Authors

Discussion

The 1920s and 30s saw the development of a Soviet cinema of conquest: the action-adventure film. Through this new form, artists attempted to construct the boundaries of their young country. What emerged was an implicit assertion of the ethnic hierarchies and imperial mission underlying the Soviet Union’s outward promises of equality and progress. A pattern emerged, of an ethnic Russian hero attempting to exert his dominion over the land (and/or its inhabitants) on behalf of the state, often supported by a mystical, indigenous character with an innate, quasi-magical connection to nature. In this paper, I provide a history of the action-adventure film as a tool of Soviet imperialism, demonstrating the essentialist tropes in the depiction of indigenous people. I then explore how Khasan Khazhkasimov’s Vsadnik s molniei v ruke (The Rider with Lightning in his Hand, 1975) acts as a disruption to these established conventions.

Over the following decades, the Gor´kii studio, based in Moscow, made several films that employed the theme of Russian colonial subjugation over the Soviet hinterlands. Then in 1975, the studio released Vsadnik s molniei v ruke (The Rider with Lightning in his Hand), directed by Khasan Khazhkasimov and set in his native region of Kabardino-Balkaria, an autonomous oblast in the South Caucasus. It is a rare example of a film produced at a Russian studio by a director from a different national group that directly deals with the group’s own history. Khazhkasimov self-consciously places his film within the wider discourses of the genre, setting his work in the 1920s and referencing key examples of earlier Soviet action-adventure films. At first glance, it could be read as the archetypal propaganda narrative; a simple recitation of the themes and ideas set forth in these earlier works. However, the film makes direct reference to the violence of Soviet imperialism in Kabardino-Balkaria and local resistance to Sovietisation, thereby subverting expectations of the genre. I offer a reading of the film as a challenge to state orthodoxies around technology, land, progress, and national identity.