“Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19).
Political films rarely seek to please. They avoid easy emotions and commercial formulas, choosing instead to confront harsh and uncomfortable realities that affect us all. Precisely for this reason, such films are seldom screened in mainstream cinemas. Among these uncompromising works, one film left a particularly strong impression on me: The Factory, written and directed by the young Russian filmmaker Yuriy Bykov.[1] The reason is simple. This film dares to answer a question that is rarely asked aloud, yet quietly troubles many consciences: how far should a person go in the pursuit of justice among their fellow human beings, using only their own strength and actions?
The unsettling plot
In today’s Russia, a dilapidated factory producing metal construction materials is located in a vast, desolate field. Its owner, Kalughin, is a cynical individual with shady business dealings, hidden political crimes, and considerable local influence. He suddenly informs the workers that he is closing the factory, offering only the vague promise that he will pay their final wages at some point. As the days pass, the families’ desperation, deprivation, and revolt grow until a group of five individuals band together, kidnap Kalughin and hold him hostage in the factory. They demand all the money in exchange for his life.
The film draws the viewer into the perspective of the impoverished workers who want to take justice into their own hands in a hostile post-industrial, post-socialist world without unions to defend their rights or a future. Here, local and central mafias dominate politics and the economy, defying the law. However, the moral problem deepens as the plot progresses, confirming the saying that “the devil is in the details”.
The boss informs his security and protection group of the situation and calls them with the bag of money to “negotiate”, but they tacitly agree to physically eliminate the unskilled workers, who are unfamiliar with aggressive actions and weapon handling. The only experienced person is their lonely, taciturn leader, who is trying to forget his bloody, unwanted past as a fighter in Russia’s recent wars. He had enlisted out of patriotism, but the army turned him into a mercenary. Mercenaries cannot be heroes, though; they are paid assassins, faceless and nameless, exploited by hidden forces. Now, alone and under threat of unemployment, he has found a dismal job and is secretly struggling with epileptic seizures, and physical and psychological trauma.
Through the workers’ protest, he becomes an outlaw, eager to seek justice for himself and his fellow workers. He returns the money to the guards and attempts to set up a sting operation by calling the police, the press, and prosecutors to the factory in the middle of the night. He hopes to expose the desperate situation of the employees and create a public scandal. However, the representatives of these authorities prove to be powerless and intimidated. The police withdraw on Kalughin’s orders, the prosecutors remain silent, and the filmed report seems unlikely to have any impact when broadcast the next day. At dawn, the workers are stormed and shot one by one by the boss’s guards.
The disarming of moral conscience
The outlaw is the last to be riddled with bullets and chooses not to defend himself. Why? Because, in the final confrontation, the boss dismantles his motivations and values. In response to his desire for personal revenge, the uncaring and untrustworthy boss Kalughin describes the broader picture of chain bankruptcies in a dying industry. In response to his intention to expose the corrupt business dealings, Kalughin convinces him of a plausible scenario in which his business partners would even liquidate him to silence him before a trial. In response to his aspiration for justice and his faith in it, Kalughin shows the worker the extent to which individuals are overwhelmed by injustice because the system is corrupt and has international ramifications. Finally, in response to the lonely outlaw’s spirit of sacrifice for his comrades, so that they may all have a better life, Kalughin’s devastating reply leaves him speechless: “You don’t want them to have a better life; you want to drag them into the misery of your failed life.” This final retort is like a dagger to the nameless outlaw, destroying his will to fight and to live.
It is only from this point that the viewer begins to reflect on the motivations and values that drive this character. This is especially so since his gesture of surrendering to fate does not impress the boss, who labels him a fool. However, the leader of the gang of hired assassins is impressed, feeling solidarity with the powerless man’s suffering, as he too had a wife with cancer and a young child at home. Ultimately, he chooses to walk home, resigning from his job as a monster’s guard.
Today, many people who have been wronged can identify with the outlaw, which is why screenwriter and director Bykov presents a generic personal profile that many in this category can relate to: ordinary men with physical strength and natural intelligence who are eager to succeed in life. They are responsible for their families, follow the rules, obey their superiors and accept military or administrative discipline. They are also patriotic and love their country, their hometowns and traditions, as well as their friends.
Following the social upheavals of recent decades, there have been widespread personal failures, with the working class falling from its privileged position in life. The stable, predictable world of the past has fallen apart, and the new world has not necessarily brought anything good—at least, not to those with whom history seems to dispense without recognition or gratitude. Now, they are looking for explanations in phenomena they learn about through widely publicised information, in the already globalised press[2]: discourses about “economic assassins”, unemployment, the harmful influence of corporations on some states’ economies, and the corruption of the few who rule—the oligarchs who monopolise political and economic life, and consequently control the fate of many factories, plants, laboratories, and construction sites that belonged to the state before the recent revolutions.
However, our focus here is not on analysing the precarious material situation of large segments of the population, but rather on the moral response of social revolt, which can lead to violent, armed reactions and a new form of “lawlessness”.
The concept of justice in human wisdom
Humanity’s general culture has preserved reflections and aphorisms about justice that mirror our aspiration for an ideal, good, and serene world, as well as the bitter realisation that this is unachievable on Earth. From proverbs to the works of renowned authors, from ancient Greece to the present day, we have inherited a wealth of illustrative sayings that are either stored in our memory or accessible in books and online: “Justice walks around with a broken head” and “He who is guilty rests in peace, and he who is innocent weeps and sighs” (old Romanian sayings); “Repay evil with justice and kindness with kindness” (Chinese proverb); “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (Martin Luther King Jr.); “People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights” (Indira Gandhi).
In his poem “Emperor and Proletarian”, Eminescu masterfully summarises the secular conception of those who believe that justice can be established on Earth in a society where everyone lives in complete equality and brotherhood.
“Tell me, what is justice? The mighty build their wall,
With wealth and pomp enclosing laws that serve them all.
Through stolen goods, united, endlessly they scheme
Against the ones they doom to toil, to sweat, to dream,
Whose living labor they enslave for all their days.
Break down this order, cruel, unjust, and cold,
That splits the world in wretched poor and bloated gold!
If after death no promised recompense is found,
Then make this life a place where justice reigns around:
Let each receive an equal share, and live as brothers bound!”
The final stanza of this extensive poem emphasises the existential pessimism of a secular strategist who devotes all his energy to the social realm, in contrast to the nothingness he envisages beyond death. However, this perspective is so oppressive, dark, and devoid of meaning that the life of the world, and indeed the universe itself, is reduced to the fragile and transient realm of a dream, created by the omnipotent and eternal force of death.
“When you know that this dream ends only in death,
That all remains behind you, unchanged by your breath—
However much you mend the world, however you strive,
The endless pursuit grows weary… and a thought comes alive:
That life itself is but the dream of eternal death.”[3]
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, who lived in a polytheistic world, believed that the values which give order to our lives belong to the transcendent realm; therefore, both goodness and the sense of justice are inspired from above, by the gods, when we examine and concern ourselves with such matters[4]. In the film The Factory, I noticed that all the characters had one thing in common: none of them showed any form of religiosity. The exception was one of the killer guards employed by the boss, who ridiculously made the sign of the cross before setting out to kill.
I consider this lack of reference to God to be a significant detail in explaining these characters’ life choices and their decision to take justice into their own hands. Why is that? Because a secular perspective reduces the universe of life to the dimensions of matter and the miserable present. This ultimately leads to the conviction that justice must and can be served here on Earth in our lifetime. If your fellow human beings treat you unfairly or the laws are not respected or are unfair, you may feel entitled to take revenge or become unfair to others in order to get the best possible share of the spoils.
It is easy to go from being a vigilante or a liberating hero to an oppressor, or from a victim to an executioner. Sometimes, these morally questionable actions happen gradually and go unnoticed; at other times, they appear as compromises, collateral damage, or necessary sacrifices along the way. However, the great ideas and values that inspire action can remain positive and “guiding”, even when they are utopian or when crimes are committed in their name. “Towards a better and fairer world!”—this was the slogan of the communist regime, which was overthrown in 1989 after much bloodshed.
A pious perspective on justice
An authentic pious perspective that translates into Christian values, decisions, and actions completely changes one’s relationship with worldly justice. Through overuse, appeals made “for heaven’s sake” have lost much of their original moral force; yet they were meant to mark a clear boundary between what lies within our human power and responsibility, and what exceeds both our authority and our capacity. For such actions, the faithful person is assured that they are considered and weighed by God; that vengeance belongs to Him; and that humans cannot find peace by usurping the divine role in the administration of justice.
Above all, it acknowledges that justice cannot be fully realised in this world and that it far exceeds human capabilities to judge, understand all aspects of cases and their interrelationships, and deliver comprehensive verdicts on individuals. This is why, for millennia, God has patiently announced a complete and edifying final judgement for all those involved. In the final prophetic book of the Bible, Revelation, He tells the saints to be patient until their fellow believers, who are persecuted on earth, join them (see Revelation 6:11).
Those who administer justice arbitrarily seem not to realise that, had they accepted and waited for divine justice and acted only within the framework desired by God for their social life, they would have enjoyed the comfort of the soul and the divine peace that cannot come from humans, even in the midst of the “hurricane” of their lives (see John 14:27).
Moreover, one of the most painful details in which the devil truly hides is this: once drawn into a brutal, self-appointed crusade for justice, people themselves begin to fall—morally and humanly. Either events take an unexpected turn for which they are unprepared or lack the resources to face, or betrayals, cowardice, and breakdowns of solidarity emerge; or they are overwhelmed by the situation and make desperate choices; or they snap under the pressure; or they are misled, or turned against one another. Heroes often find themselves doing things they never thought they were capable of: the outlaw from The Factory ends up shooting a young colleague in distress who backed down in the face of the threat that their families would become victims of Kalughin’s criminals.
The magistrates have adopted the mythological image of the goddess of justice, Themis, as their symbol. She is depicted as a blindfolded woman holding a scale in one hand and a sword pointing downwards in the other (signifying that justice has been done and the weapons are silent). This symbol is so human, showing how fragile the balance of justice is when measured on scales under threat of a weapon while “blindfolded”. This image contrasts with the biblical symbol of the Last Judgement and the all-knowing divine Judge, whom “every eye will see” (Revelation 1:7) and before whom “every knee will bow” and every nation will offer praise (Romans 14:11).
The Christian perspective helps us to understand that the people who hurt us are driven by existential and spiritual evil, which cannot be fought with brute force. However, the power of faith can restore our inner balance and save our moral conscience from degradation by making us more understanding of the limitations of our fellow human beings. At least, we are given this incomparable chance since God Himself promises the believer, “I will contend with those who contend with you…” (Isaiah 49:25).
In an impressive reflection on the benefits of religious faith, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) wrote, “Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further. Whether there are also many who do not discover it in our own age I leave open… But life has tasks enough, even for one who fails to come as far as faith, and when he loves these honestly life won’t be a waste either, even if it can never compare with that of those who had a sense of the highest and grasped it.”[5]