2.1.3.1 RELACIONES FAMILIARES

The closing image of Sergei, the Russian settler, sitting on the grass steppes of Mongolia, singing the song imprinted on his back accompanied on the accordion by Burma, Gombo’s daughter is important, because it installs the Russian abroad as an intrinsic part of the post-Soviet near abroad, where their future was in question. When Sergei returns to his wife, she asks a (rhetorical) question that is never answered: why are we here? The answer seems to come from the filmmaker, saying that we

(Russians) are here because of our honourable imperial past, when we defended the Mongols from the Japanese, and that we are not only a natural part of this abroad, but should also claim a leading role. This glosses over the guilt of colonialism, which is often part of a settler narrative,13 and instead narrates Russian imperialists, through the Russian settler, as protectors of humanistic values and ideas. Just as the settler narratives are ambiguous towards the colonial, so are Urga and Mikhalkov. Rouland asserts,

The confrontation of these two worlds, the steppe and the modern world, serves as the milieu and message of a film about Russia’s crisis with modernity at the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Eurasianist terms, they are also exaggerated moments in Russia’s self-image: one of the power of the steppe, invoking the prestige of the Mongolian Empire, and the other 








12 _{This is the DVD version released in 2003 (http://www.videoguide.ru/card_film.asp?IDFilm=19322)} 13 _{This is what the film La battaglia di Algeri/The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) so well}

of the success of hyper-industrialisation and of campaigns to canvas Eurasia with road and train-tracks (Rouland 2007, 11).

In the context of this thesis, Urga is the settler film where the Russian protagonist signifies the in-betweennes of postcolonial settler, who is left behind, stranded in a foreign land that he/she once ruled/controlled. It is noteworthy that Russian Sergei does not even attempt to return to Russia. This is because the drama is constructed as a confirmation of the Russian’s presence in the near abroad as natural and proper.

What is peculiar about this settler narrative is that the script for the film was co- written by Rustam Ibragimbekov, a prominent Soviet screenwriter who is Azeri by origin and was born in Baku, Azerbaijan. A scriptwriter who has come to embody a post-Soviet filmmaker’s ability to float on the waters of postcommunist national cinemas, Ibragimbekov is behind several award-winning scripts written with Mikhalkov during the 1990s. The two have worked together on nearly every film project that Mikhalkov has initiated since the late 1980s, from Avtostop (1990) to The Barber of Siberia (1999) and the Burnt by the Sun films (1994 and 2007). However, Ibragimbekov was also the writer and producer of Nomad (2005), the Kazakh film, which was realised by Sergei Bodrov (I will return to Nomad in more detail later).14 Within the post-Soviet Russian cinema, Ibragimbekov is associated with Russian ‘Hollywood’ filmmaking (Gorfunkel 2001, 449), in particular through Mikhalkov’s films of the 1990s, but also through one of the first films that Ibragimbekov penned, White Sun of the Desert, which was mentioned earlier. Being Azeri and working within the Russian film industry gives Ibragimbekov a liminal yet advantaged

14 _{It should also be mentioned that Russian Israeli filmmaker Arik Kaplun, whose film will be}

Part 1: Russian Cinema

Chapter 3: Russians Abroad in Drama Fiction 


position with regard to national identity; this liminality informs all of his work. Ibragimbekov tells Elena Stishova that he is “a person of two worlds – of the East and the West” (Stishova 2001, 12) and that the Eurasian idea can be transferred to a post- Soviet, postcolonial situation. He says,

Here I am; three days of the week I am Asian, three days – European, but on Sunday, I reason that it is better walking where the border is. The border is in the blood, you see. The ability to not understand a clean notion of West or East is what defines us. Our Eurasian experience is a great richness (Stishova 2001, 20).

It is not difficult to see how Ibragimbekov’s experience of border liminality infuses the ideology of Urga with the in-betweenness of its two major characters, Gombo and Sergei. However, Ibragimbekov cannot completely avoid accusations of partaking in a Russian national revival in the cinema of Mikhalkov. There is no question of

Ibragimbekov adding to the dual perspective in Urga and his commitment to the same Eurasian idea that Mikhalkov cherishes. For Ibragimbekov, though, this idea

constitutes a post-Soviet/postcolonial working relationship where real connection informs the older, colonial ties that were heralded under the banner of ‘friendship of people’ (druzhba narodov) during the Soviet period.

There is no nostalgic take on the Soviet period for Ibragimbekov. He says, “I have lived through very painful excessiveness and formality of the ‘friendship of people,’ which destroyed sincere friendship and informal connections that existed at the same time” (Stishova 2001, 12). The return of the Soviet international ‘friendship,’ which functioned on the level of Marxist-Leninism, is, thus, exposed by Ibragimbekov, who favours the emergence of new co-operations in post-Soviet cinema. Here, the former colonial connections are re-established in the formation of a postcolonial working

context, which brings together coloniser and colonised. The old colonial ties are not severed by the postcolonial condition; rather, the syncretism of the postcolonial and its unevenness are challenged and resolved within a new configuration of powers.

As far as the representation of Sergei is concerned, he stands in for the liminal space occupied by the postcolonial, but also for the fact that this Russian abroad has features of Imperialism (e.g. his ignorance/naivety) in relation to the Mongolians living in the Chinese borderlands. Both Gombo and Sergei are products of postcommunism, who, according to the film’s director and scriptwriter, need to reject the power centres (US and China), thereby finding their roots: Gombo in Genghis Khan and Sergei,

paradoxically, in Imperial Russia. Thus pre-Soviet values and ideas are put forward in the formation of a post-Soviet postcoloniality. The Soviet values are also important for the postcolonial subject, and these are on offer in the next film to be examined, Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother 2, where the post-Soviet postcolonial is positioned more directly against the Imperial West, with no solution coming from the East.