‘Stalin’s Final Films; Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953’
By Claire Knight
Cornell University Press, 268 Pages
Among the quirkier facets of Soviet culture in the decade following World War II was the popularity of movies featuring Edgar Rice Burroughs’s vine-swinging ape-man, Tarzan. In 1952, four Tarzan movies placed at the top of the year’s most profitable pictures. The Central Committee saw to it that these foreign films were released with the appropriate spin: “As a man unspoiled by bourgeois civilization, [Tarzan] opposes himself to the cruel and greedy American and British business dealers.”
Of course he did, and so, presumably, did Tarzan’s chimpanzee companion, Cheetah. This head-scratching fact can be found in a book by Claire Knight, “Stalin’s Final Films; Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953.” A senior lecturer in Russian at Bristol University, Ms. Knight knows her subject back-to-front and round again. The research she’s done in this byway of world culture is daunting. Ms. Knight is not afraid of heavy scholarly lifting.
She begins on an ominous note: “It was early summer in 1950, and Stalin was not pleased.” Knowing what we do about the chairman of the Council of Ministers, displeasure on his part was to be feared. Ms. Knight tells the story of how the minister of cinema, Ivan Bol’shakov, irked Stalin by attempting to sidestep his consent in releasing a movie. The commissars in attendance likely recalled the fate of a former head of the film industry, Boris Shumiatskii. Not long after irking Stalin, Shumiatskii was executed.
Shumiatskii’s transgression was failing to adequately toast Stalin at a New Year’s celebration. Bol’shakov’s sin was, in the scheme of things, more egregious. Ultimately, Comrade Joe gave him a pass, albeit with an admonition: “It’s impossible to fool me!”
Stalin’s whims were impossible to predict, but so, too, were those of the governmental administrators charged with maintaining a state-run entertainment complex riddled with a Byzantine set of directives. “Stalin’s Last Film” is a caution against aligning ideology and art.
Are you surprised to learn that the Soviets allowed Tarzan films into theaters? Remember, the Russians were among the victors in — no, not World War II but what they called the Great Patriotic War. Among its spoils were movies, largely from Germany and America. Informally dubbed “trophy films,” they were released into theaters in an almost surreptitious manner. Hollywood films, for the most part, were the province of the Communist Party higher-ups. Ms. Knight notes how musical comedies became an engine for dissidence. Who knew a buck-and-wing had such power?
The USSR attempted to shape the movie industry into serving the communist ethos, all the while honoring the hard-won victories of World War II: “Now that the most daunting and highly anticipated challenge to Soviet existence had been overcome, what remained for the victorious hero to accomplish?” War movies became a go-to for the popular cinema, albeit refracted through a Stalinist ethos.
Chief among its goals was to establish “a suitable positive hero,” a figure that toed the line between individual initiative and collective will. The so-called Great Soviet Family was one outcome of this dichotomy, an embodiment of “the nation as a body of children … united in brotherhood and growing in maturity under the guidance of a leader-father.” The Soviets were out to “purify” the nuclear family and restive ethnic groups for the sake of an overweening body politic. “Resubjectification,” it’s been called, a process in which “political kinship outweighed blood relation.”
The Kremlin’s program for creative activity ultimately quashed creativity. The so-called masterpieces program resulted in a dearth of same, and then there was the policy of beskonfliknost — basically, filming stories that had no conflict or tension. Uncertainty, you see, was absent in a supposedly friction-less culture. Ms. Knight quotes a literary historian, Evgeny Dobrenko, in dubbing the resulting entertainments “equations without unknowns.” Our author, with notable deadpan, observes that “without unknowns, mystery and thrill are impossible.”
Ms. Knight writes with a sobriety that is only tested when she insists on the political and artistic viability of the movies during the time-frame covered in her book. Is there more to be gleaned from these officially sanctioned pictures than shameless kowtowing to “the petulant demands of the cult of personality”? When answering the question in the affirmative — basically, with a list of Stalinist prerogatives — Ms. Knight betrays a lack of distance. Overall, though, “Stalin’s Final Films” is a scary and sobering iteration of “the most repressive era of Soviet history.”
