Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film

9 Fathers, Sons, and Brothers: Redeeming Patriarchal Authority in The Brigade

217 No one could or was allowed to attain the father’s perfection of power, which was the thing they had all sought. Thus the bitter feeling against the father which had incited to the deed could subside in the course of time, while the longing for him grew, and an ideal could arise having as a content the fullness of power and the freedom from restriction of the conquered primal father, as well as the willingness to subject themselves to him. The original democratic equality of each member of the tribe could no longer be retained on account of the interference of cultural changes; in consequence of which there arose a tendency to revive the old father ideal in the creation of gods through the veneration of those individuals who had distinguished themselves above the rest. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo Fathers or Brothers In Totem and Taboo Sigmund Freud offered a psychologized interpretation of the very origins of human society. After studying the myths and religious practices of “primitive” peoples, Freud reconstructed the foundation of human society in the narrative of an all-powerful primal father who restricts his sons’ access to the tribe’s women. Coming together as a “band of brothers,” the sons murder the father and assume leadership of the tribe. However, they cannot simply replace the father/autocrat; as a collective they now represent a different mode of social organization, or governance. As Freud comments: “Though the brothers had joined nine Fathers, Sons, and Brothers: Redeeming Patriarchal Authority in The Brigade Brian James Baer 218 · reconceiving filial bonds forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father, and in the fight of each against the other the new organization would have perished. For there was no longer any one stronger than all the rest who could have successfully assumed the role of the father” (917). While an individual son may aspire to the father’s absolute power, this band of brothers was forced to share governance and therefore to forge a new concept of rule, marked, in Freud’s phrase, by a “democratic equality” (921). Political theorists, too, contrast fraternity and patriarchy as “two opposing political orders” (Anderson 1999, 86). As Benedict Anderson put it in Imagined Communities, traditional empires and kingdoms are organized vertically in relation to a “high center,” and “its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens” (19). On the other hand, the modern nation-state, regardless of its actual governmental structure, “is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship” (7). In other words, although many modern nation -states, such as those that describe themselves as “national socialist,” are not organized on the basis of truly democratic institutions, they all imagine themselves through a rhetoric of equality and comradeship. The tension between the horizontal bonds of brotherhood and the vertical ties of patriarchal authority has always been especially acute in Russian society. On the one hand, Russian nationalists since the early nineteenth century have attempted to define Russia’s uniqueness in a natural fraternity, represented by, among other things, the peasant mir, or commune, and the Orthodox concept of sobornost’, or shared leadership , a rejection of the supreme authority of the Holy Father in Rome. Though such “attempts to find in the ‘Russian soul’ an innate striving toward communality . . . may often represent little more than romantic flights from present reality,” James Billington notes that the harshness of Russia’s geography and climate made communal action a real “practical necessity” for much of Russia’s history (1966, 19). On the other hand, Russian society—from the level of the peasant family to that of government rule—has been characterized for centuries by vertical partriarchal hierarchies in which absolute authority is centralized very often in a single male authority figure. The coexistence of these horizontal and vertical models of masculine authority reached a level of absurd incoherence during the Stalinist period, when the absolute authority of “Comrade Stalin” fathers, sons, and brothers · 219 made a grotesque mockery of the Soviet rhetoric of equality among citizens in a classless society, and the Russian chauvinism of the Soviet state belied the official rhetoric of the brotherhood of Soviet peoples. The collapse of the vertical authority of the Soviet system and its rhetoric of fraternity initiated a profound...