Authors

Discussion

The memory of the Second World War serves as a crucial component within the rhetoric arsenal deployed by the Russian regime to assert the legitimacy of its war of aggression against Ukraine. The myth of the Great Patriotic War has increasingly aligned with efforts to suppress alternative memories, fostering a rhetoric that labels any critical examination of the Soviet legacy as a revival of Nazi ideology. Such a political instrumentalization of history goes under the pretext of a “duty of memory”, that has been sanctioned by the law and inscribed in the 2020 constitution of the Russian Federation.

During the last two decades, medias and arts have undoubtedly played a strategic role in spreading and grounding this rhetoric in the public space. In particular, Russian political authority has been deploying a considerable effort in controlling the narrative of the Second World War conveyed by cinema. In this paper, I will shed light on a particular trend, where the representation of the Soviet Victory is carried out by a rather unexpected narrative device: time travel.

Between 2008 and 2018, time travel to the Second World War has been the central topic of at least five films. The rise of this trend must be considered in the broader context of the huge popularity of time travel narratives in post-soviet literature. Their main characters are the so-called popadantsy: a group of men from the present time who find themselves stuck in key periods of Russia’s history and must fight for the future of their country. The abrupt eruption of this phenomenon in literature has been quite extensively studied in recent year, but its specific functioning in cinema has so far eluded scholarly attention.

In all the films mentioned above, the narrative device of time travel fulfils a distinctive function that is generally missing in popadantsy literature. Such narratives exploit time travel as a fantastic gateway to past reality, wielding it as a pedagogical instrument: through the exposure to an allegedly authentic wartime experience, the chrononauts become aware of the necessity of remembering their ancestors and paying tribute to their sacrifice. In this regard, time travel can be considered as a metaphorical embodiment of the performative ambition of the film itself: to convey a sense of patriotic attachment to historical events that may seem remote to its targeted youthful audience. The diachronic analysis of these five films will shed light on the complex evolution of this concern with the preservation of the memory of the Soviet victory, which intricately intertwines with the memory politics of the Russian regime.