OPINION
Russia’s “patriotic” film industry has been hit by another major scandal — the commercial failure of Tolerance, a new film by Andrei Grachev set in a fictional European country, in which nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin plays a serial killer who is opposed to liberal values. In three weeks at the box office, Tolerance earned a mere 100,000 rubles (a bit over $1,000), despite an estimated budget of at least 200 million rubles (about $2.2 million). On opening weekend, an average of only three people attended each screening.
Surprisingly, this flop was not an anomaly, but a reflection of a greater reality in Russian cinema: the Russian audience consistently rejects propaganda films. Donbas war drama The Dugout (Blindazh, 2022), by Mark Gorobets, grossed 107 million rubles on a 500 million budget. Call Sign “Passenger” (2023), by Ilya Kazankov, took in 7.5 million rubles despite nearly 300 million in state funding. Military drama The Postman (2024) barely brought in 7 million rubles. In short, the pattern is clear: Russian audiences stay away from any film that tries to “sell” them a message — whether it insists “Donbas is ours” or that “The West is evil.” After years of Kremlin-sponsored filmmaking, viewers have been conditioned to distrust any kind of ideological art, regardless of the narrative it is pushing.
This is, in a way, a paradox. The Putin regime has lasted 25 years, yet unlike earlier totalitarian systems, it does not demand ideological enthusiasm. The new authoritarianism offers a different social contract: all the “necessary violence” — both literal and mental — is carried out by the state “outside society,” without demanding citizens’ open approval, only their loyalty, obedience, or passivity. As a result, the contemporary cinema’s function differs from that of Soviet times. Its purpose is not to rally people toward victory or vilify enemies, but to create a parallel reality. In that, at least, it succeeds.
The average script
In this parallel cinematic universe, there is no war, only endless summer and an endlessly repeating plot. A young female police officer with a simple Russian last name arrives in a small town where a serial killer is on the loose. She begins investigating “high-profile” crimes, which the characters literally describe in the language of official press releases. The suspects include a local drunk, a criminal boss, and several other townspeople. But in the end, the killer turns out to be a schoolteacher — an intellectual, a refined sadist and aesthete who listens to the liberal Echo of Moscow radio and reads The Insider via VPN between murders.
The police officer’s former lover now works for the FSB, and she must overcome old grievances to seek his help. As they pursue the killer, their relationship rekindles, symbolizing a spiritual and professional union between two branches of law enforcement.
With minor variations, this is the template for most Russian crime series. The traitorous enemy is always the intellectual, and the officer of the state is even more than a hero — he (or she) is also a comrade and a protector. The world, as these shows portray it, rests entirely on the shoulders of the security services. There are ten or so possible plot variations — no more — and roughly the same number of basic genres. The backdrop is usually either World War II or the present day, though regardless of the setting, secret agents can be seen battling dissidents and other “enemies.” This formula has defined Putin-era cinema for decades.
What’s the problem with such films? In short, they are degrading. Audiences may adapt to content that is “easy to digest,” but within this narrow corridor of creative possibility, actors and directors inevitably deteriorate when each “new” film is, in effect, a repetitive remake of the last. Occasionally, an actor may break away to star in a youth drama just to feel alive again, but their main income is still derived from roles like “Lieutenant So-and-So” or “Detective Such-and-Such.” There’s simply nothing else to play.
As for screenwriting, the credits often list entire teams rather than one or two writers. Why? One person drafts the script, then two others “refine” it — adding the proper patriotic emphasis, simplifying the dialogue, and removing anything remotely subversive. Then a fourth and fifth come in to finish the job, bringing the material down to the lowest common denominator and adding more corpses — since blood, oddly enough, has become the main narrative driver of “spiritual” Putin-era cinema.
This collective process inevitably leads to plot holes and contradictions — the result of too many cooks. And that’s the real issue: there is no author with a capital A, no one who feels responsible for the final product. No one fights for their creative vision or insists on a character or scene. Instead, there’s a faceless conveyor belt mechanically producing “art” for the masses (who, again, tend not to turn up at the theater).
Signs of life
Russian cinema has not been in such poor shape in a century. Even during Stalin’s era, when fewer than 50 films were released annually, there were at least periods of artistic experimentation. The 1920s and 1930s offered more than just the propaganda of Sergei Eisenstein or Alexander Dovzhenko — there were also works like Abram Room’s A Strict Young Man (1936), based on a script by writer Yuri Olesha.
Khrushchev's “thaw” of the early 1960s produced its own brand of Soviet cinema — introspective, humanist films that broke from Stalinist rigidity. The Brezhnevian 1970s, at least, brought genre diversity: comedies, war dramas, romances, and science fiction. During Gorbachev’s perestroika of the mid-1980s, filmmakers gained the freedom to address previously banned subjects.
In the 1990s, Russian cinema did degrade — due to poverty. Directors could make money only by appealing to their viewers’ most basic instincts. Still, both in the 1980s and the 1990s, filmmakers tried to say something meaningful through their work.
Whatever one thinks of Brat (Brother, 1997), Alexei Balabanov’s cult gangster drama that captured the post-Soviet disillusionment, or Peculiarities of the National Hunt (1995), a satirical comedy about Russian drinking culture, both were sincere attempts to express a unique worldview — as were the lesser-known but ambitious films of screenwriters Vladimir Lutsik and Alexei Samoryadov.
The last creative surge in Russian cinema came in the 2010s, when there was both money and, for a while, still a desire to say something meaningful to the world. Directors like Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose films such as Leviathan (2014) and Loveless (2017) won major prizes at Cannes and Venice, brought Russian cinema international prestige. At first, even the Kremlin seemed to welcome this success. Films of that decade set a high artistic bar that has not been met since.
Take, for example, Sergei Ursulyak’s TV series Liquidation (2007). The plot was conventional — Soviet secret police officers hunting a traitor in their ranks — but it was enlivened by the colorful Odessa slang of the characters, something still possible back then. From an industry standpoint, Liquidation was a solid production, yet its ending clearly served a political agenda: in the forests outside Odessa, the protagonists suddenly encounter hordes of “Banderites,” a Soviet-era term for Ukrainian nationalists. Over time, such narrative turns became standard.
Liquidation (2007)
Of course, more direct forms of propaganda have played the main role in the dehumanization of Russia’s public discourse, but mainstream cinema has contributed to this as well. Even within state commissions, however, there were moments when filmmakers tried to rise above formula. The opening shots of Fyodor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad (2013) — intact window frames of bombed-out homes through which one glimpses household items covered in gray dust — are a rare example of genuine visual poetry. Today those images look tragically prophetic.
That level of visual detail required significant money and effort. Bondarchuk wanted to be seen not merely as a commercial director or music video maker but as a “serious filmmaker,” and he sought to make a Russian counterpart to Saving Private Ryan (1998), a goal the Kremlin had cherished for decades. Around the same time, director Zhora Kryzhovnikov’s comedy Gorko! (2013), filmed in mockumentary style about a disastrous wedding, revealed a new talent trying to piece together the absurdities of Russian life.
Filmmakers of that period shared one common impulse: to break free from the circle of banality. However, that impulse faded on its own during the COVID-19 pandemic and disappeared entirely after February 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since then, Russian cinema has been reduced to satisfying reflexes. The runaway box-office success of Cheburashka (2023), a family film based on a beloved Soviet cartoon character, reflected, according to film critic Anton Dolin, a public yearning not for victory but for escape — a wish to hide from reality and “to be fed chocolate.”
Apathy is the star of the show
Soviet cinema was part of the state’s ideological machinery. Its mission was to reach the viewer’s soul. There was even a specific genre known as “secretary films,” which glorified mid-level Communist Party functionaries. To make such dreary material bearable, directors often cast great actors.
Take the 1970s television play Day After Day (Den-denskoy), featuring Mikhail Ulyanov as a factory director named Druyanov. Ulyanov chose to make his character lisp, just to add a trace of individuality to an otherwise monotonous industrial drama. Why did this matter? Because, despite strict ideological controls, the viewer still mattered. The audience’s expectations were rising, and filmmakers had to respect that.
Soviet directors, writers, and actors genuinely wanted to express something — and audiences genuinely wanted to see and hear something new. It was a shared aspiration of the progressive era of the 1960s and 1970s — the desire of the artist to matter and the desire of the audience to grow, to rise above conformity.
Under Vladimir Putin, cinema has again become part of state ideology, but the viewer is no longer a participant. In fact, no one is — except for the state itself. In Soviet times, children’s first games were “playing soldiers” or “playing house.” Even these simple games had storylines, imitating what children saw on screen. Today’s “patriotic cinema” operates at roughly that same level. Its heroes, like toy soldiers, have no will of their own. They are mere functions of the author’s plan. The central character in such films is always the state, not the individual.
The irony is that the Kremlin itself has nothing to say. Putin seems intent on avoiding what he sees as the Soviet leadership’s mistake — the overcomplication that led to the decline of Konstantin Chernenko’s pre-perestroika government, a collapse depicted in Rezo Gigineishvili’s 2023 film Patient No. 1 (released abroad but not in Russia).
Putin’s takeaway appears to be that faith, ideology, and freedom all breed dangerous complexity. What is needed, in his view, is sacred simplicity in everything. The goal now is to suppress diversity of thought, desire, and ambition, even in the arts. The current Faustian bargain is that directors and actors are well paid precisely not to “reach higher.”
Frame from Rezo Gigineishvili’s 2023 film Patient No. 1
While attempts to patriotize the film industry have not mobilized the masses, ideological work is still being handled rather efficiently by state television propaganda. After the war began, the Kremlin did not even attempt to build a “patriotic culture” to replace liberal art. It does not need talent — not even loyal talent. The Soviet government, after 1917, made an attempt to cultivate a “red intelligentsia,” but within two generations that class had produced ample dissidents. Better, from the Kremlin’s perspective, to eliminate talent entirely than to risk it turning disobedient down the road.
As artist Anatoly Osmolovsky once said, in totalitarian regimes like Putin’s, the supreme art form is death, not life. No other art is needed. Let the puppets keep jumping around in their films — the Kremlin itself is staging a grand performance in its own theater of death. Where art should be, there is only a black hole of apathy. There are no desires — not among audiences, not among artists, not even in the Kremlin. Big budgets remain, but restrictions keep multiplying.
Most likely, Russia will continue producing war films until the genre exhausts itself. Remakes of Soviet or post-Soviet films are another safe and profitable niche. Recently, filmmakers released a retread of Confrontation (Protivostoyanie), the 1984 detective miniseries by director Semyon Aranovich and writer Yulian Semyonov, centered on a police search for a murderer whose crimes trace back to World War II.
Semyonov and Aranovich’s original was formulaic, but it was filled with vivid, recognizable Soviet characters — the kind that still make the film enjoyable to rewatch. By contrast, contemporary Russian television scripts are written without care for dialogue or nuance. Today’s filmmakers have learned to depict “Soviet people” using only two or three emotional tones, with old songs as background. In other words, modern directors are no longer capable of making even something like Liquidation — all that remains is an endless series called Degradation.
The main cause of this decline is fear. In the current system, fear is irrational and pervasive: no one, including those within the industry, knows what might unexpectedly become a banned topic tomorrow. Under such conditions, quality filmmaking is impossible. Fear drains creative energy.
Of course, if fear is removed, creative energy will revitalize itself. As soon as censorship eases enough to allow honest dialogue with society, the desire to speak out will reemerge. And that new wave of Russian cinema, however long may remain before it takes shape, will inevitably begin by confronting today’s war with Ukraine.
In times of upheaval, art always starts with works like Ilya Ehrenburg’s novella The Thaw (1954), which gave its name to an entire era of cultural renewal. We should not expect instant repentance from such future films, but we can hope that they will at least say what for now remains unsayable: war is always evil (and Putin’s war in Ukraine stands out even among the works of that horrific genre). That moment will mark the beginning of a new chapter in Russian cinema — however far away it may still be.