Колоніальна спадщина Росії в українському кінематографі: проблеми подолання

Abstract

Colonial expansion of the imperial Russia on the territory of Ukraine is of a three hundred years’ history, which has got its logical continuation in the 20th – 21st centuries. Social and cultural dynamics of the colonial war of the imperial centre against Ukraine and its people during the last century is analyzed in the article. It is the period starting from the destruction of cultural institutions at the turn of the 1920s – 1930s, arrests and executions of a whole generation of the workers of literature and art, destruction of grain-growers’ culture and its bearers during the years of Holodomor. Then there has been a decade of the late Stalin years (1944–1954), when the only existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians is declared illegitimate, decades (1954–1964, 1964–1974) of the legitimization of Ukrainian political elites, with the condition of their work for a real liquidation of Ukrainian culture and language, and resistance of a young generation (the Sixtiers) to a new imperial policy. The following decennial periods have their peculiarities, however, even at the times of the dawning of the age of Ukrainian independence the expansion of Russia hasn’t abated. It is armed with the cultural and informative technologies of influence, reformatting of the consciousness of the masses, developed over the centuries. Cinematograph is one of the most powerful means of the formation of senses, narratives and images, aimed at the territories, interpreted as the zones of traditionally ostensibly Russian civilization. In fact, these zones are the borderlands. Really a clash of civilizations takes place here. According to popular and authoritative nowadays concept of the clash of civilization by American sociologist and political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, the most important borders, dividing mankind in modern world, are not determined by ideology, economics, but culture. These are not nation-states that are in conflict now (although their significance in the world is still very notable), but nations and groups, belonging to different civilizations. The clash of civilizations becomes a dominant factor of a world politics. The conflict between civilizations, which turns into a real war, is the final phase of the evolution of global conflicts in the modern world. Russian-Ukrainian war is a real war for the strengthening of the civilizational senses and lines in this context. From the side of Ukraine this is a struggle for the return to the West civilization. The struggle, which is conducting including with the means of purely cultural and artistic direction, which is evidenced with the submitted material from the up to date history of Ukrainian cinema.