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

1 The Myth of the “Great Family” in Marlen Khutsiev’s Lenin’s Guard and Mark Osep’ian’s Three Days of Viktor Chernyshev

29 In his recent monograph, Telling October, Frederick Corney contends that the institutionalization of official Soviet memory of the Revolution played an essential part in establishing Soviet political mythology (Corney 11). Since communal commemoration of this official historical narrative was one of Stalinist cinema’s central functions, the major genres of that cinema became the historical and historico-revolutionary film. At the core of these films was the ritual of paying due respect to the Revolution or the events that, according to the canonical account of not only Russian but also world history, led to the October Revolution as a key episode of world-historical significance. In the course of such screen narratives, the father-leader passed on to his sons the sacred knowledge to be preserved by them, the positive heroes of socialist realism. Spectators were presumed to identify with the filial characters and therefore to participate in commemorating the official story of origins. Khrushchev-era de-Stalinization, known as the Thaw, revived Soviet utopianism by releasing both repressed recollections of Stalinist-era crimes and the martyrs who had preserved the memories and spirit of the Leninist Revolution. Reacting to decades of Stalinist rhetoric, writers and filmmakers of the Thaw presented these martyrs as the generation of true fathers (not their false Stalinist counterparts), whom characters of the Thaw generation never saw because they either had died during the Great Patriotic War—the official Soviet name for World War II—or disappeared in Stalinist camps. Thaw cinema, according to its makers, restored the ideal values associated with the name of the lost father. one The Myth of the “Great Family” in Marlen Khutsiev’s Lenin’s Guard and Mark Osep’ian’s Three Days of Viktor Chernyshev Alexander Prokhorov 30 · Thaw, Stagnation, Perestroika Ideologically these father figures often evoked the image of Lenin either in their name (for instance, Ul’ian in Ispytatel’nyi srok [The Probationary Period, Gerasimov 1960]) or in their biographical experience (such as the fateful encounter of the narrator’s father with Lenin in Kommunist [Communist, Raizman 1957]). Lack of the father and the quest for the ideal associated with his name are a recurring motif in Thaw films. Fathers are absent usually because they perished during the Great Patriotic War, and their heroic deaths in combat partially explain their sons’ troubled childhood, criminal behavior, and resultant prison experience (as in Nochnoi pa­ trul’ [Night Patrol, Sukhobokov 1957] or Delo pestrykh [The Case of Many Colors, Dostal’ 1958]). Unable to address directly the theme of Stalinist camps, where their own fathers had disappeared, many Thaw cinema filmmakers and scriptwriters invoked it indirectly by connecting the prison, crime, or war themes with the theme of fatherlessness.1 Few pictures made the sons’ actual imprisonment the result of their crimes. For example, in Delo Ruminatseva [Rumianstev’s Case, Kheifits 1955], the fatherless protagonist ends up in jail because he is set up by his criminal boss (the false father), and the investigator (another false father) is a bureaucrat and is indifferent. To my knowledge, the only picture that dared to link directly the imprisonment of the father figure with Stalinist policies, namely, Stalin’s imprisonment of Soviet POWs, was Grigorii Chukhrai’s Chistoe nebo [Clear Sky 1961]. Marlen Khutsiev and Feliks Mironer, whose fathers died in the Stalinist purges, avoided a frontal attack on Stalin and his crimes, and preferred instead to focus on the new generation: characters orphaned by the Great Patriotic War, now restoring the memory and values of their late fathers. Perhaps by refusing to deal with the crime at the heart of the nation’s historical and personal trauma Khutsiev was able to preserve the utopian élan of his picture, essential for establishing the continuity between the genera-­ tion of fathers and the generation of sons. Though the father died during the war, he saved the state created by Lenin, and now the sons will complete Lenin’s project by finishing the construction of the communist utopia. By commemorating the heroic paternal past, the sons ensure the continuity of the Great Family myth in post-Stalinist society. In her discussion of the Soviet novel, Katerina Clark contends that the myth The Myth of the “great Family” · 31 of the Great Family constitutes the fundamental kinship metaphor of Stalinist culture.2 This family not only includes the paternal ideological mentor and the son/positive hero, but it also provides the main ideological...