NEVZOROV’S PURGATORY

This generation of Ukrainians was raised watching mostly war movies. The most penetrating masterpieces of the socialist renaissance were somehow or other rooted in the gruesome enthusiasm of militarism made up as patriotism and self-sacrifice. War, being a universal standard of senseless cruelty but skillfully portrayed, made those who had never experienced its horrors breathlessly take in its romance. Military prose, poetry, songs were the invariable daily components of the Soviet arts with their “humanistic traditions.”

Aleksandr Nevzorov’s “Purgatory”, run by Ukrainian television last week, is not a major event in cultural life. Not that it is overburdened with naturalism and documentary accuracy, but because it so closely approaches that standard of cruelty. But perhaps this is what a good antiwar film should be like in a country of mythologized militarism when sons of the people do not spit but sprinkle blood in its face and the body politic wipes it off without batting an eye.

And nor was it a coincidence that the Godfather of Ukrainian independence, ex-President Leonid Kravchuk, appeared on screen with a brief introduction to the film. This man will go down in history also because he saw to it that Ukrainian children would not have to serve in the army outside Ukraine, so that its future destinies will be decided not by people afraid of war, but by a generation spared the lot of cannon folder.

“Purgatory’s” premiere coincided with the Russian Cabinet’s sudden dismissal, which had nothing to do with the Chechen war...