Revisiting Stalin

LLooking at today’s Russian cinema – and art in general – it is hard to believe that 45 years have passed since Stalin’s death. He could have died yesterday, or at any rate, five years ago. Maybe it is the uncertainty of today’s Russia that makes art shy away from the present. In any case, the number of contemporary works seeking either to condemn Stalinism or seek refuge in the spiritual values of those times (sometimes both) grows year by year. In the late 1980s, there was The Cold Summer of 1953. In the early 1990s, there was Balthasar’s Feast. In 1993, there was Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. This year, there was another Oscar nominee – The Thief.

In The Thief, director Pavel Chukhrai (son of acclaimed Soviet war-movie director Grigory Chukhrai, see RL February 1997) tries to explain the psychology of Russia’s present generation of leaders by examining the bleak scenery of their childhoods in the years immediately following the Second World War. Chukhrai neither romanticizes the past nor overtly condemns it. But he is obviously fascinated by it.

The events of the story are simple. In 1952, six-year old Sanka (Misha Filippchuk) and his mother Katya (Yekaterina Rednikova) meet Tolyan (Vladimir Mashkov), a handsome stranger in uniform, while travelling across Russia by train. After seducing Katya, Tolyan (a macho nickname for Anatoly) “adopts” the two of them, and the group becomes a strange kind of family. They move to a provincial town and rent a room in a communal apartment, gaining trust through Tolyan’s fake military uniform, for, at that time, any man in uniform was seen as a hero. Tolyan befriends the apartment residents, invites them to the circus, then robs the apartment and flees. This scenario is repeated several times in different provincial towns until “the thief” is finally arrested – ironically not for stealing but for assaulting an officer – and sent off to prison camp.

The post-war years were tough times and the film reflects this. The young Sanka is left to his own devices and receives little in the way of parental love and attention. His mother ignores him or sends him outside to play. Tolyan threatens to throw him out the window.

Playing on his own, Sanka imagines his dead father whom he has never seen. But Sanka is so desperate for a flesh-and-blood father that, little by little, he forms a relationship with the arbitrary and often cruel Tolyan. Over the course of the film, the thief replaces Sanka’s real father and gives the boy lessons on being a man. In one scene, a wide-eyed Sanka traces a leopard tattoo on Tolyan’s back.

“What’s this for?” the boy asks.

“To scare them. If someone is scared, that means you’re on top and he listens.”

“And if someone doesn’t listen?”

“Crush him.”

In scenes like this, Sanka learns that a man should never make excuses, never take up a knife unless he means to use it and never, ever express pain. He takes these lessons to heart and admires the thief, while at the same time hating him for dealing out insults, threats and humiliation.

The unseen presence of Stalin dominates the film, just as Tolyan dominates the family. Stalin’s portrait hangs on the wall, he is toasted at every dinner and Tolyan has Stalin’s head tattooed on his chest. When Sanka asks about this tattoo, Tolyan tells the gullible youngster: “That’s my Dad.” This announcement hints at another level to the film – one on which the authoritarian thief stands for an authoritarian leader, who like him is alternately loved and feared. Speaking about the film, director Pavel Chukhrai said: “The main thing is to understand what the words ‘father,’ ‘strength’ and ‘vozhd’ meant to that generation. They were very close ... After the 20th Party Congress, many people experienced a yearning for the Boss and regretted that they had trampled their idol. This happened with every person and with society too.”

The image of a tough, uncompromising man – a muzhik – is something that today’s Russians relate to as well. And actor Vladimir Mashkov, who plays the thief, has turned into Russia’s newest sex symbol (though Mashkov himself, whether coyly or sincerely, has rejected this title). With his swarthy good looks and trademark sneer, Mashkov is a Russian Antonio Banderas, without the latter’s self-deprecating humor. He is probably best known for his performances in Limita, the story of a sexy, thirtysomething computer hacker who robs banks, and for Evenings Near Moscow, in which he plays a cynical, two-timing gigolo. Mashkov also has numerous directing credits and recently staged a production of The Threepenny Opera. His performance in The Thief won him an award for best actor at last year’s Kinoshok film festival, which honored films from former Soviet republics.

The young Misha Filippchuk is making waves as well. The third-grader recently travelled to Los Angeles with Chukhrai in preparation for the Academy Awards, where he was given Hollywood’s Young Artists Award. Already a seasoned actor, Misha has appeared in such films as Sympathy Seeker (Sirota Kazanskaya), directed, incidentally, by Vladimir Mashkov, and We Are Your Children, Moscow!

Besides the Oscar nomination, The Thief picked up a special prize at the Venice Film Festival last September, as well as a Golden Globe nomination. According to NTV-Profit, which produced the video, The Thief has sold 300,000 videocassettes in Russia and earned $100,000, placing it among the 30 best-selling Russian and foreign videos.

But for all the acclaim and success it has enjoyed, the film is not without problems. The characters are inexplicably one-dimensional. We learn almost nothing about the thief beyond his tough exterior, except that he is content with the life he leads. Katya’s character is particularly flat, and her death toward the end of the film does not produce much of an emotional response. The film’s greatest success lies in its depiction of Sanka’s development and in its couleur locale. The scenes in the communal apartments are well-drawn, and the cinematography is gripping, conveying the desolation and austerity that gripped Russia during the post-war years.

Chukhrai himself was dissatisfied with the film’s ending and reworked it several times. For the Academy Awards, he offered the jury a brand-new conclusion aimed more toward an American audience. In the version shown in Russia, Sanka, now a middle-aged field commander in some unnamed war zone and still searching for his elusive father figure, sees Tolyan in the figure of a dying drunk and rushes to his side, only to have the drunkard die in his arms. Distraught, Sanka lifts the man’s shirt in search of the familiar tattoo. But the man is not Tolyan.

Later, on a train heading away from the war, Sanka removes his own shirt to reveal an exact copy of Tolyan’s leopard tattoo – showing that he has become everything that he admired and hated in his “father:” a military man (a real one this time) who dominates and takes orders from no one. One imagines that he would be the same kind of father Tolyan was – without the redeeming charm. The lesson is that you have to look to the child to know the man, and to the past to know the present. Which is how Chukhrai and many other Russian artists attempt to tell the story of today’s Russia.  

The Thief is to be released for distribution in the US by the time this article is in print. Check your local video stores for subtitled versions. For a Russian version without subtitles, call St. Petersburg Publishing House at 800-531-1037.