Andrew Pulver - Russian war film set to open amid controversy over accuracy of events
Every Soviet
schoolchild was taught about the heroic feats of the last 28 members of Ivan
Panfilov’s division, which in late 1941 fought to the death to stop a Nazi tank
assault on Moscow in one of the best known episodes of the Soviet war effort. “Russia is vast, but
there is nowhere to retreat – Moscow is behind us,” one of the Red Army
soldiers, armed at the end with just Molotov cocktails and grenades, said as
the attack was halted.
But as a film about
the events, Panfilov’s 28, opens in Russia this week,
controversy rumbles on over the fact that many of the details of that last
stand – both in the film and versions pre-dating it – appear to have been
invented. Arguments over the
upcoming film and the mythology around the episode in general began last
spring, when Sergei Mironenko, the director of Russia’s state archive, gave an
interview stating that while there had indeed been a bloody battle outside
Moscow, it was not as many had understood it.
His words provoked
such outrage that over the summer the archive posted online a 1948 internal
Soviet military report into the events, which came to the conclusion that a
journalist from the Red Army’s newspaper had made up the particulars of the
story, inventing quotes and ignoring the fact that some of the soldiers had
survived and one was believed to have surrendered to the Germans.
The legend was cooked
up to fit in with the Soviet demand that soldiers should fight to the death
rather than surrender. Vladimir Medinsky, the
culture minister, reacted furiously to the intervention, saying it was not the
job of archivists to make historical evaluations, and if Mironenko wanted to
change professions, he should do so. Shortly after, Mironenko was fired.
The nationalist
politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky said in recent weeks that he had called at a
government meeting for Mironenko to be fired. He claimed his uncle had fought
in Panfilov’s division and said those griping about the exact numbers were
missing the point. “It’s unacceptable for someone from the archives to start
telling the whole country that there were no Panfilov heroes,” he said. Medinsky later went
further in his defence of the film and his disgust for those who questioned the
story.
“It’s my deep
conviction that even if this story was invented from the start to the finish,
even if Panfilov never existed, even if there was nothing at all, it’s a sacred
legend which it’s simply impossible to besmirch. And people who try to do that
are total scumbags.” Medinsky said he would
like to send such people, who “poked their dirty, greasy fingers into the
history of 1941” back to the war period in a time machine and leave them in a
trench to face Nazi tanks armed with just a hand grenade.
Panfilov’s division
included many central Asians, and last month Putin and Kazakhstan’s president
Nursultan Nazarbayev watched
the film together. Under Putin, victory
in the second world war has become the main building block of modern Russian
identity, and criticism of the Red Army or mentions of the darker sides of the
war effort are unwelcome.
The war’s huge place
in the national psyche is understandable, given the Soviet Union lost more than
20 million citizens during the war years. But some are uncomfortable that the
mythology has overtaken the facts. Alexander Morozov, a
history teacher and the chair of the editorial board of a magazine on the
teaching of history in schools, called the film a “big mistake”, and said
mythologising the war would only confuse children.
He told Ekho Moskvy
radio: “We should try to tell the truth, of course. Yes, there was a battle,
yes there was heroism. This is what they should have made a film about... But
as it is, they’ll watch this film, go online and find a whole load of different
information about this battle, and it will undermine their trust in these kind
of things.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/23/russian-war-film-set-to-open-against-controversy-over-accuracy-of-eventssee also
