Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu
I honoured this past Victory Day by watching Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu, the 1975 war movie by (and starring) Sergei Bondarchuk that directly inspired the people’s film 28 Panfilovtsev. It belongs very firmly in the category of ‘gritty’ war films. That’s a category that Hollywood simply doesn’t and can’t do very well. I suspect the American film industry is simply too given both by financial pressure and by force of habit to sanitising war in various ways. The only two Hollywood films I can think of, off the top of my head, that come closest to being ‘gritty’ like this film – and even these ones don’t quite fit the bill – are Clint Eastwood’s 2006 companion films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.
I have to wonder if one reason that Hollywood, in fact, doesn’t and can’t do truly unsparing war films like this one is because there is simply no parallel experience in American history. There is nothing in our collective memory to match the total, mechanised, genocidal slaughter to the tune of twenty-five million Soviet people on their own home territory. In general, we do not have to grapple with the presence of mass death on our literal front porches. We do have as part of our history the genocides of the American Indians on the frontier, but outside a very small and select (but growing) group of Native-produced films these genocides are only ever treated – if they are even acknowledged or mentioned at all – from a ‘revisionist’ outsider perspective, and that largely as a result of the Vietnam War. The closest we come to any sort of parallel experience is the Civil War. But even this is not a particularly good parallel because we tend to elevate the Civil War in our storytelling, generations after the fact, to the level of misty, shrouded mythology of glorious ‘gods and generals’: something which simply could not be done for the generation that fought the Second World War in their own front yards.
Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu is indeed a state-funded Soviet film about the Second World War – based on a novel by Mihail Sholohov – and there is of course a clear-cut villain that must be fought back. But it is also a film which does not shy away from showing us the brutal human costs of war – physical, mental, even spiritual. In more than one scene it comes close to showing the war as a total, meaningless waste: and this sentiment is even placed on the tongues of the more sympathetic characters. Oni srazhalis’ shows us, uncomfortably, the random and often meaningless deaths of characters we have begun to familiarise ourselves with. It shows us soldiers who become permanently disabled, who lose their hearing and who develop PTSD. It shows us families that have been torn apart. It alludes to wartime prostitution and the degradation of families. If films like Tuǵan jer show us a missing generation and an uprooted generation, then Oni srazhalis’ shows us what is happening to this generation as it is in the process of being torn apart at the seams and scattered to the winds.
Oni srazhalis’ follows a regiment of Soviet soldiers in retreat from the front, as they are being pushed back by the Wehrmacht across the Don. In this platoon are Pyotr Lopahin (Vasilii Shukshin), Nikolai Streltsov (Vyacheslav Tihonov), Ivan Zvyagintsev (Sergei Bondarchuk), the youngster Kopytovskii (Georgii Burkov), the cook Nekrasov (Yurii Nikulin) and the old veteran Poprishchenko (Ivan Lapikov). We see at once from their retreat that they have limited means of keeping their morale up, and the darkly-witty banter we see between them – about women, about families, about tobacco and alcohol and food – seem to alternate between attempts to stave off despair, and to genuinely build connexions with each other. Lopahin and Streltsov, early on, show very different attitudes to the war even though both of them are having the same sorts of internal struggles. Streltsov sees no point in being cheerful, while for Lopahin, staying cheerful seems the only way to stay sane. The relationships between these men, however, always remain on the level of the human: their jokes and their jealousies, their boasts and their stumbles.
In their retreat the beleaguered platoon still has to engage the enemy and halt their advance before they can pull away; the Soviet forces are show digging foxholes and trenches in a hurry before the air raids. These battles are necessary for these men, for the whole platoon, to survive… but at the same time there is very little glory in slowing a Nazi advance deeper into Russian territory in the hopes that a fresh wave of Soviet troops will advance. In these battle scenes there is a palpable sense of grim resolve, but very little of what American audiences would consider heroism. These are ordinary men who are forced to survive, to stave off the common end. They have rifles, Molotov cocktails and a limited supply of grenades against the grim mechanical might of the German Luftwaffe and Panzer divisions – and we are not spared the details as the German tanks roll over the foxholes. At the same time, we do cheer, as we should cheer for the underdog, when the vulnerable Soviets manage to take down a tank with their limited resources. Several more engagements with the Germans follow, and the soldiers make it to the Don River where they are meant to hold while a fresh platoon is called up to halt the German advance.
Filmic symbolism is heavily employed in these scenes, as at the beginning and end of the film. The ‘Rodina’ is repeatedly symbolised by wheat, by wheat fields, by barns and agricultural technology. In the first pitched battle against the Germans, the Wehrmacht sets fire to the fields and bombs a windmill which bursts into flames before Streltsov’s eyes, as he is wounded by a nearby mortar shell. Later, Zvyagintsev – who was a combine operator before the war – finds a few lonely strands of long grass in the field which have gone unburnt, plucks the heads and chews them, and mutters to himself: ‘What a waste… what a waste.’ We can tell by his expression that he is not simply talking about the fields themselves, but about the sum total of what has happened to the country. Later we see a German Panzer division deliberately destroying a village with its barns and food supply, burning it and running the tanks through the rubble. The minimalist scoring, often with only a choir singing softly in the background, and stretches of total silence that accompany these sequences, contributes to a filmic atmosphere that alternates between the grimly realistic and the surrealistic. In a certain sense, any attempt to portray the war realistically demands a certain level of this surrealism.
Perhaps surprisingly for a Soviet film of this era, religion – and in particular the Orthodox Christianity of the common soldiery – is portrayed with a significant degree of sympathy. It’s notable that the director’s own character in the film, Ivan Zvyagintsev, is the one who, trapped in his foxhole with the German tanks advancing on him, looks up at the sky and crosses himself and lifts up a heartfelt prayer to God. Later, Zvyagintsev mutters that he should not have been so silly, and that he should be allowed some leeway because he is not a Party member… but the intensity of that moment, in which Zvyagintsev is helpless and turning to God in his helplessness, is not lost on the viewer.
Again, the film does not spare us the grisly details of these engagements. Streltsov is the victim of a ‘near miss’ by a mortar: one scene of the film passes silently, in multiple vision, swimming before our eyes as it swam before his. Streltsov sees the advancing soldiers and tries to fire his gun, but cannot even manage to stand up straight or hold his head up. His ears are bleeding. We are made to think, after that engagement, that he is dead… but we are later told that he was evacuated to a field hospital. At the very end of the film we see Streltsov, deaf and suffering from what is clearly a degree of PTSD, coming back to his old platoon out of loyalty – though clearly incapable of fighting again.
Speaking personally, a particularly harrowing scene in the film is when Zvyagintsev – who is caught when a nearby landmine went off behind him – is evacuated to a field hospital and operated on. Zvyagintsev is clearly in excruciating pain as his back and legs are riddled all over with shrapnel, and the field surgeons are trying to operate on him. They have to cut off his clothes, and Zvyagintsev starts cursing out the surgeon for cutting away his boots, and then hitting on the nurse who sees him naked, before he breaks down and starts weeping into his pillow. Although it first seems as though Zvyagintsev is merely trying to stave off and master the pain through the cursing and banter, it becomes clear that he is in fact traumatised and has no willpower or control left. One has to applaud Bondarchuk’s superlative acting skill here in holding that tension for so long.
At the end of the film, the remnants of their regiment are assembled. We recall the beginning of the film when a long line of them is marching through a ravine; now there are barely 20 men left. We see poor Streltsov struggling even to stay standing straight as the regimental banner is unfurled and as Poprishchenko kisses it. This is undoubtedly a patriotic note on which to end the film, and the voice-over quotation from Sholohov’s novel cements that. But it is also a deeply ambiguous one, as though Bondarchuk is defying us – in our comfort, from our position as the audience – to share in that expression, to say too easily that Streltsov’s, or Zvyagintsev’s, suffering is somehow ‘worth it’. In this he places himself firmly head and shoulders above the trumpeting maudlin sentimentality of Spielberg’s ‘serious’ war films. Like Eastwood thirty years later in Flags of Our Fathers, Bondarchuk is not content to lay the sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War to rest in a simple expression of heroic resolve, not content to propagandise for any abstract cause. Unlike Eastwood, though, he doesn’t attempt to draw some sort of didactic lesson from the suffering of the soldiers. Instead, he lets them speak for themselves in their suffering, even when they don’t say anything at all.
It is very difficult to find a war film that says anything human about war. Oni srazhalis’ za rodinu comes damn close. It’s easy to see how Druzhinin and Shal’opa took this film as a direct inspiration for 28 Panfilovtsev: what with that film’s similar insistence on the ambiguity of its protagonists’ heroism, and the similar scenario of having to stave off repeated German advances with no supplies and dwindling reserves of human strength and will. As I think 28 Panfilovtsev bears witness, this is a Russian film but not exclusively so. It is one which is important for understanding the development of Kazakh film as well. If you want to understand – not simply acknowledge intellectually, but understand – how the Soviets experienced the Second World War, I recommend watching Oni srazhalis’, followed by Tuǵan jer, and then Oni srazhalis’ once more.
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