Most of the movie takes place inside a jail. While the movie is not full of OZ-like gratuitous violence and over-the-top drama, the director is very graphic and manages to impart to the viewer the grinding despair and suffering the boy endures.

I see this movie as a commentary on the hardships endured by people living under Soviet rule. It is as interesting for what it shows as for the fact that it was allowed to be made at all while the Soviet Union was still intact. That the movie is set in the Khrushchev era likely made easier to make.

If you do a internet search on this movie, you'll find two main groups of references to it: those pertaining to its educational value as a product of an insight into the Soviet Russia (it is included in several university courses), and, oddly enough, those pertaining to the "extensive" male nudity it.

As to the latter, there really isn't extensive male nudity in this film. As you might expect with any realistic movie that takes place in a prison, there is some male nudity, but it is hardly "extensive." So I wouldn't buy the film for that purpose.

As to the former, after watching this film and another somewhat similar film about a boy imprisoned in Soviet Russia titled "Freedom is Paradise," I believe I have some sense of the stoic attitude toward authority that many Soviet people had. And I think I finally have some idea why people that I have known that grew up under the Soviet system continue to distrust the U.S. government even after living here for 15 years or more.

"Lessons at the End of Spring" is worth watching if you are interested in what life in the Soviet Union was like.