Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  971

  MOSKVITIN, IVAN YURIEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Hulme, Derick L. (1990). The Political Olympics: Moscow, Afghanistan, and the 1980 U.S. Boycott. New York: Praeger.

  PAUL R. JOSEPHSON

  Lenin. This statement, whether apocryphal or not, became the motto of the Soviet motion picture industry. Because of the central part the movies played in Soviet propaganda, the motion picture industry had an enormous impact on culture, society, and politics.

  MOSKVITIN, IVAN YURIEVICH

  Seventeenth-century Cossack and explorer of Russia’s Pacific coast.

  The Cossack adventurer Ivan Yurievich Mosk-vitin was one of the many explorers and frontiersmen who took part in the great push eastward that transformed Siberia during the reigns of tsars Mikhail (1613-1645) and Alexei (1645-1676).

  In 1639 Moskvitin left Yakutsk at the head of a squadron of twenty Cossacks, seeking to confirm the existence of what local natives called the “great sea-ocean.” Proceeding east, then southward, Moskvitin encountered the mountains of the Jug-Jur Range, which forms a barrier separating the Siberian interior from the Pacific coastline. Moskvitin threaded his way through the mountains by following the Maya, Yudoma, and Ulya river basins.

  Tracing the Ulya to its mouth brought Moskvitin to the shore of the Sea of Okhotsk. He and his men were therefore the first Russians to reach the Pacific Ocean by land. The party also built a fortress at the mouth of the Ulya, Russia’s first Pacific outpost. Until 1641, Moskvitin charted much of the Okhotsk shoreline. Mapping an overland route to the eastern coast and establishing a presence there were key moments in Russia’s expansion into Siberia and Asia. See also: EXPLORATION; SIBERIA

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bobrick, Benson. (1992). East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia. New York: Poseidon. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1993). Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House.

  JOHN MCCANNON

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  The statement “Cinema is for us the most important of all arts” has been attributed to Vladimir

  EARLY RUSSIAN CINEMA, 1896-1918

  The moving picture age began in Russia on May 6, 1896, at the Aquarium amusement park in St. Petersburg. By summer of that year, the novelty was a featured attraction at the popular provincial trading fairs. Until 1908, however, the vast majority of movies shown in Russia were French. That year, Alexander Drankov (1880-1945), a portrait photographer and entrepreneur, opened the first Russian owned and operated studio, in St. Petersburg. His inaugural picture, Stenka Razin, was a great success and inspired other Russians to open studios.

  By 1913, Drankov had been overshadowed by two Russian-owned production companies, Khan-zhonkov and Thiemann amp; Reinhardt. These were located in Moscow, the empire’s Hollywood. The outbreak of war in 1914 proved an enormous boon to the fledgling Russian film industry, since distribution paths were cut, making popular French movies hard to come by. (German films were forbidden altogether.) By 1916 Russia boasted more than one hundred studios that produced five hundred pictures. The country’s four thousand movie theaters entertained an estimated 2 million spectators daily.

  Until 1913 most Russian films were newsreels and travelogues. The few fiction films were mainly adaptations of literary classics, with some historical costume dramas. The turning point in the development of early Russian cinema was The Keys to Happiness (1913), directed by Yakov Protazanov (1881-1945) and Vladimir Gardin (1881-1945) for the Thiemann amp; Reinhardt studio. This full-length melodrama, based on a popular novel, was the legendary blockbuster of the time.

  Although adaptations of literary classics remained popular with Russian audiences, the contemporary melodrama was favored during the war years. The master of the genre was Yevgeny Bauer (1865-1917). Bauer’s complex psychological portraits, technical innovations, and painterly cinematic style raised Russian cinema to new levels of artistry. Bauer worked particularly well with actresses and made Vera Kholodnaya (1893-1919) a legend. Bauer’s surviving films-which include

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  Twilight of a Woman’s Soul (1913), Child of the Big City (1914), Silent Witnesses (1914), Children of the Age (1915), The Dying Swan (1916), and To Happiness (1917)-provide a vivid picture of a lost Russia.

  The revolutionary year 1917 brought joy and misgiving to filmmakers. Political, economic, and social instability shuttered most theaters by the beginning of 1918. Studios began packing up and moving south to Yalta, to escape Bolshevik control. By 1920, Russia’s filmmakers were on the move again, to Paris, Berlin, and Prague. Russia’s great actor Ivan Mozzhukhin (1890-1939, known in France as “Mosjoukine”) was one of few who enjoyed as much success abroad as at home.

  SOVIET SILENT CINEMA, 1918-1932

  The first revolutionary film committees formed in 1918, and on August 27, 1919, the Bolshevik government nationalized the film industry, placing it under the control of Narkompros, the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment. Nationalization represented wishful thinking at best, since Moscow’s movie companies had already decamped, dismantling everything that could be carried.

  Filmmaking during the Civil War of 1917-1922 took place under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Lenin was acutely aware of the importance of disseminating the Bolshevik message to a largely illiterate audience as quickly as possible, yet film stock and trained cameramen were in short supply- not to mention projectors and projectionists. Apart from newsreels, the early Bolshevik repertory consisted of “agit-films,” short, schematic, but exciting political messages. Films were brought to the provinces on colorfully decorated agit-trains, which carried an electrical generator to enable the agitki to be projected on a sheet. Innovations like these enabled Soviet cinema to rise from the ashes of the former Russian film industry, leading eventually to the formation of Goskino, the state film trust, in 1922 (reorganized as Sovkino in 1924).

  Since most established directors, producers, and actors had already fled central Russia for territories controlled by the White armies, young men and women found themselves rapidly rising to positions of prominence in the revolutionary cinema. They were drawn to film as “the art of the future.” Many of them had some experience in theater production, but Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970), who had begun his cinematic career with the great prerevo-lutionary director Bauer, led the way, though he was still a teenager.

  Poster advertising the 1925 Soviet film Strike. © SWIM INK/ CORBIS

  By the end of the civil war, most of Soviet Russia’s future filmmakers had converged on Moscow. Many of them (Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and their “collectives”) were connected to the Proletkult theater, where they debated and dreamed.

  Because film stock was carefully rationed until the economy recovered in 1924, young would-be directors had to content themselves with rehearsing the experiments they hoped to film and writing combative theoretical essays for the new film journals. The leading director-theorists were Kuleshov, Eisenstein (1898-1948), Vsevolod Pu-dovkin (1893-1953), Dziga Vertov (1896-1954, born Denis Kaufman), and the “FEKS” team of Grig-ory Kozintsev (1905-1973) and Leonid Trauberg (1902-1990). Kuleshov wrote most clearly about the art of the cinema as a revolutionary agent, but Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s theories (and movies) had

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  an impact that extended far beyond the Soviet Union’s borders.

  The debates between Eisenstein and Vertov symbolized the most extreme positions in the theoretical conflicts among the revolutionary avant-garde of the 1920s. Eisenstein believed in acted cinema but borrowed Kuleshov’s idea of the actor as a type; he preferred working with non-professionals. Vertov privileged non-acted cinema and argued that the movie camera was a “cinema eye” (kino-glaz) that would catch “life off-guard” (zhizn vrasplokh)-yet he was an inveterate manipulator of time and space in his pictures. Eisen-stein believed in a propulsive narrative driven by a “montage of attractions,” with the masses as the protagonists, whereas Vertov was d
ecisively anti-narrative, believing that a brilliantly edited kaleidoscope of images best revealed the contours of revolutionary life.

  Eisenstein’s first two feature films, Strike (1925) and Battleship Potemkin (1926), enjoyed enormous success with critics and politicians but were much less popular with the workers and soldiers whose interests they were supposed to service. The same was true of Vertov’s pictures. The intelligentsia loved Forward, Soviet! and One-Sixth of the World (both 1926), but proletarians were nonplussed.

  Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Kozintsev, and Trauberg (who directed as a team) were more successful translating revolutionary style and content for mass audiences because they retained plot and character at the heart of their films. The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), one of Kuleshov’s earliest efforts, appeared as a favorite film in audience surveys through the end of the 1920s. The same was true of Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), a loose adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s famous novel. Kozintsev and Trauberg’s The Overcoat (1926) is a good example of the extremes to which young directors pushed the classical narrative.

  Despite this wealth of talent, Soviet avant-garde films never came close to challenging the popularity of American movies in the 1920s. Douglas Fairbanks’s and Charlie Chaplin’s pictures drew sell-out audiences. In response to the pressures to make Soviet entertainment films-and the need to show a profit-Goskino and the quasi-private studio Mezhrapbom invested more heavily in popular films than in the avant-garde, to the great dismay of the latter, but to the joy of audiences. The leading popular filmmaker was Protazanov, who returned to Soviet Russia in 1923 to make a string of hits, starting with the science fiction adventure, Aelita (1924).

  Also very successful with the spectators were the narrative films of younger directors such as Fridrikh Ermler (1898-1967, born Vladimir Breslav), Boris Barnet (1902-1965), and Abram Room (1894-1976). Ermler earned fame for his trenchant social melodramas (Katka’s Reinette Apples, 1926 and The Parisan Cobbler, 1928). Barnet’s intelligent comedies such as The Girl with the Hatbox (1927) sparkled, as did his adventure serial Miss Mend (1926),. Room was perhaps the most versatile of the three, ranging from a revolutionary adventure, Death Bay (1926), to a remarkable melodrama about a m?nage ? trois, Third Meshchanskaya Street (1927, known in the West as Bed and Sofa).

  It must be emphasized that moviemaking was not a solely Russian enterprise, although distribution politics often made it difficult for films from Ukraine, Armenia, and Georgia to be considered more than exotica. The greatest artist to emerge from the non-Russian cinemas was certainly Ukraine’s Alexander Dovzhenko (1894-1956), but Armenia’s Amo Bek-Nazarov (1892-1965) and Georgia’s Nikolai Shengelaya (1903-1943) made important contributions to early Soviet cinema as well.

  In 1927, as the New Economic Policy era was coming to a close, Soviet cinema was flourishing. Cinema had returned to all provincial cities and rural areas were served by cinematic road shows. There was a lively film press that reflected a variety of aesthetic positions. Production was more than respectable, about 140 to 150 titles annually. Six years later, production had plummeted to a mere thirty-five films.

  Many factors contributed to the crisis in cinema that was part of the Cultural Revolution. First, in 1927, sound was introduced to cinema, an event with significant artistic and economic implications. Second, proletarianist organizations such as RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, and ARRK, the Association of Workers in Revolutionary Cinematography were infiltrated by extremist elements who supported the government’s aims to turn the film industry into a tool for propagandizing the collectivization and industrialization campaigns. This became apparent at the first All-Union Party Conference on Cinema Affairs in 1928. Third, in 1929, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the leading proponent of a diverse cinema, was ousted as commissar

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  of enlightenment, and massive purges of the film industry began that lasted through 1931.

  These troubled times saw the production of four great films, the last gasp of Soviet silent cinema: Ermler’s The Fragment of the Empire, Kozint-sev and Trauberg’s New Babylon, Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (all 1929), and the following year, Dovzhenko’s Earth.

  STALINIST CINEMA, 1932-1953

  By the end of the Cultural Revolution, it was clear to filmmakers that the era of artistic innovation had ended. Movies and their makers were now “in the service of the state.” Although Socialist Realism was not formally established as aesthetic dogma until 1934, (reconfirmed in 1935 at the All-Union Creative Conference on Cinematographic Affairs), politically astute directors had for several years been making movies that were only slightly more sophisticated than the agit-films of the civil war.

  In the early 1930s, a few of the great artists of the previous decade attempted to adapt their experimental talents to the sound film. These efforts were either excoriated (Kuleshov’s The Great Consoler and Pudovkin’s The Deserter, both 1933) or banned outright (Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, 1937). Film production plummeted, as directors tried to navigate the ever-changing Party line, and many projects were aborted mid-production. Stalin’s intense personal interest and involvement in moviemaking greatly exacerbated tensions.

  Some of the early cinema elite avant-garde were eventually able to rebuild their careers. Kozintsev and Trauberg scored a major success with their popular adventure trilogy: The Youth of Maxim (1935), The Return of Maxim (1937), The Vyborg Side (1939). Pudovkin avoided political confrontations by turning to historical films celebrating Russian heroes of old in Minin and Pozharsky (1939), followed by Suvorov in 1941. Eisenstein likewise found a safe historical subject in the only undisputed masterpiece of the decade, Alexander Nevsky (1938). Others, such as Dovzhenko and Ermler, seriously compromised their artistic reputations by making movies that openly curried Stalin’s favor. Ermler’s The Great Citizen (two parts, 1937-1939) is a particularly notorious example.

  New directors, most of them not particularly talented, moved to the forefront. Novices such as Nikolai Ekk and the Vasiliev Brothers made two of the enduring classics of Socialist Realism: The Road to Life (1931) and Chapayev (1934). Another relative newcomer, Ivan Pyrev, churned out Stalin-pleasing conspiracy films such as The Party Card (1936), about a woman who discovers her husband is a traitor, before turning to canned socialist comedies, of which Tractor Drivers (1939) is the most typical.

  Some of the new generation managed to maintain artistic standards. Mikhail Romm’s revisionist histories of the revolution, Lenin in October (1937) and Lenin in 1918 (1939), which placed Stalin right at Lenin’s side, were the first major hits in his distinguished career. Mark Donskoy’s three-picture adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s autobiography, beginning with Gorky’s Youth (1938) also generated popular acclaim. The most beloved of the major directors of the 1930s was, however, Grigory Alexandrov. Alexandrov, who had worked as Eisen-stein’s assistant until 1932, successfully distanced himself from the maverick director, launching a series of zany musical comedies starring his wife, Lyubov Orlova, in 1934 with The Jolly Fellows.

  When the German armies invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the tightly controlled film industry easily mobilized for the wartime effort. Considered central to the war effort, key filmmakers were evacuated to Kazakhstan, where makeshift studios were quickly constructed in Alma-Ata. With very few exceptions-Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944-1946) being most noteworthy- moviemaking during the war years focused almost exclusively on the war. Newsreels naturally dominated production. The fiction films that were made about the war effort were quite remarkable compared to those of the other combatant nations in that they focused on the active role women played in the partisan movement. One of these, Ermler’s She Defends Her Motherland (1943), which tells the story of a woman who puts aside grief for vengeance, was shown in the United States during the war as No Greater Love.

  The postwar years, until Stalin’s death in 1953, were a cultural wasteland. Film production nearly ground to a ha
lt; only nine films were made in 1950. The wave of denunciations and arrests known as the anti-cosmopolitan campaign roiled the cultural intelligentsia, particularly those who were Jewish such as Vertov, Trauberg, and Eisen-stein. Eisenstein’s precarious health was aggravated by the extreme tensions of the time and the disfavor that greeted the second part of Ivan the Terrible. He became the most famous casualty among filmmakers, dying of a heart attack in 1948 at the age of only fifty. Cold War conspiracy melodramas

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  Movie still of a battle scene from Sergei Eisenstein’s classic Alexander Nevsky (1938).© BETTMANN/CORBIS dominated movie theaters (not unlike McCarthy era films in the United States a few years later), along with ever more extravagant panegyrics to Stalin. Georgian director Mikhail Chiaureli’s first ode to Stalin, The Vow (1946), was followed by The Fall of Berlin (1949), which Richard Taylor has aptly dubbed “the apotheosis of Stalin’s cult of Stalin.”

  SOVIET CINEMA FROM THE THAW THROUGH STAGNATION, 1953-1985

  By the mid-1950s, filmmakers were confident that the Thaw-as Khrushchev’s relaxation of censorship was known-would last long enough for them to express long-dormant creativity. The move from public and political toward the private and personal became a hallmark of the period. Thaw pictures were appreciated not only at home, but also abroad, where they received numerous prizes at international film festivals. There was now a human face to the Soviet colossus. The greatest movies of the period rewrote the history of World War II, the Great Patriotic War. Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958, signaling that Soviet cinema was once again on the world stage after nearly thirty years. Cranes is the story of a woman who betrays her lover, a soldier who is killed at the front, to marry his cousin, a craven opportunist. There is no upbeat ending, no neat resolution. The same can be said of Sergei Bon-darchuk’s The Fate of a Man and Grigory Chukhrai’s The Ballad of a Soldier (both 1959). In the former, a POW returns home to find his entire family dead; in the latter, a very young soldier’s last leave home to help his mother is movingly recorded.