Russian Film Symposium 2003
Program Two

Thaw (1956-1968)

Mon May 5	Tue May 6
10am Grigorii Aleksandrov: Russian Souvenir, 1960. Intro by Aleksandr Shpagin.	10am Vladimir Berenshtein: Neutral Waters. Intro by Elena Stishova, 1968.
2pm Mikola Vingranovs'kii: A Shore of Hope, 1967. Intro by Aleksandr Prokhorov.	2pm Iaropolk Lapshin: Game Without Rules, 1965. Intro by Natalia Sirivlia.

Screenings take place at 106 David Lawrence Hall.

The cultural politics of the Thaw were unstable at best, frequently contradictory. This period of Soviet cultural history is traditionally subdivided into a series on Thaws and Freezes, the origins of most of which can be traced back either to Nikita Khrushchev's improvised comments on culture in the speech of the moment or to his direct interventions into the cultural administrative apparatus in order to advance his own agenda. This constant, often ad hoc, reinterpreting and rescripting of state policy and responsibility in cultural production empowered cultural producers first and most of all: it opened the possibility for individual producers (writers, scenarists, filmmakers, artists, composers, etc.) to negotiate with the state – indirectly, but through an existing cultural administration charged with responding immediately to Party directives and pressures. The oft-celebrated "artistic freedom" of the Thaw is merely the end result of these negotiations, unprecedented during the entire Stalin period of Soviet history.

Three features of Thaw culture have attracted especial attention in the past decade. First, the cultural artifacts of the Thaw demonstrate a rejection of Stalinist monumental art and representation, and a shift to a more intimate, more interiorized spatial paradigm. Second, Thaw narratives consistently demonstrate a rejection of Stalinist art's penchant for epic narratives, both in content (lives of generals and great men, transformations and conquest of nature, the metaphor of the nation-as-family) and in form (multi-part novels and films, heroic poetry, large-scale musical forms). Instead, Thaw narratives shift to more intimate, more domestic subjects (the return of the everyday and of everyman) and genres (the literary sketch, the ode, the film short). Finally, Thaw culture is marked by its rejection of any unmediated connection between the empowered discourse of the state and the disempowered discourse of the individual and of vox populi. Indeed, Thaw cultural artifacts unconditionally and consistently privileged the latter at the expense of the former. This emphasis, clearly signaled by the Thaw's insistence on the "sincerity" – of an utterance, of a vision – as the only legitimate (political? cultural?) means for measuring and evaluating the integrity of a work of art, set the terms of the ensuing negotiations.

Central to these negotiations were two issues: the state's relationship to the arts and the limits of its tolerance of individual voices and views in the arts – that is, the state's implicit willingness to extend its foreign policy of "peaceful co-existence" to its domestic practices in the arts. These two issues were constantly open to re-negotiation between cultural producers and cultural administrators well into the first four years of Leonid Brezhnev's term of office. The fine-tuning (de-emphasizing de-Stalinization without a "posthumous rehabilitation," for example) of the early Brezhnev years (1964-1968) should not be mistaken for the radical shift of the cultural dial in the early years of the period known as Stagnation.

The dominant slogan of Soviet foreign policy during the Thaw was "peaceful co-existence," proclaiming communism's willingness to tolerate the continued presence of capitalism. On the one hand, the policy marked a significant move away from the late-Stalinist Cold-War policy of aggressive confrontation around the globe with the Soviet Union's former allies against Nazi Germany. Aggressive confrontation as a policy can be traced equally across Stalin's political culture (the partition of Europe, the Berlin blockade, the plans to attack the United States) and cultural politics (the Party Resolutions on the Arts, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, even "conflictlessness"). The post-war Stalinist culture industry was efficient in supplying audiences – general and specialized – with powerful and persuasive representations of the evil, threatening, and alien "other." These images, verbal and visual, were so effective precisely because they were so cartoon-like and vitriolic, allowing the culture industry to displace and replace the ethnic or national identity of the "other" with ease: Japanese samurai, European fascists, and White Guard retrogrades in the "vigilance" and "defense" cultures of the mid-1930s; Nazi Germany from the late 1930s through mid 1940s; American imperial ambitions from the mid 1940s.

Indeed, the speed with which anti-American images in Soviet culture of the Cold War could simply "stand in" for images of enemies defeated earlier (both real and imaginary) provides ample proof of the industry's flexibility in graphically vilifying the "other." Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of these cultural artifacts were targeted specifically at the domestic audience, with almost no attempt made to translate or subtitle any of the classic anti-American novels or films of the period into English. With the exception, for example, of Grigorii Aleksadrov's Meeting on the Elba (1949), none of the major anti-American films of the Cold War period was ever subtitled or screened abroad – neither Mikhail Romm's The Russian Question (1948) nor The Secret Mission (1950; rest. 1969), nor Abram Room's Silvery Dust (1953).

On the other hand, the shift from a policy of aggressive confrontation to "peaceful co-existence" inevitably made necessary a radical redefinition of how the "other" was represented in Thaw culture. This redefinition consisted of two parts: a softening of contours and a hardening of distinctions.

Thaw culture re-humanizes the "other," whether the "other" is defined as "ours" (for example, White Guard officer Govorukha-Otrop in Grigorii Chukrai's Forty First [1956]) or "theirs" (the American capitalist in Aleksandrov's Russian Souvenir [1960]). The "other" of Thaw culture quickly sheds the vermin-like physical markings and bestial morality that were inseparable from all such representations of the "other" during Stalinist culture. While still marked as alien and antagonistic to the Soviet state, and, therefore, as dangerous to Soviet society, the "other" quickly acquires identifiably human features, characteristics, and shortcomings. The "other," in other words, becomes a "not-one-of-us-but-who-is-still-like-us," that is, someone with whom it is possible (if neither safe nor pleasant) to co-exist.

At the same time, the Thaw's new anti-American images begin to distinguish sharply between "Americans" and "America," between (re/present/ed) citizens and the (absent) state. Within this new configuration, "Americans" are simultaneously the "other" of the Soviet people (both as non-Soviet and as representatives of capitalism) and the "other" of the "American" state (both as falsely indoctrinated anti-communists and capitalists). In a peculiar twist, "Americans" were less the overt enemy of the Soviet Union than they were the first victims of the "American" state's own virulently anti-Soviet foreign policies. Unlike, the state, however, American citizens were capable of direct contact with Soviet citizens and could experience Soviet reality firsthand, a contact and experience that inevitably transformed the consciousness of the "American" and introduced him to the expanded horizons of "peaceful co-existence." In this way, the "American" in Thaw culture becomes recast in the mold (though not the image) of the socialist realist positive hero, whose identity is marked by the transformation from unreflective (spontaneous and impulsive) actions to actions informed by newly acquired political consciousness.