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Singing on the Steppes for Stalin: Ivan Pyr'ev and the Kolkhoz Musical in Soviet Cinema

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Richard Taylor
Richard Taylor*
Affiliation:
Department of Politics, University of Wales
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Extract

In his celebrated "secret speech" to the delegates to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev singled out Soviet filmmakers for their part in establishing and maintaining Stalin's personality cult. Although not specifically mentioned by Khrushchev, one film has been generally identified as a prime example of the way in which those filmmakers "varnished the reality," particularly of the Soviet countryside during the Stalin period: Ivan Pyr'ev's Kubanskie kazaki (The Kuban cossacks) made in the film-famine year of 1949 and released in February 1950. But let us look at what Khrushchev actually said.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 143 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999

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References

1. Khrushchev, Cf. N. S., The “Secret” Speech: Delivered to the Closed Session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party (Nottingham, 1976), 70–72 Google Scholar; Khrushchev, , Doklad na zakrytom zasedanii XXs “ezda KPSS (London, 1986), 94–96.Google Scholar

2. The film was released in the United States by Amkino under the title The Cossacks of the Kuban.

3. My translation; cf. Khrushchev, “Secret “Speech, 71; Khrushchev, Doklad, 94.

4. Cf. Khrushchev, “Secret” Speech, 72; Khrushchev, Doklad, 95

5. The various stages in Pyr'ev's career are most reliably covered in Mar'iamov, G. B., ed., Ivan Pyr'ev v zhizni i na ekrane: Stranitsy vospominanii (Moscow, 1994).Google Scholar

6. Youngblood, Denise J., Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935 (Ann Arbor, 1985)Google Scholar; Youngblood, , Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, Eng., 1992)Google Scholar; Youngblood, , “Entertainment or Enlightenment? Popular Cinema in Soviet Society, 1921–1931,” in White, Stephen, ed., New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 41–61.Google Scholar

7. Kenez, Peter, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992)Google Scholar; Taylor, Richard, “Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s,” in Taylor, Richard and Christie, Ian, eds., Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema (London, 1991), 193–216.Google Scholar

8. Pyr'ev, I. A., Izbrannyeproizvedeniia (Moscow, 1978), 1: 64.Google Scholar

9. Ol'khovyi, B. S., ed., Puti kino: Vsesoiuznoe partiinoe soveshchanie po kinematografii (Moscow, 1929), 429–44Google Scholar; translated in Taylor, Richard and Christie, Ian, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896–1939 (London, 1988), 208–15Google Scholar; this phrase is on 212.

10. Shumiatskii, B. Z., Kinematografiia millionov (Moscow, 1935).Google Scholar

11. Ibid., 247, 249.

12. The slogan is derived from Stalin's speech to the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites on 17 November 1935. See Dushenko, Konstantin V., ed., Slovar’ sovremennykhtsitat (Moscow, 1997), 341 Google Scholar. The archival details of Shumiatskii's own unhappy and joyless end have recently been published in Koliazin, V. F., ed., “Vernite mne svobodu!” (Moscow, 1997), 161–68Google Scholar. Reading them is a chilling experience and makes the notion of “varnishing reality” all the more poignant.

13. Geldern, James von, “The Centre and the Periphery: Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s,” in White, , ed., New Directions in Soviet History, 62–80.Google Scholar

14. Document dated 10 February 1933; Lunacharskii, Anatolii V, Sobranie sochinenii: Literaturovedenie, kritika, estetika, 8 vols. (Moscow, 1967), 8: 615–16Google Scholar; translated in Taylor and Christie, Film Factory, 327. The imagery of flight, representing among other things man's conquest of nature and the heavens, was a common theme of Soviet propaganda in the 1930s.

15. Cited in Volkogonov, Dmitrii, “Stalin,” Oktiabr', 1988, no. 11: 87.Google Scholar

16. From Andrei Zhdanov's keynote speech to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934: Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s'ezd sovetskikhpisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), 4.

17. These are the opening words of the song “Vse vyshe (Aviamarsh)” written by Pavel German and Iulii Khait in 1920 and popularized in the 1930s. The Russian text with English translation is reproduced in von Geldern, James and Stites, Richard, eds., Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays, and Folklore, 1917–1953 (Bloomington, 1995), 257–58.Google Scholar

18. Using the term as defined by Altman, Rick in Altman, , ed., Genre: The Musical. A Reader (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Altman, , The American Film Musical (London, 1989)Google Scholar; and most recently in Altman, , “The Musical,” in Nowell-Smith, G., ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema (Oxford, 1996), 294–303.Google Scholar

19. Mezhrabpomfil'm was a joint-stock company originally established in the early 1920s with investment from the German branch of Workers’ International Relief, headed by Willi Miinzenberg. It was therefore more oriented toward the international market than other Soviet film studios and more susceptible to foreign influences, and this undoubtedly played a part in its closure in the mid-1930s, when its premises were turned into the children's film studio.

20. The happy ending was quite alien to the Russian melodramatic and pre-Soviet cinematic traditions. The idea was imported from American cinema, hence the use in Russian of the Anglicized term kheppi-end. Under socialist realism the kheppi-end of course became a necessity because life could hardly be either happier or more joyous if it did not have a happy ending.

21. Stites, Richard, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 90–92 Google Scholar; Aleksandrov, Grigorii V., Epokha i kino (Moscow, 1976), 196 Google Scholar; Zel'dovich, G., Liubov’ Orlova (Moscow, 1939), 17.Google Scholar

22. See Anderson, T, “Why Stalinist Musicals?” Discourse 17, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 38–48.Google Scholar

23. This film is analyzed in both Ratchford, Moira, “Circus of 1936: Ideology and Entertainment under the Big Top,” in Horton, Andrew ed., Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter xuith a Lash (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 83–CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Taylor, Richard, “The Illusion of Happiness and the Happiness of Illusion: Grigorii Aleksandrov's The Circus ,” Slavonic and East European Review 74, no. 4 (October 1996): 601–20.Google Scholar

24. See Turovskaia, M, “ Volga-Volga i ego vremia,” Iskusstvo kino, 1998, no. 3 (March): 59–64.Google Scholar

25. See M.|Enzensberger, ‘ “We Were Born to Turn a Fairy Tale into Reality': Grigori Alexandrov's The Radiant Path ,” in Taylor, Richard and Spring, Derek, eds., Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London, 1993), 97–108.Google Scholar

26. The spatial geography of these films is discussed in a two-part article by Dobrenko: “'Iazyk prostranstva, szhatogo do tochki, ’ ili estetika totalitarnoi klaustrofobii,” Iskusstvo kino, 1996. Aleksandrov is covered in no. 11 (November): 120–29; and Pyr'ev in no. 9 (September): 108–17.

27. There is also a curious parallel here with the two leading exponents of the “musical” in Nazi Germany: Veit Harlan married his Swedish leading lady, Kristina Söderbaum, while Georgjacoby married his, the Hungarian-born Marika Rökk, who, thanks to the “trophy” films removed by the Red Army from Germany in 1945, became a box-office drawin the USSR. See Turovskaia, M. et al., eds., Kino totalitarnoi epokhi (1933'-1945)/Filme der totalitären Epoche (1933–1945) (Moscow, 1989).Google Scholar

28. The first major study of Pyr'ev in English appeared in Lary, N. M., Dostoyevsky and Soviet Film: Visions of Demonic Realism (Ithaca, 1986), 111–54Google Scholar. As the title suggests, however, this study is almost entirely confined to Pyr'ev's later adaptations of Dostoevskii's works.

29. See Taylor, Richard and Short, Ken R. M., “Soviet Cinema and the International Menace, 1928–1939,” HistoricalJournal of Film, Radio and Television 6, no. 2 (October 1986): 131–59.Google Scholar

30. B. Balash, “Varvarskii talant,” Kino, 22 June 1933, cited in Turovskaia, M, “I. A. Pyr'ev i ego muzykal'nye komedii: K probleme zhanra,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 1988, no. 1: 111–46Google Scholar; this citation is on 119–20.

31. Turovskaia, “I. A. Pyr'ev,” 118.

32. Ibid., 136 (my emphasis).

33. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford, 1994), 262.Google Scholar

34. Dobrenko, “'Iazyk prostranstva, '” no. 9: 109.

35. Pyr'ev, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 1: 74–75.

36. Lary, Dostoyevsky and Soviet Film, 122–23, suggests that Pyr'ev had been agitating against Eizenshtein, whom he deeply resented and who was at that time in the midst of his ultimately abortive Bezhin Meadow project for the same studio. See also Iurenev's introduction to Mar'iamov, Ivan Pyr'ev, 23. This supposition is not, however, confirmed by the most recent research; see Maksimenkov, L. V., Sumbur vmesto muzyki: Stalinskaia kul'turnaia revoliutsiia 1936–1938 (Moscow, 1997), 241–53.Google Scholar

37. Pyr'ev, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 1: 5.

38. Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s “ezd, 4.

39. Iurenev's introduction to Mar'iamov, Ivan Pyr'ev, 32. Dukel'skii's unfamiliarity was probably attributable to his having come to cinema straight from a career in the NKVD.

40. S. Nikolaevich, “Poslednii seans, ili Sud'ba beloi zhenshchiny v SSSR,” Ogonek, 1992, no. 4: 23. Nikolaevich is discussing the appeal of the Aleksandrov/Orlova musicals.

41. His surname is derived from the adjective iarkii meaning “bright, brilliant, lively.” Klim is all three.

42. Translated in von Geldern and Stites, Mass Culture in Soviet Russia, 319.

43. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 83–84.

44. Novikova derives from novyi, meaning “new. “

45. This characterization contrasts with that of Strelka (little arrow), the heroine of Aleksandrov's Volga-Volga, who demonstrates initiative by delivering delayed telegrams by word of mouth, and of Kharitosha, the “conscientious postman” (akkuratnyi pochtal'ori), in Pyr'ev's The Tractor Drivers, whose role is to bring the far-flung parts of the Soviet Union closer together.

46. Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, 262.

47. Paralleled of course by Aleksandrov the same year in The Radiant Path. See Enzensberger, ‘ “We Were Born.' “

48. Iurenev's introduction to Mar'iamov, Ivan Pyr'ev, 38.

49. Dobrenko, “'Iazyk prostranstva, '” no. 9: 112.

50. O. L. Bulgakova, “Prostranstvennye figury sovetskogo kino 30-kh godov,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, 1996, no. 29: 49–62.1 have dealt with the significance of both the Exhibition and Moscow as capital city in greater detail in a forthcoming article, “But Eastward, Look, the Land Is Brighter: Towards a Topography of Utopia in the Stalinist Musical,” in Holmes, D. and Holt, A., eds., Entertaining Ideologies: Reflections on 100 Years of European Cinema (Manchester, 1999).Google Scholar

51. Giinther, Hans, “Wise Father Stalin and His Family in Soviet Cinema,” in Lahusen, Thomas and Dobrenko, Evgeny, eds., Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham, 1997), 178–90Google Scholar. Katerina Clark, Cf., The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1985), 114–35.Google Scholar

52. Shumiatskii, Boris Z., “Zadachi templana 1934 goda,” Sovetskoe kino, 1933, no. 11 (November): 1.Google Scholar

53. Saakov, Iu, “Kompromat na Kneishitsa,” Iskusstvo kino, 1998, no. 3: 73–77.Google Scholar

54. Lary, Dostoyevsky and Soviet Film.

55. Sergei M. Eizenshtein, “Ob Ivane Pyr'eve,” written in 1946 and first published in Eizenshtein, Izbrannyeproizvedeniia (Moscow, 1968), 5: 454–56; translated as “About Ivan Pyr'ev” in S. M. Eisenstein, Selected Works, vol. 3, Writings, 1934–47, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London, 1996), 292–94.

56. Iurenev's introduction to Mar'iamov, Ivan Pyr'ev, 52–53.

57. Ibid., 48.