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BUILDING THE IMAGE OF RUSSIAN POLITICAL CONSPIRATORS IN EARLY SOVIET CINEMATOGRAPHY // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2015. Issue 2 (4). P. 69-81

In my paper I aim at comparing the images of two radical 19th century revolutionists such as Sergei Gennadevich Nechaev and Stepan Nikolaevich Khalturin with the ambivalent portraits of these historical characters that appeared in the Russian and Soviet press before and after the 1917 Russian Revolution. According to a number of publications, Nechaev’s figure was given a special position by the Soviet intelligentsia of the 1920s. Also Khalturin became, at the time, particularly popular for having been the leader of the Russian workers’ movement. Main questions asked in my Paper include, but are not limited, to the following: how Russian Populists were featured through cinema? By what specific visual devices in the two fictional films shown throughout the 1920s – such as “The Palace and the Fortress” and “Stepan Khalturin” (both directed by Aleksandr Viktorivich Ivanovsky) – were the stories of the recent revolutionary past reorganised in relation to the projects predominating in the Soviet post-revolutionary present? I shall specifically focus the paper on how the characters of Nechaev and Khalturin were treated by the well-known historian Pavel Eliseevich Shchyogolev, who made use of new sources (emerged from the former archives of the Tsarist secret police departments) for composing the screenplays of the above-mentioned films.

Keywords: soviet history, film history, building the visual image, Russian populists, Sergei Nechaev, Stepan Khalturin