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Moscow Times
December 11, 2002
In Films, Bad Guys Are From Caucasus
By Nabi Abdullaev
Staff Writer
An unshaven Caucasus native in a big-peaked cap pleads for mercy, as Danila Bagrov, the cult hero of modern Russian cinema, pushes a revolver into his ribs.
"Don't kill me, brother," he begs.
"You are not my brother, you black ass," Bagrov retorts through clenched teeth.
This scene from the blockbuster "Brat" starring Sergei Bodrov Jr. as Bagrov sums up a drastic shift in how people of Caucasian origin are portrayed in modern Russian films. While shown as being friendly and hospitable just a decade ago, they are now commonly depicted as uneducated, violent people with ties to the criminal underworld.
The change in film closely mirrors real life, experts said. The flamboyant Georgians and Armenians who dominated the public consciousness in Soviet times have given way to rough, blue-collar workers from the North Caucasus.
A conflict and a bad guy are essential components to any story -- whether it be in film, books or the theater -- and Caucasus natives today fit this role better than anyone else, said Georgy Danelia, director of the 1997 film "Mimino," whose much-loved Caucasus heroes Mimino and Rubik Khachikyan were humorous and generous.
"There was always an enemy in the politically charged Soviet cinema. After World War II, the enemies were the Germans, then the Americans, and sometimes, latently, the Jews as the enemies within," Danelia said in a telephone interview. "Public enemy No. 1 in today's Russia is crime, and those who depict it in the artistic community strive to make it more colorful and temperamental. They reach this goal by making criminals of the Caucasus people."
Film critic Andrei Plakhov said the average Russian in the 1960s and '70s thought all Caucasus natives were artistic, charming and sexy and from Georgia and Armenia. "Soviet intellectuals adored them for their inner freedom, and many Caucasus movie heroes, like Mimino and Rubik Khachikyan, went into Soviet folklore," he said.
After the Caucasus republics of Georgia and Armenia gained independence, their place in modern Russian culture was filled by Chechnya and Dagestan, said Daniil Dondurei, a film critic and editor of the Iskusstvo Kino magazine. "These new Caucasus people invaded the Russian public consciousness through outdoor markets," he said. "Georgians, with their formidably developed cultural traditions, were also present at these markets, but at the same time they had a [positive image created in the] theater and cinema. The Russian intellectuals who define the tastes of the public had no reason to love the new Caucasus people."
Hundreds of thousands of natives of the Caucasus, driven by unemployment at home, have fled to Moscow and St. Petersburg in the past decade to trade. "Thus, average Russians encounter Caucasus natives when they have to give up their money," said Vladimir Mukomel, head of the Center of Ethno-Political and Regional Studies. "This is an unpleasant thing by itself but aggravated by the realization that they are giving money to 'outsiders.'"
Traders of Caucasian origin have long dominated outdoor markets, but in Soviet times the average Russian rarely went to buy food there, preferring state-run shops, said Vladimir Pribylovsky of the Panorama think tank. "As the Soviet Union started to collapse and state-owned trade fell away, people were forced to come to retail markets, where they met skyrocketing prices with Caucasian faces behind them."
However, Caucasus natives only became the bad guys on the silver screen after the first war in Chechnya, in 1994-96, Dondurei said. "Now, they play the same role in Russian cinema that Nazi Germans played 50 years ago," he said. "There are clear reasons for this -- there is a war going on in Chechnya in which Russian soldiers are being killed by Caucasus natives."
One of the latest films to show positive Russian protagonists punishing brutish Caucasus natives was "Voina," or "War," which was created by director Alexei Balabanov and producer Sergei Selyanov. The film, which tells the story of the brutal abduction of two British nationals by Chechen rebels, was a smash hit and won Kinotavr film festival's main prize earlier this year.
"This is a dangerous film because Balabanov, a very strong artist playing on a plebeian psychology, fixes the image of the Caucasus people as indisputable enemies," Plakhov said. "The artistic community shouldn't try to appeal to base instincts by showing imagined enemies as hairy beasts but attempt to provide an alternative."
Selyanov and Balabanov declined to comment for this story. Balabanov earlier this year told Itogi magazine: "I shoot films not for intellectuals but for people. I make no demarches. ... I shoot the way people think."
The Center of Ethno-Political and Regional Studies recently conducted a study of crime statistics in the Moscow and Perm regions and found that Caucasus natives do not commit more crimes that other ethnic groups, Mukomel said. "The myth of the evil Caucasus man sprang from the Russian media, which stress when a crime is committed by a Caucasus native and skip mentioning the ethnicity when a Slavic person is guilty."
Russian cinema is not unique in stereotyping bad guys. Until political correctness brought an end to it, European and U.S. movies for years had white policemen and judges fighting dark-skinned villains.
In Russia, any semblance of political correctness from Soviet times -- which was dictated by the Communist Party policy of strengthening inter-ethnic ties -- has long vanished, Plakhov said. "But it will be worked out sooner or later, and new inter-ethnic conflicts in Russian society will spur the process," he said.
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