Defending Sevastopol: Enemies, Allies, and Analogous Wars in Russian Cinema, 1911–2015

In Aleksei Balabanov’s 2000 film Brother: 2, the sequel to his cult classic gangster movie Brother, the Bagrov brothers, Danila and Viktor, travel to the United States to solve a problem: the Ukrainian mafia has been taking advantage of a friend’s brother. In a defining moment, Viktor shoots one of the Ukrainian thugs in a Chicago bathroom, proclaiming “this one’s for Sevastopol!” With four words and a gunshot, Viktor conveys a decade of angst and enmity toward Russia’s neighbor Ukraine, which did not return Crimea upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but rather kept the ancient port city and Soviet naval home base within its borders. Sevastopol bears deep cultural significance and has featured prominently in several of Russia’s most important cultural productions, namely Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches and Russia’s first feature film and the 1911 Defense of Sevastopol.

Scholars like Gregory Carleton and Stephen Norris have interpreted the significance of Sevastopol within Russian and Ukrainian national identity. Karl Qualls has discussed how the city of Sevastopol impacts relations between Ukraine, Russia, and the West. This paper contributes to this literature by asking how Sergei Mokritskii’s 2015 World War II film Battle for Sevastopol and Vasily Goncharov’s 1911 feature film Defense of Sevastopol reflect tensions of the years in which they were produced and premiered. Harris argues that Mokritskii uses historical analogies between the Second World War and the current Ukrainian crisis to reclaim Sevastopol and to send messages to the West.