Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4
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Nikita Mikhalkov’s Cinematic Verdict on Contemporary Russia / Yuliya Ladygina
Abstract: After the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, Putin’s administration reacted promptly to the new rhetoric in Washington and, in turn, re-branded Russia’s campaign in Chechnya as a clear-cut conflict of backward Islamic terrorists assaulting civilized Russia. As a result, the entire Chechen nation and its struggle for political independence has been systematically misrepresented and maligned in the Russian mass media, particularly in film and television. While an abundance of scholarship has examined what sorts of stories Western film and TV drama have been telling about war and terror, and what kinds of myths and ideologies they have been projecting or questioning since 2001, surprisingly little has been said about the representations of the ongoing Russo-Chechen conflict in contemporary Russian cinema, which changed dramatically after 9/11. Focusing on Nikita Mikhalkov’s film 12 (2007), this article offers the first comprehensive insight into the subject. By combining a socio-historical contextualization with close readings of selected scenes from 12, the following analysis argues that Mikhalkov’s film is the first cinematic counter-narrative that not only problematizes the Kremlin-propagated discourse on the Northern Caucasus, but also calls attention to the issues of racism, xenophobia and public indifference to human suffering in contemporary Russian society. It is further argued that Mikhalkov’s subversive rhetoric and his critical attempt to explore possible routes to minority support complicate his status in Russian and Western scholarship as an extreme nationalist and a pro-Kremlin artist, demanding that we revisit his films with more attention.
Keywords: Culture Studies, Television & Film, Contemporary Russian History
<1> Assholes and bastards, scumbags and devious-to-the-core freaks, wild brutes and bandits, savages and filthy animals, bearded buffoons and goat fuckers, uncultured barbarians and bloodthirsty infidels, who rape women, slash throats, and cut off people’s heads, ears, noses and fingers - these are a few flamboyant labels attributed to Chechens in Aleksey Balabanov’s blockbuster film, The War (2002), which could be seen as an emblematic piece of anti-Chechen warmongering propaganda in post-9/11 Russian cinema. These labels capture the precise images which Nikita Mikhalkov, one of the most successful contemporary Russian filmmakers, deconstructs in his film 12 (2007). By offering subversive representations of the recent Russo-Chechen war and its victims Mikhalkov not only questions the validity of the negative images of Chechens that have long been accepted in the Russian popular imagination, but also ventures to contemplate the significant consequences this ideological rhetoric has for the civil rights of all Russian citizens. This article sets out to examine Mikhalkov’s complex representations of Chechens and to investigate how the filmmaker uses them to critically address issues of racism and ethnic intolerance in contemporary Russia. The first section presents a brief historical account of the recent Russo-Chechen conflict and its representation in the mainstream media, situating 12 in its socio-historical context. The second analyzes Mikhalkov’s problematic representations of Chechens, complicating the filmmaker’s status in Russian and Western scholarly criticism as an extreme nationalist and conformist artist. The final section relates 12 to Sydney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men (1959) and Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Circus (1936), elaborating on Mikhalkov’s revision of two grand models of minority support - American multiculturalism and Soviet multi-nationalism. The article concludes with a discussion of what Mikhalkov imagines to be a possible route to combating racism and ethnic intolerance in contemporary Russia.
The Recent Russo-Chechen Conflict and Its Representation
<2> The recent Russo-Chechen conflict dates back to events in 1989-1991, when, in the midst of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the first post-communist Chechen leader Dzhohar Dudaev declared Chechnya’s independence. Although the fact that the majority of Chechens are Sunni Muslims has led the Russian media to portray them as religious fundamentalists, their original objective was a secular and democratic state that, in an aspiration typical of the time, would develop a modern market economy and thus secure the future of the nation. Russia did not recognize this claim and in December of 1994 Boris Yeltsin, the first Russian president, decided to restore constitutional order in the province by force. Moscow hoped for a short and victorious campaign, but despite a massive advantage in manpower, weaponry, and air support, it was a disaster for Russia, highly criticized at home and abroad. In August 1996 Yeltsin was forced to sue for peace in the face of public opposition, signing the Khasavyurt peace agreement.[1] This offered Chechnya political autonomy until a final decision was to be reached in 2001. The conditions of the peace treaty were, however, broken in December 1999. A rebel invasion into neighboring Dagestan in August of that year, followed by several terrorist atrocities that took place throughout Russia in September, became the official pretext for a second Russian campaign to restore control over the territory initiated by Vladimir Putin. Although Chechens’ involvement in the September terrorist attacks of 1999 has never been proven, the attacks were conveniently blamed on Chechen separatists. Russian troops swiftly invaded Chechnya to conduct a counter-terrorist operation, starting another brutal war with civilian casualties on a scale similar to the first war. The intervention was officially ended in 2003, yet the situation in Chechnya is far from being resolved even today.
<3> While the first Chechen War was unpopular, the majority of the Russian population as well as the international community supported the second Russian campaign in Chechnya. After their failure in the first Chechen War the Russian authorities learned the importance of informational warfare. As many Western experts acknowledge, the Kremlin managed to change public perceptions of the conflict, both in Russia and abroad, by skillfully manipulating and controlling the media. After the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, Putin’s administration reacted promptly to the new rhetoric in Washington and re-branded Russia’s campaign in Chechnya as a clear-cut conflict with backward Islamic extremists assaulting the civilized Russia. Despite the fact that at the time “Islam was mainly an aspect of the Chechen identity that helped differentiate the Chechens from their Russian oppressor, with radical Islamism being a marginal influence in political terms,” (Bowker 2005: 234), the links to possible Al-Qaida influences among Chechen resistance, suggested by CIA sources (Bowker 2005: 233), helped the Russian authorities to get the entire Russo-Chechen conflict viewed retrospectively as part of the global war on terrorism.
<4> Unfortunately, not only the Russo-Chechen political conflict, but also the entire Chechen nation has been systematically misrepresented and intentionally distorted in the Russian mass media, which have been employed to secure public support for the second Chechen War. Blatant vilifications of the Chechen people and their political struggle particularly stand out in cinema and television. Out of a sampling of twenty Russian mainstream feature films made after 2001 and related to Chechens, only Nikita Mikhalkov’s 12 (2007) attempts to make fair observations of the Chechen people and their political struggle. The other nineteen productions engage with what could be called a political and cultural assassination of the Chechen nation. [2] Beginning with Tigran Keosayan’s TV series Men’s Job (2001), up to and including Aleksey Uchitel’s film Prisoner (2008), representations equate Chechens with a demonic “other” who is always outside the circle of civilization, speaks a different language, wears different clothing, dwells in primitive places such as remote mountain villages, lusts after fair-complexioned Russian and Western women, worships a strange, different deity and, most importantly, does not value human life as much as Russians and the rest of the civilized world do. In all these productions the Chechen “other” is always a violent primitive mass opposing world peace and religious tolerance. The context in which the Russian audience views these demonized images - against a montage of real-life images and reports of terror attacks across the globe, of videotaped beheadings and messages from Al-Qaida, of the killing of Russian soldiers, journalists, and civilians in Chechnya - further intensifies their impact, reducing the whole Chechen nation to a single dark image of quintessential evil that deserves to be “wasted on the bog” and “flushed down the toilets,” as Putin infamously put it in a 1999 press conference on the problem of Chechen militants (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 25 September 1999). [3] As Moscow’s race riots in December of 2010 and January of 2011 demonstrated, this ideological rhetoric has led to tragic consequences not only for Chechens, but also for many other ethnic groups, including Russian, living in Russia. As will be demonstrated shortly, this is one of the main ideas that Mikhalkov strives to convey in his film 12.
Nikita Mikhalkov: An Unexpected Critic
<5> In light of the pervasive denigration of Chechens in Russian visual media, Mikhalkov’s complex representations of the recent Chechen wars, his sympathetic depictions of victimized Chechen civilians and heroic resistance fighters, as well as his use of an unconventional narrative situation of the false accusation of a Chechen individual stand out as critical of not only the Kremlin and the mainstream media, but also of general public indifference to the blatant injustice committed against the Chechen people. Surprisingly, Mikhalkov’s anti-racist discourse in 12 remains unacknowledged and his film is often regarded, with a few exceptions, as an “insidious pro-Putin” production (Levine 2008). There are two main explanations for such a reading. The first stems from Mikhalkov’s unflattering reputation in contemporary Western and Russian scholarly criticism. The filmmaker’s uncritical glorification of the idealized Russian folk in the 1970s -1990s led to his canonization as a hopelessly nostalgic nationalist (Beumers 2005). Indeed, his most renowned film-epics, An Unfinished Piece For a Mechanical Piano (1977), Oblomov (1980), The Barber of Siberia (1998), and Burnt By the Sun (1994), the last of which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, are convincing evidence of Mikhalkov’s fascination with prerevolutionary Russia, and his idealization of Russian values. All these epics are expressed in a melodramatic style by means of which the filmmaker evokes a nostalgic provincial unity reminiscent of nineteenth-century Russia. These idealized settings, in turn, serve as playgrounds for the psychological and emotional games of the charismatic male heroes, who come from privileged classes and tend to reinstate or project, rather than question or critique, certain stereotypical aspects of the Russian character. The director’s reactionary nationalistic political views of the 1990s, supporting strong state leadership and rejecting Western liberal models as inadequate for Russia, as well as his later affiliation with Putin, only fueled Mikhalkov’s negative reception among the Russian diaspora and Western scholars, several of whom wrote him off as an official conformist artist “inseparable from the Kremlin’s politics” (Condee 2009: 86). As a result, critics approached 12 with strong pre-conceived notions and focused mainly on those aspects of the film that conformed to the prevailing scholarly narrative about Mikhalkov and his work, overlooking several critical moments that signal a radical change in Mikhalkov’s ideological rhetoric.
<6> The second explanation is rooted in the multilayered textual organization of Mikhalkov’s film, whereby the filmmaker prioritizes illustrative and intertextual rather than verbal codes to convey socio-political commentaries, intentionally generating ambiguity, which allows for multiple interpretations of the film. In 12 Mikhalkov persistently avoids any direct political criticism, but relies instead on complex architectonics, employing such tropes as intertextuality, fragmentation, symbolic codification, clashing juxtapositions, and a mixture of genres and plots to construct his criticism of the recent Russo-Chechen conflict. Considering the brutal killings of several journalists and human rights activists that took place only a few months before Mikhalkov’s film was shot and released, Mikhalkov’s reluctance to confront the authorities could be seen as a measure of precaution. [4] Nevertheless, although Mikhalkov’s anti-war and anti-racist rhetoric is not immediately evident, it proves to be of great socio-cultural importance. The remainder of this section will analyze selected scenes from 12 to examine what and how Mikhalkov tells, or rather shows, about Chechnya; to reflect on how this narrative shapes the overall socio-political message of the film; and to evaluate its historical and socio-cultural significance.
<7> Mikhalkov’s 12 is known as a remake of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957). The Russian filmmaker preserves the basic storyline of Lumet’s picture, where twelve very different men must unanimously decide the fate of a defendant accused of a murder. Like Lumet in 12 Angry Men, Mikhalkov structures the main narrative of the jurors’ deliberations as a theatrical performance, where one by one each of the twelve men thrown together in the jury room takes center stage to confront, connect, and confess, while the accused awaits his verdict in jail. Yet although Mikhalkov directly alludes to Lumet’s film, he substantially alters his twenty-first century version in several key ways: he transposes his film to contemporary Russia and thus addresses issues of present-day Russian race politics and socio-political corruption; he uses, to quote Mikhalkov, “a completely new cinematic language”[5] and, most importantly, he introduces an additional storyline. The significance of the second storyline is emphasized in the title of the film, 12, which can stand not only for the agony of the twelve jurors, but also for the anguish of the Chechen nation, conveyed through twelve poetically-constructed flashbacks that narrate the life story of the accused, a Chechen youth, Umar, who becomes a representative of his people. Mikhalkov’s representations of Umar’s recollections of the war link his film to a different body of texts of the war film genre, particularly those that explicitly portray the recent Russo-Chechen conflict. This connection complicates the intertextual framing of 12, resulting in what Daniel Chandler (2007: 205) calls “a veritable system of intercodical relations,” the dynamic nature of which contributes to the generation of meaning, often ambiguous and hard to decode.
<8> Mikhalkov generates ambiguity from the first scene, opening his film with a vague quasi-Christian quotation: “Seek the truth not in mundane details of daily life but in the essence of life itself.” This epigraph together with a quotation in the epilogue, “law is above all, but what should we do when compassion is above the law,” is presented as a saying from a fictitious sage of Mikhalkov’s own invention, B. Tosia. “Tosia” is a diminutive of the common Russian female name Antonina, and the abbreviated ‘B’ could easily stand for the Russian “baba,” which means “old woman” or “grandmother.” The implied “baba Tosia” evokes a popular Russian saying “one grandma used to say,” which undermines the credibility of both expressions used to frame Mikhalkov’s picture. Accordingly, the filmmaker does not claim any historical authenticity for the events depicted, but presents his film as a folkloric tale, which by definition is a figurative narrative that often deals with deep moral issues and presupposes a strong emotional response. The filmmaker deconstructs the opening quote further by juxtaposing it to a couple of brief clips from Umar’s recollection of the war. Graphic images of debris, burned vehicles, corpses, and a plea, “Do not shoot! There are women and children in here,” painted on a demolished building, are depictions not only of Umar’s childhood, but also of the mundane daily life of hundreds of thousands of Chechen civilians caught up in the two recent wars. This opening scene thus introduces Mikhalkov’s intent to explore how the everyday reality of the war is often ignored in Russia for the sake of the imagined greater good, calling on his audience to contemplate the dichotomy between the supremacy of law and the aftermath of the Russian military law-enforcement operation in Chechnya, which he further ties to the pervasive lawlessness and racism in contemporary Russia.
<9> Mikhalkov introduces both storylines in the second scene of the film, tying them together through Umar’s dream, where the filmmaker evokes several pre-existing social discourses to frame his critique of Russia’s treatment of Chechnya. The filmmaker further uses Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains (1996), a renowned Russian anti-Chechen-war film of the Yeltsin era, as the key references to link his denunciation of racism, public indifference, and the inequities of the Russian judicial system to the Chechen theme. The dream sequence opens with a spectacular long shot of the Caucasus Mountains. This image is romanticized yet critical, for it implies a well-known question posed in 1853 by Lev Tolstoy in his short story The Raid, which exposes the atrocities of the Russian army during the 19th-century Caucasus War: “How is it that wrath, vengeance, and the lust to kill…can persist in the souls of men in the midst of this entrancing nature?”. In 1996 Bodrov opened his film, The Prisoner of the Mountains, with a similar shot to question Russia’s 1994 invasion of Chechnya. Mikhalkov’s image-reference thus revisits the same question in 2007 to problematize the second Chechen campaign launched in 1999. The filmmaker fuses his critique of the Russian military brutalities in Chechnya with the main narrative adapted from Lumet at the end of the sequence, when Umar wakes up into the reality of the courtroom. This connection between staged trial and staged war suggests a provocative connotation, which projects Russia’s treatment of Chechnya as a symbol of racism and lawlessness in present-day Russia.
<10> Further in the sequence Mikhalkov distorts notions of time, space and subjectivity by using tropes of displacement and condensation to remind his viewers about the roots of the recent Russo-Chechen conflict. He structures Umar’s dream sequence as a synchronic layering of random images. Mikhalkov employs rapid editing, voice-overs and complex superimpositions reminiscent of Dzyga Vertov’s cinematic style of the late 1920s to give a brief account of the events that led to the recent Russian invasion of Chechnya and tie them to the present situation of the accused protagonist. The filmmaker superimposes images of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin onto the background of the mountains and intercuts them with medium shots of a cyclist, who we learn is Umar himself, close-ups of a spinning wheel (a symbolic wheel of fortune or Russian roulette) and close-ups of different people from Umar’s past and present. One of these images is a close-up of an unknown Russian soldier, whose diabolical “hurray!” brings gun and artillery fire into the dream. From this shot the camera pulls back to frame a group of Russian soldiers breaking through the lines of a peaceful demonstration in a provincial Chechen town. The brutality of their assault is intensified by the cross-cut to the close-up on the murdered body of Umar’s mother, after which Umar wakes up. Clearly, all these images cannot be considered in isolation: the dynamic patterns of their interrection evoke a specific temporal and geopolitical setting that refers to the roots of the recent Chechen wars and link current Russian political leadership to the numerous war crimes committed against the Chechen people.
<11> Tropes of condensation and displacement are also used in other flashbacks to construct complex images of the war, which escalate Mikhalkov’s criticism of Russia’s treatment of the Russo-Chechen conflict and its representation in the mass media. The graphic depiction of the aftermath of a purge in Umar’s family home is probably the most provocative image in 12. The blast damage to the roof and walls of Umar’s house suggests the use of artillery, mortar, or RPG shelling. The scattered broken furniture and the flying feathers are obvious traces of the search for valuables. The corpses of Umar’s parents - mother shot in the head and father stabbed in the back - are striking embodiments of the violence committed against Umar’s family and the people they represent. All these details indicate that the scene depicts a typical aftermath of one of those federal operations “to verify legal residence,” which, as many independent war reporters acknowledge, quickly grew into raw applications of power against Chechen civilians, resulting in marauding, torture, vandalism, and murder. Mikhalkov, however, does not provide any diegetic commentary, inviting his viewers to deduce the murderers of Umar’s parents on their own. Most Russian critics (such as Svetova 2007; Levine 2008) hold the Chechen separatist commander, depicted in Umar’s earlier recollections, responsible for the crime, because Umar’s father has been killed with his knife. This reading fits perfectly into the traditional critical framework generated by Beumers (2005) and Condee (2009), who project Mikhalkov as a pro-Kremlin artist. This interpretation is, however, limited. As one of the jurors points out during the jurors’ deliberations in the main narrative, where the same knife is used in a different murder case, the initials carved on the knife prove only the ownership, but not involvement in the crime. Accordingly, to view the Chechen commander as a murderer only because Umar’s father was killed with his knife would mean passing a possibly unjust verdict, as the jurors in the main narrative initially do. Furthermore, Mikhalkov provides rich evidence that frames a different character as the murderer of Umar’s parents. Yet this data is not immediately evident - it is encrypted in the memories and dreams of the Chechen boy, who, as the film suggests, is the only witness of his parents’ execution.
<12> To get some insight into the murder of Umar’s parents, his dream should be re-read in Freudian terms as an expression of an unrealized wish-fulfillment, whereby the boy strives to save his mother. In the dream Umar urges his mother to speak Russian, but she uses Chechen only, for which, according to the boy’s memory, she is murdered. Anna Politkovskaya states in her Dispatches from Chechnya that many civilian Chechens, even those who initially did not support Chechen independence, stopped speaking Russian in revolt against the brutality of Russian troops. She also points out that in the early 2000s refusal to speak Russian was taken as evidence of affiliation with terrorists and considered grounds for being executed on the spot (Politkovskaya 2003: 81). The cause of the mother’s death is thus counter-effective in accusing the Chechen commander, who himself speaks only Chechen. The heroic image of the Chechen fighter further undermines the hasty verdict of previous critics. He is first introduced in Umar’s flashback to the celebratory reception of a separatist unit in Umar’s village. A spectacular group performance of the Chechen traditional dance lezginka is the highlight of this reception, which becomes Umar’s symbolic communal initiation and fosters his irrevocable sense of national identity. Mikhalkov is known for using the engagement of the military in social activities as a key producer of Russian collective subjectivity in his films (Condee 2009: 91-2), yet in 12 he usesthe trope to forge the language of Chechen nationhood, indirectly justifying the Chechen struggle for self-determination. To maximize this effect, Mikhalkov juxtaposes stereotypical derogatory verbal descriptions of Chechens, evoked by a xenophobic juror in the main narrative, [6] with appealing, albeit perhaps equally stereotypical, visual images of noble freedom fighters, playing on the scopophilic inclinations of the viewers. The image of the commander stands out the most, for it resembles the popularized image of Che Guevara, suggesting that Umar remembers the Chechen commander not as a murderer but as a heroic freedom fighter. Whatever the authorial intent might have been, it should be acknowledged that by giving human and even iconic faces to the Chechen resistance fighters, Mikhalkov challenges the vilified images promoted by Kremlin and the mainstream media which depict all Chechens as quintessentially evil. These representations are also a striking example of how Mikhalkov employs the “illustrative use” of images to provide semantic anchorage for his ambiguous text.
<13> Further investigation of Umar’s dream also reveals that the only villain captured in the boy’s memory is the unknown Russian soldier who brings war to the Chechen town. Remarkably, Mikhalkov makes a representative of the state responsible for Umar’s violated childhood, and by extension that of a further 25,000 Chechen children who have lost one or both parents in the two recent wars (UNICEF statistics cited in Seierstad 2007: 9). Yet the filmmaker does not engage in any direct political criticism, but lapses into broad generalizations and instead holds all Russian citizens, as voters and tax payers, liable for the actions of their government, positioning public apathy as the main Russian vice. Mikhalkov further softens his critique by offering a simple recipe for redemption to his compatriots: “it takes one person to treat his fellow men with extra kindness and compassion not to allow them to be left in their loneliness and misery.” These words belong to one of the jurors who directly addresses the viewers, positioning them as jurors, and calling on them to deliver a just verdict not only for the Chechen boy and the nation he represents, but also for the entire Russian society that remains, for the most part, indifferent towards the suffering of millions of its fellow citizens. At the close of the film Mikhalkov goes even further to redeem his Russia, when the character he plays, a retired special services officer, volunteers to help Umar integrate back into Russian society. This unexpected twist significantly undermines Mikhalkov’s anti-war rhetoric and even gives some critics ground to read his whole film as an attempt “to absolve Russians of their sins” (Levine 2008). The analysis presented here, however, complicates such a reading by highlighting numerous inconsistencies, ambiguities, contradictions and omissions encrypted in the second storyline and its dynamic interplay with the main narrative, opening up the possibility of alternate interpretations of the film’s ending, its ideological message and its socio-cultural significance.
Mikhalkov’s Conclusion: Alternative Ways to Combat Racism and Xenophobia in Contemporary Russia
<14> At the end of the film Mikhalkov shifts his focus from the Chechen boy and his story to pursue a double agenda: to expose the detrimental consequences of racism not only for the civil rights of Chechens but for all Russian citizens; and to explore some alternative routes to address this issue. To that end, Mikhalkov revisits a decades-long exchange between American and Soviet models of minority support: on one side, civil rights and multiculturalism, on the other “the friendship of peoples” (druzhba narodov) and multi-nationalism (mnogonational’nost’). [7] Surprisingly, rather than touting Russia’s projected success in resolving its national question and attacking the United States for its failure to live up to its stated ideals, as was traditionally done through much of the 20th century by Soviet political, social and cultural commentators, and as would be expected from Mikhalkov by those critics who view him as a conformist pro-Kremlin artist, instead Mikhalkov rejects both models as unfit for contemporary Russia and ventures to imagine alternative options.
<15> The key detail that illuminates Mikhalkov’s critique of American and Soviet models and gives a glimpse of his alternative direction lies in the final sequence of his film, where an ethnically-diverse jury pronounces the Chechen boy not guilty. This ending links the closing statement in 12 not only to the triumphant resolution of Lumet’s Civil-Rights-era classic, but also to the ending in Grigorii Aleksandrov’s blockbuster musical Circus (1936), which has been long recognized as the most vivid Soviet cinematic attack on American segregation. On the one hand, this multilayered reference helps Mikhalkov to expose the limits of American multiculturalism, which he seems to interpret in a similar way to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who has decried American multiculturalism as “a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism” - a type of racism that calls on us to respect the Other’s identity, but maintains an irreducible distance vis-à-vis the racial Other (Zizek 1997: 44). Yet on the other hand, Mikhalkov’s allusion to Circus and its ambivalent representations of national minorities also serves to illuminate the shortcomings of the Soviet model of “the friendship of peoples.” Mikhalkov rejects both models, American and Soviet, as unfit for contemporary Russia in their pure form, however, he recognizes, as we shall see, some hard-won gains of both approaches and even adapts a few of them for his alternate recipe for Russia’s moral redemption.
<16> While Mikhalkov’s denunciation of the American model is easy to pick up, for he transmits it by alluding to Lumet’s and Aleksandrov’s vivid indictments of racism in America, his attack on “the friendship of peoples” is less evident. To understand Mikhalkov’s criticism of the Soviet model, it helps to compare the ending of his film to the final scene in Aleksandrov’s Circus. Aleksandrov’s film chronicles the journey of Marion Dixon, an American circus artist, from the U.S. to Soviet Russia; from capitalist exploitation and racism to communist equality and happiness. After giving birth to a black baby Marion is forced to flee the United States to avoid racist prosecution. At the beginning of her journey she meets a German theatrical agent who recruits her to his circus tour across the Soviet Union. Once in Moscow, Marion instantly becomes a celebrity - an exotic circus dancer who shoots into the air from a cannon and performs acrobatics under the big top. The heroine, however, continues to live in fear of her “racial crime” as the German producer blackmails her with the threat of exposing her black baby to public view. At the film’s end the producer makes good on his threat, displaying the crying boy to the circus audience during Marion’s performance. Much to the promoter’s and Marion’s astonishment, the multiethnic Soviet circus-goers embrace the baby, passing him around and singing him a lullaby in different languages as if adopting him into their big family. When Marion asks the Soviet circus director what is going on, he explains with a smile that in his country everyone is welcome - black, white, red, or blue - suggesting that the USSR is a truly free country bound by the principle of “the friendship of peoples.”
<17> Circus’s ending evokes a particular Soviet program for combating ethnic intolerance and racial inequality - namely, the Kremlin’s effort to balance class-based unity and national difference, initiated in the 1920s. During the first two decades of its existence the Soviet government established republics, institutionalized national languages, canonized writers, and nurtured local cultural and political elites - all under the slogans of multi-nationalism and “national form, social content.” The goal was to secure the loyalty of the vast peasant population, particularly in the Soviet peripheries. The closure of Circus, where representatives of various national minorities are projected as equal members of the Soviet society, aims to display the fruits of this process. Some critics, however, recognize today that Aleksandrov’s representations of national minorities are highly problematic and capture, whether intentionally or not, the perils of Soviet multi-nationalism, which are, to some degree, similar to those of American multiculturalism: in both models national and racial differences are recognized only in a constrained artificial manner, which fundamentally undermines their socio-political significance (Lee 2008: 28-9). Although all the representatives of diverse national minorities among the circus-goers preserve their distinct national features - in clothing, language, or hair style - they are no more than exotic embellishments and remain off center stage, confined to the neatly organized, if not segregated, audience in Aleksandrov’s film. These representations become even more troubling when embedded in the context of Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s and 1940s, which was mostly targeted against national minorities and their elites. The murder of the Jewish actor, Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948), who sang the lullaby to Marion’s black baby in Yiddish, is a striking example of the artificial nature of Stalin’s “friendship of peoples”: Mikhoels was murdered during the Kremlin’s anti-Jewish campaign of 1948.
<18> Mikhalkov picks up on the jarring discord between the projected ideological message and the actual visual images in Circus and amplifies it in his film, to expose a strong imperial subtext in “the friendship of peoples” principle and its potential to promote rather than combat inequality. Like Aleksandrov’s circus audience, Mikhalkov’s jury is composed of different nationalities - a few Russians, a few Jews, a Ukrainian, a Georgian, and an Asiatic-looking man - who eventually rescue the Chechen boy from unjust prosecution. Formally, this composition refers to the very principle of multi-nationalism propagated by the current Russian administration, if only in rhetorical form, in an attempt to stimulate the reintegration of the Chechen people into Russian society. Mikhalkov’s grotesque, almost caricatured portrayals of different nationalities and social groups, their disturbing confessions of personal experiences of discrimination, and some shocking racist remarks exchanged by several jurors during their deliberations prove, however, that 12 is no naïve glorification of the good old days of “the friendship of nations.” Through these highly problematized images Mikhalkov projects the proclaimed ideal of cultural tolerance and inclusiveness in the current Russian constitution as no more than a mask for enduring prejudice and racial intolerance in contemporary Russian society. As we have seen, Mikhalkov transfers much of the socio-political responsibility for the shortcomings of the regime, and its convoluted application of multi-nationalism, onto all Russian citizens, exposing public indifference to racism through several of his juror characters, who are depicted simultaneously as victims and perpetrators of racial discrimination and hate-crimes. Therefore, the character played by Mikhalkov, the retired special services officer who adopts the Chechen boy at the end of the film, is clearly far from being a symbolic embodiment of Russia’s redemption, but only a call to individual action, as well as a warning against the destructive consequences of ethnic intolerance.
<19> Certainly, this conclusion could be read as typical for Mikhalkov, who has famously been obsessed with reaching and persuading the audience with his socio-political ideas and messages about patriotism and national regeneration. It can also be criticized for its lack of coherent anti-war statements and its final retreat into a conservative outlook in the grand idea of a united Russia. Nevertheless, whatever the shortcomings of Mikhalkov’s political critique in 12 might be, his attempt to relate Russia’s treatment of the Russo-Chechen conflict to the broader issues of racism and ethnic intolerance in contemporary Russia deserves to be taken seriously as a critical representation of contemporary realities not only in Russia and Chechnya, but also in many other countries of the world. The significance of 12 is best summed up by Mikhalkov’s critical revision of the American ideals of the Civil-Rights era and the Soviet values of multi-nationalism of the 1930s. While recalling the missteps of each, the Russian filmmaker recognizes the promises of both models and calls on us to further their hard-worn gains by exploring new ways to imagine differences, new routes to combat inequality, and new policies to achieve peace.
Endnotes
[1] Khasavyurt is a small village in Dagestan where the peace treaty between Russian and Chechnya was signed in 1996. The Khasavyurt treaty is considered the endpoint of the first Chechen war.
[2] The term ‘cultural assassination’ is borrowed from Jack Shaheen, who researched and exposed similar systematic stereotyping of Muslim and Arab peoples in Western films (Shaheen 2009).
[3] In a 1999 press conference on the problem of Chechen militants, Putin, Russia’s little-known prime-minister at the time, announced that “we will hunt the bandits down and kill them even in a toilet.” He used the word “mochit” which literally means “to make wet,” but is also a slang for “to kill.” “Mochit’ v sortire,” or “waste on a bog” was the first scandalous headline Putin made in worldwide news.
[4] The deaths of Anna Politkovskaya and Aleksander Litvinenko, who openly criticized Putin’s administration and its military intervention in Chechnya, are the best known examples.
[5] See Mikhalkov’s official site: http://www.trite.ru/.
[6] One of the jurors in the main plot of Mikhalkov’s film, a xenophobic taxi driver, continually refers to Chechens using derogatory verbal descriptions, which have become canonical for Chechen characters in the mainstream films – assholes, bastards, scumbags, etc. – as indicated at the beginning of this article.
[7] For further discussion of Soviet nationalities policies see Suny (1993), Slezkin (1994) and Hirsch (2005).
Works Cited
Beumers, B. (2005) Nikita Mikhalkov: Between Nostalgia and Nationalism. London: I.B. Tauris.
Bowker,M. (2005) “Western Views of the Chechen Conflict,” in R. Sakwa (ed.) Chechnya: From Past to Future. London: Anthem Press.
Chandler, D. (2007) Semiotics: The Basics. London: Routledge.
Condee, N. (2009) The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hirsch, F. (2005) Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lee, S. (2008) “Borat, Multiculturalism, and Mnogonational’nost’,” Slavic Review 67 (1), Spring.
Levine, Y. (2008) “Revisiting 12: Mikhalkov’s Oscar-Worth Remake,” The Exile, 24 January, http://www.exile.ru/.
Politkovskaya, A. (2003) A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Seierstad, A. (2007) The Angel of Grozny: Life inside Chechnya. London: Hachette Digital.
Shaheen, J. (2009) Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press.
Slezkin, Y. (1994) “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, 53 (2).
Suny, R.G. (1993) The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Svetova, Z. (2007) “12 As Putin’s Apology,” Daily Journal, 19 October, http://www.ej.ru.
Zizek, S. (1997) “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review, 37, September-October.
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