The three young heroes of Ilich's Gate come of age in the Moscow of 19612, and Khutsiev chose as his co-author Gennadii Shpalikov, roughly the age of the film's protagonists, so as to ensure up-to-date language and mood. Characters work on actual construction and demolition sites, enhancing visual/atmospheric veracity; students from the State Institute of Cinematography - future stars of Soviet cinema - play many roles; a poetry reading organised for the film looks as real as the documentary footage of a May Day parade. (In fact, the actors had to elbow their way through the throng crowding in to hear such superstars as Rozhdestvenskii and Akhmadulina.) Much about Ilich's Gate's depiction of the relationship between generations exasperated
Khrushchev, but one scene enraged him. When the twenty-three-year-old hero Sergei asks the ghost of his father, killed during the war, for guidance on how to live, his father replies 'I am twenty-one', and vanishes. 'There's more to this than meets the eye,' fulminated Khrushchev. 'The idea is to impress upon the children that their fathers cannot be their teachers in life, and that there is no point in turning to them for advice. The filmmakers think that young people ought to decide for themselves how to live, without asking their elders for counsel and help.'[71]
Before Khutsiev succeeded in revising and abridging Ilich's Gate into a version finally approved for release in 1965, under the title I Am Twenty (Mne dvadtsat' let), well over a year had passed, and Khrushchev himself had been replaced by the team of Brezhnev and Kosygin (in October 1964). The film's sad fate reflects the Soviet Union's general retreat from Thaw liberalism and the onset of a process of calcification that later earned the sobriquet zastoi, 'era of stagnation'. Like the Thaw before it, stagnation proceeded unevenly, often imposing itselfruthlessly in the cultural sphere but occasionally permitting new voices to join the cultural chorus. Its crudest and most notoriously repressive manifestations - the trials of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel', the arrest of Ukrainian dissidents, the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Writers' Union and then from the country - conceal a more complex and less uniformly bleakpicture. Ideas, instincts and individuals nurtured by the Thaw survived into zastoi - indeed, most of them survived into Gorbachev's era of perestroika and glasnost', if not beyond. However, in the generally inhospitable cultural atmosphere that prevailed between Khrushchev's fall and Gorbachev's ascension, they faced constricting official possibilities and found themselves compelled to explore alternative channels and outlets.
Stagnation, 1967-85
Official attempts to suppress debate and to reverse the relative openness ofthe Thaw dominated cultural life from about 1966 until the early 1970s, with 1967 - the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution - proving particularly stultifying. In 1965 Mikhail Romm's Ordinary Fascism (Obyknovennyifashizm), a documentary probing the psychology underlying and engendering Nazism, with tacit parallels to Stalinism, attracted 20 million viewers during its first year and won a prize at the Leipzig festival.[72] By the end of i965 censors routinely cut 'any parallels, direct or implied, between communism and nazism', any reference to the penal units during the war, to Red Army atrocities, to the official policy that branded as traitors Soviet soldiers imprisoned by the Nazis as prisoners of war (which among other consequences precluded Red Cross assistance), even to venereal disease among combatants.[73] Estonian film-maker Kaljo Kiisk made Madness (Bezumie)in 1968, setting its action in Nazi-occupied Estonia and suggesting parallels between Nazism and the Soviet domination of his country: the film was banned until 1986. These proscriptions remained broadly in force until the early i980s.
The same strictures applied to de-Stalinisation, the purges and the cult of personality. In early i965, lacking explicit guidelines from the new Central Committee, the script and editorial committee (GSRK) overseeing film production reacted warily to scripts on these subjects. Gradually committee members gained confidence, vetoing one script based on the wartime diary of a girl whose father spent seventeen years in the Gulag, another whose protagonist investigates the rehabilitation cases of those unjustly accused. 'The theme ofthe cult ofpersonality', they explained, 'is unacceptable at the present time.' By late July, GSRK reacted to a proposal from Armenia's studio with a flat assertion: 'This film should not be about the era of the cult of personality, for there was no such era.'[74]
In May 1967, with domestic publication of Cancer Ward (Rakovyi korpus) bogged down indefinitely, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mailed 250 signed copies of a thunderous denunciation of censorship and of the literary establishment whose members were about to gather at the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers. He sent them to 'all the people whom Solzhenitsyn regarded as honest and genuine writers', and to prominent members of the Writers' Union (the two categories rarely overlapped).[75] 'Literature', he wrote, 'cannot develop in between the categories of "permitted" and "not permitted," "about this you may write" and "about this you may not".'[76] Eighty-three members of the Union signed a collective letter to the congress requesting open debate on the subject, but the congress resolutely ignored the letter, the author and the issue.
Nevertheless, people like Solzhenitsyn - members of the 'disaffected intelligentsia' - constituted an 'extremely powerful intellectual subculture that challenged the official culture through the power of moral persuasion it exercised . . . through nonofficial channels'.37 By 1967, official control over culture had substantially shifted from doctrine to praxis, from the once-powerful, now attenuated dogma ofsocialist realism into the bureaucratic structures that regulated distribution of the arts as a means of regulating what actually reached the consumer. Those structures proved both effective and durable, particularly when manned by orthodox bureaucrats. The unions exercised control over pensions, housing, lecture tours, travel funds: infringement of unwritten rules - whether signing a petition in defence of an arrested human rights activist or writing about a proscribed subject - could entail serious financial hardship. The State Committee for the Press, parallel and complementary to the Writers' Union, expanded its powers, devising a production plan to fulfil economic goals and a thematic plan to fulfil ideological ones.
The system encouraged both conformity and hypertrophy, meeting its goals by producing a certain number of books (movies ... paintings... plays) rather than by satisfying readers or audiences. Production figures, not sales figures, measured success, although studios and publishing houses faced close questioning when ticket sales fell or books gathered dust on shelves. (Since the number of copies printed determined royalties, rather than the number of copies sold, publishers authorised large print runs of 'safe' books - including Brezhnev's ghost-written war memoir My Little Homeland (Malaia rodina).) Censorship processes - as opposed to self-censorship - began within the intricate hierarchies ofjournal, publishing house, theatre or film studio, longbefore a work ever reached official censors.
71
Khrushchev's speech appeared in
72
For attendance figures on Soviet films, see Sergei Zemlianukhin and Miroslava Segida,
74
Valerii Fomin, 'Nikakoi epokhi kul'ta lichnosti ne bylo . . .', in Fomin (ed.),
(Moscow: Materik, 1996), pp. 292-9 and
(i989).
75
Michael Scammell,
p. 584.
76
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 'Letter to the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers', in John B.
Dunlop, Richard Haugh, Alexis Klimoff (eds.),