Russia has been no stranger to oppression. Centuries of autocracy, foreign invasion, and the smothering weight of her own state apparatus have produced a national sensibility that is fatalistic, leaning on occasion toward nihilistic. It's no surprise, then, that this country would produce a darkly satirical tale of the trundling organs of that very apparatus creating a person who doesn't exist, and then promoting said person to increasing positions of power and authority within its machinery.
Spoiler alert: this is the plot of Lieutenant Kizhe. Contrary to what you might expect, it’s not an episode from the Gulag Archipelago condemning Soviet communism penned by the late great Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This is a comedy anecdote originating in several different nineteenth century Russian literary magazines. The despot throwing fits isn’t Ivan the Terrible or Stalin, but Tsar Paul I, a paranoiac obsessed with militaria who was, ironically, murdered by his own officer corps in 1801.
Speaking of irony, the most famous incarnation of Lieutenant Kizhe was made in 1934, directly under communist rule by the politically reliable Mosfilm state studio. If this strange name sounds familiar, it's because Prokofiev's score (his first for the silver screen) is still a concert staple. Aside from the excellent music, this movie feels almost too daring for the time in which it was made. In showing a bully on the throne, a bumbling bureaucracy suited to appeasing his whims, and servants more interested in self-preservation than good governance, the Lieutenant Kizhe dared to show tyranny in a way one wouldn’t expect the authorities to tolerate.
Don’t think for a second that Soviet audiences didn’t see the parallels; if anything, they probably found them even funnier. They must have laughed, and also nodded with more than a little fear at the fact that Tsar Paul, portrayed as a barking buffoon in line with Bolshevik propaganda, is shown as a man whose rabid mood swings must be appeased. At no point does anyone in the palace question his distorted version of reality, and it is through this absolute obeisance that this comedy of errors is able to treat us to a series of escalating absurdities.
The plot itself is even more ludicrous than you’d think. It begins with a clerical error on the books of the imperial army, causing “Kizhe” to be “promoted” to the rank of lieutenant. Immediately after being informed that it was the (non-existent) Kizhe who had called “Guard!” and interrupted Paul’s ruminations, the monarch has his household guard called to attention to see the Lieutenant flogged. We are then treated to the image of two burly men whipping an empty post, before a couple of soldiers have to march a phantom on foot to Siberia. Talk about a shaft tasking.
And the palace servant trying to stay alive isn’t the only person who finds a fictitious Lieutenant to be to his liking. No, a princess begs for Kizhe to be brought back to St. Petersburg (then the capital of the Empire), whereupon he is “rehabilitated” and promoted to colonel before being married to said princess. In possibly the most ludicrous scene, the Tsar himself does the role of a best man in Orthodox tradition (holding a crown aloft above the head of the groom), only in this case, that means empty air for the “absent” Kizhe - who of course is then immediately promoted to general for his loyalty!
When the paper error leading to the newly-minted general’s illustrious career can no longer be defended, and may in fact negatively affect the longevity of every toady involved, the decision is made to “kill” Kizhe off. Two German physicians attend the empty cot, whereupon the Tsar mourns the loss of his greatest soldier. As such a dedicated servant of the crown, Kizhe is thus awarded a state funeral - only to have the entire train reversed as the man in the empty casket is demoted to private! The emperor’s assistant decides to make Kizhe the scapegoat for the embezzlement of state funds. The servant’s just deserts are… a promotion to general, wedding of his own to the princess, and however happy an ending a high-ranking officer can have under a paranoid tyrant. Maybe he was later part of the assassination plot.
On the surface, Lieutenant Kizhe makes for excellent communist propaganda. It manages to be funny while hitting all the right ideological notes. The worker and peasant audiences get to see the Tsar, who had once been considered the chosen of Christ Himself, act like a lunatic, to see his bandying servants bend to his will, and then to see his servant (another working class lad) make it all the way to the top. The message is implicit: aren’t you glad we did away with this? Isn’t our socialist system so much more rational?
If we leave the Marxist underpinnings to one side, this is still a satire that can be appealing to anyone watching. Huge, lumbering bureaucracies are stupid, they are staffed with self-interested stakeholders, and it’s not hard to imagine the Environmental Protection Agency promoting a Special Director Kizhe just to cover its ass due to the latest fuckup. While this makes the tale understandable to anyone who has shaken their fist at filing taxes, I want to emphasize how deeply this specific parody works for a Russian audience. Longstanding cultural traditions have seen Russians subject to powerful sovereigns - who are often seen positively in direct proportion to their strength - leaving them at the mercy of the pointy end of the stick: the state apparatus. The latter is almost always seen poorly, or at least blamed for the worst excesses of the monarch, even when it is merely enforcing his will.
If you are reading this, I assume that you, like me, are from an anglosphere settler country (the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand). Our societies tend to be highly individualistic and place a premium on self-expression. We also tend to chafe when the Leviathan of the state impinges on our personal freedoms. The brilliant French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd hypothesizes in his Lineages of Modernity that this is because of the sociological behaviours of our ancestors prior to modernity. One inheritance we retain from our Anglo-Saxon forebears is the tradition of the nuclear family, where adult children move outside the household and live with their new kin away from the power of the father. This engenders much less connection to specific places, and an entrepreneurial spirit.
The Russians are in a much different proverbial boat. For an individualist culture such as our own, Lieutenant Kizhe is biting, but it’s not as deeply personal in understanding the smothering power of the state apparatus. Most of the peoples of the former Soviet Union are from the opposite side of the anthropological spectrum compared to Westerners. Prior to modernity, their peasants lived under the authoritarian-egalitarian family type. A strong patriarch was the head of every household, and children would live under his roof and command until the day he died, whereupon his property was divided equally amongst the male children.
This, in turn, has led to a strong preference for a specific type of leader: an inviolable leader, a sovereign or monarch, be he a Tsar, a General-Secretary, or today a President who is seen as the father of the nation and entrusted with the final say on most choices. Thus, in Russian tradition, the monarch is above reproach. He can’t be wrong, especially when he is wrong, such as when he’s asking to meet soldiers who don’t exist. The people around him are not allowed to question his version of reality, which leads to erratic decisions, which leads the state to inevitably repress the common people according to his wishes. In turn, the blame cannot then fall on the national father proxy. No, it’s the bureaucrats or disobedient nobles (boyar in old Slavic languages) who must be at fault! This is the myth of the “good Tsar, bad boyars” that is endemic to many Russian folk tales.
But the people aren't stupid. Even if they all wish to believe their Tsar is good and his boyars wicked, that doesn't mean they disbelieve their own eyes. They knew upon whose orders doors were broken down and families made to disappear in the middle of the night, or worse. They knew, they accepted it, and they feared it. But Stalin was also genuinely popular, and remains so in Russia today, not because Russians don't know what he did, but because the authoritarian-egalitarian family type respects strength above all else. The communists industrialized a peasant empire, won the largest war in human history, and turned a backwater into a superpower within a generation. For a culture where the father's might makes right, that record speaks for itself. He was terrible, and he was theirs. That gives people living under that kind of power every reason to laugh when someone hands them the opportunity. And that makes the irony of Lieutenant Kizhe even funnier: it's telling the truth about the new boss, through the person of Paul I, in a way that cannot be publicly expressed without arousing the ire of the secret police.
In an even further act of patent absurdity, the film making this parallel is a propaganda production of the communist party-state itself. In trying to lampoon the office of emperor, they accidentally show the possibility that their own strong and fatherly leader could be a buffoon. We thus see several layers of satire. The most obvious is that Lieutenant Kizhe is just the tale of a bureaucratic error resulting in a non-person being promoted to general, and demoted back to private. On the historical level, at this specific moment of Russian history, the movie’s a critique of the person of the despot whose flavour of “benevolence” the people got to taste for decades. And most importantly, it satirizes the entire local cultural pathology: the desire to be led by a strong sovereign results in a bogus, inefficient, and unaccountable government apparatus with enormous power that nobody likes very much.
This brings us to the question of why satire works as a weapon, even in regimes that want to discourage subversion as strongly as possible. In Nikolai Gogol's play The Government Inspector, the corrupt Mayor of a provincial town – having been thoroughly humiliated by a con man he mistook for a state auditor – wheels on the audience in a famous fourth-wall break and demands to know why they are laughing. The alleged dissidence of the play required the intervention of the reactionary Tsar Nicholas to even see the stage, reportedly because he wanted to watch his subordinates squirm. The only person in the theatre who could afford to laugh was the Tsar himself: he left thoroughly entertained, remarking that everyone had gotten what they deserved, himself most of all. The officials in the audience, who recognized themselves in the corrupt provincials on stage, were furious. Funnily enough, Gogol was a committed conservative monarchist loyal to Nicholas. His satire was "good Tsar, bad boyars" performed with total sincerity. The bad boyars got pissy, but the good Tsar's endorsement meant Gogol escaped with his reputation and his skin intact.
Lieutenant Kizhe breaks this rule. Where Gogol preserves the sovereign's authority and directs all mockery at the apparatus beneath him, the film makes the Tsar himself a barking buffoon – and that is exactly what the Bolsheviks wanted. Paul I could be made ridiculous in ways that no living leader could. But the laughter in that Moscow theatre carried an unspoken recognition: the phantom promotions, the obeisance, the inability to tell the boss he is wrong, none of it was buried with the Romanovs. The Soviet public revered Stalin and they were terrified of him and they still wanted to laugh at him. They held all these truths at once without contradiction, as Russia's historical family type demands. Gogol's audience could laugh safely because the father was never threatened. The 1934 audience laughed at a dead dynasty while living under a new one, and Mosfilm didn't seem to realize they had handed their viewers permission to notice the absurdity of it all.
This is what makes satire simultaneously dangerous and necessary, especially for authoritarian regimes. It doesn't reveal anything hidden; it gives people permission to acknowledge what they can already see. A 1934 Moscow audience watching a tyrant send soldiers to flog an empty post didn't need the subtext explained to them. They lived it.
Today, we know how phantoms can be promoted because admitting the error costs more than perpetuating it–and yes, we see it all the time here in the West where this wasn't supposed to happen. We know what it's like to see obvious fictions sustained because nobody can afford to point them out, and to find that the only safe response is to laugh. Every large institution, from the Kremlin to the Pentagon to your local DMV, has a Lieutenant Kizhe on its books somewhere. Nobody wants to be the one to tell the boss he doesn't exist.
