Contemporary Russian ideologists hearken to Lenin’s famous saying,
“Cinema is our most important art.”
The Federal Security Service (the FSB, successor to the KGB) has established a prize for the best work of art depicting Russia’s intelligence agencies. Television shows, films, documentaries, fiction and even musical compositions, art and sculpture are eligible. The competition covers any work of art created between 2004 and 2006. The winners will be announced in December.
To be considered, works should be patriotic, and quite possibly the jury will judge how cleverly and unobtrusively the agency’s ideology, patriotism and operations are portrayed. During Soviet times, such projects in support of the State Ideology were conducted by the entire government. Now a single law enforcement agency has taken on this role.
But even before the official announcement of this FSB Prize, the country was already producing films whose ideology and themes ought to have been pleasing to Russia’s security forces. A review of some of these projects may smoke out the eventual winner.
To Serve and Protect
The films Night Watch (Nochnoy Dozor, 2004) and Day Watch (Dnevnoy Dozor, 2006) are based on novels by the popular Russian fantasy writer, Sergei Lukyanenko. Their production was financed by ORT, the main government-controlled television channel. In Russia, Night Watch beat box-office records set by Lord of the Rings, released in Russia around the same time. Filmed for just $4 million, Night Watch took in $9 million in its first week. Day Watch, released on New Year’s Day this year, broke previous single-day box office records with $2.1 million in receipts.
But these dry facts alone don’t show the whole picture. Lukyanenko’s novels center on a struggle between the forces of Darkness (vampires, wizards) and Light (sorcerers) for the body and soul of man, while restrained by a centuries-old truce. Each side operates its own special service to monitor whether the other side is complying with the truce, on the one hand verifying that not too much human blood is drunk, and on the other that the fight against evil stays within certain bounds. This is how the leaders of the dark and light forces ensure the balance between good and evil.
Both sides claim to care deeply about people (the forces of darkness insist that they are fighting for freedom of choice) – but in reality neither seems to care about human beings. The author himself has said in interviews that the Forces of Light and Darkness are not the forces of good and evil, but merely higher beings sorting things out between themselves, and to avoid troubling ordinary people, they do this in the invisible Gloom. In the process, people are constantly being sacrificed.
Before the movies, Lukyanenko was neither altogether obscure nor particularly well-known as a writer. He was but an idol of the technical intelligentsia (Russia’s main science fiction demographic), on-line fiction fans, and some upper-middle class readers. He was discovered and promoted by Boris Strugatsky, the top science fiction writer of the former Soviet Union, who predicted Lukyanenko’s great future.
After release of the films, Lukyanenko’s books were published in huge print runs. The writer became a pop culture star and a regular guest on talk shows.
But that’s beside the point. The point is people’s reaction. People of every age and every background started going Watch-crazy. Lukyanenko fan clubs cropped up all over the country – The Darks and The Lights, Night Watches and Day Watches. Online personality tests sprouted to help people determine whether they belong to the Light or the Dark side. An online Watch computer game appeared. Recently, on the banks of the Moscow River in the Russian capital, the Lights and the Darks got together and engaged in peaceful merrymaking to celebrate the first anniversary of the game’s release. Lord only knows what these fans do in real life. Nobody seems to be actually drinking human blood. But nowadays it’s not uncommon for two young people in the metro to say, instead of a good-bye, “May the Light be with you” (Da, budet s toboy svet). Or the Dark.
Sergei Lukyanenko said that both Light and Dark have their own measure of the Truth. Accordingly, devotees of Light and Darkness (who are referred to as Others – Iniye – in the Watch books and movies) are more or less evenly divided. But no one wants to be an ordinary human being anymore (see box, right).
Perhaps the secret war Lukyanenko depicts, vampires and mysticism aside, somehow captures the real ideology behind the very existence of the security services. After all, it is important to keep straight who can be called Light and who Dark. But the Lights are of course more in the right. The author has been asked many times for his opinion on this, and he says that the security services cannot work with absolutely clean hands. There is no right side and wrong side – there’s us and them, and he prefers the Others of the Light.
Lukyanenko, meanwhile, does not deny that he has many friends in the Russian security services, and he insists that his rumored membership in the pro-Kremlin Unified Russia party had nothing to do with the movies’ generous state support. “I am not a member of Unified Russia,” Lukyanenko told Russian Life. “I also have no plans to get involved in politics. And that had nothing to do with the financing of the movies or the promotion of the movies.”
When asked if he liked the film versions of his books, Lukyanenko said, “My answer would be closer to ‘yes’ than ‘no.’ Despite a lot of changes to the plot, the main idea was left intact. And the movie was wonderful for increasing the popularity of the books – how can I not like that?”
As to whether the film is ideological or not, his reply was straightforward. “The film was no more and no less ideological than Lord of the Rings or The Chronicles of Narnia,” Lukyanenko said. “And everything I wanted to say about that has been said in the books and in the film.”
Still, the Watch filmmakers acknowledge that the government did commission a “new Russian fantasy.” Director Timur Bekmambetov has said more than once how easy it was to work on a project that had been commissioned by the government and had already been fully conceived by the time he was hired to carry it forward.
Critics have not feared raising political issues, from the skeptical (“Why, in advertising for the film, after the slogan, ‘As long as there are still those who defend the light, hope lives on,’ do we suddenly see an emblem on the screen that looks a lot like the emblem of the Russian FSB?”) to the serious: “Why has an idea that is being sown today by the security services – the end justifies the means – and which is so eloquently expressed in the movie, so resonated with the public?” The Center for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg studied the problem and concluded that, in the fantasy genre in other countries light is always good and dark is always evil. This is not true of Russian fantasy. All of the Russian continuations of Tolkien, for example, one way or another, sided with the forces of darkness, explaining the association between light and goodness in terms of its victory on the ideological front.
In Russian fantasy, the intelligence agencies are always among the main characters. And the genre developed in parallel with a growth in the public fascination with everything associated with the “power institutions.” The charisma of the security forces comes from the decline in centralized power during the 1990s. So both the books and the films were surprisingly timely, and served the State’s objectives nicely, at least insofar as they were defined by those in power at the top of Russian intelligence.
Meanwhile, it is worth noting that the Watch series will soon made into a trilogy, adding the film based on the third novel – Gloom Watch, which is to be produced in English by a joint Russian-Hollywood film team.
Imperial Patriotism
The State Counselor (Statsky Sovetnik, 2005), produced by Nikita Mikhalkov, Russia’s most prominent director and a favorite in the corridors of imperial power, is the film version of Boris Akunin’s book of the same name. The plot centers around the pursuit of a secret terrorist organization at the end of the 19th century. The terrorists have been murdering top officials of the secret police. Erast Fandorin (Oleg Menshikov), a man in charge of the case and hero of Akunin’s many popular mystery novels, investigates the murders to find out eventually that the murders and terrorist acts are orchestrated by a highly-placed official in the secret police, Pozharsky (Nikita Mikhalkov), who is seeking to advance his own career by removing competition and creating a fear that he can exploit.
Philip Yankovsky, son of the Russian cult actor Oleg Yankovsky, is listed as the film’s director. But the film was made at Studio TriTe, which belongs to Mikhalkov. And it was Mikhalkov who did the talking at all the press conferences.
True, he was also the film’s producer. And, as a producer, he changed the script (written by Akunin) plenty.
In Akunin’s book, Fandorin is the protagonist, but in the film Pozharsky-Mikhalkov has a more commanding presence. The book also explores in some detail the character of Green, the terrorists’ leader – how he witnessed and survived Jewish pogroms, how he was tempered in the crucible of life, his encounters with the exercise of arbitrary power in the Russian heartland and with top officials’ total indifference to people’s problems, how his convictions gradually changed, and why he finally decided to turn to terror. None of this makes it into the film. All we see is a fanatical killer. [Interestingly, the terrorist Green is played by Konstantin Khabensky, who also plays the protagonist of the Light, Anton Gorodetsky, in the two Watch movies.]
In the book, Prince Pozharsky, despairing of ever receiving an honest promotion, decides to kill off his rivals. To achieve this, he slips information to the terrorists, who don’t realize where it is coming from. In the movie, Pozharsky has been transformed into a patriot worrying over the fate of his motherland. He is exceptionally clever and talented, while his rivals within the secret police are a bunch of crooks and incompetents. The whole “using terrorists to kill dishonest officials and then sending them to prison for these crimes” plot line turns into a rehashing of the trite theme, “the end justifies the means.” After all, the patriot Pozharsky is killing two birds with one stone – he’s getting rid of both dishonest officials and terrorists, who are forced out into the open.
In the movie, Fandorin’s role is much smaller than in the book, which helps make Pozharsky more sympathetic. Russia’s most respected film critic, Yury Gladilshchikov, wrote, “the audience does not know that people were pushed into terrorism by injustices of the Russian empire, so Pozharsky, while he may be a careerist, still looks like a true statesman. If you follow his logic, whereby Russia has two enemies – numbskull dignitaries and murderous terrorists – and that, for the good of the motherland, they should be pitted against one another, you might even think that he has a point. Fandorin, meanwhile, comes across as someone who insists on doing everything by the book, wherever that might lead, which is straight to the collapse of the country in October 1917.” As a result, unlike the novel, at the end of the film, Fandorin does not leave government service in protest, instead saying he will serve the tsar if allowed to work without interference.
Some say that Mikhalkov the actor just wanted to play an interesting role, something he hadn’t done in a while. So, Mikhalkov the producer had the scriptwriters embellish the Pozharsky character, making him more prominent. And it really did turn out to be a great role.
But is it a coincidence that the film so touchingly defends the tsarist secret police, forced to dirty their hands so that society can sleep peacefully at night? After all, the FSB does not deny that the secret police is the secret police, whether they are serving the tsar or the people. The important thing is that they are defending society. It’s the same as Lukyanenko’s thought that one can’t keep his hands clean while doing dirty work.
This is unlikely to be just a coincidence, given that the making and distribution of the film was also bankrolled by the government. Furthermore, Yankovsky was given easy access to locations that are usually no small feat to get a camera into: St. George’s Hall in the Kremlin, the Russian Cultural Fund house, Red Square, the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square, and Tretyakov House (a protected landmark), among others. And when Counselor was ready, no distributor released any other major film at the same time, not even Hollywood films, despite the fact that each week typically five or six films premier in Moscow.
I caught up with Boris Akunin at a public reading and asked him what he likes to see in screen adaptations of his novels. Akunin said that the film of his newest book might have two parts, with one half animated. He added that he “would like the screen adaptation of the new novel to be done by an experimental director, but there are so few of them in Russian film industry.” Akunin had a very sad look in his eyes as he said this. When asked whether he was pleased with the screen version of State Counselor, he replied that, “a director has the right to his own interpretation.” But he refused to discuss State Counselor in greater detail, saying he did not have time.
Akunin’s books are among Russia’s most frequently adapted for film. While, of course, no such project would be undertaken without his consent, it may be that he is growing tired of what they are doing to his books as they are translated to the screen.
Them and Us
As soon as the Federal Security Service started taking an interest in cinematography, it began to react very strongly to what was being shown in films. For example, it gave high marks to the movie Countdown (2004) [the Russian title, Lichny nomer, translates literally as “Identification Number”], which portrays the “correct” version of the Dubrovka Theater siege. The Chechen Umar, Major Smolin, a Russian intelligence agent, and American journalist Catherine Stone join forces against the terrorists. Interestingly, an émigré Russian businessman named Pokrovsky turns out to be behind the terrorist group, his story oddly reminiscent of the fate of Boris Berezovsky, the real-life Russian oligarch who fled the country. [Notably, the oligarch Pokrovsky is played by the same actor who played the leader of the Dark forces in Day Watch.]
The film feels authentic: FSB Deputy Director Anisimov and retired CIA Deputy Director for Operations Richard Stoltz both served as consultants on the project. The film was shot on locations in Moscow, the Caucasus, and Italy, employing troops from the Vympel [Pennant] special forces unit, along with lots of military hardware, including military helicopters and even an aircraft carrier. The film cost $7 million.
Countdown premiered in 2004, and its creators were banking on huge profits flowing in from pre-release hype and big media buys. But this did not come to pass. True, the movie was sold to 34 countries and received several awards – in China. But it only took in a little more than twice the production cost, and filmmakers must give almost half of their profit to distributors. This scotched the plan to leverage the film’s success to produce another blockbuster.
The FSB has actually been investing in films for some time now, supporting the “correct” cinematic portrayal of the intelligence agencies. The first series about the FSB to come out of this effort, The Special Department (Spetsotdel, 2001) was devoted to those who serve in the FSB’s department in charge of protecting the art treasures of St. Petersburg (whose numbers, in real life, are surely being thinned by the recent fiasco of art thefts at the Hermitage).
Later, the television miniseries Special Forces (Spetsnaz, 2002) premiered, telling the story of special forces units bravely battling Chechen bandity. The series was produced by Konstantin Ernst, who later went on to produce the Watch films.
Around the same time, a mini-series was released that had been filmed in 2001, entitled Man’s Work (Muzhskaya rabota), about military intelligence managing to bring constitutional order to the Caucasus. The film was directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk, son of the famous Soviet director, Sergei Bondarchuk, with support from the Ministry of Culture and the Federal Agency for Print and Mass Media. The younger Bondarchuk is also a close friend of Nikita Mikhalkov.
Finally, in the fall of 2005, television ran a series about the field surveillance service called The Secret Watch (Taynaya strazha, 2005), which was also shot with Lubyanka support. And filming has now been completed for Three from the FSB (Troye iz FSB, June, 2006), which employed real FSB agents during production.
So the announcement of the FSB Prize is only one aspect of a new policy on the part of Russian intelligence agencies. Given how much effort those organs have put into having lovely movies made about them, their reactions to “politically incorrect” films is entirely understandable.
Not long ago, a film was released in Russia that is being distributed in the West under the title Bastards (Svolochi, 2006). It is based on a story of the same name by the writer Vladimir Kunin, about events during World War II that have yet to receive official comment. It is set in 1943 and tells of a Soviet colonel assigned to train a sabotage squad to harass and attack German military units. The squad is put together using criminally-inclined street children who no one will be looking for, since, after they have carried out this assignment, any surviving “holders of top secret information” are slated for extermination. The film’s director, Alexander Atanesyan, insists that the writer told him the events portrayed in the movie are authentic and that such a group really did exist.
Even before the film was released, however, on the eve of its premiere, the FSB Public Relations Center issued official statements that the FSB had already begun to receive complaints from indignant veterans’ organizations, who were convinced that the movie’s story could not be true. The FSB had checked and officially stated that KGB-FSB archives contained nothing to confirm that during the war there had been any secret sabotage school that sent orphans to their deaths. The FSB did, however, say it had documents showing that Fascist Germany followed such a practice. It also had documents attesting to the fact that, during the war, German Intelligence Service Command 203 trained sabotage squads of orphans from the occupied territories surrounding Smolensk and Orsha.
If this was an FSB attempt to influence independent cinema, it may well have backfired. Director Atanesyan said he feels that the FSB announcement only served to draw more attention to his film. Interestingly, the Federal Security Service did not issue any statements concerning the series, The KGB in Tuxedo (KGB v Smokinge, 2005) which shows the workings of the Andropov-era intelligence agency in an unflattering light.
Children’s Games
Finally, there is a genre of cinematic art – animation – where the audience might least expect to find propaganda and ideology. Yet, by definition, perhaps one should be more prepared for it here: given the young audience, cartoons often show a world more clearly delineated between black and white.
Animated films found a new life in Russia after the successes of Shrek, Finding Nemo, Shark Tale, and Monsters, Inc., as well as Shrek 2. High-budget Russian cartoons followed, led by Alyosha Popovich (2003), a comic tale about adventures of a medieval Russian knight (or bogatyr).
The real boom came three years later, in 2006, with the release of the two high-budget, well-promoted films: Prince Vladimir and Dobrynya Nikitich and the Dragon Gorynych (Dobrynya Nikitich i Zmei Gorynych).
Prince Vladimir tells the story of Vladimir Fair Sun (Krasno Solnyshko), who brought Christianity to Rus, and of the battles waged by heroes and simple folk against the enemies of the ancient land of the Eastern Slavs.
Dobrynya Nikitich relates the travels of a legendary bogatyr and his young sidekick in a quest to recover the latter’s abducted betrothed. The heroes suspect the dragon Gorynych of the kidnapping, but it turns out that it is not the monster who is guilty, but rather a merchant who fell in love with the girl and made a deal with her father, the tsar.
Almost immediately, ideological comparisons started to be drawn between these two cartoons. Vladimir calls upon brotherly nations to come together in the face of foreign aggression. Dobrynya seems to suggest that Russia’s main enemies are not foreign, but its own unscrupulous merchants and corrupt authorities.
Here are just a few of the comments left by viewers about the films on the website of the biggest Russian encyclopedia of world cinema, Kinopoisk:
“In Prince Vladimir, there’s too much politics. I didn’t like the fact that, when they were burning the idols, one of them looked like the Statue of Liberty.”
“Why did one of the leaders of the enemy tribes look like Mikhail Khodorkovsky?”
“Vladimir is a really classy cartoon. In Ukraine it was quickly taken out of distribution, literally after two weeks. It was all because it included calls for brothers to unite, i.e., brotherly states.”
“Dobrynya Nikitich is a classy cartoon made in the style of old Soviet cartoons, but with contemporary humor.”
“In the film Dobrynya Nikitich they really play fast and loose with the history of Russia. Stupid jokes are not always appropriate.”
Russian Life asked Dmitry Puchkov, better known as Goblin, to comment on these recent additions to the Russian animation (for a history of the genre, see Russian Life, Nov/Dec 2003). Goblin worked in law enforcement before gaining acclaim as the author of alternative, humorous voiceover translations of famous Hollywood movies. His version of the Matrix turned into the Shmatrix, and he transformed Star Wars: The Phantom Menace into Star Wars: Tempest in a Teapot. His work has attracted thousands of fans and his translations are considered works of art in their own right. His film reviews are also read with great interest.
Russian Life: Did you like these animated films?
Goblin: To tell you the truth, not very much. Prince Vladimir, in my view, is too heavy and serious. Despite vehement assertions of “complete historical authenticity,” it didn’t turn out to be quite what was promised. The stodgy pathos, the brutal seriousness – that doesn’t do much from a child’s point of view, in fact it pushes them away. The script and dialogue for the cartoon Alyosha Popovich were unreservedly weak at times. Dobrynya Nikitich was much better, and it seems to me it represents movement in the right direction.
RL: In your opinion, do these cartoons have a certain ideological coloration?
Goblin: It goes without saying. Furthermore, this is true whether the cartoon’s creators want this or not. And if the creators do want this, then it should be done in a way that is interesting for the children, but so the message is still there. The problem is that everyone knows what the message is supposed to be these days. Either way, it seems to me, these are no more than attempts to get a feel for what should be done and what direction to move in. We still haven’t recovered from the battering that our civic consciousness took during perestroika. Including the filmmakers themselves. The time for fierce confrontation is in the past. It is hard to imagine what good comes from a film that shows Asiatic-looking people being slaughtered. Sure, everybody had their turn at being slaughtered, but do we need to show that now? I very much doubt it. Now, the Shrek cartoon has the right idea. On the one hand, it’s a fairy tale about an ogre, but in fact it’s about friendship and love. It doesn’t come across to our audiences that the ogre is Scottish, the donkey is African-American, the cat is Hispanic – but for Americans, it is about friendship among peoples and love. And another thing about it is that it’s interesting both for children and adults. In my opinion, that’s the right ideology.
Should we really believe that these animated films were originally made as “ideological weapons,” not only for children, but for the older generation as well? This can be debated. The government probably did not get involved in these specific cartoons and they were made in response to the personal convictions of their creators. But it is obvious that the current generation, like all Russian generations before it, has become an object of interest for intelligence agencies.
It started back in early 2000, when the Ministry of Culture announced that it intended to invest in Russian film production. Back then, Russian directors were having a hard time producing 57 pictures a year, and at the time desperately needed state funding for their productions. Mikhail Shvidkoy, culture minister at the time, announced that Russia should produce no fewer than 100 films per year, adding that his ministry would finance a third of them. An arrangement was proposed whereby directors would present scripts to the ministry for consideration, and the ministry would decide which films would get funding. Primarily, they would be financing “patriotic” and “historic” films, as well as films for children.
They say that no one wants to know how sausages or laws are made, but everyone wants to have them. Perhaps the same is true of films. At the turn of this century, a particular sort of meat grinder was mounted in the kitchen of Russian filmmaking. The patriotic films Night Watch, Countdown, and State Counselor were the sort of cinematic sausage that resulted. All were made with financial support from the government and with the participation of government-owned Channel One, with its gigantic advertising capabilities. This is the kind of “independent” film industry the Kremlin would like to see. RL
Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.
Russian Life 73 Main Street, Suite 402 Montpelier VT 05602
802-223-4955
[email protected]
