Back in the USSR: A curious piece of cinema history

The Cranes are Flying is a 1975 Soviet film that people talked about back in that era, a glimpse, one might have hoped, of art and creativity in the USSR in those bleak days and a little bit of a bridge from East to West - a love story, no less. Today on the one hand it's still surprisingly good, a plain old melodrama - young couple separated when the young man volunteers to go off to war, and we watch him in battle as the girlfriend struggle with wartime poverty and air raids - hey, wait a minute, doesn't this remind me of some Russian novel? Anyway, the story does have a few unexpected twists - the girlfriend, who hasn't heard from soldier (Boris)  ends up marrying hiscousin, who has an exemption from service and musical aspirations, though her motive for this is never clearly explained - there's a hint that they might, gasp!, have had sex. Based on the story line, the heavy handed characterization, the clumsy propaganda scenes (even in wartime, the Russians are surprisingly comfortable, living in ample apartments with plenty of food), and the archaic editing (montages lifted from Eisenstein, for example) this looks like a film not from 1975 set in 1945 but like a film from 1925. But some things the Russians do really well, crowd scenes especially: seeing the soldiers go off to war, and the triumphant return of the Soviet army after the defeat of the fascists are both great sequences, bustling with life and w/ emotion. The scene in the impromptu Siberian wartime nightclub, as the piano player croons with a stub of a cigarette dangling in Bogartian manner, is a great moment of decadence, and, on the opposite extreme, the jubilant animation of the young lovers before the war, with Boris's balletic ascent of the winding staircase, is also a beautiful shot sequence. Doubtful that this was a realistic vision of Soviet life at any time, but it's about as close as they ever got to making a film that wasn't completely agit-prop and that had some potential appeal to a wider audience - a curious piece of cinema history.