STALIN AT THE MOVIES
In the mid-1930s Stalin began to review film scripts and view and preview films in the Kremlin’s new cinema. The transition to ‘talkies’ had made the medium more attractive to the text-obsessed Stalin, a particular influence being Chapaev (1934), the story of a Red Army commander who died a heroic death during the Russian Civil War – one of the most popular Soviet films of all time, which he is said to have watched thirty-eight times.
His general take on the scripts he read was that films should be historically accurate and aesthetically true to life, as well as politically progressive.
Stalin’s response to Fridrikh Ermler’s script The Great Citizen – a fictionalised account of the Kirov assassination – was that the politics that had led to murder should be at the centre of the screenplay, i.e. the struggle for the victory of socialism in the USSR versus the restoration of capitalism.26
Asked to choose between two screenplays about Giorgi Saakadze, a military commander who battled for Georgia’s unity and independence in the early seventeenth century, Stalin opted for the one he thought was a better piece of history. However, he complained that even this version ended with an inaccuracy – with Saakadze’s victory when, in fact, he had ultimately suffered defeat at the hands of the country’s feudal princes. ‘I think that this historical truth should be restored in the screenplay,’ wrote Stalin. ‘And if it is restored, the screenplay . . . could be characterised as one of the best works of Soviet cinematography.’27
In September 1940 Stalin was drawn into a controversy about a film called Zakon Zhizni (The Law of Life), based on a novel by Alexander Avdeenko, who also wrote the screenplay. Since the story concerned a morally corrupt Komsomol official, it went through quite an extensive process of censorship before being released, whereupon it was reviewed positively in Izvestiya and other publications. However, a Pravda review objected that such corruption was not typical of Soviet society and complained about the film’s main protagonist being too richly drawn while other Komsomol members were depicted as his dupes.28
Stalin was among Avdeenko’s critics at a specially convened meeting of the central committee but he also told the comrades that ‘you have to give freedom of art. You have to let people express themselves. . . . There is one artistic line, but it can be reflected in different ways, various methods, approaches and ways of writing.’29 Towards the end of the meeting, he made some general remarks about truthfulness and objectivity in literature.30 He was all in favour of both but that didn’t mean fiction should be impartiaclass="underline"
Literature cannot be a camera. That’s not how truthfulness should be understood. There cannot be literature without passion, it sympathises with someone, despises someone. . . . There are different ways of writing – the way of Gogol or of Shakespeare. They have outstanding heroes – negative and positive. When you read Shakespeare or Gogol, or Griboedov, you find one hero with negative features. All the negative features are concentrated in one individual. I would prefer a different manner of writing – the manner of Chekhov, who has no heroes but rather grey people . . .
I would prefer we were given enemies not as monsters but as people hostile to our society but not lacking all human traits. . . . I would prefer it if enemies were shown to be strong. . . . Trotsky was an enemy but he was a capable person, undoubtedly he should be depicted as an enemy with negative features, but as one who also has positive qualities. . . . We need truthfulness depicting the enemy in a full-fledged way. . . . It’s not that comrade Avdeenko presents enemies in a good light but that the victors, who beat them, are sidelined and lack colour. That’s the problem. That’s the fundamental inobjectivity and untruthfulness.31
Stalin’s remark about the recently assassinated Trotsky was macabre, to say the least. There was no mention of his good points in the Pravda obituary that Stalin had personally edited and entitled ‘Death of an International Spy’.
Stalin didn’t have much time to read film scripts during the war. One exception was Alexander Dovzhenko’s Ukraine in Flames. Dovzhenko was an important Soviet filmmaker, considered by some to be on a par with Eisenstein and Pudovkin. In 1943 he made the documentary Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine. His follow-up fictional treatment of the war in Ukraine was not so welcome and in January 1944 he was summoned to a meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin, who accused him of ‘revising Leninism’, of prioritising national pride above the class struggle, and of blackening the party’s name.32
Ukraine in Flames never saw the light of day but in 1945 Dovzhenko redeemed himself with another documentary, Victory in Right-Bank Ukraine. And, as we have seen, he was the director selected to make the film about Annabelle Bucar’s book, The Truth about American Diplomats.
In an August 1946 speech to the central committee’s Orgburo, Stalin criticised three films: Vsevolod Pudovkin’s biopic of the nineteenth-century Russian Admiral Nakhimov; part two of Leonid Lukov’s A Grand Life, which dealt with postwar reconstruction in Ukraine; and Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part Two (see p. 140 above).
Stalin’s general gripe was that these filmmakers did not do enough research. He compared them unfavourably to Charlie Chaplin, who worked on projects for several years. ‘You can’t make good films without details,’ said Stalin. ‘Goethe, he worked on Faust for thirty years, that’s how honestly and conscientiously he regarded what he was doing.’
Stalin praised Pudovkin as a capable producer and director, but he detected ‘elements of an unconscientious’ attitude, which had resulted in a film full of trivia and not enough history. The film had been sent back to Pudovkin but Stalin wasn’t confident the filmmaker would make the requisite changes. In the event, Pudovkin was able to rework the film enough to secure its release in 1947.
Part one of A Grand Life, set in the 1930s, had been awarded a Stalin Prize in 1941, but the award’s namesake was scathing about part two, complaining that it was aimed at ‘the undemanding viewer’. Very little of the film was devoted to reconstruction, said Stalin.
It’s simply painful when you look, can it really be that our producers, who live among golden men, among heroes, can’t depict them as they should but must necessarily dirty them? We have good workers, damn it! They showed themselves in the war. . . . What kind of reconstruction is shown in the film where not a single machine figures? They’ve confused what took place after the Civil War, in 1918–1919, with what is taking place, say, in 1945–1946.33
This film was shelved until 1958.
Stalin was later to level similar complaints against a 1950 documentary, Fishermen of the Caspian. The director, Yakov Bliokh, was accused of using dramatisations that had the effect of ‘distorting real life by showing faked episodes’. Most importantly, ‘Instead of a truthful display of the organisation of labour among Caspian Sea fishermen, as well as advanced methods of fishing and fish processing, the film reproduces the old backward fishing technology based on manual labour.’34
It was not all work and no play on the film front. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana remembered being thrilled by the many films she saw in the Kremlin as a child: ‘The next day at school I could think of nothing but the heroes I’d seen on film the night before.’35 While visiting the United States in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev told President Eisenhower, ‘When Stalin was alive, we used to watch Westerns all the time. When the movie ended, Stalin always denounced it for its ideological content. But the very next day we’d be back in the movie theatre watching another Western.’36 Stalin’s trade minister, Anastas Mikoyan, recalled that Stalin was particularly fond of an English film about a marauding pirate who returned home with a fortune after raids on India and other countries. But the pirate did not want to share the glory (or the loot) with his erstwhile comrades-in-arms so got rid of them by destroying figurines of them.37