Somewhere in the fields outside Moscow, in the summer of 1963, fifteen thousand Soviet Army soldiers put on Napoleonic-era uniforms, formed into squares and columns—and went off to die for show. They were commanded by real generals, the explosives were laid by real sappers, and it was all filmed by a man who was himself playing Pierre Bezukhov and periodically collapsing from exhaustion. This is the story of a film that was, all at once, a movie production, a military operation, and an act of state vanity.
In 1956, Hollywood director King Vidor released his War and Peace—with Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostova and Henry Fonda as Pierre. The film was expensive, beautiful, and, in the opinion of Soviet critics, utterly wide of Tolstoy’s mark. Hepburn was too fragile, Fonda too American, and Borodino looked like a skirmish in a park. But when Vidor’s picture was shown in Soviet cinemas in 1959, it drew 31.4 million viewers—a figure that probably made someone in the Ministry of Culture leadership twitch. Thirty-one million Soviet people watched Hollywood tell them about their own war.
The response was predictable for an era when the cultural Cold War was waged with the same seriousness as the nuclear arms race. The CPSU Central Committee and the Ministry of Culture, headed by Yekaterina Furtseva, decided: there had to be an answer. Soviet Tolstoy—on a Soviet screen, on a Soviet scale that would make Hollywood look like a school production. The adaptation was launched as a state project, with production approved on May 5, 1961. The original director was supposed to be Ivan Pyryev—a Mosfilm mastodon, a man with an administrative grip and a difficult temperament. But Pyryev left the project fairly quickly, and the burden fell on Sergei Bondarchuk, then forty years old, with acting fame behind him and one directorial feature, Fate of a Man. He was about to make the most ambitious film in Soviet cinema history while also playing its leading role.
Casting became a drama in its own right. Bondarchuk took the part of Pierre Bezukhov for himself—and it made sense: he was the right age, had the right presence, and, bluntly, a director standing in front of the camera himself saves time on explanations. But Prince Andrei was another story. Bondarchuk hesitated, considered candidates—and in the end the role went to Vyacheslav Tikhonov, not without pressure from Furtseva. The culture minister intervened actively in production in general: the film was too important to state prestige to be left entirely to the director’s discretion.
Natasha Rostova was played by Lyudmila Savelyeva—a 19-year-old ballerina from the Kirov Theatre with no film experience. The choice was risky and exact at the same time: ballet gave her the lightness Tolstoy had written into his heroine, while the absence of acting mannerisms made her presence on screen almost documentary. The role of Hélène Kuragina went to Irina Skobtseva—Bondarchuk’s wife, which prompted understandable gossip, but Skobtseva, with her cold beauty, was right where she belonged. The old Prince Bolkonsky was played by Anatoly Ktorov, an actor from the Moscow Art Theatre, whose performance became one of the film’s finest—a bilious, prickly, unbearable, and yet tragic old man.
Cinematography became a separate problem. The first cinematographer was V. Monakhov, then he was replaced by a pair—A. Shelenkov and Iolanda Chen. They shot 30–40 takes of every scene, seeking painterly perfection in every frame—and at some point, the conflict with Bondarchuk became unbearable. Both left. They were replaced by 31-year-old Anatoly Petritsky, and it is through his eyes that we ultimately see Borodino, the ball, and the burning of Moscow.
Now—to the reason this whole machine was set in motion. The Battle of Borodino. Filming began on August 1, 1963, and continued until October. For it, Defense Minister R. Ya. Malinovsky assigned Soviet Army units and brought in the General Staff. The military consultants were Generals V. V. Kurasov, M. M. Popov, P. A. Zhilin, M. Markovich, N. S. Oslikovsky—men who understood how large masses of people move across a battlefield because they had led divisions into battle themselves.
The figures, confirmed by production documents: 13,500 infantrymen and 1,500 cavalrymen—15,000 servicemen in total. That is an enormous crowd scene, comparable to the population of a small town. But in later retellings, it swelled to 120,000 extras—a number that migrates from article to article and that would be physically impossible to fit into a single frame. The confusion arises because different sources count differently: some add up participants in all the film’s battle scenes, some include civilian extras, some simply round up for effect. Fifteen thousand is impressive enough without exaggeration.
The soldiers did what they had been trained to do—just in a different era. They formed infantry squares, went into bayonet charges, fell on command. The cavalry rode in extended formation—fifteen hundred riders at once, and try organizing that without military discipline. The pyrotechnics unit worked with 23 tons of explosives, 40,000 liters of kerosene, 12,000 pyrotechnic charges, and 10,000 smoke grenades. On top of that, the frame featured 1,500 antique museum rifles—real ones, from storage, because props would have looked like props. I can’t shake the feeling that the museum workers handing over those rifles signed the paperwork with a mixture of horror and patriotic duty.
Bondarchuk and Petritsky were tackling a problem cinema had solved only a handful of times before them: how to show a battle so the viewer could see both its scale and feel its chaos. A panorama—and then a soldier’s face. Thousands of people in a field—and smoke flying into the lens. To do this, they assembled a whole arsenal of devices: rail-mounted dollies for horizontal camera movement, a 15-meter tower on a wheeled platform for high angles, and a cableway for aerial passes. No drones, no computer graphics—just metal, cables, and a cinematographer’s nerve.
They shot on Soviet 70-mm film stock made by the Shostka plant. The widescreen format gave stunning detail and depth, but the film was temperamental: defects, tears, inconsistent quality from batch to batch. Every shooting day with fifteen thousand people on set cost colossal money, and every ruined take was a small catastrophe. Petritsky, who was 31 years old when work began, endured the pressure that had broken his two predecessors.
Natasha Rostova’s ball scene was the other pole of that same perfectionism. It was filmed on a Mosfilm soundstage with more than 500 dancers. Four cameramen—on roller skates, carrying handheld cameras—glided among the dancers, creating the sensation that the camera itself was whirling in a waltz. It was a device from the cinéma vérité arsenal transplanted into a costume period, and it worked brilliantly. Special effects—optical compositing, matte painting, glass shots—were used too, but whenever possible Bondarchuk preferred reality. If you can put a real army on the field—put a real army on the field.
The episode of Moscow burning was filmed on October 6, 1966, near the village of Tryaevo in the Volokolamsk district—by then, production had already dragged on for more than five years. The shoot involved 6 cameras, 5 fire engines, Su aircraft and MiG-9s, and helicopters. Pyrotechnician V. A. Likhachev organized controlled fires on sets that burned for real—and burned only once, because there is no second take with a burning city. Every camera had to get its shot on the first try.
The total production lasted more than 6 years, from its approval in May 1961 to completion on October 25, 1966. The official budget came to 8,165,200 rubles, but that figure was accounting sleight of hand: it did not include the army’s free assistance, the equipment, locations, and transport provided. According to various Western estimates, the real cost ranged from 29 to 100 million dollars—a spread that says no one knows exactly what the film cost once you honestly count all the state resources poured into it. Over those years, Bondarchuk suffered several nervous breakdowns, worked himself to the bone, and clashed with cinematographers, officials, and his own health. The score was written by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov—a composer whose temperament matched the director’s, and their collaboration gave the film one of the finest scores in Soviet cinema.
The first and second parts reached Soviet theaters in 1966, after being screened out of competition at the Moscow International Film Festival in May 1965, where the film shared the Grand Prix. The first part drew 58.3 million viewers—a number that today seems like something out of fantasy, but Soviet distribution, with its thousands of cinemas and no competition from television, worked exactly that way. The third part, 1812—the one with Borodino—was shown in Cannes in April 1967, then released in Soviet theaters in the summer of that same year. The fourth part reached viewers in November 1967.
In 1968, the film was released in American theaters in a dubbed version through the distributor Walter Reade. And in April 1969, War and Peace received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film—the first Oscar for Soviet cinema in that category. The irony of the moment: a film conceived as an answer to Hollywood received the highest recognition from Hollywood itself. Its total reach was 250 million viewers in more than 80 countries—and that is perhaps the only figure in all the film’s statistics that no one disputes.
The question from which this all began—whether the production was the artistic feat of an obsessed director or a military operation dressed up as a film shoot—has no clean answer, and that is what makes it honest. Bondarchuk was obsessed—there is no disputing it. A man who plays the lead, directs a fifteen-thousand-strong crowd scene, collapses from exhaustion, and keeps filming is acting not on orders but under an inner pressure stronger than any order. But without Malinovsky’s order, there would have been no army on set. Without the Central Committee’s decision, there would have been no money. Without Furtseva—perhaps no Tikhonov as Andrei. The film exists at the intersection of personal mania and the state machine, and remove either element—nothing would have come of it.
It seems important to me that Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, for all its monumentality, is an uneven film. It contains scenes of staggering beauty and scenes where the grandiosity thickens into stillness. Natasha’s ball is a masterpiece of cinematic choreography. Borodino is a spectacle no one could replicate before CGI arrived. But the four-part structure sags, and Bondarchuk’s Pierre Bezukhov sometimes feels too heavy for Tolstoy’s eccentric. The film bears the weight of everything invested in it—and you can feel that weight.
The Soviet film industry never again repeated anything like it. Bondarchuk later made Waterloo (1970)—an international co-production with thousands of soldiers on the field once again—but that film flopped at the box office. The model itself, in which the state assigns an army to a film shoot, proved impossible to reproduce: it required a specific combination of political will, directorial madness, and a historical moment when Tolstoy on screen meant more to the country than a line item in the Defense Ministry budget. By the beginning of the seventies, that combination had fallen apart, and War and Peace remained the only film made like a battle—and won.