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Seeing the Bigger Picture: Conspiratorial Revisions of World War II History in Recent Russian Cinema

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2018

Boris Noordenbos
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Abstract

This article analyzes revisions of World War II history in recent Russian cinema and television, including the feature film The Match (Andrei Maliukov, 2012), Spy (Aleksei Andrianov, 2012), and the television series Liquidation (Sergei Ursuliak, 2007). All these productions rely on the logic of conspiracy theory for their reimaginations of war history: pivotal developments during the war or its aftermath are presented as the result of subterranean manipulations by enemies or intelligence services. Through a narrative and visual analysis, the article shows how these films and series use the notion of conspiracy to reformat the contexts of wartime events and to place them within a speculative “bigger picture.” In doing so, they infer that what we know about the past is merely a part or effect of larger, hidden designs. Finally, the article situates these findings within a wider “reconciliation with the Soviet” in Putin-era culture, which increasingly centers on the remembrance of World War II.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 77 , Issue 2 , Summer 2018 , pp. 441 - 464
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2018 

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References

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15. In his opening speech to the conference XII Malye Bannye Chteniia: Teoriia zagovora: Optika “istinnogo” znaniia (Saint Petersburg, April 22–23, 2016), Il΄ia Kalinin characterized conspiracy theory precisely as a particular “optics” that has surprising applicability and helps to structure knowledge into apparently unified and understandable forms.

16. Kevin Platt argues that state-supported discourses of the Putin-era have increasingly co-opted conspiracy thinking, thereby depriving conspiracy theory of the critical edge it often had in the period immediately after the demise of communism, see Kevin M. F. Platt, “Flickkunstwerk Putin: Zagovor, ironiia, postmodernizm” (paper presented at the XII Malye Bannye Chteniia Conference, Saint Petersburg, April 22–23, 2016). Conference program available at www.nlobooks.ru/node/7050 (last accessed March 20, 2018).

17. See Eliot Borenstein's blog post “What Not to Wear: Discarding the Emperor's New Clothes,” Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy After Socialism, February 29, 2016, at www.plotsagainstrussia.org/eb7nyuedu/2016/2/29/what-not-to-wear-discarding-the-emperors-new-clothes (last accessed March 20, 2018).

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20. See for instance Kevin M. F. Platt “Flickkunstwerk.”

21. Eliot Borenstein, “Punch-Drunk History,” Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy After Socialism, January 18, 2016, at www.plotsagainstrussia.org/eb7nyuedu/2016/1/18/what-a-country (last accessed March 20, 2018).

22. An important exception is Borenstein's post of August 3, 2016, where he writes about “more mainstream entertainments that naturalize and domesticate conspiracy,” “Fascism with a Human Face,” Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy After Socialism, at www.plotsagainstrussia.org/eb7nyuedu/2016/8/3/fascism-with-a-human-face (last accessed March 20, 2018).

23. The film received financial support from the Russian Ministry of Culture and from the Federal Fund for Social and Economic Support of the National Film Industry.

24. The writer and correspondent Lev Kassil’ coined the term “match smerti” in Izvestiia in 1943.

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27. James Riordan, “The Match of Death: Kiev, 9 August 1942,” Soccer and Society 4, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 88.

28. Kulida “Razvenchannye mify.”

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33. The Ukrainian journalist Oksana Faryna felt that the ultimate tragedy behind the film was precisely the fact that the Ukrainian film industry lacked the financial means to make large productions that could counter or nuance the cinematic interpretations of history coming from Russia. The Match’s budget—partly financed by the Russian State Cinema Fund, which ensured a stellar cast, impressive special effects, and a soundtrack by a pop star—was on a scale simply not available to Ukrainian filmmakers, see James Marson, “‘Death-Match’: Why a Nazi-Era Soccer Movie is Making Ukraine Angry,” Time, May 31, 2012, at http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2116038,00.html (last accessed March 20, 2018).

34. The film's portrayal of Ukrainians collectively as Nazi collaborators and sympathizers caused a stir in Ukraine. The Ukrainian State Film Agency initially planned to ban the film, on grounds that it would promote ethnic strife. When, after due consideration, it was released, screenings were restricted to after 6 pm, and to audiences older than 18. Members of the nationalist party Svoboda nevertheless disrupted the premiere, making it clear that they considered the film an aggressive cultural product from the “Moscovite occupiers.” Marson, “‘Death Match.’” Politicians, too, entered the fray. Andrei Parubii, Ukrainian Member of Parliament representing the Fatherland Party, reacted to Maliukov's repeated statement that the film was merely about “love and football” and abstained from politics. Parubii contended that the romantic and sport themes in the film were nothing but a background “for this propaganda from the Russian world.” In his view, the film was motivated precisely “to show that every man in Ukrainian dress is a collaborator.” Oleksandr Ivancheskul, “Parubii: fil΄m ‘Match’—eto propaganda russkogo mira,” Obozrevatel΄, May 9, 2012 at www.obozrevatel.com/politics/74350-parubij-film-match-eto-propaganda-russkogo-mira.htm (last accessed March 20, 2018). In 2014, when Russian-Ukrainian relations had reached a new low due to the war in the Donbass and the annexation of Crimea, Ukraine's State Film Agency prohibited the dissemination and screening of The Match. The agency's chairman described the film as one of “the most odious examples of contemporary Russian propaganda” in the Ukrainian newspaper Glavnoe on September 30, 2014.

35. This shared suffering is underlined through the story of an orphaned Jewish girl who is secretly cared for by Anna. Another Jew, Mikhail (Vladimir Nevel΄skii), a friend of the Dynamo players, also loses his entire family to the Nazi slaughter. The Start players later hide him among their ranks, telling the Nazi authorities he is Polish. These scenes recycle a motif of “interethnic harmony” described by Jeremy Hicks in his analysis of Mark Donskoi's film The Unvanquished (Nepokorennye, 1945). “Mark Donskoi's Reconstruction of Babyi Iar: The Unvanquished,” in Hicks, Jeremy, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 (Pittsburgh, 2012)Google Scholar, 135. The Unvanquished includes (surprisingly early) depictions of compassion among Soviet citizens for Jewish suffering, and some of its scenes anticipate, as Hicks points out, the trope of “the Jewish child hidden by Gentile resisters, in essence the story of Anne Frank.” Ibid., 140. While The Match closely replicates such visions of parallel Soviet-Jewish victimhood as well as Soviet resistance against the prosecution of Jews, Maliukov's film also postulates new moral and political dichotomies, not least between faithful Soviet citizens and devious Ukrainian nationalists.

36. Eliot Borenstein, “The Devil Next Door,” Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy After Socialism, April 24, 2016 at www.plotsagainstrussia.org/eb7nyuedu/2017/4/24/the-devil-next-door (last accessed March 20, 2018). See also Eliot Borenstein, “Punch-Drunk History,” Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy After Socialism, January 18, 2016 at www.plotsagainstrussia.org/eb7nyuedu/2016/1/18/what-a-country (last accessed March 20, 2018).

37. See Keeley, “Of Conspiracy Theories,” 121, on the unfalsifiable logic of conspiracy theories.

38. As Jovan Byford has pointed out, conspiracy theories often incline towards a paradoxical logic, in which “the lack of proof about a plot, or any positive proof against its existence, is turned around and taken as evidence of the craftiness of the secret cabal behind the conspiracy and as confirmation of its ability to conceal its machinations,” in Byford, Conspiracy Theories, 36. Such rhetorical gestures make it almost impossible to contest conspiratorial explanations.

39. The tenor of the film corresponds with that of more recent Russian narratives about western “foul play.” In 2016 and 2017, some Russian media outlets reported, in a marked conspiratorial tone, on the ban of Russian athletes from the Olympic Summer Games of 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. A few months after the games, the Petersburg-based Channel 5, for instance, revealed an “Olympic conspiracy against Russia.” The WADA report of July of that year about a state-run Russian doping program, as well as the subsequent efforts by various sports authorities to issue a blanket ban on Russian athletes, were, according to the channel, part of a larger western attempt to torpedo Russia's success at the games. In the beginning of 2017, the Russian sport channel Match TV launched a new weekly program entitled “Conspiracy in Sport” (Sportivnyi zagovor), in which the presenter, Kirill Kiknadze, scrutinized and triumphantly disproved allegations of systemic state-dictated doping programs in Russian sport. The program also pointed to western doping scandals which had been treated leniently by the same sport authorities that had been eager to ban Russia from the Rio Olympics. As in The Match, in these media reports the sportive test of strength is not merely a metaphor for military and political conflict (as it has been in many other contexts), it becomes a stake precisely in such conflicts. Sport is unveiled as an extension of (cold) war and ideological conflict, and its circumstances and outcomes are, according to these accounts, secretly doctored by unfair western institutions keen to stain Russia's glory.

40. Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, 95; Knight, Conspiracy Culture, 204.

41. This material on Rossia 1 is available online at https://russia.tv/brand/show/brand_id/41965/ (last accessed May 3, 2018.

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43. Rossia 1, available online at https://russia.tv/brand/show/brand_id/41965/ (last accessed May 3, 2018).

44. Byford, Conspiracy Theories, 72.

45. In this respect, The Match subscribes to the contemporary genre of what Tatiana Smorodinskaya calls “patriotic ‘light’ war movies.” Smorodinskaya, Tatiana, “The Fathers’ War through the Sons’ Lens,” in Goscilo, Helena and Hashamova, Yana, eds., Cinepaternity: Fathers and Sons in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film (Bloomington, 2010), 108Google Scholar.

46. As often in conspiratorial approaches, The Match displays an inconsistent commitment to the fictional and documentary mode. Mark Fenster points out that “[n]umerous conspiracy-based novels, feature films, and television series include in their fiction thrillers real people, places, and events, while putatively nonfiction work of actual conspiracy theorists typically conjures up unproven, often quite fanciful narratives to explain real historical developments.” Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, 119–20.

47. See for instance the miniseries The Shield and the Sword by Vladimir Basov (Shchit i mech, 1968), but also films from the Stalin era like Secret Agent by Boris Barnet (Podvig razvedchika, 1947).

48. Lovell, Stephen, “In Search of an Ending: Seventeen Moments and the Seventies,” in Gorsuch, Anne E. and Koenker, Diane P., eds., The Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World (Bloomington, 2013), 305Google Scholar.

49. While the series obviously fitted the cold-war context (and conveyed a somewhat anachronistic, pre-détente view of Soviet-American relations), it also contained subversive undertones. Stierlitz's contemplative nature and his refined professional instinct for what could and could not be said under the Nazi regime, for instance, reminded many viewers of the plight of the intellectual within Soviet authoritarian society. For other viewers, the series provided a tantalizing window on the otherwise curtained-off “bourgeois” luxuries of the west. They were gripped by the easygoing atmosphere of a German pub, the conveniences of Stierlitz's cozy house in Babelsberg, his classy Mercedes, details all meticulously registered in long takes, see Lipovetskii, Mark, “Iskusstvo alibi: ‘Semnadtsat΄ mgnovenii vesny’ v svete nashego opyta,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 3, no. 53 (2007)Google Scholar, at http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2007/3/li16.html (last accessed March 20, 2018); Nepomnyashchy, Catharine Theimer, “The Blockbuster Miniseries on Soviet TV: Isaev-Shtirlits, The Ambiguous Hero of ‘Seventeen Moments in Spring,’” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 29, no. 3 (2002): 257–76Google Scholar; and Lovell, “In Search,” 303–22.

50. Do these criminals fanatically continue their sabotage activities even after the Abwehr has ceased to exist? Or, as one critic wondered on his blog, are their anti-Soviet activities also motivated by a separatist political agenda? See Mikhail Magid, “Retsenziia na fil΄m ‘Likvidatsiia’: Odesskie povstantsy v abrikosovykh dzhungliakh,” review of Liquidation (Likvidatsiia), directed by Sergei Ursuliak, Live journal, December 31, 2007 at https://shraibman.livejournal.com/10126.html?thread=80782 (no longer available).

51. The series reminded many viewers of The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, but Seventeen Moments of Spring, too, was a recurring point of reference. After the release of Liquidation the comedy show of Channel 1, The Big Difference (Bol΄shaia raznitsa) broadcast a parody of the series. It was entitled Capitulation (Kapituliatsiia) and in it a delicate Stierlitz was endowed with the bravura and melodious Odessa-region accent of Gotsman.

52. NKVD agents, for instance, stage a trolleybus accident that kills dozens of citizens merely to make the Germans believe that one of their spies died in the calamity and not at their hands.

53. Notwithstanding the conspicuous absurdism of the film's idealized Moscow, and its overblown story of grand, ramified conspiracies, viewers were indeed fascinated by its alternative reading of history. One of them described the film's intrigue as “Stierlitz the other way around,” and valued the fact that its story at least provided an explanation, albeit “mystical and conspiratorial,” for Stalin's hitherto unexplained ignorance of Nazi plans. Ruthaizer, “Shtirlits naoborot,” review of The Spy [Shpion], directed by Aleksei Andrianov, KinoPoisk, May 7, 2012, https://kinopoisk.ru/review/1518368/ (last accessed March 20, 2018; no longer available).

54. Fenster proposes the term “velocity” for the rapid movement implied in many conspiracy narratives. Velocity refers to the “protagonist's physical and cognitive movement through historical space. . . . The protagonist . . . must continually move in order to collect necessary information or rely on numerous scattered sources about the conspiracy and its effects.” Fenster, Conspiracy Theories, 134.

55. Knight, Conspiracy Culture, 204.

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60. Anna Latynina has shown that the novel by Akunin on which the film is based already employed the clichéd conventions and narrative pivots of cheap spy novels from the 1950s to the 1970s. Moreover, the simple and naïve illustrations that accompany the story in Akunin's novel, too, are part of the stylized imitation of these trashy novels and are, according to Latynina, meant to inspire an (ironically tinted) nostalgia in its readers. Latynina, Alla, “Entomologiia roda Fandorinykh,” Novyi mir no. 8 (2005)Google Scholar at http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/2005/8/lat11.html (last accessed March 20, 2018).

61. Hofstadter, “Paranoid Style,” 11.