Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s
A film and its success are directly linked to the degree of entertainment in the plot…that is why we are obliged to require our masters to produce works that have strong plots and are organised around a story-line.
Boris Shumyatsky, 19331
The conventional approach to Soviet cinema looks at the films produced almost exclusively in terms of the men who directed them: Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov head a long, and lengthening, list of what film critics and historians would, borrowing from their French counterparts, nowadays call auteurs. Yet our approach to Hollywood, which is both more familiar to us, and more influential over us, is rather different: the auteur theory persists in the discussion of such important individual directors as Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford but we are much more prepared to concede that a film is the result of a variety of influences, perhaps even of a collective effort–at best a collective work of art, at worst a mere industrial commodity destined for mass consumption. In the Hollywood context, therefore, we talk of a studio style or of the influence of a producer like David O.Selznick. We group American films according to their scriptwriter (Jules Furthman or Clifford Odets), their genre (the western, the musical, the war film) or their star (Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean). But we never apply these criteria to Soviet cinema.
There are, of course, good historical (and ideological) reasons for this: one of the principal reasons is quite simply lack of adequate information. But, if we do not ask different questions, we shall never get different answers or, indeed, much new information at all. In concentrating exclusively on directors, our approach to Soviet cinema lacks an important dimension. We ignore the different styles that emanate from different studios and we ignore the role of a man like Adrian Piotrovsky, head of the script department of the Leningrad studios in the early 1930s, in creating a studio style. We ignore the threads of continuity in the work of a scriptwriter like Mikhail Bleiman, whose first script was filmed in 1924 and who was still active in the 1970s, or Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko, who scripted films for both Eisenstein (The Battleship Potemkin, 1926) and Pudovkin (The Deserter, 1933). We ignore the importance of Soviet actors like the comedian Igor Ilyinsky or the more serious Nikolai Cherkasov or massively popular stars like Lyubov Orlova or Tamara Makarova. And we ignore the significance in Soviet cinema of genres like musical comedy (The Happy Guys [Veselye rebyata, 1934], The Circus [1936], Volga-Volga [1938] or The Tractor Drivers [Traktoristy, 1939]), Civil War films (Chapayev [1934], We from Kronstadt [1936], Shchors [1939]), or ‘historical-revolutionary’ films (the Maxim trilogy [1934–8], A Great Citizen [Velikii grazhdanin, 1937–9], Lenin in October, 1937] etc.). As a result our view of Soviet cinema has been both distorted and impoverished.
But perhaps the most surprising omission of all is our constant underestimation of the importance of those who actually ran the film industry at the highest political level, those who took the major policy decisions and who held the ultimate responsibility. This underestimation is a limitation we share with Soviet cinema historians, although the ideological origin of their blind spot is rather different from that of ours. In this chapter I want to look at the role of the man who dominated Soviet cinema for seven years from 1930 until the end of 1937: he was neither a film director nor a scriptwriter, neither an actor nor a cameraman, but a Party activist and an administrator and his influence on Soviet cinema can still be felt today. His name was Boris Shumyatsky.
Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky was born on 4 November 1886 (old style) to an artisan family near Lake Baikal, joined the Party in 1903, played a leading part in the disturbances in Krasnoyarsk and Vladivostok in 1905–7 and, after 1917, held a number of important position in the Soviet governmental and Party apparatus in Siberia. From 1923 to 1925 he was Soviet plenipotentiary in Iran and on his return he became rector of the Communist University of Workers of the East and a member of the Central Asian Bureau of the Party Central Committee. This might seem an unlikely background for his next appointment, which is the one that concerns us here: in December 1930 he was made the chairman of the new centralised Soviet film organisation, Soyuzkino. But it was precisely this background as Old Bolshevik, Party activist and administrator that did qualify him, in the authorities’ eyes, for the task in hand.2
There had been two previous attempts to organise Soviet cinema along centralised lines since the film industry had been nationalised in August 1919. In December 1922 Goskino had been established to put Soviet cinema on a secure footing: it had failed, partly because it was underfunded and partly because it had to compete with numerous other organisations, some of which were privately funded. Learning from these mistakes, Narkompros established Sovkino in December 1924 to perform a fundamentally similar task. But even Sovkino did not have the resources to compete adequately with the private sector and Soviet cinema audiences still flocked to see either imported films like Broken Blossoms [USA, 1919], The Mark of Zorro [USA, 1920], Robin Hood [USA, 1922] or Soviet films that imitated imported models. An excellent example of this last category is the film The Bear’s Wedding [1926],3 made by Konstantin Eggert in 1925 for Mezhrabpom-Rus, the joint-stock company in which he had a large shareholding, from a story by Prosper Mérimée adapted for the screen by Anatoli Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar for Enlightenment, with Lunacharsky’s wife, Nataliya Rozenel, playing the female lead. The story is set in the forests of Lithuania and contains the stock horror-film elements of murky castles, human beasts, hereditary insanity, storms and dungeons. It was unashamedly a commercial film aimed at attracting audiences through entertainment and diversion rather than through edification, agitation or propaganda. Showing in Moscow at the same time as the state film organisation’s The Battleship Potemkin, it attracted more than twice as large an audience and was advertised as ‘the first hit of 1926’.4 ‘Later in the year public demand’ led to Potemkin being replaced by Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood.5
Since Soviet cinema was expected to stand on its own two feet financially, Sovkino had to make films that were commercially rather than ideologically orientated. What surplus, if any, was left from the production and distribution of kassovye (cash) films was to be used to finance klassovye (class) films. Sovkino was bitterly attacked from all sides for its heavy-handed attitudes and for its failure to make any real attempt to combine ideological rectitude with box-office success. Mayakovsky, echoing Lenin’s remarks to Clara Zetkin, commented in an October 1927 debate on ‘The Paths and Policy of Sovkino’:
We’re merely saying that the masses who pay to see films are not the upper stratum of NEP or the more-or-less well-to-do strata but the many tens of millions of the mass of those same textile-workers and students who pay kopeks but produce millions. And, however much you might try and try, however much profit you make from the public by catering for their tastes, you are doing something foul and nasty.6
Adrian Piotrovsky, the critic and scriptwriter who was later to become the head of the script department of the Leningrad film studios, argued that Sovkino should tackle its problems not by a rigid division between the commercial and the ideological, not by a slavish imitation of ‘bourgeois’ cinema but by a more efficient concentration on low-budget films offering a quick return on capital expenditure:
Our businessmen would probably agree that they need a quick return on their capital expenditure, a quick return even on small amounts. It is only average-cost topical contemporary films that can provide this. In their own way these films are the cruisers of our cinema fleet and it is certainly no accident that in our current naval fleet it is the fast and light cruisers that are replacing the expensive armoured hulks. A stake in the average-cost Soviet film should be the basis of our production. This should become clear from distribution too and that will then put an end to the complaints that not enough is done to make Soviet films popular: these complaints are after all caused by the distributors’ secret distrust of the commercial possibilities of Soviet ‘ideological’ films.7
Sovkino’s continuing problems came under closer scrutiny at the First All-Union Party Conference on Cinema in March 1928. The resolutions passed by this conference reflected the same kind of Party balancing act that can be seen in earlier resolutions on literature and theatre. The Party was unwilling to endorse any particular group or school but offered a framework for the guidance of Soviet filmmakers:
In questions of artistic form the Party cannot support one particular current, tendency or grouping: it permits competition between differing formal and artistic tendencies and the opportunity for experimentation so that the most perfect possible film in artistic terms can be achieved.
The main criterion for evaluating the formal and artistic qualities of films is the requirement that cinema furnish a ‘form that is intelligible to the millions’.8
But the Party’s endorsement of the importance of ‘entertainment quality … proximity to the worker and peasant audience and a form that corresponds to the requirements of the broad mass audience’9 left the door open to the more vociferous critics of Sovkino in the hierarchy of ARRK,10 the film-makers’ equivalent of RAPP, to insist on the supremacy of their own positions.
The widespread criticism of Eisenstein’s October [Oktyabr’, 1927] for obscurantism and self-indulgence11 was symptomatic of an emerging attempt to establish a so-called ‘proletarian hegemony’ in Soviet cinema, such as RAPP was trying to establish in literature. It was no use making films on contemporary themes set in a working-class milieu if those films were made by effete intellectuals whose contact with that milieu was tenuous in the extreme. The faults of Soviet cinema were thus laid at the door of an intelligentsia severed from the proletariat and an avant-garde portrayed as making films largely for its own benefit. Because the films that they produced were divorced from the masses and therefore from reality (or so the argument went), their achievement was an empty and a purely formal one. Thus the avant-garde intellectuals were tarred with the brushes of aestheticism and Formalism as well.
One of the leading exponents of the proletarian hegemony was the scriptwriter and director Pavel Petrov-Bytov. In April 1929 he wrote:
When people talk about Soviet cinema they brandish a banner on which is written: The Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, October, The Mother, The End of St Petersburg [Konets Sankt-Peterburga, 1927] and they add the recent New Babylon [1929], Zvenigora [1929] and The Arsenal [1929]. Do 120 million workers and peasants march beneath this banner? I quite categorically state that they do not. And never have done.
…the people who make up Soviet cinema are 95% alien, aesthetes or unprincipled. Generally speaking, none of them has any experience of life. Can these people, who are capable of understanding abstract problems but not life, serve the masses? Yes, they can if they are born again or regenerated. If their hearts beat in unison with the masses. If the joys and sorrows of these masses are as dear and close to them.…
If they are regenerated in this way, there will be honour and a role for them in Soviet cinema. If not, the workers and peasants will show them their proper place. So far they have not been regenerated but they shout from the house-tops: ‘We shall lead the masses behind us.’ I am sorry, but you will not lead with ‘Octobers’ and ‘New Babylons’ if only because people do not want to watch these films. Before you lead the masses behind you, you must know them. For this you must either be from the masses yourself or have studied them thoroughly, and not just studied but also experienced what these masses themselves experience.12
Petrov-Bytov’s solution to the problem he had diagnosed was somewhat extreme:
The public-spirited artist who works on the masses and leads them must, before being an artist, spend a couple of years in the worker’s ‘school of life’ and two years in the peasant’s, or he must come from this milieu.13
But he was echoing the solution favoured by the Party leadership which in January 1929 had issued a decree ‘On the Strengthening of Cinema Cadres’:
The task of the Party is to use all measures to strengthen its leadership of the work of the cinema organisations and, by preserving the ideological consistency of the films produced, to combat decisively the attempt to bring Soviet cinema nearer to the ideology of the non-proletarian strata.14
The Party viewed the problems of cinema at least in part as a result of its rapid growth. In 1914 there had been only 1,412 cinemas, 133 of them in rural areas: by 1928 the figures had grown to a total of 7,331, with 2,389 in rural areas and cinema was serving an annual audience of 200 million people.15 In 1922/3 only twelve feature films had been released: in 1926/7 the figure was more than ten times higher.16 In 1924 thirty-four directors had been working in Soviet cinema but by 1928 this had risen to ninety-five.17 But the artists’ trade union Rabis estimated that only 13.5 per cent of these ninety-five were Party members18 and Party statistics suggested that 97.3 per cent were of non-proletarian origin.19 That such figures were taken seriously is itself an illustration of the obsessive nature of the debate. None the less, the intelligentsia were clearly dominant and, equally clearly, they were not enamoured of Petrov-Bytov’s proposed solutions. But his diagnosis that Soviet cinema was producing films that were either unpopular with mass audiences or popular but ideologically unsuitable was a diagnosis that most contemporaries would have agreed with. Our conventional approach to Soviet cinema has tended to obscure that argument by overlooking the wider political context.
We have largely ignored the implications of Lunacharsky’s observation that in the Soviet Union too ‘cinema is an industry and, what is more, a profitable industry’20 and his subsequent conclusion that:
Many of our people do not understand that our film production must whet the public appetite, that, if the public is not interested in a picture that we produce, it will become boring agitation and we shall become boring agitators. But it is well known that boring agitation is counter-agitation. We must choose and find a line that ensures that the film is both artistic and ideologically consistent and contains romantic experience of an intimate and psychological character.21
The lessons of Lunacharsky’s remarks may have been lost on ‘many of our people’ but they were not lost on Boris Shumyatsky.
Shumyatsky was appointed head of Soyuzkino when the ‘proletarian hegemony’ was at its height. Many leading directors had turned to making films on contemporary themes drawn from the everyday experience of the Soviet worker or peasant. Ermler was making Counterplan [Vstrechnyi, 1932], Ekk The Path to Life [1931] and Yutkevich The Golden Mountains [1931], while the Kozintsev and Trauberg film Alone [1931] was greeted warmly by Sutyrin, the editor of the monthly journal Proletraskoe Kino, in a review significantly entitled ‘From Intelligentsia Illusions to Actual Reality’.22 (Despite its name, Proletarskoe kino was not quite the forcing ground for proletarianisation that it might have seemed, or wanted to seem, to be: its editorial board, in addition to Sutyrin, included the directors Pudovkin and Ermler while Petrov-Bytov became editor of the mass-circulation Leningrad film magazine, Kadr.) Shumyatsky himself paid little more than lip service to the campaign, preferring to concentrate on the broader problems of Soviet cinema, which were enormous, and as much industrial as political.
In the year 1927/8 box office receipts from Soviet films had exceeded those from imports for the first time,23 but this did not mean that Soviet films were intrinsically more popular. It meant that a shortage of foreign currency had led to a severe reduction in the number of films imported while the Soviet films that filled the gap were on the whole imitative of Western models. The rapid expansion of the cinema network during the first Five Year Plan period accentuated the problem and the spread of cinemas to the countryside created a new audience for Soviet films.
While we cannot talk in conventional Western terms of supply and demand, we can say that those responsible for Soviet cinema, from Lunacharsky and Shumyatsky downwards, realised that the industry was not producing enough films, or enough of the right films to meet the demand that they perceived. Hence the emphases on attracting established authors into writing scripts, on adapting the established classics and on tackling themes and developing genres that were immediately relevant to the ever-widening audience. The shortage of foreign currency meant that Soviet cinema also had to try to achieve self-sufficiency in the production of film stock, projectors and other equipment and to achieve this as quickly as possible.
Figure 23 Sound proofing the first Soviet sound studio with ‘torfoleum’, a derivative of peat.
Lastly, the Soviet Union had, like other countries, to come to terms with the advent of sound film. This meant ‘the agitation, the anxieties and the alarm’ that the scriptwriter Yevgeni Gabrilovich detected among ‘script-writers, directors, actors, cameramen and editors when the screen suddenly, surprisingly and quite unexpectedly began producing sounds’.24 It also meant a further massive investment in re-equipment and yet another headache for Shumyatsky.
Initially Shumyatsky had then to devote his attention to the immediate day-today problems of running Soviet cinema. Symptomatic is the battle he was forced to fight for sound cinema equipment, the battle he describes in his first published article, ‘Alarm Signal’ in Proletarskoe kino, May/June 1931.25 In October 1930 Soyuzkino had ordered a thousand sound projectors but the producing organisations would agree only to a target of 700, which they further reduced in December 1930 to 500. In February 1931 production ceased altogether for a month and it was only under pressure from Vesenkha, the Supreme Council for the National Economy, that they agreed to a revised target of 400 projectors by the end of 1931. In April a further reduction to 275–95 projectors and a unit price increase from 9,000 roubles to 27,000 roubles were announced. Given Soyuzkino’s budgetary limits, this threefold price increase meant that the cinema organisation had funds only for 100 projectors, a tenth of the target six months earlier. By May 1931 only one projector instead of the projected 47 had been delivered so that there was only one cinema in the entire Soviet Union equipped to show the emerging queue of sound films: in six months the original target figure had been reduced a thousandfold. This in turn meant that, because there was nowhere to show the sound films, silent versions of these sound films had also to be released, diverting funds that could more profitably have been deployed in the making of new films. During this period of transition Soyuzkino was therefore simultaneously producing: (1) silent films; (2) sound versions of silent films; (3) sound films; (4) silent versions of sound films. This clear duplication of resources and effort led Shumyatsky to introduce more stringent overall planning controls. The nucleus of Party and Komsomol members in the film industry was to be strengthened and better management techniques introduced but the linchpin of the reforms was to be the further development of the annual ‘thematic plan’ [templan] for film production to overcome the ‘backwardness’ that so many of its critics lamented.26 Annual thematic plans had been introduced by Sovkino in the mid-1920s but these plans were drawn up in vacuo by the administrative heads of studios. Under Shumyatsky the impetus for discussion was to come from the film-makers themselves who were to be consulted and represented at annual thematic planning conferences, such as that held in December 1933.27
But Shumyatsky’s problems were not always internal to the industry: in June 1932, while he was on extended leave in Sochi, the People’s Commissariat of Light Industry, Narkomlegprom, tried to take over Soyuzkino, apparently without any Party or government orders and allegedly without even the knowledge, not just of Shumyatsky but also of the People’s Commissar for Light Industry, Lyubimov, himself.28 In an impassioned speech on 2 July 1932 Shumyatsky attacked what he called ‘a sad misunderstanding’ and argued that a ‘People’s Commissariat’ was an inappropriate form of organisation for an industry like cinema that was also an art form. Shumyatsky was particularly appalled at the way in which his subordinates had meekly accepted the proposed reorganisation:
Where have they been in the last month and a half while the storm of liquidation has been raging about Soyuzkino? Why did they remain silent and not protest? Surely even a blind man could have seen that the proposed reorganisation was wrong and that it was being carried out in the absence of the responsible authority. They remained silent and were passive. Their behaviour is a cause for regret.29
He proposed a rapid return to normal work and an overhaul of methods and procedures—‘It’s back to how it was at the end of 1930, more like a bivouac than an institution’30—but he did remark prophetically: ‘We live in the Soviet Union and we shall be reorganised more than once.’31 It was on 11 February 1933 that Soyuzkino became the Principal Directorate for the Cinema and Photographic Industry (GUKF), headed still by Shumyatsky, but with powers similar to those of a People’s Commissariat and directly subordinated to Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars.32 Thus was Shumyatsky’s position strengthened and apparently secured. He could now devote his time to thought as well as action.
Shumyatsky’s ideas were developed in two books published in 1934 and 1935.33 By then he had the time and the experience to consider the longer-term aims and achievements of Soviet cinema: he was no longer dealing with a period of acute crisis. Like others before him, he asked where Soviet cinema had gone wrong. For him the answer lay not with a predominance of non-proletarian strata (although he made the by now standard reference to sabotage by class enemies and their exposure by OGPU)34 but with the primacy of montage in Soviet film theory in the 1930s:
The overvaluation of montage represents the primacy of form over content, the isolation of aesthetics from politics.35
The prime object of Shumyatsky’s critique was not, as is usually supposed, Eisenstein but Lev Kuleshov whose early concentration on montage he denounced as ‘typically bourgeois’ because Kuleshov had emphasised form and ignored content. He was therefore a Formalist, one who had no sense of the coherence of life, one for whom ‘life is a collection of individual phenomena, incidents and anecdotes’. Kuleshov’s early films, such as The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks [1924], could, in Shumyatsky’s view, have been produced in the West: there was nothing specifically Soviet about them, while his most recent film, The Happy Canary [Veselaya kanareika, 1929], was ‘objectively hostile to Soviet art’.36
Kuleshov attracted Shumyatsky’s venom because it was he who had first developed the theory of montage as the essence of cinema specificity. Early film theorists had sought to justify cinema as an independent art form and they had in particular to delineate its independence from theatre. In 1917 Kuleshov was the first to argue that the distinctive feature of cinema was montage:
The essence of cinema art in the work of both director and art director is based entirely on composition. In order to make a film the director must compose the separate, unordered and unconnected film shots into a single whole and juxtapose separate moments into a more meaningful, coherent and rhythmical sequence just as a child creates a whole word or phrase from different scattered letter blocks.37
In March 1918 he went further:
Montage is to cinema what the composition of colours is to painting or a harmonic sequence of sounds is to music.38
In a series of film experiments he demonstrated what is now known as the ‘Kuleshov effect’. He took a still shot of the actor Ivan Mosjoukine staring expressionless straight ahead of him and cut that shot into three different sequences: the context in which the shot was placed turned Mosjoukine’s expressionlessness into expression—into sadness, laughter, anger, hunger.39 It is from these experiments that the whole notion of the fundamental importance of montage develops. Vsevolod Pudovkin and other members of Kuleshov’s Workshop later remarked: ‘We make films but Kuleshov made cinema.’40
For a newer and younger generation of artists, inspired by the ideals of the October Revolution and dedicated to the construction of a new society and a new way of life, cinema was seen as the art form with which to shape the new man. One critic remarked: ‘Theatre is a game: cinema is life’,41 another defined it as ‘the new philosophy’,42 while a third argued:
There can be no doubt that cinema, this new art form, is the rightful heir for our time, for its melodiousness, its rhythm, refinement and its machine culture, and it therefore represents the central art form of the current epoch.43
Even Lenin stated, ‘Of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important.’44 It therefore mattered uniquely if Soviet cinema was not playing, or was thought not to be playing, a central role in the transformation of Soviet society and this backwardness’ became a particularly acute embarrassment at the time of the cultural revolution’ that was to accompany the first Five Year Plan. But, as we have seen, this was not a new problem, rather a more acute manifestation of an old problem.
Shumyatsky argued that the inaccessibility or unintelligibility ascribed to some of the major triumphs of Soviet silent film (Eisenstein’s The Strike or October, the Kozintsev and Trauberg New Babylon or almost any of Vertov’s documentaries) resulted from an emphasis on the primacy of montage at the expense of other elements such as the script or the acting. This emphasis on montage paralleled a similar emphasis on the director at the expense of the scriptwriter or the actor. People behaved ‘as if the director was empowered to do with a film whatever he and he alone wanted’.45 The underestimation of the role of the scriptwriter had, in Shumyatsky’s view, made it very difficult to attract good writers to the screen and this had resulted in recurring ‘script crises’, acute shortages of material that was suitable for filming, and Soviet cinema had suffered from an almost continuous series of such ‘crises’ since its inception. Although there were some notable exceptions (Mayakovsky and Shklovsky are obvious examples) the majority of writers regarded scriptwriting as a somewhat inferior and even unworthy activity; this was a view they shared with their colleagues in other countries. Repeated efforts to encourage writers to play a more active part in cinema culminated in a Central Committee decree in the spring of 1933 designed to stimulate such participation on a more regular and organised basis. Gorky was quoted as regarding film scripts not just as a worthwhile activity in themselves but as ‘the most complex dramaturgical work’.46 For Shumyatsky the principal task facing Soviet cinema in the mid-1930s was ‘the battle for high-quality scripts’.47
Montage had, as I have indicated, played a central part in attempts to distinguish theoretically between silent cinema and theatre: it was prominent in the writings of Soviet film-makers of different schools, from ‘fiction’ film-makers like Eisenstein, Kuleshov and Pudovkin to documentarists like Shub and Vertov. In silent cinema the absence of sound gave the visual image an inevitable primacy over the word. This had certain political advantages: it could simplify a film’s narrative structure, thus broadening its appeal. But it also had certain political disadvantages: it could encourage an experimental search for non-narrative structures of exposition, emphasising visual continuity or discontinuity through montage leading in some instances to an abandonment of conventional plot and story-line altogether. Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’ in which each attraction ‘collides’ with another is one example that confused worker audiences and Dziga Vertov’s Cine-Eye factory of facts’ and ‘life caught unawares’ is another. Both represented attempts to replace what were perceived as bourgeois narrative forms imitative of Hollywood with new forms of exposition deemed more appropriate to a revolutionary art form.
But the abandonment of conventional narrative structures and the notion that a film might in some way be ‘plotless’ were a particular bête noire for Shumyatsky:
The plot of a work represents the constructive expression of its idea. A plotless form for a work of art is powerless to express an idea of any significance. That is why we require of our films a plot as the basic condition for the expression of ideas, of their direction, as the condition for their mass character, i.e. of the audience’s interest in them. Certainly, among our masters you will find people who say: ‘I am working on the plotless, storyless level.’
People who maintain that position are profoundly deluded.48
Accusing them of ‘creative atavism’, Shumyatsky maintained that ‘they have not yet got used to the discipline of the concrete tasks that our mass audience is setting them’.49 Without a plot, no film could be entertaining:
A film and its success are directly linked to the degree of entertainment in the plot, in the appropriately constructed and realistic artistic motivations for its s development.
That is why we are obliged to require our masters to produce works that have strong plots and are organised around a story-line. Otherwise they [the works] cannot be entertaining, they can have no mass character, otherwise the Soviet screen will not need them.50
In Shumyatsky’s view then it was the hegemony of montage and the primacy accorded by montage to the director that represented the root cause of the dalliance with ‘plotlessness’ that he deplored. Montage lay in complete antithesis to the entertainment film that he considered so important. Montage represented creative atavism’: plot represented ‘the discipline of the concrete tasks that our mass audience is setting’. Plot necessitated script and an effective script had to be worked out carefully, in detail and in advance: ‘At the basis of every feature film lies a work of drama, a play for cinema, a script.’51 The notion that a script was ‘a play for cinema’ represented a complete reversal of the general desire that we have seen among film-makers to distinguish cinema from theatre. It represented in particular a realisation of the worst fears expressed by Eisenstein, Alexandrov and Pudovkin in their seminal ‘Statement on Sound’, published in August 1928:
Contemporary cinema, operating through visual images, has a powerful effect on the individual and rightfully occupies one of the leading positions in the ranks of the arts.
It is well known that the principal (and sole) method which has led cinema to a position of such great influence is montage. The confirmation of montage as the principal means of influence has become the indisputable axiom upon which world cinema culture rests.
The success of Soviet pictures on world markets is to a significant extent the result of a number of those concepts of montage which they first revealed and asserted.
And so for the further development of cinema the significant features appear to be those that strengthen and broaden the montage methods of influencing the audience.52
Those significant features included the development of colour and stereoscopic film but the most important feature of all was the advent of sound:
Sound is a double-edged invention and its most probable application will be along the line of least resistance, i.e. in the field of the satisfaction of simple curiosity.…
The first period of sensations will not harm the development of the new art; the danger comes with the second period, accompanied by the loss of innocence and purity of the initial concept of cinema’s new textural possibilities, which can only intensify its unimaginative use for ‘dramas of high culture’ and other photographed representations of a theatrical order.53
It is significant that the shortage of suitable scripts led Shumyatsky to encourage film-makers to turn their attention to adaptations of the classics54 thus producing precisely those ‘dramas of high culture’ that the 1928 ‘Statement’ was denouncing. It is also significant that the advent of the doctrine of Socialist Realism and the proclaimed need to produce films that were ‘intelligible to the millions’ led to an increase in ‘photographed representations of a theatrical order’, and a reinstatement of more familiar conventional narrative structures so that Eisenstein could write in the spring of 1938, a few months after Shumyatsky’s fall from grace, that:
There was a period in our cinema when montage was declared ‘everything’. Now we are coming to the end of a period when montage is thought of as ‘nothing’.55
But for the time being the primacy of montage and the hegemony of the director were blamed by Shumyatsky for the shortage of suitable scripts.
Similarly the downgrading of the actor’s role had in his view led to a deterioration in the standard of film acting. This had even been formalised by some directors. Eisenstein had renounced professional actors for his first four films (The Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, October and The Old and the New [Staroe i novoe, 1929, a.k.a. The General Line]) and resorted to ‘typage’, where non-actors were selected who simply looked right for the part, who were in some way ‘typical’ of the mass: this process culminated in the use of worker Nikandrov as Lenin in October.56 Kuleshov had also renounced a conventional theatrical style of acting and deployed the quasi-Meyerholdian naturshchik or model, a specialised cinema actor highly trained in specific external movements and gestures that would replicate his internal state of mind. As two recent Soviet critics have observed:
What was required above all else from the naturshchik was the appropriate external trappings—speed of reaction, accuracy and precision of movement—that is, external qualities more reminiscent of the requirements of sport than of the criteria of art.57
In Shumyatsky’s view the use of both the naturshchik and typage had led to a breakdown in communication with the audience who had no one in the film real enough for them to identify with. The cardboard effigies on the screen were not the psychologically real ‘living men’ that RAPP and ARRK had demanded: they were not convincing.
To some extent of course this lack of realism and exaggerated dependence on mimetic gesture was an inherent attribute of silent film: in the absence, or virtual absence, of words there was no alternative means of communication. But the dependence on the external trappings of mimetic gesture vitiated against a psychologically convincing development of characters and led to an underestimation of the actor’s full potential. The film actor’s role was a two-dimensional one: small wonder then that, just as creative writers had proved reluctant to furnish scripts, so theatre actors had also proved reluctant to act on film. This, Shumyatsky agreed, was also partly because of the loss of live contact with the audience but mainly because cinema did not use the actor efficiently. He cited the particular instance of the actor Naum Rogozhin who, in the period January-September 1935, worked for only six full days.58 Rationalisation of acting commitments was another problem to be dealt with by the annual thematic plan, for the actor’s role was in fact quite central:
The Soviet actor creates the popularity of our art. The creative success of cinema is to a significant extent based on the success of our acting resources.59
The role of the actor is yet another aspect of Soviet cinema that we in the West have tended to overlook.
If, as Shumyatsky thought, the problem of Soviet cinema lay with the predominance of the director at the particular expense of the scriptwriter and the actor, the obvious question then arose as to how the imbalance could be rectified. Shumyatsky’s answer lay in a collective approach in which the plot outline, then the script and then the rushes would be discussed by all concerned to eliminate errors and infelicities at the earliest possible stage; significantly that collective approach was to include the management of the film industry and by clear implication and known practice also direct representatives of the Party—for each film there was to be in effect a thematic plan in microcosm. Shumyatsky’s argument ran like this:
The creation of a film is a collective process because a film unites the creative potential of many of its participants, from the scriptwriter and the director to the actor, the composer, the designer, the cameraman—and beginning and ending with the management…. The time has come at last to speak unequivocally of the direct creative participation of the management in a film because it is the management that accepts the script and the general plan (and often even the plot outline), the management that criticises and makes suggestions and corrections, views the filmed material and asks for changes if those changes are necessary, it is the management that accepts films and so on and, it must be admitted, it is the management that often authors (without copyright!) both the plan and the details of a work.60
It was the management that would direct film-makers, as indeed Shumyatsky directed Eisenstein. In 1934 he praised him for his return to the notions of plot and acting and for his renewed theatrical activity.61 But in March 1937 he ordered him to stop work on Bezhin Meadow [Bezhin lug] because he had wasted 2 million roubles, indulged in ‘harmful Formalistic exercises’, and produced work that was anti-artistic and politically quite unsound’.62 Shumyatsky admitted ‘that I bear the responsibility for all this as head of GUK [Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie kinematografii, State Cinema Enterprise]63 and reiterated that, ‘It was inadmissible to allow a film to go into production without establishing beforehand a definite script and dialogues’.64 The ban on Bezhin Meadow was not an isolated incident and certainly not the result solely of any antipathy between Shumyatsky and Eisenstein. The tone of the argument in this instance was characterised as much by sorrow for a master gone astray as by anger. In the spring of 1934 there had been a much greater public furore over Abram Room’s failure to shoot more than 5 per cent of the footage for his projected film comedy Once One Summer [Odnazhdy letom] after spending more than half a million roubles. On that occasion both Pudovkin and Dovzhenko had joined the chorus of denunciation.65 None the less, by stopping the production of Bezhin Meadow, Shumyatsky claimed, ‘the Party has shown once again the Bolshevik way of resolving the problems of art’.66
This ‘Bolshevik way of resolving the problems of art’, this enhanced role for management, was in fact of course a way of resolving the political problems of art. When the Central Committee had turned its attention to the strengthening of film cadres in January 192967 its concern had been to improve the political rather than the artistic performance of Soviet cinema. Similarly, Shumyatsky’s emphasis on a prepared and detailed script facilitated the elimination at an early stage of undesirable elements from the completed film, whose undesirability derived from ideological as well as aesthetic considerations. Nevertheless he claimed:
This organisation frees creativity and promotes the creative independence of each participant in the film.68
We have seen the main thrust of Shumyatsky’s critique of Soviet cinema: primacy of montage and the hegemony of the director had led to a series of ‘script crises’ and to the production of films that were all too often ‘unintelligible to the millions’. But we need to consider also the kind of films that Shumyatsky wanted to put in their place. The negative critique was balanced by the positive exhortation. How then was this ‘creative independence’ to be used?
The Conference of Film-Makers held in the wake of the August 1934 Writers’ Congress in Moscow in January 1935 under the slogan ‘For a Great Cinema Art’69 revealed, as Shumyatsky himself admitted, that:
We have no common view on such fundamental and decisive problems of our art as the inter-relationship between form and content, as plot, as the pace and rhythm of a film, the role of the script, the techniques of cinema and so on.70
The first tasks therefore were: (1) to create a common language of cinema, in which sound was to play a vital role and (2) to train suitable masters to use that language.71 Just as the management leadership of the film industry was to intervene to revise the relationship between the director and other participants in a film, so in the wider context the political leadership was to inspire and, if necessary, intervene:
The leader of our Party and our country, the leader of the World Revolution, Comrade Stalin, devotes a great deal of attention to art and finds the time to watch our best films, to correct their errors, to talk to our masters and indicate the direction that each of them should take.72
The principal source of inspiration for Soviet film-makers was to be the collected observations of Stalin on cinema:
If only we were to collect all the theoretical riches of Joseph Vissarionovich’s remarks on cinema, what a critical weapon we should have for the further development not just of cinema but of the whole front of Soviet arts.73
It is somewhat difficult to take this at least of Shumyatsky’s statements seriously. When in 1939 the historian Nikolai Lebedev edited a collection entitled The Party on Cinema he managed to fill only 4 of its 142 pages with quotations from Stalin and most of them can be traced back either to Lenin or, more particularly, to Trotsky.74 One such seminal contribution to Soviet film theory is usually attributed to Stalin’s remark at the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927:
I think that it might be possible to begin the gradual abolition of vodka by introducing instead of vodka such sources of revenue as radio and cinema.75
But the idea undoubtedly derives from an article by Trotsky which appeared in Pravda on 12 July 1923 under the heading ‘Vodka, the Church and Cinema’.76 However, although this notion might conceivably have inspired some artists to creative endeavour, it hardly provided any clear indication of precisely what was required. For this film-makers had to look to Shumyatsky rather than Stalin.
Shumyatsky was particularly concerned to provide Soviet cinema audiences with a greater degree of variety in their staple diet:
We need genres that are infused with optimism, with the mobilising emotions, with cheerfulness, joie-de-vivre and laughter. Genres that provide us with the maximum opportunity to demonstrate the best Bolshevik traditions: an implacable attitude to opportunism, with tenacity, initiative, skill and a Bolshevik scale of work.77
He urged a concentration on three genres: drama, comedy and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, fairy tales. He was especially interested in developing these last two. Of comedy he wrote, in a chapter entitled ‘The Battle for New Genres:
In a country where socialism is being constructed, where there is no private property and exploitation, where the classes hostile to the proletariat have been liquidated, where the workers are united by their conscious participation in the construction of a socialist society and where the great task of liquidating the remnants of the capitalist past is being successfully accomplished by the Party even in the consciousness of the people—in this country comedy, apart from its task of exposure, has another, more important and responsible task: the creation of a good, joyful spectacle.78
In this instance he argued for the satisfaction of audience demand:
The victorious class wants to laugh with joy. That is its right and Soviet cinema must provide its audiences with this joyful Soviet laughter.79
The two films that Shumyatsky held up as examples were Alexander Medvedkin’s satire Happiness [1935] and Grigori Alexandrov’s jazz musical comedy The Happy Guys [ 1934] which he described as ‘a good start to a new genre, the Soviet film comedy’.80 Shumyatsky was particularly incensed by the criticisms levelled at The Happy Guys at the Writers’ Congress in August
1934: he compared its detractors to preachers from the Salvation Army and retorted:
Neither the Revolution nor the defence of the socialist fatherland is a tragedy for the proletariat. We have always gone and in future we shall still go into battle singing and laughing.81
In Shumyatsky’s view, a variety of genres was the spice of socialist cinema art.82 Shumyatsky used a similar defence for the fairy-tale film:
There is a new genre that we are now trying to introduce into our plan: it is the fairy-tale film that treats the raw material of scientific fantasy. Here too any notion that there is a limit to what is permissible is dangerous. Here everything is permissible, provided only that it is imbued with definite progressive ideas.83
But, lest anyone should imagine that Shumyatsky’s blueprint should mean that Soviet cinema concentrate entirely on comic and fairy-tale escapism, he emphasised that Soviet science fiction should be based on reality rather than utopia. Whereas for the scientist, he argued, unfinished experiments
are merely a job half done, it is another matter for the artist. For him the world of as yet unfinished scientific experiments is a Klondike of creative ideas and story-lines.84
Figure 24 The Happy Guys [ 1934];’A good start to a new genre, the Soviet film comedy’ (Shumyatsky).
Perhaps the best example of the kind of film that Shumyatsky had in mind is Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky’s Cosmic Flight [Kosmicheskii reis], a Soviet parallel to Things to Come [Great Britain, 1936], released in 1935,85 although the film can hardly be said to contain a ‘Klondike of creative ideas’!
Soviet films were to be firmly tied to reality, or at least to the socialist realist perception of it, by their subject-matter which was to be relevant, topical and realistic. Shumyatsky designated five principal themes for film-makers to pursue. The most important of these was the process of the collectivisation of agriculture. The reasons for this are obvious: it was a policy that had encountered more widespread opposition than any other and a greater propaganda effort had therefore to be directed towards making it more palatable, if not to the expanding audiences for cinema in the countryside, who were after all those most closely affected, then at least to audiences in the towns and cities. A large number of films can be counted in this category, from Medvedkin’s already mentioned Happiness and other earlier efforts such as Ermler’s Peasants [Krest’yane, 1934] through Eisenstein’s abortive Bezhin Meadow to the series of what are best described as ‘kolkhoz musicals’, such as Savchenko and Schneider’s The Accordion [Garmon, 1934] and Pyriev’s extraordinary The Tractor Drivers [1939].
Of almost equal importance are films depicting the socialist construction of industry such as Macheret’s Men and Jobs [1932], Dovzhenko’s Ivan [1932] or Ermler’s Counterplan [1932]. This theme was closely related to another: the depiction of the Revolution through the portrayal of its effect on an individual who, while being a fully developed character in his own right (unlike Eisenstein’s ‘types’ or Kuleshov’s naturshchiki), also represented the mass. The Kozintsev and Trauberg Maxim trilogy is perhaps the best example of this, although their Alone, Ekk’s The Path to Life, Yutkevich’s The Golden Mountains, Pudovkin’s The Deserter or Raizman’s The Pilots [Letchiki, 1935] would also suffice. This theme was again intertwined with what Shumyatsky termed ‘the everyday life of the new man’.86 One of the most intriguing films in this field, Abram Room’s A Severe Young Man, from a script by Yuri Olesha, was in fact banned because it confronted in a politically unacceptable way the question of inequalities in Soviet life and both director and scriptwriter were disgraced. It is worth noting, however, that, despite the thorough discussion of the film at all stages of its production, it was actually completed87—unlike Bezhin Meadow, and unlike Room’s earlier project, Once One Summer. Quite how it was completed, given the controversial nature of its subject-matter, is one of the many questions that still await an answer.
The last theme that Shumyatsky urged upon Soviet film-makers was that of defence. Again it is difficult to consign particular films to any one thematic division but, if we are to include the defence of the Revolution, then the list is almost endless: Soviet cinema has from its inception produced a steady flow of ‘historical revolutionary’ films. We could again include the Maxim trilogy, The Deserter and, for different reasons, The Pilots and The Tractor Drivers but we should also recall Barnet’s Outskirts [1933], Dovzhenko’s Aerograd [1935], Dzigan’s We from Kronstadt, the Zarkhi and Heifits The Baltic Deputy [Deputat Baltiki, 1936] and, of course, Eisenstein’s one completed 1930s film, Alexander Nevsky [ 1938]. Lastly, we might also include films about the rise of anti-Semitism and fascism in the West: Pyriev’s The Conveyor-Belt of Death (Konveier smerti, 1933], Kuleshov’s Gorizont [1932], Roshal’s The Oppenheim Family [Sem’ya Oppengeim, 1938] or the Minkin and Rappaport film Professor Mamlock [1938].
But one of the most important themes for Soviet film-makers in the 1930s was the Civil War of 1918–21. Its role for Soviet cinema was comparable to that of the western for Hollywood and it had many of the same ingredients: action and excitement, clearly defined ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ (Reds and Whites instead of cowboys and Indians), and the security of a known ‘kheppi-end’ that established and then confirmed a myth and in this instance helped to legitimise the Revolution and the sacrifices in the eyes of the cinema-going public.
The great model for the Civil War film was of course Chapayev, made by the Vasiliev ‘brothers’ in 1934, which, perhaps not surprisingly, won the Grand Prix at the 1st Moscow International Film Festival in 1935. No other Soviet film, not even The Battleship Potemkin, has ever been accorded such widespread official sanction so quickly and so repeatedly. Shumyatsky wrote:
In 1934 the best film produced by Soviet cinema in the whole period of its existence was released: it was Chapayev, a film that represents the genuine summit of Soviet film art.88
The strength of Chapayev lay in its action rather than its ‘psychologising’ and in its simultaneous portrayal of the positive and negative sides of the Red Army in the Civil War period. The hero of the film was portrayed realistically, warts and all, while the Whites were depicted as a powerful enemy that could only be defeated by a considerable effort, an enemy worth defeating:
In Chapayev the heroism of the movement of the masses is depicted alongside the fate of individual heroes and it is in and through them that the mass is graphically and colourfully revealed.… The film Chapayev has proved that in a dramatic work it is the characters, the intensity of the tempo, the ideological breadth that are decisive.89
The relative subtlety of the characterisation, the clouding of the absolute distinctions between black and white (at least in comparison with films like The Battleship Potemkin or October), involved the audience more closely in the film and its developing story-line:
Chapayev’s development does not take place on the actual screen (as in many of our films) but in the audience’s own eyes. Chapayev is not finished and ready made, as all too often happens: he becomes a type through the plot, through dramatic changes. There is no head-on confrontation here, no exaggerated tendentiousness: the tendentiousness derives from the very essence of the action, from the deeds of the characters themselves.90
Chapayev then was the model film. In his message of congratulation to Soviet filmmakers on the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet cinema in January 1935, Stalin said:
Soviet power expects from you new successes, new films that, like Chapayev, portray the greatness of the historic cause of the struggle for power of the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union, that mobilise us to perform new tasks and remind us both of the achievements and of the difficulties of socialist construction.91
It was also Stalin who personally suggested to Dovzhenko that he should make ‘a Ukrainian Chapayev’, a project realised in 1939 in the film Shchors.92
Shumyatsky angrily rejected the view, expressed by the writer and former RAPP activist Vladimir Kirshon among others, that Soviet art was developing in an irregular pattern and that the emergence of Chapayev was in some way accidental.93 Soviet cinema was, he claimed, ‘the most organised of all the arts in our country’94 but it should be raised to the level of the best:
Figure 25’ Chapayev, a film that represents the genuine summit of Soviet film art’ (Shumyatsky).
The whole Soviet cinema can work better. The whole of Soviet cinema, by aligning itself with the best films, can and must achieve better results.95
In order to do this, Soviet cinema had to undergo a radical reorganisation and overcome its ‘backwardness’. Shumyatsky was keen for Soviet cinema to learn from the West, just as other spheres of Soviet industry were encouraged in the 1930s to ‘catch up and overtake’ the West by deploying foreign advisers.96 In the summer of 1935 Shumyatsky headed an eight-man commission that visited the West to study film production methods in the larger studios. Shumyatsky, the Leningrad director Fridrikh Ermler and the cameraman Vladimir Nilsen visited Paris, New York, the Eastman Kodak plant in Rochester, NY, Hollywood (where they were welcomed by Frank Capra, entertained by Rouben Mamoulian and met, inter alia, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Adolphe Menjou—that later scourge of ‘un-American’ activities, Cecil B.DeMille, G.W.Pabst and Erich von Stroheim, and watched Charles Laughton filming for Mutiny on the Bounty)97 and London. Ermler and Nilsen then went on to Berlin, where they toured the UFA studios, but Shumyatsky, for reasons of prudence, returned directly to Moscow.98
The Shumyatsky Commission concluded that ‘The entire Soviet cinema is today producing fewer films than one Hollywood studio’. “The reason for this was, in their view, quite simple:99
When they make a film our directors are achieving a synthesis of various authors (the dramatist, the composer, the designer, etc.) but they are overburdened with administrative and organisational functions and this turns them into ‘Jacks of all trades’ without proper conditions and qualifications. This situation hinders the creative development of the director and similarly obstructs the development of the other co-authors of the film, subjugating them in administrative terms to the director.100
As we have seen, this was the opposite of what Shumyatsky wanted. Drastic measures were called for:
Setting ourselves the task of producing in the first instance 300 films a year, with a subsequent expansion to 800, we conclude that there is an inescapable need to build a single cinema centre in the southern and sunniest part of the Soviet Union, near the sea and the mountains.101
This project became popularly known as sovetskii Gollivud—the ‘Soviet Hollywood’—and officially known as Kinogorodor’ Cine-City’.102
The full details of the ‘Soviet Hollywood’ are properly the subject for another essay. Suffice it to say here that the Shumyatsky Commission was impressed by the efficiency of Hollywood’s production methods and recommended their adoption by and adaptation to Soviet cinema.103 Above all, they were impressed by the facilities afforded to American film-makers by the climate and location of Hollywood. The decisive factor in favour of the eventual choice for a ‘Soviet Hollywood’—the south-western corner of the Crimea—against competition from what we might nowadays describe as the rest of the USSR’s ‘sunbelt’ was that it provided the closest approximation to conditions in the original Hollywood and the surroundings of Los Angeles.104
The relatively balmy climate of the Crimea would make location shooting possible throughout the year and liberate Soviet cinema from the rigours of the northern winter, which limited outdoor work to four or five months a year.105 The location, the wide variety of the surrounding scenery and the opportunity to construct permanent sets that could be used over and over again for different films would obviate the need for costly filming expeditions to remoter parts of the Soviet Union and lead to an overall reduction in production costs.106
| Planned | Completed | |
| 1935 | 130 | 45 |
| 1936 | 165 | 46 |
| 1937 | 62 | 24115 |
Cine-City was only one part of the Shumyatsky Commission’s plan to revitalise Soviet cinema but it was the focal point. While the production from existing studios was to be increased to 120–50 films a year through reorganisation, reconstruction and modernisation,107 the bulk of the expansion in production was to be concentrated in the Crimea. Cine-City was to provide the necessary capacity to produce 200 films a year.108 Its internal organisation was supposed to adapt the best of American practice and serve as a model for the other smaller studios.
Cine-City was to consist of four studios, each sharing certain common facilities and employing, by December 1940, around 10,000 people.109 Each of the four studios was to be composed of ten artistic production units (Kh. P.O. or khudozhestvenno-proizvoidstvennye ob’’edineniya) and each of these units was to comprise five filming groups (s’’emochnye gruppy). Each unit was to be headed by a producer (or prodyusser—even the word was imported from Hollywood), whose function was to relieve the director and his creative workforce of the administrative and organisational burdens that had apparently ‘hindered his creative development’:110
The producer must know everything that is going on in his filming groups, he must organise them and direct them towards their work, he must free the director from the functions that are not properly his and must render him every possible assistance in realising his creative potential… The producer has an enormous responsibility: he must represent the interests of the entire studio.111
There is an echo of the artistic production units in the creative units present in Soviet studios today through which veteran directors transmit their experience and expertise to the younger generation. A base for the filming expeditions that Shumyatsky’so deprecated was constructed on the Crimean site but the rest of the project for a ‘Soviet Hollywood’ never progressed beyond the planning stage.
One reason for this was undoubtedly the enormous expense: the plans envisaged that construction costs would reach almost 400 million roubles for the period 1936–40.112 Another reason was that Shumyatsky, like so many others at the time, was slipping gradually from Stalin’s favour and his ‘Soviet Hollywood’ became an albatross around his neck.113 Actions spoke louder than words and Shumyatsky had in the final analysis failed to produce the goods or, more precisely in this instance, the films. The production statistics were not refuted:114
The financial, technical and political difficulties of Soviet cinema, many of which were beyond Shumyatsky’s control, were disregarded, the enormous burden of conversion to sound ignored. All Shumyatsky’s exhortations had been in vain, all the rewards for film-makers in the shape of prizes,116 of fast cars and luxurious dachas on the Hollywood model,117 had failed to produce their intended results.
A Soviet anecdote relates that at some time in the course of 1937, when he was already under attack in the press, Shumyatsky complained to Stalin that Soviet film-makers would not co-operate with his plans. Stalin is said to have replied, ‘But they are the only film-makers we have.’118 Shumyatsky was not, however, the only administrator at Stalin’s disposal. He was arrested on 8 January 1938 and denounced in Pravda the following day,119 reviled as a ‘captive of the saboteurs’ in Kino on 11 January120 and as a ‘fascist cur’ and a member of the ‘Trotskyite-Bukharinite-Rykovite fascist band’ in the film monthly Iskusstvo kino in February.121 Sent into internal exile, he was executed on 29 July 1938,122 his reputation in ruins and his name mentionable in public only as a term of abuse. But 1938 was not a very good year for reputations.
Shumyatsky’s replacement, Semyon Dukelsky, was appointed on 23 March 1938123 but sacked on 4 June 1939.124 He was in turn replaced by Ivan Bolshakov (of whom Leonid Trauberg has said that ‘He had as much connection with cinema as a policeman on point-duty’125), who was to survive the war to become the first USSR Minister of Cinematography in March 1946.126
Shumyatsky’s achievement, even if not realised or fully appreciated in his own curtailed lifetime, was to have laid the foundations for a popular Soviet cinema, one that entertained, amused and attracted audiences as well as providing the agitation and propaganda that the political authorities required. He recognised that filmmakers needed a certain freedom to experiment and that they needed protection both from administrative burdens and from outside financial pressures: pace Eisenstein, Shumyatsky is remembered now by veteran Soviet film-makers as the man who understood their needs and let them get on with the job.127 He was a complex man in a complex position. But he recognised above all that cinema was a popular art form or it was nothing. A film without an audience was useless, even to the director who made it, and what a socialist film industry had to produce was encapsulated in the title of Shumyatsky’s most important book: a ‘cinema for the millions’.
