Trapped in the prisoner scenario: the first Chechen war and Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains

Abstract

Russia’s centuries-long history of imperial war and domination in the Caucasus had produced a canonized body of literary responses that, during the first post-Soviet decade, served as the foundation for reassessing the role and position of ethnic Russians vis-à-vis Russia’s ethnic minorities. The newly independent Russian media used the nineteenth-century Prisoner-of-the-Caucasus mythology less reflectively in their political critique of the Russian state’s aggressive policies in Chechnya that afflicted Russians and Chechens alike. During the same time, Russian filmmakers utilized this imperial-era scenario to offer more profound thoughts on the Russian national identity in the multi-ethnic state than those proffered by the national media. Among them, Sergei Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains (Kavkazskii plennik, 1996) dissects and re-imagines the comfortably familiar prisoner formula in its efforts to critically examine Russian imperial attitudes. While the archetypal Prisoner-of-the-Caucasus plot provided a common basis for the national dialogue about the Chechen conflict, both the independent media discourse and the critical response to Bodrov’s film paint the picture of a society trapped in the imperial biases of a rigidly interpreted cultural mythology.