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

4 The Fathers’ War through the Sons’ Lens

89 Venerating World War II Tengiz Abuladze’s film Pokaianie [Repentance 1984] marked the beginning of perestroika and glasnost’. It suggested how society should deal with its criminal past for the sake of the future: acknowledge, repent, and renounce. The Son throwing the Father-tyrant’s corpse off a cliff symbolized liberation from the repressive power of Soviet patriarchal ideology. It seemed inevitable during the perestroika years and the early 1990s that the collapse of the communist regime would also end numerous propagandistic myths of Soviet history. Various articles, TV programs, books, and documentary films revealed terrifying pages of the bloody history of the USSR, including some rather inglorious facts and hidden secrets about the major Soviet myth—the Great Patriotic War. In the early 2000s, however, owing to high oil prices and fast economic recovery, Russia started to revive its former superpower political ambitions, and demonstrated disturbing signs of a gradual restoration of patriarchal ideology, vividly illustrated by, for example, the Kremlin’s control of the media. The new Russian masterminds do not try to restore communist ideals; rather, they strive to create a new unifying national idea, and they clearly realize the importance of the heroic past as a basis for a new patriotic doctrine. The attempts to revisit World War II history critically, which were welcomed during the 1990s, now are perceived almost as a Russophobe heresy. Whereas virtually no films about World War II appeared for almost a decade after the Soviet Union disintegrated, the first six years four The Fathers’ War through the Sons’ Lens Tatiana SmorodinskayA 90 · war in the post-soviet dialogue with paternity of the new century have witnessed a deluge of war films, including miniand multi-series TV productions. Some of them continue to explore, with integrity and openness, complex and painful truths about the war, at odds with Soviet mythology, but the majority of film directors use the history of World War II as a source of stories for action and adventure films. They include some exposé features for the purpose of extra plot complications, but make no effort to uncover historical truth, which appears to be uncalled for by both authorities and the general public. This essay examines contemporary cinema’s treatment of World War II by the generation of “sons,” and compares it with the Soviet screen depiction by the generation of “fathers” so as to identify the discrepancies, as well as intersections, between the two. Passionate renunciation of the Soviet past after the fall of communism took place, unfortunately, against the backdrop of an economic crisis and painful market reforms. Rapid transition from the status of a “world superpower” to that of a Third World country caused social depression and political confusion among Russians. It became clear that Russia’s disoriented society, deprived of its ideological foundations, needed to unite around some new idea(s) and reconcile with its past. Sons, who first rejected their Fathers, started to search for them in an effort to restore the interrupted succession of generations. The theme of fatherlessness taken up by countless films during the 1990s was impossible to ignore.1 Often part of the plot was a desperate search for a lost father or an alternative paternal figure.2 And if sons happened to find fathers, they accepted them regardless of past sins, faults, and mistakes. Taking into account the cultural, ideological, religious, and historical significance of the Father mythology in Russia’s worldview, the desire to find a “lost” father and reconstruct the interrupted succession of generations became an increasingly important social and political task for a new Russian statehood. Sons realized the importance of the father’s blessing, which Peter Blos, in his book Son and Father: Before and beyond the Oedipus Complex, calls “that protective magical spell” (12). Sons in Search of Fathers: The 1990s Aleksei German’s film Khrustalev, mashinu! [Khrustalev, My Car! 1998] is not only a gruesome portrayal of the atmosphere during the last days The fathers’ war through the sons’ lens · 91 of Stalin’s rule, but also shows a son’s indirect homage to his father, a famous brain surgeon, general, and war veteran. Constructed as a phantasmagoric recollection of the past through the prism of a child’s capricious memory, sporadic episodes and dialogues, and real and imagined scenes, it has at the center of that horrifying nightmare the son’s admiration for his father. The teenage son...