From Empire to Smuta and Back. the Mythopoetics of Cyclical History in Russian Film and TV-Documentaries
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From Empire to Smuta and back. The Mythopoetics of Cyclical History in Russian Film and TV-Documentaries Sander Brouwer Although it is not the core business of this volume to study the cultural memory of events prior to the Soviet period, I would like in this chapter to pay attention to some films and documentaries relating to the earlier history shared by Russia and Poland. I do this, first of all, because the contemporary screen-representations of these historical periods make use of visual material from well-known films of the Soviet period, thus filtering the ‘cultural memory’ of these distant events through the prism of the Soviet ‘collective memory’, in Assmann’s (1995) terms. I would like to take some time to ponder on the possible effects of this, which I will do here while discussing the memory events connected with the Time of Troubles in the early 17th century, or Smuta, and then proceed in a separate chapter to discuss a second, related topic of interest, a Ukrainian screen version of the Mazepa plot. In the second place I turn to these earlier periods because these films undoubtedly have a role in the ‘memory wars’ played out today in the press and the media, and on Internet—they are even central in the way governments try to manipulate national memory, and thus, national identity-building. And in the third but not last place, because the relative success of this cinema with their respective national audiences seems to point to an essential difference between the way historical experience is dealt with in post-soviet Russian culture, on the one hand, and Polish and Ukrainian culture, on the other. Let us look at the Smuta theme. As the reader is perhaps aware, Vladimir Khotinenko’s film 1612, made in 2007 and released on November 1 that year, is only the most obvious in a whole series of memory events around and representations of the Smuta that served to bolster the popularity of the new national holiday of 4 November, called People’s, or National Unity Day. The holiday celebrates the end of the Smuta through the expulsion of the Polish interventionists in 1612, in a united effort of a 124 Sander Brouwer Russian army allegedly constituted by all social classes and multiple nationalities living within the boundaries of the Muscovite state; it was led by a simple butcher from Nizhnyi Novgorod, Kuz’ma Minin, together with a nobleman, prince Dmitrii Pozharskii. It is important to remember—we shall return to that presently— that these historical events have a long-standing tradition of being at the centre of patriotic memory, state-directed or not. Already before the bicentenary festivities planned for 1812, patriotic poems were written on the leaders of the Russian forces in 1612 (for instance, S.A. Shirinskii- Shikhmatov‘s Pozharskii, Minin, Germogen, or Russia Saved of 1807), but of course after the expulsion of Napoleon in 1812, the historical year 1612 acquired an extra dimension in that it ‘rhymed’ with 1812, a coincidence that was fully exploited in patriotic texts. Indeed, to commemorate the victory of 1812, in 1818 the monument to Minin and Pozharskii was erected on Red Square (although plans to do so had existed earlier—from 1803; the sculptor Martos had made his first sketches already in 1807). In 1931, this monument was moved from its original place to where it stands now; it always served and still serves as a backdrop to the (widely televised) military parades on Red Square, most famously that of 7 November 1941, when the troops marched out of Moscow to defend the city against the Nazi invaders. Indeed, Stalin in a radio broadcast to the occasion had reminded the Soviet people of the great ancestors by whom they should feel inspired: Aleksandr Nevskii, Dmitrii Donskoi, and Minin and Pozharskii (and Suvorov and Kutuzov; all, of course, defenders of the Fatherland against foreign invasion). As part of the campaign to promote the new state holiday, in 2005 a copy of the statue, made by the omnipresent Zurab Tsereteli, was given to the city of Nizhnyi Novgorod by the mayor of Moscow, Iurii Luzhkov. To the Smuta complex was added the Boris Godunov theme in 1825- 1830, by Pushkin‘s famous play, adapted to the no less famous opera by Musorgskii in 1874. Of both the play and the opera famous Soviet screen versions exist, while various other films tell of the events in a more historicising way, for instance the well-known Minin and Pozharskii, made by Pudovkin and Doller in 1939 on the order of Stalin, and based on a scenario by Viktor Shklovskii. .