Observaciones relevantes

Moving from sociological and anthropological studies to cultural analysis, scholars of late- and post-Soviet visual media who focus on gender identify a surge of machismo, strength, and patriarchal authority that accompanies, or, to be more accurate, masks representations of the masculine crisis during both the Stagnation and immediate post-Soviet eras. Writing on

television culture during this period, Elena Prokhorova addresses the relationship between cultural, economic, and political events and identity crisis:

Devaluation of national symbols, fragmentation of national mythology, arrested economic development, and impotent gerontocratic leadership marked the crisis of national identity in the 1970s. […] Soviet masculinity as cultural construct was built primarily on the foundation of the political utopia, and once [it] started showing signs of decay, masculinity as the icon of Soviet modernity underwent a crisis. (132)

The ideological function of television as the most popular form of official culture during the Brezhnev era meant, however, that programming must communicate the masculine ideal and give no indication of this crisis. Prokhorova argues that the “dual crisis of Soviet national mythology and of the conventional image of the ‘real man’ brought about gendered TV scheduling” (134). She goes on to demonstrate convincingly that specific genres traditionally popular among male viewers—“spy thrillers, detectives, [and] police procedurals”—“were ideally suited for the project of recuperating the obsolete masculinity of Soviet patriarchy’s golden days” (134-5).

The further away from the “Soviet patriarchy’s golden days” we move, the more excessive and even violent representations of men become. Attwood’s article “Sex and the Cinema” provides an overview of the representation of sex and sexuality in Russian film dating from 1988, when Vasilii Pichul’s Little Vera (Malenkaia Vera) was released. While advancing a hypothesis similar to Prokhorova’s—namely, that the masculine crisis produced, perhaps counter intuitively, the resurgence of manly men in visual media—Atwood approaches her topic from a different angle. In an attempt to make sense of the proliferation of misogynistic and violent imagery in Glasnost'-era Russian filmmaking, Attwood follows the reasoning of Anglo feminist film scholars who read the “glut of films appearing in the early 1970s which depicted women

being raped” as a patriarchal punishment doled out to women, who owing to the women’s movement “were able to claim their own sexuality” (84). Attwood notes that while there is no comparable woman’s movement in Russia, a similar backlash phenomenon occurs. She writes, echoing the research of the Russian and Anglo sociologists presented above, that “[f]rom the mid-1970s on, alarm was expressed in the Soviet press about the ‘masculinisation’ of women and the challenge this posed both to Soviet manhood and to Soviet society” (84). This threat to patriarchal gender relations results in a proliferation of imagery showing men, who reassert their control by dominating women physically, sexually, and even economically.

Continuing along the timeline to post-Soviet culture, Eliot Borenstein writing on the rapid proliferation of pornography in the early 1990s treats the men’s magazine Andrei as

symptomatic of a larger phenomenon. While the magazine’s straightforward economic objective is to sell sexual images of Russian women to Russian men (374), Borenstein explains its

ideological function as a form of recompense for men suffering from Russia’s diminished position in international relations, which results in Soviet masculinity being besieged from all sides.

The main ideological role of Andrei’s agenda is compensation for the trauma associated with the lost position of global dominance, with the trauma suffered not only by the entire nation, but also in particular by the Russian man. Sex becomes the magical formula necessary for the Russian man to cope with the enduring shock. (375)⁸

8 “На повестке для журнала Андрей стоит главная идеологическая задача по компенсации травмы, связанной с утратой позиций мирового господства, травмой, переживаемой не только всей нацией, но и, в особенности, русским мужчиной. Секс становится той магической формулой, которая необходима русскому мужчине для того, чтовы справиться с перенесенным шоком.”

In popular post-Soviet Russian cinema, the image of men has been decisive. In her article “National Identity, Cultural Authority, and the Post-Soviet Blockbuster: Nikita Mikhalkov and Aleksei Balabanov,” Susan Larsen demonstrates how the popular films of these directors set out to construct an appropriate hero for the post-Soviet period. She notes that Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun (Utomlennye solntsem, 1994) and Barber of Siberia (Siberskii tsiriul'nik, 1998) and Balabanov’s Brother 2 return to “models [that] are all emphatically masculine, as are the

conflicts and communities central to these films, each of which casts paternal and fraternal bonds as vital threads in the tattered post-Soviet fabric of Russian national identity” (493). She

continues:

Much of the pathos of these films derives from a common anxiety about what it means to be Russian at the end of the twentieth century, and most of the films articulate that anxiety in terms of threats to masculine “honor” and “dignity”

(Mikhalkov) or national “might” and “right” (Balabanov). The conflation of national identity with masculine authority is a key component of these films’

appeal to Russian viewers. (493)

Bondarchuk, like Mikhalkov and Balabanov before him, offers his viewers hyper-masculine characters, whose violent might and brute force combine to present a spuriously heroic image of Russia. Were Larsen to have written her article a few years later, she could have included Fedor Bondarchuk’s film Company 9 about soldiers who transition from boys into valiant, patriotic men as they advance from boot camp to the war in Afghanistan. Of course, Company 9 is less of a historical recount, and more of a historical rewrite that offers audiences valorizing, if

hyperbolic and bombastic images of themselves.

In opposition to Stagnation-era popular television images of stereotypical manly men, Perestroika cinema’s burgeoning use of male sexual violence on women, the post-Soviet

pornography boom that provides men the opportunity to reassert—even if only in fantasy—their dominant role, or recent blockbuster hits that realign masculinity with nationalism, the buddy film stands out as an exceptional genre that allows for atypical content. Unlike Brezhnev-era television or late Soviet and early post-Soviet cinema that obscure crisis with hyperbolic men, like the New Russian, whose dominant masculinity promotes, in the words of Helena Goscilo and Nadezhda Azhgikhina, “the real macho” (“nastoaiashch[ee] macho”) (531), the buddy film allows average men to gather in small groups and express frustration, sadness, confusion, and anger as they come to realize their compromised, even minimized role in contemporary society.