Discussion
Films can both reflect and shape reality. We seek to explore films set in the past and the present and "haunted" by the past and the present (Pond, 2025) by analysing representational strategies through which Stalinist repressions were retrospectively constructed in Soviet and Post Soviet cinema and by tracing how these cinematographic narratives deal with the "inconvenient" historical past and shape contemporary understanding of Stalinism in Soviet and Post-Soviet (Russian and Ukrainian perspectives) period.
Our understanding of memory politics aligns with the works by Nikolai Epple (The Inconvenient Past: Memory of State Crimes in Russia and Other Countries, 2020) and by Anton Weiss-Wendt&Nanci Adler (The Future of Soviet Past: The Politics of History in Putin's Russia, 2021) and embraces both the concepts of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working off the past - Neiman, 2020 - the critical reconsideration and processing of history by recognizing moral guilt and commemorating victims) and political usage of the past (Halbwachs, 1980; Evans, 2003; Müller, 2004; Heisler, 2008, etc.) and the Soviet case in particular (Smith, 2002; Merridale, 2003; Sherlock, 2007; Etkind, 2013; Koposov, 2018; Malinova, 2019). However, Soviet and Post-Soviet (Russian and Ukrainian) perspectives in contrast have not been yet analysed in terms of their dealing with the "inconvenient" Soviet past cinematographically.
The 1980s are characterized by the emergence of a new quite revolutionary Soviet film genre - predominantly screen adaptation of the already existing Soviet dissident prose/poetry/drama (by Boris Vasiliev, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Vasily Aksyonov, Lidiia Chukovskaya, Fazil Iskander, Leonid Filatov, Anatoly Rybakov, etc.) in which Soviet film makers (Leonid Filatov, Yuri Kara, Alexander Mitta, Vladimir Bortko, Yevgeny Tsymbal, Mark Zakharov, Arkady Sirenko, etc.) explicitly or implicitly rebelled against the constraints of Soviet era reaching cinematographic, prosaic and poetic kinship in their attempt to explore a revisionist approach to Stalinist era interpretation. The above cinematographic trend aligns with the ongoing process of reconsideration of the traumatic parts of political repressions of Stalinism era and disclosing the blind spots - previously ideologically silenced.
As Olga Malinova claims, "practices surrounding the political uses of the past are also closely connected with the construction and representation of national identitites" (Malinova, 2019). The period in focus of this research - the 1980s-until present - is the active period of forming national identities by country-members of the Soviet bloc. Cinematographic representation of Stalinist repressions as historical past is one of the key features in building or re-building national identity for Russia and Ukraine.
