The First Five-Year Plan centralized the Soviet film industry under one company, Soyuzkino, in 1930 (p. 140). The purpose was to make the industry more efficient and to free the USSR from having to import equipment and films. In order to dominate the home market, the film industry had to boost the number of films being made. By 1932, new factories were supplying the necessary raw stock, and the conversion to sound had been accomplished with little help from abroad (pp. 204-205). Low production and inefficiency, however, remained problems.
The period from 1930 to 1945 also saw a tightening of controls on the types of films being made. Boris Shumyatsky became head of
Soyuzkino at its formation. He was directly responsible to the country’s leader, Joseph Stalin, who took a great interest in the cinema. Shumyatsky favored entertaining and easily comprehensible films, and under his regime the avant-garde Montage movement died out. In 1935, he oversaw the introduction of the doctrine of Socialist Realism into the cinema.
Before the introduction of Socialist Realism, several significant films appeared. Men and Jobs (1932, Alexander Macheret) combined the Montage style with an emphasis on production reflecting the First Five-Year Plan. An American expert arrives to help build a dam. His initial condescension breaks down, and he decides to stay on and help the new Soviet state (12.1). A more unusual film was made by Alexander Medvedkin, who spent the early 1930s traveling in a train, shooting and showing films in villages throughout the Soviet Union. His early shorts made in this fashion do not survive, but his only feature, Happiness (1934), does. A peasant, Kymyr, resists the reforms of the Russian Revolution and seeks happiness through personal wealth, while his oppressed wife, Anna, eventually enters a collective farm and persuades Kymyr to join her. Medvedkin uses comic exaggeration to portray the initial poverty of the couple and the stupidity of soldiers and priests (12.2). Largely ignored in 1934, Happiness was revived in the 1960s, and critics recognized it as an important film.
The Doctrine of Socialist Realism
From 1928, Joseph Stalin ruled the USSR as an absolute dictator, and harsh repression enforced government policy. The secret police ferreted out dissent in all walks of life. The government conducted “purges,” whereby party members who were considered not to support Stalin wholeheartedly were expelled, imprisoned, exiled, or executed. This reign of terror peaked during 1936 to 1938, with “show trials” in which party leaders made scripted confessions of their participation in “counterrevolutionary” activities.
Socialist Realism was an aesthetic approach introduced at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress. A. A. Zhdanov, a cultural official, explained,
Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does this mean? What duties does the title confer upon you?
12.1 A heroic image of Soviet labor in Men and Jobs.
12.2 Stylization in Happiness: the hero and heroine’s poverty leads their horse to graze on their thatched roof
In the first place, it means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art, not to depict it in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as “objective reality,” but to depict reality in its revolutionary development. 1
Writers and artists in all media were required to serve the Communist party’s goals in their work and to follow a set of vague official tenets. This policy would remain more or less strictly in force until the mid-1950s.
Artists were forced to accept Socialist Realism as the only correct style. Sergei Eisenstein’s early mentor, the foremost theatrical director of the 1910s and 1920s,
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