Eisenstein and the Soviet Icon

The strangest chapter in the afterlife of St. Alexander Nevsky is its Soviet one: the militantly atheist regime that in the 1930s was demolishing churches and imprisoning clergy reached back to a medieval Orthodox saint and recast him — stripped of his sanctity — as a secular national hero of the Russian land against German aggression. The vehicle was Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, with Sergei Prokofiev’s cantata score and Nikolai Cherkasov in the title role; the film’s Battle on the Ice fixed the popular image of massed Teutonic knights swallowed by cracking ice. Pulled from circulation after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and triumphantly re-released after the German invasion of 1941, the figure was crowned in 1942 by a Soviet military Order of Alexander Nevsky — the only Soviet decoration bearing the name of a canonized saint. This file reports that instrumentalization as historical fact, even-handedly, neither endorsing nor sneering.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Right-Believing Prince)

The Paradox of a Soviet Saint

To understand what Eisenstein’s film did with Alexander Nevsky, one has to hold two facts together. The first is that the Soviet state of the 1930s was conducting one of the most sustained assaults on the Orthodox Church in Christian history: churches and monasteries were closed and dynamited, the clergy were arrested, exiled, and shot in large numbers, and militant atheism was state policy (on the wider catastrophe of the Russian Church under Soviet power, see St. Tikhon of Moscow, and the repository’s Mongols and Muscovy for the longer arc of Church and state in Russia). The second is that in 1938 this same state financed, produced, and distributed a major prestige film glorifying a man the Church had canonized in 1547 as a Right-Believing Prince.

The contradiction is real, and it is the subject of the principal scholarly study of Nevsky’s memory, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk’s Aleksandr Nevskij: Heiliger – Fürst – Nationalheld (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), which traces the figure across seven centuries and treats the Soviet appropriation as a deliberate act of memory-politics. The resolution of the paradox is that the regime did not revive the saint. It revived the prince — and only those of his attributes that served a secular, patriotic, and above all military purpose. Alexander entered Soviet culture not as the schema-monk Alexis who died in the Orthodox faith, nor as the wonderworker whose relics Peter the Great had translated to his new capital (see Peter the Great and the Lavra), but as a defender of the Russian land against invaders from the West. Sanctity was stripped away; the warrior was kept. The transformation is the interpretive key to everything that follows, and it is an interpretation that Schenk and subsequent scholars advance, not a neutral datum.

The Mid-1930s Turn

The film did not appear in a vacuum. From roughly the mid-1930s the official Soviet line on the Russian past shifted. The early-revolutionary view, associated with the historian M. N. Pokrovsky, had treated the whole pre-revolutionary past as a record of oppression to be repudiated; from about 1934 onward, under the pressures of rising German power and Stalin’s consolidation of a more nationally inflected ideology, selected figures and episodes of the Russian and even tsarist past were rehabilitated as patriotic heritage (Schenk 2004; David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002], on the rehabilitation of pre-revolutionary national heroes). Within this turn, medieval princes who had fought foreign invaders were ideal raw material: their religion could be quietly set aside, their patriotism foregrounded. Alexander Nevsky, victor over Swedes and Germans, was almost made for the role. The commissioning of Eisenstein’s film belongs to this broader campaign — the point is the instrumental use of a national past for present mobilization, and it is presented here as Schenk and Brandenberger present it, as politics, without a verdict on its merits.

Eisenstein’s Film (1938)

Alexander Nevsky premiered on 1 December 1938. It was directed by Sergei Eisenstein — already world-famous for Battleship Potemkin (1925) — working under unusually close political supervision after the suppression of his earlier project Bezhin Meadow; the title role was played by Nikolai Cherkasov, and the score was composed by Sergei Prokofiev, later reworked by the composer into the concert cantata Alexander Nevsky, Op. 78 (on the production and Eisenstein’s method, see David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], and the essays in Russell Merritt’s and Joan Neuberger’s work on Eisenstein’s later films; Neuberger, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019], for the political conditions of Eisenstein’s late career). The film is a work of monumental stylization rather than historical reconstruction: it presents Alexander as a grave, far-seeing leader of the common people, the Teutonic Knights as a faceless, helmeted, quasi-fascist menace, and the conflict as a defense of the Russian land — zemlya russkaya — whose closing line warns that whoever comes to Rus’ with the sword will perish by it.

The contemporary political charge is unmistakable. The Teutonic Knights, with crosses on their robes and a sinister Latin-chanting clergy, were a transparent figure for Nazi Germany, and the film was understood as such by its first audiences (Schenk 2004; Bordwell 1993). The film’s religion is almost entirely displaced onto the enemy: it is the German side that is clerical and crusading, while Alexander’s Rus’ is rendered as a community of soldiers and townsfolk defending their soil. The saint’s own Orthodoxy — central to the medieval Life and to his canonization — is muted nearly to silence. This is the stripping-away in its sharpest form: the Orthodox prince made into a secular patriot, with the religious coloring transferred to the villains.

The Battle on the Ice

The film’s most famous sequence is its long depiction of the Battle on the Ice of 1242, on the frozen surface of Lake Peipus (Chudskoe). Eisenstein staged it as a vast set-piece — the black wedge of armored German knights advancing across the white expanse, the Russian counter-attack, and the climactic cracking of the ice that swallows the heavily armored Westerners — set to Prokofiev’s music. Cinematically it is among the most influential battle sequences ever filmed, and through countless later war films its visual grammar became the template for the screen depiction of medieval combat (Bordwell 1993).

Historically, however, the sequence is very largely an invention. The collapse of the ice under the weight of the knights is not reported in the near-contemporary sources for the battle: the Novgorod First Chronicle and the Life of Alexander Nevsky describe a fight and a pursuit but do not narrate the dramatic ice-drowning that the film made iconic; the detail’s prominence in the popular imagination is owed chiefly to Eisenstein. The scale of the engagement, too, is far smaller in the source-critical literature than in the film’s massed armies. [Disputed: the degree to which the film's Battle on the Ice is historical invention is itself contested — the chronicle and hagiographic record is thin and the numbers are debated; John Fennell, *The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200–1304* (London: Longman, 1983), deflates the encounter to a minor frontier clash, while more conservative readings allow a more substantial battle; the cinematic ice-collapse in particular is not attested in the primary sources. The full source-critical treatment is in [The Scale and the Legend](../03-the-battle-on-the-ice/the-scale-and-the-legend.md) and [Lake Peipus 1242](../03-the-battle-on-the-ice/lake-peipus-1242.md)]. The film thus did not merely dramatize the battle; for the mass public it largely created the image of it — a clear case in which a twentieth-century artwork, not the medieval record, fixed what most people “know” about a thirteenth-century event.

Withdrawal After the Pact, Re-release After the Invasion

The film’s career tracked Soviet foreign policy with almost mechanical precision, which is itself the strongest evidence of how thoroughly it had been understood as an anti-German instrument. On 23 August 1939 the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of non-aggression. With Germany now a treaty partner, an openly anti-German film was an embarrassment, and Alexander Nevsky was quietly withdrawn from circulation (Schenk 2004; Bordwell 1993).

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The film was promptly returned to the screens, now matching the moment exactly, and its imagery and Prokofiev’s music were mobilized for the war effort against the very enemy it had been made to evoke (Schenk 2004). Alexander Nevsky — the medieval prince, refashioned by an atheist regime — became one of the patriotic touchstones of the Soviet war against Germany. That this wartime resonance was genuinely powerful is not in dispute; the film spoke to a real and broadly felt defense of the homeland under invasion. The even-handed point is twofold: the patriotic force was authentic, and the figure carrying it was a saint of a Church the same state had spent the previous decade persecuting.

The Wartime Order of Alexander Nevsky (1942)

The wartime appropriation reached its institutional peak with a military decoration. By a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 29 July 1942 the Soviet Union established a series of military orders named for commanders of the Russian past, including the Order of Suvorov, the Order of Kutuzov, and the Order of Alexander Nevsky, awarded to officers for skillful command and personal valor (Schenk 2004; on Soviet decorations generally, the standard handbooks of Soviet orders and medals). [Disputed: the exact instituting details — the precise date, the grouping with the Suvorov and Kutuzov orders, and the order of statutes — are given slightly differently across sources; the standard reckoning places the establishing decree on 29 July 1942 alongside the Suvorov and Kutuzov orders, but the specifics of class, statute, and first awards vary by reference, and this file follows the common dating without resolving the minor discrepancies].

Two features make the Order of Alexander Nevsky a telling artifact. First, it was the only Soviet order to bear the name of a canonized Orthodox saint — an atheist state’s highest-profile borrowing of a holy name for a secular military honor (Schenk 2004). Second, and pointedly, its design did not derive from any icon or ecclesiastical image of the saint. There was no contemporary portrait of the thirteenth-century prince, and the medallion instead bore a profile modeled on Nikolai Cherkasov as he appeared in the 1938 film (Schenk 2004). The decoration thus honored not the saint of the Church nor even the prince of the chronicles, but the cinematic Alexander — Eisenstein’s image had become the official face. The secularization was complete: the canonized prince now reached Soviet soldiers through a film actor’s profile stamped on a state medal.

The 1943 Rapprochement as Backdrop

The instrumentalization of Alexander unfolded against a broader and partial wartime thaw between the Soviet state and the Orthodox Church. Under the pressures of the war, Stalin permitted a limited revival: in September 1943 he received the surviving senior hierarchs, and the election of a patriarch — vacant since 1925 — was allowed, restoring the patriarchate that had been suppressed (on the Church under Soviet power and this wartime turn, see St. Tikhon of Moscow and Russian Orthodox Tradition). This rapprochement was tactical and tightly controlled, and it does not cancel the persecutions that preceded it. But it forms the backdrop against which the Soviet use of a saint’s name and image is best understood: a regime that had warred on the Church was, under the strain of a war for survival, selectively re-enlisting elements of the Russian Orthodox past — its saints, its patriotic memory, eventually its hierarchy — in the service of the state.

The Irony, Reported Plainly

The irony at the center of this chapter is sharp enough that it must be stated, and disciplined enough that it must be stated without relish. A militantly atheist state, in the act of persecuting the Orthodox Church and demolishing its buildings, revived one of that Church’s canonized saints as a national hero — stripping his sanctity, keeping his sword, transferring his religion onto his enemies, and finally honoring him through the profile of a film actor on a military medal. The saint of a persecuted Church was conscripted into the war effort of the persecuting state. That this conscription drew on, and fed, a genuine and broadly shared patriotism does not dissolve the irony; it is part of it.

The repository’s stance, per its methodology, is to report this as the historically attested instrumentalization it was — documented above all in Schenk’s study of Nevsky’s memory and in the film scholarship — and to render no verdict beyond what those sources support. The veneration of St. Alexander Nevsky as a Right-Believing Prince is one thing; the Soviet myth of “Alexander Nevsky” the secular war-hero is another; and the discipline of this collection is to keep the two distinct while reporting, even-handedly, how thoroughly the modern era fused them. The continuation of that fusion into the post-Soviet period is the subject of the companion file (see The Post-Soviet Symbol).

References

Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin. Aleksandr Nevskij: Heiliger – Fürst – Nationalheld. Eine Erinnerungsfigur im russischen kulturellen Gedächtnis (1263–2000). Cologne: Böhlau, 2004. (The definitive study of the memory of Nevsky; the Soviet appropriation, the 1938 film as memory-politics, the withdrawal after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and re-release after June 1941, and the 1942 Order of Alexander Nevsky with its Cherkasov-derived profile.)
Alexander Nevsky. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Music by Sergei Prokofiev; Nikolai Cherkasov in the title role. Mosfilm, premiered 1 December 1938.
Prokofiev, Sergei. Alexander Nevsky, cantata, Op. 78 (concert reworking of the film score).
Bordwell, David. The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. (Eisenstein’s method, the staging of the Battle on the Ice, and the film’s political conditions.)
Neuberger, Joan. This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. (The political supervision of Eisenstein’s late career.)
Brandenberger, David. National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. (The mid-1930s rehabilitation of pre-revolutionary national heroes within which the film was commissioned.)
Fennell, John. The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200–1304. London: Longman, 1983. (The skeptical reading of the scale of the Battle on the Ice against which the film’s depiction is measured.)
Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 29 July 1942, establishing the Orders of Suvorov, Kutuzov, and Alexander Nevsky (cited by date; for the instituting details and statutes see the standard handbooks of Soviet orders and medals).