Soviet film found its ultimate realization when it became the medium of Soviet historiography. Reconstruction of Soviet and Russian history, undertaken by the Bolsheviks, implied a radical revision of historical record. History, in other words, had to be recaptured as an evil present, and this present, in turn, depicted as something that could be changed. Film was the ideal medium for such a strategy because its photographic nature could create a convincing audio-visual, chromatic simulacrum of the past - one that embodied the image of history that corresponded to the society's expectations.

Perestroika delayed the process of the evaluation of Russian and Soviet history. The society, first, had to recapture what it had forgotten. The film, like other arts, aids this anti-amnesia therapy. But the task of film is not only to revive the lost memory. Film must also create the non-existing memory - the memory that corresponds to the expectations of contemporary society - and to embody this memory in the images, pictures, sounds, etc. The 'recaptured' or 'recreated' memory must be introduced into the material world of senses and placed into the symbolical word of signs. One way to accomplish this is through the use of architectural forms in film.

For the first time in this century, the reconstruction of Moscow planned by the city for the year 2000, takes the form of the "the recreation of the historical centre": the reconstruction of the destroyed monuments of the Russian history; restoring the original names to streets and functions, to the buildings (the cathedrals and aristocratic assembly halls that had once been converted to the worker-clubs must now be reconverted).

Semiotization of the old and new architectural monuments was one of the functions of Soviet art, and it was carried out in the most imaginative and successful manner. E.g., Sergei Eisenstein transformed the old symbolical architectural forms, like the Winter Palace in "October" (1927), into a new one; likewise, Grigorii Alexandrov was able to create in the 30's a new symbolical geography of Moscow. A late Soviet avant-garde movement known as SotsArt played with the symbolical forms of the Soviet culture and placed their signs into a new context. This is the combined legacy that the new Russian film had to take into account. In other words, it had to deal with all these signs, had to integrate the Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet forms into the one signifying chain.

The past constructed in recent Russian films is often structured in accordance with both Soviet nostalgia and Russian mythology - the memory that need to be recaptured is transformed into a phantasm. We have not the deep "historical" perspective but a landscape with some architectural forms (the embodiments of the memory) like a chain of disconnected signs. The topography of memory is formed by the temples (pre-Christian as well as Christian), Stalinist monuments and summer residences combining in one way or another Ivan Turgenev's "Nest of the Gentlefolk" (dvorianskoe gnezdo), Vladimir Nabokov's "aristocratic estate" (usad'ba), and Chekhov's dacha. I will analyze these architectural topoi and their functions in the new Russian films such as "Lebedinoe ozero. Zona" (Swan Lake. [Concentration Camp] Zone) by Yuri Il'enko, "Serp i molot" (Hammer & Sickle) by Sergei Livnev, "Luna Park" by Pavel Lungin and "Opalennyie solntsem" (Burnt by the Sun) by Nikita Mikhalkov.