We had only one opportunity for his genius to dazzle – that was in the strategy of the Battle on the Ice, the famous pincer movement in which he crushed ‘the iron swine’ – the Teutonic Knights – the pincers entirely surrounding the enemy. This is a manoeuvre all generals in history have dreamed of, it brought unfading glory to the first person to employ it … It brought hundred-fold more glory to the generals of the Red Army …
‘The courtroom. My case is being tried. I am on the stand. The hall is crowded with people who know me … I try to shrink by gazing at my feet. I see nothing but all around me I hear the whisper of censure and the murmur of voices. Like blow upon blow fall the words of the prosecuting attorney’s summing up … My return from prison. The clang of the gates closing behind me as I’m released. The astonished stare of the servant girl who stops cleaning the windows next door when she sees me enter my old block … There is a new name on the mail box … my door is closed in my face by the former acquaintances who now occupy my apartment … I turn back. The hurriedly raised collar of a passerby who recognises me …’ This revealing passage, not published until 1943, is not, as one might imagine, by Franz Kafka, but by Eisenstein, expressing palpable fears of what might be his own trial, disguised in the form of an objective, academic essay on Word and Image in his first book, The Film Sense.1
Apart from his three women friends, Pera Attasheva, Elizabeta Teleshova, Esther Shub, and his faithful housekeeper, ‘Aunt’ Pasha, who stood by Eisenstein during this ‘grey atmosphere’, the only prominent cultural figure to give him support was the writer Alexander Fadeyev. Fadeyev sent him an admiring and encouraging letter begging him not to pay overmuch attention to the slanders and attacks, ending up, ‘I clasp you warmly, warmly by the hand.’2 It marked the beginning of a close friendship. Eisenstein was frequently to seek Fadeyev’s advice in moments of crisis and was among the few people he addressed in the familiar form.
The dramatist Vsevolod Vishnevsky, who was brave enough to defend Eisenstein publicly regarding Bezhin Meadow, sketched two scenarios for Eisenstein to direct: We, the Russian People and an untitled film about the war in Spain, treated as a battle against fascism. Eisenstein mentioned this in his letter to Jay Leyda in February 1937, ‘Primo: There are plans for Spain. Secundo: Paul Robeson who was with a concert tour here has put himself at my entire disposition for the time from July to October. Now both these things can fit marvellously together – taking the race and national problem within the film about revolutionary Spain …’3
A few months later, Pera was writing to Ivor Montagu: ‘What do you think about Robeson playing the part of a Moroccan soldier in Spain – that is the new idea, instead of Black Majesty (sweet dreams! while Shumyatsky sleeps!).’4 Eisenstein made a few sketches, indicating roles for Robeson, Pera, Maxim Strauch, Judith Glizer and others, showing a church, a Madonna, and an army tank in a town square with snipers on the roofs.
About We, the Russian People Eisenstein was enthusiastic, and after a favourable reception by a group of actors, scenarists and the artistic council of Mosfilm to whom Vishnevsky read it, he looked forward to starting work on the film. He often visited Vishnevsky for a meal, after which they would retire to the writer’s study and spend long periods looking at each other in silence.
Among those who saw a rough cut of Bezhin Meadow was the German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who was in Moscow to discuss a film version of The Oppenheim Family with the Jewish director, Grigori Roshal. He and Eisenstein discussed the possibilities of a film of Feuchtwanger’s historical novel, The Ugly Duchess, and the staging of his play, The False Nero, for which Eisenstein made sketches and designs. Because of the problems he had had in completing films, or even getting them made, Eisenstein began to consider going back to directing for the theatre. Most of the plays suggested were fairly weighty, but while in America he had obtained the Russian theatrical rights to George Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Once in a Lifetime, which he wanted to direct with Maxim Strauch and Judith Glizer. This 1930 lampoon of the havoc caused by the coming of sound to Hollywood, would have finally satisfied Eisenstein’s desire to direct a comedy. Unfortunately, it was not to be, though his grotesque humour was apparent, in varying degrees, in all the various manifestations of his talent.
On May 18, 1937, Yelena Sokolovskaya, the head of Mosfilm, wrote and informed Eisenstein that she was trying to secure a script by Pyotr Pavlenko about the hero of 13th-century Russia, Saint Alexander Nevsky. A little later, Boris Shumyatsky offered Eisenstein the choice of two historical subjects about patriotic heroes, either Ivan Susanin (the hero of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar) or Alexander Nevsky. Perhaps Eisenstein’s letter to Stalin had had some effect because, behind this proposal, lay an instruction from the Leader himself, who would ‘entrust’ Eisenstein with one more production. Despite the heartache, literal and figurative, that he had suffered over the assassination of Bezhin Meadow, Eisenstein was elated to be given another opportunity, no matter what the subject. He had not completed a single film since The General Line in 1929, and a director’s fee would help pay off a number of creditors.
If Eisenstein had had the choice, the historical subject that he really wanted to make was that of the 12th-century Prince Igor of Severski, which Borodin had treated in his grand opera, Prince Igor. Unlike Borodin, who played down the clashes between the different Russian princes, Eisenstein wanted to stress the internecine conflicts. However, Prince Igor was suggested to, and rejected by, Mosfilm.
One afternoon in the summer of 1937, Eisenstein was at his dacha in Kratov, living next door to Mikhail Romm, when he called to Romm over the garden fence. He told Romm about the choice of two subjects he had been given. Romm expressed surprise that Eisenstein was thinking of going back so far in history. ‘Oh, I knew you’d regard both these ideas as irrelevant and out of date,’ Eisenstein retorted. ‘But why should you? What is it that makes you regard history as dead and useless? I happen to know that despite what you say I’ll enjoy doing it.’ He asked Romm which of the two subjects he would choose. Romm said Ivan Susanin. Eisenstein asked his reason. ‘Because for one thing you have a good plot, the dramatic story of a peasant. Then the period of history is well researched and well documented. But Alexander Nevsky is largely a mystery.’ ‘Precisely!’ Eisenstein replied. ‘And that is exactly why it appeals to me. Nobody knows much about him, and so nobody can possibly find fault with me. Whatever I do the historians and the so-called “consultants” won’t be able to argue with me. They all know as well as you and I do the evidence is slim. So I’m in the strongest possible position because everything I do must be right … I’ll find an actor and cast him as Alexander Nevsky, and the whole world will soon believe that the real Nevsky was just like my actor. If I choose a fat actor, then Nevsky was fat. If I have a thin actor, then he was thin. Then and now, always and forever.’5 Eisenstein was always proud to have created (or imagined) history with the Odessa Steps sequence from The Battleship Potemkin.
Actually, ‘then and now, always and forever’, Alexander Nevsky is assumed to have looked like Nikolai Cherkassov, who reluctantly agreed to play the title role. Cherkassov had just come from great successes – in Alexander Zarkhi and Josef Heifitz’s Baltic Deputy and in the role of Alexei, the son of Peter the Great in Peter the First. It was difficult to believe that this commanding thirty-four-year-old actor of great height and deep voice, had actually started his career as a comic actor in music hall.
In 1990, The European newspaper obtained a distorted version of Judith Glizer’s memoirs published in an obscure quarterly Kinovedcheskie Zapiski (Diaries of the Cinema). The correspondent, Jeanne Vronskaya, claimed that Glizer had written that Eisenstein and Cherkassov were lovers, and that Cherkassov’s wife knew of the affair. What Vronskaya’s motive was in misquoting Glizer remains obscure. Factual errors in the article headed ‘How the Casting Couch Survived Under Stalin: Eisenstein made his male lover a star – and Uncle Joe approved’, add to the suspicion that the whole piece might have been concocted in order to defame the memory of both Eisenstein and Cherkassov. According to Vronskaya (falsely attributed to Glizer), Pera Attasheva was ‘his childhood sweetheart from Riga’ and Cherkassov was an ‘obscure film extra’ in 1933 when Eisenstein’s ‘eye fell upon him’. In fact, Cherkassov had already had substantial roles in a number of films, including Zarkhi and Heifitz’s Hectic Days (1935). It is also implied that Eisenstein had to get Stalin’s approval for the casting of the ‘unknown’ Cherkassov as Alexander Nevsky. Actually, Cherkassov was a member of the Supreme Soviet and a State Artist, more in favour than the director. The actor, whom Eisenstein called, enigmatically, a ‘Holy Nag’, forbade his face to be photographed from certain camera angles – behaving like certain Hollywood sex symbols.
Eisenstein began work on Alexander Nevsky with his co-author, Pyotr Pavlenko, in the late summer of 1937. Pavlenko was a Stalinist and probably a KGB agent; the Kremlin was taking no chances with Eisenstein this time. To protect him from the temptations of formalism, and any ‘deviation’ from the accepted tenets of Socialist Realism, Eisenstein was surrounded by collaborators faithful to Party policy; he was ‘assisted’ by Dmitri Vassiliev (who had also recently watched over the making of Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October) and had been given, in addition to Cherkassov, ‘politically correct’ stars like Nikolai Okhlopkov, formerly Chief Director of Moscow’s Realist Theatre, who would play Vassili Bouslai. Another factor which would contribute to making political ‘errors’ impossible, was that the Kremlin’s views on the subject were well known.
The increasing threat from Nazi Germany had led to further official encouragement of patriotic art, and the victory of the Novgorod nobles, led by Prince Alexander Nevsky, over their Teutonic rivals, was considered the first victory of democracy over fascism. The official announcement of the film described it as ‘dealing with the struggles of the Russian people against the German knights,’ being filmed ‘to make workers conscious of what they had to defend.’ These were the pressures and restrictive conditions under which Eisenstein embarked on Alexander Nevsky.
In November 1937 the first version of the scenario, entitled Rus, was completed and published in Znamya, after the inclusion of a series of suggestions volunteered by Vishnevsky. As Prince Igor still lingered in Eisenstein’s mind, he had included a battle between Russians in Novgorod before Alexander Nevsky arrives to stop the feuding. The script ended with Nevsky being killed by the Mongol chief before the climactic triumph of the Russian army. Following publication, a whole avalanche of suggestions from historians, teachers, students and even schoolchildren flooded in. When Stalin received the second version of Rus, he cut the battles between the princes and refused to condone the death of the hero.
It was while he was doing preparatory research on locations that Eisenstein heard the news of the downfall of his nemesis, Boris Shumyatsky.
In the first six months of 1937, very few Soviet pictures had been produced. Alexandrov was enjoying a vogue with his comedy-musicals, and there was a football comedy called The Goalkeeper of the Republic, reviewed by the New York Times as ‘a rollicking if by no means first rate production, strongly reminiscent of American college comedies.’ Other releases of 1937 acceptable to Stalin were Grigori Roshal’s People of the Eleventh Legion, about the Paris Commune; Vladimir Petrov’s Peter the First, based on Alexei Tolstoy’s novel, the hero of which Stalin identified with; Romm’s Lenin in October (‘This remarkable and momentous film’, according to Eisenstein’s review), and Baltic Deputy, starring Cherkassov as the distinguished Russian scientist Klement Timiriazev, who became a hero of the Revolution.
But the Soviet film industry was on the brink of bankruptcy. A notebook kept at Lenfilm studio in 1936 stated, ‘Filming of the picture Peter the Great was stopped because of the cold in the studio … actor Cherkassov refused to be filmed wearing only a shirt … sound recording for The Youth of the Poet was delayed four hours because the roof leaked … It is discovered that an actor is holding a different script today. A search begins for yesterday’s script …’
A version of Treasure Island that had been produced by the Children’s Film Trust was denounced as ‘bourgeois’ by Soviet Art, the organ of the Central Art Committee. In this case, criticism may have been justified, because in order to get love interest, Jim Hawkins had been changed into Jenny Hawkins, with whom Dr Livesey falls in love, and, to give it a class angle, the Irish revolutionary movement had been dragged in. A reference in the review to Shumyatsky as ‘the former chief’ of the cinema industry was the first public intimation of his fall.
However, in a country with so Machiavellian an infrastructure, it would have been too rational merely to fire Shumyatsky for incompetence. If he had simply been dismissed, it would have reflected on the regime which had kept him in office for eight years. Therefore he was charged with having permitted ‘savage veteran spies, Trotskyite and Bukharinist agents, and hirelings of Japanese and German fascism to perform their wrecking deeds in the Soviet cinema.’
In January 1938, Boris Shumyatsky was arrested, and was shot in July of the same year. Although Eisenstein did not openly express any glee at Shumyatsky’s demise, he must have felt some satisfaction that he had outlived the man who had led the campaign against Qué Viva México!, had taken pride in the aborting of MMM, Moscow and The Black Consul and, most wounding of all, who banned Bezhin Meadow after two versions of the film had been virtually completed. Yet, Eisenstein’s satisfaction would have been qualified by the knowledge that nobody was safe in the climate of the times, and that his turn might come.
Nevertheless, with optimism again triumphing over experience, Eisenstein could only hope that he would now be able to make more films in the future, relatively unimpeded, and that he would be thoroughly rehabilitated as a Soviet artist. However, celebrations were premature because the Kremlin replaced Shumyatsky with Semyon Dukelsky, who came straight from the NKVD or Secret Police. He was appointed ‘to introduce firm Bolshevik order’ into the cinema.
Developing a technique used in Qué Viva México!, Eisenstein made sketches for Alexander Nevsky before shooting because, as he wrote, ‘without some concrete notion of act and gesture it is impossible to be specific about individual behaviour. The drawing is very often the search for something. Sometimes the scene you shoot has apparently no longer anything in common with the drawing: sometimes it will be even two years later, the drawing itself comes to life.’
Although stylistically much less experimental than his previous work, Alexander Nevsky has what Eisenstein called a ‘symphonic structure’, derived from his close collaboration with Sergei Prokofiev. Prokofiev and Eisenstein had met many times in the past, but few could have predicted the extraordinary success of their collaboration. (Even closer than that of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrman, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota.) Prokofiev welcomed the opportunity of working on the score of a film. He had spent some time in Hollywood film studios, making a careful study of film music techniques with the thought of applying them to his work in Soviet cinema.
‘The cinema is a young and very modern art that offers new and fascinating possibilities to the composer,’ Prokofiev commented. ‘These possibilities must be utilised. Composers ought to study and develop them, instead of merely writing the music and then leaving it to the mercy of the film people.’6
As the action of the film takes place in the thirteenth century, there was a temptation to make use of the actual music of the period, but the Catholic choral singing was considered far too remote from contemporary audiences to have much effect.
Prokofiev would watch the rushes, note the timing of a sequence, and then leave around midnight, promising to deliver new music at noon the following day. True to his word, he would arrive punctually on the morrow, in his little blue car, with music that harmonised perfectly with the images he had seen. For the ‘Battle on the Ice’ sequence the composer produced a brilliant ‘tone poem’ in a matter of days, merely on the basis of Eisenstein’s sketches and spoken ideas.
When it came to recording the sound track, Prokofiev was actively involved at all the stages, experimenting with dramatic microphone distortions and using the Mosfilm bath-tub as a percussion instrument. Eisenstein explained: ‘There are sequences in which the shots were cut to a previously recorded music track. There are sequences for which the entire piece of music was written to a final cutting of the picture … in the battle scene where pipes and drums are played for the victorious Russian soldiers, I could not find a way to explain to Prokofiev what precise effect should be “seen” in his music for this joyful moment. Seeing that we were getting nowhere, I ordered some “prop” instruments constructed, shot these being played (without sound) visually and projected the results for Prokofiev – who almost immediately handed me an exact “musical equivalent” to that visual image of pipers and drummers which I had shown him.’7
Because of the difficulty of its execution, The Battle on the Ice was filmed first, paradoxically, during a summer heatwave at a lake near Moscow. Tisse converted the summer sky into a wintry one by means of filters, artificial snow was spread over one bank and the trees were painted white and covered with cotton wool. The ‘ice’ on the lake was supported by air-filled balloons from which the air was released when the ice blocks had to give way under the weight of the drowning German knights. Unlike the non-factual Odessa Steps sequence in The Battleship Potemkin, The Battle on the Ice had really taken place, on Lake Peipus, on April 5, 1242.
Alexander Nevsky was made with extraordinary speed. Shooting began in the spring of 1938, and the completed film was ready by November of the same year, five months ahead of schedule. To achieve this, Eisenstein worked as many hours in the editing room as the day would allow.
One night a telephone call came from the Kremlin – Stalin wanted to see the film. Without waking Eisenstein, his assistants gathered up the reels and hurried them off to the command screening. When the film was returned to the editing studio, it was discovered that one reel was missing. One theory put forward to explain its disappearance, was that the reel had been left behind in the studio by mistake, and Stalin did not notice its absence. Afterwards, when this was brought to the attention of the official in charge of the Kremlin screening, it was decided that the film would be better if released in the version that had been seen and approved by Stalin. Therefore, the spare reel was destroyed. A more likely explanation is that suggested by Esther Tobak, Eisenstein’s assistant, who controlled the lights at the showing for Stalin. She believed that the complete film was shown, but that Stalin objected to scenes involving a brawl on the bridge at Novgorod. The reel on which it appeared was extracted and eventually destroyed.
However, whatever the cause of its disappearance, the missing reel has never been found. The reason the gap was (and is) hardly noticeable is due to the way many films were still being made with a single projector in mind. The technique, dating from the silent era, was to have the end of a reel coincide with the end of a sequence so as not to interrupt the action.
Alexander Nevsky is Eisenstein’s most straightforward and linear film, whatever the complexities behind its conception and making. Although Nikolai Cherkassov has the charisma and stature to hold the film – and the Russian army – together, Nevsky is presented as a one-dimensional figure, a conqueror striking heroic poses at the centre of a grandiloquent historical fresco. A Russian icon, in fact. Eisenstein’s watchdogs (Dmitri Vassiliev was given a co-director’s credit) made sure that he kept to the straight and narrow of the tenets of Socialist Realism, and that Nevsky was the kind of hero the times required, princely and patriotic, not revolutionary. If one were to imagine Eisenstein’s works as animated films in the manner of the best of Walt Disney, Alexander Nevsky would need the least modification. There is even a Russian folk tale, about a vixen and a hare, told by a soldier in Nevsky, that would benefit as a cartoon sequence because, on English ears at least, it falls flat as it stands.
In other hands, this patriotic pageant would have been unwatchable. What one sees is how much Eisenstein (as in The General Line) tried to get away with while confined within the strict formula of the propaganda film. The costume designs alone conjure up a fantastic folk tale: the Germans wear bucket helmets with slits in the form of a cross for their eyes, while their leaders have even more fanciful helmets, with stag’s horns or eagle’s wings and claws on either side. As black smoke billows behind an evil-looking Catholic priest speaking of God (in the dictatorial manner of the father in Bezhin Meadow), a sinister Savonarola-profiled monk in a black cowl plays an organ outside the German camp, in what can be seen today as ‘camp’ in another sense. (In an echo of the priest in The Battleship Potemkin, the monk also pretends to be dead as he cowers behind his cowl.) Nevsky’s helmet has elements of the goggles of a pilot’s cap (as was worn by the tractor driver in The General Line.)
If one analyses the film in terms of grand opera, the surface simplicity is deepened further. Nevsky’s orations can been seen as arias, the scenes between Vassili and Gavrilo as duets. There are trios (Olga, Gavrilo, Vassili), choruses (the fishermen, the masses), the dying men on the battlefield each crying (or singing) out in a fugue for their loved ones, and a ballet (the Battle on the Ice), underlined by the dramatic use of Prokofiev’s score, including songs (all of which the composer developed into his symphonic cantata, Alexander Nevsky). The music often takes a broadly satirical approach, switching briskly from the uplifting (the Russians) to direful, menacing chords (the Germans), and there is a comic ‘glug, glug’ coda to the drowning of the enemy under the ice.
However, the music is used in the manner of a silent film score, accompanying the images rather than integrating with them, and cutting off after each sequence. Indeed, Alexander Nevsky has many of the elements of a silent film, with the camera hardly moving throughout, apart from a few effective tracking shots. Although Eisenstein still relies on montage to advance the action, there are a number of uncharacteristic long takes, such as one which picks out the German army as tiny figures on a hill, advancing slowly towards the camera. The violent and bloody clash between the two armies could have come from Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. Despite some occasional speeding up, the battles, which take up the greater part of the film’s running time, are excitingly choreographed, and influenced many subsequent screen battles, notably Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight.
Ominous tuba chords sound the overture to The Battle on the Ice, as the thin ice on the lake gives way beneath the weight of the Germans’ heavy armour, and the white knights are swallowed up by the waters, desperately – and a little comically – trying to cling to the blocks of ice under the broad, white expanses of the sky. (Eisenstein is here making an allusion to the climax of D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East, when Lillian Gish is rescued from the swirling ice-floe.) The battlefield strewn with the dead refers back to the film’s prologue, where skulls and skeletons on the ‘field of death’ echo the Day of the Dead in Qué Viva México!.
Just as it was inevitable that the scenes after the Odessa Steps sequence in The Battleship Potemkin, despite their fervour, would be anticlimactic, the prolonged post-battle scenes of celebration in Alexander Nevsky cannot avoid bathos. The great leader with small children clinging to him (reminiscent of another ‘great leader’), the resolution of which of the two friendly rivals will be chosen by Olga, rapidly solved by Vassili’s pairing off with the warrior goddess Vassilissa, and the final patriotic speech, are the nearest Eisenstein ever came to the conventional.
Alexander Nevsky opened in Moscow on November 23, 1938. At the premiere, held in Stalin’s presence, Eisenstein sat between Prokofiev and Cherkassov. He was amused by Prokofiev’s whispered query as to who the man was on his other side – the composer had failed to recognise Cherkassov without his make-up, small beard and flowing locks in the film. After the performance, Stalin personally congratulated Eisenstein and shook him by the hand. With Stalin’s endorsement, Alexander Nevsky and its director were given the official stamp of approval, increasing Eisenstein’s confidence in his future as a film director. (During the war, Stalin instituted an Order of Alexander Nevsky for Bravery.)
On February 20, 1938, Hitler had made his most anti-Soviet speech to that date. ‘There is only one State with which we have not sought to establish relations, nor do we wish to establish relations with it: Soviet Russia. More than ever do we see in Bolshevism the incarnation of the human destructive instinct …’
By 1938, the Soviet Union appeared thoroughly isolated and ignored. On the day after Hitler’s speech, Chamberlain declared that peace would depend on ‘the four major powers of Europe: Germany, Italy, France and ourselves.’ In September came the Munich agreement, and the belief that appeasement had succeeded.
Because Alexander Nevsky was conceived as a piece of history with contemporary overtones, and was first shown only two months after the Munich Pact, the defeat of the invading Teutonic Knights by Nevsky’s army became, by implication, a comment on Nazi aggression and, more ominously, proved to be a prophecy of what was to happen to Soviet Russia three years later.
While still working on the film, Eisenstein, in his mandatory bombastic (parodic?) vein, wrote an article entitled ‘Alexander Nevsky and the Rout of the Germans’ for Izvestia. In the piece, published on July 12, 1938, he made a correlation between Nevsky and Stalin, and presented Nevsky’s victory over the Germans as a warning to their present-day counterparts.
‘The only miracle in the battle on Lake Peipus was the genius of the Russian people, who for the first time began to sense their national, native power, their unity: a people able to draw from this awakening self-awareness an indomitable strength; able to advance, from their midst, a strategist and commander of genius, Alexander; and with him at their head, to defend the motherland, having smashed the devious enemy on foreign territory and not allowed him to despoil by his invasion their native soil. “The swine are finally repulsed beyond the Russian frontiers,” wrote Marx. Such will be the fate of all those who dare encroach upon our great land even now. For if the might of our national soul was able to punish the enemy in this way, when the country lay exhausted in the grip of the Tartar yoke, then nothing will be strong enough to destroy this country which has broken the last chains of its oppression; a country which has become a Socialist Motherland; a country which is being led to unprecedented victories by the greatest strategist in world history – Stalin.’8
This was followed a few months later by an equally rhetorical article called ‘My Subject is Patriotism’, effectively playing dummy to Stalin’s ventriloquist. This Eisenstein was unrecognisable to friends, and not to be found in his letters, diaries or memoirs.
‘The great ideas of our Soviet Fatherland endow our art with unusual fecundity. We have tried to serve these great ideas of our Socialist Fatherland in all the films we have made in the course of nearly fifteen years. These were themes about the underground struggle, collectivism, the October Revolution, collectivisation. And now, in this picture [Alexander Nevsky], we have approached the national and patriotic theme, which dominates the attitude of Socialist creativity not only in our country, but in the West as well, for the guardians of national esteem, pride and independence, and true patriotism throughout the world are none other than the Communist Party and Communism … Now as I write this article, the picture Alexander Nevsky is finished. Our entire collective, imbued with the lofty ideas of the picture, worked on it enthusiastically; we are sure that the close of this film, Alexander Nevsky’s splendid speech, will resound in our day as a terrible warning to all enemies of the Soviet Union. “Should anyone raise his sword against us, he shall perish by the sword. On this the Russian land stands and shall stand!”; These words express the feelings and will of the masses of the Soviet people.’9
The film and these public pronouncements did the trick. On February 1, 1939, a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR awarded Eisenstein the Order of Lenin. The following March he was accorded the title of Doctor of the Science of Art Studies.
On this occasion, as if to consolidate his position as one of Stalin’s darlings, Eisenstein wrote a piece in Izvestia called ‘We Serve the People’ in which he maintained, ‘Living in conditions that are exceptionally conducive to creativity, unlike artists and craftsmen in the West, our artist does not always realise the extent to which these conditions oblige him to rise to the occasion.’
In contrast, early in 1939, Eisenstein wrote to Jay Leyda, ‘I’m still so tired after Nevsky – who was a hell of a job to be made on so short a schedule … Please write me as much as you can and about everything of importance and interest in books, in the arts and so on … What about the ‘snobbishness’ around Nevsky? [The film had recently opened in the USA] I’d like to know as much as possible about everything – unfavourable even more than favourable. What is written in Nation and New Republic, what in magazines? What do people say about him? The next film will be not so very soon …’10
Though not yet fully recovered from the exhaustion induced by Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein was nonetheless immersed in his next film project. Perekop (aka Frunze), which he was writing with his novelist friend Alexander Fadeyev. It was to retell the story of Mikhail V. Frunze’s 1920 victory against the White forces at the Battle of Perekop in the Crimea. Since his Proletkult days he had been familiar with Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry stories, Frunze himself, and other veterans of the campaign.
However, in May 1939, Pyotr Pavlenko, his co-scenarist on Alexander Nevsky, returned from a trip to Uzbekistan and enthused to Eisenstein about the construction of the Ferghana Canal. Eisenstein discussed the project with Tisse early in June, when the decision seems to have been taken to make a ‘half-documentary, half-acted’ film about it. On June 18 he obtained official blessing, and at the suggestion of the Committee for Cinematographic matters, he, Tisse and Pavlenko set off by plane for Tashkent to look into the filming possibilities.
The next few weeks were spent touring the area by car, covering some thousands of miles and visiting the historic cities of Bukhara and Samarkand. After all his travels and researches, Eisenstein and his colleagues returned to Moscow on July 12. Soon after, Eisenstein wrote to Prokofiev asking him to write the music for The Great Ferghana Canal. ‘We shall be making a long and complex film … I cannot imagine such a film without you and therefore without delay I took the liberty of sending you an expanded libretto … In my opinion the stuff is damned fascinating and might prove very substantial.’11
The scenario was completed before the end of July and the first form of the shooting-script was edited in record time at Eisenstein’s dacha during the first three days of August. ‘The plan of the scenario was for an epic film dealing with the fertilisation of the deserts from Tamburlaine’s time to the building of the Ferghana Canal in the modern Soviet of Uzbekistan,’ Eisenstein announced. ‘This will be the story of humanity’s epic struggle against the deserts and sands of Asia and of the spectacular fight for water … another hymn to collectivist unification through socialist labour.’12
A reading of the imaginative shooting script reveals that The Great Ferghana Canal would have been far more than ‘another hymn to collectivist unification through socialist labour.’ The main action – the fight for water and the fertilisation of the desert with the help of the Ferghana Canal – is preceded by an historical prologue showing the invasion of Tamburlaine, who, in the fourteenth century, diverted the water, thus condemning the country to drought and death. Each episode was to be linked by songs from Tokhtasin, an aged and popular Uzbek singer, who evokes the drama and greatness of his country.
‘The singer Tokhtasin sings, gazing into the desert … singing a song of a flowering land, such as was known in the days of the ancient land of Kharesm … Before Tokhtasin spreads the endless desert … Over the words of the song dissolve to … a spray of delicately flowering bush … And lo! before us a whole shady oasis is disclosed … its trees reflected in a broad artificial lake … intricate patterns of silvery channels irrigate fertile fields … we see in the lake the inverted reflection of a sky-blue cupola [Eisenstein was hoping to use colour] … The lake reflects the domes of the mosque … the intricate pattern of silvery channels dissolves into the complex arabesques of the ornamental tiles of the facade of a magnificent mosque, and before us is the square of the rich ancient city …’
There follows a brutal episode of Tamburlaine oppressing the people. As the people cry out for water, the cruel Emir of Kharesm orders that their blood be used to mix the mortar for his buildings. ‘Scimitars flash through the frame … The stretched neck of a prisoner … Blood drips into a tub … From the desert comes the black cloud of the attacking army of Tamburlaine … The city square is strewn with dead. In the middle of the square a single crawling figure strains upwards crying, “Water!” … The warriors of Tamburlaine burst through the breach in the city wall, laying waste everything in their path …’13
The scenario was delivered on August 23 and the film unit left for Uzbekistan, where shots of the construction of the canal were taken. By October, Eisenstein had designed part of the decor and costumes and even began casting. But on the eve of shooting, a halt was suddenly called, leaving everything in mid-air. Eisenstein returned home with only the preliminary footage (later edited into a short documentary) to show for months of minutely detailed and laborious work. Another project had, like the city in The Great Ferghana Canal, become engulfed by sand.
One of the reasons given for the abandonment of the film, besides the apprehension that the monumental project would be too expensive to accomplish, was the signing of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact by foreign commissar Wenceslas Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop on August 23, 1939. The public text was simply an agreement of non-aggression and neutrality. The real agreement was in a secret protocol which, in effect, not only partitioned Poland, but much of Eastern Europe, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia were allotted to the Soviets; to the Nazis went everything to the west of those regions, including Lithuania. The Pact, coupled with a trade treaty and arrangements for a large-scale exchange of raw materials and armaments, amounted to an alliance. The Soviet Union obtained immunity from attack by Hitler, the opportunity of considerable expansion, and non-involvement in the war which began with Hitler’s blitzkrieg against Poland on September 1.
The foreign reaction to the Nazi-Soviet Pact was one of shock and rage, while the Communist parties abroad who had had no official warning of the Soviet switch, reacted in confusion. Until the middle of 1941, the Soviet Union was to some degree in military, trade and cultural alliance with Nazi Germany, the rest of the West ‘in an enemy camp’.
Naturally, Alexander Nevsky, a patriotic pageant depicting the defeat of Teutonic invaders, was withdrawn quietly from distribution and was only reshown, appropriately, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Ironically, the opening pastoral scenes of Alexander Nevsky are imbued with a Nordic savour – tall and fair-haired men and women, in contrast to the dark and shifty-eyed Tartars who descend on the peaceful village, are interchangeable with the iconography of some of the Nazi films being made in Germany during the same period. Vassilissa, the heroine in chain mail, who fights as bravely as any man, seems to have stepped out of Die Walküre.
Anti-Nazi films such as Adolf Minkin and Herbert Rappaport’s Professor Mamlock and Grigori Roshal’s The Oppenheim Family were also discreetly withdrawn from circulation. The former, about a brilliant surgeon publicly degraded because he is a Jew, was also banned in Britain in 1938 because of its anti-Nazi stance.
*
Not long before the signing of the Pact, Stalin had told H.G. Wells, ‘Fascism is a reactionary force which is trying to preserve the old world by means of violence. What will you do with the Fascists? Argue with them? Try to convince them?’
How hollow Eisenstein’s article ‘My Subject is Patriotism’ (written before the Pact) rings in retrospect. He wrote: ‘It is hard to believe your eyes when you read of the unbridled ferocity of the Jewish pogroms in Germany, where the whole world watches as hundreds of thousands of people, denied their rights and deprived of human support, are being wiped from the face of the earth. The Communists have led, and are leading the front line against this bloody nightmare …. The mighty voice of the Soviet Union is the only one to have rung out unwaveringly, insistently, and uncompromisingly for a decisive struggle against this obscurantism … We want our film [Alexander Nevsky] to mobilise even more those who are in the very thick of the worldwide struggle against Fascism … there is no force of ignorance and darkness that can resist the united forces of all that is best, healthy, progressive and forward-looking in humanity.’14
Meanwhile, the Soviet government continued to wage war on its own citizens. In 1938, Meyerhold’s theatre was closed down after its director was accused in Pravda of consistently producing anti-Soviet plays, as well as allowing formalism, nepotism and favouritism to flourish in his theatre. Nevertheless, Stanislavsky invited the humiliated but still proud Meyerhold to direct at the Opera Theatre, where he revived Mayakovsky’s The Bed Bug in an abridged form. But the death of Stanislavsky, whose Moscow Arts Theatre had been above criticism, deprived Meyerhold of his protector and exposed him to the full force of the purges.
Not long after Eisenstein received the Order of Lenin, the sixty-five-year-old Meyerhold was given an ovation at the First All-Union Conference of Directors on June 13, 1939. A few days later he was arrested, and a month later his wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was found brutally murdered with her throat cut. In February the following year, Meyerhold was executed in a Moscow prison.
Eisenstein only made one oblique reference in print to Meyerhold’s arrest. In his account of one of his first meetings with his mentor, Eisenstein wrote: ‘Let everyone know how they treated Meyerhold … So far, nothing in particular had happened to Meyerhold …’15 In spite of the real danger to himself, Eisenstein remained faithful to Meyerhold, visiting his home frequently during 1938 and 1939, and he saved Meyerhold’s papers and notes by hiding them in the walls of his dacha.
After Eisenstein’s death, Pera immediately called the State Archives and informed them that she had some material of Meyerhold’s that she would like to donate to them secretly. She never told them that Eisenstein had hidden anything, only that he had been a student of Meyerhold’s and had kept a few papers of his. Two weeks later some KGB agents turned up at Pera’s apartment to ask if she had any papers belonging to anyone else. Somehow, she managed to convince them that she had nothing of interest to them, and Eisenstein’s papers and the rescued frames from Bezhin Meadow remained safeguarded.
On 3 September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany. The world would be torn apart by World War II for five long years, during which the USSR would become a once unlikely ally of the West, and Stalin would be fondly known as ‘Uncle Joe’ to the British. This, however, did not happen until mid-1941, and February 19, 1940, saw the following report in the New York Times.
‘Sergei Eisenstein, one of the most prominent Soviet film directors, today launched a Soviet-German cultural co-operation program over the Comintern Radio Station. Broadcasting especially to Germany, Mr Eisenstein said that friendly Russian-German relations established last year formed a solid base for “increased cultural co-operation between the two peoples.”’ But Eisenstein’s private diary at the time was filled with anxiety and dread about the rapprochement with Nazi Germany.
In 1940, political imperatives dictated that there should be pro-German films like Dovzhenko’s Liberation. As part of a government policy to put Russia’s best film directors in positions of creative authority, Dovzhenko was assigned the studios in Kiev, and Eisenstein became the Head of Productions at the Mosfilm Studios, somewhat alleviating his disappointment over the cancellation of The Great Ferghana Canal.
Now Eisenstein, the man who once wrote, ‘Soviet cinema must cut through to the skull! It is not Ciné-Eye that we need, it is a Ciné-Fist’, was celebrating, in print, ‘the final victory of Socialist Realism in cinema’. After tracing the road to this victory, the price of which was paid with ‘kilometres of wasted film; lists of failures, gradually fading from memory’ (including Bezhin Meadow, we assume), he proclaimed: ‘For cinema, unlike the other arts, can capture and reflect with the greatest clarity and resourcefulness both the leading tendencies and the subtlest nuances and shades of the progressive movement of history … And this is probably because one and the same genius is tirelessly nourishing both the most progressive movement of the whole country and at the same time the arts that reflect this movement – above all, cinema. That genius lies in the genius of our great people and in the genius of the wise leadership of the Bolshevik Party.’16
There is in Eisenstein’s public actions an echo of Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo, completed in November 1938, which was written under the impact of the Soviet show trials that had resulted in the execution of, among others, Nikolai Bukharin, whose confessions of his ‘crimes’ was to no avail. Galileo yielded to the Inquisition because he felt both his life and the survival of his work were threatened. Brecht saw Galileo going down on his knees before the Inquisition out of ‘an historical necessity’.
Brecht has Galileo say: ‘Shortly after my trial a number of people who had known me before, treated me with a certain degree of indulgence, in that they attributed to me all sorts of high-minded intentions. I rejected all of them … After a careful consideration of all the circumstances, the extenuating ones as well as the others, one cannot but conclude that a man would find no other ground for such submission but in the fear of death … No less than a threat of death is generally needed to deflect a man from that to which his intellect has led him – this most dangerous of all the gifts of the Almighty.’
Eisenstein himself, in a self-revealing passage in his memoirs, tells a Persian legend: ‘It concerned a certain strong man who would become a hero and who had felt, since childhood, a calling to accomplish some very great task. Preparation for this future accomplishment meant conserving his strength until he had attained his full might. He went to a bazaar, where some tanners, as I recall, pressed around him. “Get down on your knees before us and lie in the filth of this bazaar, so that we can walk over you,” they jeered. And the hero-to-be, saving his strength for the future, humbly lay at their feet in the filth. This is said to have happened as many as three times. Later the hero reached manhood, attained the full mastery of his unprecedented strength and performed all the feats of unheard-of difficulty that lay before him. I found this episode with the tanners utterly captivating: his unheard-of self-control and sacrifice of everything, including his self-esteem, as he readied himself for the achievements to come, where he would accomplish what had already been primordially ordained and decreed. In my personal, too personal, history, I have had on several occasions to stoop to these levels of self-abasement.’17