DEPICTING UKRAINE UNDER NAZI OCCUPATION: IGOR' SAVCHENKO'S FILM PARTISANS IN THE STEPPES OF UKRAINE (1943).

The focus of this article is Igor' Savchenko's Partisans in the Steppes of Ukraine (Partizany v stepiakh Ukrainy, 1943), the first full-length feature film produced by the Kiev Film Studio entirely during the Soviet Union's war against Nazi Germany. Drawing on memory studies, post-colonial theory, and theory of deconstruction, the article discusses the artistic means that Savchenko used to integrate Ukraine's experience of the war into the Soviet discourse of wartime valor, unity, and stoicism, and thus deliver a patriotic message about Soviet nations that fight together against the invaders. Barely mentioned in scholarship, this film is pivotal for understanding representations of Ukraine in Soviet depictions of the war. Savchenko constructs Ukraine's response to the war effort by making use of the aesthetic strategies found in prewar representations of friendship between Ukrainians and Russians, propaganda posters of 1941, and first wartime short films. While making use of tropes of a big family as well as Biblical imagery, and elements of folk culture, Savchenko depicts Ukraine's war experience as part of the Soviet one and proposes a hierarchy of Ukrainian and Soviet components in representing the war. The evocations of Soviet leaders frame the references to Ukrainian national heroes. Thus, the fathers-and-sons metaphor acquires here a new twist, with the fathers represented by the leaders of the Soviet state and the sons envisioned as Ukrainian patriots. The study of Savchenko's film contributes to our understanding of the debates about Soviet-era and present-day collective memory about the Great Patriotic War (1941--1945) in Ukraine and Russia. With the discourse about the biggest Soviet nations' familial unity now shattered, it is important to consider how the idea of brotherhood between Ukraine and other Soviet nations was expressed in Soviet wartime cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]