“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est–‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.” Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt’s up ender to Origins nails what autocrats fear most about humankind. It speaks to why Putin went wilding in Crimea and the Donbas after stand-up Slavs made Ukraine new in 2014. Take a look at primary sources if you doubt their uprising on the Maidan overflowed with beginners’ grace. Or just take in this testimony by a Jewish man who led a self-defense group there that included members from “the Right sector” who might’ve been wary around him until they hung together for Ukrainian sovereignty in a public square:
It was worth living in this country in order to live up to the Maidan, it was worth it. I am shocked by the lack of barbarism, because 12,000 fighters who are on the Maidan and Hrushevsky could wipe everything into dust within a radius of ten kilometers. A “wrong” ending football match causes more damage to a European city. There is simply no desire for vandalism, and the fact that these people do not smash the shelves is evidence of the health of the nation, that not everything is as hopeless as it looked once. This responsibility is very heavy, anywhere in the world such events would cause tragic consequences–look at Bosnia. And if after all people have not lost their human face, then we have matured and we have a future.
A scary prospect to the dictator without borders. Reaction is stuck on the past.
That came home to me forcefully as I watched The Brest Fortress (2010)—a joint prestige-production financed with state money from Russia and Belarus. Another viewer/reviewer pointed out the film “has taken on an uncanny, frightening and powerful alignment with the cruel facts on the ground in Mariupol as you read today: soldiers and civilians driven to the basements of a fortress, being shelled and bombed night and day, and gradually running out of food, water and medical supplies.”[1] Per that viewer, the film’s effect/affect amounts to a “powerful indictment” of Russia’s special operation since, “roles reversed,” Russians are doing to Ukraine “what Nazis did to the holdouts in the Westernmost Soviet outpost of Brest.”[2] No doubt, but for me the movie’s imaging of the Great Patriotic War doesn’t prep you for Ukrainian bravery. It often feels irreal and/or Spielberg-y.[3] Happy (samey) family scenes, along with straight boys’ and girls’ coming of age, seem tuned to Putin’s backward sexual politics. There’s also a “false flag” operation by Nazis—a usable past for con-scum out to sell the scam that crisis actors are everywhere faking crimes against humanity.
One episode in The Brest Fortress highlights how Russian patriotism is skewed by patriarchy. Under extreme fire in an upstairs room, a wife tells her husband she doesn’t want to live without him and their children and they both agree they’d rather die than be taken prisoner. They ask each other for forgiveness as they’re making a suicide pact on the fly. Husband asks wife to check if Nazis are inside the house. When she turns away, stepping off-camera, he shoots her. We hear her fall. Then we watch him breathe in and aim his gun at his own head. The camera cuts away to a young Russian boy—the movie’s eyes/ears and voice of history—who hears the shot. The Brest Fortress is a boy’s-to-man’s nexus where that wife’s free choice is diminished by her husband. While she volunteered to die, he makes the last decision for her and he seems a little fast on the draw (even if Germans are coming). The drama of their twinned deaths fizzles since the wife’s place in this movie’s universe is like that of countless extras who die in pricey yet counterfeit scenes of combat—she’s only there to take a bullet.
The falsity of the The Brest Fortress‘s death-do-us-part turn leapt out at me in part because I’d just read Isaac Babel’s certified true copy of a mercy-killing in one of his Red Calvary stories, “Dolgushov’s Death.”[4] The narrator—a sort of outlier in the army— meets up with a fatally wounded Red comrade, propped against a tree. Dolgushov can’t be moved since his guts are “spilling to his knees.” He must be left behind and he asks for a bullet in his head so the enemy Poles will not have “fun kicking me around.” (“Write my mother where, what, why.”) The narrator refuses. He rides off and runs into another calvary-man, Afonka, who’s triumphal after a skirmish with Poles. (“We’re kicking their asses!”) The refusenik kills that vibe by pointing to the dying man and moving his horse “out of the way.” Afonka takes the cue…
They spoke a few words. I couldn’t hear what they said. Dolgushov held out his papers. Afonka slipped them into his boot and shot Dolgushov in the mouth.
The narrator tries to commiserate with the mercy-killer after the deed (“I couldn’t have done that.”), but Afonka is done with him:
“Get lost or I’ll shoot you!” he said to me, his face turning white. “You spectacled idiots have as much pity for us as a cat has for a mouse.”
Lionel Trilling once noted how class-based, anti-intellectual animus runs through the Red Calvary stories. The four-eyed narrator of “Dolgushov’s Death” was pretty close in spirit to Babel, but the author didn’t sign off on his character’s ride away from dirty duty. Later in Babel’s cycle of stories, that same calvary-man irks another comrade by admitting he rode into battle without a loaded weapon. The vexed Cossack reams him for having the temerity to act as if there’s a God whose Commandments count. The insulted and bespectacled one ends up “begging fate for the simplest ability—the ability to kill a man.”
The talent behind the Red Army stories wasn’t content with easy ironizing. Not that Babel was down with brutalism or above satirizing coarse machos with whom he served during a Red army campaign against “Polish Masters” that ended in defeat late in 1920. Babel’s tales, though, tend not to be vectors for morally superior preceptors. Trilling equated Cossacks in Babel’s Red Calvary stories with Noble Savages. He probably overstated Babel’s attraction to them, yet certain stories surely suggest men of action live forward with more brio than Hamletizers. Trilling may also have been right to link Babel’s aesthetic (“…there is no iron that can enter the human heart with such stupefying effect as a period placed at just the right moment”) to Cossacks’ hard cuts and bruises.
Per Trilling, the Red Calvary stories are marked by a tension between the ethos of brave and rapey Cossacks and intimations of an “unattainable International” of the good and kind. There are more than hints of that beloved community in stories that touch on the irrepressible sweetness of beat-down Polish Jews and a Slavic Caravaggio who paints living people into his biblical scenes. This populist genius, Pan Apolek, is the subject of one tale and a crafty presence in another story that has drunken Cossacks cavorting in a church. They’re startled by the sudden unveiling of an Apolek painting, which depicts figures who seem alive to them. It’s not about their vodka. The narrator evokes how a tough crowd was shaken by the verisimilitude of the painting, which was “the most extraordinary image of God I had ever seen in my life”—”a curly-headed Jew, a bearded figure in a Polish greatcoat of orange, barefooted with torn and bleeding mouth, running from an angry mob with a hand raised to ward off a blow…”[5]
A vision worthy of images in Come and See—the singular 1985 film, directed by the late Elem Klimov, about Nazis’ genocidal acts in Belarus during WWII.[6] Truffaut famously said there are no anti-war films since cinema always affirms brothers in arms, but he didn’t live to see Come and See. The anti-hero in this movie ends up marching with anti-Nazi partisans through a snowy wood, but that’s a postscript (with Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem on the soundtrack, rather than martial music). Come and See, which was made during Gorbachev’s great awakening, doesn’t traffic in patriotic uplift.
It uses the surreal to get real about unimaginable horrors without leaving truth in the dust. The movie doesn’t rush. It begins with hard-to-parse scenes of Village elders ranting and two kids digging for a hidden gun. One of them, Flyora, gets lucky, which makes him ripe for conscription into the fight against Nazi invaders, though his mother hates the idea and rages at him as his sisters (unmistakable—and unforgettable—twins) watch. Flyora’s first stretch as a soldier ends when adults in the partisan unit where he’s been a menial make him stay behind as they head out to fight. German paratroopers and dive bombers drive him and a young girl (a nurse in his unit) out of the nearly empty camp into the woods. They enjoy a freaky-sweet, blonde-on-blonde idyll there. Flyora is hot to bring his odd new girl home where the duo find his house strangely empty as flies buzz around their eyes…
Flyora races off in search of his missing family and passes right by a pile of corpses stacked in the backyard. His girl friend sees them (along with viewers of the film). It’s her portion to tell him what he’s missed. He won’t hear her at first, but that’s just the start of what he’ll have to take in.
Come and See’s story of Belarus/Flyora (though that slash should probably be an equal sign) culminates in a sequence depicting gang rapes and mass murder in a village where Flyora watches locals being herded into a wooden church and burned alive. (Later in the movie, a screen card notes: “628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all their inhabitants.”) There’s an appalling festive quality to these scenes of immolation. The German soldiers are having fun as Flyora is their witness… [7]
The contrast is at once over-the-top and undeniable in part because the Germans are weirdly human, not pure monsters. (Their commander has a pet marmoset and he puts a helmet over it so the animal won’t see atrocities his troops are committing.)
Flyora is spared, maybe because the Nazis are too lazy to finish him off. He runs into them again when they get ambushed and captured by his unit of partisans. The German commander begs for mercy. The Nazis’ Belorussian collaborators aim to be deflectors, volunteering to burn him and all their former German allies. One Nazi officer proves to be a mouthy fanatic who must talk up cleansing slaughters of Slavs and Jews since those populations spread communist contagion. He gets the last word as Partisans and Belorussian villagers hear their prisoners out and then…machine gun them all. This collective act of vengeance isn’t filmed with regrets, but there’s no catharsis in the kills either.[8]
In the aftermath. an unsatiated Flyora loses it when he sees a framed poster of Hitler in a puddle. He starts blasting away at the portrait and as he’s firing, a montage of clips from Hitler’s life plays in reverse, until Hitler is shown as a baby on his mother’s lap. Flyora stops shooting and weeps. More than just a bravura piece of filmmaking, this sequence brings the moral equivalent of Hannah Arendt’s lens on history into cinema. Come and See’s title comes from the Book of Revelations, where it refers to the summoning of witnesses to devastation brought by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yet the film’s Hitler sequence isn’t very biblical. Come and See doesn’t make a case for Original Sin. It comes closer to Arendt’s humane originalism. The unwinding of Hitler’s bio implies everyone starts as an absolute beginner. Come and See is the antithesis of innocence, but its creators realized nobody, not even Hitler, is born to murder.
That’s not an excuse, though, to steer clear of history or take a tabula rasa approach to the past. If only Come and See had been a true sign Russians had stopped remembering to forget. The movie, though, was a one-off—a creation of Gorbachev’s glasnost. Director Klimov never made another film.
Russians don’t seem ready to face up to their own chronicle of atrocities. Perhaps Come and See’s final snowfall covering up the bloodlands amounts to their last best hope.
Zelenksy has spoken to his neighbors’ avoidant tendencies in a recent Q&A.
Russians don’t just need access to facts; they need help understanding their own history, what they have done to their neighbors. At the moment, Zelensky says, “they are afraid to admit guilt.” He compares them to “alcoholics [who] don’t admit that they are alcoholic.” If they want to recover, “they have to learn to accept the truth.” Russians need leaders they choose, leaders they trust, “leaders who can then come in and say, ‘Yes, we did that.’ That’s how it worked in Germany.”
Anne Applebaum has picked up on Zelensky’s point:
There was no reckoning after the Ukrainian famine, or the Gulag, or the Great Terror of 1937–38, no moment when the perpetrators expressed formal, institutional regret. Now we have the result. Aside from the liberal minority…most Russians have accepted the explanations the state handed them about the past and moved on. They’re not human beings; they’re kulak trash, they told themselves then. They’re not human beings; they’re Ukrainian Nazis, they tell themselves today.
There’s still a darkness at noon Over There. But I’m not going to leave you in Russia’s shadows. Come and see what’s still bright in Babel’s story of his hometown, “Odessa.” He loved that place. Life, he wrote, may be “sad and monotonous” but cosmopolitan Odessa—port city of tough Jews (and concert violinists) is “exceedingly exceedingly interesting.” Babel avers his town is about to make a fresh contribution to readers of the world. Russian lit, he explains, lacks sun. He offers a quick and dirty weather report on the tradition:
Turgenev poeticized the dewy morning, the calm night. With Dostoevsky you feel…[t]he grey roads and shrouds of fog that stifle people and, stifling them, distorts them in the most amusing and terrible way, giving birth to the fumes and stench of passions, making people rush around frenetically in the hectic humdrum pace. Do you remember the life-giving bright sun in Gogol, a man, who was, by the way, from the Ukraine? But such descriptions are few and far between…The first person to talk about the sun in a Russian book, to talk about it with excitement and passion, was Gorky. But precisely because he talks about it with excitement and passion it still isn’t quite the real thing.
Babel invokes how heat suffuses a sexy Maupassant story set in the South of France and claims his own countrymen are learning echt Russian cities are too cold. (Maybe that’s why life there seems “twisted and rotten.”) “In Odessa,” by contrast, “there are sweet and oppressive spring evenings, the spicy aroma of acacia, and a moon filled with unwavering, irresistible light shining over a dark sea.” And Odessa nights are bridges to beach days…
I think to myself Russians will finally be drawn to the south, to the sea, to the sun! “Will be drawn” by the way is wrong. They already have been drawn for many centuries…
It is high time for new blood. We are being stifled. Literature’s messiah, so long awaited, will issue from there—from the sun-drenched steppes washed by the sea.
Babel wrote his own prospekt. Let’s keep circling (like him) from books to life, broadening his map so it includes, along with Odessa, the rest of Ukraine. It’s not very sunny in-country now and we don’t need another messiah, yet let’s not forget where this began. The Maidan revolution in 2014 was a radiant time. Back then, in the dead of winter, shine-eyed sons of Ukraine lit up the world, giving us something even brighter than a Southern sun.
Notes
1 William O’Neil writing at this website: https://gracchibros.wordpress.com/.
2 Yelensky, indeed, might come to mind when one of the Russian heroes doubles down on his identity, announcing he’s both a Communist and a Jew, once he’s captured by Nazis.
3 Saving Private Ryan is one template for The Brest Fortress’s script. It also has the standard Hollywood postscript, tracing the afterlife of the movies’ martyrs who were all honored (posthumously) as heroes of the Soviet Union, though it allows one who survived WWII ended up in the Gulag.
4 Reading “Dolgushov’s Death” I flashed on a scene in Fredric Smoler’s “My Father’s War.” You’ll have to read the Smolers’ true stories to find out why…
5 I’ve borrowed Trilling’s compaction of Babel’s own passage on the painting.
6 Kilmov collaborated on the script with Ales Adamovich, who fought with the Belarusian partisans as a teenager.
7 Klimov hoped not to put too much stress on the child actor who played Flyora. He tried to have him hypnotized by a psychotherapist before the most violent scenes, but the young actor wouldn’t go under. Rumor had it his hair went grey as a result of what he was asked to imagine and enact, but that is, apparently, a Russian legend.
8 The filmmaker’s stance complements Zelenksy’s realism about the limits of payback:
Too many Ukrainians, Zelensky told us, died not in battle, but “in the act of torture.” Children got frostbite hiding in cellars; women were raped; elderly people died of starvation; pedestrians were shot down in the street. “How will these people be able to enjoy the victory?” he asked. “They will not be able to do to the Russian soldiers what [the Russians] did to their children or daughters … so they do not feel this victory.” Real victory, he said, will come only when the perpetrators are tried, convicted, and sentenced.
But when will that be? “How long do we have to wait? It’s a long process, these courts, tribunals, international courts.”
Abruptly, he made it personal. He has two children, he reminded us. “My daughter is almost 18. I don’t want to imagine, but if something had happened to my daughter, I would not have been satisfied if the attack had been repelled and the soldiers had run away,” he said. “I would have looked for these people and I would have found them. And then I would feel victory.”
What would he have done when he found them?
“I don’t know. Everything.”
Then, as if remembering the role history has given him, as an avatar of democratic civilization confronting the cruelty of a lawless regime, he became reflective. “You realize that you want to be a member of a civilized society, you have to calm down, because the law decides everything.”
But he feels, viscerally, what so many Ukrainians feel. “There will be no complete victory for people who lost their children, relatives, husbands, wives, parents. That’s what I mean,” he said.
“They will not feel the victory, even when our territories are liberated.”
His un-triumphal note is tenderer and truer to life than hard rock Ukrainian agitprop.