Russian Film Symposium 2003
Program Three

Stagnation (1968-1986)

Thu May 8	Fri May 9
10am Budimir Metal'nikov: Doctor Ivens's Silence, 1973. Intro by Elena Stishova.	10am Mikhail Tumanishvili: Solo Journey, 1985. Intro by Natalia Sirivlia.
2pm Tamara Lisitsian: On Rich Red Islands, 1981. Intro by Elena Prokhorova.	2pm Iurii Marukhin: The Man Who Took an Interview, 1986. Intro by Aleksandr Shpagin.

Screenings take place at 106 David Lawrence Hall.

Historians of political culture tend to locate the end of the Thaw in October 1964 with the palace coup that forcibly retired Nikita Khrushchev and installed Leonid Brezhnev as the First Secretary of the CPSU. Such a view, however, overly maximizes the immediacy of the impact of political events on cultural politics and practices, on the one hand, and overly privileges a belief in unmediated control of the cultural apparatus by the state, on the other. By contrast, historians of cultural politics tend to locate the end of the Thaw with a different political event: the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 by Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks. The symbolic crushing of an eastern European attempt to establish "socialism with a human face" very quickly became a material crushing of "peaceful co-existence" as a domestic policy both in political culture (the dire consequences to the demonstrators on Pushkin Square protesting the termination of the "Prague Spring"; the rise of the dissident movement; the right to emigrate extended to undesirable ethnic minorities – Jews, Armenians, Volga-Germans; etc.) and in cultural politics (the explosion in the number of films shelved; the mass removal of books by émigré writers from libraries, or banning of plays by émigré playwrights or of films by émigré directors; the expulsions of writers, composers, filmmakers from the creative unions; etc.).

As a political event, August 1968 marked a radical redefinition of what was tolerable in cultural practice under "developed socialism": the prospects for negotiating a private voice or view with the cultural administrative apparatus ended that summer. Although the right to a private voice or view was not publicly contested, any attempt to exercise the right – to reproduce it (to type or paint it, to print or film it, etc.) or to circulate it (socially or culturally) – was prosecuted with the full force of Soviet law, if it deviated too much from the narrowed limits now set by the state. This narrowing of tolerance for private voices and views quickly filtered down the cultural administration to the level of the artistic councils (khudsovety), through several of which every verbal or visual text had to pass prior to receiving permission to enter the domain of public consumption. Surviving documents for many of the discussions at the artistic councils surrounding "problematic texts" that were shelved (scrupulously collected and republished by film historian Valerii Fomin) provide ample evidence of these councils' caution and inflexibility in dealing with views they considered "inaccurate," "slanderous," "un-Soviet."

Cultural producers faced a greatly reduced likelihood of negotiating successfully for the artistic integrity of their individual voices and views. Instead, they were once again forced onto the defensive, required to demonstrate the extent to which that individual voice or view fulfilled or complied with what was permitted or with what was already established as tolerable. It did not take long for the inflexible policies imposed and pursued by the khudsovety to alienate cultural producers from cultural administrators. With negotiations replaced by defense summations, the line between the two sides was firmly drawn.

"Peaceful co-existence" gave way to "détente"―that is, the tolerance of the "other" yielded to a stand off between two antagonists equal only in their ability to annihilate each other if the fragile truce should break down. "Détente" was the major slogan of the foreign policy pursued successfully by both sides in the Cold War during the Stagnation period. At its core, "détente" was simply a diplomatic way of acknowledging the prospect of "mutual annihilation," a peculiar form of stability predicated on maintaining the political and military status quo. Any shift from the agreed-upon status quo was always and only seen as a transparent act of hostility, guaranteeing an immediate (and potentially escalating) response from the other side.

In many ways "détente" was as active (if unmentioned) a policy within the Soviet Union during Stagnation in maintaining the social and cultural status quo. Any attempt by cultural producers to deviate from publicly endorsed images of "us" or the "other" were instantly seen as and responded to by cultural administrators as acts of hostility by a "cultural double agent," an "other" who merely has merely passed as one of "us." This is precisely the strategy that Stagnation culture embraces in imaging the American-as-other: the "other" is not the American, but rather that American who merely passes as one of "them" (that is, Americans). One of Stagnation culture's most productive discoveries was the rupture between Americans and their (secret) government agencies, the true servants of capitalism: the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the unnamed-and-ultra-secret. In effect, Stagnation culture was marked by its rejection of Thaw culture's idealistic distinction between "Americans" and "America," the roots of which were already to be found in late-Stalinism's predilection for the naïve and unwitting American agent. Instead, Stagnation culture focuses on the distinction between "Americans" and "agents of America," who invariably are "double agents" within American society (hence the recurrence of renegade CIA units and operatives, and of top secret "black ops" agents as the arch-villains qua cold warriors in Soviet films and political-adventures thrillers of the period).

At the same time, Stagnation culture partially re-Stalinized the visual codes for representing "us": a return to the image (and spirit) of Soviet (especially Russian) superiority to anything and everyone abroad, especially the American "other." "Developed socialism" presupposed not simply the domestic stabilization of the material conditions of daily life, but more important, the attainment of a permanent moral high-ground over the capitalist world more broadly. Soviet citizens, these representational codes suggested, were far more advanced in their transition to full consciousness than their misguided (politically flawed and morally weak) antagonists. In much the same way that the cultural tolerance of the Thaw allowed the "other" to be recast in the mold of the "positive hero," the cultural inflexibility of Stagnation led to the recasting of the "us" as the "mentor": fully developed and possessing a political consciousness anchored in moral superiority.