Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism

Part 2. The Price of War

111 A2004Moscowsurveyaboutthesourcesof prideincontemporaryRussiafoundthat “thecountry’smostsignificantachievement”remainedthe victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. Second on the list was the postwar construction, followed by Russia’s cultural heritage.1 That the victory placed first in the poll should surprise no one. A host of excellent studies have appeared in the two decades since communism ’s collapse that explore how the Soviet victory over Nazi Germanyfunctionedasapowerfulmyth .2 Themythchangedovertimeand, while state driven, was not just a univocal top-down program. Film, as Denise Youngblood’s recent work has clarified, played a major role in the ongoing construction of the Great Patriotic War myth.3 The Soviet Victory was therefore not just “movie-made” by the state; individual filmmakers and individual filmgoers all had parts in shaping how the war got remembered.4 By2005,televisionandfeature-lengthfilmsabouttheGreatPatriotic Warhadexplodedontoscreens.TheGreatPatrioticWaryetagainserved asthebasisforRussianpatrioticrenewal,particularlyduringthesixtieth anniversary of the victory. That year also saw the release of Fedor Bondarchuk ’s Afghan War blockbuster and buddy movie Ninth Company. The Afghan War had largely been a source of forgetting, not remembering , since it ended. A few documentaries appeared in the late 1980s that focused on the war’s impact on individual families and a couple PA R T T W O The Price of War 112 Blockbuster History in the New Russia of feature films appeared in the early 1990s. The Afghan War, as Denise Youngblood has written, “seemed a dead topic in Russian cinema” until Bondarchuk’s blockbuster.5 The success of it and of numerous films about the Great Patriotic War suggested that past wars could serve the cause of present patriotic sentiment and national renewal. Cinematic wars filled theaters and made money; they also offered myths of renewal that sought to inspire audiences to return to the perceived collective heroism displayed in past wars. To assess the return of cinematic war narratives, Iskusstvo kino held a 2005 roundtable titled “The Price of War [Tsena voiny].” Motivated by the sixtieth anniversary celebrations, the roundtable contained some surprising statements. Daniil Dondurei, the editor, set the tone by noting the number of deaths the Soviet Union incurred and by calling into question the ultimate price the war brought—namely, an officially sanctioned victory myth that sustained the Soviet system. Leonid Radzikhovskii agreed, positing that even compared to the Russian soldiers of 1914, Soviet soldiers lacked “a higher, political patriotism” to the state. Instead,RadzikhovskiitheorizedthatSovietsoldierseitherrespondedto 1941 with a “pleasant [priatnyi]” patriotism (that is, no love for the Soviet state but a recognition that the Nazi system was far worse and therefore theirlandshouldbedefended)oran“unpleasant”patriotism(thatis,out of fearbecauseof whattheirbrutalstatewoulddotothemafterward).As he wrote, Soviet soldiers mostly had “no faith in Pushkin and the Kazan´ Mother of God but fear in Beria and the Gulag.”6 In this view, the price of war was steep, for the Victory should be understood as part of a fiftyyearCivilWarinRussiathatbeganin1905andendedin1953withStalin ’s death.7 TheGreatPatrioticWar,therefore,wasanotherinstanceinwhich Russia experienced “the psychology of war and death.” Anatolii Vishnevskii took issue with some of Dondurei’s and Radzikhovskii ’s views, but agreed that of the “two myths” that twentiethcentury Russia had developed, the war myth had triumphed over the revolutionary one. All agreed that the “Great Patriotic War” warranted the first adjective because the cost in human lives, including those of Soviet Jews who had perished in the Holocaust, had been so high. All agreed that the Stalinist state had used patriotism to mask the war’s human costs and to unify the population around a new myth. In the end, 113 The Price of War Vishnevskii declared, “The slightly retouched picture of the glorious past can flatter our national pride. However, the exaggeration of our past successes makes it impossible to take the right lessons from it and therefore can lead to future defeat.”8 New cinematic narratives of war provided another layer to the notion of the “Russia that we lost.” The myth of victory proved malleable in the new Russia. Victory still mattered, but it was not a victory for the Soviet state as much as a victory for the Russian nation. The state had harmed its citizens, but they had nonetheless responded patriotically to the crises of 1941–45. This patriotic script could also be applied to other wars,makingtimelessdefenseof themotherlandtheessenceof Russianness and a usable virtue for post-Soviet citizens searching for meaning. The price of war in the USSR had been high, yet the recognition of this price had changed tremendously. ...