Soviet cinema has been so intimidated by the Ku-Klux-Klan of ‘Formalism’ that it has almost eradicated creativity and creative searches in the field of form. If Formalism as a scientific literary tendency invites attack and censure, it has first and foremost a complete and formulated platform. But in cinema ‘Formalism’ was rather created ‘by analogy’ – and not so much by the film workers themselves as by the critics who were looking for a label to attach themselves to.
Eisenstein had already received a pointer as to how things were changing for the worse in the Soviet Union when a letter from his mother reached him in Mexico. She told him that she had been visited several times by the KGB, who had confiscated the family jewels. She pleaded with him to come back to Moscow as soon as possible to relieve the pressure on her. Pera also wrote, informing Eisenstein that his mother was in danger because of rumours that he was not going to return to the Soviet Union. As a result, Eisenstein departed from New York without delay, leaving Alexandrov and Tisse to stay a little longer.
After the Europa docked at Cherbourg in May 1932, Eisenstein went on to Hamburg where he hoped to take delivery of the rushes of Qué Viva México!, only to learn that they had not been sent from the USA as Sinclair had promised. Apparently, Mrs Sinclair had stopped the shipping of the reels, claiming that if the material got into Eisenstein’s hands, they would never get any money back on the film from the Soviets. Disappointed, he travelled to Berlin, stopping at the Golf Hotel where Hitler was rumoured to be occupying a suite two floors above him. During his brief stay in Berlin, he discussed various projects, including a travel film on the USSR, and A Modern Götterdämmerung, with German producers.
‘The film was to show the decline of capitalist society, and I proposed to base it on the sensational stories about the recent disappearance of the “match king” Ivar Kreiger, the financier Lowenstein, who threw himself out of an aeroplane, and a number of other sensational catastrophes that overtook the representatives of big capital.’1
On the train to Moscow, he met Bertolt Brecht, Margarete Steffin, Brecht’s collaborator and lover, and Slatan Dudow, on their way to Moscow for the premiere of Kühle Wampe, the only film with which Brecht was ever involved that did not distort his intentions. Directed by Dudow and written by Brecht, it was a co-operative venture using actors drawn from the theatre, supported by real workers. The film had fallen foul of the German censors who felt it ‘endangered the safety of the State’, not realising that the true danger was approaching in the form of the Nazi party. Like Eisenstein, Brecht was also thought to be a formalist by the dominant and conservative Moscow critics, but neither man was aware how much the arts were in the grip of Stalin’s iron fist. During the three years that Eisenstein was abroad, he had changed, the Soviet Union had changed, and so had his country’s attitude towards him.
The entry on him in the 1932 edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia reads: ‘In his works October and The General Line, Eisenstein, despite his great ability, yet gave no deep analysis of the decisive stages of the Socialist Revolution and made a diversion to formal experiments. Eisenstein is a representative of the ideology of the revolutionary section of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia which is following in the path of the proletariat.’
While Eisenstein was gallivanting over Europe, the USA and Mexico, the Soviet Union was experiencing forceable collectivisation in agriculture and forceable proletarianisation in the arts. This was the period when all the nation’s resources, human and material, were conscripted in the service of the one great objective: fulfilment of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. In 1930 signs of trouble began to appear. Factories were erected with no machines available, machines were delivered to plants unable to house them. Hastily recruited and untrained workers ruined shiny new machines in one place, while skilled workers sat idle for want of equipment in another. In the last quarter of 1930 there was an attempt to overcome all difficulties at once. October, November, December were proclaimed a special ‘shock quarter’ – Stalin’s effort to wheedle and frighten workers and technicians into greater exertion.
There was a trial in 1930 of the so-called ‘Industrial Party’, whose members included Professor Ramzin and other engineers accused of working for France; and in 1931 a number of ex-Mensheviks, headed by Professor Groman of the State Planning Commission who was said to have acted for emigré Mensheviks, were put on trial. The accused were intimidated but not liquidated. Stalin was merely trying to frighten the trained specialists of pre-revolutionary days into doing what he demanded of them. As the Five-Year Plan approached its final year, the strain became intolerable. Industrial workers were on subsistence wages and forced collectivisation, jammed through under high pressure, produced the terrible famine of 1932–1933.
In two years, the arts were laid to waste like the fertile Ukrainian farmlands. The most notorious case was the dictatorship exercised over literature, with Stalin’s blessing, by the RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). Its chief was Leopold Averbakh, whose brother-in-law was Henry G. Yagoda, chief of the secret police. Calling for the creation of a ‘literary front’ in the struggle to fulfil the first Five-Year Plan, Averbakh inaugurated a literary dictatorship. Some of the most independent and original of Soviet intellectuals were now attacked for their ‘anarchism’ and for their ‘Trotskyist-left deviations’.
Writers were called upon to become ‘shock workers’ in ‘art brigades’ in the service of the first Five-Year Plan. Boris Pilniak was chastised for publishing a novel abroad and for other failings. He attempted to set things right with a large work glorifying the Five-Year Plan called The Volga Falls To The Caspian Sea. The writers who wanted to go on publishing, hastened to write ‘Five-Year Plan novels’. Fyodor Gladkov produced Cement and Energy, Valentin Katayev wrote Time Forward!
Vladimir Mayakovsky had been one of the earliest writers to satirise this utilitarian attitude to the arts in his 1929 futurist play The Bedbug. When the hero-villain requests books on roses and daydreams, he is told that ‘nobody knows anything about what you asked for. Only text books on horticulture have anything on roses, and daydreams are dealt with only in medical works – in the section on hypnosis.’ In 1930, Mayakovsky’s play The Bathhouse (Banya) was a direct assault on the bureaucracy that was closing in on him. The cultural bureaucrats had tolerated his satire on the Communist Millennium in The Bedbug, but they were determined not to let him get away with attacking the present regime.
After a first reading in February 1930, Glavrepertkom, the theatre censorship committee, declared the play was unacceptable in its present form. Only Mayakovsky’s formidable reputation saved it from being scrapped altogether. After some alterations, it was produced the following month but failed as badly as The Bedbug had. This time, his enemies were more outspoken in the press and at public meetings. The critic and official of RAPP, Vladimir Ermilov, insinuated in Pravda that Mayakovsky was playing the game of the Trotskyite opposition, an accusation once levelled at Eisenstein. Always hypersensitive to criticism and stricken by failure, Mayakovsky believed he was now the victim of persecution. With the purges of the intelligentsia at hand, he sensed he would be among the first to be condemned.
At the beginning of April 1930, Mayakovsky was taken to the Kremlin Hospital for a few days with a breakdown that was diagnosed as nervous exhaustion, and on April 14, he shot himself. Part of his suicide note read: ‘Do not blame anyone for my death and don’t gossip. The deceased terribly dislike this sort of thing. Mamma, sisters, comrades, forgive me – this is not a way out (I do not recommend it to others), but I have none other … Seriously – there was nothing else I could do. Greetings.’
At 8 p.m. on the day of his death the State Institute for the Study of the Brain extracted Mayakovsky’s brain; it weighed 1,700 grams as against an average of 1,400, and was put in the Institute’s ‘Pantheon’. Five years later Stalin declared, ‘Mayakovsky was and remains the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch … Indifference to his memory and to his work is a crime.’
As the first Five-Year Plan neared its completion, the Party Central Committee again intervened in the literary scene in April 1932. RAPP was abolished and replaced by a single Union of Soviet Writers. The policy of Averbakh as leader of RAPP was condemned for alleged leanings towards idealism. Stalin blamed RAPP for the suicide of Mayakovsky, who had been driven to the grave by ‘enemies of the people’. Stalin expressed his willingness to forget the past errors of the old intelligentsia, who should be utilised for ‘socialist construction’.
By the end of 1932 the slogan ‘Socialist Realism’, a phrase attributed to Stalin himself, was de rigeur in the arts. Socialist Realism had a dialectical antithesis, ‘formalism’ – in other words experimental or modern art. Soviet art must be understandable and loved by the masses, but it must be worthy of its ancestry in classic Russian and world art, and by its strength and optimism it must help to build socialism. In architecture it meant classical colonnades, in painting the academic French school of the previous century; the major experimental formalist painters – Natan Altman, Pavel Filonov and Kazimir Malevich (absurdly accused of being a German spy) were under intensifying attack. In literature Soviet Realism was exemplified by the banal novels of Alexis Tolstoy, and in music the tuneful marching songs of Ivan Dzerzhinsky.
The Union of Soviet Composers was established to safeguard ‘Social Realism’ in Soviet music. Stalin admonished Dmitri Shostakovich for his discordant modern technique, ordering him to compose melodies which the toiling masses could whistle on their way to work. Art had to function as an opiate not a stimulant. Where now Eisenstein’s Ciné Fist?
The Civil War operas The Black Crag (Cherny yar) by Andrei Pashchenko and The Break-Through (Proriv) by Sergei Pototsky were composed in an old-fashioned nationalist idiom. The senior Soviet composer of symphonies for thirty years, Nikolai Myaskovsky, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, wrote in a late-Romantic style. His Eighth (1925) was based on appropriate folk-songs; his Tenth (1927) was regarded as a deviation in the direction of ‘false modernism’, and number Eleven (1932), he admitted, was ‘subjective’. He made amends in the same year in his Twelfth, conceived as a ‘Collective Farm’ symphony and dedicated ‘To the Fifteenth Anniversary of the October Revolution’. Shostakovich’s Second Symphony (1927) was subtitled ‘To October: symphonic dedication.’
Some of the episodes in Shostakovich’s Third were meant to represent the Young Pioneers, and others the excitement of a vast May Day meeting. (He could just as well have labelled them Stalin’s birthday or Lenin’s funeral.) On February 15, 1932 Shostakovich announced that he had begun ‘a great symphonic poem with orchestra, chorus and solo vocal numbers, its theme being “From Karl Marx to our own days.”’
There were two operas written at the same time on the subject of an uprising by serfs in 1606 against Dmitri Shuysky. One, Ivan Bolotnikovan by Vassili Nechaev, had been accepted for production in 1932 by Stanislavsky, but it had leanings towards ‘modernism’ and never reached the stage. The other, Valeri Zhelobinsky’s Kamarinsky Muzhik, modelled on Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov – there was even a Polish scene with mazurka – was produced in 1933. However, it was criticised for its failure to show the hero’s connection with the people and for Zhelobinsky’s ‘grotesque and ironical’ treatment of the boyars, almost the identical criticism that would be levelled at Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part II thirteen years later.
Sergei Prokofiev, who had been abroad since 1917, returned to the Soviet Union in 1932, having decided to settle in Moscow permanently. His musical language during his twenty-five-year absence, nine of which were spent in Paris, was marked by jagged tonal shifts, aggressive harmonies, humour and mordant satire. He had grown increasingly disillusioned with what seemed to him the artificial nature and narrowly restricted appeal of contemporary music in Western Europe, and became more aware of the ties that bound him to his native country and the possibilities that it promised him as a composer. Later in his life he wrote: ‘The cardinal virtue (or sin, if you like) of my life has been the search for an original musical language, a musical language of my own. I detest imitation; I detest hackneyed methods. I always want to be myself.’2 As he was to discover, the Soviet Union was not the ideal climate in which any ‘original’ artist could thrive.
The sterility of the Soviet cinema was of more direct relevance to Eisenstein. In the spring of 1930, a piatiletka, or plan, had been announced for theatre, cinema, sculpture and painting. The piatiletka for cinema was implemented by a decree bringing all branches of the movie industry under the centralised control of a new organisation – Soyuzkino (All-Union Soviet Film Trust). At the head of Soyuzkino, Stalin placed Boris Shumyatsky, an energetic thirty-two-year-old bureaucrat, whose authority over directors was absolute. His chief concern was to make sure the industry could fulfil its fantastic production quotas.
In the summer of 1931, when the cinema had been brought almost to a standstill by the combined problems of censorship, bureaucracy and the technicalities of sound, Shumyatsky announced that Soyuzkino planned to make five hundred full-length films in 1932, eighty of them in sound and twenty in colour, which was more than all the studios in Hollywood produced in an average year. Two months later, he was talking even more wildly: ‘By the end of 1932, we shall need 75,000 projection-machine operators … We have today only three theatres in the whole of the Soviet Union equipped to show sound pictures. By the end of the year we shall have 100. Next year, there shall be 5,000.’ Lenin had a word for this: komchvanstvo meaning communist swagger. However, within a year, the movie industry had slumped both qualitatively and quantitatively.
From 1929, Soviet film directors struggled to solve two major problems. One was technical – the use of sound. The other was how to treat a new theme: the everyday life of the Soviet Union. The problem was that although film-makers at that period knew the rules they were never sure how to interpret them. The two most notable films on collectivisation, The General Line and Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) came in for semi-official criticism.
Izvestia had a three-column article denouncing Earth as ‘counter revolutionary’, ‘defeatist’, and ‘too realistic’ in its portrayal of the peasantry. The article was even more damaging as it was written by Demyan Bedny (the pseudonym of E. Pridvorov), a writer who was close to Stalin and lived in the Kremlin. There were other ‘spontaneous’ protestations against Earth, which was not seen in its entirety until 1958.
Pudovkin’s last silent film, A Simple Case (Prostoi Sluchai) aka We Live Well (in December 1930) aka It is Necessary to Live Well (in February 1931) aka Life is Beautiful (at its release in the summer of 1931) was condemned as ‘elitist, overly-abstract and pseudo-significant.’ Paradoxically, Pudovkin set out to make a film with wide appeal. It concerned a triangular love conflict during the Civil War: a married Red Army commander falls for another woman. He is condemned by his friends for betraying their ‘comrade citizen’ and returns to his wife.
In December 1931, an official decree criticised ‘ultra-leftist tendencies’ in cinema. As the better-known directors failed to adjust themselves to the demands of the bureaucracy, the members of the Stalin School began to push them aside. The Road to Life, directed by Nikolai Ekk, was the first Soviet film to be conceived and made as a talkie. Although it contained remnants of the montage techniques Ekk had learned from his teacher Eisenstein, the film moved towards a more personalised kind of Soviet cinema. It told of the thousands of homeless orphans who roamed the countryside as vagabonds in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War. At a children’s collective, they are rehabilitated and taught a trade.
In the same year, 1931, Sergei Yutkevich produced his first talkie, The Golden Mountains. Eisenstein had introduced the film to audiences in New York, an occasion which provided him with the opportunity to get in some digs at Hollywood. This rather tedious affair with long stretches of slow dialogue was hailed by Professor Yesuitov, the Kremlin’s voice on cinema aesthetics, living up to the first syllable of his name, as ‘a picture of great ideological significance.’ The Soviet Culture Bulletin added, ‘Its greatness lies in its profound and earnest social thematics.’
In 1932, Ermler and Yutkevich collaborated on Counterplan for which Shostakovich wrote the score. The theme was the foiling of a sabotage attempt in a steel plant, and the film was the showpiece of the celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution. It took its text from one of Stalin’s sayings, ‘The realisation of our Plan depends on us, on living men.’ No expense was spared on the film, which was to show the world, and particularly other Soviet directors, just what Stalin wanted in the cinema. Ermler studied at the Communist Academy for two years to prepare himself for his great task. The Soviet Culture Bulletin (1932) described it thus: ‘It freely combines elements of healthy romance with joyous comedy, dramatic intensity with lyric warmth … unimpeachable pictures of Leningrad’s white nights … Special mention should be made of the work of the painter-architect Dubrovsky-Eshke, who built within the studio a giant department of a metal factory with all of its machines and lathes.’
Counterplan, wrote Professor Yesuitov, ‘was the first victory of Socialist Realism in the Soviet cinema.’
Despite the best efforts of the Stalin School, the cinema refused to thrive. In 1933, Pudovkin’s The Deserter opened. Having taken two years to finish, he had started before Socialist Realism took hold so he had to alter it in the cutting room to conform to the new dogma. As a result, the film was marred without making it politically acceptable. The Deserter was taken off the screens of Moscow’s two biggest movie theatres after a week because of the film’s ‘Leftism’ and ‘Formalism’, and because it dealt too much with politics!
This was the environment in which Eisenstein, already persona non grata with the authorities, found himself on his return to the Soviet Union. Although his international reputation could not be ignored, he was attacked by the Soviet press and in film circles for his involvement in the Mexican scandals, his altercation with Upton Sinclair, a radical writer respected in the Soviet Union, his long absence which had generated rumours of defection, whispers about his sexual preferences, and his deviation from the endorsed tenets of Socialist Realism.