ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Civil War film in Russo-Soviet cinematic history. It examines the long shadow cast by the Vasil'ev Brothers’ 1934 film Chapaev, and how the image of Vasilii Chapaev created in that film influenced Soviet directors and audiences. Beginning in the 1960s, as the Soviet Union commemorated its fiftieth birthday, a series of Civil War films recast the meanings of that foundational event and revised its heroes. Action films such as Edmond Keosaian’s The Elusive Avengers (1966), dramas such as Evgenii Karelov’s Two Comrades Were Serving (1968) and nostalgic films such as Nikita Mikhalkov’s At Home among Strangers (1974) introduced more subtle, more flawed heroes from the Civil War onscreen. After 1991, film-makers reversed course, recasting White officers – who had always been villains in Soviet films – into heroes who fought patriotically to defend their motherland. Andrei Kravchuk’s The Admiral (2008) epitomizes this trend, for it turned Aleksandr Kolchak, the self-styled Supreme Leader of Russia in the Civil War, into a devout, patriotic hero. Over the last half-century, the Civil War has continued to be of interest to Soviet and then Russian film-makers; at the same time, the concept of heroism has gone through revision, with cinematic villains turning into heroes and vice versa.
