Forget the War

This article examines retroactive constructions of the images of Soviet people within post-Soviet Russian films about World War II. The author demonstrates that such images signify a break with the Soviet past rather than its nostalgic or neo-authoritarian replay. The emplotment, characterization, and style of recent films about the war relocate the projected sense of patriotism from a state- and ideologically-bound collective to individual agents who no longer form the family-like unity that used to be promoted by the Soviet discourse of the war. The wartime past these films depict becomes a space of projections that serve the purpose of creating a more pragmatic relationship between contemporary subjects and the Soviet past. Instead of promoting a sense of belonging to a Soviet collective, many recent war films depict the individuals as temporarily bound by a particular task or circumstance, of which surviving the ordeal of war is one of the most important

Aesthetics · Authoritarianism · Democracy · Epistemology · Ideology · Patriotism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Subjectivity · Trial by ordeal · World War II · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy

• Poetry and Identity

  Open Access•Irfan Fazili•ShodhKosh: Journal of Visual and…•2021

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