Revisionist Heroes and Dissident Heroines: Gender, Nation and War in Soviet Films of “the Thaw”

Abstract

This article focuses on three films produced in the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1966, a period encompassing both “the Thaw” and the rise of the dissident movement. In distinctive ways these films challenge aspects of both “official” discourses on war and cinematic representations of war that prevailed in the Stalin era. The article interrogates changing representations of heroes, heroines and heroism, the concomitant challenges to prevailing representations of gender in stories of nation and war and also the limits of “subversion” and “dissidence” with respect to the story of gender within the grand narrative of the nation at war.