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 andproof 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.
