Figure 25.1 Successful Soviet films and the size of their audiences: a montage from an issue of USSR in Construction devoted to Soviet cinema
‘The message of moving pictures was easily comprehensible; the cinema was ideally suited to becoming the “leading medium” in a country that had been catapulted into modernity.’
In the first decade following the Revolution, Soviet cinema had thriven above all on the experience of the great upheaval, the newly available possibilities and formal experiments, even though these reached only a relatively small public, chiefly in the towns. By contrast, during the twenties and thirties the foundations were laid for an indigenous Soviet film industry which reached an entirely new public – the village and the immigrant peasants streaming into the towns. This led to a second cinema boom, after the first one of around 1910. In the old Moscow there had been around a dozen small cinemas. By the mid-1930s there were already fifty-seven large cinemas and, beyond that, 423 venues where films could be shown: workingmen’s clubs, palaces of culture, institutes, Red Army clubs and open-air cinemas. All had become capable of showing ‘talkies’ and possessed the necessary new, costly equipment. New cinemas were among the model buildings of the new Moscow, as could be seen from the Udarnik Cinema, which formed part of the Government House complex.6 In 1938 another model cinema was built. This was the Rodina, which contained two screens with seating for 1,200 spectators. Building plans up to 1945 envisaged a large number of new cinemas; this suggests that something like a systematic process of ‘cinematification’ was intended. ‘From 1928 to 1940 the number of installations quadrupled and the number of tickets sold tripled. Soviet industry was also finally successful in producing its own raw film stock, projectors and other equipment.’7 The cinemas were always sold out. Performances began at around 12 noon. Altogether the statistics reveal that there were around 45 million cinema visits in Moscow during the second half of the thirties. Every Muscovite visited the cinema around ten times a year. In addition, there were the 260 clubs and the educational establishments that showed special film programmes – the Planetarium, the Polytechnical Museum, the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest – with countless millions of visitors annually.8 The sheer numbers of places of entertainment, the cinema programmes printed in the daily papers, the references to cinema visits in memoirs and diaries show the degree to which the cinema had taken its place alongside the theatre, even though the latter still remained a potent authority in Russian cultural life. It meant that the cinema had become a self-evident fact of life in the capital, especially in the eyes of the younger generation.
The new cult of film stars was an integral part of this process. The age of collectivism and asceticism that had characterized the First Five-Year Plan had come to an end. Once again there were identifiable personalities, actors and actresses, favourite figures with whom millions of people could identify and whose tunes had become hits. Individuals, personalities and stars had made a comeback. Their faces could be seen prominently placed on posters and in advertisements. Their names were Liubov' Orlova, Boris Babochkin and Marina Ladynina. They appeared in the penumbra of power, but made no attempt to deny their origins. They were the embodiments of the new, modern, Soviet Russia; they were cultivated and cosmopolitan yet patriotic. They moved in a world of luxury, but conveyed the message that anyone might achieve what they had achieved, if they only made the effort. They exemplified breathtaking Soviet careers. They were the first Soviet stars to achieve international recognition.
Hollywood and the USA generally were the great models here. That was already true of the 1920s, when popular American films also enjoyed a runaway success in the Soviet Union, and Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and others became household names in the USSR too. Hollywood was a natural destination for Soviet filmmakers, a place where, as often as not, they met people they already knew, namely Russian émigrés who had succeeded in making the transition to the USA. It was therefore no very great surprise when Boris Shumiatskii, the head of the Soviet film industry, announced on his return from an extended trip to the USA that he wanted to create a Soviet Hollywood, a second California in the Crimea. And what they wished to emulate in the American model were above all the pure entertainment films, the comedies and musicals, though without slavishly copying them.9 On 11 January 1935, when a grand celebration was held in the Bolshoi Theatre to honour outstanding filmmakers, the political leadership was present, including Kalinin and Stalin, and one of those there – Jan Leyda – felt reminded of the Oscar award ceremonies in Hollywood.10
The public did not yearn for films like Battleship Potemkin; it wanted to be entertained. Public demand exceeded the number of films on offer. The number of cinemas had almost doubled, from 17,000 in 1927 to 31,000 in 1937. In 1927, thirty-one films were shown each week – twenty of which were imported – while ten years later the number had fallen to eleven films, all of them made in the Soviet Union. In addition, private cinemas had now ceased to exist and film distribution and performance was exclusively in the hands of state organizations.11
Popular Soviet films were meant to show more than the banalities of everyday life. They were supposed to concern themselves with what was characteristic, typical and of relevance to the masses, who were supposed to find it moving. Filmmakers were expected to achieve this, however, in a way that did not involve endless playing around with formal experiments or drowning in a flood of meaningless objectivities. Soviet realism was to be found in narratives in which people could recognize themselves and whose success could be measured in terms of viewer numbers, box-office takings and mass reactions.12 Films of this kind assumed the emergence of a new public, consisting not of film connoisseurs but of ‘the people’, who were not interested in theory, ideology and programmes but wanted an exciting storyline with which they could identify, and, if that were not possible, at least a few moments in which they could relax and enjoy themselves. All genres were represented: documentaries, children’s films, cartoons, cinematic versions of literary works, films about the natural world, exploration and travel, educational films. But
the principal place in the repertoire must be occupied by heroic pictures. The aim of these films is to mobilize the masses. The second place must go to pictures on the problems of everyday life in the transitional epoch … In the third place, less significant but more numerous, should be entertainment pictures, the aim of which … should be to attract the masses to cinema … to fight against the more harmful leisure activities such as drunkenness, hooliganism and so on.13
Boris Shumiatskii had defined the entertainment film as follows: ‘By the entertainment value of a film we mean the considerable emotional effect it exerts and the simple artistry that rapidly and easily communicates its ideological content and its plot to the mass audience.’14
Between 1933 and 1940, 308 films were produced in Soviet film studios. Of these, fifty-four were children’s films, while sixty-one treated subjects taken from the Revolution and the Civil War, including such successes as Chapaev, by the brothers Georgii and Sergei Vasiliev, and the Maxim Trilogy, by Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. Among historical films were Peter the First (1937 and 1939), by Vladimir Petrov, and Sergei Eisenstein’s Aleksander Nevskii (1938). Other films treated current and everyday topics; the majority were set in collective farms (17), somewhat fewer (12) in factories.15
Great cinema successes in the early 1930s all followed this general line, which was increasingly enforced as part of the ‘struggle against formalism’ and ‘in favour of narrative (sujet)’, as the convoluted jargon of the period put it. Chapaev was undoubtedly the greatest success. It was an ‘Eastern’, a film based on the novel by Dmitri Furmanov, in which thrilling adventures and scenes from the history of the recent Civil War came together to create the prototype of a genre that would provide nourishment for an entire generation. ‘The whole country is going to see Chapaev’, we read in a leading article in Pravda on 21 November 1934.
Chapaev is developing
into a political phenomenon … the Party has been given a new and powerful means of educating the class consciousness of the young … Hatred of the enemy, combined with a rapturous admiration for the heroic memory of the warriors who fell for the Revolution [sic], acquires the same strength as a passionate love for the socialist motherland. The whole country is watching Chapaev. It is being reproduced in hundreds of copies for the sound screen. Silent versions will also be made so that Chapaev will be shown in every corner of our immense country: in the towns and villages, the collective farms and settlements in barracks, clubs and squares.16
Among the most successful films were films made for children, such as Karo, based on a story by Arkadii Gaidar, and Lonely White Sail, based on the bestseller by Valentin Kataev. Other successes included musical comedies, which formed the main stock-in-trade of the Soviet mass entertainment film. They attracted a unique constellation of the geniuses of the genre, who produced such films as The Jolly Fellows (1934), The Circus (1936) and Volga-Volga (1938). One of these was a genius among directors – Grigorii Aleksandrov, a pupil of Eisenstein and the cameraman Vladimir Nil'sen, himself a pupil of Eisenstein’s cameraman Eduard Tisse. World-ranking scriptwriters such as Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov, Valentin Kataev and Nikolai Erdman came together with composers such as Isaak Dunaevskii and the legendary star of Soviet jazz, Leonid Utesov. Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, the writer of popular songs, could find himself working with an actress such as Liubov' Orlova, who became a star of the Soviet film scene, almost a Soviet equivalent of Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. ‘Such total convergence between the three criteria – ideological, aesthetic and mass appeal – has never been repeated in the history of Soviet cinema.’17
Figure 25.2 Scene from the musical comedy The Jolly Fellows
‘Other successes included musical comedies, which formed the main stock-in-trade of the Soviet mass entertainment film.’
Mosfilm 1937: chaos in the film factory
The centre of the Soviet dream factory was to be found in the Moscow studios Soiuzkino and Moskino, which merged in 1935 to become Mosfilm. Nowhere but here, on the slopes of the Sparrow Hills, was such a concentration of cinematic know-how and experience to be found. Almost every famous Soviet director had worked there. In fact, the Mosfilm studios may be regarded as a microcosm or a prism of the confusions of 1937, as Maia Turovskaia has shown in her studies.18
The Mosfilm studios had particularly ambitious plans for the jubilee year of 1937. Twelve feature films were to be produced, including Courage (Pavlenko, Marian), The Happiest Man (Sarchi, Pudovkin), Bezhin Meadow (Eisenstein, Rzheshevskii), Gavroche (Shakovskoi, Lukashevich), Volga-Volga (Aleksandrov) and a collective farm-themed film by Medvedkin. On average the budget for each film was to be 1,400,000 roubles. But in reality events turned out very differently. Some films were completed, some were postponed, while others simply came to nothing.19
There are many reasons why the plan could not be carried out in practice and also for the fact that, in spite of this, important films were nevertheless produced, as it were, outside the plan. Some films failed to live up to the political and aesthetic standards established by the Party leaders responsible for filmmaking. They included the vetting of film scripts by special commissions and in some cases by the Party leadership itself. Many scripts were read, commented on and ‘improved’ by Stalin himself. His intervention in Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October was no unique event. He suggested title changes – for example, the title of Ivan Pyr'ev’s Anka was changed to The Party Card. The script for Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Aerograd of 1935 was read out to the entire Politburo, Stalin among them, in the Kremlin. Stalin also had definite views on Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow and Aleksander Nevskii.20 In one instance Stalin may even be considered a co-author. A letter he wrote to Boris Shumiatskii about Friedrich Ermler’s The Great Patriot still survives:
I have read Comrade Ermler’s script. I agree that there is no doubt that it is politically literate. Also it undoubtedly has literary virtues. However, there are some errors:
1. The representatives of the ‘opposition’ appear older, both physically and also in the sense of the length of their Party service, than the representatives of the Central Committee. This is not typical and did not correspond to reality. Reality gives us the opposite picture.
2. The character of Zhelyabov must be removed: there is no analogy between the revolutionary, Zhelyabov, and the terrorists and pigmies from the camps of Zinovievites and Trotskyites.
3. The reference to Stalin must be excluded. Instead of Stalin, the Central Committee of the Party must be mentioned.
4. Shakhov’s murder should not be the centre and high-point of the scenario: this or that terrorist outrage pales in comparison with the acts of terror that are being uncovered by the trial of Pyatakov and Radek.21
The turbulences and repressive measures of 1937 prevented Mosfilm from meeting its production targets in this jubilee year. On 5 March 1937, work on Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow was brought to a halt after it was denounced by the Politburo.22 It had been intended as a showpiece of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Its suppression was a disaster. By April 1937 only two of the twenty-six films had had their scripts approved and released. They were Volga-Volga and The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids. The universal atmosphere of fear had produced a situation in which no one wanted to accept the responsibility for making a decision about whether to approve a script or reject it. In its issue of 17 May 1937, the magazine Kino wrote: ‘Our largest film studio “Mosfilm” is currently far behind its own production schedule. It is scandalous that the studio has not made a start on a single film for the twentieth anniversary of the socialist October Revolution.’ The article continued, ‘a huge enterprise with a workforce of over 2,000 has been idle for five months now. In the first quarter of 1937 the studio as a whole produced 0.8 films and has managed to spend 800,000 roubles.’23 Only six months remained to the actual jubilee festivities – and sixteen films had been planned for that deadline. The screenplay for The Revolt, about which Shumiatskii was enthusiastic, had still not been approved by the commission responsible for scripts, even though production had been due to start in July. This was because of the sensitive nature of its subject – this was the first time Lenin had figured in a film, and Stalin was supposed to appear in his new historical role.24 Mikhail Romm finally started production in the middle of August – he filmed scenes of the Revolution not in Leningrad, but on set in the Mosfilm studios, and he delivered the film in an incredibly short time for 6 November 1937. This essentially meant the rehabilitation of Mosfilm. The film was printed in 900 copies and distributed throughout the country – at that time there were only forty-two copies of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, while there were as many as 259 copies of the musical comedy The Jolly Fellows. So, in this year of celebrations, Mosfilm did succeed in making sure that the figure of a popular Lenin, close to the people, circulated throughout the nation, with a Stalin already in the background.
The key event in the film world during 1937 was the controversy surrounding Eisenstein’s Bezhin Meadow, culminating in the suppression and the physical destruction of the film. At issue was not just Eisenstein’s film, but also a general change of direction: the victory of ‘socialist realism’ over ‘formalism’ and ‘naturalism’.25 Eisenstein had been interested in this project since 1935, when the screenwriter Aleksandr Rzheshevskii first adapted the story of Pavlik Morozov. Morozov was a young pioneer who lived in a village in the northern Urals and who was killed because he had denounced his father, an affluent peasant, a ‘kulak’. Eisenstein wanted to make his contribution to rendering visible the transformation wrought in the Russian village by the process of collectivization – much as Friedrich Ermler had done before him with his film Peasants.26 But even though Eisenstein’s intention was that his chef d’oeuvre should overcome formalism, his treatment of class struggles in the village ended up taking a very different form. An individual drama of an ‘in
tensification of class struggle in the village’ was transformed into a universal conflict of an almost archaic, biblical grandeur, between old and young, between progress and reaction, between delusion and an optimistic faith in the future, between murderous instincts and childlike innocence. The view of the Politburo as expressed on 5 March 1937 ran as follows:
Figure 25.3 Something of the inflamed atmosphere of the years of the show trials can be detected in the scenes of Friedrich Ermler’s film The Great Patriot (1937–9), with Nikolai Bogoliubov in the role of the Party leader Shakhov, who was based on the murdered Leningrad spy-chief Kirov.
‘I have read Comrade Ermler’s script. I agree that there is no doubt that it is politically literate. Also it undoubtedly has literary virtues. However, there are some errors.’ (Stalin)
1 Public performance of the film is to be prohibited in the light of the anti-artistic and open political feebleness of the film.
2 Comrade Shumiatskii is to be informed that studios may not take up production without prior approval of the detailed screenplay and dialogues.
3 …
4 It is Comrade Shumiatskii’s duty to explain this instruction to the creative workers on the project.
This explanation and the debate it triggered took place in a session of 19–21 March 1937, in which the entire complement of prominent figures of Moscow’s film industry took part.27
Eisenstein confessed to having failed to overcome the old individualism of the intelligentsia and at the same time insisted on his right to his own subjectivity. ‘I have found myself in the situation of a Don Quixote … And that is my fundamental mistake. It always seemed to me that I had a right to my own opinion on intellectual and artistic matters.’ Nevertheless, he yielded to the act of submission required of him: ‘the task of the artist is not to provide a senseless interpretation but to give expression to the opinion or the decision of the Party.’28 Eisenstein thought the fault lay in the distance of his collective from the life of the people. ‘I worked in isolation, within our own group. I created a film not from the flesh and blood of our socialist reality, but rather from the fabric of associations and theoretical ideas about that reality.’ Eisenstein set himself the task of ‘working seriously at his own world view and penetrating more deeply into new themes in a Marxist fashion, while specifically studying reality and the new man.’29 Nevertheless, he did not escape the ritual of public censure. In the course of the discussion, David Mar'ian attacked Eisenstein as ‘alien to the Soviet spirit’, while Boris Barnet courageously spoke up for him and expressed the view that, ‘if Sergei Mikhailovich is to see the error of his ways, he must be given the opportunity to assemble his material as he had wanted to do from the outset. I have faith in an artist as great as Eisenstein.’ Mikhail Romm too praised Eisenstein.30 For his part, Eisenstein turned to Shumiatskii, to whom he wrote: ‘only the passionate effort of exerting one’s entire creative energy can lead to the liquidation of ideological and artistic errors … We must make visible the country, the people, the Party, Lenin’s cause, and the events of October. We must transpose into reality what the Party and the government have called for.’ On 19 April Shumiatskii advised the Party leadership to forbid Eisenstein to work: ‘Since Eisenstein, with his insistence on “reinstatement”, is determined to nullify the decision of the Central Committee of the VKP (B), and since even in private conversations Eisenstein attempts to reinforce his ambitions with threats to commit suicide, I regard an instruction of the Central Committee as indispensable.’ The Politburo discussed the matter and resolved on 9 May that Eisenstein should be given the opportunity of continuing to make films. A year later a film by Eisenstein reached the cinemas for the first time in years. This was Aleksander Nevskii, a topic that already anticipated the war with Germany. The film became the great box-office success of 1938. But while Eisenstein was still working on Aleksander Nevskii, Shumiatskii, the head of Soviet film, who had been so eager to persecute him, was himself overthrown as an ‘enemy of the people’.31
Moscow, 1937 Page 54