New movie refocuses the Russian mind set

To the communists, he was an arch-villain, a defender of the oppressed, a class enemy. For decades, that is also the way films and textbooks portrayed Admiral Alexander Kolchak, a leader of the fight to roll back the 1917 Russian Revolution that gave birth to the Soviet Union.

Now, a $20 million state-supported epic glorifying Kolchak as a failed savior of Russia, has come along.

Such a reversal might seem odd, less than four years after Vladimir Putin decried the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

But ever since the beginning of the Putin presidency in 2000, continuing under his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, the Kremlin has tried to be all things to all Russians. Championing the country's Soviet past, while resurrecting symbols of the once-despised czarist era.

Rich in Russian flags, warships and Russian Orthodox religious rituals, the movie reinterprets the checkered career of Kolchak, who led an anti-communist government and held the title of Supreme Ruler.

Kolchak's courage and faith are driven home repeatedly in "Admiral," from his steely command against the Germans in a World War I naval battle, to rejecting a blindfold before being shot by a firing squad midway through the 1917-1923 Russian Civil War.

To underscore his religious devotion, the film shows his body being dumped in a cross-shaped hole cut into the ice of a Siberian river.

Kolchak is played by Konstantin Khabensky, hero of the "Night Watch" vampire movies that are popular in the West. The film follows Kolchak from the privileged world of an officer in the czar's navy, through the increasingly beleaguered efforts of his so-called "White Russians," the counterrevolutionary forces in Siberia, to his execution in 1920.

Some have compared the new myth and the images portrayed in the film to Putin's own path to supremacy. "Just as Putin built his chain of command, so 'Admiral' builds a new historical line," reviewer Yuri Gladilshchikov wrote in the Russian edition of Newsweek. This lavishly promoted history lesson has sold more than 4 million tickets since opening Oct. 9 in what is reportedly the widest release ever in Russia. Filmmakers plan to release the movie, directed by Andrei Kravchuk, in the United States and elsewhere once they find distributors, executive producer Dmitry Nelidov said.

At the "October," a sleek, renovated Moscow multiplex that has kept its Soviet-era name honoring the October 1917 revolution, "Admiral" has been playing on as many as four of the theatre's 11 screens.

Partially financed by a government eager to replace post-Soviet disgruntlement with patriotism and pride, Russia's resuscitated movie industry has produced a string of films, several of them major box office and critical flops, that glorify the country's past.

But "Admiral" is the first to canonize a figure who fought the founders of the Soviet state.

It stops short of rejecting Russia's Soviet past. But its popularity strongly suggests, as the Communist era recedes and its staunchest defenders die off, the czarist past is a great draw for millions of Russians.

Shortly before the movie opened, Russia's Supreme Court declared Czar Nicholas II, his wife and children, shot in 1918, were victims of political repression, officially rehabilitating them.

"Admiral" is Kolchak's rehabilitation, depicting him as a resolute man with a deep faith in God and unshakable loyalty to Russia.

The Bolsheviks, as the communists who would run the Soviet Union for 74 years called themselves, get rougher treatment on the screen in "Admiral" than Russian moviegoers are used to seeing. In one scene, the Bolsheviks bind a block to a White officer and drop him into the sea. It is the mirror image of a famous scene from Soviet cinema, but with the good-guy, bad-guy roles reversed.



White and Red World

Soviet audiences will recognize one aspect of "Admiral," reviewer Larisa Malyukova wrote in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, "a White and Red world divided into us and them, only the chessboard has been turned upside down." One theme of the film, and of Russia's current rulers, is the biggest threat to Russia comes neither from Reds nor Whites, but from abroad.

It is a French general and Czech forces who, in the end, deliver Kolchak to the Bolsheviks for execution. Some of the Communist villains look more like Georgians or Central Asians than ethnic Russian. "In line with Russian ideology today, a foreigner can only be a foe," Gladilshchikov wrote.

Putin's critics have accused the Kremlin of playing down the crimes of the Soviet era to help justify its centralization of power. "Admiral" may seem to buck the trend in that here it is the anti-communist Whites who get whitewashed.

But few expect the film to mark the death knell for the Kremlin's celebration of the Soviet legacy, or of lingering public nostalgia for Josef Stalin, the most brutal of Soviet dictators.

Critics warn that glossing over the gritty details brings the nation no closer to a much-needed reckoning with its tortured 20th century history, in the way Germany, for example, has sought to confront its Nazi past.