Visions of War

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II this May, we look back at how Soviet and Russian cinema has depicted the war.

In 1949, film director Mikhail Chiaureli made The Fall of Berlin («Падение Берлина»). Its main idea was simple: the Soviet Union had won the war with Germany thanks to Comrade Stalin’s sage leadership. The entire Soviet Union felt love and admiration for the Father of all Peoples, and it was specifically this emotion (rather than, let’s say, love for the Motherland) that inspired them to great feats at the front.

The plot goes like this. One Soviet citizen with particular feelings of veneration for Stalin was Alexei Ivanov, a steelworker. Before the war, he had had the spectacular honor of speaking personally with the Vozhd, and even confided in him about his feelings for a girl named Natasha. With a heart full of love for Natasha and adoration for Stalin, Alexei sets out for the front, reaches Berlin, and winds up hoisting the Victory Banner atop the Reichstag, along with fellow soldiers Yegorov and Kantaria. Finally, amid the jubilation of victory, he encounters his beloved, who has been liberated from German captivity. Things only get better when Stalin emerges from a plane that has landed right on Reichstag Square. Nothing of the sort actually happened, of course, but the director had to show the epiphany of a new deity and the resulting jubilation of ordinary people.

This film, which was typical for the time, depicted Soviet people going off to battle to give their lives “For the Motherland, for Stalin” without the slightest hesitation. What was also typical was the way in which, soon after the war, the countless disabled veterans begging on the streets of major cities were hurried out of view and taken to remote locations. “Sanatoriums” for disabled veterans were set up across Russia’s North, on the island of Valaam and in other remote locations. The sight of limbless beggars forced out onto the street by unwelcoming families did not fit with the image of Stalin’s Great Victory. They had to be hidden as far away as possible.*

Time passed and Stalin died. With the arrival of the Thaw, the icy artificiality of the arts began to melt away. The inhuman and cold Stalinist grand style became a thing of the past. Ordinary people with their everyday problems, joys, and sorrows began to appear in books and on movie screens – a true breath of fresh air. Suddenly it turned out that the war had been more than a triumphant military pageant inspired by the greatness of Stalin, and that the need to sacrifice your life was no easy and exultant matter. A new reality was being portrayed in which the war had left in its wake miserable, lonely people struggling to overcome their traumatic experiences and distressing memories.

In 1958, one of the Thaw’s most brilliant directors, Marlen Khutsiev, made Two Fyodors («Два Федора»), starring a still young Vasily Shukshin, who was just beginning his career as an actor and writer. He played “big Fyodor,” thrown together by the war and fate with the orphan “little Fyodor,” whom the war had left utterly alone in the world.

Four years later, young Andrei Tarkovsky would also make a movie about the war, Ivan’s Childhood («Иваново детство»), about a 12-year-old boy left psychologically wounded by the horrors that had unfolded around him. Children and war is a topic that had never found its way into the weighty solemnity of the triumphant Stalinist narrative.

The year after Two Fyodors came out, Grigory Chukhrai made Ballad of a Soldier («Баллада о солдате»), which took place during the war but included only one scene depicting actual military operations, an episode fraught with tension and high symbolism and featuring no large-scale troop movements. In it, a German tank pursues a single soldier, and their duel is cast as a struggle between a solitary human being and a soulless instrument of war.

The rest of the movie tells the story of the soldier, Alyosha Skvortsov (played by the lyric and handsome Vladimir Ivashov), and his journey home on leave. After countless hurdles and difficulties, he finally reaches his native village. And no sooner has he embraced the mother he had longed to see than he is again sent back to the front, never to return.

Rather than a cause for jubilation, war is a tragedy.  Rather than the triumph of a Vozhd, it is millions of upended lives. This simple thought beautifully permeated the overall atmosphere of the Thaw and the worldviews of the “children of the twentieth century.” This new generation, which believed that “the whole truth” had now been told and that a new life had arrived, much better and purer than the old one, turned out to be naive, poetic, and fragile.

In another film by Khutsiev, Ilyich’s Gate («Застава Ильича»), released only after being heavily censored, cut, and renamed I Am Twenty («Мне 20 лет»), the protagonist has an ongoing internal conversation with his father, who died at the front. His mother had told him about how she was able to save her children by scavenging for unharvested potatoes in a field. Later, at a party dominated by wealthy and arrogant snobs, he attempts to explain what he regards as serious and comes up with a list emblematic of the early sixties: “I take 1937, the war, The International, and potatoes seriously.” When one of the guests mockingly asks how he feels about beets, the young woman who accompanied the protagonist to the party immediately slaps the rude jokester in the face.

Around the same time, authors writing in a genre that would come to be known as “lieutenant prose” began being published: Grigory, Baklanov, Vasil Bykov, and Yuri Bondarev, among others. These writers, rather than taking a sweeping view of the valor of war and using it as an occasion to praise Comrade Stalin and his generals, focused on war’s darker side – “the truth of the trenches” – and individual experience.

Alas, the hopes of the younger generation were never realized. Ten years passed and Gennady Shpalikov, who had written the screenplay for Ilyich’s Gate, took his own life, unable to withstand the pressures of the Brezhnev era. Society took a step backwards: newfound freedoms were retracted, criticisms of Stalin were no longer welcome, and dissidents faced intensified persecution. Not surprisingly, depictions of the war changed as well.

In 1965, May 9 – Victory Day – became a national holiday. And in 1968 Yury Ozerov began filming his long (almost eight hours), bombastic, and triumphant cinematic epic, Liberation («Освобождение»), where the war is again cast less as a human tragedy than as a monumental choreographing of troop movements. Of course, there were the privates and junior officers, the young women falling in love with a soldier and then losing him, but all this was mere background scenery for grandiose military operations, the action at Headquarters, and for Buhuti Zakariadze to deliver his performance as Stalin – a simultaneously majestic yet simple and “correct” Stalin. Around the same time, a lot of memoirs by generals began to come out that all hewed to the same narrative that still flourishes in Russia today: Stalin won the war. What would we ever have done without him?

To be fair, Soviet filmmakers did shoot some marvelous films during this dismal period. Trial on the Road («Проверка на дорогах») was the first film made by the still-young Alexei German, who lived to become legendary. Here, the war is completely different. There are partisans (Soviet guerilla fighters in occupied areas) who do not speak in lofty prose, do not venerate Comrade Stalin, but do put up a fierce fight. There is also – oh, horrors! – Alexander Lazarev, who had been captured by the Germans and even collaborated with them, but now, in 1942, has come back to the Soviet side.

Even today, the topic of collaborators is so emotionally charged it is hard to discuss rationally. Was everyone who went over to the Germans a traitor? What are we to make of those who did so but returned to their own at the first opportunity? Or whose only other option was death, whether by being shot outright by the Germans or ultimately starving in a labor camp (keep in mind that, for Stalin, anyone captured was a traitor by definition). This torturously difficult and unbelievably beautifully made film, with amazing actors, was of course banned by the censors. Thank goodness it was not destroyed, and during perestroika audiences were finally able to see it.

Another point about Trial on the Road: its very essence was an antidote to the vile myth that Stalin won the war. When in the final scene Ivan Lokotkov, the former commander of a partisan detachment, now fighting in the regular Soviet Army (played by the brilliant Rolan Bykov), helps some other soldiers push a cannon, it becomes perfectly clear who won the war: ordinary soldiers who were ready to go to any length to save the country. It was also clear that this film would be utterly incomprehensible for Soviet officialdom and strike them as blatantly “anti-Soviet.”

Another amazing war film shot around the same time, rather than focusing on Red Army advances or the storming of Berlin, explored complex moral dilemmas. Larisa Shepitko based the screenplay of her film The Ascent («Восхождение») on a book by an author who was about as truthful about the war as a writer could be back then. Vasil Bykov (or Bykau in his native Belarusan) wrote extensively about the war, especially about the partisan movement. This was an understandable choice, both because the partisan movement was extremely widespread in Belarus, on the Soviet Union’s western frontier, and because this subject matter gave Bykov an opportunity to explore not just the war, but the hard choices it imposed and the ways that people dealt with these choices.

The sugar-coated image of partisans emerging from the forest to the cheering of local peasants always eager to help, and always willing to die for the sake of those same peasants, abounded in fiction, classrooms, and film. In fact, the picture was not so simple. On one hand, the heroism and nobility of those who went off into the forests to fight the Nazis is beyond doubt. But on the other hand, the local peasants did not feel unmitigated joy at the sight of these guerrilla fighters.

The peasants, of course, helped them – both out of patriotism and fear of retribution. But after the partisans came out of the woods to conduct an operation against the Germans, they would retreat back to their bases in the dense forests and swamps of Belarus, while the locals were left to bear the full brunt of the Germans’ retaliatory wrath. The huge number of Belarusan villages burned down by German punitive attacks is not evidence that the Nazis were any crueler in Belarus than they were in other areas – they were brutal everywhere. But it was in Belarus that partisans provoked the greatest number of retaliatory expeditions. Furthermore, the precariousness of the partisans’ existence compelled them to make some grim choices. Should they take along Jews fleeing the city, even if they didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other? (Usually, the answer was no.) And what should they do about local families with children and grandparents who would hinder their mobility? (They were left in their villages to the mercy of the Germans.)

Many of these hard choices are represented in Bykov’s books. His story The Ordeal («Сотников»), on which The Ascent is based, was published in 1970, albeit in heavily censored form. It addressed the circumstances under which some partisans wound up collaborating. Even raising the question of collaboration by partisans was considered extremely inappropriate – of course partisans were fearless and would never consider working with the politsei! In The Ordeal, however, one partisan who falls into German hands, a man of unimpressive physical stature, proves his mental fortitude and refuses to collaborate, while his more agile and stronger comrade at the last minute agrees to work with the Germans.

Shepitko understood this story’s great potential and made a magnificent film, replete with Christian symbolism and moral tension. The Ascent was also almost banned, as much due to its religious symbolism as its bold approach to the war. It was saved from the censors by First Secretary of the Belarusan Communist Party’s Central Committee, Pyotr Masherov, who himself fought as a partisan during the war and was moved by the lofty truths the film conveyed.

Perestroika brought a great variety of cinematic approaches to the war. At the very start of perestroika, Larisa Shepitko’s husband Elem Klimov, perhaps to honor the memory of his wife, who died after an auto accident, made a film about the war in Belarus: the spine-chilling Come and See («Иди и смотри»), about a punitive operation and the death of countless civilians.

In a further loosening of the template, in 2002 Alexander Rogozhkin came out with The Cuckoo («Кукушка»), a somewhat fanciful, mystical, and even comical film about two soldiers, one Finnish and one Soviet, who hide out from the fighting in the hut of a Sami woman named Anni. None of the three understands each other’s language.

The idea of finding a funny side to the war has not been easily accepted. The humor in The Cuckoo was not the humor of lighthearted war movies in which pilots sail off into the sky with a cheerful song, but a strange, tragic, and eerie humor that brought the surrealism of war to the surface.

The comedy Holiday («Праздник»), released in 2019 (but only on the YouTube channel of director Alexei Krasovsky), provoked outrage. In terms of genre, the film might be categorized as a satirical situation comedy. In this case, the situation is a wealthy and well-fed family trying to hide their wealth from the poor and hungry. Furthermore, not all of the characters are what they pretend to be. None of this might have been a problem had the backdrop not been the Siege of Leningrad. The father of the family at the story’s center has earned his family rare privileges by fulfilling an important government assignment, so they are living comfortably amid poverty and famine.

The furor that greeted Krasovsky’s film is hardly surprising. The full truth about the war has yet to be told, and society is only ready to accept certain visions of it. Not only is society not yet ready, the general trend is in the wrong direction. In today’s increasingly militaristic and xenophobic Russia, the Great War, won through the unimaginable efforts of ordinary people acting in concert with allies, is being transformed into a propagandistic bludgeon.

Panfilov’s 28 Men («28 панфиловцев»), shot in 2016 with state support, is a good example of the new trend. The legend of 28 soldiers who died stopping a massive onslaught of German tanks from reaching Moscow arose while the war was still being fought.

Long ago, in the 1960s, it was proven that the entire story was dreamt up by a journalist assigned to describe “the feat of Soviet soldiers” and that it was not 28 men who fought at the Dubosekovo railroad junction, but many hundreds, and that far from all of the 28 men considered heroes died. The legend, nevertheless, lives on.

Recently, the controversy reached new heights when the respected historian and then head of the State Archive, Sergei Mironenko, published documents demonstrating that the Panfilov story was pure fantasy. Mironenko fell victim to the “righteous wrath” of Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky and was forced out of his post. The film Panfilov’s 28 Men, of course, stuck to the official version of the legend and was lavishly praised by the minister.

It seems that the truth still must face hard times, and yet many great films and books about the war remain with us.