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

6. Mirror of War

The Soviet Union as a shtrafbat: Tverdokhlebov (Aleksei Serebriakov) at the end of the series. 115 In May 1985, the Soviet film critic Lev Anninskii published a seminal article in Iskusstvo kino. Appearing just two months after Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary, Anninskii’s “Quiet Explosions [Tikhie vzryvy],” promised, as the subtitle suggested, to be a series of “polemical notes.”1 Published to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Victory Day, Anninskii asserted that the war against Nazi Germany had now passed into memory, particularly because of Soviet cinematic representations . What appears on screen, he wrote, “is not what was, but what is remembered [his emphasis].” Because cinema had fostered this memory work, turning the war into a myth that could be used by the Soviet state, Anninskii urged artists to break away from previous cinematic explorations of the war and to “sing their own songs about the war.” What was needed, according to Anninskii, was a series of “silent explosions” that could shake up the memories produced onscreen. Anninskii got his wish, but only in part, for the Gorbachev era brought a series of loud cultural eruptions. The call for “silent explosions” seemed quaint by December 1991, when a new era dawned. Nearly twenty years later, Anninskii published an equally important article in the same journal. Titled “The Shtrafbat as a Mirror of the Great Patriotic,” Anninskii posited that the 2004 blockbuster television series about a Soviet penal battalion (shtrafbat) used as cannon fodder in the war represented a new apex in wartime cinematic remembrances. Mirror of War S I X 116 The Price of War According to Anninskii, the sixty years’ worth of accumulated opinions about the Great Patriotic War amount to “some kind of circular repentance in answer to the eternal Russian question Who is to blame?” From the perspective of 2004, the war had been waged on two fronts, for “it seems that the army fought not just against German invaders, but against its own supreme commander and against its organizational structures.” He concluded: “The point at which our sins, our repentance, and our misfortunes cross—our roles in the theater of war—is the penal battalion.”2 Anninskii’suseof “theater”andhisinvocationof memorybothpoint tothepowerfulwaysthatculturesof remembrance,asAlonConfinohas argued, can shape a society and not just reflect the social world around it.3 Anninskii is one of many critics who view the past as presented on screen as a performance, or a “theater of memory.”4 The remembrances offered up by Russian filmmakers since 2002 have disturbed the mythic narrative of what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. In this explosive role, movies offer a performance of the past and past memories. As a result, the films of the zero years have helped to reaffirm the war as an important event while simultaneously changing the way the war is viewed in Russian society. Shtrafbat, an eleven-part series that began in September 2004 on the channel “Russia [Rossiia]” provides a clear case of how memories and myths of World War II have been reflected and distorted, yet also shaped contemporary remembrance of the war. The series dominated the ratings; generated a great deal of discussions in print, on television, and on chatrooms; and led to a “memory boom” of sorts, in which survivors of Stalin’s penal battalions began to grant interviews and publish memoirs. Nikolai Dostal´’s television series, in other words, took a taboo subject and turned it into an act of cultural recall. Before 2004, the existence of penal battalions was hidden away, only mentioned peripherally in banned books such as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate or in Vladimir Vysotskii’s 1964 song “Penal Battalions [Shtrafnye batalony].” After the series aired, one could buy copies of the DVD at kiosks both legal and illegal, purchase Eduard Volodarskii ’s novel that he turned into the screenplay, read about the penal battalions in the most important Russian newspapers, watch debates Mirror of War 117 on television about the significance of these battalions (as well as the series), or even buy books at any number of stores written by former battalion members such as Aleksandr Pyl´tsyn or new books that promised the “truth” about penal battalions. Because of a blockbuster television series, suddenly discussions of penal battalions appeared everywhere and Russians began to look into the mirror of war to judge what it reflected back at them. Theater...