For a few years after the war audiences hungry for entertainment had the chance to see German and American 'trophy' films captured by the Red Army: the regime authorised their distribution partly for revenues, partly to compensate for the absence of new domestic films. Introductory texts and revised titles provided requisite ideological adjustments: Stagecoach became
The Journey will be Dangerous, 'an epic about the struggle of Indians against White imperialists on the frontier', and Frank Capra's Mr Deeds Goes to Town became The Dollar Rules.[47] Though rarely reviewed, these films were popular enough to annoy the authorities: a central newspaper censured Dom Kino, the film industry's Moscow clubhouse, for screening too many foreign films, including films 'with jazz and fox-trot', to mark the fifth anniversary of the Nazi invasion.[48]
In post-war culture, one blueprint served for all cultural products. Russian chauvinism dictated Russifying the ethnic designations of Greek and Tatar settlements in the Crimea to obliterate their pasts. Eisenstein had repeatedly to answer for the 'lack of Russian spirit' in Part II of Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Groznyi); composers, a couple of years later, were anathematised for violating the 'system of music and singing native to our people'. Soviet chauvinism dictated rewriting recent history: new editions of Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don (Tikhii Don) (1928), for instance, added quotations from Lenin and Stalin, and cleansed individual Bolsheviks 'of a wide array of personal vices pertaining, among other things, to sex, marriage, foul language, drinking and brutality'. Aleksandr Fadeev cut or altered descriptions of the Red Army's hasty retreat during the war in his novel The Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia) (1945) after a critical Pravda editorial, and Valentin Katayev increased the 'operational capabilities of [an underground] group' by adding several local Communists to For the Power of the Soviets (Za vlast' Sovetov) (1949-51) after Pravda had a go at him.[49]
The trophy films disappeared from Soviet screens in the late 1940s. Instead audiences could choose from a thin stream of anti-Western films (Aleksan- drov's Meeting on the Elbe (Vstrecha na Elbe), Romm's Secret Mission (Sekretnaia missiia), Room's Court of Honour (Sudchesti), historical spectacles explicitly glorifying Stalin (The Vow (Kliatva), The Battle ofStalingrad (Stalingradskaia bitva), The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina)), and biographies of scientists and musicians implicitly doing the same thing.[50] From its outset the anti-cosmopolitan campaign had vilified the intelligentsia, many of whom were Jews, but after 1948 the campaign turned categorically anti-Semitic, first in print - the leading serious film journal, Iskusstvo kino, published a list of 'aesthete-cosmopolitans in cinema', nearly all Jews - and then in action, with the NKVD execution of
Solomon Mikhoels, the Soviet Union's leading Yiddish actor, in January 1948 and the execution of thirteen prominent Jews in August 1952, four of them
writers. [51]
With very few exceptions, the arts between 1945 and 1953 operated in the realm of fantasy. 'Even the recently ended war,' Dobrenko comments, 'a horrible wound that continued to bleed, was immediately externalized and became yet another thematic.'[52] As Boris Slutskii, a poet who fought in the war, wrote, And gradually the cracks were painted over, / The strong wrinkles smoothed out, / And gradually the women grew prettier / Andsullenmengrewmerry.'[53]Painters produced 'meaningless mass scenes', canvases filled with cheerful civilians and clean, well-rested soldiers.[54] Playwrights struggled with the absurd and inherently anti-dramatic theory of'no conflict drama', premised on 'the alleged impossibility of conflict in a "classless society"',[55] which dominated discourse in the early 1950s. 'Hortatory' writing on rural themes, 'designed to promote discipline and enthusiasm for the painful sacrifices involved in restoring agriculture after the war's devastation', presented the depopulated, devastated countryside as a thriving hive of enthusiasm and productivity.[56] The collision of'the good and the better' (in one famous formulation), whether on stages or cinema screens, left little space for ambivalence, weakness and death, except for heroic death on the battlefield; it left no room at all for tragedy. As environment - factory, shop, school, field, farm - supplanted human beings and roles replaced character, protagonists became virtually interchangeable, clones identifiable only by their jobs.[57] Thus art shrivelled to function as defined by the Communist Party.
Between 1945 and 1953, nearly every genuine artist fell silent. Authentic popular culture was restricted to the labour camps of the Gulag, and reached a wider public only after Stalin's death. Ersatz, officially sponsored popular culture reflected the regime's conservatism, its determination to preserve the status quo, its insistence on stability and normalisation. The rising middle class shared many of those values. At a time when Soviet citizens had little opportunity to amuse themselves in cafes or dance halls and no opportunity to travel, and movie houses recycled hits from a decade before, the bulk of middle-brow reading material - mainly novels - provided diversion, escapist happy endings and 'one of the few ways of meeting the people's need to understand their society's major workaday problems ... a chance [for the reader] to check his own questions about postwar adjustments against the paradigms of current social issues'.[58] The discrepancy between reality and the 'utterly profane' version[59] advanced in fiction like Babaevskii's Cavalier of the Golden Star (Kavaler zolotoi zvezdy) (and Raizman's 1950 screen version) and films like Pyr'ev's Cossacks of the Kuban' (Kuban'skie kazaki) troubled the regime not at all. As for the Soviet public, or a large part of it, they suspended belief - willingly or reluctantly - in the pursuit of enjoyment and whatever scraps and tatters of meaning they could relate to their own lives.
The Thaw, 1953-67^)
Although the beginning of the Thaw is far easier to date than its terminus, even the death of Stalin did not mark an absolute turning point. After all, individuals and institutions involved in the creation, regulation, dissemination and reception of cultural products did not simply vanish the day Stalin died, nor did their modus operandi. At the same time, signs of renewal pre-dated March 1953, in the arts and in society at large. Valentin Ovechkin's 'District Routine' (Raionnye budni), a fictional sketch that began 'the process of returning rural literature to real life',[60] appeared in Novyi mir in September 1952. Vsevolod Pudovkin's last film, The Return ofVasilii Bortnikov (Vozvrashchenie Vasiliia Bort- nikova), marked by psychological credibility and imaginative camerawork, was shot in 1952. Young people rebelled against grey Soviet monotony by wearing imitations of Western styles, tight trousers and short skirts. Still, Stalin's death unquestionably liberated the psychocultural shifts characteristic of the Thaw years. Belles-lettres responded the most quickly. The fine lyric poet Ol'ga Berggol'ts insisted on the poet's right to express personal emotions in her own voice; the established novelist Ilya Ehrenburg and the novice literary critic
47
Richard Stites,
48
Peter Kenez,
50
See David Caute,
51
See Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov (eds.),
53
Boris Slutskii, '1945 god', in
54
Musya Glants, 'The Images ofWar in Painting', in John and Carol Garrard (eds.),
55
Melissa T. Smith, 'Waiting in the Wings: Russian Women Playwrights in the Twentieth Century', in Toby W Clyman and Diana Greene (eds.),
58
VeraDunham,
60
Kathleen Parthe,