentally corrupt for treating its own youth as expendable. The moral center of the film involves the choice to find heroism despite a corrupt national system. Per the prompt's definition, this criticism is directed at a totalitarian communist system, which is philosophically antithetical to core Western institutions, and therefore does not constitute Western civilizational self-hatred.

Feminism1/10

The story centers on a male-dominated environment: a secret boot camp training 14-15 year old male convicts as saboteurs for a WWII mission. The plot revolves around male bonding, conflict, and survival in a military and criminal setting. There are no prominent female characters, "Girl Boss" tropes, emasculation of males, or anti-natalist messages present in the central conflict.

LGBTQ+1/10

The film is a WWII military drama about juvenile criminals and their male instructors in 1943 Soviet Union. The plot is strictly concerned with a high-stakes military mission, crime, and survival. The narrative adheres to a normative structure based on its historical and military setting. There is no presence of alternative sexualities, deconstruction of the nuclear family, or lecturing on gender ideology.

Anti-Theism4/10

The movie operates within a bleak moral framework where the totalitarian state (the officially atheist Soviet Union) is the source of cruelty and moral compromise, suggesting a spiritual vacuum. While the narrative is secular and the characters are forced to operate in a world where morality is subjective to state power, the film's primary hostility is directed at the political and military authority, not at traditional religion (specifically Christianity) as the root of evil.