Vasily Shukshin's film Kalina Krasnaya is released in the USSR

Kalina Krasnaya ("The Red Snowball Tree") was written and directed by Vasily Shukshin, a writer, actor and film director known for stories about Russian village life. It reached Soviet cinemas in 1974.

Shukshin himself played the lead, Yegor Prokudin, a former prisoner trying to start an honest life after release. Lidia Fedoseyeva-Shukshina played Lyuba Baikalova, a kind village woman who takes him in and helps him begin again. Their story, set in the countryside, balanced tenderness with the weight of Prokudin's criminal past, which eventually catches up with him.

The film drew huge audiences across the Soviet Union and won praise for its honesty and emotional force. Shukshin died suddenly in October 1974, the same year, while working on another film, so Kalina Krasnaya came to be seen as his artistic testament. For Fedoseyeva-Shukshina, the role of Lyuba became one of the best-known of her career, and the film remains a fixture of Russian television and a reference point for Soviet cinema.