Our film is not so much about the manifestation of the Living God as it is about the attitude towards theophany of those who are estranged from Him, and the profound meaning of culture.
(Yuri Arabov, screenwriter)
Among the films of the so-called ‘Orthodox movement’—which took root in Russia after 1990 with the aim of revitalising Christianity and the Orthodox Church—the feature-length fiction film The Miracle (Ciudo), directed by Aleksandr Proshkin (2009), based on a screenplay by Yuri Arabov and produced by Amkart Studio, occupies a special place. Although it centres on a miracle that resonated deeply at the time, the film is, first and foremost, a revealing historical fresco of the oppression of faith by the Khrushchev regime in the first post-war decade. The film does not belong to the category of ‘mystical-transcendental’ works, which explore the ‘physiology of the miracle’ and the ultimate horizons of faith and human consciousness (as in the works of Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Zvyagintsev), and this choice of screenplay and direction is most inspired in this instance.
The historical background
In 1956, the Samara region, situated in the middle reaches of the Volga River, was shaken by an unprecedented miracle, which took place in full view of the whole world right in the region’s capital, the industrial city of Samara (or Kuibyshev), and perceived as a ‘paranormal phenomenon’ – that is, a miracle impossible to explain away. The phenomenon, which defied the tenets of scientific atheism – the compulsory ideology of the era – and took place in the city of Kuibyshev, came to be known among the people as ‘Zoya’s Freezing’.
Samara, or Kuibyshev, was one of the Soviet Union’s major industrial centres. The city was home to metallurgical, oil refining, machine-building, electrical engineering and light industry complexes, and was also recognised as one of the centres that had made a major contribution to the victory over Hitler’s Germany in the Second World War. In other words, the city was one of the strategic industrial targets of the Volga basin and, in the eyes of the party leadership, it was also intended to serve as an example in the fight against ‘obscurantism’ within the virulent anti-religious campaign launched by the newly elected (in 1953) General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev.
It should be noted that during the war and in the immediate post-war period (1941–1954), many of the churches and monasteries in the USSR that had been destroyed during the Bolshevik persecution of the 1920s and 1930s were restored, andnew ones were built, so that the anti-religious campaign launched by Khrushchev upon his rise to power – and officially proclaimed as a priority objective of state policy – dealt a severe blow, particularly to the majority Orthodox Church. His statement in a televised address, in which he promised that ‘soon we will show the last [Orthodox] priest on television’1, has remained famous.
And it was precisely such an exemplary proletarian centre as Samara, in the midst of an anti-religious campaign, that was shaken by a bewildering, persistent and impossible-to-conceal miracle, which defied the very materialist-scientific precepts of communism!
During a New Year’s party organised by Zoia, a young worker, she—upset that she had no dance partner because her fiancé, named Nicolae, had not turned up, took an icon of Saint Nicholas from the ‘prayer corner’ of the house (which, according to tradition, was to be found in every Russian home, however poor) and began to dance with it. For Russian believers, who follow the Julian calendar, New Year’s Eve falls during the Nativity Fast, making celebrations all the more inadvisable. But ‘times had changed’… The girl’s mother’s advice not to hold the banquet during the Nativity Fast fell on deaf ears, as did her friend’s warnings not to commit such a sacrilege. The rebellious young woman took the icon from the wall and began to dance with it, retorting boldly: ‘If God exists, let him punish me!’ At the end of her third lap around the room, a loud roar erupted and a blinding light flashed, driving all the revellers out of the house. Only Zoia remained frozen in the room, just as she had been dancing, clutching the icon of Bishop Mirel of Lycia to her chest. Her body grew cold and hard as stone, and remained so for months on end.
A crowd of people from all walks of life – doctors, psychiatrists, journalists, priests and party propagandists – filed past the frozen girl, yet no one could rouse her from her inexplicable catatonia, nor could they wrest the icon from her frozen arms. What is more, the syringe needles, with which the doctors sought to inject her, would bend or snap upon contact with the cadaverous rigidity of her body, whilst her breathing remained steady.
In the midst of a campaign to eradicate ‘religious obscurantism’, the town on the Volga became shrouded in an ominous reputation, as if it were haunted. The young woman’s rigidity—she could not be moved from the spot, nor lifted by the orderlies who had come on orders from above to take her ‘to hospital’ (in fact, to cover up the miracle)—defied all the laws of medicine and physics.
Unbelievable to any ‘modern mind’, yet difficult even for believers to accept, ‘Zoe’s paralysis’ was a heavy blow to the virulent anti-religious propaganda, reignited this time by Khrushchev, and which had penetrated, via party propagandists, even the Soviet provinces. After more than four months, the girl was finally ‘dispelled’ and the icon was taken from her hands. For reasons that are easy to understand, the girl’s saviour quickly disappeared without a trace. History has recorded several versions of the saviour’s identity (in the film we are about to discuss, he is a devout teenager, the son of a priest and the grandson of a martyred priest; another version attributes the young woman’s deliverance to the reformed priest, the hieromonk Serafim Tiapocikin, whilst yet another credits it to Saint Nicholas the Hierarch himself, who arrived as a gentle old man in the Russian hut and then vanished without a trace). From the perspective of the meaning of the miracle for contemporaries, the identity of the saviour matters little.
Having returned to physical life, Zoia would never again speak coherently nor regain her consciousness. Very rarely would she repeat, mechanically and in terror: ‘Repent and pray! The earth is burning! We are all perishing in the flames because of our sins!’ She was brutally and pointlessly interrogated ‘for anti-Soviet conspiracy’ and committed to a psychiatric hospital, where it appears she died. Some claim that, after the ordeal of her paralysis, the young woman received the gift of healing, but there are no definitive facts to confirm this.
Soviet censorship did everything in its power to cover up this extraordinary case, whilst the press dismissed it as a hoax, vehemently denying the supernatural nature of the phenomenon. Consequently, until the fall of communism, the story of ‘Zoe’s Stiffening’ was known only locally and on a very limited scale, recounted in hushed tones, with fear and in whispers, which led to the folkloric distortion of the case.
From historical event to film
As simple as it is disturbing, this modern miracle of Saint Nicholas—the halting of biological development and the defiance of human physiology—did not seem at all to lend itself to a cinematic treatment. Nothing dynamic or spectacular, but a simple ‘No’, louder than history itself, hurled in the face of a rustic era and a primitive social mindset, from the dusty wood of an icon. And yet… the case was too shocking to be left unspoken.
It was only after the year 2000 that the miracle bore fruit in literature and cinema, quickly gaining notoriety within Orthodox culture and extending beyond Russia’s borders. Initially, director Dmitri Oderusov made a 20-minute documentary for a Christian studio in Samara, consisting of interviews with witnesses and titled ‘Stoianie Zoi’ (loosely translated as ‘The Stiffening of Zoia’). In 2009, Yuri Arabov published a novel entitled Ciudo (The Miracle), which formed the basis for the screenplay of the film of the same name, which we present here. Several books, written by devout laypeople and clergy, published from 2010 to the present day, have revisited this astonishing miracle in various literary genres (ranging from interviews with eyewitnesses to short stories and lyrical epics), and in 2015, a three-part television series entitled ‘Zoia’ was produced, based on a play evoking the miracle in Samara.
In 2009, the challenge faced by the makers of the film Ciudo/The Miracle – director Aleksandr Proșkin and screenwriter Iuri Arabov – produced by the ‘Amkart’ Film Studio on commission from ‘Central Partnership’, was to imbue this morbid, revealing miracle with cinematic rhythms and emotions – but at what cost! – of aversion to holiness, elevated to the status of state policy.
How can one resolve, in screenwriting terms, this condemnation to stagnation, which constitutes, at least on first reading, the visible essence of the Kuibyshev miracle? How can one set to a narrative rhythm and dramatise the main heroine’s paralysis in sacrilege, cast, like an unyielding curse, over the progressive slogans of the era, when ‘the boundless achievements of science’ were trumpeted from every official platform? The film also serves as a jarring warning, still relevant today, against any technocracy or governing ideology based on elevating godless science to the highest rank.
The great challenge of unfolding this sombre miracle as a visual narrative for the general public was taken on by the screenwriter Yuri Arabov, a refined philosopher of history and a religious man, a long-standing collaborator of the legendary director Aleksandr Sokurov and a Cannes Award winner for the screenplay of the film Moloch, as well as a laureate at other film festivals in Russia and around the world. According to his own statement, the screenwriter set out, through this film, to continue the artistic direction of rediscovering ‘deep Russia’, which began with the contemporary drama St George’s Day (dir. Kirill Serebrennikov, 2008) and which would subsequently be continued with the historical drama The Horde (dir. Andrei Proshkin, 2, 2012) and the cinematic fable The Monk and the Devil (dir. Nikolai Dostal, 2016).
His collaboration with Aleksandr Proshkin, a successful Russian director renowned for his crime, historical (the series Doctor Zhivago, The Cold Summer of ’53) and biographical (Mikhail Lomonosov) films has imbued the screenplay written by Yuri Arabov with a distinct sense of realism and shifted the focus away from mystical-spiritual inquiry (characteristic of his films made in collaboration with Aleksandr Sokurov) towards a sociological and historical one 3. The result was neither a transcendental exploration of the unfathomable universe of the miracle, nor a film-debate between science and religion, nor an abyssal probing of the conscience, but a multi-layered historical fresco, based on a real event, objective in its narrative and dramatic approach, about the community’s reception of a truly extraordinary miracle, in an era hostile to faith, dominated by lies, hypocrisy and hatred. Only the names of the characters and the location of the event have been changed: Zoia has become Tatiana, and Samara, Greciansk.
The story of the film
Aleksandr Proshkin and Yuri Arabov’s film Ciudo/The Miracle, about the disturbing event in Kuibyshev, focuses not so much on the spiritual fate of the girl who was suddenly paralysed, or that of her loved ones, who play a secondary role in the narrative, but rather the reaction to the miracle by representatives of various social and power groups, who try by every means, from the absurd to the ridiculous, and at any cost, to prove its inconsistency: the poet Artemiev, employed as a journalist at the local edition of the party newspaper Voljskaia Pravda (Pravda of the Volga), tasked by his boss with investigating the case and demonstrating its purely scientific nature—that is, to cover up the miracle. Artemiev’s boss, the zealous party propagandist Kondrašov, concerned with laying the ideological groundwork for the 20th Congress of the CPSU 4, is accountable to the party’s higher leadership for purging the city of any mystical or religious upsurge and for closing down the churches. The victim of these two apologists for lies elevated to the status of state policy is the humble priest of the city’s last functioning church, Father Andrei. Unable to help his few parishioners—indoctrinated by atheist propaganda, who could barely remember whether they had even been baptised—he is hounded by the propagandist, who is determined at all costs to close down his parish, so as to turn it into a cinema. The war declared on faith also cuts deeply into the priest’s family life, in the form of tensions with his own son, whose faith is wavering because he is mocked at school as the ‘priest’s son’. Promised in return that the church would be spared, Father Andrei reluctantly agrees to publicly deny the miracle before his parishioners, invoking in his sermon, at the propagandist’s behest, the Machiavellian Securitate slogan: ‘Do you want miracles? Is your faith no longer enough?! It is easier to believe in miracles than in God! Is life not the greatest miracle of all?!”, elegantly packaged within Immanuel Kant’s famous deist dictum: “The greatest miracle is the starry sky above me and the moral law within me”. The priest repents belatedly, realising his betrayal. The bargain with the ‘devil’ has been struck, but it does not hold. His parish is requisitioned, and he is arrested by the militia. His spiritual destiny will be restored, in a way, by his hesitant son, when it is he who will succeed in prising the icon of Saint Nicholas from the girl’s stiffened arms and bringing her back to life.
The way each of these characters, from different social backgrounds, draws near to the girl frozen in the now-abandoned room, teeming with spiders and rats, is an almost metanoic shock, an examination of conscience and a social X-ray. Shaken by the cataleptic sight of the frozen young woman, the atheist and womanising journalist confesses his sins to his wife and gives up his job at the newspaper, which forces him to make serious moral compromises and robs him of the chance to write authentically. The inveterate party propagandist, although deep down he believes in God (he crosses himself in secret and refuses to swear by the holy), does the opposite: the moment the girl returns to life physically (without regaining consciousness), he does everything in his power to destroy the living proof of the miracle, resorting – futilely, cruelly and ridiculously – to the violent tactics of a KGB interrogator to intimidate her. Whilst the atheist’s conscience awakens, the conscience of the seemingly devout man, whose soul is rotten, deteriorates even further. For the careerist Kondrashev, social status and the climate of deceit that enables him to carry out his work are more important than the Truth.
Even the newly elected General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev (a die-hard atheist and a fierce opponent of the Church) descends upon the ill-fated town – a real event, recorded in the chronicles of the case – ‘to dispel the gloom of mysticism’ and to annihilate the last remaining clergymen – ‘instigators of anti-Soviet sectarianism’, but he retreats helplessly, disconcerted by his confrontation with the reality of the miracle, which is beyond his capacity to comprehend. The character, played by Aleksandr Potapov, oscillates convincingly between primitive, ridiculous boorishness and exaltation, offering a realistic portrayal of the ill-famed leader. ‘What is truth?’ – he utters sceptically, in a bitter exchange with the bishop who has come to exorcise the stiff-necked girl, an exchange reminiscent of the dialogue between Christ and Pontius Pilate. The context of the unyielding relationship between God and worldly power is the same.
The direction pays close attention to detail, including set design and costumes (impeccable, as is everything that contributes to the period atmosphere), and is discreetly inventive in its visual flourishes: the little red fish in the aquarium, superimposed over the party footage on the television; the propagandist’s glass eye, which falls into the mud following a slap from Khrushchev and is subsequently covered with a black bandage, revealing his thuggish morality.
The precise and nuanced acting, restrained in its handling of emotional moments, is carried by leading names from today’s Russian screen. In the role of the journalist is the sensitive and charismatic Konstantin Habenski, one of the most beloved contemporary Russian actors, known here for his leading role in The Admiral, and in the West, particularly for the films Night Watch and Day Watch; in the role of the anti-religious propagandist, the popular actor Sergei Makovetsky, eloquent in his ambiguity, known for his leading role in the film The Priest; theatre and film director, screenwriter and actor Viktor Shamirov in the role of Father Andrei, who succeeds in expressively conveying all his anguish and moral dilemmas; Maria Burova in the challenging title role – a part rarely offered to actresses – a performer who has appeared very rarely on screen; the refined Polina Kutepova and Natalia Gandziuk, in the roles of the poet-journalist’s wife and Father Andrei’s wife respectively, bring an added touch of ethereal vibrancy to a harsh film, dominated by a sombre atmosphere and fleeting glimmers of hope.
A series of memorable lines, with subtle yet unsettling echoes of the Gospel—whether ironic or heart-wrenching (Are the Komsomol members rising from the dead?!; If you do not wish to climb onto the cross, you will have to watch as another is crucified upon it. Will you be able to?) compels abrupt soul-searching, which is particularly uncomfortable for an atheistic totalitarian society, regardless of its ideology. All this shapes a well-rounded and complex film, skilfully orchestrated from every artistic perspective and accessible to a wide audience—a film that invites reflection on dictatorships of all kinds and on paths to salvation in the face of anti-Christian persecution.
Here is a brief statement by the screenwriter Yuri Arabov, who explains in a 2009 interview for the magazine Foma his vision of the relationship between the film’s characters and the ‘miracle’: ‘Together with Aleksandr Proșkin, we wanted to show that, despite their rejection of what had happened, something extraordinary happens to each of them… with the exception of the atheist propaganda officer. He does not change because he appears to be a dead soul. In any case, in the screenplay we portrayed him as a demon, for, according to the Gospel, no one but demons knew that Christ is God. But something does happen in the lives of the other characters. Starting with the carpenter, whose axe suddenly blunts [the one he had used to try to pry the girl loose from the floor, ed.] and who realises that something extraordinary has happened; to the journalist, who decides to leave the newspaper to lead a free life as an artist, as he had long desired but had thought impossible. I think even Khrushchev, who sees an incomparably beautiful view through the aeroplane window and, suddenly, remembers angels, in whom he does not believe. And, somewhere, in the background, who knows, a new saint is born in Russia: Zoia in real history, Tania in our film.”
Denouement
Indeed, we learn almost nothing—just as the documents of the era make no mention—about the young woman’s experiences ‘in the other world’, a world to which her consciousness had been transported during her long period of cataleptic confinement. What superhuman shock caused her to withdraw completely into herself and fall silent upon her return from physical paralysis? Only the calls for collective repentance because of ‘the earth burning with sin’ suggest a glimpse of a hellish scene, much like those witnessed by certain saints, from the Righteous Lazarus, who was raised from the dead on the fourth day—of whom it is said that after his resurrection he never again smiled or laughed— and right up to the righteous of the last days, such as the Venerable Matrona of Moscow, in visions recorded in ascetic chronicles, which likewise call for severe repentance.
In the final sequence, we discern a subtle and apt Tarkovskian nod. Whilst having her hair shorn short in the psychiatric hospital where she is forcibly admitted for ‘anti-Soviet mystical conspiracy’, the main character slowly turns, with a faint smile (her first smile), her scorched lips and her liberated gaze, full of compassion, towards the blackened pigeons on the hospital’s grimy windowsill – an evocation of the pigeons which, according to legend, fed her unseen during the four months she was confined to her body. As the shot deepens, panning sideways across a sad, leafless forest edge, its silhouette looming desolately over a gloomy steelworks – the leitmotif backdrop of the industrial city, the setting for the film’s action – a newly introduced, celestial and soaring musical theme recalls the transcendent musical motif by the legendary composer Eduard Artemiev from the finale of the film The Stalker (1979).
Of course, a vast gulf separates the cinematic genres and character types of the two films, as well as their relationship to reality and symbolism: namely, the young, atheist and arrogant female worker in Proshkin’s film, and the gentle, mute little girl in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. From the perspective of their relationship to the everyday and to the symbolic, the two characters are polar opposites. Even if a historical epic with the flavour of a journalistic investigation cannot be compared to a metaphysical parable, the connection between the endings of the two films is not without reason. For the mystical meaning – the call for collective repentance and a return to faith – towards which Proșkin’s The Miracle converges is fully realised in the metanoic polyphony (personal, collective and cosmic) in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a landmark film for many generations of filmmakers. Indeed, Yuri Arabov’s admiration for Andrei Tarkovsky is well known.
Conclusions
The punitive silence imposed on the arrogant young woman—not for the act of dancing itself, but for her impermissible breach of the ‘transcendent barrier’ (that is, of proper deference towards God’s saints)— transports the reckless unbeliever from the crude, materialistic and God-fearing dimension of her era into a mysterious space of silence-as-imposed-asceticism, a penance which, after four months of torment, to the gateway into the metanoic realm of transfiguring silence—a mystical silence of the same calibre as that of the mute little girl in Tarkovsky’s Stalker or the other ‘mystical autisms’ of Tarkovsky’s characters. A long and arduous unseen journey leads our heroine from silence as a punishment for spiritual deafness to the word of God, to the mystical silence of hesychasm, towards which the film’s final frame leads both her and the audience.
‘After recovering from her stupor, the heroine begins to see the other side of the miracle and receives the gift of healing,’ observes Oksana Golovko, editor of the Christian dialogue magazine Foma, in an interview with Yuri Arabov about the film, published in December 2009. The spiritual ‘realm’ in which the inner transformations of the heroine from Kuibyshev took place is not part of the film’s narrative; therefore, we can only vaguely surmise its existence. This universe ‘beyond the image’ is the coda suggested by the final shot, a burst into a higher dimension that defies the aggressive anti-religious ideology of the era, an ethereal dimension which, in keeping with the canon of silence imposed by the icon of Saint Nicholas, not even the screenplay dared to explore. Only a spiritualised smile and a compassionate gaze, a few grey doves, not yet ready to soar aloft, and a musical motif with celestial overtones speak of this.
- 1
Further historical information on ‘Khrushchev’s blow to Orthodoxy’: https://www.stoletie.ru/territoriya_istorii/hruschevskiy_udar_po_pravoslaviju_2008-10-17.ht
- 2
Not to be confused with Aleksandr Proșkin.
- 3
Another miracle, this time much more recent, was the reception of the Sacrament of Holy Baptism by the film director Aleksandr Proshkin in 2008, whilst filming was underway. The event took place without any media fanfare, but it was reported by the Orthodox press (the magazine ‘Neskuchnyi sad’, http://www.nsad.ru/?issue=48§ion;=9999&article;=1023, etc.).
- 4
The legendary CPSU Congress of the ‘Khrushchev Thaw’ marked a break with the climate of Stalinist political terror, but not a relaxation of the persecution of the Church and of religion in general, towards which Khrushchev harboured a radical aversion, even greater than that of Stalin.