Prisoners of the Caucasus

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Dec 29 04:41:07 PST 2002


***** A contemporary version of a Tolstoy story sheds haunting light on the tragedy of Chechnya - and Russia.

Directed by Sergei Bodrov | Starring Oleg Menshikov, Sergei Bodrov Jr. BY ANDREW ROSS

...The story itself follows Tolstoy's original fairly closely. Two Russian soldiers in Chechnya, the naive Vania (played by Bodrov's son, Sergei Bodrov Jr.), and Sasha, a callous, seen-it-all veteran (Oleg Menshikov, last seen in the U.S. in the Oscar-winning Russian film "Burnt by the Sun"), are captured and held for ransom by Abdoul-Mourat, the village chief (played in an expertly dour manner by Jemal Sikharulidze), in exchange for his son, who is being held in a nearby Russian jail. As in Tolstoy's story, captives and captors develop a mutual fascination, even dependence, despite their almost genetically inbred antipathy. But there is less Russian derring-do here than in the original, greater recognition of the humanity of the Caucasian Muslims and considerably more tragedy.

Much of the tragedy, despite Bodrov's insistence that this is a neutrally pacifist fable, is specifically Russian. In the character of the dissolute, violent and ultimately doomed Sasha, one sees the final, inglorious end of the old Russia. At one point, Vania, earnestly wishing to impress the old soldier, tells him, "I can learn to kill, too." "It's too late," says Sasha - his reply as much a commentary on the futility of Russia's attempts to hang onto its empire as a rebuff to Vania's appeal for friendship. The open, unbloodied Vania, a figure of warmth and hope, represents the dawning of a "new" Russia - but it is not at all clear whether he will be able to survive the burden of the past....

<http://www.salon.com/feb97/prisoner970207.html> *****

***** Prisoner of the Mountains A Film Review by James Berardinelli

...Nearly every interpersonal dynamic in this film is fascinating. The best-explored is that of Vanya and Sacha, who, although they're fellow countrymen, have vastly different outlooks on the world. Vanya is young and green. He has never fired a shot at anyone, and is now desperately afraid that he will be killed before he ever gets a chance to experience life. Sacha, on the other hand, is a veteran. A career soldier who joined the army because he was "stupid, loved guns, and needed money", he's short-tempered and jaded. But, as the period of captivity wears on, his hard shell deteriorates, and he becomes fiercely protective of his naive compatriot.

Abdul-Mourant is painted as a fair, but emotionless, man. Of his three children, one is dead, another is a captive, and only his youngest remains with him. He refuses steadfastly to interact with his prisoners on any emotional level, leaving their care in the hands of his mute son-in-law, Hassan (Alexander Bureyev). Abdul-Mourant has no love of Russians, and, if not for the promise of getting his son back, he would have no compunction about shooting both of them.

Dina, Abdul-Mourant's 12-year old daughter, befriends the captives, but never loses sight of their relative positions. She's a solemn, serious girl who takes pity on them, and gradually begins to see them as human beings. But she has been hardened by the centuries old struggle and is in many ways less naive than Vanya, with whom she develops an oddly tender relationship....

<http://movie-reviews.colossus.net/movies/p/prisoner.html> *****

***** Ram, Harsha, "Prisoners of the Caucasus: Literary Myths and Media Representations of the Chechen Conflict" (August 1, 1999). Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. Working Paper 1999_01-ram. <http://repositories.cdlib.org/iseees/bps/1999_01-ram>

...Human rights groups such as Memorial, or civic movements involving the mothers of conscripted soldiers, while limited in terms of political influence and mass participation, can still be read as an index of how far the Russian debate on interethnic relations has come in the last decade. 61 No longer tied to the opaque allegories of the Russian poets, these groups, and with them the debate at large, have entered into a direct confrontation with the post-Soviet state. Yet in at least one way the position of many civic organizations remains indebted to the coded politics of the literary tradition: their polemic, like those of Russia's classical writers, has not been radically anti-imperialist. Rather, they frequently prefer to "domesticate" the crisis of empire by focusing primarily on the abuses of power perpetrated by the state against Russians themselves. In this sense, the romantic figure of the Captive, who falls victim both to the enemy and to his own political system, continues to dominate the Russian imagination. 62

In exploring a prolonged political tragedy whose textual record stretches from classical Russian poetry to contemporary debates in the national media, it is perhaps appropriate to conclude with a glance at a work that generically embraces the entire tradition. Sergei Bodrov's film _Kavkazskii plennik_ (released in English as _The Prisoner of the Mountains_) transposes the basic plot of the Pushkin/Tolstoi story onto a contemporary setting, while sharpening, in a typically post-Soviet fashion, its critical message. Bodrov's film is in many ways a powerful fusion of the literary tradition with modern media culture. It contains documentary-style footage of army life, with topical references to the role of the soldiers' mothers, institutional corruption, and the unpreparedness of Russian soldiers for combat duty. These contemporary references contrast sharply with a markedly romantic rendering of the life of the North Caucasian highlanders. In a media release Bodrov makes the improbable claim that the highlanders "have lived through the Soviet era untouched by time. They live as they did one hundred years ago." 63 Erasing the complex two-century long encounter of the highlanders with Russian and Soviet modernity, Bodrov positions the local inhabitants in a kind of ethnographic time-warp: their struggle with Russia, now as before, can do no more than exemplify the perennial allegory of the Noble Savage and his Captive.

In the film's final scene, the Russian soldier Vania, who has been held prisoner in a North Caucasian mountain village, is being led to his execution. He is made to stand at the edge of a sharp drop with his back to his captor, who then shoots randomly into the air instead of killing him. In a magical-realist twist, Vania sees an apparition of his dead comrade telling him that he has been spared. He then spots a fleet of helicopters, hailing them and thus identifying himself with the Russian side. This identification is imperiled as he realizes that his army will not in turn identify him, and is indeed bent on perpetuating a conflict that he and his captor have already resolved on a personal level.

The film's dénouement, in which Vania is spared only to see the larger war continue, reverberates with the richly symbolic ambiguities of the nineteenth-century literary tradition. For much of the film, the protagonist is the Russian Captive, a victim rather than an agent of the war. In the final execution scene, he acquires the richly allegorical resonances of Lermontov's Corpse: hovering between brute matter and consciousness, his body becomes a symbol of the Russian nation and its imperial burden. Finally, his erstwhile captor is once more the Noble Savage: in sparing Vania's life, he shows himself capable of a gesture of magnanimity that morally redeems him and his people. The violent logic of the Russian state deepens the political alienation of the Russian, while eliciting the native nobility of the highlander.

This closing scene of _Prisoner of the Caucasus_ might be seen as a translation of the recent Chechen war into the symbolic idiom of Russian romanticism. Vania, and with him the Russian people, here occupy a liminal space. Like Lermontov's wounded soldier, Vania is poised at the threshold between life and death, with his back to the living and facing the dead. No longer captive but not yet identified and rescued by "his" army, Vania might be seen as the Russian national body. Disavowed by the political center yet unwelcome in the colonial periphery, the Russian body seeks a homecoming, in order to dwell within the national memory. Abandoned by the empire, it must achieve its repatriation by other means....

...61 As examples of independent civic initiative one might mention the work of the human-rights group Memorial in documenting the massacre that took place in Samashki in April 1997. Memorial performed the painstaking task of interviewing survivors, photographing the site, establishing a probable narrative of events, and compiling a verifiable list of the dead. In calling the Russian state to account for an atrocity of the present (and not an outrage from the Communist past), Memorial's published report constituted a significant precedent, one usefully contrasted with the scandalously biased conclusions of the Parliamentary Commission on the Chechen War: see _Vsemi imeiushchimisia sredstvami... Operatsiia MVD RF v sele Samashki 7-8 1995g_. (Moscow: Pravozashchitnyi tsentr "Memorial": 1995). The report's conclusions are generally confirmed by the British television documentary on the Chechen war, _The Betrayed_ (dir. Clive Gordon, 1995). An edited redaction of the report of the Russian Parliamentary Commission, interpolated with highly tendentious commentary, is also available: _Kommissiia Govorukhina_ (Moscow: Laventa, 1995). The Govorukhin Commission was a heavily politicized exercise that asserted the priorities of the Duma majority: to absolve the Russian army of any responsibility while laying the blame for the war almost equally at the door of Dudaev and Yeltsin. One might also point to the emergence of the mothers of Russian conscripts as a social force. Appalled by the systemic violence and institutional decay that permeated the army, and concerned about their sons' forced participation in a war for which they, like the nation at large, were unprepared, the soldiers' mothers became one of the more visible groups in Russia's emerging civil society. Shrewdly relying on the symbolic place accorded to motherhood in Russian society, the soldiers' mothers were able to portray their critique of militarism as a provocative but readily grasped extension of the maternal instinct. See the website for the Soldiers' Mothers Organization of St. Petersburg, http://www.openweb.ru/windows/smo/smo.htm; see also Amy Caiazza, "Russia Meets Its Matriarchs," _Transitions_ (January 1998) (also at http://www.ijt.cz/transitions/archive1.html.)

62 I do not believe my point is substantially disproved by the Memorial inquiry into the Samashki massacre (see the previous note): most of the human rights activism arising from the war took no position on Chechen independence, and simply opposed a military resolution to the crisis, which was assumed by most to be an internal Russian affair.

63 _Prisoner of the Mountains_ (Orion Pictures Corporation, 1996), 6. The film, we are told, was shot in Daghestan; its immediate point of reference was the Chechen war, but Bodrov's intentions were also more universal.... ***** -- Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>



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