Myth-making and Myth-taking: Lost Ideals and the War in Contemporary Russian Cinema

Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika had an enormous impact on the production and release of films dealing with Soviet history. The Stalinist totalitarianism of the 1930s in particular became the subject of many works in film, theatre and literature. In the late 1980s this concern was reflected in the form of an attempt to restore in the people's memory those pages of Soviet history which had been blotted out. In artistic terms this was expressed as an appeal to remember the Purges in a similar way to the Great Patriotic War (as World War Two is referred to in Russian history)-"remember, do not forget. " In the 1990s it coincided with the active rewriting of the history of a state which had collapsed: documents had been released, and history was being discussed openly, explicitly, and subjectively. All the films that deal with the Stalin period reflect at the same time a certain degree of distrust in the political system and its reliance on the individual sacrifice. Many films from the Thaw onwards have looked at the Great Patriotic War-with a clear goal in the fight against fascism, and a clear result in its defeat-in terms of the loss of individual lives rather than victory. However, the soldiers in the Great Patriotic War-from Alesha Skvortsov of Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier, Chukhrai, 1959) to Nadezhda Petrukhina of Kryl'ia (Wings, Shepitko, 1966)-put their task over personal ambitions. During the 1930s people were at the mercy of the whims of the Leader. In the 1990s soldiers are dispatched to war zones, aware of neither reason nor aim. As time moved on, the films about the 1930s expose increasingly the idealised and glorified values of the Soviet past as false myths. In a number of ways the films about the Stalin era demythologise the past and thus prepare the ground for a different treatment on screen of contemporary history, the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. In dealing with events of recent Soviet and Russian history, film-makers refrain from constructing myths about the fatherland through the medium of cinema. THE SOVIET MYTH DECONSTRUCTED Tengiz Abuladze's Pokaianie/Monanieba (Repentance, 1984) became a cult film of the 1980s. It assesses the history of the 1930s in a highly allegorical form, while it offers an utterly pessimistic perspective on the relationship between history and the individual: Keti is decorating cakes at the beginning and the end of the film. Her childhood, which she remembers during the film, and her present occupation, are the only realities the film offers. Her resistance to the totalitarian leader Aravidze, who is responsible for the arrest and murder of her parents, only features in her imagination (she exhumes Aravidze's body, is put on trial, and eventually forgives Aravidze's grandson who shows a sense of responsibility), while she lacks the civic courage to take real action. Keti is passive, a victim of a collective history in which individual courage has led to destruction (her father's defence of his artistic freedom leads to his death). Keti's freedom and her potential for activity are crippled by the force of the past. In the end, the only morality that remains intact lies in the church, not in the state (the judicial system is reduced to a farce). The investigation of the hitherto unknown details of the terrible years of the purges had, in fact, begun with Aleksei German's Moi drug Ivan Lapshin (My Friend Ivan Lapshin, 1983). Lapshin is a police officer who fights a local gang of criminals and eventually shoots the leader of the gang. He carries out his duties with honesty and conviction, believing in the ideals of socialism. Lapshin is a realistic portrayal of ordinary everyday life, without any propaganda or illusions about reality. Like Repentance, it takes the form of a recollection based on the personal memory of a narrator figure. The film, set in 1934/35, presents this as the last moment in history when it was still possible genuinely to believe in the ideals of the Revolution and their implementation in Soviet Russia. …