This book analyses Russian cinema movies that became blockbusters among home-produced motion pictures of the 1990s, and the plots of which refer to the Soviet past. The study seeks to establish the nature and function of the particular past that the post-Soviet films of the 1990s portrayed. This recent past is reproduced today primarily through the stereotype of a ’Soviet man.’ The study is located within the field of modern cultural and anthropological studies. For the first time, the post-Soviet film-industry is scrutinized with methods of cultural anthropology. The analysis reveals heavy borrowings from structural elements of Soviet culture in the movies scripts of the 1990s. The themes of ’trial’ and ’proof’ reflect the evaluation of a person’s destiny primarily through its correspondence with the life of the country or community that were normative for Soviet culture. The book discovers the mechanisms of forming the ’new Soviet man’ represented in the Soviet film-production, and demonstrates the logic and notion of the ’Soviet destiny’ in the thematic variants of post-Soviet motion-pictures. The study also explores theoretical approaches to the analysis of Soviet anthropology such as the development of a specialized language for describing images of collectiveness and of the system of instruments for de-individualization in Soviet culture.

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