Indifference in Recent Russian Films: The Gulag Face of Cruelty Returns

Abstract

Several recent Russian films show victimizers become victims, and victims— victimizers. This random division into victimizers and victims was forced on society by Stalin, who enjoyed sending his intimate friends-victims (and their wives, children, and relatives) to torture and death. Millions of innocent Russians were captured, killed, or sent to the Gulag, but in an unprecedented way, they were also made to implicate their own intimate friends and family members and become victimizers in their turn. Alternatively, the NKVD torturers were also turned into victims, periodically killed off and replaced by new recruits. Testimonies of Shalamov, Ginsburg, and Dovlatov show that when intimate relationships shrink to command-compliance, both victimizers and victims shed emotions, including shame and guilt, and aggression becomes the only socially meaningful action and the last available entertainment. I identify the visual metaphor of this dynamic, the always identical indifferent face of cruelty, in the films Burnt by the Sun, The Return, Elena, Loveless, and Captain Volkonogov Escaped.