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 Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 2015
Vol. 9, No. 2, 94–109, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17503132.2015.1035083

Cargo 200: a bricolage of cultural citations

Frederick H. White*

Department of Languages and Cultures, Utah Valley University, MS194, 800 W. University
Parkway, Orem, UT, 84058, USA

Persistently revisiting the notion of a Godless society, Aleksei Balabanov directly

dialogued with Fedor Dostoevskii’s cursed question and established a permanent
touchstone for his own representations of Russia/the USSR, with the help of William
Faulkner’s potboiler Sanctuary, in Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, 2007). Balabanov assem-
bled a cinematic text for viewers, drawing on philosophical ideas articulated by the
Downloaded by [Frederick White] at 13:55 12 May 2015

character Ivan Karamazov, filtered through a vulgar reinterpretation of Friedrich

Nietzsche and constructed within the context of socialist realism’s own version of the
Grand Inquisitor. Faulkner’s entire novel was forcibly relocated to the Soviet Union,
where the degradation of the American South is offered as the wreckage of an indus-
trial civilization tottering on the verge of collapse – or the late Stagnation period.
Through the bricolage of Dostoevskii and Faulkner, Balabanov explores the realities
of a Godless, morally corrupt Soviet society in which anything and everything is per-
mitted. In so doing, Balabanov invites audiences to reassess Vladimir Putin’s new
national unity that relied heavily on sanitized memories of a Soviet past, a Soviet
Union that had demanded that citizens renounce personal freedom in order to enjoy
collective economic and social stability.

I used to read a lot, often I’d re-read Dostoevskii. And from among the capitalists –
Faulkner. They are my favourites.

— Aleksei Balabanov (quoted in Sergeeva 2000)

What do you like in culture. What do you read?

I love Faulkner.

— Aleksei Balabanov (quoted in Nechaeva 2002)

In your interviews you keep saying that your films have to be read literally, while the critics
try to find some non-existent subtext in them. How is that possible – a film without subtext?

There is always a subtext. It is right there, on the screen. People always find what they
want to find, it depends on the person who’s searching. I make films. It’s my job to tell a
story.

— Aleksei Balabanov (quoted in Okulova 2010)

*Email: Frederick.White@uvu.edu

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 95

In his films, Aleksei Balabanov persistently revisited the notion of a Godless society,
yet it was in Cargo 200 (Gruz 200, 2007) that the filmmaker directly dialogued with
Fedor Dostoevskii’s cursed question and established a permanent touchstone for his
own past and future representations of Russia/the USSR, with the help of William
Faulkner’s potboiler Sanctuary. Postmodern cinema does not provide ultimate answers
or create new realities, but Balabanov’s film was clearly meant to interrupt an increasing
nostalgia for a Soviet past and to question the re-emergence of authoritarianism in post-
Soviet Russia. In Cargo 200 Balabanov assembled a cinematic text for viewers, drawing
on philosophical ideas articulated by the character Ivan Karamazov, filtered through an
interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy and constructed within the context of
a socialist realism of miracle, mystery and authority. At the same time, Faulkner’s entire
novel was forcibly relocated to the Soviet Union. Through the simulacrum of
Dostoevskii and Faulkner, Balabanov explored the realities of a Godless, morally
corrupt Soviet society in which anything and everything was permitted, challenging the
official nostalgia for this recent past.
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In the novel The Brothers Karamazov (Brat′ia Karamazovy, 1880), Ivan Karamazov
presents a provocative idea: if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality,
then nothing would be immoral; everything would be permitted. This concept is further
developed within the novel and has been extrapolated to mean that if there is no God,
then everything is lawful. The three Karamazov brothers must struggle with this philo-
sophical question following the murder of their wicked father and the search for the
guilty party. For Dostoevskii, as a writer and a thinker, this one tormenting question
regarding the existence of God was developed throughout his five major novels and his
most memorable characters often demonstrated how the belief in or rejection of God
has profound moral and ethical consequences. As an example, in these novels,
punishment is often meted out to the morally or ethically guilty, but not always to the
individual who committed the actual crime. Dostoevskii’s exploration of a perceived
non-existence of God has a distinctly timeless quality and many artists have interacted
with and reformulated these ideas.
In 1931 the American writer William Faulkner published the controversial novel
Sanctuary. Set in rural Mississippi, it tells the story of the rape and abduction of the
young college student Temple Drake. Two years later, the book was adapted into a film
starring Miriam Hopkins. The Story of Temple Drake was released a year before the
morality code was established for Hollywood films. Daring and disturbing for 1933, the
film was pulled from cinema screens the following year instead of submitting to signifi-
cant edits. At the end of Faulkner’s novel, Temple commits perjury, condemning an
innocent man to death. In the 1933 film version, Temple kills the man who had raped
her. In both versions, questions of moral degeneration and personal responsibility are
raised.
In 2005 President Vladimir Putin declared that the collapse of the Soviet Union had
been the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Although these com-
ments may have been partially directed at Western critics who had noted Putin’s shift
towards an authoritarian government, they also reflected an officially sanctioned nostal-
gia for the Soviet era, practically an official invitation to re-remember the best qualities
of the Soviet Union; a wistfulness that would continue to grow over time. Just as sig-
nificant, Putin’s comments were made two days before a verdict was expected for the
Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodarkovskii, who had just endured a show trial in which he
had been accused of (and would be convicted of) fraud as head of Yukos, one of the
largest Russian oil companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the
 96 Frederick H. White

presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Only two years previously, Khodarkovskii and fellow oli-
garch Roman Abramovich had been hailed in Russia for their business acumen.1 At
odds were Putin, with his return to authoritarianism via a rehabilitation of the Soviet
past, and a business elite who had emerged from the lawless 1990s, wealthy but vul-
nerable to legal prosecution. This lawless period had been devoid of strong central
leadership and moral fortitude, but now Putin was offering social and economic stability
in the place of personal freedom. In Putin’s speech, economic stability was intertwined
with a sense of Soviet morality that had been lacking in the intervening years between
the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of Putin’s law-and-order society
(Putin 2005).
In 2007 Balabanov and producer Sergei Sel′ianov provided Russian audiences with
a retro-chernukha adaptation of Faulkner’s novel about human exploitation and moral
impotence, meant to provide profound intertexts between a degenerate Soviet Union and
a morally bankrupt American South. Not unexpectedly, this postmodern film synthesized
a past through intertextuality, bricolage, multiplicity and simulation in order to represent
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a recent present (Degli-Esposti 1998, 4–5), a post-Soviet society of powerful oligarchs

and unbending political leaders. These two extremes reflected Russia’s latest conundrum
– vacillating between the results of ultimate freedom (lawless 1990s) and the promise
of future stability (law-and-order society). The cinematic response to this conundrum
brought Temple Drake to the Soviet Union in order to test Ivan Karamazov’s theory that
if there is no moral code, then everything is permitted. Through Balabanov’s bricolage
of cultural citations, audiences were invited to reassess Putin’s new national unity that
relied heavily on sanitized memories of a Soviet past, a Soviet Union that had
demanded that citizens renounce personal freedom in order to enjoy collective economic
and social stability.

The legacy of The Brothers Karamazov

Fedor Karamazov is completely debauched and it is rumoured that one of his three sons
will eventually kill him. Dmitrii is in the military, Ivan is a student in Moscow and
Alesha is a seminarian at a local monastery. The sons gather at the beginning of the
novel to decide issues concerning their inheritance, but little is resolved as Fedor’s scan-
dalous behaviour eliminates any opportunity for agreement on the main issues. Through
the course of the novel, all indications are that Dmitrii will kill his father for a myriad
of reasons, not the least of which is their mutual attraction to Grushenka. When Fedor
is found dead, all circumstantial evidence points to Dmitrii, who is convicted at the end
of the novel by a court and sentenced to 20 years of hard labour in Siberia. In fact, it is
Fedor’s illegitimate son Smerdiakov, upon the impetus of Ivan, who is the murderer.
Ivan’s philosophical position that everything is permitted is taken by Smerdiakov as a
licence to kill. Even though Smerdiakov commits the actual murder, Dostoevskii implies
a collective guilt for the killing of Fedor. Even the townspeople are guilty for their
hypocritical enjoyment of the sin and violence of the Karamazovs, which no one has
attempted to address.
Ivan Karamazov posits that there is gratuitous cruelty in the manmade God and reli-
gion of Christianity. He supports this assertion with stories of the brutality perpetuated
on defenceless children. For Ivan, the suffering of an innocent child is an indictment
against the existence of an all-powerful benevolent God. Consequently, Ivan rejects
God’s rule on earth. To further demonstrate his ideas, Ivan tells Alesha of a prose poem
that he has written called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. In this poem, Christ returns to Earth
 Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 97

during the Spanish Inquisition, the day after 100 heretics have been burned for the
greater glory of God. Christ is arrested and that night the Grand Inquisitor interrogates
Him. The Grand Inquisitor argues that the Church now provides for the people and has
even corrected the precept that truth shall set you free as people do not want to be free.
The Church has vanquished freedom in order to make people happy, providing them
with bread, mystery and someone to worship. The Grand Inquisitor intends to burn
Christ as a heretic the next day, but when Christ kisses the Grand Inquisitor, He is
released and told never to return. For Ivan, man is too weak to bear the struggle for
spiritual self-perfection or to be given the free choice between good and evil.
At issue for many of Dostoevskii’s characters is this weighty responsibility of
human freedom. V.V. Zenkovsky argues that the author was not tormented by the ques-
tion of God, but rather by the choices available to mankind – ‘man’s power of destruc-
tion and limitless egoism, the fearful amoralism which is hidden in the depths of his
soul’ (1962, 133). Freedom is mankind’s greatest possession and his heaviest burden.
When characters like Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakaza-
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nie, 1866), Stavrogin from The Possessed (Besy, 1872) and Ivan Karamazov confront
traditional morality with reason, they reject the possibility of goodness in a quest for
ultimate freedom. Yet Dostoevskii asserts that only through suffering is mankind liber-
ated from the temptations of evil, and able to turn to God. Zenkovsky (1962) claims
that Ivan Karamazov’s own revolt against God occurs exactly because he refuses to
accept a world based on suffering. In turn, Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor argues that man is
weaker and lower than Christ had estimated and that the Church must enslave mankind
in order to save them from themselves. Save themselves from what, one might ask? For
those who are possessed by freedom, but reject God completely, the world is a chaotic
absurdity in which inhumanity wreaks havoc on society.2
According to the Grand Inquisitor, there will be an interregnum when mankind will
again construct the Tower of Babel on the basis of reason and science. Under the guise
of free thought, mankind will engage in a Darwinian struggle for life. Only then will
the Grand Inquisitor and his henchmen seize the opportunity to persuade mankind to
renounce freedom in order to become truly free. Arguably, it is via the bricolage of
Dostoevskii’s criticism of the Roman Catholic Church, refracted through the lens of vul-
gar Nietzscheanism,3 that Balabanov has re-imagined Ivan Karamazov’s tale as a con-
demnation of the Soviet state. After all, it was Vladimir Lenin and his fellow
Bolsheviks who exposed the opiate of the masses and asked Russian peasants and
workers to surrender their personal freedom for the untroubled security of a collective
society.
As Edith Clowes and Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal have shown, the Russian tradition
of moral rebellion, in particular the ideas found in the works of Dostoevskii, influenced
Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception in Russia. A vulgarized version of Nietzschean philoso-
phy reputedly signalled the moral decline of Russian society at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Lev Tolstoi, among others, saw in Nietzsche’s philosophy everything
that the Russian intelligentsia traditionally interpreted as evil: egotism, aestheticism and
sensuality, all of which seemed to condone bestial behaviour. It was believed that the
popularity of Nietzsche’s thought signalled the imminent collapse of morality and that
Russian society, deprived of a moral code, would sink into hedonistic chaos (Clowes
1988, 66–81). The Grand Inquisitor’s warnings about the rebuilding of the Tower of
Babel might be found in this valorization of vulgar Nietzschean ideals.
Although Nietzsche had been a sharp critic of society, he did not offer many
answers for once the old, decayed power structures had been destroyed. While the
 98 Frederick H. White

Soviets had promised peace, land and bread as part of a communist paradise, it was far
from realizable at the time of Joseph Stalin’s first five-year plan. Yet socialist realism
was mandated to depict an objective reality in its revolutionary development as a mobi-
lizing myth to energize Soviet citizens for the tasks ahead. Rosenthal suggests that the
establishment of socialist realism was an exercise in Nietzschean myth creation with a
shift from Dionysian chaos to Apollonian order. Socialist realism was to institute the
myth of a prosperous land of socialism with a distinctive language and a mythologized
new Soviet man (Rosenthal 2002, 293–300).
The artificial socialist paradise with its uncomplicated heroes living and working in
a society with political purpose was depicted in Soviet literature, films, plays and the
visual arts after 1932.4 In such a society, we find the Grand Inquisitor’s ideal citizens,
those who have renounced freedom in favour of miracle, mystery and authority. Every
detail of their existence, including their most intimate sexual and family matters, were
under the Soviet state’s control – just as the Grand Inquisitor had suggested.5 The prob-
lem is that this façade could only be maintained if an iron-willed individual like the
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Grand Inquisitor or Joseph Stalin was able to enforce the limits on personal freedom.
Weaker Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev would fail to main-
tain political and social order. The more freedom that is offered to mankind, according
to Dostoevskii, the more likely it is that the individual will turn away from God (or the
state) in order to engage in criminal and hedonistic behaviours. Once a citizenry lacks a
moral (Christian or socialist) code, everything is lawful.
In Putin’s reanimation of the recent past, he seemed to favour the strong leadership
of Stalin (while avoiding associations with the cult-of-personality), but within the con-
text of the perceived abundance of the Soviet 1970s, thus confusing the details of the
Soviet legacy, selectively choosing the ‘best’ elements of the Stalin and Brezhnev eras
(while clearly avoiding Khrushchev’s liberal Thaw). Predictably, Kremlin-sponsored
youth camps at Lake Seliger were organized in 2005 to contour the ideology of Russian
national unity, in imitation of Soviet-style youth organizations that once supported
communist doctrine. That same year, pro-Kremlin Gazprom-Media took over the
influential newspaper Izvestiia, which soon after strongly supported the government line.
The following year, two harsh critics of the president died in mysterious ways: the jour-
nalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaia was killed in an elevator outside of
her apartment in Moscow; former Russian secret service agent and journalist Alexander
Litvinenko was poisoned in London with radioactive polonium-210. Also in 2006, the
newspaper Kommersant was bought by steel magnate Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch
with close ties to the Russian government. By 2008, 90% of Russian media was directly
or indirectly controlled by the Kremlin (Lynch 2011, 78). Putin’s law-and-order govern-
ment was offering stability and security after the lawlessness of the previous decade,
but at what cost to individual freedom?

William Faulkner’s Sanctuary in the Soviet Union

At the same time that socialist realism was being developed as an official artistic policy,
Faulkner was publishing his potboiler Sanctuary. In it, the lawyer Horace Benbow has
left his wife and is returning to his hometown in rural Mississippi in order to move into
his parents’ abandoned house. Along the way, he comes across the ‘Old Frenchman’
homestead, where the bootlegger Lee Goodwin employs several degenerates including
the menacing Popeye and the simpleton Tommy. After a brief visit, Benbow gets a ride
into town to his widowed sister’s home.
 Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 99

Faulkner then turns his attention to Temple Drake, a flirtatious university student
who comes from a wealthy Mississippi family. Temple and Gowan Stevens have just
gone on their first date. Gowan learns of Goodwin’s moonshine and spends the rest of
the night drinking with some local men. For their second date, Gowan is supposed to
take Temple to Starkville to watch the football game, but returns for more moonshine,
stranding Temple at Goodwin’s farm. Ruby, Goodwin’s wife, warns Temple that she
had better leave before nightfall as the men in the house are dangerous. Although the
drunken men harass Temple, Ruby and Tommy protect her until most of them leave on
a whiskey run.
Abandoned the next morning by Gowan, Tommy hides Temple in a corn crib in the barn.
Nonetheless, Popeye finds them, kills Tommy and rapes Temple with a corncob. Popeye
then takes Temple to a Memphis brothel where he makes her his sex slave. Although Popeye
is impotent, he enjoys watching Temple have sex with Red, a young tough in the Memphis
criminal world. One night, Popeye takes Temple to a local bar, where she pleads with Red to
save her from her captor. Later that evening, Popeye kills Red.
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Meanwhile, Goodwin is arrested for the murder of Tommy. Benbow takes Good-
win’s case and tries to get to the bottom of what happened at the farm. Goodwin knows
that it was Popeye, but is afraid of what might happen if he were to say anything. Ben-
bow eventually learns that Temple is in Memphis, where he visits her in the brothel.
Temple tells of her rape by Popeye and how she has become a prostitute. Soon after,
Goodwin’s trial begins. On the second day, Temple unexpectedly appears and testifies
that it was Goodwin, not Popeye, who raped her. Goodwin is found guilty and is
lynched that evening by the enraged residents of Jefferson. Ironically, Popeye is arrested
and hanged for a crime he never committed (accused and found guilty in Florida, on his
way through to visit his mother), while Temple is taken to Paris by her father in order
to start a new life. Benbow, defeated, returns home to his wife.
Balabanov once claimed that young Russians no longer read books (‘they have no
time for literature’); they just play video games and watch blockbuster films (Norris
2012, 198).6 As a possible response, Balabanov provided a cinematic introduction to
Faulkner’s novel and Dostoevskii’s philosophy within the historical pastiche of the late
Stagnation period at a moment when Russians were being invited by their president to
romanticize this very same recent past. Over time, film critics have revealed the connec-
tion between Balabanov’s film and Faulkner’s novel – even though Balabanov claimed
that the film was based on a true story, as well as his own life experiences (Fanailova
2008).7 In fact, Sel′ianov, the film’s producer, has admitted that the CTB film studio
was unable to get the rights to Faulkner’s novel, so instead Balabanov created this cine-
matic simulacrum (Kuvshinova 2013, 39). As a result, David Auerbach (2012) has
called Cargo 200 ‘an American story’ (see also Schenker 2009). Yet one might ask,
why would Balabanov select an American novel set in rural Mississippi in order to
depict the devolution of Soviet society? Carson McCullers has argued that there was a
natural affinity between Russian realist writers, in particular Dostoevskii, and American
Southern writers, including Faulkner. For both groups, one of the dominant characteris-
tics is ‘the cheapness of human life’ (McCullers 1971, 252). Maria Bloshteyn (2004, 5–
6) argues that it is the novels of Dostoevskii that had the greatest impact on these
Southern writers, as both deal with the social disruptions found following the liberation
of the serfs in Russia and the emancipation of black slaves in the American South. The
notion of a Southern Grotesque literature is also recognized by scholars as having direct
connections to Dostoevskii’s literary influence – in particular ‘a theological vision of
society, history and the human being’ (Bloshteyn 2004, 9).
 100 Frederick H. White

Edward Wasiolek found a specific thematic connection between The Brothers

Karamazov and Sanctuary: ‘[i]n both a child abandoned by society to horrible condi-
tions is claimed by the church and the civilizing forces of humanity not for sympathy
but for judgment, not for brotherhood but for the sole purpose of impressing him with
his unworthiness to be a part of it’ (1959, 116; see also Weisgerber 1968). In Requiem
for a Nun (1952), Faulkner’s continuation of Sanctuary, Temple is married to Gowan
Stevens and comes to the governor to plead for the life of the woman who has killed
her baby. In a bit of twisted logic, the young Nancy has killed the baby in order to pre-
vent Temple’s elopement with her lover, thus saving the baby from a broken home.
Within this novel, most scholars believe that Faulkner makes direct reference to Dosto-
evskii and, more specifically, to The Brothers Karamazov. ‘One of the central issues of
Requiem is that of whether human suffering can possibly have any higher meaning’,
argues Bloshteyn. Ultimately, the question of the novel rests on whether there is a God,
as salvation can only occur in the afterlife. Temple eventually concludes that there
probably is no God and that everyone is damned (Bloshteyn 2004, 17).
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During one interview, Balabanov was asked why so many of his films come directly
from literary sources. The filmmaker answered: ‘I read a lot, when I was a student. I read
a lot of everything. Everyone read. Without interruption. We read [entire] volumes. The
Collected Works’. In this same interview, he even admitted to having read Faulkner’s
Sanctuary in English, while at the university in Gor′kii (Kuvshinova 2014). This fact
was confirmed by Balabanov’s former professor, Gennadii Riabov, who said that Bala-
banov would have had an individual exam on Faulkner for his American Literature
course.8 Consequently, it is not surprising that Balabanov would turn to both writers in
order to depict Soviet society in crisis. In fact, Faulkner had been afforded a biography
in the respected series Zhizn′ zamechatel′nykh liudei (Life of Remarkable People) in
1976, drawing further attention to his literary works among the Soviet reading public. A
six-volume compilation of Faulkner’s collected works soon followed and Soviet literary
scholars at this time were particularly interested in comparative analyses of Faulkner and
Dostoevskii; Faulkner and Mikhail Sholokhov; and Faulkner and Albert Camus. Madina
Tlostanova argues that in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Faulkner was considered the
‘absolute value’ when discussing Southern literature. As the theory of ‘regionalism’
gained currency, areas south of Moscow began reading Faulkner as the main representa-
tive of a universal Southern (not connected to a specific country) culture and problemat-
ics (Tlostanova 2000, 45). In this context, Balabanov would have had ample
reinforcement of the Faulkner/Dostoevskii connection as well as a view that Faulkner
represented universal values that could readily be applied to American or Soviet cultures.

Postmodernism in Russia: challenging (hyper-)realities

Mikhail Epstein argues that Russian and Western postmodernism share a similar search
for the way out of a revolutionary past that attempted to affirm an essential reality. The
modernist urge to establish an absoluteness of being resulted in the formation of
pseudo-realities. The libido and the unconscious, the power of the workers and peasants,
historical materialism and other such theories of authentic being in the works of Karl
Marx, Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce and others are found
and repeated in the slogans of the futurists and the Bolsheviks (to name only two such
groups), which all contributed to the (re)construction of an essential (hyper-)reality.9
Postmodernism is in reaction to this modernist project to establish a ‘true, essential real-
ity’ in its attempts to expose these theories as pseudo-realities.
 Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 101

Among the various revolutions (sexual, social, scientific, philosophical, etc.), Epstein
identifies two modernist (hyper-)realities that are particularly relevant for Balabanov’s
postmodern critique. One is communism itself and the idea of communality and collec-
tivism as the highest moral principle. ‘In truth, the social bonds that unite people were
rapidly being destroyed’ (Epstein, Genis, and Vladiv-Glover 1999, 20). By the mid-
1930s, people, even within families, could no longer trust one another in the Soviet
Union as ‘party loyalty’ forced individuals to denounce and betray people close to them.
In fact, the entire communist state relied on the will of a single individual (not the col-
lective), undermining the illusion of independence and personal freedom. The second
(hyper)-reality is Lenin’s notion of ‘scientific materialism’ that negates the possibility of
the spiritual or the ideal. In fact, ‘Soviet materialism never tried to conform to the laws
of material reality but strove instead to refashion this reality’ (Epstein, Genis, and Vla-
div-Glover 1999, 23). This led to the merciless exploitation of material life and to eco-
nomic subordination, enacted in the idealistic five-year plans and ideological edicts of
the party congresses.
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Epstein argues that these (hyper-)realities are paradoxical because the revolution
gradually reveals an even greater subordination to the thing that it was supposed to van-
quish. ‘Materialism thus turns out to be much more detrimental to material reality and
much more scholastic and abstract than any idealistic philosophy previous to it.
Communism turns out to be more favorable to the absolute affirmation of a singular,
omnipresent individuality than any kind of individualism preceding it’ (Epstein, Genis,
and Vladiv-Glover 1999, 24). Postmodernism posits that these are, in turn, actually
(pseudo)realities, which create ‘a crisis of utopian consciousness as such, followed by
the construction of parodic pseudo-utopian discourses’ (27).
If the postmodern impetus is to challenge modernism’s universal claims, its means
for doing so is a return to the historical and cultural texts that paradoxically enact both
change and continuity. In this process, the past is a referent that is incorporated and
modified to provide new and different meanings for the present. According to Linda
Hutcheon, postmodernism is self-conscious of its own parodic qualities and is fore-
grounded in the historical, social and ideological contexts that allow for a dialogue
between past and present (Hutcheon 1998, 24–25). Consequently, Balabanov’s return to
the discussions of Dostoevskii and Faulkner concerning a society without moral
restraints in order to undermine the notion of a communist paradise provides opportuni-
ties to both reflect on the philosophical question and the manufactured societal (hyper-)
reality, especially in light of Putin’s desire to champion those same Soviet myths.
In fact, wanting to contest the universal claims of Christianity, science and commu-
nism, among others, postmodernists have turned to the realist novel in order to decon-
struct the strategies used by their authors to depict the unpleasant truths of life
(Hutcheon 1998, 178–191). Postmodernism challenges the artifice that the realist novel
has presented itself as an unadulterated reality (lacking in idealization or myth). Yet the
idea that realism contains its own illusory belief systems that support the power rela-
tions of society became evident for many in the Soviet Union with the declaration of
socialist realism as state policy in 1932. This version of realism was political in nature
and intentionally propagandistic. As a result, Russian postmodernists are acutely aware
that truth and meaning are historically constructed. Consequently, Balabanov returns to
the literary works of Faulkner and Dostoevskii, both of whom struggled with many of
these same universal truths. In particular, Balabanov excavates Ivan Karamazov and his
tale of the Grand Inquisitor as a parodic allusion to the Soviet power structure that
vanquished individual freedom in order to emancipate the workers and the peasants,
 102 Frederick H. White

providing them with miracle (revolution), mystery (historical materialism) and authority
(Lenin and Stalin). He also appears to be undermining attempts to romanticize that
period for further political gain by Putin and his supporters. If Ivan’s tale offers an
explanation for the immorality of the Karamazov family and their society, then
Balabanov reassembles this philosophical and political discourse to reach their natural
outcomes in order to depict the last days of Soviet society and to undermine many of
its foundational (hyper-)realities of communist doctrine. After all, Balabanov suggested
that Cargo 200 depicted ‘the disintegration of a person alongside the disintegration of a
country’ (Nieman 2010).

Cargo 200 as touchstone for Balabanov’s other films

Although Balabanov did not immediately acknowledge that Cargo 200 is an adaptation
of Faulkner’s Sanctuary, most blog posts and film reviews now make this connection
without any hesitation.10 After all, the organization of the film follows exactly the plot
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of Faulkner’s novel. The black worker, Tommy, is replaced by the Asian helper, Sun′ka;
the daughter of an affluent American judge, Temple, is replaced by Angelika, the
daughter of a high-ranking Communist Party official; Popeye, with his connections to
the Memphis criminal world, becomes Captain Zhurov, a corrupt Soviet militiaman who
uses his position to cover for his nefarious criminality; the debauched student Gowan is
the nihilistic student Valera; Benbow is transformed into Professor Kazakov; the
bootlegger Goodwin is now the bootlegger and ex-con Aleksei; Goodwin’s common-
law wife Ruby is Aleksei’s hardened wife Tonia.
In Balabanov’s film Captain Zhurov kills Sun′ka and then rapes Angelika – the only
difference being that the object used for the rape is a vodka bottle rather than a corn cob.
The other minor difference is that Captain Zhurov dumps the dead body of Angelika’s
fiancé, who died during the Afghan war, onto the bed as one of the final acts of her
degradation, while Red’s corpse is simply dislodged from the coffin during a drunken
fight at his wake, something that Temple does not have to witness directly. Yet it is the

Figure 1. Still from Cargo 200. Captain Zhurov (Aleksei Poluian).

 Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 103

awareness of the philosophical underpinnings of Faulkner’s novel and a clear reprisal of

Ivan Karamazov’s argumentation that allows for the successful transportation of Temple
Drake to the Soviet Union (ca. 1984).
On his way to the town of Leninsk, the Professor of Scientific Atheism, Artem
Kazakov, experiences car trouble and is forced to seek help from the bootlegger Alek-
sei. While seated at Aleksei’s table, in a rough-hewn wooden dacha, the two unlikely
conversants discuss the existence of God. According to Professor Kazakov, Marxist-
Leninist philosophy denies God’s existence and the idea that the world is incompre-
hensible. Aleksei presses the professor with a very simple question: is there or isn’t
there a God? Professor Kazakov definitively denies the existence of God. Aleksei then
wants to know what exists; in particular, is there a soul? The professor also denies the
existence of the soul. Most would recognize in this initial exchange of ideas an implicit
reference to Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov and the notion that if there is no
God, then all things are permitted.
After leaving the Vietnamese worker, Sun′ka, to repair the car, Professor Kazakov
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returns to the house to continue his conversation with Aleksei, stating that he is a
communist and a member of the Party. Aleksei asserts that only evil came from the
communists, who wanted to replace God with the Party and Lenin. Here, Balabanov
extends the semantic reference as described above – Lenin, Stalin and the Communist
Party assume the place of the Grand Inquisitor and the Spanish Inquisition. Professor
Kazakov is stunned by such a statement and unable to respond. Aleksei then states:
‘There is no God, so everything is permitted – remember?’ Balabanov, as a result,
explicitly links Cargo 200 to Ivan Karamazov’s moral and philosophical dilemma within
the framework of Faulkner’s novel of moral degradation. Consequently, the film follows
in very dramatic fashion what might occur in a society with no moral restraints. We
might also remember Epstein’s position that the (hyper-)realities of materialism and
communism reveal their own illusionary nature when examined within a postmodernist
context – presenting a hyperbole of what is negated.

Figure 2. Still from Cargo 200. Angelika (Agniia Kuznetsova).

 104 Frederick H. White

While drinking vodka with the professor, Aleksei tells a tale of how he once killed
a man by accident. He confessed to the crime and was sentenced to 10 years of hard
labour. Aleksei tells Professor Kazakov that he could have got away with the crime, but
that his conscience would not let him; that God would not allow it, even though people
like the professor wished to abolish God and replace Him with science. Kazakov
responds that moral standards are governed by economic concerns and were formed in
primitive societies long before Christianity. As he argues this point, Police Captain
Zhurov, lurking outside, looks in through the window. Captain Zhurov will kidnap the
young Angelika and put this philosophical conversation between Aleksei and Kazakov
into a horrific context. In Dostoevskii’s novel, Ivan Karamazov struggled with both his
reason and his faith, while Smerdiakov acted as the actual instrument of the immoral
code that was the result of a Godless society. Similarly, Balabanov’s Aleksei struggles
with his faith, while Captain Zhurov demonstrates the actualities of a lawless society.
Valera, who has met Angelika at a local dance, arrives at Aleksei’s to buy vodka,
although he is already quite drunk. Continuing his drinking with Aleksei and Sun′ka,
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Valera forgets that he has someone waiting in his car. Angelika enters the house just as
Valera passes out. She is sent out to the banya to hide, but is eventually discovered by
Captain Zhurov. The captain kills Sun′ka and then rapes Angelika with a vodka bottle.
The next morning, Zhurov takes Angelika to Leninsk while the police descend on Alek-
sei’s house, suspecting that he has killed Sun′ka. Captain Zhurov lives with his demen-
ted alcoholic mother and chains Angelika to his bed. Through a bureaucratic mishap,
Captain Zhurov is also able to collect the corpse of Angelika’s fiancé and dumps the
body of the dead soldier in the bed with Angelika, dashing any hope that she might be
rescued. As if things could not get worse, Captain Zhurov also forces a local deadbeat
to rape Angelika and then shoots him, leaving the criminal’s corpse to rot in the room.11
All the time that Angelika is being held captive, Captain Zhurov’s mother watches
Soviet television and supports her son’s grotesque activities (replacing Faulkner’s Miss
Reeba – the madam of the bordello and close friend of Popeye). Like Temple, who
deals with her tragic situation by drinking gin and tonics, Angelika consumes bottles of
vodka to mediate the horror of her present condition.
In the meantime, Aleksei has been charged with Sun′ka’s murder. Captain Zhurov
visits Aleksei in prison and reminds him that ‘you owe me’. Aleksei agrees to take the
blame for the murder and simply asks that Captain Zhurov not touch his wife, Tonia.
Like Dmitrii Karamazov, Aleksei accepts the guilt for a crime that he did not commit,
but for which he feels a general sense of culpability. Later, Kazakov, deeply affected by
his conversation with Aleksei, visits Tonia and learns that Sun′ka has died and that
Aleksei will now be charged with the murder. Kazakov is adamant that Aleksei should
fight the charges, but when Tonia asks if he will testify, the respected Professor of Athe-
ism and member of the Communist Party explains that he cannot appear in Aleksei’s
defence. Aleksei is convicted for the murder by a Soviet court and sentenced to execu-
tion, which follows shortly after with a single bullet to the back of the head. In
response, Tonia unearths a shotgun, goes to Captain Zhurov’s communal apartment and
kills the militiaman. Simultaneously, Kazakov goes to a small parish church and
enquires about the christening service. It is explained to him that it is a sacrament and
not a service; the old woman tells him to pray and wait for Father Vasilii’s imminent
arrival.
The American scholar Cleanth Brooks has written on Faulkner’s understanding of
good and evil. It is doubtful that Balabanov read Brooks, but many of the assertions
about Sanctuary can be directly applied to Cargo 200. For example, Brooks (1962) calls
 Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 105

Benbow (or Kazakov) a sentimental academic with great confidence in the efficacy of
reason who discovers ‘the horrifying presence of evil, its insidiousness, and its penetra-
tion of every kind of rational or civilized order’ (695). Beyond even the horror of the
actual crimes committed, Benbow (Kazakov) is further distraught by the fact that the
‘forces of law and order are also corruptible’ (695). Similarly, Brooks argues that
Popeye (or Zhurov) represents the ‘inhumanly mechanistic forces of our society’ – a
true monster (698). Where Faulkner and Balabanov differ is that Faulkner’s concept of
good and evil, according to Brooks, comes from Faulkner’s Calvinistic Protestantism,
which ‘represents a violent repression and constriction of the natural impulse, a denial
of nature itself’ (704). Balabanov, in turn, replaces this American Protestantism with the
religious philosophy of Dostoevskii and elements of a Russian Nietzscheanism that
exploit the chaos of freewill in a Godless society.
More significantly, Cargo 200 might act as a touchstone for Balabanov’s recurring
representation of Russia as a Godless nation devoid of moral restraint. Of Freaks and
Men (Pro urodov i liudei, 1998) and Morphine (Morfii, 2008) both depict a Russian fin
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de siècle full of deviants and degenerates, intimating that the post-Soviet dystopia is
only a more recent emanation of a persistent national pathology. These postmodern pas-
tiches of moral degeneracy level criticism directly at Russia, representing a social and
moral decline that has led to the ubiquitous devolution of post-Soviet society. The ques-
tion then arises as to whether Russia needs a new authoritarian presence in order to
tame the Russian soul. In fact, Otto Boele (2009) has suggested that we might even
view Morphine and Cargo 200 as a cinematic diptych of the very beginning and very
end of the communist experiment: ‘Together they tell the story of “the Russia that we
lost”’.
As a result, Temple Drake’s appearance in the Soviet Union is not a singular event,
but Balabanov’s articulation of Ivan Karamazov’s philosophical legacy. Temple’s rape
and kidnapping occur during the political confusion of the late Stagnation period, lead-
ing to further societal degradation during the bandit culture of Danila Bagrov and his
ilk depicted in Brother (Brat, 1997) and Brother 2 (Brat 2, 2000). In these films, Bala-
banov is less pessimistic, but certainly in his black comedy Dead Man’s Bluff (Zhmurki,
2005) and in Stoker (Kochegar, 2010), a film about military comrades turned mobsters,
he reasserts the notion of a society in moral freefall, devoid of an organizing principle
beyond the accumulation of power and money for personal gain. The 1990s were the
perfect laboratory for the articulation of the Dostoevskean-Nietzschean moral philoso-
phy, which Balabanov exploited in order to depict the various excesses of human
degradation. Balabanov once told the journalist Leonid Parfenov that he had come up
with the idea for Cargo 200 at the end of the 1990s. ‘Simultaneously with the corrup-
tion of an individual, is the collapse of a society, the disintegration of a country. Taken
all together, it provides such a frightening aggregate effect’ (Parfenov 2007). With the
rise of Putin and his attempts to legitimize his authoritarian government with references
to the Soviet past, Balabanov conflates Dostoevskii’s Grand Inquisitor with the commu-
nist state’s deification of Lenin and Stalin. Finally, Balabanov brought these same devi-
ants together in his last film in order to provide a possible conclusion to his
predominant theme. For Dostoevskii, criminals stood at the farthest limits of freedom
and at the threshold of either repentance, with a return to God, or self-destruction and
eternal damnation. In Balabanov’s Me Too (Ia tozhe khochu, 2012) a similar polarity is
created for morally corrupt individuals seeking a mystical place for salvation. Like
Dostoevskii, Balabanov offers the same choice – repentance or damnation – but this
time the choice is not made by the individual, but by a divine and mystical force.
 106 Frederick H. White

At the end of Cargo 200, Valera (the nihilistic student who left Angelika in peril)
befriends Professor Kazakov’s son at a disco and begins telling him about some busi-
ness opportunities that could make both of them rich. This final scene resonates with
Russian viewers because most of them realize that it is out of this period of chaos and
human degradation that someone like Valera will emerge to participate in the banditry
of the post-Soviet period. In 1984, Valera is roughly the same age as some of the future
oligarchs who would ultimately conspire with the Kremlin to run Russia. Balabanov
makes a similar cinematic assertion in Dead Man’s Bluff – the petty criminals of the
1990s become the political leaders of the 2000s. According to Agniia Kuznetsova, the
actress who played Angelika in Cargo 200, this was Balabanov’s intent – to show the
moral depravity of the men who would ultimately lead post-Soviet Russia (Savodnik
2009, 23–24). Yet in making this point, what are we to take away from Cargo 200 in
its entirety?
Although postmodern cinema does not provide ultimate answers, Cargo 200 invited
a reassessment of contemporary Russia. In the interview already mentioned, Parfenov
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suggested that the film probably would not be shown on Russian television because it
depicted unsavoury elements of the Soviet Union and, by association, its ‘legal succes-
sor’ – the new Russia of Putin. Balabanov responded that the Soviet Union was not
great and mighty, but a ‘hopeless horror and abomination’. It was not clear if he
believed that the legal successor was equally horrible. More intriguing, Sel′ianov took
issue with the current trend to re-imagine the Stalinist and Stagnation eras as examples
of ‘an ideal socialism’ in contrast to ‘today’s real Russian capitalism’. In this, we sense
the struggle between Putin’s national unity and the oligarchs’ free enterprise. Signifi-
cantly, Sel′ianov claimed that it was a ‘civic duty’ to fight this growing nostalgia for the
Soviet period (Parfenov 2007). Although Sel′ianov and Balabanov certainly struggled
financially and personally during the 1990s, they also thrived professionally, building a
successful film production company, while depicting Russian banditry in many of their
most popular films. From this perspective, for the co-founders of CTB, artistic (ultimate)
freedom might trump economic stability with a loss of self-determination. With this

Figure 3. Still from Cargo 200. Professor Kazakov (Leonid Gromov).

 Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 107

backward glance, Balabanov and Sel′ianov were inviting audiences to reassess the rise
to power of a new heir to the Grand Inquisitor (Putin), who was asking society to
renounce freedom (the anarchy that produced the Russian oligarchs) in a return to Rus-
sian national unity (a post-Soviet socialist realism).
The final epigraph at the beginning of this article suggests that an audience, as well
as film critics, can find what they want to find in Balabanov’s films. The intertexts exist
for those who care to search for them. Balabanov made films and told stories, but he
did not intend to explain what they mean. This might have been fraught with danger.
Therefore, we should not look for too many final answers within Balabanov’s Cargo
200. This job is left to the film scholar and social critics. Balabanov assembled a post-
modern visual text, drawing on the philosophical ideas of Dostoevskii and Nietzsche,
reinterpreted within the context of the miracle, mystery and authority of socialist rea-
lism. Faulkner’s Sanctuary is displaced to the Soviet Union, where the degradation of
the American South is offered as ‘the poisonous wreck of an industrial civilization tot-
tering on the verge of collapse from the sum of its political, social, and individual vices’
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(Anemone 2007) – or the late Stagnation period. Ivan Karamazov’s philosophical pre-
mise and its complex cultural legacy provided a unifying thematic for Balabanov’s
films, a plausible ur-text, when trying to excavate the filmmaker’s multiple depictions of
the national pathology. Finally, for those who care to interpret this postmodern text,
Cargo 200 was a warning against the return of a Grand Inquisitor who might ask Rus-
sian citizens to renounce freedom in order to provide them with law and order – a post-
Soviet socialist realism – yet another indication of the enduring Russian pathology.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. For example, Valerii Butaev’s article in Komsomol′skaia Pravda (2003) extols the acquisition
of Abramovich’s oil company Sibneft by Khodarkovskii’s company Yukos for three billion
dollars.
2. Kirilov from The Possessed represents this self-destructive path of reasoning.
3. This is a distinction, ‘vulgar Nietzscheanism’, made by Edith Clowes. I continue to use this
distinction to reference the ways in which the philosophy of Nietzsche was absorbed into
Russian culture, often confused or intermingled with the ideas of Dostoevskii and other Rus-
sian philosophical and political thinkers who were popular at the beginning of the twentieth
century.
4. Rosenthal argues: ‘The darker the reality, the brighter the picture. […] The more instability
and unpredictability existed in life, the more the arts depicted an ordered and stable world.
The more overcrowding in communal apartments, the more space in the photo, the more
sacrifice demanded of the individual, the more talk of individuality; the greater the terror, the
more people had to smile (pessimism was equated with disloyalty); the more tragedy in real
life, the more comedy in film; the more fear and distrust pervaded life, the greater the
emphasis on intimacy and love’ (2002, 348).
5. For a discussion of the Grand Inquisitor see Frank (2002, 600–620).
6. Norris conducted an interview with Balabanov on 11 July 2007.
7. Noted first in Viktor Toporov’s introduction to Balabanov (2007, 11).
8. I conducted an interview with Gennadii Petrovich Riabov in Nizhnii Novgorod, Russia on
20 March 2014. Professor Riabov was Head of the Translation Department and Balabanov’s
professor when the filmmaker was a student at the Gor′kii Pedagogical Institute of Foreign
Languages.
 108 Frederick H. White

9. Hans Günter has defined hyper-realism as an unrealistic art form of ignorance or a ‘mythol-
ogy cloaked in realism’ (Giunter 2000, 10).
10. Recently, Sel′ianov has confirmed that from their earliest conversations at cinema school,
Balabanov wanted to adapt Sanctuary for the silver screen and it was from this fascination
with Faulkner’s novel that the script for Cargo 200 was written. I conducted an interview
with Sel′ianov in Moscow on 21 May 2014.
11. It is unclear why Balabanov added these horrific details, but it is likely part of his homage
to the chernukha films of the period in question.

Notes on contributor
Frederick H. White is Associate Vice President – Engaged Learning and Professor in the Depart-
ment of Languages and Cultures at Utah Valley University. He is the author of two monographs
on the Russian writer Leonid Andreev. He has also co-published a book on the economics of cul-
ture with Yuri Leving and co-edited a student reader dedicated to the Russian avant-garde and
radical modernism with Dennis Ioffe. Presently, White is working on a book of interviews, mem-
oirs and scholarly essays on the recently deceased filmmaker Aleksei Balabanov.
Downloaded by [Frederick White] at 13:55 12 May 2015

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