A 1997 interview with Sergei Bodrov, Jr.

Interview with actor Sergei Bodrov Jr., who famously played the loveable gangster Danila Bagrov in Aleksei Balabanov’s films Brother and Brother 2, becoming a post-Soviet cultural icon. In both films Balabanov constructs Danila as a charmingly guileless recently demobilized soldier of the Chechen war, who possesses the wherewithal to establish himself as an undeterred and masterful killer, who follows a strict moral code, which is steeped in nationalistic and xenophobic convictions. This interview is recorded after the release of the first Brother film, which became a surprise hit with young audiences. In describing the post-Soviet youth, who consider his character Danila a national hero, Bodrov Jr. refers to them as patriotic, which in his opinion is not the most dangerous phenomenon and publicly applauds the Russian youth, who love their country. However, the socioeconomic chasm between Bodrov Jr. and his fictional image of Danila becomes very clear in the interview, as well as the inability for his young fanbase to transcend conflating Danila the character with Bodrov the actor. The careful viewer is able to perceive Bodrov Jr.’s highly privileged social position – his father is a film director, who is part of the Russian intelligentsia, Bodrov has recently finished his PhD dissertation on Venetian painting, and is well travelled, unlike his character Danila, who comes from a troubled fatherless family. Despite this, Bodrov Jr. is celebrated almost exclusively for his portrayal of Bagrov, whose fictional personality is attributed to the actor. This type of semiotic and semantic misalignment is a key feature of Bodrov’s celebrity and can be observed more generally in other mass-cultural constructions of post-Soviet masculinity, like, for example, the stage image of Sergei “Shnur” Shnurov, the leader of the popular band Leningrad [#00148]. Bodrov’s untimely death in 2002 in an ice slide at the Kolka Glacier while filming his unfinished project The Messenger, cemented the actor’s status of a youth idol and yet another martyred voice of a generation, likening his legacy to the late Soviet rock star Viktor Tsoi. In the decades following his death, he became a cultural figure, which earned him the moniker “The Brother of all Russia’ (“Brat vsei Rossii”), and spurred the construction of numerous monuments and memorials. The post-Soviet cult of Bodrov Jr. in large part celebrates the values and attitudes of his character Danila, who is a Russian patriot, who loves his country, derides foreign influence, is unfailingly loyal, and possesses decisiveness of mind and physical strength, all the while unapologetically maintaining his vocation as a cold-blooded killer. This dichotomy of patriotic steadfastness and criminal transgression that Bodrov Jr. have come to personify became a useful political tool of the Putin era. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Danila’s lines from the film have been coopted by Russian government propaganda to legitimize and justify the war to the Russian population.