Postsoviet Heroism

Nationalism and youth in Aleksei Balabanov's Brat saga

Abstract

This article analyzes Russian film saga Brat (Brother), by Aleksei Balabanov, as cultural artifacts pertaining to the transitional period between the USSR and the Russian Federation (1991-2000). Its most significant aspect is the construction of a Russian hero that exemplifies the values that the country would follow in the upcoming millennium. The result is Danila Bagrov, both an inheritor and renovator of national literary and film traditions. This character and the environment in which he moves are examined according to two criteria: as a heroic agent of the moral and social change proposed by Balabanov, and as a participant of the social dynamics pertaining to the period that brought him into the light. These two facets are responsible for his current status in contemporary Russian pop culture: both a nostalgic relic of a key period in its recent history and an emblem of a national project still in-process. Likewise, the social analysis Balabanov made of his country’s panorama is also exposed; its inherent problems and particularly the dangers that he predicted with the growing westernization product of liberalization, associated with moral and cultural decadence. In this line, it is argued that Brat is a contemporary artistic contribution to the traditional debate between Slavism and westernization advocates –in force within the country for centuries– in favor of a culturally independent Russia, unified, powerful, and nationalistic.