Historical Construction

The following is taken from an unfinished review of Evgeny Dobrenko's Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History - Museum of the Revolution.

Among the Russian matters which the British press has been wringing its hands about over the last couple of years is the 'Greatest Russian of all time' poll, 'Name of Russia', conducted by Russia TV. A similar exercise in Britain saw an eventual contest between the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Winston Churchill. In Russia the major worry was that Joseph Stalin – a Georgian, after all – would be voted as Greatest Russian, something not altogether surprising when taking into account either his success as an imperialist, or the paltry attempts at de-Stalinisation by both Communists and neoliberals. After a brief and heartening period where it appeared as if Yuri Gagarin or Lenin might win this exercise in public approbation, the eventual winner was Alexander Nevsky, medieval warlord and leader of Rus. 

Not the least interesting matter in Evgeny Dobrenko's attempt to survey Stalinist cinema as an example of the 'production of history' is the discussion of who Nevsky actually was, or rather how he was created. Unlike, say, King Arthur, there is certainty that Nevsky existed, and that he won certain military battles against some countries and conducted alliances with others. Yet very, very little else was known about him in 1938 when Sergei Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky was released. Dobrenko makes clear that, for Eisenstein, this was quite deliberate. Desperate to make a film, after the consecutive disasters of Que Viva Mexico! (cancelled by his American sponsors) and Bezhin Meadow (banned by the Soviets and later destroyed), Eisenstein had the opportunity to make a patriotic historical epic, one not unrelated to the possibility of a forthcoming war. Dobrekno writes:

'Offered a choice between Alexander Nevsky and (the 17th century folk hero) Ivan Susanin, Eisenstein settled on Alexander because practically no historical materials had been preserved from this time. 'Whatever you did would be correct, nobody could refute you'' 

Alexander Nevsky would, from 1938 onwards, always be seen through Alexander Nevsky. In a sense this is not unlike Hollywood's own historical constructions - Robin Hood, for instance, will always look like Errol Flynn – but it is given a sharper political significance by the Great Patriotic War, and the role that both Nevsky and Nevsky played within it. The film's great set-piece, its only rival to the 'ecstatic' release of the Odessa Steps or The General Line's cream-separator, is the 'battle on the ice', a spectacular fight against inhuman, armour-clad Teutonic Knights, and after a brief decline during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the film would be a regular backdrop to the attempt to drive out another army of Teutons. War posters show paintings of Nevsky based on the film as a patriotic inspiration to the Russian soldier, while an Order of Alexander Nevsky ('awarded to commanders for showing initiative in the choice of a felicitous moment for a sudden, unexpected attack') was created. Dobrenko relishes this definitive confirmation of history's cinematic production: 'it turned out that no contemporary portrait of the epic leader existed. And so the decoration used the profile of...Nikolai Cherkassov, from Eisenstein's film.'

This vignette makes clear the value both to the historian and to the observer of cultural politics in mafia-capitalist Russia of Dobrenko's study. Far from being something thrown out as part of a discarded Soviet baggage, the Soviet cinema of the period least studied by historians - 1932 to 1953, roughly speaking - the Stalinist period, a word used advisedly given the General Secretary's personal interest in and direct interference with cinema, which extended as far as personally ordering Eisenstein to give Alexander Nevsky a happy ending. There are good reasons for the obscurity of this period. The films themselves are not held in high esteem, largely abhorred for their retrograde, philistine repudiation of the 'formalist' works of the 1920s – although these films' retreat from montage into what the younger Eisenstein derided as 'filmed theatre' was paralleled by the sound film in other countries. Aside from a few exceptions, where the memory of once-famous works faintly lingers – Chapaev, Mark Donskoi's Gorky trilogy, Kozintsev and Trauberg's Maxim films, Eisenstein's late work – these are very seldom seen in the west. Most of all, their unashamed glorification of one of the 20th century's most barbaric regimes has an unsurprising effect on their public perception. Nevertheless, these films, as the example of Nevsky proves, may have a public cachet in Russia akin to that of the 'golden age' of Hollywood – the period of widest cinema attendance, and of the greatest political and emotional investment in the form. It may be the case that Nevsky is a Soviet equivalent of, say, Casablanca, something ingested to the point where even those who haven't seen it can quote large chunks of the dialogue. As it is, the viewers and voters of Name of Russia have, whether they were aware of the fact or not, voted for a fiction, a myth, and one created as recently as 1938. What makes this unusual is that this myth was created consciously, and in public.