Would have loved to see a scene where Pasha comes for Lara ...
... grabs a gun and, well, blows his brains out.
"It's the system, Lara. People will be different after the Revolution."
They changed how Pasha dies in the film. In the book, he does in fact blow his brains out, after a long talk with Yuri where he learns that Lara still loves him.However, in the book, Lara has already left the country and Pasha knows the Soviets are going to execute him, so he shoots himself.
shareI know the movie was long enough but that would have been a scene to see!
"It's the system, Lara. People will be different after the Revolution."
In the film, Pasha is caught by the red guards as he tries to get back to Lara, and is captured just 5 miles away. It is because he is dead that Lara is no longer useful to the communists, and is likely to be executed herself, thus Victor persuades Yuri that she must leave for her own safety.
shareIs it ever explained why the Reds are trying to kill Pasha/Strelnikov?
shareIs it ever explained why the Reds are trying to kill Pasha/Strelnikov?
I don't remember if the novel explained this (it probably did, because it went into a lot of the politics much more deeply than the movie did), but a possible explanation in the film is hinted at in the scene where Pasha is handing out leaflets and is stopped by police, whereupon Lara comes up and says, "He's my brother!" and they let him go. She remonstrates with him about stirring up trouble and asks if he's a Bolshevik, to which he responds with disdain,"No. The Bolsheviks don't like me. And I don't like them. They don't know right from wrong." Lara giggles at this, but it is significant: Pasha is an idealist and a revolutionary, but not a Bolshevik.
During the war, and afterward, the revolutionaries were divided among several groups, Bolsheviks being one (with Lenin their leader in exile, along with others who became famous later - Trotsky, for instance), while there were a number of other groups, most notably the Mensheviks. The Mensheviks were divided as well, some (post-war) basically supporting the Bolsheviks, others not. Pasha, as Strelnikov, was shown fighting for the Red side (as opposed to the Whites)in the Russian Civil War, but if he was known to be not a Bolshevik, and even anti-Bolshevik, he would have been targeted for execution when the Bolsheviks finally assumed nearly complete power, beginning after the assassination of the Tsar in July 1918 but not complete until 1922. Assuming Yuri was a prisoner of the partisans for about 2 years, his and Lara's departure from Varykino and Pasha's death would have taken place sometime around 1920-21.
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