On Sleep and Oblivion in Post-Soviet Film

By Alla Efimova, The Imprints of Terror: the rhetoric of violence and the violence of rhetoric in modern Russian culture, 2006

The legacy of Stalinism, and more generally Soviet totalitarianism, has remained an ethically unresolved issue in the post-Soviet culture and society. The failure to accept responsibility for the regime of terror distinguishes Russia from Germany, Switzerland, and even France where the need to take responsibility for the midcentury events are acknowledged to various degrees. Yet, the literary, visual, and cinematic representations of the past in the post-Soviet culture have been profuse. Analyzing the tropes common to these representations is one way to understand the logic of post-Soviet retrospection. The visual rhetoric of post-Soviet films is the subject of this paper. I emphasize the word visual as it often contradicts the intended effect of accompanying texts. Discussed here are fiction and documentary films produced in the early 1990s, made for mass audiences in the attempt to visually represent, at the end of glasnost, the collective memory of the Soviet past, or perhaps the collective dream about the Soviet past.