The characters may speak another language, but cinema lingo is universal, and there is a lot to be learned. One of the best ways to get to know a country – a place you may never visit, especially in plague years – is by studying its films. I think the fact that I can write this, and watch these movies, shows that anti-Russian sentiment is not universal, that an anti-Russian project has not, as yet, taken total hold of our national narrative. Hitler remarks at the end of White Tiger that the long-term western project, which he was only trying to carry out, was to destroy the Russians. The enemy are usually identified as Nazis Nazis must be exterminated. But the message is not simply Germans = bad. There are no sympathetic Germans here: in Fortress, the sound of a German voice inevitably presages horror. Then the shells and aircraft and Panzers come. Alliances with militarily powerful states exist only until they are broken. And there are always women and children present – because the Russians are fighting on Russian soil.Ībove all, the message is one of ever-present danger. Multiethnic: the Irishman, the Italian and the Jew in a Hollywood GI foxhole become the Caucasian, the Kazakh and the Jew in a MosFilm trench. What are we being told? That Russians are survivors. To sum up: the bigger-budget Russian films tend to adopt the contemporary action strategies of western films, with washed-out, high-contrast flashbacks, speeded-up action, moments of slow motion, extremes of sound design. Photograph: IMDbĪlso about tank battles, but I can remember little of it, other than that there were lots of tanks. But they did so with widely different budgets, and in different ways. Most stand in the shadow of Klimov’s film and detest war. What do the current generation of Russian war films have to tell us? I sat down to watch as many as I could. In 1985, the director Elim Klimov made that rare thing, a genuinely anti-war movie: Come and See. In Russia, however, things are very different. Dunkirk (2017) celebrated Britain going it alone, gamely and successfully improvising her European exit. The mega-budget Pearl Harbor (2001) suited the aspirations of the Project for the New American Century.

Saving Private Ryan (1998) persuaded us that Americans fight wars justly, and with a moral conscience. War movies aren’t historical documents, but signs of our current times. This is the most recent addition to a host of films done about the Winter War and the subsequent Continuation War (Finland’s name for their involvement in WWII) with the Soviet Union from a Finnish perspective. Since films aren’t made by accident, there’s a reason for the many, costly movies about events that happened long ago. Unknown Soldier does not sugar-coat the grind of this kind of warfare. Many things have happened since then, yet the war retains an unending fascination for politicians and for makers of big-budget cinema. T he second world war ended – as we all know – 75 years ago.

European war movies