Just Assassins: The Culture of Terrorism in Russia

Narrating Terror: The Face and Place of Violence in Valery Todorovsky’s My Stepbrother Frankenstein

 Narrating Terror:The Face and Place of Violence in Valery Todorovsky’s My Stepbrother Frankenstein Brian James Baer The media certainly does not create the terrorist, but like a skilful make-up artist, can assuredly make of him either a Saint or a Frankenstein’s monster. —h. h. a. cooper Valery Todorovsky has made a crucial film for our time. Future generations will see it and understand the reasons behind the crisis of our regulated and comfortable civilization—the catastrophes that befell mankind after 9/11. —valery kichin For those acquainted with modern military history, the phrase coined by the Bush administration,“global war on terror,”has a distinctly oxymoronic ring, insofar as war and terror for most of the twentieth century formed a mutually defining opposition, delineating very real differences in terms of the conduct of operations and the treatment of combatants. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Beslan atrocity of September 2004, the Russian government, as Stephen Hutchings shows in his essay in this volume, has followed the United States’ lead in redefining the insurgents in Chechnya as terrorists in a global jihad. This redefinition has helped to disassociate the violence from any “legitimate” political aspirations of the Chechen people and reinscribe it within the “illegitimate” context of global Islamic extremism.1 The distinction between war and terrorism is one that governments  brian james baer have long sought to enforce in order to maintain what Max Weber described as the state’s “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.” However , as Alex Houen points out, “there is still no internationally accepted definition of terrorism,”and Joseph Zuleika and William A. Douglass note the “play with meaning and confusion of contexts inherent in the word ‘terrorism .’”2 The refusal of terrorists to respect the “proper” place (designated war zones) and the “proper” face of violence (lawful combatants) challenges the best efforts of governments to define and discursively to contain such violence.Therefore,Houen maintains,“producing a narrative or theory that outlines an etiology of terrorism and accounts for its effects is obviously a form of counter-terror itself.”3 In this volume, Birgit Beumers analyzes what we might call, following Houen, counterterrorist narratives that arose in the aftermath of the terrorist attack during a performance of the popular musical Nord-Ost at a Moscow theater in 2002. By recounting the tragedy in terms of clear-cut good and evil and by abjuring commentary on the government’s deadly handling of the affair (approximately 130 civilians died as a result of a botched attempt by Russian Special Forces to free the hostages), these narratives embed terror, Beumers asserts,“in structures of play that seemingly remove its unpredictability and make it appear controlled.” Valery Todorovsky’s 2004 film,My Stepbrother Frankenstein (Moi svodnyi brat Frankenshtein),however, stands out starkly against the backdrop of such counterterrorist narratives by eschewing black-and-white moral categories and by dramatizing the utter failure of traditional narratives to contain terrorist violence. Situating the problem of terror within the context of a family drama, the film dramatizes the effects of terrorism, described by Houen as “blowing a hole in the very fabric of everydayness.”4 The film tells the story of a middle-class Moscow intelligentsia family that is plunged into a world of paranoia, panic, and death by the sudden appearance of a physically and mentally impaired Chechen war veteran,Pavlik Zakharov (played by Daniil Spivakovsky),who claims to be the illegitimate son of the father,Yulik (Leonid Yarmolnik). The wife, Rita (Elena Yakovleva), a real estate agent, initially takes pity on the young man but grows increasingly frightened of him and the threat he poses to her two children, Egor (Artem Shalimov) and Anya (Marianna Ilina). Yulik, on the other hand, at first wants nothing to do with Pavlik,but later comes to appreciate his traditional masculine qualities of courage, loyalty, and sacrifice. The film ends when Pavlik, who has grown increasingly paranoid throughout the course of the film,“abducts”the family with the purpose of protecting them from the “spooks” (dukhi) he sees all around him. Each of the characters that comes into contact with Pavlik in the course of the film applies a traditional narrative to make sense narrating terror  of him and his experiences,but in every case the narrative proves inadequate to contain Pavlik’s violence and paranoia...