What ‘Come and See’ Can Teach Us About Ukraine

Come and See (Иди и смотри), the iconic 1985 World War II movie by Elem Klimov, offers western audiences valuable insights into the Russian mindset. Unfortunately, they were all lost on us. We see the “horrors of war” trope and it overwhelms all of the other much more important lessons. On top of that, our minds are shielded by 80 years of Cold War propaganda, and the morality of Come and See goes over our heads.

(This story is related to my previous post, I finally Understand Why We Hate Russia.)

Set in 1943 Belarussian SSR (Belarus), Come and See depicts the war experience of Flyora, a 14-year-old boy who, in a fit of child-like enthusiasm, finds a discarded German carbine and joins the local partisans.

I very much consider Come and See the unofficial sequel to another Soviet partisan movie, Ascension (Восхождение), filmed in 1977 by Klimov’s wife, Larisa Shepitko (who died young in a car accident in 1979). There are many similar artistic choices, overlapping themes, and visual tropes and I think it’s all deliberate.

Before going any further, there are spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen Come and See already, you absolutely should. It’s available on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYOg4ORc1w

Come and See is unlike any “guerrilla warfare” type movie from the West, or at least any that I can think of on the top of my head. It’s certainly not like Red Dawn (for starters, Come and See is based on real events, while Red Dawn is fantasy). It’s not even like Defiance, a movie that attempted to paint an image of “hardboiled” Jewish resistance fighters and fell flat (Daniel Craig as a 1940s European Jew might just be one of the most bizarre casting decisions in history). And it’s definitely not like Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. I understand that Tarantino is really into revenge fantasies, but watching Jews act like nazis made me uncomfortable and is probably not a great moral lesson.

In sharp contrast, Flyora is a powerless victim throughout the movie. He doesn’t even get to shoot his gun until the end. A few days of war unnaturally ages him. He starts out a boy, and comes out the other end a wrinkled old man. This is surrealism, of course. None of the other characters age and no one comments on his appearance. It’s in his head. It’s surrealism, not to be taken literally. However obvious, I feel like I have to spell that out because I read many reviews, and it’s not clear to me that they understood this. It’s also worth noting that despite being powerless, he is not passive. He always perseveres and makes the most out of every bad situation he ends up in.

Aside from depicting the Great Patriotic War, Come and See celebrated the peasants of Russia to the point of almost deifying them. They were people who lived in thatch huts with dirt floors – strong, industrious people who could get by and be content despite having very little. Flyora meets a girl, Glasha, and they make their own Garden of Eden in the woods. Even if they were the last two people on Earth, they would do okay, apparently. Later on he has to leave Glasha behind in a refugee camp and I really wanted them to get back together, but Come and See isn’t a fairy tale. Whether they meet again, or even both survive the war, is unknown (I have decided they do and that makes me happy).

I bring this up as an important example of how ideas get “lost in translation” between Russian culture and our own. “Peasant” is not synonymous with “serf,” as Russian serfdom was abolished in 1861. However, in English these two words are both used interchangeably and with derision. Such linguistic sloppiness damages our ability to look at Russian concepts and understand them.

One time a retired American Air Force officer told me that since the Soviets had peasants this is proof that the Soviet Union was bad. And mind you, this is someone who had spent years studying and living in Eastern Europe. A few months later, I met a Russian woman who told me that her grandparents were Belarussian peasants. This was almost the first thing she said about herself and was obviously very proud of it. Something is getting lost in translation, apparently. Perhaps us Americans, even our “experts,” have grown too accustomed to being monolingual, and think our mishmash of borrowed/shared words have and always had the same meaning to everyone everywhere.

Another equally egregious misconception is that Come and See is about the so-called “horrors of war.” Yes, all wars are horrible but Come and See is not about a war. This wasn’t a case of two armies lining up and politely dueling each other over some political disagreement. What happened to the East in 1941-45, truthfully depicted by the movie without any exaggeration, wasn’t a war, it was a genocide. In the longest and most horrifying scene, the entire population of several towns is herded into a church and burned alive. Does that sound like a war to you? A young mother escapes the church and is brutally gang-raped. Does that sound like a war to you? If we look at such atrocities and think this is a normal and “part and parcel” of a war… I worry. That says more about us than it does about the Russians.

Yet another related misconception in the way we habitually describe Come and See, and the war it’s about, is the supposed “German” army. If you bother to look at Russian media, both contemporary memoirs and stories afterward, you’ll notice they rarely say “Germany did this” or “Germans did that.” They refer to the enemy collectively as “fascists.” Understand that the Third Reich, the Axis Powers, were not just one country. They were the many nations of Europe brought together into one horde with a singular, shared purpose. To completely destroy the Russian people.

The diversity of the nazi forces, and the Waffen SS, is a central theme of Come and See and we seem to consistently miss it. Maybe in some sense we deliberately miss it. There do seem to be some similarities. For example, they both share a love of critical race theory. The nazi regime was just as diverse and woke as NATO, maybe. The borders of these two totally unrelated entities seem weirdly similar as well.

(Besides the butt monkey character who is credited as a Ukrainian collaborator, I don’t know what the specific nationality/nationalities of the non-German nazis was supposed to be, wether it was other Ukrainians, Romanians, or even included other Russians. If someone can enlighten me I would greatly appreciate it!)

With that said, I think there’s a bigger and more altruistic reason behind Russians differentiating between “Germans” and “fascists.” Russians could not let themselves hate the German people for the crimes of the fascists. Words are the way we express thoughts, and those words lead to other thoughts. A nation cannot lose 27 million people and not hate someone for it. So they hated fascism, a political ideology that could be rooted out and destroyed without guilt, and Germany, the historic neighbor, friend, and cousin of Russia could be spared. Russians went to extraordinary lengths to make this differentiation, starting at state-level propaganda all the way down to individual people’s diaries.

Back to the Waffen SS, this brings me to the most contemptible character in the movie, a Ukrainian nazi. The people behind the cameras and the script seemed to actually hate him more than the German SS, and portray him as vile and pathetic as possible. He shuffles around on the heels of the Germans like a little ogre, and they treat him like a dog. They don’t even let him have his own gun. Come and See is probably exaggerating on this one point a little bit, but maybe not by much. Real-life nazis did treat the Banderists like dogs, including Stepan Bandera himself. Bandera was quite the obedient little dog, from what I’ve read about him. Apparently the joy of murdering people in the Holocaust outweighed the humiliation of servitude. Now there are monuments to him in Kiev.

Now for what I personally believe is the most important moral of the movie, and Come and See is by far not the only example. This is a theme seen over and over again in Soviet and Russian stories. In the end, the nazis are defeated, and the survivors grouped under a bridge. Despite the horrible crimes they had committed throughout the movie, they’re given a public trial, and Flyora bears eyewitness testimony against them. The nazis have a chance to live, but immediately turn on each other, effectively condemning themselves with their own cowardly and disgusting behavior.

One interesting detail from this scene is the SS officer. He’s easily the most evil character in the movie (turning the church burning into a sick game was his idea), but is also portrayed with a certain respectfulness. He’s fanatical to the end, and has a Christ-like indifference to the panicked Waffen SS soldiers dumping gasoline on his head.

I watched Come and See before I saw Ascension, and in hindsight, Klimov’s SS officer standing under the bridge makes me think of Shepitko’s Belarussian partisan stepping out of his jail cell to be hanged. Ascension is a Jesus/Judas story. The other partisan is Judas who defects to the nazis to avoid execution. Not unlike the Waffen SS soldier in Come and See who betrays the German.

Looking at this analogy even deeper, Flyora himself is a Judas. He accepts the SS officer’s “game.” He abandons everyone else in the church and is spared. Klimov based this scene on a true event. A man had confessed to him that he abandoned his wife and children in a church about to be burned. The difference is that unlike Shepitko’s Judas, Flyora finds the strength to redeem himself in the end, and continues fighting.

Flyora doesn’t find redemption in killing, but by not killing. In the final moments of the film, he has a surreal encounter with Hitler’s portrait sitting in the mud. When Flyora shoots it, actually the first time he’s shot anything at all, he discovers he can reverse time and prevent the war. Literally the famous “would you kill Hitler as a baby?” question. Flyora refuses to kill Baby Hitler, thus preserving his own humanity.

Ponder this the next time you read a CNN or BBC article about the Red Army eating 60 billion German babies. Or LGBT Ukrainian babies. Sure, it’s Kremlin propaganda, but contrast it with our own propaganda. In Saving Private Ryan, the Judas character redeems himself by murdering the German he had rescued earlier. When faced with the worst situations, people default to the stories they were raised with, and the morals those stories taught. What morals do our stories teach?

On a related note, Aleksei Kravchenko, who starred as Flyora, went on to have a distinguished career. Last year he participated in Blazing Sun (Солнцепёк), playing a cool army guy who leads a group of volunteer militia defending Donbass from invading Ukrainian nazi revolutionaries. And yes, that was probably a deliberate casting decision.

This story is related to my previous post, I finally Understand Why We Hate Russia.


EDIT: Serfdom was abolished in 1861. I said 1864, I fixed it.

Ian Kummer

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4 thoughts on “What ‘Come and See’ Can Teach Us About Ukraine”

  1. I just saw the movie, and I agree with most of your analysis.

    I would add here that the movie is also prophetic. In the end of the church scene(2:04:50) the mentioned SS officer rants about how Russians have no right to exist and ends his speech with these words: “And our mission will be accomplished, if not today, tomorrow.”

    That tomorrow arrived with the Ukrainian crisis – but will the mission be accomplished is another question.

    Reply
    • Well, Ukrainian nazis were identified early on as a “soft underbelly” that could be used to undermine the Soviet Union. After the war, the newly-founded CIA gave direct support to Bandera, and this is revealed by their own documents. So it is unfortunately, prophetic only in the sense that the West had long advertised their intent of what they wanted to do with and to Ukraine.

      Reply
  2. The so called West is a source of all filth and violence in this world – soviets identified that entity “fascism”, you nailed it when you wrote: “They refer to the enemy collectively as “fascists.”

    But that´s only one way to see it – what´s important is to recognize the enemy, whatever you call it.

    Reply

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