Trapped in the prisoner scenario: the first Chechen war and Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains

Abstract

Russia’s centuries-long history of imperial war and domination in the Caucasus had produced a canonized body of literary responses that, during the first post-Soviet decade, served as the foundation for reassessing the role and position of ethnic Russians vis-à-vis Russia’s ethnic minorities. The newly independent Russian media used the nineteenth-century Prisoner-of-the-Caucasus mythology less reflectively in their political critique of the Russian state’s aggressive policies in Chechnya that afflicted Russians and Chechens alike. During the same time, Russian filmmakers utilized this imperial-era scenario to offer more profound thoughts on the Russian national identity in the multi-ethnic state than those proffered by the national media. Among them, Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains (Kavkazskii plennik, 1996) dissects and re-imagines the comfortably familiar prisoner formula in its efforts to critically examine Russian imperial attitudes. While the archetypal Prisoner-of-the-Caucasus plot provided a common basis for the national dialogue about the Chechen conflict, both the independent media discourse and the critical response to Bodrov’s film paint the picture of a society trapped in the imperial biases of a rigidly interpreted cultural mythology.

Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Arlene Forman for reading and editing various drafts and providing thoughtful comments. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers and the editor of the SRSC for their encouragement and valuable suggestions.

Notes

1. For a detailed analysis of Pushkin’s poem in the context of the nineteenth-century empire building, see Layton (2005, 89–109).

2. In interviews Bodrov repeatedly explains that he omitted Tolstoy’s name from the opening credits because of his principal disagreement with the writer’s imperial bias that he attempts to overcome in his film (Pritulenko 1996, 12; Arkus and Timofeevskii 1996, 34; Moev 1996, 8). Unlike his ‘politically noncommittal’ early writings about the Caucasus, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat (1896–1904) ‘unequivocally condemns the war against the Muslim tribes’ (Layton 2005, 263).

3. Paula Michaels also notes Bodrov’s use of ‘a familiar vocabulary of orientalist sounds and images’ to ‘offer the viewers the exotic elements they expect … Only later, through character development, does the normalcy of Caucasian life creep up on us’ (Michaels 2004, 72).

4. For a discussion of meaningful modifications of gender dynamics in the Prisoner-of-the Caucasus plot in Leonid Gaidai’s comedy Kidnapping, Caucasian Style (Kavkazskaia plennitsa, 1966) and Vladimir Makanin’s novella Prisoner of the Caucasus (Kavkazskii plennyi, 1994), see Goscilo (2003).

5. For a comparative analysis of Soviet communal myths in Russian cinema of the mid-1990s (including a section on national and family community in Prisoner of the Mountains), see Prokhorov (2007).