Nikita Mikhalkov

Nikita Mikhalkov is a filmmaker whose cinematic authority in the book is inseparable from political power and contested historical memory. His films become both instruments in the public argument over the Soviet past and targets of protest: to Eduard Limonov, Mikhalkov represents a cultural insider protected across political eras, while the authorities’ harsh response to demonstrations around his work gives that influence a coercive edge.

Public Image and Political Position

The narrator portrays Mikhalkov as the scion of a prominent cultural nomenklatura family, a man who befriended dissidents when doing so involved no risk, remained favored under successive regimes, and emerged as an official eulogist of the counterrevolution. This is not a neutral biography but the judgment through which Limonov’s hostility toward him is explained. Mikhalkov’s cultural standing appears, in this account, less like an independent position outside politics than an ability to remain close to power as political conditions change.

The book makes that closeness explicit when it describes Mikhalkov as to Russian cinema what Vladimir Putin was to political power: the boss. The comparison gives his prominence an institutional dimension. Mikhalkov is not merely a director whose films provoke disagreement; he is presented as a figure whose influence could shape the consequences faced by those who challenge him, though the claim that he personally directed reprisals is attributed to Limonov rather than established as fact by the narration.

Films and the Politics of Memory

Burnt by the Sun is commissioned amid a campaign to secure Boris Yeltsin’s reelection. The surrounding media barrage warns viewers against a return to communism through documentaries about the Gulag, the famine organized by Joseph Stalin in Ukraine, and the Katyn Massacre, as well as dramatic films about the purges. Mikhalkov’s film belongs to this anti-Stalinist cultural effort, but the narrator sees a contradiction in its form: its summer dachas and contented family life are shattered by a deceitful political commissar, whose destruction of their happiness arises from envy as much as fanaticism. The film condemns Stalinism, yet does so in a recognizably Stalinist cinematic style.

The narrator says he likes the film, while imagining that Limonov would be furious to see it. Limonov’s objection, as presented here, is not simply that the film opposes Stalin. He prefers older Stalinist films because he considers them less duplicitous and more honest about the world of his childhood. Mikhalkov’s polished anti-Stalinism therefore stands in contrast to the older films Limonov values: one exposes political violence through an account of innocent domestic happiness destroyed; the other, in Limonov’s view, does not disguise the character of the world it depicts.

Protest and Repression

Mikhalkov’s The Barber of Siberia becomes the setting for a protest by National Bolsheviks. At the end of its official premiere, they distribute a leaflet titled Our Friend the Torturer, denouncing the treatment of opposition figures in Kazakhstan. The leaflet targets the film’s patron, President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The narrator characterizes it as more humanitarian than fascist, while noting that established humanitarian organizations would have been unlikely to risk confronting so powerful and popular a figure as Mikhalkov.

The retaliation, as the book recounts it, begins with a Molotov cocktail thrown into the National Bolshevik bunker. Riot police then force their way in, confiscate property, beat and imprison those present. Limonov is certain that Mikhalkov ordered the response; the narrative reports his conviction without turning it into independently verified fact. At another screening, two National Bolsheviks throw rotten eggs at Mikhalkov. Both are arrested and receive six-month prison sentences. The disproportion between the protest and punishment sharpens the book’s account of the filmmaker’s political reach: even an attack with eggs can carry a substantial penal cost.

Narrative Role

Mikhalkov’s importance lies in the way the narrative connects cultural representation to the exercise of power. His films stage arguments about Stalinism and political memory, while protests against them expose the risks faced by dissenters. The narrator’s own admiration for Burnt by the Sun sits beside his account of Limonov’s contempt for its style, preserving a tension between aesthetic appreciation and political distrust rather than resolving it. Through Mikhalkov, cinema becomes both a medium for interpreting the past and a site where present-day authority is tested.