Constructing National-Cultural Identity in the Context of Institutional Collapse: An Interpretation of Stanislav Govorukhin's Film "The Voroshilov Shooter"

The article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of Stanislav Govorukhin's film "The Voroshilov Sharpshooter" (1999). Considering the director's work in the context of the dramatic evolution of Russian society at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the author highlights the key role of this film in the process of national-cultural self-determination in the post-Soviet era. The study examines the phenomenon of institutional collapse in the 1990s, which gave rise to a state of anomie and a vacuum of values. Based on a detailed analysis of the narrative structure, the semiotics of the characters, and the visual decisions of the film, the model of identity proposed by Stanislav Govorukhin is reconstructed. The figure of the main character, played by Mikhail Ulyanov, occupies a central place in the analysis, interpreted as a carrier of the sacred code of the Great Victory and the archaic ethos of honor, entering into an irreconcilable conflict with the new cynical order of the "others." Special attention is paid to the analysis of the intertextual function of the film's title, the semiotics of weapons, and the spatial opposition of "us versus them." The author considers the act of self-justice as a political-philosophical gesture of claiming sovereignty in conditions where the state has renounced its protective functions, as well as a mechanism for consolidating the community of "us" around ritualized violence, which in this configuration acquires a quasi-sacred character and the function of restoring a violated norm. The central argument of the article is that the conceptual simplicity and binary nature of the artistic world of "The Voroshilov Sharpshooter" form the foundation on which the film builds its therapeutic function and gains the status of a manifesto in mass consciousness. It is concluded that "The Voroshilov Sharpshooter" represents not just genre cinema but a profound social diagnosis of the era and a key text for understanding the processes of forming the cultural code of Russia in a pivotal historical period.