Introduction

The notion of cultural identity is closely entangled with notions of self and other and the notions of self and other are inseparable from one another: it is only in contrast with other that one can define self, and vice-versa. Concerning the opposition svoi/chuzhoi in Russian, Olga Yokoyama wrote:

Оппозиция свой-чужой... входит в состав основных оппозиций древнеславянского мировоззрения. Обследование современного русского текста (в широком смысле) устанавливает, что языковые проявления этой оппозиции наблюдается на всех уровнях языковой системы, из чего предлагается заключить, что эта оппозиция находит систематическое выражение в языке – а следовательно и в сознании его носителя – и в наше время.^[1]

Yokoyama defines the opposition svoi/chuzhoi as “Установка говорящего на адресата, которого говорящий воспринимает или как своего, или как чужого.”^[2]

Yokoyama analyzes the svoi/chuzhoi opposition from several perspectives – intonation, lexicon, morphology – and argues that this opposition can be viewed as an important distinction between colloquial speech and the codified literary language. This argument is certainly interesting, and I recommend it strongly, but I wish to focus on Yokoyama’s definition of the svoi/chuzhoi opposition rather than on how that opposition figures in the analysis of the language itself.

Given the rapid pace of social, political and economic change in Russia in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is not surprising that the attitudes of citizens of the Russian Federation have also changed. Indeed, a survey conducted by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion on the nature of Soviet and then Russian Federation citizens’ self-identification shows evidence of a complicated metamorphosis in the hearts and minds of people who live in the Russian Federation. For instance:

In 1989 only 9% of those surveyed thought Russians were “energetic,” but in 1999, 20% thought Russians were energetic, and 29% thought they were themselves energetic.

In 1989 31% of those surveyed thought Russians were impractical, while only 22% thought Russians were impractical in 1999 and only 9% thought they themselves were impractical.

In 1989, the five most outstanding Russians of all times were ranked as: Lenin, Peter the Great, Pushkin, Lomonosov and Suvorov. In 1994, that cast of characters looked somewhat different: Peter the Great, Lenin, Pushkin, Stalin, Suvorov. In 1999, the rankings were as follows: Peter the Great, Lenin, Pushkin, Stalin, and Gagarin.

In 1989, 35% of respondents identified the lack of a work ethic as one of the most important problems facing Russian society; in 1999 only 9% of Russians identified that as a problem.

In 1989, 53% of Russians reported that playing with their children gave them the greatest joy and satisfaction and 19% of Russians reported that making good money gave them the greatest joy and satisfaction, whereas. In 1999, only 35% of Russians surveyed reported that playing with their children gave them the greatest joy and satisfaction and a whopping 33% reported that making good money gave them the greatest joy and sense of satisfaction.

Lastly, the percentages of Russians favoring the elimination of prostitutes, homosexuals, drug addicts, alcoholics, homeless people, skinheads, victims of AIDS and other social outcasts has fallen by half, suggesting that Russians are more tolerant than they were a decade ago. The number of Russians favoring helping these groups or leaving them alone has grown significantly. This suggests, perhaps, that Russians are more and more seeing these groups not as other but as self.

Indeed, the definition of self and other in the era preceding Perestroika was remarkably simplistic for the modern era because it was a product of official ideology. In the Soviet era, self was defined to include all those Soviet citizens who upheld official ideology, while other was defined to consist of those within Soviet borders and beyond them who were still not yet enlightened by communist ideology. Consider, for instance, the use of the epithet “chuzhdyi” in reference not just to American and other foreign capitalists, but also to native-born Russians who in one way or another defied communist norms.

In this paper I will trace the evolution of Russian self identity in the last dozen or so years as evidenced in some important Russian films of the period:

Little Vera, Vasilii Pichul, 1988
Taxi Blues, Pavel Lounguine, 1990
Window to Paris, Iurii Mamin, 1995
Brat 2, Aleksei Balabanov, 2000

I will also make brief reference to other more recent films (2002).

I will argue that in the period before perestroika and even throughout the perestroika, all things other were part of the forbidden fruit, just out of reach, a forbidden fruit that had to be deliciously sweet to young Soviet citizens. It was in contrast with this delicious other that Russians defined themselves. In the early post-Soviet era, I will argue, the contrast between self and other for Russians became yet more complicated, as more and more Russians began to travel to the West. While they were enchanted with the material conditions they observed there, they were less than pleased with the spiritual aspects of western life. Thus, the notion of self came to be associated with a more spiritual approach to life, although material aspects of other remained as desirable as ever before. In the most recent period, however, the notions of self and other have become even more blurred. Indeed, in reading a list of Russian cities in descending order of population, we find that Moscow is the largest Russian city, Petersburg is the second, and so on. The 26th largest Russian city in the world is… New York. In other words, there are only 25 cities in Russia with a Russian-speaking population greater than the Russian-speaking population of New York. It can easily be argued that a Muscovite would feel more at home in Brighton Beach, New York, than in Izhevsk or Volokolamsk. What does that mean for Russia and what does that mean for Russians’ sense of self? The Internet brings world culture to the home of any Russian with access and what the Russians call a “provaider”: who needs to travel now to explore other?

In the analysis that follows I will trace a transformation taking place on the screens in Russian movie theaters, a transformation that I believe reflects that taking place in the minds of Russian viewers.

Malen’kaia Vera

Directed by Vasily Pichul, with a screenplay by Pichul’s wife Maria Khmelik, Маленькая Вера was released in 1988. The film tells the story of a young woman named Vera, her parents, Kolia and Rita, all living in an unnamed city that is most likely the director’s native Zhdanov. The cast of characters also includes Vera’s brother Vitia, a doctor living in Moscow, and Vera’s friends, including Andrei, who joins the merchant marine, Lena Chistiakova, a single mother of a mulatto boy, and Vera’s lover, Sergei. During the course of the film, Vera meets and falls in love with Sergei, a student. The two lovers stumble into the decision to get married and ultimately move in with Vera’s parents. At one point, when Kolia is in a drunken rage, Sergei locks him in the bathroom. When Kolia is released from the bathroom, he stabs Sergei, nearly taking the young man’s life. Vera is put in the awkward position of retracting a statement to the police that would send her father to prison, thereby compromising her relationship with her fiancй. In the middle of this difficult situation, she tries, unsuccessfully, to take her own life and is saved by her brother and Sergei just as the audience is led to believe that her father is having a fatal heart attack. The film was somewhat scandalous at the time of its release no likely due at least in part to the frankness with which it depicted the sexual and very sensuous relationship of the two young and attractive lovers, Vera and Sergei.

There are four different ways in which the director and screenplay writer of Little Vera have foregrounded the self and other opposition in their film: by means of narrative elements of the film’s storyline, by means of the ways in which the characters use language, by means of settings and costuming, and by means of editing and montage, including the selection of sound and noise for the soundtrack. I will talk briefly about each of these strategies, giving an example or two of each.

Here’s an example of a narrative element figuring into the opposition of self and other. Near the very beginning of the film, Kolia and Rita are very upset because Rita says she found a $20 bill in Vera’s purse (while looking for a pen there.) Thus the film begins with a conflict over the very notion of self and other, us and them. The money is clearly chuzhie: Rita’s mother calls them “inostrannye dollary” in a telephone conversation with her son, Vitia, a doctor living in Moscow. Rita has gone into Vera’s purse, a violation of Vera’s personal space, and then talks about a serious violation of Soviet law on the telephone in an intercity call. This would, by the way, be a good example of a “netelefonnyi razgovor,” yet another displacement of what is properly part of the notion of “self” into the domain of “other” in this short scene. Vera manages to get the $20 bill back, rips it up, and flushes it down the toilet to end the conversation and the scandal, but it continues to grow in ways I don’t have time to describe here.

The director and screenplay writer also use phrasing and lexicon from the domain of communist propaganda to establish the displacement of self and other. It should be noted first that the main characters in the film do not speak in standard literary Russian. Mikhail Petrovich, the middle-aged man with whom Lena Chistiakova takes up, does speak in standard literary Russian, using even participles in a conversation with his daughter about how some Indian women choose self-immolation upon the death of their husbands so as not to outlive them. The other characters all use non-standard Russian: their language features non-standard forms (e.g., lexical stress on the wrong syllable), obscenities, slang and colloquial speech of various social strata. This linguistic background makes the use of communist propaganda all the more conspicuous.

Soon after Vera and Sergei first meet, Sergei asks Vera about her friend Lena Chistiakova. Lena tells Sergei that they are good friends, and that Lena is like a sister to her. Sergei responds that all people are brothers and sisters, using the stock phrase of communist propaganda. Shortly after this scene, Lena and Vera are sitting in a cafe eating ice cream when Sergei walks in. Lena is interested in Sergei and doesn’t know that Sergei and Vera had just spent the night together the previous night: after embracing her, Sergei notices that Vera is in the cafe and disengages himself from Lena’s arms to join Vera. Lena understands that Vera and Sergei have developed a personal history in the last 12 hours and backs off from the pair, announcing that she senses that “рождается большое светлое советское чувство”, (a bright Soviet feeling is being born) a play on the term “svetloe budushchee,” (“bright future”), another stock phrase from communist propaganda, and another shift between the personal and public. Later, when Vitia visits Sergei in his dormitory, he discovers that his sister is there, too. Hoping to deter Sergei from a one-night stand with his little sister, Vitia explains to Sergei that Vera is his sister. Vera quickly responds that we are all brothers and sisters, building on Sergei’s earlier statement and repeating the stock phrase of communist ideology.

One of the other elements of interest here is the use of costuming and make-up and other issues of personal appearance. When we first see Vera, she is standing on the balcony of her family’s apartment, eating sunflower seeds and looking very unremarkable. In this and virtually all her other appearances in the family apartment she is wearing a worn-out housecoat. When we see her the second time, she is dressed to kill, wearing a lot of makeup, and ready for a public outdoor dance. She is virtually unrecognizable as the Vera from the first scene: she is completely transformed. Kolia thinks that Vera’s fashion preferences make her a prostitute and he calls her a whore or comments that she is “whoring around” on numerous occasions in the film, clear references to the displacement of “self” and “other.” As for Sergei, he is usually modestly dressed, but when he comes to Vera’s family’s apartment for the dinner to celebrate their engagement, he is wearing shorts, a violation of the expectations Vera’s parents as well as Vera herself had for his appearance. Lastly, in the scene at the beach when the young people go swimming, Tolia gets a tattoo of a crucifix while another young man is shown to have a tattoo of St. Basil’s. Clearly the young people think that these images are somehow “part of the notion of self” and want them emblazoned on their bodies, and yet the very process of doing so makes them all the more alien to the larger culture in which they live. All these details of appearance contribute to the disruption of the norms associated with the opposition of “self” and “other” in Russian culture.

One of the most interesting juxtapositions of sound and image occurs shortly after Vera’s return home, when she is washing the dishes as her mother returns from work. The radio is on and the station is about to go off the air: the Soviet national anthem is playing as the image track reveals dilapidated kitchen with a string of fish hanging out to dry as Vera washes the dishes. Vera’s mother comes home and soon after sitting down asks her daughter to turn off the radio: even she does not want to hear the pretentious anthem. The Soviet national anthem is very majestic and its use in the soundtrack at this point can only be an ironic projection of the “other” (the Soviet national anthem and the socialist realist depiction of Soviet life) onto the reality of the life of Vera and her family, the life of the inner self.

Pichul clearly manipulates the opposition of self and other, internal and external views of the world, by using the tools of narrative elements, character dialogue, editing and soundtrack, to convey important meanings to the film’s viewers. I would argue that the sum of these manipulations establishes a new reading of the cultural identity of the Russian characters depicted in the film. According to this new reading, that which was once marked as “other” and defined as “forbidden fruit” is now, regardless of its value or quality, marked for “self.” In part, this is how Vera and Sergei, and to some extent even Vitia, define themselves as members of the younger generation in contrast with the generation of their parents. This is a typical pattern of generational renewal, and might be consigned, as such, to an insignificant cultural phenomenon. However, this film, and its redefinition of “us” comes at the beginning of a period of great cultural transition and, I will argue, is the first step on the path towards a significant realignment of cultural identity for Russians.

Taxi Blues

Taxi Blues, directed by Pavel Lounguine, released in 1990, a mere two years after Little Vera and one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, depicts the somewhat tortured relationship of an alcoholic saxophonist, Alyosha Seliverstov, who happens to be a Jew, and Vanya Shlykov, a taxi driver. The film begins with Alyosha and some of his Bohemian friends out for a drunken ride in Vanya’s cab. Alyosha’s friends gradually leave the party, leaving him to pay the rather large fare on the meter: he stiffs the cab driver. Vanya doesn’t give up on recovering his fare, and begins to stalk the saxophonist, eventually making the musician his indentured servant. Alyosha takes up living with Vanya, who does not have a lot of living space to himself. In fact, he shares a communal apartment with an older man identified only as “Gramps” (“дед”) and this proximity provides opportunities for cultural conflict, because it turns out that Alyosha is a Jew and Gramps an anti-semite. Gramps, in his first appearance in the film, argues with Vanya that Russia’s fate is being decided and that Russians must stick together, especially in the face of world Zionism. When Vanya discovers that Alyosha is a Jewish drunk who has sold off his clothes for booze, he remarks, “Я думал, вы себя не пропиваете!” (I thought you [Jews] didn’t drink yourselves to ruin!) Alyosha’s response is that the Russians made him do it: “Довели!” (That’s what you [Russians] have brought us to!)

Indeed, in many respects it is Alyosha who personifies some of the qualities typically identified as markers of Russianness, not Jewishness: his spiritual qualities – in his ingenious music and in the fact that through his music he talks with God (as he says so himself and as noted by others around him.) Indeed, he is a “hero” in the Russian sense: despite the awful conditions in which he finds himself, including his own alcoholism (another marker of Russianness), Alyosha manages to achieve greatness. He climbs out of his drunken stupor to play for a famous American jazz musician, Hal Singer, even more marked as American by virtue of the fact that he is African American; Singer is so impressed with Alyosha’s talent that he takes him on a whirlwind tour of the United States, making Alyosha a wealthy and famous man whose image is broadcast on a huge outdoor screen on Kalinin Prospect (now, New Arbat) in downtown Moscow. It was on this same outdoor screen that images of Russia were broadcast in the film’s opening scene as Alyosha and his friends rode around in Vanya’s cab. In the film’s final scene, a triumphant Alyosha returns to visit Vanya, bringing along with him a new entourage of friends in a scene I will show you now: Alyosha gives the old man a Japanese shirt, calling him a samurai, and Vanya an inflatable sex doll. When Alyosha and his friends suddenly leave, Vanya runs out and gives chase in his car, ultimately winding up in a terrible accident with another vehicle he presumes to be Alyosha’s. When he runs to Alyosha’s car and pulls Alyosha from the car, it turns out that the victim in this car is an Asian businessman and Alyosha and his friends are nowhere to be seen. The credits inform us that Alyosha wound up in a New York hospital for his alcohol problem after cutting his second record in the States; Vanya founded a taxi cooperative and just bought himself a red Mercedes.

Lounguine uses the same filmic strategies to manipulate the opposition self and other to establish an opposition not very different from the one established in Little Vera, a similar sense of somewhat tortured cultural identity. Consider Alyosha’s identity, for example. He is both Russian and not Russian. As the alcoholic musician unable to stay in control of his own life, Alyosha shows characteristics stereotypically Russian; however, as Jewish musician, one might expect him to play classical violin, not Jazz saxophone. His music identifies him as something foreign. Indeed, it is an African-American jazz musician who discovers Alyosha and makes him famous – where? in the US. It was only in the US that Alyosha’s talent could be truly appreciated and it is only in the US that his success is “cashed in,” so to speak. It is his western success that brings him respect back at home in Russia, as demonstrated by the fact that his face is broadcast on the big screen on Kalinin Prospect. Moreover, in the car crash, as Vanya pulls what he believes to be Alyosha’s body out of the wrecked car, it turns out that the body is that of an Asian businessman. Alyosha truly is foreign. And yet, is he?

Lounguine’s film positions the Russian cultural identity in a sexual context, in fact, in a sexual context including both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. This context was a new twist for Russian film at the time that this film was released, just as Little Vera was a Russian first in terms of its sexual explicitness. The relationship between Alyosha and Vanya is never overtly sexual, but its depiction does skirt the boundaries of homoerotica, including such scenes as when Vanya and Alyosha have one of their first confrontations in a public bathroom, a moment when Gramps walks in on Vanya in the shower, and another scene in which the naked Alyosha playing an instrument he calls a “sex-o-phone” in what can only be interpreted as a performance simultaneously musical and masturbatory, and finally, the scene in which Alyosha washes Vanya’s car, as if he were a sexual slave whose favors can be purchased from his master. This sexual context – created with narrative elements – is orchestrated with a beautiful jazz soundtrack the music of which spells a kind of creative freedom from the repressive grips of social and political constraints.

Lounguine is challenging the definition of self and other, even the definition embraced by the younger generation in Little Vera, with the freedoms of the post-Soviet era. In the opening scene, when Alyosha and his friends are driving around town in Vanya’s cab, one of the friends keeps asking, “Where are the Italians?” Presumably, the company of friends was supposed to meet up with a group of Italians with whom they would have even more fun. Alyosha finally explains: “We are the Italians.” Much of the film works to undermine the traditional concepts of self and other in Russian culture: the Jew is the alcoholic, the Russian works like a dog, the Russian intervenes to help the Jew and, ultimately, falls in love with him, only to be rewarded with an inflatable doll. Time and again it is the Jew who embraces the wild recklessness – бесшабашность (recklessness / urge to party) – stereotypically identified with the Russian. Lounguine blurs the lines: the Russian befriends the Jew who stiffed him, the Jew comes to depend on the Russian. The notions of self and other, us and them, is confused in this film.

Window to Paris

Iurii Mamin’s film Window to Paris, released in 1995 – more than three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union – cannot be compared with the other three films I’m discussing in terms of its aesthetic qualities. One of the reasons that the film is impoverished compared to the other films discussed here is the fact that its director, Iurii Mamin, makes the contrast between self and other in this film solely on the strength of narrative elements and dialogue, failing to use other filmic systems of meaning to enhance the contrast as the other three directors did. That notwithstanding the film does present a fascinating contrast of self and other in Russian film. In this film, a mystical window to Paris opens up in a post-Soviet era St. Petersburg apartment, allowing people to pass through it onto a Paris rooftop for a period of several days (according to a mystical calendar that predicts such openings once every twenty some odd years). The characters discover the window when they notice the return of a cat, Maxi, who had disappeared around the time an old woman who had lived in the apartment had disappeared. They follow Maxi through a window they never knew existed and find themselves in Paris. The responses of the Russians in Paris, including the main character, Nikolai Chizhov, and his communal apartment neighbors, can be predicted on the basis of their spiritual and ideological beliefs. (The predictability of the characters’ response to their sudden change of location is parallel, in some ways, to the predictability of characters’ behavior in the films of the socialist realist era.) The communists, convinced they are simply lost, refuse to accept that they have wandered through an inexplicable door into the capitalist world. The materialists use every opportunity to make the most of their experience and bring it back with them to St. Petersburg, stealing and begging their way to what would be riches in Russia. Nikolai, a spiritual man, confronts the strangeness of the reality and strives to understand it as he develops a relationship with a French woman, Nicole, who turns out to be his soulmate in many ways (despite the lack of a common language.) The spiritual qualities shared by these two people are underscored by the fact that they share the same name, despite the cultural and linguistic chasm that separates them.

The film’s narrative has several moments important for this discussion of the theme of Russian identity. At one point, some of the Russians, eating a wonderful meal in a French restaurant, berate the French among whom they are eating. They explain that the French are eating well, but talking only about the meal they are eating, the meals they will eat or have eaten, whereas Russians, sharing among them only one bottle of vodka and one pickle, talk about God, the philosophy of art, and other higher-level issues. When, at various moments, the Russians find themselves cut off from Russia, they cry out for Russia. We expect this from Nikolai Chizhov, who is shown to be spiritually-oriented from the beginning of the film, but even the materialistic Gorokhovs react the same way. Vera Gorokhova, upon seeing the staircase to the Paris rooftop removed, thus severing her connection to Russia, cries out, “Rossiia! Matushka!” and nearly faints in shock. One of the most striking contrasts of self and other in the film occurs when Nikolai tries to get a job in Paris. He is delighted to be hired to perform in an orchestra and only moments before he is about to go on stage does he realize that he is expected to perform without wearing any pants. Chizhov refuses: for him, the music is an art that he cannot and will not defraud by stooping to the vulgarity for which he was hired.

Perhaps one of the most striking scenes in the film occurs when Nikolai has brought some of his schoolchildren on a fieldtrip to Paris. The children decide they want to stay in Paris, having been seduced by its material wealth. They refuse to return to Russia. Nikolai speaks to them, turning directly to the camera to do so (violating the suspension of disbelief of the genre in so doing) to convince them to return and to encourage them to take an active role in making Russia a better country.

Near the end of the film, the Russians are all back safely on their side of the window, back in St. Petersburg, when they once again notice the old woman’s black cat, Maxi. Maxi has disappeared into a crevice in a cement wall. The Russians immediately look to tear down the wall, assuming that behind there lies yet another mystical door to Paris.

The film, therefore, establishes a very strong opposition between the material west and the spiritual Russia, us and them, as it were. The Russian characters reject the material wealth of the west for the spiritual wealth of Russia, but at the end of the film are shown trying to tear down the wall that separates us and them, the wall that separates Russia from the West.

Brat 2

The wall between Russia and the West comes tumbling down in Alexei Balabanov’s Brat 2 (2000). Perhaps the most interesting film of the four I am discussing today, with regard to the opposition of self and other, Balabanov’s Brat 2, an extraordinarily popular 2000 sequel to his earlier film, Brat, features some of the same characters from the first film. In the sequel, Danila Bogrov, now living in Moscow, goes to America with his brother Viktor to make right for a dear friend’s brother. The friend’s brother, Dmitrii, is a hockey player in Chicago and he has somehow fallen victim to an unscrupulous American businessman. While in America, Danila befriends two Americans, the truck driver Ben Johnson and the TV news correspondent, Lisa Jeffrey. Danila also rescues a Russian woman, Dasha, from a life of prostitution in the streets of Chicago. As just mentioned, the film was extraordinarily popular, in part perhaps due to its perceived “America-bashing.” Danila’s brother, Viktor, makes disparaging comments about American authority figures who time and again make very naпve decisions that turn out quite well for Viktor. Danila kills a slew of Americans in a night club and office building on his way to the office of the businessman who has cheated his friend’s brother. The film’s popularity was also quite likely due to the quality of its soundtrack, featuring contemporary music by Russian bands. Although much of the film takes place in America, the soundtrack consists entirely of Russian and Ukrainian music, in the sense that the music was composed by Russian and Ukrainian musicians and features lyrics in Russian and Ukrainian. There are two songs in Ukrainian, the rest are in Russian. However, this music is heavily influenced by American popular music, such as The Cure, The Talking Heads, or the Grunge movement out of Seattle, but also shows influence from the music of Central Asia. While the music of the soundrack is, on its face, Russian, its sources are anything but Russian.

Balabanov takes on the opposition of self and other right away. As the film opens, the camera pans past a “new Russian,” standing in front of a military vehicle, reciting Lermontov’s poem, “Net, ia ne Bairon, ia drugoi…” (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m different …”) The setting and character are an ironic juxtaposition to the poem itself, a Russian romantic’s proclamation of independence from and yet direct influence from the famous English poet. The music which is heard at this point in the film is Chaikovskii’s – again, music that is utterly Russian and yet somehow not Russian at all, so influenced by the west European tradition of the time. The hero, Danila, falls in love with a Russian woman, Irina Saltykova, who sings western style music in MTV video clips and lives in a western style flat. Her home is starkly contrasted with Danila’s mother’s home, a thoroughly Russian context in which Danila’s mother drinks tea while Viktor, his brother, drinks vodka. Danila even objects to Irina’s music and her lifestyle and she tells him, quite simply, get over it: “This is what I do for a living, this is who I am, accept this and me or get out of here”. Danila does NOT break off the relationship. Irina is, in many ways, the embodiment of the incorporation of western culture in contemporary Russia and Danila loves her, betraying her sexually, in the course of the film, only for an African-American woman in Chicago. The notions of self and other are foregrounded in the film’s music, in the setting of Irina’s apartment, in the montage of the soundtrack and imagetrack of the film.

Danila first attempts to intercede on Dmitrii’s behalf by taking on the Russian businessman who works with the American boss. This Russian, Valentin Edgarovich Belkin, the head of the Nikolaevskii Bank, has a very interesting name because it is at once very Russian – Belkin, after all, is a name celebrated in the famous tales by Pushkin – but at once very foreign, since his patronymic indicates something other than pure Russian ancestry. When Danila goes to confront Belkin at the school where Belkin’s son studies, Danila hears the little boy recite a poem, “Стихотворение гимназиста” (“The Schoolchild’s Poem”):

Я узнал, что у меня
Есть огромная семья:
И тропинка и лесок,
В поле – каждый колосок,
Ветка, небо голубое,
Это все – мое, родное.
Это родина моя!
Всех люблю на свете я.

(I have found out
That I have an enormous family:
The path in the little woods,
Every blade of grass in the field,
The branch on the tree, the blue sky
This is all mine, this is all home [native].
This is my home [homeland]!
I love everyone on earth.)

I have not been able to find a source for this poem, although it is likely a Mikhalkov stylization, according to the scholar Leonid Livak (personal communication). It is possible the poem was written specifically for the film, and yet it has the air of something very familiar to Russian adults who remember their childhood days in Soviet elementary schools. The recitation of this poem, or perhaps the memory it evokes, has a profound impact on Danila, because he refers to it on a few occasions in the film, including during his ascent up the fire escape outside the skyscraper where Mannis, the American businessman, has his office. With each flight ascended on this Chicago skyscraper, Danila, more out of breath, more fervently swears his allegiance to Russia.

The opposition of self and other is celebrated throughout the film. As Danila works with his friend, Ilya, to set up his trip to America, we are treated to a view of Ilya’s home, in the Historical Museum on Red Square (where he works.) Right in Ilya’s apartment we see banner portraits of Lenin and Stalin, and the view out the window gives us the mausoleum where Lenin’s body still lies in state and the grounds right behind the mausoleum where Stalin was ultimately buried. The men go to a Russian who sells firearms to prepare for the trip to America; this Russian’s nickname is “the fascist,” although when asked, he denies any German ancestry. The room where he takes our heroes is festooned with Nazi military banners and he himself wears a German army uniform from the Second World War. And yet, he is Russian. It is interesting to note that the source of all the weapons that the two Russians take with them to America is ideologically associated with the gravest enemy Russians ever faced: Hitler. Is the fascist Russian? Is he a Nazi? Can a Russian be a Nazi and still a Russian? These are questions the film raises, but doesn’t answer. The fascist who supplies them with weapons identifies himself as a Russian; he denies any German ancestry and doesn’t attempt to explain his fascination with Nazism. Danila doesn’t question him: he simply accepts the situation, as it is in his character to do. But this scene contributes a lot to the dissolution of the notion of Russian identity in the film.

Before leaving Moscow, Danila meets up with Irina on a bridge in Moscow. She asks him why they are meeting at this particular place and he explains that he has chosen this spot because it’s beautiful: indeed, behind them is a beautiful panorama of Moscow at night. This is another instance in which the director uses settings to make his point about the contrast between self and other. This scene in Moscow is beautiful, and it is a beauty that is never matched in the American scenes: with all Danila’s further adventures in Chicago, the night skyline of that city is never shown in the film even though it would clearly match Moscow’s in its beauty and the excitement it evokes. Danila explains to Irina that he’ll be busy with work, but he tells her that he will be right nearby and she can call him on the cell phone (which has a roaming plan so she can call him as if he were in Moscow). For all Irina knows, Danila is still in Moscow; he wants her to believe that and continues with the subterfuge throughout his American adventure. In this sense, while he is in America, he is in Russia for Irina. This geographic dislocation is a cultural dislocation not only for Irina, but also for Danila and the viewer. Danila perceives virtually all his experiences in America as if he were in Russia and the viewer has very little sense that Danila is in America. The imagetrack rarely shows us any American sites recognizable to the average Russian viewer (such as the skyline of New York or Chicago or landmarks of New York, where Danila arrives from Moscow), nor does the soundtrack offer us any American music to illustrate the new context in which Danila finds himself. Indeed, in all the places where Danila goes, he never hears American music, only Russian music, including the night club in Chicago which happens to be featuring a Russian band.

When Danila arrives in New York, he gets a ride to Brighton Beach from a Russian-speaking taxi driver who reminds him of a taxi driver in Moscow. The driver in New York complains that Russians come just to see the US but then do anything to stay here. When Danila objects that he loves his homeland, the taxi driver becomes very agitated:

А, патриот! Где твоя родина? Горбачев сдал ее Америке, чтобы хорошо тусоваться! Крым просрал, сербов и болгаров сдал. Родина там, где задница в тепле…

Aha, a patriot! Where is your homeland? Gorbachev sold it to America to have a good time! He gave up Crimea, betrayed the Serbs and the Bulgarians. Your homeland is the place where you can put your ass in a warm spot…

This is an argument Danila rejects throughout the film, but especially at its end, while his brother, Viktor, accepts the argument, deciding to accept a jail term in the US in order to stay here. This defies Danila’s seeming rejection of the US and its creature comforts..

In Brighton Beach Danila walks the streets and looks at the people, the stores, the signs and feels very much as though he is in contemporary Moscow. At this point in the soundtrack we hear the song “Iskala” (“I’ve been searching”); in part, the lyrics of the song are as follows:

Я искала тебя годами долгими,
Искала тебя дворами темными,
В журналах, в кино, среди друзей,
В день, когда нашла, с ума сошла.

Припев. Ты совсем как во сне,
Совсем как в альбомах,
Где я рисовала тебя гуашью.

I’ve been searching for you for long years
I’ve been searching for you in dark courtyards,
In magazines, in the movies, among friends,
On the day when I found you, I went crazy.

Chorus. You’re just like in my dreams,
Just like in my album
Where I drew you in watercolors.

The vertical montage of the imagetrack, with its scenes of Russian New York which seem so distinctly Russian, not at all American, together with this song of long anticipation and searching, suggest that the film’s hero (and perhaps the film’s viewers) have waited for a long time to see America, but that in fact, America has already come to Russia because Russia is not very different from America.

In Brighton Beach Danila meets a Jew from Russia, marked as a Jew by his accent, and he buys a car from this man. Danila is concerned that the car is not in good enough shape to get him to Chicago and the man argues, “Hey, we Russians don’t deceive one another!” Of course, the man is deceiving him and the car breaks down. But Danila is deceived by other Russians, too, most notably all those mafiosos in Moscow who had his friend, Kostia Gromov, killed, and Belkin’s thugs who are trying to kill him, too. Danila is most helped by his two American friends, Ben Johnson and Lisa Jeffrey, both of whom play roles that turn out to be essential to Danila’s success in helping Dmitrii. Danila even makes love to Lisa – an African American and therefore even more marked as “other” than European Americans, betraying the Russian woman, Irina Saltykkova, in doing so.

Perhaps the most striking scene in which the opposition between self and other is illustrated is a scene in which Danila tries to find the Russian prostitute so he can help her escape from her pimp. He goes into a bar in an African-American neighborhood to find the people who can lead him to this woman, Dasha, who goes by the American name, Marilyn. In a bar full of African-Americans, Danila, the very Caucasian Russian, asks the bar tender to help him find the Russian prostitute. As he says those words, the entire bar full of patrons is absolutely silent: the sense of alienation is complete. Danila is clearly completely out of his element. As different as the Russian man and the African-Americans appear to be in this and other scenes in the film, Danila bridges the gap when he makes love to Lisa Jeffrey, the African-American woman who helps him at two critical points in the film’s narrative. In this sense, she stands in for his Russian lover, Irina Saltykova, helping Danila to continue to blur the lines between us and them in America, as he did in Russia.

In a scene that illustrates the cultural divide between Americans and Russians, Danila asks Dasha why Americans keep saying “How are you” to him. He’s confused, because he thinks they don’t really care about him. She explains that they don’t really care about him, but that it’s just a manner of speaking. “Everything,” she says, “is a manner of speaking here, except money.” We are led to believe that this is the only thing Americans care about, and yet the film clearly demonstrates that money, and all it can buy, is of critical importance to the new Russians, too. Consider, for instance, that it is Belkin’s greed which has gotten Kostia Gromov into his mess in the first place. In fact, Danila argues with both Mannis and his brother that strength comes not from money, but from truth, a spiritual argument that underscores the entire film. In this sense, the film does not so much engage in America-bashing, as it does in bashing of the stereotypical image of America held by many Russians as a country whose people worship money. It is that ideal – the ideal of money – which the director seeks to subvert in this film. At one point in the film Danila talks with his brother about what is more important, money or truth. Viktor argues for money, Danila for truth. Danila asks Viktor what he would do if he had a lot of money and Viktor explains that he would buy off everyone around him. Danila is incredulous: “Would you also buy me off?” Danila believes that truth is more important than money, and this philosophical position – I would argue Balabanov’s most important message – is a position for which the questions of self and other are irrelevant. Both American and Russian characters, as well as Ukrainians, are corrupted by money in Brat 2; both Russian and American characters show concern for friendship and truth in the film.

Balabanov is, in fact, arguing for a new sense of self and other for his generation of Russians. While the younger generation in Little Vera viewed everything western as forbidden fruit to be totemized as part of their desire to engage in a struggle with the generation of their parents, and the main characters of Taxi Blues found themselves confused as to their own definition of self and other, Balabanov’s heroes have come to a different and more nuanced sense of self than even the hero of Window to Paris. While seeming to bash America with every step they take, Balabanov’s heroes are, in many ways, completely and utterly Americanized. They use American technology, listen to music that could be considered American, even though the lyrics are in Russian. They wear American style clothing and are as corrupted by money as the Americans they so despise. The film itself is thoroughly American in style, very much reminiscent of the film Pulp Fiction., especially in the characterization of Danila Bogrov, as played by Sergei Bodrov Jr., very similar to the role played by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Both characters remain calm despite anything that might befall them, and both, despite the fact that they are cold-blooded killers, display charming idiosyncracies and childlike innocence seemingly inconsistent with the persona of a murderer.

One particular episode underscores this Americanization of the Russian self. Near the end of the film, Viktor is hiding in a building surrounded by the Chicago police. It seems that they have finally caught him. The Russian-speaking police officer calls upon him to give himself up, but Viktor cries out, “Russians don’t surrender, haven’t you seen the movies?” Moments later, Viktor gives himself up, confessing that he is surrendering because he wants to stay in America and live there. He has fallen in love with the place. In surrendering to the police, he seems to surrender his Russian identity. Moments later, when Danila and Dasha finally get onto the Aeroflot flight back to Moscow, Dasha asks the flight attendant to bring them vodka. He refuses, explaining that they don’t serve alcoholic beverages during take off and descent. She takes off her wig, revealing her shaven head, and explains, “Lad, you don’t understand, we are going home.” Her shaven head identifies her at once with the political prisoners whose heads were shaven. Dasha has been a prisoner of sorts while she was in America; now she is going home again, although how she will be received there and what she will do there is utterly uncertain.

The soundtrack for the film was sponsored by a Russian radio station, ironically called “Nashe radio,” which runs an American style format, Moscow 101.7, complete with a man-woman repartee typical of that might be heard in any American city. The songs on the soundtrack are entirely in Russian, except for the 2 songs in Ukrainian. The lyrics are not particularly meaningful, something that is striking in the Russian context: one would expect in a film such as this to find meaningful lyrics and that is, surely, the Russian bardic tradition. These songs’ strong rhythm and well-defined “Grunge” sound contribute a lot to the emotional context of the film’s action and its placement in a cultural context that is at once both Russian and American.

Us and them are forever changed in Brat 2 because now the very notion of us includes something of them. The wall separating the West and Russia in Window to Paris has, effectively been torn down. As Danila wanders through Brighton Beach and even Chicago, he is, essentially still at home in Russia. Russia is everywhere and Russians are everywhere. There is no more distinction into neat categories, as in the Soviet Era, of us and them. It is, perhaps, this aspect of the film that its viewers in Russia most celebrated. Long separated from the rest of the world, Russian viewers can now participate in the larger global culture, whether vicariously through the Internet, or up close and personal by traveling abroad. Wherever they go, however, they are likely to be able to find themselves not far from home – in the company of Russians with whom they can drink vodka and lament the lack of spiritual values anywhere but in Russia, at the same time that Russians in Russia lament the lack of spiritual values now in Russia.

Conclusions

The picture described here of Russians’ sense of identity as reflected in Russian film continues to be relevant to more recent Russian films. The films Ekhali dva shofera (“Two Chauffers Were Driving”) by Aleksandr Kott (2002) and Balabanov’s latest film, Voina (“The War,” 2002) both feature foreign characters in some shape or form. In Kott’s film, there is no foreign character per se, but the film’s narrative hinges on the presence of an American Ford truck and the truck is a symbol of America. The two main characters of the film, a man and a woman both of whom are truck drivers, live and work in a somewhat competitively romantic relationship. The man drives an old beaten-down and dirty Soviet truck, the woman the clean and elegant Ford. While the Ford is faster, it is clearly not built for Soviet conditions and the man has to help his woman friend pull her truck out of the mud one day. This quiet, apolitical film has a subtle message of friendly competition and collaboration, and does not represent a stark image of opposition. Balabanov’s film “The War” features an English couple, actors in a traveling theatrical production of Hamlet, who wind up being taken hostage by Chechens in the Chechen war. The Englishman is released in order to collect a ransom to gain the release of his fiancйe and he ultimately works together with the Russian here to mount a daring rescue. The Englishman fails to understand the realities of life in Russia, in general, and the realities of war, in particular. He films everything he experiences as part of a deal with a British television station, which in turn has given him a large sum of money towards the ransom. The video he creates shows the distance between the Englishman’s understanding of the brutal world he has found himself in and the realities of that world, as experienced by the Russian hero. The disconnect has tragic consequences for the Russian hero, who nonetheless goes along with the Englishman’s potential suicidal plan to rescue his fiancйe. These consequences highlight the emergence of Russia into a political system marked by the rule of law (and thus perhaps more “British” than Russian in some respects), but that this very rule of law does not “fit” a country which believes that it is in the midst of a brutal war with terrorists. The question of identity looms large for Balabanov’s hero: Is Russia a cool dispassionate society governed by a system of fair laws or a society engaged in war against terrorists? Balabanov seems to be suggesting that it cannot be both.

The evolution of the concepts of self and other in Russian cinema in the last 15 or so years (since the Perestroika era) have reflected the changes or, in some cases, led to changes in attitudes held by Russians about their own national identity. The seemingly shatterproof construct of Soviet national identity, enforced by official ideology in every aspect of public life, turned out to be a very fragile structure, a structure destroyed in a very short period of time in the years preceding and following the collapse of the Soviet state. Lacking the larger vision of Russia as a force for salvation in world history (whether as the “third Rome” or as the leader of world communism), Russians are struggling with their place in the world and this struggle is reflected in the films analyzed in this article. The evolution of Russian self-identity is shaped, of course, also by the increasingly prominent trend of Russian travel and immigration to all corners of the world, but for the vast majority of Russians who neither immigrate, nor travel beyond the borders of the Russian Federation or the former Soviet Union, the imagined universe of the cinema is one of the most important arenas for this continuing national discussion.