EYES WIDE OPEN: Marlen Khutsiev's film IT HAPPENED IN MAY (1970)

Printed version appeared in the Telluride Film Festival publication Film Watch (2016)

Todorovsky and Arkhilovski in It Happened in May

Old films are like a message in a bottle, mysterious and enchanting, even more so if written in an hidden code to elude the censor. Sophisticated and committed to self-expression, Soviet film makers from Eisenstein to Muratova have made such coding part of their cinematic aesthetic, and as Soviet experience fades into distant past, lovers of vintage cinema would do well to keep this in mind. Marlen Khutsiev belongs to the Olympian roster of Soviet directors auteurs whose films transcend ideological regimentation. Few have more successfully incorporated this constraint, making it part of their cinematic expression.

Marlen Khutsiev

Marlen Khutsiev(his given name is a contraction of MARxLENin) was born in 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia, to a father who was a committed Bolshevik revolutionary and shot, like many, in the Stalinist purges in 1937. This year Khutsiev plans to release his thirteenth film featuring a dialogue between – appropriately for a nonagenarian director – two Russian sages, Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Khutsiev is, perhaps, best known for his 1961 I am Twenty (a.k.a. Zastava Ilyicha) and July Rain (1966) – films that share the cinematic “vibe” with Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and Blowup (1966). Like Antonioni’s, Khutsiev’s films became iconic for the 1960s generation.

It Happened in May (Был месяц май, 1970), too, is intensely contemporary. Released to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of WWII, it falls thematically within the range of government-sponsored topics: victory over the Nazi evil, war-time heroic sacrifices, and staying vigilant in the face of the uneasy coexistence with the former foe. In the USSR, by 1969, the victory in WWII has largely replaced the revolution of 1917 as the principal source of legitimacy for the Party and the state. Accordingly, movie houses, TV screens, theaters, bookstores, and media were saturated with war themes.

There was also a pernicious side to this enforced obsession: the Brezhnev regime used the theme as a cover for rehabilitating the war-time supremo Joseph Stalin and his party’s Gulag record. Like many among the intelligentsia, Khutsiev was appalled. Although not a dissident, he joined other prominent artists and scientists in 1966 who petitioned against creeping Stalinism. No wonder, then, that he approached the war theme from an unusual angle and introduced his own, subtly discordant, note into the official chorus of commemorative hosannas.

A war movie, It Happened in May is set paradoxically on a bucolic German pig farm, untouched by war, a few days after the Nazi surrender. But before the story begins, as if to get the requisite bravura out of the way, Khutsiev opens with a five-minute montage of war footage, replete with a deafening battle-field soundtrack overlaid with Tchaikovsky’s Manfred and culminating in the hoisting of the Red flag over the Reichstag. Then, all of a sudden, come the deafening silence and the indolent air of the opening scene: the protagonist, a young Lieutenant (Alexander Arzhilovsky) wakes up on a peaceful sunny morning in a clean and puffy farmer’s bed. There were more surprises to come.

G. Baklanov

Made for television, which explains its generous use of close-ups and a spare setting, the film is based on a short story by a war veteran writer, Georgy Baklanov (Fridman), entitled  “The Wages of Horror” (Почём фунт лиха,"1962). Baklanov (1923-2009) was a well-known chronicler of WWII much admired for his authenticity and honesty. In his story, an old veteran recalls how, as a young officer, he was stunned when coming face to face with the Nazi camps and ovens, concealed by the civilized surface of German life. On the face of it, the film, like the story, was meant as a message in a bottle from the WWII generation to be discovered by their carefree descendants a quarter of a century later. But while Baklanov’s narrative is straightforward, the film infuses the central moment of discovery with extraordinary resonance and depth.

A small detachment of Red Army scouts, led by a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant, is quartered on an idyllic German farmstead that appears untouched by the war. The soldiers are making friends with the farm’s German owners who are as eager as the Russians to put the war behind them. The camera focuses on the simple pleasures of peace: sleeping late, a hearty meal, sharing a carafe of cider, the soldiers making simple conversation in broken German, their clumsy courtship of the farmer’s pretty wife. The farm raises pigs, and the soldiers are eager to help the young-looking farmer’s wife in her chores around the well-tended pigsty. But come evening, the farmer, mindful of the soldiers’ gallantry, takes his wife and their teenage son to spend the night with relatives in a nearby village. The overall scene’s setting is serene but the inquisitive camera eye, awkward silences, strained exchanges, and the  scene’s flat, shadowless light lend the opening episode the air of the uncanny – a Gothic fairytale castle, its ghosts too shy for the light of day.

Early in the evening the young Lieutenant is summoned by his superior to a nearby estate where a group of junior officers are celebrating the end of the long war. The Lieutenant mounts a trophy motor bike and speeds to the party along a beautiful wooded alley. Within sight of his destination, an opulent German country house, he fumbles and crashes. For a moment he looks dead. This is how Khutsiev prepares him for a nocturnal encounter with the ghosts – readies him for the descent into hell.

The accident leaves the Lieutenant dazed but uninjured and he soon joins the partying officers, raising melancholy toasts in honor of fallen comrades and singing melancholy Russian songs. They have seen too much grief and lost too many comrades to enjoy their victory celebration. As the party comes to an end, the host, a Sr. Lieutenant (played by the film maker Peter Todorovsky wearing his own war-time uniform), invites officers to go for a ride in a captured German
convertible. Unexpectedly, they are stopped at a mysterious gate, not quite realizing they have arrived at the gates of hell, a Nazi concentration camp. Inside, still clueless, they enter the dark buildings. Illuminated by their flash lights, various objects come into view: mysterious empty cans (the gas Zyklon-B), mounds of abandoned footwear, spoons, and finally, heavy oven doors that the visitors take for the camp’s heating system.

Only later, when the Lieutenant encounters the camp’s former inmates, who wander onto the pig farm in the night, does he learn the truth about the death camp: the gas ovens, the burning of the victims, the use of human ashes to fertilize the nearby fields. When he finds out that their hosts had been complicit in having one of their Polish forced laborers gassed, the officers go searching for them in the nearby village. In vain. The family has disappeared. The farmstead is also empty, except for the pigs. The final shot is of the Lieutenant.
He is standing alone, dazed and bewildered by the revelation, while around him the farm’s well-tended pigs are crowding the yard, a fairytale visual substitute for the disappeared family.

The film’s final segment, like the introductory part, consists of a montage of documentary footage, but this time, the clips show street life of modern European cities – Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow – replete with well-dressed men, women and children hurrying on their way along avenues pulsating with traffic. Wearied by the horror, the eye feasts on these quotidian scenes. Without warning, the human traffic begins to flow onto the grounds of a concentration camp museum.

Now the moving images get interspersed with some of the most famous stills of the Holocaust. The knowing viewer is perplexed. The stills show what look like exclusively Jewish victims whereas those in the film are a Polish couple forced to work on the pig farm.
The camera lingers, moves on, and then returns to one of the iconic holocaust images – a seven-year-old Jewish boy from  the Warsaw ghetto, his arms raised in a gesture of surrender. The present-day footage resumes, and the camera picks out a charming boy of the same age and follows his gaze before fading into the credits.

This final juxtaposition – a Jewish boy victim and his happy and free counterpart of 1970 – invites the Soviet viewer, keenly aware of subliminal messaging, to recapitulate the film narrative mentally, thereby deciphering its other layer of meaning. Apparently the film functioned also as a silent protest against official Soviet anti-Semitism. Soviet propaganda habitually suppressed the story of the Jewish holocaust and denied the Jews’ singular status as victims of the Nazi extermination policies.

Baklanov must have been ecstatic for the way Khutsiev  “unpacked” the hidden, perhaps even unconscious, layers of his short story. In a rare tribute of one author to another, he renamed his "Wages of Horror" after the film.  In all subsequent publications the story appeared as “It Happened In May.”

August 2016
Berkeley, California

Alexei Balabanov. 1958-2013. In Memoriam.

One of the most talented, masterful and remarkable Russian cinematographers, Alexei Oktyabrinovich Balabanov, died suddenly on May 18, 2013, at the age of fifty five, in his family residence outside St. Petersburg.

        Aleksei Balabanov and Agniya Kuznetsova in 2007 after the showing of "Cargo 200"at the Sochi Film Festival in 2007

Russian cinema of the last quarter century, indeed contemporary Russian culture, is unthinkable without his "Brother" (Брат)  a gangster thriller about the early years of post-communist Russia that became folklore as soon as it was released in 1997; or his film "War" (Война) with its chilling stereoscopic (Western and Russian) view of the Chechen conflict (2002); or his blood-curdling, Gothic vision of Putin's Russia, "Cargo 200" (Груз 200). His sixteenth, and last, film, the mystical "I Want It, Too" (Я тоже хочу), came out in 2012.

For years now, I have been collecting notes for a long essay on Balabanov's cinematography and its deep roots in Russian intelligentsia mythology, including Russian nationalism, and contemporary popular culture, Russian and Western. A rock musician in his youth, he has been an unrivaled master of the sound track. The soundtrack for "Brother" I and II is the best anthology of contemporary Russian rock, which should be a thrilling discovery for those not aware of this period music. Ditto his "War." It opens with a Jihadist rock song in Chechen-accented Russian, cycles through the best of Splin, Bi-2 and others, and culminates with Butusov's piercing "My Star" (Моя звезда). The website for Balabanov's soundtracks is here.

Osip Mandelstam once called Baudelaire a martyr of modernism "in the true Christina sense of the word." It is in this sense, too, that Alexei Balabanov was a cinematic martyr of Russia's contemporary cinematography, so much did he identify with Russia's pain and her fragile beauty. I may yet write my long piece on Balabanov's cinema, but in the meantime. as a tribute to him, I am reposting my short essay on "Cargo 200." The piece appeared in "Film Watch," the magazine of the Telluride Film Festival where "Cargo 200" had its American premiere in August 2007. Click here to ro read the publication or simply read the text below.  

19 May 2013. Paris

Russia's Grey Underbelly

Aleksei Balabanov's Thriller Reveals Soviet Corruption

 (Film Watch (Telluride Film Festival. August 2007): 72-74

By Gregory Freidin

On the surface, Aleksei Balabanov's Cargo 200 is a noir thriller about a psychopathic police captain in a provincial Russian city, one of those industrial hellholes that pockmarked the face of the U.S.S.R. The month is August, the year the Orwellian 1984. It was then that the angel of history despaired of the Soviet Union and made way for Mikhail Gorbachev. Historically authentic, Balabanov’s packs his Cargo 200  with such a strong allegorical charge that the result is a double exposure of Russia then and now, perhaps, forever. The film has polarized the opinion and set the whole of Russia talking—a sign of the rebirth of Russian film and engagé art.

In 1984, Balabanov was 25, college behind him, and serving as a paratrooper in Afghanistan five years after the Soviet invasion. The USSR itself was 67 and stagnating. Keep this in mind as Cargo takes you to the Captain Zhurov’s fly-infested apartment; think also about the corpse of Vladimir Lenin, embalmed and still open for display outside the Kremlin, a ghoulish symbol of the country’s historical freight.

Balabanov heaves it out of storage. We are treated to close-ups of recycled pickle jars and vodka bottles, armored apartment doors, dilapidated buildings, classic Russian and Soviet kitsch, by now vintage Soviet jalopies, and Soviet TV footage that will set your teeth on edge. All objects are lit with bare bulbs, flashlights, hurricane lamps, primitive disco strobes and, for the most part, the kind of diffuse gray northern daylight that one imagines illuminates the better parts of hell. As always, Balabanov provides a lovingly selected period soundtrack with lyrics that create another layer of meaning. The illusion of authenticity he achieves is powerful, and those who lived under the old U.S.S.R. may break into a cold sweat realizing how little has changed. Cargo was shot on location, not far from St. Petersburg (Leninsk is the actual steel town Cherepovets). Apparently, all Balabanov’s crew needed for time travel was a set of wheels and a tank of gas. Pity Sasha Baron Cohen, who had to travel to Romania to get to his "Kazakhstan.”

Not having to go far, Balabanov digs deep, raising questions both about recent history as well as Russia’s much older romance with alcohol, corruption, xenophobia, and a rigid authoritarian state known for using extreme violence against its own people. Lest we forget, Balabanov has captain Zhurov head the Dzerzhinsky district of the Leninsk police department, the point amplified by a huge bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of Cheka (now FSB),  next to Zhurov’s desk.

As in fairy tales, the film's three female figures stand for the three faces of Russia. The 18-year-old Angelika embodies Russia’s present, a spawn of the stagnant Soviet Union. Zhurov’s old mother is a caricature of Soviet citizenry, their minds shot by alcohol and propaganda. She is permanently glued to her TV and a glass jar full of hooch. And Antonina, wife of the underground distiller Aleksei, is a traditional good Russian woman, who is helpless to change anything (she fails to prevent the rape of Angelika) but is loyal and effective in her revenge.

For the main male characters, Balabanov uses his favorite “brothers” device, arranging them in three sets. The “fathers” are the 50something colonel from Leninsk and his Leningrad sibling Artem, a professor of Scientific Atheism. Both worry about the future and are corrupt. Their “sons” are more despicable. Slava—that's Russian for "glory"—is a good-for-nothing hedonist. The shady operator Valery ("healthy" and" strong”) wears a red T-shirt with huge letters USSR on it and is romancing the colonel’s daughter to avoid the draft. As in the old Soviet joke about Pravda and Izvestia, which contrary to their titles contained neither truth nor news, the “sons” have no claim to either glory or strength, or health. Valery turns out to be a hopeless drunk and coward: he abandons Angelika to her abductor and flees from the area reluctant to get entangled with the police. As the film ends, he and Slava strike up a friendship of convenience, and we see them in a fading shot poised to spin out deals and become tycoons in today’s Russia. The film’s only other young man of their generation is Angelika’s long-awaited boyfriend, heroic Sergeant Major Gorbunov. He arrives in a sealed coffin, the film’s actual cargo 200.

At the core of the tale are Aleksei (the director’s namesake) and captain Zhurov ("glum") who belong to neither generation and are, in a way, outside of time. They formed a bond, based on some secret, while Aleksei serving a ten-year term for manslaughter. The bond remains so strong that when asked by Zhurov, Aleksei accepts a death sentence for the murder committed by Zhurov. What their secret was is never revealed, but the film as a whole implies that, whoever different , Alexey and Zurov are invisibly joined at the hip like Siamese twins.

They are eternal Russian types, locked in the eternal Russian sadomasochistic drama. Alexei may indulge in a drunken Dostoevskian “conversation across eternity” with the professor of Scientific Atheism, wax eloquent about God and spin visions of utopian socialism. But he thinks nothing of forcing himself on Angelika the moment she walks in and would have, had he not conked out in a drunken stupor. Antonina hides Angelika in the peasant bathhouse where Aleksei keeps his illegal still but Zhurov picks up where the other left off. He finds Angelika there, forces her onto all fours and sodomizes her … with an empty vodka bottle. Soviet times, Balabanov is implicitly quoting from Dostoevsky, are the “eternity that is nothing but a peasant bath house with cockroaches in every corner.”

The rape scene is hard to take. But if you don’t look away, you notice a shadow of pleasure flit across Angelica's face—a form of consent between the victim and the victimizer. Balabanov links Angelica’s violation to Russia’s romance with alcohol. If Angelika-Russia is the enabler, then the police officer, who instead of protecting, gruesomely violates an innocent, rises as an embodiment of the brutal Russian and Soviet state for which vodka—before they struck oil—was the biggest source of revenue and civil quiescence.

In the morning, Zhurov handcuffs Angelica to his motorcycle. Their ride through the industrial outskirts of Leninsk is perhaps the most haunting long shot of the entire film, an inversion of the motorcycle glamour. Zhurov is taking his victim into the heart of—no, not darkness, but worse—Soviet industrial gray. Shooting in color, cinematographer Aleksandr Simonov proves himself the supreme connoisseur of every possible non-descript tint. Elevated tracks, intertwining pipes, smokestacks, girders, cables and cooling towers fly by, forming a cruel backdrop to Zhurov’s handsome stiff-backed motorcycle posture and Angelica’s face with smeared eyeliner and flowing mane.

Balabanov inverts the opening of Easy Rider and has a soundtrack to match Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild.” As Zhurov rides, his prey handcuffed to the sidecar, the voice of Yuri Loza croons: " Through storms and rain, taking with me only my reveries, my childhood dreams, I shall float away on my little raft, … let my journey be hard … and perhaps I shall come to know the world in which I live … perhaps shall find a new bright and colorful world …”

Gregory Freidin, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities at Stanford University, is author of a critical biography of Osip Mandelstam, A Coat of Many Colors (UC Press, 1987) and forthcoming critical biography of a Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel, A Jew On Horseback (Stanford University Press). He has been a commentator on Russian affairs for the Voice of America, BBC, PBS, and CBS.

Copyright © 2007 by Gregory Freidin 

Target: Film Screening and Discussion at Stanford University. Nov. 10, 6PM

Ever since posting my review of Target in March, I have been asked by readers where they could see the film. Here, at last, is the opportunity.

Screening of Target (2010), directed by Alexander Zeldovich, script by Vladimir Sorokin and Alexander Zeldovich.
Discussants: Alexander Zeldovich, Vladimir Sorokin, Gregory Freidin (Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford), Tom Luddy (Director, Telluride Film Festival) 

Date: Thursday, November 10, 6 PM.
Building 320 (Braun Corner), Room 105, in on the Main Quad of Stanford.

If you are closer to London than Stanford, you can catch Target at the BFI London Film Festival on October 25 and 26.

In the meantime, the film was recently screened at the Telluride Film Festival where it created quite a stir. The NYT critic A.O. Scott called it "an astonishing piece of visionary futurism" that left him in a state of a "sublime puzzlement" (NYT 9/5/2011). I hope this billing will elicit in some American distributors an equally sublime desire to show Target in the US.

“A Bitter Taste of Freedom” - How Sweet It Is!

Thanks to my friend Tom Luddy, the Director of the Telluride Film Festival, I had a pleasant surprise waiting for me in my mailbox on Sunday afternoon, “A Bitter Taste of Freedom” (2011), a cinematic biographical tribute to and about Anna Politkovskaya. The film was directed and, in part, shot by a much acclaimed Russian documentary film maker, Marina Goldovskaya, who had known and interviewed her subject personally. But it is not so much Anna Politkovskaya (much has been written about her) as the film itself that I am most interested in thinking about.

As we all know, a biographical tribute, documentary or otherwise, is always a mythology, because the materials are both selected and organized by the author—who always keeps one eye on the present, the moment that is shaped, among other things, by the outlook and interests of the author, whether they are acknowledged or not. "A Bitter Taste of Freedom" is no different in this respect from any other work of this kind. Two ostensibly historical lines frame its film narrative. One is Russia’s passage from perestroika to the fall of communism and, eventually, the Chechen war and the Putin presidency; the other is a personal story of Politkovskaya, her student years, her happy marriage to a man who became the center of the most daring and entertaining TV news program in the perestroika years, their eventual estrangement, divorce, and her professional rise in the late 1990s as an investigative journalist working for one of the few remaining independent news outlets, Novaya gazeta. Inside this frame is the strong and attractive, not to say beautiful, face of Anna Politkovskaya.

In a nutshell, “A Bitter Taste of Freedom” is a hagiography of a latter-day Russian martyr and, perhaps, a holy woman, and perhaps, even a saint. The voice over tells us more than once that the Chechen women – whose loved ones had been killed, tortured, or kidnapped by the Russian forces, and whose cause Politkovskaya fearlessly publicized ­– prayed to her.  Goldovskaya shows masterfully – and here she really hits the mark – what a charismatic person is about: intense and radiant with the sense of purpose and rectitude, wholly dedicated to her cause, and perhaps most important, vibrating with the sense of vocation. Charisma of course is the name of a type of social bond existing between the charismatic person and her followers, and Goldovskaya never tires of showing the worshipful admiration with which the Chechen women and others treated Politkovskaya. As a study in charismatic reporting, although it may not have been intended as such, the documentary wins high marks and will be worth studying in schools of journalism. 

There is also plenty of good footage from the 1980s to the present, along with a series of interviews of Anna Politkovskaya that the film maker had recorded over a course of several years (among them, a lot of close-ups of Politkovskaya being interviewed in her bathrobe in her hotel in LA, just before she rushed to Moscow to participate in negotiations with the terrorists who had seized a Moscow theatre).

Unintentionally, though, and most interesting for this writer, the film provides plenty of food for thought about the way that members of Russian intelligentsia, including Goldovskaya herself, look at the world through the prism of victimization: innocent victims of evil power who are redeemed symbolically in the acts and above all, death of a martyr-intercessor. There are other “habits of thought,” all too familiar to the students of Russian culture and society, for example, that Moscow equals Russia.  There is a long shot of the Moscow 1990 or 1991 march along Gorky Street meant to illustrate the real freedom enjoyed by Russian citizens that has now been lost under Putin. The sad truth is that Moscow, more exactly, the center of Moscow, is not Russia. I was in Moscow in the heady days of the August 1991 Putsch, and I remember being shocked by the routine normalcy of life just outside the small perimeter around the White House, not to mention outside Moscow or in other parts of the vast USSR, save St. Petersburg. This is probably the hardest truth for the Moscow intelligentsia elite to swallow (and has been for over a hundred and fifty years, at least since Alexander Herzen's acute observation on the subject, once he found himself in exile in provincial Russia). 

The context provided by the film leads the viewer into believing that it was by sheer transcendence that Politkovskaya managed to stand up to the Russian Leviathan. These intelligentsia elite optics cast Politkovskaya into a giant herself while Putin awkward explanation  (the unforgiving footage of his press conference in Prague) that the Kremlin had no rational motive for killing Politkovskaya, because her activities “had very little impact on Russian politics” begins to sound like a denial of a self-evident fact of Politkovskaya’s importance and, by an unspoken implication, of Putin’s complicity. Putin, of course, as well as those who might wish to please him by assassinating the Kremlin gadfly, the FSB, the Chechen Supremo Akhmad Kadyrov and his minions, have been mentioned in the press as possible conspirators. By the same token, though, their opponents had as much to gain from the assassination by embarrassing the authorities and showing how helpless these strongmen really were. Goldovskaya seems to be pointing her finger, though never explicitly, at Putin and nobody else. To the extent that Putin is where the proverbial buck stops, she has a point (for Politkovskaya, too, Putin was the ultimate evil genius) but given the fact that, pace Wikileaks, only 40% of Putin’s orders are ever followed up, it would have been only appropriate to mention other possibilities. 

What is, perhaps, most puzzling about the film is its actual voiding of history in favor of myth in its presentation of the turmoil in Chechnya, the main focus of Politkovskaya’s investigative journalism and, ipso facto, the documentary itself.  There is no mention that Yeltsin decision to send troops to Chechnya, however ill-fated, was a response to the civil war raging in Chechnya, de jure still under Russia's jurisdiction, in which Chechens had been killing Chechens and the central government had lost all control 1991-1994. Nor is there a single word about the apartment building bombings in Moscow in 1999 (and elsewhere) that preceded Putin's notorious "we'll look for the terrorists everywhere and we'll rub them out, and if we find them in the toilet, we'll rub them out in the toilet." Nor will anyone watching this film have any idea that Chechnya enjoyed a virtual independence in 1994-1999, with no central government presence in the republic itself, until Shamil Basayev (who had just resigned as Prime Minister of Chechnya), along with his Jordanian jihadist confrere Al-Khattab, led their Islamic International Peacekeeping Brigade <sic> into the neighboring Dagestan - de jure and de facto, part of the Russian Federation. In response to this act of aggression, Putin and Yeltsin, then still President, sent Russian forces back into Chechnya, beginning what is known as the Second Chechen War (1999-2006).

The brutality and atrocities perpetrated by the Russian troops in Chechnya are, of course, well-documented by human rights groups, journalists, foremost among them Anna Politkovskaya. But watching this film, you will learn little about the forces on the other side – those who chose violence, unleashing what is now a decade-long civil war in North Caucasus, whether in the name of independence of Chechnya or the establishment of the Caucasus Emirate, or joining the fight for the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate. What we see in the film are Chechen women weeping, mourning, pleading – and praying to their only savior Anna Politkovskaya. Even the seizure of a crowded Moscow theater (Nord-Ost) by a group of Chechen terrorists in 2002 that resulted in the death of one hundred and thirty  hostages, largely because of a botched rescue, is placed by the director at the feet of Vladimir Putin. True, he had apparently overseen the rescue himself and must bear the responsibility for his mistakes, but surely the blame should be with the terrorists, who threatened to blow up the theater and its nine hundred hostages and probably would have, had it not been for the rescue, botched or otherwise. For Goldovskaya, it seems, there is but one source of evil.

The film sounds a tragic note: a brilliant, fearless reporter, who took on a whole state establishment, is gunned down in the prime of her life. Paradoxically, though, it is this tragic note that sounds false, because in the end, “A Bitter Taste of Freedom” is a feel-good documentary: good people are on this, our side, the side of the good; the evil are on the other. Politkovskaya herself knew better:

 <…> all of us are responsible for what has been going on [in Russia]. The responsibility is ours above all, not Putin's. Our “kitchen” reaction to Putin (grumble about him over the kitchen table) and his cynical profanation of Russia – this is what made it possible for Putin to do what he had done to the country in the last four years. Political apathy shown by society is bottomless, and it is this apathy that has given Putin the pass to continue for four more years <treating the Russian people> like cattle…

(Putin’s Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy (2007); translation is mine from the Russian original)

Copyright © 2011 by gfreidin@stanford.edu