Filmmaking as Cultural Aggression

The article discusses cinematic depopulation, the strategy of appropriation of the colonized by the colonizer widely used in the Soviet and post-Soviet cinema made in Ukraine and Russia and, until now, never analyzed in academic literature. The cinematic depopulation is a mode of filmic representation whereby a given ethnoscape (Ukraine) is cleansed of its national community (Ukrainians) and instead is populated by the colonizer (Russians) as if it were an integral part of his historical territory. As a form of cultural imperialism, this strategy has, until quite recently, been widely used in both Soviet and post-Soviet Russian and Ukrainian filmmaking to promote the idea of Ukraine conceivable outside of and without the Ukrainian language, culture, and other attributes of Ukrainian identity.