Re/framing the “Good Russian Prisoner”: Challenges of Postcolonial Reassessment in Aleksandr Rogozhkin's Checkpoint

Abstract

In 1994–96 the newly independent Russian media took the lead in interpreting the Russian army’s disorganized and brutal Chechen campaign as an authoritarian state’s abuse of its own citizens, innocent civilians, and inexperienced recruits who, in Harsha Ram’s words, were “caught in the spiral of violence resulting from Russian military aggression and Chechen reaction.” In their expository coverage of the uncaring Russian state on the one hand and the courageous but violent Chechen insurgents on the other, independent news channels employed the readily recognizable nineteenth century literary mythology of the Caucasus in which the post‐Soviet Russian people now collectively filled the role of the proverbial Prisoner of the Mountains, traditionally a weary romantic poet persecuted in his oppressive homeland yet culturally alienated from the freedom‐loving Caucasian tribes that hold him captive. In contrast to the news media’s dominant focus on the Russian people’s post‐imperial trauma, several artists engaged the paradigmatic Prisoner myth more thoughtfully to reflect on the ordinary ethnic Russians’ role and responsibilities in a new post‐imperial setting. Aleksandr Rogozhkin’s 1999 war drama Checkpoint (Blokpost) evoking Tolstoy’s early fiction about the Caucasus (along with Vladimir Makanin’s 1994 novella Prisoner of the Caucasus [Kavkazskii plennyi] and Sergei Bodrov’s 1996 cinematic adaptation of Lev Tolstoy’s eponymous tale, Prisoner of the Mountains [Kavkazskii plennik], challenges and complicates the independent media’s simplistic anti‐state rhetoric, and critically examines the imperial‐era mythology that serves as its ideological framework.