Ukraine in Soviet Narratives about the October Revolution: A Case Study of Ihor Savchenko’s Film Ballad About Cossack Holota (1937)

Ukraine’s social, political, and cultural history has become a controversial issue since the 1990s. Dominant until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the discourse about the Soviet brotherly nations has since been contested by depictions of Ukraine as politically and ideologically divided over the course of its 20th-century history. Russia-Ukraine war that began with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 Feb 2022 has had a dramatic impact on the process of replacing the formerly standard version of Ukraine’s past with new interpretations. At the same time, Russia’s war on Ukraine has also demonstrated that Soviet-era collective memory about the key events in Soviet history has outlived the Soviet state and has been mobilized for political use. When in pain of heart a Ukrainian politician says that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cancelled a shared past of Ukraine and Russia, he refers to a familiar discourse about these nations’ familial ties (Tkach). With this discourse now shattered, the question of particular salience is: How was the idea of brotherhood between Ukraine and other Soviet nations expressed and sustained? How did it evolve? In light of Russia-Ukraine war, the stories that were building blocks of the Soviet foundational narrative about Ukraine and Russia as fraternal nations are worth revisiting. An analysis of such stories reveals the mechanism of making Ukraine’s part an integral part of Soviet culture. In this paper, I discuss the issue of the evolution of the Soviet discourse about ‘eternal friendship of Ukrainian and Russian peoples’ in the example of Igor Savchenko’s film Ballad About Cossack Holota ( Duma pro kozaka Golotu, 1937), released by the Gorkii Film Studio as part of the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Igor Savchenko (Ihor Savchenko in 24 | WEEReview 13 | 2024 Ukraine in Soviet Narratives about the October Revolution Ukrainian) was a Ukrainian Soviet film director who made films both in Russian and Ukrainian film studios; his work played an important role in promoting the idea of familial ties between Ukraine and Russia. Ballad About Cossak Holota is based on Arkadii Gaidar’s novella for children R.V.S. (1925) that is set during the Civil War in Ukraine, following the October Revolution. Savchenko’s film is especially interesting in how he reworks Gaidar’s story; he depicts events of the Civil War in the context of Ukraine’s 17th-18th-century history, drawing on Ukrainian folklore. Cossack Holota, a character from Ukrainian folklore, becomes a symbol of the revolutionary liberation of Ukraine, a promise of a just social and political order. Drawing on memory studies, post-colonial theory, and theory of deconstruction, I discuss the artistic means that Savchenko used in order to integrate Ukraine’s experience of the revolution and the Civil War into the Soviet discourse about the fight for Soviet power. Savchenko constructs Ukraine’s response to the revolution by making use of tropes of a big family, Biblical imagery, elements of folk culture, conventions of the adventure film. The study of Savchenko’s film contributes to our understanding of the debates about Soviet-era and presentday collective memory about the October Revolution and the Civil War in Ukraine and Russia. As the discourse about the biggest Soviet nations’ familial unity is yet another casualty of Russia-Ukraine war, it is important to consider how the idea of brotherhood between Ukraine and other Soviet nations was expressed in Soviet cinema. Such analysis explains why Ukrainian’s common emotional response to the start of the war was that of a feeling of shock and betrayal.