MDSCDU1
PRIME TIME
HOUI THE SOVIET UNION DUILT THE MEDIA EMPIRE THAT LOST THE CULTURAL COLD WAR KRISTIN BOTH-EY
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS     ITHACA AND LONDON
h
Figure 1.1. The Amphibian in love. Anastasiia Vertinskaia and Vladimir Korenev in the USSR's first blockbuster, Amphibian Man, 1962. R1A Novosti, Used with permission.
Man (Chehvek-amfibiia, 1962), a fantastical romance featuring beautiful young stars and state-of-the-art underwater photography, sold 65.5 million. But Soviet * cinema-art had both Ivan and the Amphibian, international esteem and a gi- ^ gantic domestic audience. It was the kind of thing that went to people's heads, S and not only Soviet filmmakers'. Goskino officials traveled internationally in | the post-Stalinist era, too, and they could share a sense of pride in Soviet cm ^ ema: the prestige of high art and the clout and dynamism of a mass audience J (all the sweeter to savor as audiences were seen shriveling on the vine across 3 Western Europe). It was easy to gloss the details: that Soviet viewers adoied the -| Amphibian even if Sartre and the cinematic community loved Ivan—audience J dynamism rarely correlated with artistic prestige—and that they also showed 4 \ great affection for the heroes of foreign commercial cinema, say, the American ^ ! Western The Magnificent Seven (i960). These were "shortcomings" in Soviet $ ' parlance, sometimes probed in meetings and in the media but easily evaded x in favor of a generalized notion of Soviet cinema-art: outsized, upstanding,,\ unique. i
FOREIGN FILMS ON SOVIET SCREENS: SWINGING WITH TARZAN, INVITING BRIGITTE BAR DOT
While the thaw has often been celebrated as the moment when the USSR emerged from Stalinist cultural autarky, the history of cinema presents a more complicated picture. Foreign-made films were a powerful presence in the Russian-Soviet cultural marketplace for nearly all of the twentieth century. The 1930s were . an anomaly: the only decade when domestic productions had a conclusive lock 0n audience affections and the only decade when foreign imports were almost entirely suppressed. In the pre-1917 period, French, American, and German productions ruled the screen, with a nearly 80 percent share of the market in the Russian Empire's cities, and for most of the twenties foreign domination was equally pronounced.44 Once again in the post-World War II era, foreign cinema had a leading position, beginning almost immediately at the war's end. If we consider the volume of foreign-made movies proportionate to the overall market, the high point was late Stalinism. In 1951, only one in four films in distribution in the Soviet „Union was Soviet-made^Jn1952, the topôflňTbag^^ all four slots—were ocmpjafbj^^
^a^äTat^SSncefigures are not available, we EiowtlíäTeach sold more than 31.6 million tickets (as that was the figure for the fifth-place film, a Soviet civil war drama "starring" Stalin).46 And 1952 was in no way exceptional for foreign cinema's triumph. The most widely seen picture in the USSR for the 1940s was neither a thirties classic nor a postwar masterpiece but a German musical produc-
■.  tion, The Girl of My Dreams (.DieFraumeinerTraiime. 1044).47__ ^
<~—Tarzan, Marika Rokk (the girl of their dreams), and other foreign exotica .. came to the USSR by way of Nazi Germany; they were war booty and so excep-. nopal by definition. This at least is how the authorities presented them to Soviet audiences. Yet the story of these films' careers in the USSR reveals fundamental, long-term trends in the Soviet approach to masscult—trends in popular and bureaucratic tastes, mechanisms for control, and the centrality to the system of "commercial considerations," to use the Soviet bureaucratic trope. In most respects, it turns out, the trophies were not exceptional at all.
It took the Soviets less than a week after the Nazi surrender to have someone from the Ministry of Cinematography on the ground in Germany and hunting for movies. The official, I. Manevich, picked up new boots from Mosfil'm's wardrobe
44- Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (New York, 1992), 20; Neia Zorkaia, "O 'massovom segodnia'—Neskol'ko elemen-tarnykh istin," Kinovedcheskiezapiski, no. 45 (2000): 27-37. ^.45. Fomin. Kinematomif omoel Knisa vervaia. a.
46. The film was Nezabyvaemyi 1919 {The Unforgettable Year 1919). Box-office figures at ,: http://www.nashekino.ru/.
47- D. B. Dondurei, ed., Otechestvennyi kinematograf: Strategiia vyxhivaniicu Nauchnyi dpklad (Moscow, 1991), 71.
chapter i
the soviet film industry * 39
department and went directly to the "German Hollywood" at Babelsberg, where he found a specially designed, bunkerlike movie archive surrounded by Red Army men. The soldiers were as eager as Manevich, "shouting, demanding the pictures, and proposing to break down the doors to the bunker-with grenades," 'he later wrote. Manevich seized over 17,000 films and selected around 3,700 I j[ /features and about 2,500 shorts for immediate shipment to Moscow.''8 Among \ /them were a large number of genre productions—adventures, comedies, musi-\ / cals, and love stories. Most dated to the prewar period and were American and ' Western European (especially German) in origin.49
At the very highest levels, Soviet authorities treated their cinematic war booty with loving care, Stalin scheduled regular late-night screenings for members of the Politburo and watched a good number, if not all, of the films himself, with simultaneous translation provided by the minister of cinematography.50 The films were also vetted by the CC, which gave precise instructions about what to: release, where, and in what fonn.51_AUtrophv pictures were to be accojmpaiiied by "a specially prepared^Mjhatj^ojrc "^orth^flhrfMS^carefully edited explanatory subtitles " the CC advised.52 Stag?- $ wadt (mmng»re388r^^ began m
with an on-screen announcement: "Thjsjah^djsj^ bourgeois jod^andtitelgEogr^
will not be difficult for the Soviet viewer to discern that the filmdoes not accu- ^ ratel^showAmericaV:^
f 48. The official numbers cited by Manevich were 17,300 total: 6,400 feature films, 3,500 shorts, 4,800 advertising spots, and 2,600 newsreels. I. Manevich, "Chuzhie trofei/ SE;~ no. 18 {1991): s.
49. The German trophies were combined with pictures seized during previous military operations (from western Ukraine and Belorussia in 1939 and the Baltics and Bessara-i^ bia in 1940) to form a special fund housed in Belye Stolby. About 40 percent of the films | were American in origin, and rougtuy 50 percent were Western European. RGASPI, f. 17,7 op. 132, d. 88,11.3-4. The Soviets had also acquired (by purchase or as gifts) a number cf American and British films prior to and during World War II, including Sure Valley Serenade (1941), The Thief of Baghdad (1924), and Bambi (1942)- Though often lumped together with the trophies, these films were on Soviet screens much earlier, and they were legal; Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War; Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, PA, 2003), 129; M. Semenov, '"Trofeinoe kino'? Net, vorovannoe " Navoe russkde slow, 19 February 2002, and 12 March 2002. v,;
50. Archival documents make occasional mention of a film's release "according ro Com?| rade Stalin's instructions." RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 576.1- 60.
;   51. A1948 report on a batch of seventy films rejected nineteen "as politically alien or jbase from an artistic point of view"; twenty-six were approved for "limited" use in trade unions and clubs; and twenty-four were authorized for general distribution. RGASPI, f. 17». bp. 132, d. 92,1. n. i 52. Ibid.
? 53. Semenov," 'Trofeinoe kino'?"
1
..fitms also had their opening credit sequences cut and replaced by a title page that identified them as the spoils of war.54 In some cases the films were edited so clumsily as to be nonsensical in parts or to alter their original meanings altogether. In the Soviet version of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (renamed The Dollar Rules), Deeds, a millionaire accused of insanity because he had decided to give his money away, was not vindicated in court in the end. Soviet audiences saw only the judge threatening to expel the millionaire's vociferous supporters, followed by shots of an empty courtroom and the millionaire's beloved in tears.55
Mr. Deeds joined Tarzan, Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the King of California in winning Soviet viewers' hearts all the same. In Tula, all four of the city's movie theaters were showing the foreign films in the fall of 1947, while in Barnaul, the Oktiabr" theater offered forty-five days of trophy cinema that season and only two days of the Stalin cult film The Oath (Kliatva, 1946). One Riga < house was showing Girl of My Dreams practically around the clock, from the first screening before noon to the last at one in the morning.56 In Baku, movie theaters held screenings even later, at two and four in the morning, and some ardent viewers went from one to the next.57 A whole series of political and workplace organizations in Moscow petitioned for special screenings of Girl of My Dreams, from the Academy of Sciences to large factories such as Krasnyi Oktiabr". Even the CC apparat chimed in with its request.58 Many contemporaries, particularly people who were then youngsters, recall going to see trophy pictures over and over agaraJMojc^s^oj^^ »«4aurigJaj3anJmitator^ the tarzanets haircut afteirthefrl^5^**"
Grown-up Russian men "practically drooled at the mention of the American Deanna Durbin,60 while women swooned over Robert Taylor, star of the British ..- love story Waterloo Bridge (1940).
The stunning success of the trophy films elicited some murmurs of concern V7 . and even protest at the time. After the release of Girl of My Dreams in 1947, offi- \ cials from a variety of regional party organizations contacted the CC questioning
j.:    S4- This was also an attempt to avoid copyright disputes: the Soviet authorities were well aware of the potential for lawsuits and concerned that film sales abroad would be ., ■. ■ jeopardized and Soviet film distributors held liable. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 92,1.5.
55. V. Demin, "Nostalgiia—greshnoe protivoiadie," SE, no. 18 (1991J: 3.
56. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 12s, d. 576,1.57-
57. Elena Kurbanova, "Eiramdzhan, ulozhivshii Kuravleva v ginekologicheskoe otdele-nie," Moskovskaiapravda, 11 May 1999.
58. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 12s, d. 576,1.4.
59. Aleksei Kozlov, Kozel na sakse (Moscow, 1998).
6 a. Oriana Atkinson, Over at Uncle Joe's: Moscow and Me (New York, 1947), 136. Deanna Durbin's popularity appears to have been extraordinary and enduring. See Irving R. Levine's comments in Main Street, USSR: Selections from the Original Edition (New York, i960), 141; Serge Fliegers, "Liz Taylor Mistaken for Deanna Durbin," CM-cage Daily Defender, 28 January 1958.
40  ■  chapter i
the soviet film industry
wt1
9
the wisdom of showing the films, as did the head of the Komsomol.61 In 1948, L. ll'ichev (of the CC Department of Agitation and Propaganda) reported that the department had received "a large quantity of letters from workers" about die trophy films with "harsh criticism and, in many cases, demands for their removal from the screen."62 One man in 1952 wrote of his frustration that Soviet theaters. were, as he put it, "engaged in real bourgeois propaganda."
The harmful effects of showing these films can be seen in every courtyard-including ours, where dozens of children play "Tarzan and Cheetah," in particular—and also in relations between adults. It seems to me that the state of. affairs is reminiscent of the situation in the well-known fairy tale by Ander- . < sen, when everyone had to admit that "the emperor had no clothes."63
JSut with the emperor outnaked on parade, Soviet media carefully avoided
were at ooee^ culture in the late Stalin- Jj
XtU^^^mofficiai, everywhere on view, yet rarely reflected in orthodox
The story of the trophy films captivates people now in its very strangeness. J| Tarzan and Stalin in one sentence—on one screen, in fact, as any Tarzan showing would have been preceded by newsreels featuring Stalin—Is difficult to fathom, j Factor in the world beyond the theater, and your head spins. Thjs_was a time jyhen the Soviet regime forbade marriage to foreigners, when scores chartists" and scientists suffered public persecution, and often worse, for their alleged lack of "Soviet patriotism.'' If drooling over Deanna Durbin did not qualify as grovel* ing before the West, what did?
Historian Peter Kenez has suggested that Soviet leaders were willing to tolerate the trophies because they considered them light and frivolous and also be- ■ cause officials were banking on them to distract people from pressing economicx and social problems.65 Yet other4ight^ulttiraliOTms frmnthe capjtalistworld— iazz^paaianar^wereamderJ^ same period.;
61. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. S76,1.2; ibid., 1.58.
62. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 92,1.63.
63. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 383,1.208.
64. When Komsomol'skaia pravda ran an editorial critiquing the trophy film phenom- j| enon in 1947, the Ministry of Cinematography sent a formal objection the CC. RGASPI, J f. 17, op. 125, d. 576,1.59- Seven years later, another Komsomol critique appeared in IK and. won the journal an official rebuke and the Komsomol a warning from the CC. The offend- < ing article criticized Soviet filmmakers for failing youth and effectively throwing them5| into the arms of Tarzan. It was apparently quoted by an Associated Press reporter. See* E. S. Afanas'eva and V. lu, Afiani, eds., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul'tura 1953-1975: Dokumenty ^| (Moscow, 2001), 285.
65. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 192.
^.yyhat. was the difference between ja2z,bands.andJTarzm^Inmgine, for a start, the sound of millions of kopeck coins jingling in cash drawers across the USSR. As Manevich, the official in charge of seizing the Nazi film fund, explained in 1991' ^^^SO^MaE^JESSU161?'11^ the fflm distribution bureaucracy overfulfiU its plan, and its officials win ttdyTSonusesJT^
tie's:Wew~S6ffierpicfuT^ tickets Cat'25 kopecks per ticket, <
for a gross take of ro miUion rubles) was considered a smash success.66 In 1948, when the potential audience was far smaller, the Soviets anticipated an income 1 of 35-40 million rubles for a limited release of the American Viva VUlal (1934).67 \ And the film came free of charge. There were dozens of Viva Villas! —'
The story of the trophies, then, while captivating, is not so strange after all. With the new wave of imports after Stalin's death, many things changed, but the Soviet audience's taste for foreign, commercial cinema held fast. The children of Tarzan's fans in the USSR crowded theatersfor The Magnificent Seven and Bobby (a 1975 Bollywood teen romance); yesterday's droolers for Durbin and Taylor now lusted after Sophia Loren and Rishi Kapoor. Moreover, the fondness of the USSR's cultural bureaucracy for masscult endured over the decades.
In the early postwar period, the framework for authorizing this taste was war booty—a just reward to the victors, like wristwatches seized from POWs. In lateryears, the official basis for imports was mutual cultural understanding. The USSR also used cultural jjg^jaage^g^eements as a mechanism for promoting Soviet cinema abr<^l^Soveksportfil'm, thmorganization in charge of import-export deals, chose apacT^roff!^^ India, and India, in exchange, accepted a selection of Soviet pictures.68 The Soviets also bought films outright. In the Brezhnev era, they were spending US$so,ooo-iso,ooo for a picture made in acapitalist country. Films from the developing world came far cheaper and were often bartered for goods, a fact that made them even more attractive. With socialist countries, the typical method was exchange.69 (ThcdMsionof cinematic ., production into "cap^
_SoyefepOTtffl Ws own classification system.) The Soviets never paid percentages or royalties—a sale was alial&^n3'tn?ywe^ to circulate film prints
until they shredded.70 The most popular film of all time in the USSR, Soviet or
_fo*&ign,,was a Mexican-made melodrama with a gypsy theme, Yesenia (1971)7'
66. Zorkaia, "O 'massovom segodnia,'" 28.
67. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 92,1.5. See also the three CC decrees on projected profits in Oleg V. Naumov and Andrei Artizov, eds., Vlast' i khudozhestvennia intelligentsia: Doku-■menty 1917-1953 (Moscow, 1999).
68. See Sudha Rajagopalan, Leave Disco Dancer Alone! Indian Cinema and Soviet Movie-Going after Stalin (NewDehli, 2008), 76-83.
69. Arkus, Noveishaia istoriia, 5:98-103
70. Films from capitalist countries were typically licensed for a limited period—a legal arrangement not always respected on the Soviet side.
P
42
chapter i
the soviet film industry m 43
which the Soviets bought for only U$20,ooo in 1974. Yesenia sold 91 million tickets.71 Even with the costs of copying, distribution, theater management, and so on, the clatter of kopeck coins was thunderous. Sovej;spor^mJ^areDUtation as the most profitable foreign trade sector in ffie^cg.nflmyj.and it was not thanks
" toexpOT^ SoveksportfU'm estimated income from
foreign film purchases at 5 rubles; in the case of some masscult pictures, it could
~ reach 2567^
Comprehensive statistics on the foreign-film market in the USSR are not available at this time, but all indications suggest that films from capitalist countries attracted more viewers as a rule than either Soviet productions or films from the socialist bloc. A CC investigation in i960 found that in.the first nine months of that year, jach film from the capitalist world drew an average "'audience of more than 50 o.ooojn ^
Hjs&ooo aha^sSctelistbfoc pjctt^jsj^ooo^Using other indicators, histo nan;SudhaRajagopalan concluded that Indian-made films were even more successful than capitalist productions on the Soviet^ market. The USSR" im-\-ported 206 films from India in the period 1954 to 1991, nearly all of them (175)
"ifin^i^ua^lmeiodrMnas made in Bombay^ (so-called Bollywood cinema). ,
*R^agopalan counted the number of films surpassing the 20-milhon mark for . ticket sales in their first year of release and found that fifty productions were from India, more than from any other country. (The United States was sec ond with forty-one, France third with thirty-eight.)74 Until 1962's blockbuster, Am-phibian Man, the record holder for any film was one of the first Indian produc
"TjonsTtb^^ At nearly 64 million tickets, The. Vagabond still ranks in the top twenty films al the
v box office for the entire Sc^etera.7^____
"'   In i96o,„Central Committee investigators concluded that.the countr^s (me
nwiSnetworkhad "received an excessf^elylargectffi "countries''and'that "as a result, the attentions of a wide sphere of Soviet people
are riveted on themes and our tasks in ideological work and not.,
"^frequently contrad^ tasks."7* This was one of several attacks on an
ema repertojre^by. the„Centra^c^ 961,
gladsome modifications did followrNever again (in,^ the ,
71. Dondurei, Otechestvennyí kinematograf, 73. See also Neia Zorkaia, "Sovťlsku kinoteatr, ili chto tam bylo na samom dele v proshlye gody," IK, no. 11 (1995): 121.
72. Arkus, Noveishaia istoriia, 5:98-103.
73. Afanas'eva and Aflani, Ideologicheskie komissii, 258.
74. Sudha Rajagopalan, "A Taste for Indian Films: Negotiating Cultural Boundaries in Post-Stalinist Soviet Society" (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2005), app. A.
75. Sergei Kudriavtsev, Svoe kino (Moscow, 1998), 391. Rajagopalan, "Taste for Indian^ Films," 149-
76. Afanas'eva and Aflani, Ideologicheskie komissii, 258.
jjj^nfojrnatiojxAgency^ were showing Hollywood films, asjtjljidj^
'0iKn'V-.Srrele^^~mig"6^ and seven in 1961, the years 1962-70 saw numbers ranging from two to six annually. (The i960 level was then surpassed only once, in 1977, with eleven U.S. releases.)78 As a rule, according to one official in 1966, two to three tim^^ releaserwefe ~~
" also jSeing-printedZ?..-, ~     "~         —•
Yet it is important to recognize that the new approach—restricting the num- ~~ ber of new titles and copies, especially for U.S. films—did not always limit audience size. Twenty-four million viewers managed to watch the mere 360 copies of the French Les Miserables {1958) ,80 Some Lrite It Hot (1959) with Marilyn Monroe reached even more spectacular heights: 211,000 viewers per copy.81 Visitors to the Soviet Union continued to remark on the prevalence and popularity of mass-cult. One young Yugoslav scholar was surprised to count more than eighty Moscow theaters showing capitalist films in the summer of 1964. Well over a third of them were playing the same picture, the Italian comedy Divorce Italian Style (1961).82 In the 1970s, the policy of restricting the number of hew titles continued, and with it came a general shift away from films made in the capitalist West and toward Middle Eastern, Latin American, and especially Indian products.83 One expert estimated that only 65 percent of ticket sales in the seventies were — for Soviet-made productions, with the rest attributable to foreign films.84 The head of the Filmmakers' Union gave an even lower figure for 1975 at the union's congress: 50 percent. He may have been pleased to report that the number had risen to 70 percent by 19S1, but that still left nearly one-third of ticket sales outside the Soviet camp.85
77- "USIA Report Notes Huge Increase in U.S. Films Shown In Soviet Union," Washington Post, 19 September i960. 78. Golovskoy, Behind the Soviet Screen, 133.
79- The Moscow party organization complained in 1961 that the city's largest theaters \ . and stadiums were still showing capitalist films (though trade union clubs and TV were 1 non).TsAOPIM,f.4,op.i39,d.52,l. 6. ——}
8b. RGALI, f. 2936, op. 4, d, 1307,1.106. ,  81. Average viewership per copy was twenty-five to thirty thousand. Dondurei, Otechest-vennyi kinematograf, 71; Kudriavtsev, Svoe kino, 392. The Soviets bought Some Like It Hot for 54,000 convertible rubles. Evgenii Zhirnov, "Arkhiv: Kremlevskie piraty," Kommersant-vlast', 14 October 2002.
, 82. Mihajlo Mihajlov, Moscow Summer (New York, 1965), 51. See also William Taubman, The View from Lenin Hills: Soviet Youth in Ferment (New York, 1967), 136.
83. Peter Kenez estimated there were only twenty Western films on Moscow screens «1 1969-70. Kenez, "Notes on a Moscow Movie Season" (August 1975), OSA, box 300-80-1-316.
84- Golovskoy, Behind the Soviet Screen, 137.
$S>Chetvertyi$"ezdkmemv.tografistovSSSR. ■ -
44
CHAPTER I
THE SOVIET FILM INDUSTRY  H 45
fr
Here we can draw a straight line back to the trophy film era: the Soviet cultural bureaucracy was consistently canny when it came to imports. For all the complaints about greedy officials pushing lowbrow movies and talk of their corrupting influence, these filrr^jneverleftthe screen.-They wereessentialto the smooth runctioningfqf the: Soviet cinematic system. Boris Pavlenok, Goskino's deputy chairman in the seventies, described the rationale in 2003:
In order to make ends meet, we "invited Brigitte Bardot," as we used to say. Tins is a normal approach for producers. It is not important where I get the money— the main thing is to pay off my debts and obtain credits for the following year. Sometimes,theheadofGosbankwouldcallYermashandsay: "Listen, buy some Yesenia or another, my accounts are empty." So we bought Indian melodramas, tossed them in the theaters in many copies, and filled up the budget.86
Soviet officials naturally did not speak in public about the Bardot technique, nor did they share the details of another important continuity with the past: acquisition practices. SoveksportfiTm representatives made a preliminary selection of films alm>ad*a5d~seiitco^ Sir:, review. The commission comprised people from Goskino,.the CC apparat, the,. TttffiTstfylol^
ers' Union, and. also representatives of "the public,'' such as writers and teachers". and it generated repoflgLwiiiijrecp^ of *
TcapltaUstproduction reqmredjm offia^
Bllt even after i9M^ffi^fioS^prd in any case rested with the CC," said one forjni^anic^
enon^massi^M^^/M??1 Sty!*; for «ample» reportedly made the cut because Adzhubei was a fan,8^^
Sove^^or^^anfbr'ffiS'viason played it very safe in its proposals. The selection it sent for review was always narrow, and this was especially "true as much of cinema outside the USSR grew more sexually explicit, violent, and morally.: ambiguous. Itwjisj^^oughjor a fihn.to.L.CQntain.stringent.soctalcriticfem, to-be anti-American, anticapitalist, or even Marxist. If it might be considered "for
naturalist" (nakedbodies), or 'Tbirutai" farapruc violence), Sov^spRtdBipi had.
■"good grounds to assume it'wouXSbe rejected. This is one re^as^njwhy Bollywood;;
~^rrjKmrtio5EEtyjrfta^ for ac-n
quisition. Politics could come intojtay mjpih^
""^nSeFdepur^ commission's favorable recom-
mendation of Milos Forman's Amadeus (1984) was blocked by the Czechoslovak
86. Evgenii Zhirnov, "Arkhiv: Rentabel'nost' sovetskogo kinematografa sostavliala 900% ■ v god," Kommersant-vlast?, 10 March 2003.
87. RGALI, f. 2918, op. s, H. 40-42.
88. Zhirnov, "Arkhiv: Kremlevskyepiraty."
communist leadership, who made it known how offended they would be should
their Soviet comrades purchase a film made by a "traitor" to their homeland.89 If, as was sometimes the case, the Soviets decided to acquire a picture with
objectionable scenes, they altered it, and this too was a link with the past. Au-; ' diences in the USSRjaw%jgixpnxJ^an^lgjisofm^t^l^y. stripped of Its*
"storyline about a local communist, deemed too controversial. Censors were
known to cut as much as^ ^•aso'ed^^^^anj^Q^esepenciagof scenes, for example—and purjgosefu^-*'^
mistranslated dialogue in dubbing. These practices reached historic heights in "the seventies and eighties, but by then they were a Soviet tradition stretching '
t»ck totfie tw^ttes.90 Titles were changed wholesale; w^ji>rwte<L_ . in black-and-white; Soviet artists copied and ncm^^j^JamJ^a^XkMSk, " loundtracksas"their]owffiTn^
: _by deSmHon^masiculf & attitude was_
^_at once„cavali.er:with. respect, to. the rigntsof creators and mindful, even fearful,
of the potential powe^of tie cre^ there to generate
V revenues and WSnstra^A to providing'ait ancT-
leisure (evenjf of dubious o^ty?. They were also objects oFiritehse attraction ~
from thTevery top of1 the system down. The Soviet love affair with masscult cin-. ema was no fling; it was an enduring, fruitful passion at the very heart of the
cultural system.
DEFINING CINEMATIC SUCCESS
Cinema's super-profitability in the USSR is a historical chestnut that deserves to be cracked open and examined. In Soviet times, officials often bragged about their multibillion-strong audience, and although they mostly refrained from grubby talk of rubles and kopecks, the message was clear enough. Internal reports from Goskino and the Filmmakers' Union did include financiaTclataTand
. in the mjd-sixties they put gross ticket sales at roughly .1 billion rubles aimually1_ jrfwhich thejtate was saidto have collected 440 million in "pure profit??* Boris
- Pavlenok clauned in hfepp a 900 percent
profit margin during his tenure. He also cited the figure of 1 billion rubles for an annual box office and estimated 440 million rubles or so as the annual take.93
All these figures should be taken as notional rather than actual because they were notional in their original historical context. The 1 billion-ruble gross sales
89. Arkus, Noveishaia istoriia, 5:102. ■ 90. Ibid,, vol, 4 (Moscow, 2002), 109-111. .. 91. Foreign literature fared no better. See Maurice Friedberg, A Decade of EuphoriaTl (/ Western Literature in Post-Stalin Russia, 1954-1964 (Bloomington, IN, 1977}, esp. 16-57. | .  92. Fomin, Kinomatografottepeli, 6,
93- Zhirnov, "Arkhiv: RentabPnost' sovetskogo kinematografa.'' See also Boris Pavlenok, Ktnn. Ugmdy i byl': Vospominaniia, razmyshleniia (Moscow, 2004), 91.
46
chapter i
the soviet film industry ■ 47
number, for example, was not an actual box-office figure but rather an estimate
derived from the number of tickets sold. The USSF^^^
time, evaluateAcjmema mj^^^tj^^^^ti^^M^e^aj^^sygefy
equatedM&:view^
'viduais frequently saw a film more than once). Taking an avejggej^^tjfrself an„ "^esfln^Kj^Sstop^dSper ticket and anaudience"of 4 bUHonX%lsi)_esjJr^aj.ec :c^iSrri^at ab^:^^i^kie of i^fflionrSHiSr^S^Stiy, the 440 million de-^ TfvecTlrom the organization of the film financing system: by plan, sspercent of all receipts from movie ticket sales went to local budgets. That would leave ,
roughjj[4^o_milHonpf ^e_iWUtpn.in^ui^profit^M----------
Overall, we can say that cinema was a moneymaking venture for the Soviet state through the seventies.95 The boon to city and regional coffers, in particular, was substantial: movie money helped pay the salaries of teachers, doctors, and many others on municipal payrolls across the USSR. My point here is not to . mock the Soviets for either their pride or their bookkeeping but rather to draw our ■> attention to how they framed cinematic success. Two important themes emerge. The first is thej:entrality p£profjtJocuiei^ ] Though the term "profit" itself was shunned, the convenriormljmsdon^false: but dnrablfr-jwas that film ranked second only to vodka in generatJng,p^finue£. t jfciF3iJe^ the arts was always markedJaLits-Midas, i'
touch.,, and filmmakers did not hff toteg) point this out Cinema, the Klmrnak- : era' Union and Goskino reminded the CC in 1966,. "is the only art in our country.,
that brings in stable, constant, and ever-increasing revenues."96 _____
The'second 'unpOTSnTtb«nteTo note is the opacity of Soviet film finances as a matter of policy and not mere incompetence. Along with audience research/ economics was the least well-tended and most secretive field in the entire cinematic sphere. It is not only that die Soviets did not collect accurate, comprehensive data.97 They also rarely publicized and discussed what they did know. Box-office figures were almost never published, and even filmmakers rarely knew how their work had fared in theaters—nor were they particularly interested. The perpetual, systemic cloudiness about the facts on the ground and de-■>. mands for "performance," however vaguely defined, opened filmmakers up to periodic assaults for squandering resources and undermining a winning sector of the socialist economy. Yet this kind of systemic cloud cover also worked to
94. Kosinová, Istoriiakinoprodiuserstva vRossii, 20.
95- Birgit Beumers contended that returns on ticket sales exceeded expenses until 1983." Beumers, "Cinemarket, or The Russian Film Industry in 'Mission Impossible,'" Europe-Asia < Studies 51, no. 5 (July 1999}: 871; Arkus, Naveishaia istoriia otechestvennogo kino, 5:115
96. Fomin, Kinomatografottepeli, 85. j
97. Aleksandr Fedorov, "Gorkaia pravda luchshe vsiakoi lzhi?" SK-Novosti, no. 43,;; http://www.film.ru/sk-news.
their advantage.9* It was, in this way, one of the most fruitful contradictions of the Soviet film industry. Movie theaters were packed, film was profitable overall, and digging into the details could well be considered beneath the dignity of the socialist artist or even a socialist cultural bureaucrat." The image of Soviet cinema's profitability was essential to the smooth functioning of a system that had many bumpy patches.
Art or no, cinema was also an in^triaUpmcess, and it suffered production problems typical of Soviet industj^The planjtas the organizing principle. In '   . thecaseoffflmApngd^c|ioj>.pJaTO
/:■: propriate Cena^ Comrnit^depairaents. and they were organic hy.riwm*;^
ajAejnatic,plaa
would produce in a given year—seven films in the historical-revolutionary the-.matic slot, three social dramas, and so cmJ_^Therewere also plans for snorter periods-^uartfifly plahs7|oF^
"lllOSg^^ Mosfifm production""
in the late fifties, noticed very little happening on the set until thewsry.end.pf the hiontH, when there was a flurry of actmty101 This was storming to meet the. plan, much as Belfrage would hlave: found ~fi a refrigerator plant. And since, half or more of all film productions ifTtfie early sixties were not completed until the final quarter of the fiscal year, storming must have been very common.102 Other productions—again, an estimated 50 percent—simply ran over schedule.103
Why was this so? A 1963 evaluation of the industry gave a typical litany of " problems, from overshooting and unnecessary travel to rewriting screenplays . : and recasting actors midway through productions.104 If Soviet filmmakers were
. 98. Sloppiness in data collection could also make it easier to cook the books, Vladimir Motyl' claimed that the figures for The White Sun of the Desert (Belae sol'ntse pustyni, 1970) were lowered so that those for another fflra would appear higher. "Vladimir Motyl': V kino nuzhno gospolitika," Kommersant-DaUy, 6 November 1998.
99. My argument is not that the Soviet film industry was the only one to cook the books (Hollywood was, and is, famous for it) but that recipes differ by system/See Edward Jay , Epstein, The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood (New York, 2006). J00, Thematic plans varied yearly and were subject to interest-group lobbying._Plans.fbr ^6^kraam^,aam inoeaieinl^ :j toryjBJMmMJM^^ honest police, offl-
Pgrt of a mediawide campaign to burnish the reputation of the police force. Denis_
Fomin, Kino i vlast', 143. ,   "iof. Salty Belfrage, A Room in Moscow (London, 1958), 147. The film was Pamiatserdtsa (1958).
10 2, Afanas'eva and Aflani, Ideologicheskie komissii, 475. 10 j, RGAU, f. 2936, op. 4, d. 1307,1.25. I04. RGAIJ, f. 2944, op. 1, d. 20,1.185.
48
chapter i
the soviet film industry  ■ 49
here to defend themselves, they would protest—with good reason—that the problems were not their fault. Given the execrable quality of Soviet film stock—an estimated 10 to 15 percent of the costs of production were related to problems. 'SSTra^^'^ft--the amount.of.^aff«< fan*»fl» wgs and reshooting^
inevitables5 "Rewritten" was often another word for censored. wTiat cnoicethd •
^a director have if, say, military top brass decided the character of the soldier in
"his fum~was not "sufficiehidy heroic? He reworked the script. He found an actor with a stronger chin, broader shoulders, and better connections, and he reshot the soldier's scenes. Many filmmakers did whatever they could to beat the system, and sometimes this meant shooting material they knew would likely raise objections, but they were willing to sacrifice to satisfy the bureaucrats.
All these changes drove up the costs of filmmaking substantially: in 1970, the average Soviet production cost over 400,000 rubles, up 30 percent from a decade before, and the trend continued.106 However, expensive films were not necessarily popular ones, and filmmakers were producing fewer and fewer hits as the years went by. In 1960, thirty-nine Soviet-made pictures sold 20 million^
jackets or more in th^rirsTveir^fJM^ three could boast this level of successMLAmpkMmMan^S£J™&i°n tic^eXs ,n
"1962 stunned the cinematic community"not only because it was the first Sc^TT"
film to surpass the 50 miWqn tmdj^
was completely out of proportion to that of the rest of the industry. The avei ag_e_ Soviet picture_yithejn.ki-s
ward trend continued through_Ae 1970s,.and by 1984, one-half of new produc- ■: ^lion£did n^meet the 5 million-ticket mark for their first year on the screen."109""* None ofthe non-RusaaTSc^T^^
own costs in Dc^^fficereS^ns; they were all [except Ukraine, which covered its own losses) dependent on direct subsidies from MoscovvT™ ! "
""The core mecbanlsm^^ system was the official rating as-.
signedto every film for^W^^^^^ag^^O^aspecial Goskino com-.. ^inlssloni^
-Tnwncing^ording to fiscal plans (and before films went h^pjo^jction)^inost_ ,| people who worked in axtema^i^ie!^^^^^^itvr^&film's rating
105. Evgenii Zhirnov, "Kak zakalialsia brend. Tselluloidnoe iskusstvo," Kommeri,ant- ^ dengi, 20 September 2004.
106. L. Furikov, "Analiz odnogo... analiza fil'ma," IK, no. 8 (1970): to8. ;
107. RGAU, f. 2936, op. 4, d. 1307,1.97. 10S. Ibid., 1.23.
109. Valerii Golovskoi, Mezhdu ottepel'iu iglasnostv Kinematograf 70-x (Moscow, 2004),;: 68; Sergei Kudriavtsev, "Rekordy i mify sovetskogo kinoprokata," Vretnia novostei, 2 Km.-: gust 2007.
no. Interview with Baskakov in Troianovskii, Kinematograf ottepeli: Kniga vtoraia, (Moscow, 2002), 334,
that set the gears in motion for additional forms of compensation. A top-rated picture brought its studiojibonus of 15 percent of its budgeted cost, whereas a
received bonus payments based on ratings ImTregard^ metffieff^
for production crews were calculated as al>acceiita^e*o?Aeir'total wages for ^elh^tTtliey'had a built-in incentive to draw things out.113 A picture^fi'atBsr money overall still stood to makTmoneylo^ people who made
it. The forgotten The General and theDaisies (General i margaritki, 1963) failed to earn back even 70 percent of its costs (for production, copying, and distribution) in ticket sales yet still earned MosfiTm a healthy 50,000-ruble bonus.114 The key was the rating
Ratings determined how many copies of a film were printed (its tirazh), and , this^nade^Retn^peoaTly important to screenwriters and composers.115 Unlike / other film professionals, these two groups had a right to royalties, calculated i as a percentage of the gross take in theaters (potirazhnye). Thel-ange'W'fllm"! tirazh was very wide—anywhere from a dozen to a few thousand copies—and a liigh rating was no guarantee of high royalties.116 Republic- and district-level authorities had a say in setting.cinematicrepertory in^^ a film with a top rating might not be selected widely. In practice, higher ratings
u^C^en^^td^^rJ^&^^a^^iSr^^. On the origins of the ratings system7see\
112. Faraday's informant reported directors'TSonuses of 8,000 rubles for first-category films, 6,000 for second, 2,500 for third, none for fourth, and 12,000 for goszakaz. These
■ rates likely refer to the seventies and early 1980s. George Faraday, Revolt ofthe Filmmak-. ers: The Struggle for Artistic Autonomy and the Fall ofthe Soviet Film Industry (University
Park, PA, 2004), 59-
. 113, A1972 Pravda article quoted in Cohen, Cultural-Political Traditions, 445. The system also encouraged longer-running films. The trend was for two-part films, funning three-plus hours but shown in one seating. Viewers were said not to like them because of the length and because they had to buy two tickets. Steven Hill, "The Soviet Film Today," Film Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Summer 1967): 40; Chukhrai, Moe kino, 164-165. 114. Fomin, Kinematograf ottepeli. 78. General i margaritki, directed by M. Chiaureli, known for Stalin cult films. An official in 1966 cited different figures for the film (cost, 7is,ooor; sales, I90,ooor; bonus, 36,ooor) to make the same point. RGAU, f. 2936, op. 4, d. 1307,1.46.
■ 115. No doubt this is one reason why so many directors were credited as screenwriters as
■ well. Some industry critics complained that the practice of directors writing or rewriting screenplays contributed to the gray-film problem. See Aleksei Kapler's letter to the CC in Fomin, iCmematogra/ottepeli 87-89. Fomin also published a 1969 KGB report on Kapler's complaints that directors were forcing writers to split screenplay royalties. Fomin, Kino i vlasf, 92-94.
n6. "Kakvziat'otfil'maboI'she?,"JiC no. 7 (1966): 13.
o
CHAPTER I
THE SOVIET FILM INDUSTRY
almost, always translated into larger print runs and widespread distribution | Actors also stood to gain materially from high ratings, although rarely at the | level of screenwriters, composers, and directors.117 Though most were ordinary 4 salaried studio employees, actors who had been awarded^^ihOTois--I^>eopte's d artfcts" ^
other perquisitesas well. To participate in highly rated films with wide dist nbu- | donwas'«»lna®S^e"8d<teofconecting honors.118 | - Limiting-^distribution practically guaranteed limited audiences; the regime '| employed this strategy for controversial works throughout the postwar penod il Tarkovskii's The Mirror tZerfcqZ^^ l^e J
' entire USSR, to give one example.119 Conversely, to grant a picture a high lirash J| was to give it the biggest possible advantageon the Soviet market, this was~sl the case with the so-caUed3t^orcto (g^^^^ftthe most prestigious and I potentially lucrative of all productions. Most filled the historical-revolutionary 'J 0:917 and the civil war) or military-patriotic (World War II) slots in studios' the « matic plans, and all were lavishly funded, promoted, and distributed. The Lrv- Jl ^ng^md the Dead. (2^i^eimertyye}..1964), a screen adaptation of the novel by I
Konstantin Simonoy, was one example, With a ^ ^'S^et theaters, it inevitably topped the box-office charts. The acto?-d7re<^;! SergeiBjffldarchuk made several films by goszakaz, including War ana Peace tj (Voina i mir, io66-67)^pur-part.e.stra^^ | ^s^^a^st^fTiwusands." Bondarchukused his connections to muster an en- | tire cavalry division for trie film. The estimated cost: nearly 20 million rubles120 J| By way of comparison, the Filmmakers* Union reported spending a little over ^ 2 million rubles over a five-year period in the seventies on housing projects for | its members.121 || A goszakaz film embodied the essence of Soviet cinematic production In 3 effect, the goszakaz filmmaker locked in top ratings, bonuses, honors, festir,^ val prizes, and foreign travel—the best the system had to offer if you played M by its rules. He (and most were men) guaranteed Soviet cinematic success by^ successfully managing his relationships with people in power. Not every film $ could be a goszakaz, and not every film professional aspired to work on one.;*!
117. Actors consistently complained about low pay levels. See, for example, comments afci^ the 1981 Filmmakers' Onion congress. Chetvertyi s"eed kinematografistov SSSR, m. U
118. Other film professionals were also eligible for honors. Marina Raikina, "Patológ A icheskie narodnye " Moskovská komsomolets, 14 May 1999. On the j;aimdu<tion of honors 'jj
^__in_i9_37^see Maya Turvoskaya, "The 1930s and 1940s: Cinema in CČmíext/Hu TdyluiŤriiď^ ^pring^SlaUnism^ndSoviet Cinema, 37. 4.
119. Arkus, Noveishaia istoriia, 5:125. i J20. "Kak vziať ot fil'ma bol'she?" 9. The film was also reviewed in more than one bun $
dred newspapers. Woll, Real Images, 153. J 121, Chetvertyi s'ezdkinematografistovSSSR, 42. :M
Filmmakers often chafed against the demands of thematic planning and railed against the ratings system. But an oHeraiielming m^otiiy^jj^^imions re-ceiv&Ui™SJ>L?J~$!™ productions were practically
unheard of.132
If most Soviet films drew the highest ratings and. funding levels while also falling at the box office, how did cinema fate as a profit:making.se?tor of the' Soviet cultural economy? Cinema-art did have a business model of a sort, and if :"we were to drawlt, the best shape would be an inverted pyramid: a great block of middling and failing films balanced on a far smaller base of box-office hits. This model worked In large measure because the base of the structure was so solid and because moviegoing held a privileged place in Soviet social life well mto the 1970s, It was the amphibian men plus strategicinfusiorts of Bardot and Bollywood that filled Soviet movie houses and dominated the moviegoing experience of Soviet audiences. It was these films, iri large measure, that bankrolled ■    the industry.
In their public statements, Soviet officials were adept at stressing cinema's vitality in the USSR while eliding the issue of its basis—fudging their business model, in other words. But Soviet cineastes were also routinely excoriated for wasting the people's money and failing to meet the challenge of masscult infil-J tration. The attacks came in public speeches and published decrees as well as behind closed doors. Goskino^s chairman told a group of filmmakers in 1063 that of the forty-two films he had recently screened, only five or six had a future. The rest, he said, "are doomed to lie in storage.--.They will not be successful with viewers. They have nothing to offer from "the perspective of cinematographic innovation. They have nothing to offer, period."123 To be clear, these were not films the chairman planned nrsend to the shelf (though there were a few of those too, he said); they were "gray" films destined to fail on the market. At a 19 66 conference on film distribution, the head of the film distribution agency took filmmakers to task for producing "large quantities of gray, boring, utterly , uninteresting films that have no success whatsoever with viewers."124 "Gray," of course, was not a neutral term but a cudgel in the hands of officials and filmmakers alike. One person's gray film was another's artistic experiment. A gray film was a lost opportunity to fulfill Soviet cinema's given mission—aesthetic, political, and ethical education of the masses. And if the masses then chose to spend time in the enemy camp with a film like The Magnificent Seven, this was a loss compounded and made potentially treacherous.
The "upper political leadership was always dissatisfied with cinema," said a former Goskino deputy, V. Baskakov, in a post-Soviet interview; in his view, the
122. RGALI, f, 2936, op. 4, d. 1307,1.44. r23. RGALI f. 2944, op. I, d. 19,1.81. '■í4- RGALI, f. 2936, op. 4, d 1307,1.13.
52  ■  chapter i
the soviet film industry ■ 53
situation worsened as the sixties wore on, especially after 1968.125 The ideologi cal controversies around cinema were serious, and they have been skaifully doc umented by Fornin, Josephine Woll, and other film scholars. Yet for all that, we < should recognize that nothing fundamentally altered the way filmmaking was organized in the Soviet Union after Stalin. Cinema was mass art, but small films (gray or artistic—much depended oh your perspective) proliferated; Amphibian,: Wdnremmiie&'ame exception; and generations of audiences packed the aisles ; for movies identified as ideological lightweights, if not pollutants.
As in other spheres of Soviet life, the question was not so much one of skill:; as one of self-interest, incentive, and inertia. Cinema's business model generated revenues for the state; the pyramid structure stood, and it was impressive in size and scope. Soviet filmmakers had very little incentive to alter its structure and produce audience-pleasing films. No doubt director Mark Donskoi spoke for, • many when he told distribution officials, "I think that if I have made a film, then -it is your business to take, care of putting it forward [zanimafsia ego prodvmhe-nieni]. I have never gone out to the movie theaters, and I do not feel comfort- ? able selling my own films."126 In terms of cultural capital, there was indisputably more prestige to be won by producing an artistically innovative, sophisticated, work than by attracting mass audiences. Mass popularity could be damaging to; one's reputation and sense of self; cinema's amphibian man, Vladimir Korenev, said he found his success embarrassing, and he refused romantic leading roles and eschewed entertainment-oriented films from then on.127 The highest goal,?; for any Soviet film professional was to join the canon, preferably the interna tional one, which is where Soviet cinema-art saw itself as the natural leader And though not everyone could be a Sergei Eisenstein, of course, there were few.?, penalties for nursing those delusions, not even financial ones. The landscape,; was in fact strewn with incentives.
Cultural capital was a critical commodity for Soviet filmmakers on its own terms, as George Faraday has argued.128 Film professionals publicly scorned; "petit bourgeois materialism" (meshchanstvo),. reflecting both Soviet ideology and the traditional orientation of the Russian intelligentsia, Antimateriahsm was also a theme in many Soviet films, and we have no reason to question filmmakers' sincerity. Marlen Khutsiev, director of a controversial youth-theme film,5 llich's Gate (Zastava H'icha), released as I Am Twenty (Mne 20 let, 1965), recalled that after the film's first screening at the studio, Mikhail Romm came up 1 o him
i2s. Fomin, Kino i vtasť, 135. -v
126. RGALI, f. 2936, op. 4, d. 1307.1.98.
127. Elena Smimova, "Zolotaia pora Ikhtiandra," Rossiisskaia gazeta, 21 June 2000,, Tat'iana Khoroshilova, "Vladimir Korenev: Moi geroi byl naiven i chist," Rossiükaia gazelí 22 November 2003.
128. Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers.
and said, "Marlen, you have justified your existence."129 Soviet cinema-art could not have been more serious to self-defined Soviet artists.
Nevertheless; the structure of the system was such that it was always impossible to isolate cultural capital from the political and material kind. Romm's
; opinion of llich's Gate—and, more broadly, mobilizing the cinematic community (so-called obs/icftestvennoe mnenie, or public opinion) in favor of your film— was essential. People at Goskino and the Central Committee were not certain to accept the currency, but sometimes they did. Cineastes knew too that cultural capital could be spent to improve their lifestyles: such was the way of the Soviet world. Tickets from the Filmmakers' Union to a rare movie screening went to your connection in the electronics shop who had promised you first pick from the next shipment of transistors, to your seamstress, to your doctor. If you were sent to Venice with your film and saved your per diem wisely, you just might be able to buy shoes for yourself and a raincoat for your daughter. Nearly every Soviet cineaste's memoir includes at least one story of this kind, and though most are gently self-mocking in tone, they also acknowledge the importance of these consumer boons in a system of chronic shortages. On a larger scale, to be acknowledged as a great Soviet artist (especially, but not only, by foreigners) could mean moving from a communal to an individual apartment or jumping the queue for a telephone or a car.130 Cultural capital not only had real currency in the film community and among the intelligentsia, but it also counted "on the street" (with your hairdresser and mechanic) and most significantly, "upstairs"
. among the political-bureaucratic elites,131
In 1988, with the system unraveling at lightning speed, one Soviet director attempted to orient a reporter from the New Yorker magazine: "In most countries," he said, "you make either films that are high art or films for the general public— for people to enjoy. But in the political situation that existed here for so long the vast majority of films were of neither type. They were made to please the people in Goskino, and nobody watched them."132 Fomin and other film scholars stress the same dynamic—filmmaker-bureaucrat or, better still, filmmaker under bureaucrat—and emphasize how damaging this was to the creative process because it induced people to play it safe. There were so many gray films in Soviet
129. Larisa Maliukova, "Cherno-beloe vremia Romma: Vladimir Dmitriev i Marlen Khutsiev govoriat o mastere," Ifovaia gazeta, 5 February 2001.
.130. On networking and the lifestyles of the Soviet intelligentsia, see Maia Turovskaya, "Soveteldisrednyiklass,"JVeprifccwnovenn)'i!aipas:, no. 1 (2002),
131. Here I part ways with Cjeorge Fgyaga& who sees a "gulf between the creative intelligentsia and the nomenklatafaHnTef^sWvalues.RewjtofoteFitamatgr^,36jNotonly did their ranks overlap (many members of the mtelUgen^wh^'nc^fSatara rank), but their cultural values were broadly consonant.
132. James Lardner, "A Moment We Had to Grasp," New Yorker, 26 September 1988,82.
54 ■ chapter 1
the soviet fi1.m industry
55
56
cinema, the argument goes, because the bureaucrats, the party, the regime bled: the color out of nearly every one.
The bleeding was real enough, no doubt. But determining just who ordered : the operations and how they transpired is more difficult. Soviet cinema was a complex social formation..Although historians tend to trace bright lines sepa-.; rating film professionals from the "other side," if we look at the way the sys-■'; n^n^^TS^Wsee'ttat alt lines of necessity overlapped. A filmmaker had to please people in power, but some of the most powerful people in Soviet cinema were fellow filmmakers—cinema's power brokers. Screenwriters and directors altered their work to meet the demands of their studios long before they went;" before Goskino. This was mutual censorship; there was also self-censorship. No; doubt many people involved would have preferred not to do it—including some on the bureaucratic side. It is a point several former cineastes have made when • prompted to recount their experiences with censorship. Khutsiev, for example; took exception to one interviewer's blanket statements condemning the authon- *-ties (ruhovodstvo) in 2005. "Today people curse the editors, but they varied," he7 said, mentioning one studio editor who stood up for him. The interviewer per- *4* sisted; "But there were 'supervisors' [smotriteltl at Goskino who saw sedition in the most innocent things." Khutsiev answered, "This is complicated too, because after all they were not free. They suggested that I get going on new projects "13'
People had no choice but to work together across artist-bureaucrat line s, and given the importance of networking In Soviet life generally, they often soci ahzed across lines as well. Many Soviet officials prided themselves on having friends >: in the arts and cultivated those ties. Actor Vsevolod Sanaev joked with a friend, "What do you think, why do the bosses include me in every film delegation trav eling abroad?. ..Because they are bored! How do they relax there in the evenings? They sit in their hotel rooms and drink. And I tell jokes and cock-ari d bull'i stories... .Thanks to this talent of mine, I have seen the whole world."134 When« director Georgri Daneliia went to Rome for the first time in 1963, he shared au$ hotel room with Baskakov, then new to Goskino. This would not have been his choice, he later wrote, but the two men got along better than he had imagined, and he- sympathized with the deputy chair's difficulties on his maiden voyages?*5 abroad—his failure to anticipate needing more than two shirts, for example Baskakov was the boss without a doubt (Daneliia handed over his shirts), but it J| was Daneliia who had experience in foreign situations, and it was Daneliia and;; his filmmaker colleagues who got Baskakov the invitation he coveted to a swanky^ dinner with Italian cinema's leading lights.'35 A film official had more power ^ than filmmakers, but in some situations, he also had no power without them.
*■
133. Larisa Maliukova, "Kul'turnyi sloi. Marlen Khutsiev: Vremia samo prostupaet naw ekrane," Novate gazeta, 3 October 2005,24-25. .....'
134. SergeiBondarchukvvospominaniiakhsovremennikov (Moscow, 2003),476.
135. Daneliia, Bezbiktnyipassazhir, 182-189.
chapter i
■■ Figure 1.2. Connections: Minister of Culture Bkaterina Furtseva hobnobs with French star Leslie Caron and leading Soviet director Sergei Iutkevich, 1967. Boris Kaufman, RIA Novosti. Used with permission.
It was no minor point that filmmakers in the USSR were said to produce something defined as art—something that would uplift the masses at home and
' - spread the good news about superior socialist culture abroad. Even in the context of an authoritarian system, Soviet filmmakers' status as artists always gave them a good deal more room for maneuver than the portrait painted for the New Yorker reader implies. Even films sent straight to the shelf still meant a paycheck for their producers. Some directors—Tarkovskii is the best example—saw
: their work all but banned at home yet screened and sometimes sold abroad. And
... even directors who were troublemakers from the regime's point of view, but did .not enjoy international cachet, were usually able to secure financing for future projects. A fruitful, if painful contradiction. For all the real ideological pres-
■ sures exerted on Soviet filmmakers, they were never compelled by the regime to make popular or even acceptable films. And this is because cultural capital was a meaningful commodity not only to them but to Soviet political elites as well.
REDEFINING CINEMATIC SUCCESS UNDER BREZHNEV?
.. The best demonstration of Soviet cinema's deep structure and values is the story of the Experimental Creative Studio, or ETK (Eksperimental'naia tvorche-skaia kinostudiia), a targeted test in applying the profit motive to film production
the soviet film industry ■ 57-
that lasted from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. Although the formation of . Goskino in 1963 was meant to put the cinematic house in order, the new men m the Kremlin were still dissatisfied and instituted another bureaucratic reorganization two years later. Goskino saw its status and staffing levels raised and also suffered a wave of firings.1?6 More sweeping measures, however, still lingered in the air: one idea was to create a Ministry of Cinema, as had existed under Sta-" lm; K liquidating all the creative unions-and replac-
ing them with a single organization, the better, to manage the intelligentsia.137
The new Filmmakers' Union worked actively in this period to forestall what it saw as drastic action, and together with Goskino, it put together a series of proposals for refonriing Soviet cinema that were remarkable in their candor and ; often radical in their approach. Singling out the ratings system as, in the words of one 1966 proposal, "the source of the complete apathy of creative workers: and studio directors regarding their films' performance in theaters," they advo- -cated introducing limited material incentives pegged to box-office results.138 It was an idea in step with the times: in 1965, the Kremlin had tipped its hat cautiously to the profit motive with the Kosygin reforms (named for the then chairman of the USSR Council of Mmiste^rsri^ies^osygin). The reformist spark turned out to be fleeting, however, and the regime opted instead to ratchet up.; control by expanding and purging the film bureaucracy yet again and increasing. • parry oversight. This process, which had parallels in other mass media, picked; up momentum after 1968 and culminated in the 1972 reorganization of Goskino under Yermash. The Experimental CreativeJtuiip^was^a lone survivor of the sixties reformist moment arid Iastfflj^ it was degare'dTO have run
itt'w^lH^^P^^8^3" kter, in the full flush of perestroika, cineastes would cite the"ETK story as an example of how an incompetent and intolerant1 bureaucracy had stifled cinematic progress. .
ETTCs founder, Grigorii Chukhrai, was no nm-of-the-mill Soviet cineaste, and the same could be said of Vladrnir Pozner, his chief collaborator, a dynamic manager with a rare commodity in the Soviet film world: Hollywood experience. (Pozner was an emigre who had spent much of his adult life in the United Si ates, where he had managed overseas film distribution for MGM.)140 Chukhrai came
136. For Baskakov's view of the mid-sixties changes (which cost him his job), see Fomin, 3 Kino ivlastf, 137.
137. Fornin, Kinematografottepeli, 60.
138. Ibid., 77; Kosinova,IstoriiakinoprodiuserstvavBossii, 228-229.
139. Motyl', "Za derzhavu po-prezhnemu obidno." One historian reports that the CC apv proved plansforanETK-Iikesmdio as earlyasJunei^^
v Rosso, 229. Chukhrai described his initial meeting with Kosygin in Moe kino, 173-176
140. Pozner was also the father of the future television star of the glasnost era, Vladimir J Vladimirovich Pozner, who described his family's life in the United States in Parting mt£-* Illusions (New York, 1990).
to cinema a decorated veteran of World War II, and this, plus his international reputation (his films had won multiple awards, including Cannes) gave him unusual clout with the authorities. Moreover, though Chukhrai was a proud party man and socialist, he was also a self-styled maverick. With his intellectual and moral $wagger, Chukhrai epitomized the shestidesiatniki (peopie of the sixties) spirit; he was a true believer. And it is in this context that we must examine his cinematic experiment in market socialism.
Chukhrai told Soviet Screen in 1966 that the problem with the Soviet cinematic system was that it "incessantly pushes people to lie."141 The insight had come to him, he said, when he was working as a screenwriter, and a director asked him to add a few bogus shots in order to pad the budget. Chukhrai refused, but rather than blame the director, he concluded that the root of the problem was the system's fixation with meeting budgets regardless of performance or artistic merit.142 The ETK was designed to reward people according to how well a film performed with audiences. Screenwriters, for example, earned twice as much at ETK as at other studios, provided that their films drew an audience of at least 30 million. The studio was also prepared to penalize failure: the same screenwriters who stood to gain from a hit got no bonus at all if their films failed to sell 17 million tickets, the average amount necessary to cover the cost of production and distribution.143 It was a sink-or-swim operation: if they made unpopular films, it would fail, and its staff would be out of work.144
The ETK was thus the first and only Soviet studio since the 1920s to focus on crowd-pleasing, productions. "The ETK sbiaméd iňákmg "iunis" for an elite " ctóe/'said one of its most successful directors, V. Motýľ. "It was interested in genre films for mass, distribution."1.45. Many of these directors achieved terrific successes with their ETK productions, and on the whole the studio proved profitable. For the periodj9^66^,_ET^filrns; ori^veragedrew 29.2 million viewers,
of their accomplishments in 1986: "Productivity increased sharply, and useless expenses dropped. In terms of profitability, our films surpassed our highest expectations."147
141. "Eksperimentvedet vbudushchee,"S£ no. 3 (1966): 1.
142. That this was not only an economic but a moral question for Chukhrai comes through even more clearly in his post-Soviet memoirs. "Workers were getting paid for money they did not earn. This suited them and at the same time corrupted them." Chukhrai, Moe fafio, 168.
143. Fomin, Kinematografottepeli, 239. 144- "Eksperimentvedetvbudushchee,"i.
145. Motýľ, "Za derzhavu."
146. Fomin, JfineiJiilrograrottepefi, 241.
147. G. Chukhrai, "Chto Icorraiť kinostudiiu?" Pravda, 14 February 1986,3. -
V
58  ■ CHAPTER I
THE SOVIET FILM INDUSTRY  ■ 59
Although the ETK was brought summarily to an end in February 1976, Gos- ;| kino's decree sounding the death knell also seemed to endorse the studio's busi-
ness mode!.148 Linking the "size of the material rewards for film crews" with their '3f
observance of shooting schedules and budgets had achieved "significant results," ' :|
it said, and it recommended that the leading figures in ETK be rewarded for hav- .v
ing "fulfilled an important governmental task."14' The studio had passed all its , |
periodic governmental audits with high marks, and in 1973, Goskino had gone |
so far as to establish a special commission to develop plans for expanding the ex- |;
periment to the entire Soviet film industry. One year later, the head of Mosfifrn |
declared that his entire studio would shift to ETlCs model of self-financing. The f
February 1976 decree itself claimed that Goskino and MosfH'm had studied the 4 results of the experiment and were "developing new, specific principles of plan-
jiing and organizing production, providing economic incentives and increasing ;g
workers' material self-interest in creating films of high ideoarttstic quality." None v|
of this came to pass.150 ™>
It is hard to know why there were these confusing signals, but it should come. iS;
as no great surprise that the ETK model was allowed to die on the vine. Following :|
its principles would have turned the entire film industry on its head—precisely |
the kind of fundamental change that all bureaucracies, and not only the Soviet, . |; resist. Yet why snuff out the studio itself, which was, after all, highly profitable?
Valerii Fomin, who has enjoyed unusually broad access to the Goskino archive, J|
reported that there is no paper trail to follow about the decision to close the :|j studio; the 1976 decree is not accompanied by the usual supporting documents.
Fomin speculated that Yermash, the Goskino chairman, was personally behind ' ;|
the disbanding of ETK because its success made him, and the entire industry, ;|i
look bad.151 Chukhrai told an interviewer in 2001 that the decision had "come. '|
from above" [Yermash], "It was axed with the rest of the Kosygin reforms,"152 \4
In 19 86, he offered a few vague comments about people who saw the ETK as "a ;|..
reproach and a threat to their well-being"153 and elaborated more fully in his :| -'
post-Soviet memoirs: Goskino economists and film professionals had opposed >|
148. The ETK*s death was drawn out via two 1976 decrees. The firstfFebruary) ended the ;;| experiment formally and reconstituted the experimenters as a regular Mosfil'm working -| group; the second (May) dissolved this new unit. Fomin, Kinematografottepeli, 245-248. . ^
149. Ibid., 245-247.
150. We have some signs of possible ETK influence, however. According to one recent J| history, films that passed the 19 million mark in the seventies could be reevaluated for ^ ■ higher ratings. Arkus, Noveishaia istoriia, 5:125. Golovskoy, a former Goskino employee ■# :'■ who emigrated to the United States in the eighties, concurred. Golovskoy, Behind the Soviet Screen, 74. ft
151. Fomin, Kinematografottepeli, 249. KJJ
152. "Partinyi bilet za premiiu Fellini," Noyye hvestiia, 13 November 2001. ,|
153. Chukhrai, "Chto 'kormit."' .;';'
■ CHAPTER I 'if ;
the model. On one occasion, he said, he was called in to the CC offices to explain how it was that Leonid Gaidai had earned 18,000 rubles for a single film. Apparently they had been hearing complaints from other people In the film world.154 Garden-variety jealousy? Yes, but given the rules of the game, opposing the ETK was also nothing if not logical. It seems telling that the ranks of ETK di-
"Vsmirnovj and the very well establishedUChukhrai mmselTGTDaiSnaT™' T^^^P^^^^^^Mew people wefFrnleresteTfnTaTa^ lenge. If the entire industry were to shift to an ETK model for production, then most professionals in the film world would be cut from the studios' payrolls and forced to compete for contracts. If bonuses were tied to box-office receipts, then some people stood to live without bonuses. The Filmmakers' Union was always interested in increasing its powers (and directors' powers too); the sixties proposals, in the full flush of a reformist moment, can be seen in that light. But the union was less supportive of competition (in i960 it opposed and defeated a plan to award productions on the basis of contests), and a sink-or-swim approach had little to recommend it.156 By the 1970s, the costs of filmmaking had risen substantially, and the overwhelming majority of Soviet productions were receiving high ratings. Bonuses were solid and dependable, and cineastes had even more reason to shun the risks of competition.
Theother obvious possible source of opposition to the ETK is ideological. Konchalovskii, who worked as a screenwriter for ETK, claimed the studio was "a nest of revisionism, a hotbed of samizdat fandl seditious ideas."157 The real ETK had ended as early as 1968, he wrote, when "tanks drove through Prague, showing the whole world how,experiments end up." That year the studio, which had been independent, was attached to Mosfffm, Certainly the atmosphere and ethos of the ETK were unique. Chukhrai and Pozner welcomed young professionals with dubious political credentials, and the studio was known to champion controversial projects as well. The 1976 decree has an undeniable whiff of ideological dissatisfaction: it faulted the studio for failing to create "large-scale pictures on contemporary and historical-revolutionary themes"—the two favored thematic categories fbr.Soviet cinema-art.158
It is possible, as Konchalovskii suggests, that the ETK was shut down as a breeding ground of subversion, but the truth seems more prosaic. The studio inspired jealousy and had few defenders, and in a system that had for generations
154. Chukhrai, Moe kino, 1B3-184. The film was the comedy Nan Vasil'evich meniaetpro-fessiu (Ivan Vasil'evich Changes Careers)—third place at the box office in 1973 with 60.7 million tickets.
155. Fomin, Kinematografottepeli, 237.
156. See V. Fomin, "God i960," published at http://www.frim.ru/sk-news.
157. A. Konchalovskii, Vosvyshaiushchii obman (Moscow, 19993,53. 15S. Fomin, Kinematografottepeli, 246.
THE SOVIET FILM INDUSTRY  ■ 6l
1/
relied on relationships and barter, this meant a great deal. But most important of all, the ETK was, in context, superfluous. It is true that it was profitable, but so was Soviet cinema in big-picture terms—inefficient, yes, wasteful, no doubt, but what of it? With a box office of 4 billion tickets, the bureaucrats at Goskirio and the CC could still crow to their bosses and their foreign counterparts about Soviet cinema's might.
Chukhrai always spoke of the ETK as a model for modernizing Soviet cinema. (In his memoirs, he stressed that its planning experts had designed evaluation techniques analogous to those used in the American space program I)159 Yet in many ways, by the late sixties and certainly the seventies, Chukhrai, with his socialist idealism, was already an old-fashioned figure on the scene. The Soviet cinematic sphere modernized without him, if by modernization we mean its increased complexity, differentiation, and resemblance to cinemas in the capitalist West. The notion of resemblance may seem counterintuitive, given the expansion of Goskino-party control mechanisms in this period and the increasingly complex choreography of social, political, and bureaucratic factors that came with it. Control was plainly never in question; there was no samizdat movie circuit in the USSR. What we do see, nonetheless, is a steady segmentation of the Soviet cinematic sphere into high/low, elite/mass, art-house/mainstream zones, with different films, different audiences, and even different venues. This was one facet of the broad process of sociological modernization in the postwar USSR that brought people more free time, disposable income, and cultural resources, as well as more clearly delineated phases in the life-cycle, and that therefore "acih^gd=a^e^fcehmce.160
AMence segmentat^Jwas an ideological five wire few people were willing to tou^iTO^DlcTc^tahiiy not in the fifties and srxties^t^bj^efiRitionJ4r'a»-scended indjviduaLtaste^de^rJerifince, and cinema was the ''mc^tjtnrarjjajj: ■ "oTthTarts^ film about aconstructimiworTreflim appeal to construc-
ticirwolters more than to sailors or students, but its artistry (its "truth" as Soviet writers often put it) lent it universal import. Chukhrai's own work, to his mind, was mass art, and that was his goal for the ETK films as well. He was a traditionalist in this sense. But in the seventies the realities of the cultural marketplace I very clearly pointed to self-segmentation of the Soviet audience and divisions I Within the filmmaking community too. And to some extent, these divisions weie I   pursued and promoted by regime policies.
Goskino's new chairman, Yermash, was avigorous proponent of Soyjej-made, genre pro^
-mtrer ofcapitaiist modds]^nejdjrector even_recaUe^
159. Chukrai, Moe kino, 179.
L160. The connection between lifestyle changes, social differentiation, and the deveiop-ment of Soviet cinema is developed in D. Dondurei, "Gumanizm zhanra," Kinovedcheskie zapisi, no. II (1991): 82-86.
62  ■  CHAPTER I
pictures at meetings as an example for cineastes.161 However, the new emphasis 0n genre was never designed to supplant goszakaz films witFweoiogicalTiefr^ —noTwas it advanced as Soviet cinema-art!s orgaruzing^rinciple and dominant "face to the^rid^Somejform^
appreciated the value of aesthetically challenging projects an^for supporting their development witWnA^ (unlike, itTs
said, his predecessor, Romanov). "He did not care about whether an individual picture covered its costs, but he did worry about the profitability of the sector as a whole," explained one historian.162 In genre, he saw a mechanism for maintaining the movie industry's bottom line. ,„The_ Yermash ,poh^,had,un^
eficiary, and its most famous example, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (Moskva sksarri ne verit, 1979) a sweeping Soviet-style rags-to-riches romance,' not only conquered the Soviet market, selling.^4J!^&riticteK|w.each of itstwolTarts, ~~* "butlronjhe A^
triedjheirhand.at large-scale action films and thrillers during his tenure, including Pirates of the Twentieth Century (PiratyXXveka, 1979),;ariotnertwo-part rajtravjag^ opium smugglers. jiULgocipping-
-if inevitably u^yej^battle^jCrhe good guys won.) At 88 million tickets, Pirates, was the number one Soviet film of the Soviet era and came close to besting the
^.USSR's^bsoiutexecordJiolder, the Mexican Yesmia. Yermash presided over an
_jra o£blockbusters^ shrinking—people were going less and less often—but there was also a greater number of hit pictures than ever before in the seventies.
Meanwhile, in small, often out-of-the-way cinemas, clubs, and special screenings, cognoscenti audiences were watching what in the West would be called "art house" films—and this, too, must be considered an essential feature of the Yermash era. Some of these pictures were foreign-made, and others were productions that Goskino had decided to bury on the market by limiting their distribution, but many were films no one, including Yermash, had ever expected to reach a mass audience: films made to speak to an elite that did not call itself an elite. They were "people with developed taste," "aesthetically educated people." This sector, made possible by the remarkable boom in the movie industry after Stalin's death, expanded in the Yermash era; as it did, it took on a more distinctive cultural identity. By promoting a more robust entertainment sector in the industry, the regime also authorized a more forthright cultural elitism. Segmentation was stul a tricky concept ideologically; the unified mass
_audience remained.the id^al.Jjpnetheless. some critics and fflfnm»kpr<; now referred to elite productions and audiences proudly. As one cineaste said in the
161. Arkus, Noveishaia istoriia otechestvennogo kino, vol. 6.
162. Ibid.
THE SOVIET FILM INDUSTRY  ■ 63
64
perestroika period," [T] he very existence of the Soviet arts depends on the fact that we can idle away year after year and then ingeniously hit the nail on the { head "l63 It was this idling and ingenuity that the rejection of an ETK model protected, and with it a whole way/ofthinking about films, filmmakers, and , audiences.
The postwar Soviet film industry always operated with a business model that ' "used enters cinema, foreign and Soviet-made, to fill the cof-
fers. The shift in the seventies under Yermash was not fundamental: it was one :. of degree and, to certain extent, of frankness about the model itself. In the eyes of many historians and some former Soviet cineastes, "cynicism" would be the : more operative term. There is a tendency in the literature to present the poli- . cies of the Yermash era as antiprogressive, even reactionary. Some say masscult importS^nT^cwfnmde genre films "deformed" audience sensibilities ("the public taste in entertainment turned 'bourgeois,'" wrote one historian). Others idescribe the growing segmentatipj.Qf mass-elite cinemas in terms of loss ("the * "destruction of audience cohesion"). Yermash is accused of trying to "enforce an v entertainment orientation on the film industry."164 It is an argument that echoes voices from the era, when Goskino's support for blockbusters was resented in many quarters as an assault on the notion of cinema as an art and on the position ,■■ of the artist in Soviet society. At the Filmmakers1 Union congress in 1981, several ; people, including the screenwriter for Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, referred ; to the "snobbery" of the cineaste establishment faced with so-called box-office ■ (kassovye) films; others defended their right and their duty as Soviet artists to ig-nore the box office. Yermash told the assembled filmmakers that, the "economic factor" was "one of the most important [factors]" in their work. "Figures reflect ; the importance and the role of cinema in the life of the people."165
<.And yet, even at its most fraaktyxcanmerxiJal moment under Yennash, jjm^ Soviet'fiim industry did not gpjsojar as to adopt the ,j-''''nomtcj^E^^'m^Dow-have'beea touted-as-one of the mostimportantJac^; tors, bureaucrats and political elites, cineastes and viewers all had more pressing ',• factors in mind. For this reason, Faraday, characterized the Soviet industry as ; "nonrationalized" in financial terms.166 But Soviet cinema had its own terms. ;. Mosfil'm had. three times as many cameramen on staff as there were jobs in the seventies.167 They knew the terms when they picked up their pay packets every v
163. Lawton, Red Screen, 388.
164. "Public taste turned 'bourgeois,'" Anna Lawton, Kinoghsnostr Soviet Cinema in Our Time (Cambridge, 1992), 9; "destruction of audience cohesion," Graffy,. "Cinema;" 183; "enforce an entertainment orientation," Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers, 90. See also Golovskoy, Kinematograf70-x, 75-76.
165. Chetvertyis"ezdkinematografistovSSSKJ 179.
166. Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers, 66-70.
167. Chetvertyi s"ezd kinematografistov SSSR, 98.
CHAPTER I
week, as did cineastes who defended their duty to pursue Soviet cinema-art, regardless of costs or revenues. And as for redefining cinematic success under Brezhnev, they saw no need.168
SOyiBT FILMS ON FOREIGN SCREENS: CINEMA-ART AND THE CULTURAL COLD WAR
If the contradictions of Soviet cinema-art bore fruit domestically—for cineastes and the industry, for bureaucrats, and even for audiences in this golden age of moviegoing—what about the international context? Dependent though they were on masscult, Soviet officials always promoted their cinematic system as a world apart and a model for emulation. The Soviet minister of culture launched Moscow's 1958 International Film Festival by declaring, K[T]he days of Hollywood's domination of the world market are coming to an end."169 Soviet cinema-art would lead the way. Nine years later the Soviets inaugurated an international festival in Tashkent for film from the postcolonial. worlds
prcfooteaW
_ dote to Hollywood.170
Success on the international screen was central to Soviet cinema's identity, and from some angles it did cut an impressive figure. In the Khrushchev era, Soveksportfil'm expanded its operations substantially to field offices worldwide (in over 50 countries as of the sixties); where it had no official representation (such as in the United States), its agents brokered deals via intermediaries.171 In 1967, to take one year, the USSR boasted film sales in 108 countries, for a total gross revenue of over 4.4 million rubles (roughly 2 million from sales to the socialist bloc, 2.4 to capitalist countries.)172 Certain films sold very widely. By 1963, Grigorii Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier (Balladaosoldate, 1959) had sold in 93 countries and The Cranes Are Flying (Letiat zhuravli, 1958) in88.173
Raw figures, however, are often misleading. One major film could weight the scales: the rights to War and Peace, for example, sold for US$1,3 million, a sizable chunk of the total revenue from capitalist-country sales in 1967.174 More important, a sale did not necessarily translate into widespread distribution. The
168. On similarphenomena in literature, see Dirk Krechmar, Politika i hd'tura priSremh-neve, Andropovs i Chemenko, 1970-1985 gg (Moscow, 1997).
169. "US Film Rule Scored," New York Times, 3 August 1959.
170. Rajagopalan, leave Disco Dancer Alonel 84-85; S. Chertok, Tashkentskii festival' (Tashkent, 1975).
171. Fomin, Kinematograf ottepeli 379-386, The situation for trade with the People's Republic of China was exceptional. See Tina Mai Chen, "Internationalism and Cultural Experience: Soviet Films and Popular Chinese Understandings of the Future in the 1950s," Cultural Critique 58 (Fail 2004): 82-114.
172. RGALI, f. 2918, op. 5, d. 511,11. ro-11.
173. Fomin, Kinematografottepdi, 381.
174. RGAIi, f. 2918, op. 5, d. 511,1.14.
THE SOVIET FILM INDUSTRY
65
Cranes Are flying was one of the films the United States bought yia^i9s8 U.S.-Soviet exchange, andjhpjjghjt: got good play on the university and art-house
tixaritj it "neveferusreTt^ dnemat^^ who .
vfSoSSS^aMc^^catt Seven dwarfed that of Americans whctsaw Cranes, and the same might be said in comparing Soviet audiences for Les Miserables'(.1958) and French audiences for Chukhrai's Ballad.1'5 The Soviets chalked this up to ideological warfare—audiences in the West were being denied Soviet movies for . political reasons—and they protested; in 1963, a senior Soviet official announced -that the USSR would stop buying U.S. films unless the American side could guar- -fi antee wide distribution for Soviet films.176 No boycott ever happened, and in the J seventies Soveksportfu'm was still struggling to broker deals with U.S. firms that % would ensure not just sales but exposure for Soviet films.177 The Americans, for . | their part, argued that Soviet pictures did not perform well, and they were not t; ^ alone. The Indians were also reluctant to take on Soviet films, especially after s i960, when distribution moyedfroma^culturaLexchangeformat, via friendship societies and clubs, to a commercial oneL17j_^jQlete i enthusiastic; in the early sixties fftm^ dfmoc^ ragesjvere^^ 1 |
to Poland in the summer of 1962 was dismayed to find Krakow's theaters showing only five Soviet films, but twenty-five capitalist oi^^^he only sector that ap •~-~p^axM rc^"e~expl^ and '70s was the postcolomal
one_Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East—but here too, despite Soviet attentions, the United States held an overwhelming advantage.181
The USSR lost the cultural Cold War in cinema in blockbuster fashion: the q gap between Soviet cinema's reach and Hollywood's was colossal. It is true that in comparison with Western European countries and Japan, the USSR was very successful in protecting and developing its domestic industry. The Soviets, of course, did not see themselves as playing in the same league with anyone else
/" 17s. les Misirables with Jean Gabin sold 46 million tickets in 1961. RGAU, f.ja^^og. 13, /   d. 138. On U.S.-Soviet film exchanges, see Yale Ricbmond£TO^vleTci^r^£ic^^e^ 1    rpsS-X9S6CWestview,CO,i987),65. ~~ "~ £
W^nyft. "Moscow to Halt US Film Imports," New York Times, 2 March 1963; I. Bol'shakov,
"Sovetskie fiTmy na ekranakh mira," IK, no. 9 (1959); Y. Vorontsov and I. Rachuk, The
Phenomenon of Soviet Cinema (Moscow, 1980), 369-388.
177. See, for example, transcripts of negotiations between Soveksportfu'm and rep « resentatives of different U.S. film companies in 1973. RGALI, f. 2908, op. 7, d. 162, 11 * 8-10,13-15-
178. See Rajagopalan, Leave Disco Dancer Alone! chap. 2. ■.■;
179. Fomin, Kinematografottepeli, 383.
180. Poland's cineastes had even morereason to be concerned: there were only two Polish movies on krakav/s ienaidWiaOEXI^t^ 0- 2«. t*» regL^JL.'-1'
--~i8r."W>T Uu3aBo concerns about Chinese cinema as a rising competitor in the develop- . ing world, see RGALI, f. 2981, op. 5, d. 283,11.81-89.
when it came to cinema for reasons of ideological superiority. But they also understood their innate material advantages: the Soviets were right not to compare themselves to, say, France, which, given its size, had little hope of supporting a large-scale, capital-intensive production and distribution operation along the lines of the Americans. (India, although it had both raw size and an extensive industry, lacked the capital.) The.USSR was the only major industrialized country ui the world with a domestic rnarketbig enough tadnm^^^^xM^^ HoUywooct iii ite^|o^r^ch.^guaMjr, the Unionol'Soviet Socialist Republics, a multiethnic, multilingual state, was in as good a position as the United States, and possibly a better one, to develop a cinema culture that could speak to a di-verse global audience aswdl.182
the Soviets were always volTferbus critics of Hollywood's bullying of the international movie marketplace, and for good reason. Yet as many critics also pointed out over the years, the USSR's export troubles had deep domestic roots. Soviet cinema was an industry that identified itself as an art but operated like a craft; it had a handmade quality that hindered its international competitiveness." AsHollywood and other cinemas went to color and wide-screen films, the Soviets lagged behind. More than that, they suffered baseline problems with equipment of all kinds. The production values in Soviet films often fell far short of international standards, and this was something cineastes talked about openly. Reform proposals from the Filmmakers' Union in the sixties flatly stated that Soviet films were not competitive on the world market because of their inferior production values. Film-stock quality was the most glaring issue. It was a problem universally acknowledged, repeatedly studied, and never solved,183 The film industry also lacked adequate facilities for subtitling and dubbing films and so wound up spending hard currency for the services of foreign companies or, more often, doing without.
On the organizational side too, as we know, Soviet cinema suffered fundamental problems. An industry that missed its domestic production deadlines missed the international ones, too.184 Indian film distributors complained about the lack of professionalism at Soveksportfu'm as agents dallied in selecting films
182. For an argument about Hollywood's competitive advantage internationally (including the question of the ethnic composition of the United States) and its relationship to the establishment of American "cultural hegemony" in Europe, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresist-MeBmpire:America'sMvanceThroughTwentieth-CenturyEurop^ For a different interpretation of the American challenge to European national cinemas, see Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies, 1939-1900 (New York, 1991).
Ij3ljg™t cinema suffered from the ügnsfgrofjtsindusttial.basejathe-Mjiifetry of-D^—j  / Ü ^^"»«n^Se KEröshchev e^jis^wa^d a succe^'ca^^ t^cEänie   "* *\ 7 ^uug in the 1970s andalsohad plans fj'ever fulfilled) to buy 'iKaSS^SSc^cü^it' ^ ^^^^isWialstorüa, 4:123-126. ' "' ~ ""'
184. RGANI, f. 5, op. 55, d. 51, H. 638-666, 39-49.
66  ■ CHAPTER I
THE SOVIET FILM INDUSTRY ■ 67
68
and returned them damaged.185 TheJSoweK also faced persistent rumors—well, founded, as it tarns put—that copie^JShnsjen^ -
sideration.18^ Many foreign cineastes who knew of the Soviets' high-handed at-"fifude to inteliectual property rights were reluctant to do business with them. Polish film officials complained to a visiting delegation in 19 62 that the materials they got from SoveksportfiTm were of such poor quality that they could not use them to advertise Soviet pictures.187 Similar problems hampered efforts to pro pagandize Soviet cinema through noncommercial (diplomatic and educational) channels. Though the only film projector bus in all of West Africa in the early sixties was indeed imported from the USSR, it sat rusting in a Soviet embassy compound in Senegal for years: the embassy claimed it had no money to operate it, and the State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries refused to let it be presented as a gift to the Senegalese government.188 .
The other crucial question in Soviet cinema's fate on the world market was, of course, whether audiences wanted what it had to offer. The Soviet answer was always framed in terms of artistic and ideological caliber, as was true in evaluations of the domestic scene. The standard line was that Soviet films failed when they lacked depth and failed to take on important issues in contemporary life I. Bol'shakov, the USSR deputy minister of foreign trade, fleshed out the portrait of failure for The Art of Cinema (Iskusstvo kino) in 1959: "[TJhere are a lot of un-] necessary details of everyday life [in these films]," he wrote, "and romantic troii-[ bles which do not touch the viewer, lots of little songs, dubious witticisms, and lightweight, openly entertaining scenes."189 It is a formula that sounds rather promising from the point of view of genre, or entertainment-oriented, cinema. And of the films Bol'shakov listed that fit this bill—films therefore unfit for inter national distribution, in his view—a good number were crowd-pleasers on the USSR domestic market: for example, the spy drama Case^o^oAiMona^oC), second olac6M^.h^^Mj^Ji^a^^^sl6B& aodi Girt won a Guitar (Devushkasgitaroi), a musical comedy that sold 32 million three years later.
185. Rajagopalan, "Taste for Indian Films" 146-147.
186. Socialist bloc countries were also rumored to have copied capitalist films illegally and sold them to the Soviets. Philip Caputo, "The Soviets Veto the Hollywood Filmmakers'. Box-Office Blockbusters " Chicago Tribune, 21 August I9T7- Pms sent for festivals were also illegally copied. ThisishowEasy Rider (1969), a noncompetition festival film in Moscow in 1971, entered Ae1d\c^c,(reiii|.jDirectDr of Soviet Film Festival Rules Out the Pub-
-lictty Seekers," NewYork'TimesT^My 1971; Stephen Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 97.
187. TsDAHOU, f. 1, op, 71, d. 261,11. 6-21.
.188. Sergey Mazov, "Soviet Policy in West Africa: An Episode of the Cold War, 1956-1964," in Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters, ed. M. Maw sevich (Trenton, 2007D, 303-304-
189. Bol'shakov, "Sovetskie fil'my na ekranakh mira " 123-124.
chapter 1
Soviet taste consistently fell within the international mainstream. Soviet hits, in theory, could be international ones too. ,_ The USSR did market some domestic hits successfully—-Amphibian Man, for instance. But bringing girls with guitars and amphibian men to the international viewer was never the ideal, as Bol'shakov made clear. And, more to the point perhaps,, the Soviet film industry had few of these films to market anyway. So- ' viet cinema as a world cinema could not contravene the realities of domestic productions—the great gray block of movies that few people cared to watch and the small clutch of films like Ivan's Childhood that, however important from an artistic point of view, also failed to attract mass audiences. Soviet cinema-art did not fare well on the open international market because it did not meet international standards for cinema entertainment. Surely it was galling that, as, export... -officials reported to the CCin 1963, "we were unable to sell a single film at the 'Cannes Film Festival." It was unacceptable that even socialist countries turned """ ' lip~their noses at Soviet "production^1* But the standards of the internatiplrari^' market were hot Soviet standards; they*were, critics sneered, masscult in nature, 1 cut from Hollywood's cloth. Soviet cinema-art doggedly sought refuge in its own j values and sense of superiority.
As a strategy this had definite pluses: it provided a ready explanation for failure, and it played well for a time to pro-communist, and anti-anti-communist, elites. In the West, the fascination with the post-Stalinist USSR faded, and in the seventies in particular, intelligentsias set their sights on other sources of revolutionary chic (including, significantly, the cinema of the Soviet avant-garde of the twenties).191 Tarkovskii and a few others remained influential, but in the eyes of fellow auteurs in the West, they looked more and more like exceptions to a rule of Soviet banality—a rule only confirmed by the Yermash-era run of homegrown genre hits. The influence of the Soviet cinematic model among educated elites in the postcolonial world developed somewhat later, and the USSR worked hard to promote it through material interventions such as the Moscow and Tashkent international film festivals. VGIK and other Soviet institutions also trained aspiring cineastes and contributed to the development of new, national cinemas. Despite the many problems of the Soviets' export business, audiences for Soviet films gathered in many postcolonial urban centers. The critic Kirill Razgolov maintained that "in a significant part of the world, primarily the 'developing* world, the doctrine was: the worst Soviet film is better than the most perfect Western one."192
190. Fomin, Kinematograf ottepelif383J
191. This was especially true of FrWěm the aftermath of May 1968. For a brief discussion, see Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds., The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema inDocuments, 1896-1930 (London, 1994), ir-13.
í92. Kirill Razlogov, "Vývozu ne podlezhit," IK, no. 7 (2006): 64-70.
r
the soviet film industry
69
This may have been true, but we must recognize that in the postcolonial sphere, as in the West, the audience that preferred Soviet cinema to its capitalist rival was by and large an educated, elite audience. This is not to say that Soviet pictures never performed well internationally but rather that they consistently and dramatically performed worse than the Soviet model's sense of itself as world leader, and that this was important. At home, Soviet cinema made room for an elite/mass split in practice: it could accommodate a definition of cinematic success that relied on exploiting theoretically noxious or inferior productions (foreign and Soviet) to satisfy audiences while giving cineastes salaries and the all-important idling time for art. Internationally, however, in open market conditions, Soviet cinema had no way to implement this strategy, no way to fudge its business model and define its own way to success. Not only was the Sor viet Union a net importer of cinematic imagery from its ideological archnemesis, masscult, but Soviet cinema, which defined itself as the world's leading cinema, was patently peripheral on the world screen. This was one contradiction that simply could never bear fruit.
70
CHAPTER I
THE NEW SOVIET MDVIE CULTURE
Soviet cinema-art was a particular kind of ideological construct, and at its heart was a particular model of a Soviet audience. It was, by definition, a giganticjtuflencs^jreaselessly expanding, and unanimous inks appreciation fpjjhe_wojkjof_Sc^e£ cineastes. Each of these charactejristSlwis^ls^n^E The size of the audience^nit millions of tickets but billions—was living proof of Soviet cinema's success. And because film in the USSR was defined as art, a huge audience further demonstrated the cultural level of its people and their fundamental unity.1
Soviet cinema's model audience was forged in the 1930s, whenPravda had dedareH,^!KeJ^okCountry Is Watching Chapaevl" andTn7art"entireTac»ne^^ 'muTtary brigades, schoolsTlinH'or^
drama en masse, as they did for other films instantly dubbed "classics" by the authorities. All Soviet viewers returned to these classics again and again, it was said, not only for recreation but also for inspiration and education, for heroes.2
The Soviet film world, bureaucrats and cineastes alike, invoked Soviet cinema's canon throughout the entire postwar period. Chapaev, especially, was summoned up as a symbol of unity—the unity of politics and art, of filmmakers and viewers, of the audience itself—and as a model for emulation. Yet in villages, towns, and cities across the postwar USSR, Soviet cinematic culture presented a rather different picture. Most obviously, if the whole country was watching anything in ^j^^j^^VioMyias^^ytas likely to be the trophy " H6larrarian^rTne%st Soviet blockbuster. Amphibian Man,.BottwoodYs'lowr~ m Simla or "the Soviet adventure story jfrgiesofthe ite^t/Tcenu^—that
1. Cf. Stephen Lovell on Soviet book culture, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (London, 2000).
2. On Chapaev and the canon, see Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, eds. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (London, 1994), 334, 358-363; Richard Taylor, "Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s," in Inside, the FUm Factory, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (London, 1994), 2M-213; Maya Turovskaya, "The Tastes of SovietMcv^^
from ftrestroSai^Jo^os^