LAST WEEK I was in Tallinn for a series of interviews, a strange mini-seminar with some very maxi-participants and, perhaps most usefully of all, a chance to simply wander around for a bit.

My first wander took me to a tiny little cinema at the end of the day where I watched Alyosha, a film about the eponymous Soviet war memorial and the 2007 ‘Bronze Soldier riots’. It happened to be about to screen just as I was passing at 5pm, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’m glad I did. I’d heard mixed reviews but I thought it was a super piece of documentary film-making.

Today when virtually every documentary you see on TV skews off into ‘reconstruction’ and barely-veiled rhetoric, it was immensely refreshing to see a film whose only real authorial technique was the juxtaposition of footage of essentially the same thing - Alyosha - but at different times and in different social and political contexts.

So sometimes Alyosha stood alone, sometimes he was surrounded by admirers, sometimes attacked by those who regarded his presence as an insult, sometimes almost forgotten but always there, in foregound or background.

Importantly, the juxtapositions of chronology were not crass. Even the Soviet propaganda films had a certain poignancy, as those attending the ceremonies of the time clearly showed genuine respect and a sense of bereavement as well as inevitable triumphalism.

The closest the film got to prodding me in the ribs and saying “compare and contrast” is when a Soviet bigwig was giving an eminently reasonable speech about how the youth should work hard, remember the sacrifices that had been made by the dead and take the most from life. Cut to rat-like looters smashing windows of designer stores and filling their pockets with any old junk that came to hand. True Heroes of the Soviet Union.

In general the old came out of the film rather better than the young. A young mother takes her children to meet a female WWII fighter pilot in her uniform on Victory Day. “Look,” says the mother, “she must have shot down planes and killed lots of enemies.”
“No,” the old woman corrects her, “I was in bombers, not fighters. It was very hard to bomb your own country. Try to live your lives without the need for war, children. Be good.”

But the true hero of the piece is an old Russian Estonian, doing his best to stay loyal both to the past and the present, and always seemingly on the verge of dignified tears at the effort of doing so. He wears his Soviet worker’s medals but pledges loyalty to Estonia with almost every sentence. He says he’ll enjoy a drop of vodka later on, but when someone offers him some, he says thanks, but, he never really touches it. Most touching of all, when most of his Russian friends are complaining about Alyosha’s relocation, he tries to point out the positives: “It’s much better here, I think. There’s more room, it’s easier for people to get to. There’s enough space for everyone. Where it was before was too cramped, that’s why there were some problems.”

So the next day I went to visit Alyosha for myself. He was alone, and not as intimidating as he had seemed in the footage I’d watched the night before. A Russian and a Belarussian ribbon were tied around his arm and a few flowers were fading around his boots, but he looked a little tired and perhaps glad to have someone visiting him on a cold, grey day.

It struck me that the reason he seemed less imposing was that he was now in a cemetery rather than a living city, a necropolis rather than a metropolis. His surroundings suited him and he seemed comfortable, perhaps not thrusting forward any more so much as sagging with exhaustion, welcoming his retirement as a symbol of something he could no longer remember and thinking only of resting in peace for a long, long time.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Estonia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.