Artistic Representation of Man Making Projects in the Context of Post War Culture (Based on Soviet Cinema from 1945 to 1990)

This article examines Soviet cinema (1945–1990) to explore how artistic representations reflect projects for making the New Soviet Man. The scope of the study is limited to the post-war situation understood as an invariant of post-conflict culture. The initial idea is that in the post-war period, human experience formed during the war, axiological attitudes, and ways of adaptation are not abolished when society transitions to peaceful times but become building material and a resource for designing the present and the future. The man-making project is of particular significance in the realm of socio-cultural design. It involves the development of human qualities at the cognitive, axiological, and physical levels, which are essential for the successful execution of social projects. In this regard, the arts, particularly cinema, play a pivotal role in the process of anthropological engineering. The study references several films in which the past war is depicted as an event, a memory, a backdrop for understanding human transformations, a criterion for evaluating actions, and a potential resource for building the future. These themes are explored in depth. The thematic material is analysed by period as follows: the post-war decade (“late Stalinism”), the Thaw, the transition period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and “stagnation” or late socialism. In each period, two factors are used to assess the interpretation of the war theme: (a) the temporal factor, i.e., the time elapsed since the war; and (b) the сurrent situation, i.e., the ongoing man-making project aligned both with top-down institutional goals and bottom-up societal needs, shaped by the condition of human resources. Filmmakers become mediators between the subjects of engineering, and this provides a basis for obtaining information about both the real anthropological transformations in Soviet society and the projective efforts of artists and the authorities. A comparative analysis of the periods leads to conclusions about the prolonged use of the military theme as a resource for engineering the Soviet man from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s; the impossibility of using the experience of war as building material for the future; and the need to search for new guidelines for development outside the military discourse during the late socialist period.