Conclusion

Russian Self-Hatred

On October 30, 1998, just two months after the Russian Federation’s economy went into a tailspin, the director Nikita Mikhalkov released Sibirskii tsiriul’nik (The barber of Siberia), an overambitious failure that was the cinematic equivalent of the ruble’s collapse. Not that its viewers at the star-studded Kremlin premiere were unimpressed by what was then the most expensive film in the country’s history. By most accounts, Russian audiences loved the film (Beumers, 77, 120; Norris, chapter 2); indeed, from what I could tell from my own, somewhat less glamorous screening in downtown Moscow, my (American) wife and I were the only ones in the theater stifling groans rather than bursting with laughter at the film’s comic moments.

The film’s release followed an intensive advertising campaign, from billboards to television spots to a limited-edition eau de cologne (Iunkerskii [Cadet])—Mikhalkov wanted it to combine the “smell of a shaven cheek, saddle leather, a recently downed shot of vodka, and the first drag on a papirosa” (Maslova). The story of the late-nineteenth-century doomed love affair between a Russian military cadet with the unlikely name of Andrei Tolstoy (Oleg Menshikov) and an American woman (Julia Ormond) representing the interests of a rapacious American inventor (his “Barber of Siberia” is a machine that will chop down Russia’s precious woods with inhuman efficiency), Mikhalkov’s film had the ambition to match its imperial setting. Not content with winning an Oscar for best foreign picture in 1995 for his Burnt by the Sun, Mikhalkov apparently wanted to nab the great white whale of American cinematic acclaim: best picture, full stop (“Mikhalkova vydvinuli”).

Hence the odd contrivance that nearly everyone the Americans encounter in 1885 speaks English, and the resulting 70 percent of the dialogue spoken in what for the Russian audience was a foreign language. Whatever Oscar hopes Mikhalkov had for this tactic, it could have been seen as an insult to Russian audiences, who experienced the film the way they always do when the movie is foreign rather than domestic: with a single voice talking over the foreign dialogue in Russian. Granted, this overdubbing was by Mikhalkov himself, an accomplished actor with a soothing and mellifluous voice. But this only reinforces the director’s maniacal control of the finished product.

The Barber of Siberia was a curious intervention in the debate over Russia’s past, its future, and, most important, its identity. Authored by a man so thoroughly invested in his own fantasies of Orthodox, monarchic traditionalism that he cast himself in the role of Tsar Alexander III, the film unsuccessfully negotiated the geopolitics of global cinema.¹ Everything about Barber itself was designed to portray a positive image of Russia and Russians: the cadet core is filled with honest, earnest young men, the tsar himself is good, the nobility and common people even better, while the greatest threat to the country is an overreaching, blundering United States that wants to turn Russia’s natural resources and natural beauty into fodder for a global capitalist mill.² The film tries to pander to everyone: flattering to Russian viewers, it nonetheless revels in stereotypes about the Russian soul that verge on minstrelsy—most notoriously, in the Maslenitsa (pre-Lenten festival) scene, when a Russian officer starts drinking only to go on an epic spree. Russians often complain that Westerners think their country is nothing but vodka and dancing bears, and this is, quite literally, what The Barber of Siberia supplies. Had a foreigner made this movie, it would have been offensive.

The irony of this film about two generations of men training with guns is that it misfires: aimed at a Western audience, the only target it hits is domestic. For an avowedly patriotic director, that should be enough, and yet it clearly was not. Among the many reasons that the film flopped in the West is that the very question of Russian identity is primarily a Russian concern. In his attempts to make a film for export, Mikhalkov distorts his characters for an imagined foreign gaze that will never be turned on them. The film’s tag line—“He’s Russian. That explains a lot”—comes from an exchange between an exhausted American drill sergeant and the mother of the recruit whose stubbornness has driven the officer to distraction. But what, exactly, does it explain? And to whom?

Perhaps the oddest, yet almost appropriate, thing about this formulation is that it is an answer standing in for a question.

On the most superficial level, the tag line is supposed to elucidate the main conflict in the two scenes that, framing the movie proper, take place twenty years after the main story. The young recruit is Andrei Tolstoy’s son, and his Russianness is meant to justify his almost idolatrous dedication to a portrait of Mozart. He would rather suffer unending punishment at the drill sergeant’s hands than simply repeat the phrase demanded of him: “I don’t give a shit about Mozart.” Mozart, of course, is even less Russian than his half-American admirer, but in addition to showing a presumably Russian steadfast devotion to high ideals, this episode also prefigures the strategy that would be later adopted by Alexander Sokurov in his 2002 film, Russian Ark, which suggests that the European heritage collected in the Hermitage is housed and saved specifically by Russia (de Khegel, 85; Shlikhar, 168).

Yet despite the Eurocentric cast it gives to Russian culture, The Barber of Siberia stands out as a remarkable work of self-orientalization. The overreliance on Russian stereotypes and national culture in the Maslenitsa scene has all the subtlety of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” ride, with animatronic Russians dancing in their colorful national garb. The Russian audience’s pleasure is that of both direct recognition (“this is us!”) and mediated or alienated pleasure (“this is us, showing those Westerners who we truly are”), even if the West greeted the film with resounding indifference.

This self-orientalization on screen is performative by definition, but it is a performance that is hardly naturalistic. Mikhalkov is no David Mamet, inventing hyperrealistic dialogue to show the very specific, and very problematic, underside of his country’s culture. The Barber of Siberia performs identity in such broad, exaggerated strokes that one hardly needs the writings of a Judith Butler to identify what makes it performative as opposed to “natural.” Indeed, the characters of The Barber of Siberia are so mannered, so artificial that they resemble nothing more than … a drag show.

Consider: Oleg Menshikov is a talented and popular actor, so it is no surprise that Mikhalkov would want him in his film. But casting him as a member of the Cadet Corps strained credibility: when Barber was released, Menshikov was already thirty-eight, and he spent most of the first half of the film contorting his features into a wide-eyed impression of naïveté as a way to look younger. His mother is played by another acclaimed actress, Marina Neyolova, who at the time was only fifty-one. The role of the American femme fatale is filled by the British Julia Ormond (who, to be fair, manages a convincing American accent). And, of course, all of the English dialogue is overdubbed in Russian by Mikhalkov himself when he is not too busy playing the film’s literal and figurative tsar. If Mikhalkov were of a less conservative bent, one might be inclined to think of The Barber of Siberia as an exercise in nontraditional casting, akin to having Bob Dylan played by six different actors of various genders and races in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. Instead, Mikhalkov’s aesthetic of excess points us back to an unconscious replication of drag. The performances are all over-the-top, with the main actors saddled with roles they can embody only through campy exaggeration, and Mikhalkov turning all of them into Russian cinematic Lypsinkas.

It may have been the most expensive drag show in history. Mikhalkov himself has stated repeatedly that the film cost more than $46 million to make, with a quarter of the funds coming from Russian state coffers. One source places The Barber of Siberia as number seventy-six on a list of the top hundred money-losing films in the Russian Federation, grossing only $1.6 million (Karsanova). On a financial level, Barber was a spectacularly bad investment, but the lost money must not obscure the fascinating role the film plays in the drama of post-Soviet Russian mass culture’s renegotiation of Russian identity. On one hand, the film was clearly an occasion for the country’s elites to celebrate themselves. Mikhalkov’s lack of artistic subtlety was outdone only by the pomp occasioned by the premiere: fireworks, the ringing of the Kremlin’s fabled chimes, and a four-course “tsar’s” banquet (“Desperate Siberian Gamble”). On the other hand, its failure in the international arena recapitulated the film’s performance of Russian soulfulness in the face of a combination of capitalist cynicism and the West’s inability to understand Russia’s “authentic self.”

Mikhalkov had insisted that Barber would restore Russia’s national pride while reviving the domestic film industry (“Desperate Siberian Gamble”); the man who cast himself as Russia’s second-to-last tsar saw little distinction between his ambitions for himself (international critical acclaim) and for his country (a return to glory).³ No amount of Cadet eau de cologne could hide the stench of this flop at Cannes or the Academy Awards, but it was still granted a special (consolation?) prize by the Russian state in 2000. From a distance of two decades, The Barber of Siberia appears to have succeeded at only one thing: being the perfect symptom. Mikhalkov’s film, in no small part thanks to its aesthetic of unrelenting excess, is a snapshot of the post-Soviet, pre-millennial national preoccupation with national identity. Such a preoccupation should not be surprising, given the circumstances. As an independent state, the Russian Federation was only seven years old, and the trauma of the Soviet collapse has not been resolved to this day. What Barber shows, however, is how much this concern with identity depends on the imagined gaze of the other. If the debate on national identity happens, and no one outside the national borders pays attention, does it really matter?

“He’s Russian. That explains a lot” is a substitute for an explanation, or perhaps a pointer in the explanation’s direction. Its placement toward the end of the film suggests that the explanation has already been provided by the film itself. Its deployment is humorous, since there is little chance that the drill sergeant actually has any idea about Russia beyond a few stereotypes. In contrast, it is precisely stereotyping that the film so gleefully provides. And as an advertising slogan in Russia, and in Russian, it was a peculiar choice, since the majority of people reading it would be Russians, and therefore should be unlikely to see a fellow Russian’s Russianness as a persuasive explanation for anything they might otherwise find confusing. Only the imagined other justifies the need for such a gloss, and yet the content of the film (the explanation) was far more satisfying to Russian audiences than to any outside the country’s borders. Earlier I called the film’s stereotypes “self-orientalization,” a process that only works as part of the audience’s self-alienation: imagining how this looks to outsiders.

When Mikhalkov deflects accusations that the film was made for Hollywood, not Moscow, he portrays his cinematic project as messianic, precisely because the distinction between the foreign and the domestic is threatened with total erasure. Russians themselves are so alienated from their own culture that they need to be educated like foreigners:

The substantive questions always amounted to the same thing. Why did he cover Red Square with salt and turn off the Kremlin star lights? Why are they speaking English in the film? Why such a large budget, and what was the money spent on? And, finally, most important: why did Mikhalkov come up with a Russia that never was [Rossiiu, kotoroi ne bylo]? …

Was Russia the way it looks in the film or wasn’t it—it’s the Russia I see and love… . And the conversation about “Russian clichés” [kliukva], about Mikhalkov making this picture for foreigners… . Yes, for foreigners. For the hundred million foreigners living in my country. Who don’t know its culture, it’s history, and—most important—don’t love it. (quoted in Arkus)

Though based very much on post-Soviet realities, Mikhalkov’s sentiment is nothing new. Indeed, he appears to be channeling Pyotr Chaadaev, whose Philosophical Letters (1829–1836) led to him being declared a madman (rather than, in Mikhalkov’s case, a cinematic national treasure). In his first letter, Chaadaev wrote, “Our memories reach back no further than yesterday; we are, as it were, strangers to ourselves.” Chaadaev’s quote is, of course, translated from the original … French, as if heralding Mikhalkov’s musings on the Russian soul in English. When Mikhalkov responds to criticism about language and audience, he sees no contradiction. His recreation of Russia is an exercise in sympathetic magic, meant to transform the de-Russified masses from de facto foreigners into the Russians they are meant to be.

Mikhalkov’s recreation of his favorite imaginary iteration of Russia is a project very much of its time, but also pointing to the way that the discourse of Russianness would develop beyond the models examined elsewhere in this book. Rather than separate out a subgroup of Russian citizens, whether for praise or stigmatization, Mikhalkov longs to define Russia and Russians in their totality. Ultimately, this is the direction in which Putinist culture would go: repeatedly appealing to an ideal of “Russians” while refraining from imbuing the concept with any real specificity.

The tag line from The Barber of Siberia alludes to wisdom while remaining defiantly content-free. By assuming that the definition of “Russian” is common knowledge, Mikhalkov reaps the benefits of a flattering patriotic marketing strategy without having to commit to anything. Or rather, the film itself becomes the thesis, and if it does its job correctly, it positions the viewers to accept this thesis as confirmation of something they already know rather than as a polemical stance they can choose to adopt or reject.

As a contribution to Russian identity discourses, The Barber of Siberia was a tonic for an old malady: the self-hatred that has been an integral part of unofficial Soviet and Russian identities. But this is a remedy that is more homeopathic than medical, as self-aggrandizement and self-hatred are not so much binary opposites as they are overlapping categories, based on the same habit of anxious self-assessment through the eyes of an imagined other.

In terms of its content, The Barber of Siberia contributes little of substance to actual debates about Russian identity. Structurally, however, it is a powerful rebuke of all the phenomena discussed in the previous chapter. At the turn of the millennium, Mikhalkov used the tsarist 1880s to make a statement about Russianness that was meant to be valid and compelling over one hundred years later. Implicit in The Barber of Siberia is an argument for a static, eternal Russian identity that withstands the forces of history rather than being shaped by them. Though Mikhalkov’s late nineteenth century is more a reflection of his concerns about the twentieth and twenty-first (hence the American antagonists at a time when the United States was irrelevant), the goal of the film is, in fan terms, decidedly affirmational rather than transformational: there is a core of Russianness that must be emphasized and preserved.