The Representation and Re-Perspectivization of Stalinist Repressions in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film

The Representation and Re-Perspectivization of Stalinist Repressions in Soviet and Post-Soviet (Russian and Ukrainian) Film: Killing the Dragon?

Films can both reflect and shape reality. This seminar explores Soviet and post-Soviet Russian and Ukrainian films “set in the past but haunted by the present” [Pond, 2025].

The perestroika period was marked by a new trend of the cinematographic re-perspectivization of the Stalinist regime’s representation in Soviet feature films (starting in the mid-1980s), a result of glasnost´ and a new (relative) freedom in cinema. This period saw the emergence of a new revolutionary (for that time) Soviet film genre – screen adaptations of Soviet dissident prose/poetry/drama by figures such as Boris Vasil´ev, Evgeniia Ginzburg, Vasilii Aksenov, Lidiia Chukovskaia, Fazil´ Iskander, Leonid Filatov, Anatolii Rybakov and others, in which Soviet filmmakers, including Leonid Filatov, Iurii Kara, Aleksandr Mitta, Vladimir Bortko, Evgenii Tsymbal, Mark Zakharov, Arkadii Sirenko and others, explicitly or implicitly rebelled against the constraints of the Soviet era, attaining cinematographic, prose and poetic kinship in their attempts to explore a revisionist approach to the representation of Soviet reality. This new cinematographic genre, originating in the 1980s and fulfilling a political mission of resistance, has continued its journey in time through decades until today.

The cinematic representation of Stalinist repressions has undergone a significant transformation from the 1980s to the present day. In this seminar, we will attempt to understand the nature and systematicity of these changes, trace the relationship between the political era in which a film was created and the degree of freedom of representation demonstrated in it, and identify patterns in the choice of literary predecessors for subsequent cinematographic adaptations in the period from the 1980s to the present time.

From 1991, the trajectories of post-Soviet Russian and Ukrainian feature films on themes connected with Stalinist repressions proved to be different, with the former demonstrating a certain rehabilitation (starting in the early 2000s) of the strongman behind the Great Terror, or what we could term re-Stalinization, the glorification of Stalin’s historical role complying with the narrative of the present regime. In contrast, the latter remained largely committed to commemorating “restricted” moments of the past – Stalinist repressions of Ukrainian intelligentsia, forced resettlements of Western Ukraine population, Ukrainian dissent, the Holodomor, etc – that were previously silenced in Soviet cinematographic narratives.

Image credit: Evgenii Schwartz, The Dragon (1944).