Authors

Discussion

The full-scale Russia-Ukraine War has shattered the formerly standard collective memory about the eternal friendship between Ukrainians and Russians. Rather than being a given, the discourse about familial ties between these nations was carefully sustained through many narratives, including depictions of the Great Patriotic War. The theoretical framework of this paper are works on memory studies (Maurice Halbwachs, Andreas Hyussen), post-colonial theory (Edward Said), and the works on soundscape in cinema (Rick Altman). This paper examines how the discourse about familial ties between two biggest nations of the Soviet Union evolved in Stalin-era cinema. WWII films that were produced in Kyiv Film Studios (such as directed, for example, by Ihor Savchenko and Mark Donskoi) and those that were produced in Mosfilm Studios followed the models that were established in the 1930s films about the Civil War, thus ensuring continuity in the discourse about the brotherhood of Russia and Ukraine. This paper focuses on two productions by Moscow-based film studios. Based on Konstantin Simonov’s eponymous novel, Alexander Stolper’s Days and Nights (1944) was the first feature film about the Battle of Stalingrad and was produced by Mosfilm. Sergei Gerasimov’s The Young Guard (1948), a screen adaptation of Alexander Fadeev’s award-winning novel that glorified the Komsomol members’ resistance to Nazi occupiers in Donbas, was produced by Gorky Film Studio. While the idea of the friendship of the Soviet peoples was expressed time and again in many narratives about the war, Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language occupied a special role in sustaining this discourse. The filmmakers relied on the implication that Ukrainian and Russian can be mutually intelligible. Therefore, of the non-Russian nationalities of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian was the only language that was not dubbed or translated in Soviet cinema. A study of the artistic devices used in the films by Savchenko, Donskoi, Stolper, and Gerasimov (sound score, trope of a big family, literary allusions) demonstrates how films about WWII became building blocks for the discourse about particular affinity between Ukraine and Russia.