Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 38, October 2003
George O. Liber
Re-examining Dovzhenko's Political Environment:
A Response to Riley
John Riley 'A (Ukrainian) Life in
Soviet Film: Liber's _Alexander Dovzhenko_' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7
no. 31, September 2003 http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n31riley I am grateful to John
Riley for his serious assessment of my biography of
Alexander Dovzhenko (1894-1956). In response, I would like
to elaborate on the impact of the revolutionary period,
Ukrainianization, and socialist realism on the filmmaker's
life and art. Revolution,
1917-1919 When the revolution broke
out in March 1917, Dovzhenko -- a peasant-turned-teacher --
could openly express his views, participate in mass meetings
and demonstrations, and celebrate his Ukrainian identity
without fear of political reprisal for the first time in his
life. He joined the Ukrainian Party of Socialist
Revolutionaries (the UPSR), the largest and most pro-peasant
political party in the Ukrainian provinces. For him, as for many
others, the course of the Ukrainian Revolution brought great
disappointment. Ukrainian intellectuals with socialist
sympathies in the cities sought to create an independent
Ukrainian National Republic, but they could not permanently
bind the peasantry to their cause, nor could they resist
Bolshevik intervention. Joining Symon Petliura's nationalist
army, Dovzhenko fled Kiev in February 1919 and spent nearly
eight months in ever-shifting encampments fleeing the
Bolsheviks. Falling into the hands of
the secret police (the Cheka) in September 1919, the trauma
of imprisonment caused the young man to re-evaluate his
revolutionary enthusiasms. In his cell, Dovzhenko had much
time to think. He could reflect on his world turned upside
down. The Ukrainian Revolution had collapsed. Ukrainian
peasants, his own flesh and blood, had betrayed his hopes
and aspirations to create an independent Ukraine.
He may well have concluded
that his efforts to establish an independent Ukrainian state
were absurd and brought him nothing but deprivation,
suffering and brushes with death. At perhaps his darkest and
most depressing moment, the Borotbists -- the left-wing of
the UPSR which had allied themselves with the Bolsheviks --
gained his release and offered him an opportunity to redeem
himself. With the help of his new patrons, he became a
member of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Dovzhenko's political
journey between 1917 and 1920 lacked a coherent logic, but
this inconsistency emerged from the chaos unleashed by
revolution, invasion, and civil war. He took calculated
risks and made every effort to eke sense out of his
confusing surroundings. When his circumstances changed, he
did what many did during this turbulent period -- he
switched sides. He survived as best he could in an
incredibly violent, volatile, and difficult period.
His political choices
between 1917 and 1919 left a sword of Damocles hanging over
his head for the rest of his life. Although the Stalinist
national security state began to emerge only a decade later,
Soviet security organs had already flagged Dovzhenko. His
nationalist allegiances and his arrest became powerful
incentives to conform publicly, especially during the purges
of the 1930s. His experiences as a Cheka prisoner in 1919
may have permanently wounded him emotionally, if not
physically. Ukrainianization The Bolsheviks,
overwhelmingly urban, proletarian, and Russian, attained
power in a predominantly agricultural, multi-national state
by winning the support of the Russian and Russified working
class in the non-Russian areas. But even in victory,
Bolshevik success over the long term remained precarious
unless the ruling party legitimated its power monopoly with
the peasants and the non-Russian nationalities, who
constituted nearly half the population of the newly formed
Soviet state. Only a 'Great Compromise' with these groups
(as Lenin argued forcibly) could pave the way towards a
stable Soviet government. The 'Great Compromise'
consisted of the New Economic Policy directed towards the
wary peasants, enacted in March 1921, and a set of policies
oriented towards the non-Russians. The establishment of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on 30 December 1922 and
the decisions at the Twelfth Congress of the Russian
Communist Party (Bolshevik) in April 1923 approved three
inter-related policies towards the non-Russians. The first policy
emphasized the national-territorial principle: the Communist
Party and the Soviet government recognized each large
national group's territorial base by creating the separate
Ukrainian, Belorussian, Transcaucasian republics and many
autonomous regions in the Russian republic within the
federal structure of the Soviet Union. The second policy
advocated the creation of separate Communist Parties within
these non-Russian republics. Although these parties stood
completely subordinate to the Russian Communist Party
(Bolshevik) (later to the All-Union Communist Party), their
development reaffirmed symbolically, if not in reality, the
national-territorial principle. The korenizatsiia
(indigenization or nativization) program represented the
third policy. This program advocated the equality of the
non-Russian languages and cultures vis-a-vis the Russian
language and culture. Most importantly, korenizatsiia sought
to enhance the position of the non-Russians by promoting
them into leading positions in the party, the government,
and the trade unions. In short, this policy sought to
legitimate an urban based revolution in a predominantly
agricultural, multi-national state by encouraging the
development of distinct national cultures. Korenizatsiia sought to
overcome the structural problems experienced by the
non-Russians in early Soviet society: the high illiteracy
rates, economic underdevelopment, cultural backwardness, and
the tense relationship between the Russified cities and the
non-Russian countryside. Korenizatsiia would be the
political, and industrialization the socio-economic response
of the Soviet government to the nationalities problem. These
responses were intertwined. In the long run, the
Bolsheviks expected that industrialization would
successfully integrate the ethnically diverse peoples of the
Soviet Union into the socialist order. Already in 1921
Stalin had predicted that with industrialization the cities
in the non-Russian regions would attract the nationalities
from the surrounding countryside. But the Communist Party
and the Soviet government could not wait until this natural
nativization would equalize the urban-rural ethnic
imbalance. Measures such as korenizatsiia had to be
implemented immediately in order to defuse, if not reverse,
the non-Russian hostility towards the alien cities. In order
to neutralize non-Russian nationalism, the Soviet party
introduced measures which would outwardly placate the
aroused national feelings of the non-Russians, but limit
their true political content, as expressed in the slogan,
'national in form, socialist in content'. The Soviet government and
the Communist Party promoted the development of the
non-Russian languages and cultures in the 1920s and early
1930s. Employing the native languages in the non-Russian
regions would be a modernizing society's most effective
means of communicating to its large, multilingual
population. In addition to pragmatic considerations,
native-language use had a political purpose: to neutralize
the hostility, if not to win over the non-Russian peasants
and elites by condemning the social and political
Russification of the tsarist past. This policy also provided
a public demonstration of respect for the languages and
cultures of the recently oppressed and nationally-aroused
non-Russians. Following these
considerations, the Soviet government and Communist Party
expanded the base of its modernization effort by investing
heavily in massive anti-illiteracy campaigns, teaching the
non-Russians to read and write in their own languages. The
government subsidized the standardization and modernization
of the non-Russian languages. It also expanded primary,
secondary, and higher education with instruction in the
indigenous languages. The number and circulation of
native-language newspapers, journals, and books expanded
greatly, and in some republics more appeared in the
non-Russian languages than the number of periodicals
published in Russian or imported from the Russian republic.
By emphasizing language and literacy, the Soviet government
in effect created and expanded the number of native-language
consumers within each non-Russian region. By establishing a
heretofore non-existent cultural infrastructure, the Soviet
government and Communist Party created an independent
cultural and intellectual universe for these new
language-consumers. By emphasizing the
non-Russian languages and cultures, the Soviet government
forged the non-Russian identities and raised the prestige of
the previously underdeveloped non-Russian languages and
cultures to the point where these languages and cultures
were juridically equal to Russian. By employing,
standardizing, and modernizing previously low-status
languages, by creating a cultural infrastructure, and by
creating a monopoly for its consumers, cultural
entrepreneurs -- to use Crawford Young's phrase -- raised
the prestige of the non-Russian languages. Korenizatsiia
encouraged the non-Russians to identify modernization with
their non-Russian cultures and values. By raising the prestige of
the non-Russian languages and cultures, korenizatsiia
clearly defined not only the cultural, but the political
boundaries as well. Responding to the non-Russian
aspirations of national self-determination, the All-Union
Communist Party (VKP(b)) sought to increase the number of
non-Russians in the rank and file and in the leadership of
the party. In pursuing this course of action, the VKP(b) was
successful. By 1933, the local nationals constituted over
one-half of the Communist Parties of Uzbekistan,
Tadzhikistan, Kirghizia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia,
the Chuvash ASSR, the Komi Autonomous Oblast, and the Kalmyk
Autonomous Oblast. The largest numerical increases during
the 1920s were made by the Belorussians and the Ukrainians.
With the rise of non-Russians within the party, the Russian
percentage of the membership radically declined. By 1 July
1931, Russians constituted only 52 percent of the VKP(b), a
drop from 72 percent in 1922. The rise in the number of
non-Russians in the regional communist parties did not
represent a passing of power to the non-Russians. The party
was not a democratic organization and did not follow
majority rule. Moreover, in the course of the 1920s the
party became an increasingly centralized organization. Even
though the number of non-Russian cadres increased,
constituting the majority of the most important regional
parties, they were symbols of power. In reality, power lay
in Moscow and in the Russian or Russified cadres in the
non-Russian republics. The central party never intended the
native elites to represent their nations. During the 1920s this
changed. The native party leadership in some of the
republics stopped playing their assigned roles as symbols
and began to represent and to defend regional interests. To
paraphrase Andrew Janos, the All-Union Communist Party used
nationalist symbols 'to drum up support for a politically
isolated leadership' in the non-Russian republics. But in
acting out their roles as the defenders of the non-Russian
cultural and historical heritages some groups within the
regional parties 'became absorbed by it'. The establishment of the
Ukrainian SSR created a republic with physical boundaries.
In 1923 the Soviet Ukrainian government recognized two
official languages in the Ukrainian SSR -- Ukrainian and
Russian -- which enjoyed equal administrative status. The
Ukrainian-language print revolution generated psychological
boundaries. Ukrainianization (as korenizatsiia was called in
Ukraine), mass education, literacy campaigns, linguistic
standardization, and orthographic changes helped millions of
people to perceive themselves as Ukrainians (not just
peasants), and to imagine their oneness. Inasmuch, as
Benedict Anderson put it, as the members of 'even the
smallest [nation] will never know most of their
fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the
minds of each lives the image of their communion',
[1] the spread of Ukrainian literacy and the
Ukrainian-language print revolution helped these readers
form an abstract idea of themselves as members of a single
Ukrainian nation containing 23 million men and women. Due to
the numerical superiority of the Ukrainians (who constituted
80 percent of the population in 1926) and as a result of the
official promotion of that language, the Ukrainian language
had the opportunity of becoming the most important language
in the republic. Although the All-Union
Communist Party encouraged trends promoting a united
Ukrainian SSR, a separate Ukrainian communist party, and
Ukrainianization, the leadership of the party naively
believed that its recognition of Ukrainian distinctiveness
would not lead to separatism. But at the end of the 1920s,
at the same time that the Soviet party's primary interests
became closely identified with maintaining its political
monopoly and with creating a modern industrial base, some
very visible members of the Ukrainian party stressed a
different priority: the need to emphasize the legitimacy of
the Soviet order in Ukraine by means of Ukrainianizing both
culture and the power relationship. They never espoused the
end of communism or Soviet rule. At most, they desired full
equality with the Russian republic and 'home rule'. But in
the ever-centralizing Stalinist environment, their views
represented centrifugal tendencies. After 1930 the new
centralist course, set by Stalin, called for a
transfiguration of Ukrainianization. In order to create
common denominators in a multi-national state, language
differences (especially in a republic with the largest
non-Russian working class) had to be de-emphasized. In view
of the center's need to coordinate the all-Union economy,
language differences should not become a divisive issue.
Inasmuch as Ukraine occupied a strategic location and
constituted one of the major agricultural and industrial
centers of the Soviet Union, and inasmuch as Ukrainian (like
Belorussian and Russian) belonged to the East Slavic group
of languages, policies promoting linguistic differentiation
jeopardized the Stalinist command economy. Because
Ukrainian, after its language reforms in the late 1920s,
increased its divergence from Russian, many in the center
considered these language reforms (which included a
Ukrainianized scientific terminology) to be nationalistic
and counter-revolutionary. Instead of promoting many
languages, the center believed that the Soviet industrial
revolution should have one common language. The party's second major
war with the countryside in a decade also endangered
korenizatsiia's existence. Since it represented the urban
party's need to establish peace between the Russian and
Russified cities, on the one hand, and the non-Russian
countryside, on the other hand, collectivization upset this
complex political equation. Once the Soviet state initiated
the struggle against the peasants, 'policies to placate the
countryside became irrelevant'. [2] Since the party
felt itself strong enough eleven years after the revolution
to storm the countryside, destroy its class enemies, and
collectivize the peasants, there was no need to compromise
with the rural areas. Collectivization and the
famine, moreover, broke the tie between the peasants who had
migrated into the cities and those who had remained in the
countryside. Those migrants who found employment in the
urban areas now had no reason to maintain contact with their
old, ravaged world. Over time they cut their bonds with
their former villages and became more urban in outlook. Once
the authorities de-emphasized Ukrainianization in the 1930s,
it became easier for the migrants to succumb to the
processes favoring Russification. The center undoubtedly
considered the assertiveness of the Ukrainian party and
society to be closely linked to the nonfulfillment of the
industrial and agricultural quotas. Political reliability
and loyalty were two separate but interconnected questions.
Unreliability, according to Stalin and his entourage, was a
short step from disloyalty and treason, which led to
'sabotage' and 'wrecking'. Ukraine's location on the borders
of the capitalist world and its proximity to the Western
Ukrainian territories occupied by Poland, Czechoslovakia,
and Romania heightened these apprehensions. To insure the
Soviet Union's international security and fulfillment of its
economic goals, the All-Union Communist Party needed to
supervise the situation closely, and maintain order by
centralizing its authority and by crushing those who
allegedly weakened the USSR's political and economic
position. Defenders of local interests, whether 'bourgeois
nationalists' or Old Bolsheviks, became 'class enemies' and
had to be destroyed. Stalin's Russocentrism reinforced these
notions. In the wake of Stalinist
hypercentralization, Soviet support for multi-national
diversity plummeted. The party now stressed the Russian
people and language as the most modern, as the first among
equals. The non-Russian identities, supported for nearly a
decade by the Soviet state, became secondary in importance.
Stalin's insistence on
Russian culture as the only key to modernization promoted
stratification and ultimately Russification. In the 1920s,
non-Russians could perceive themselves as modern and
non-Russian; by the end of the 1930s, the Soviet mass media
identified modernization solely with Russia and with those
who spoke Russian. Since the 1930s, this redefinition of
korenizatsiia produced an ambivalent sense of identity (even
an inferiority complex) among the non-Russians. Socialist
Realism In order to put an end to
factional strife 'on the artistic and cultural front' and to
subordinate all cultural activity to the party leadership in
Moscow, the Central Committee on 23 April 1932 issued a
decree, which disbanded all independent artistic groups. In
their place, the party established highly centralized
'creative unions' of writers, artists, composers,
architects, and filmmakers, which would present their
members' works through the prism of 'socialist realism'.
First coined on 17 May 1932 by Ivan Gronsky, the head of the
organizational committee of the newly-founded Soviet
Writers' Union, socialist realism remained a vague concept
even after the union's first congress in late August 1934.
At this meeting, the writers and the Communist Party
hierarchy enshrined the model for all artists, who
thereafter would create the 'truthful, historically concrete
representation of reality in its revolutionary development'.
[3] How artists would
incorporate this 'modal schizophrenia' into their works
without a specific set of rules remained a mystery even
after the first congress. Although the leadership of the
writers' union and the party issued pronouncements that
socialist realist literature should be optimistic,
accessible to the masses, and party-minded, most novels from
the mid-1930s conformed to a single master plot, which
represented a synthesis of the plots of several 'exemplary'
novels (primarily Maxim Gorky's _Mother_ and Fedor Gladkov's
_Cement_). According to Katerina Clark, the master plot
defines socialist realism. [4] In the evolution of the
master plot, which integrated Soviet politics and communist
ideology, on the one hand, and Russian literary traditions,
on the other, the hero of the novel acquires or strengthens
his communist consciousness by overcoming a serious
socio-political-economic challenge. The main protagonist
usually arrives at a new place and realizes that the
state-given plan is not being fulfilled properly. Instead of
accepting this status quo, the migrant becomes a socialist
crusader and makes plans for correcting the problem.
Inevitably, the local authorities rebuke him, asserting that
the hero's solutions are utopian. The protagonist then
mobilizes 'the people', after addressing them at a mass
meeting, and inspires them to follow his plan. Despite the
prosaic, heroic, and personal problems he encounters on his
journey to fulfill the plan, he succeeds in overcoming all
obstacles and gains a full-blown communist consciousness.
This positive hero resembles a fairy-tale hero as well as
the model hero presented by Joseph Campbell's _The Hero with
a Thousand Faces_. By observing and
interpreting reality only in the framework of its long march
toward Communism, the creative intelligentsia became
'engineers of human souls' [5] and servants of the
Soviet state. Artists, composers, architects, writers, and
filmmakers sought to raise the political consciousness of
their audiences. Conforming to the spirit of socialist
realism, they portrayed current and historical events in a
revisionist spirit calculated to lend support to the present
Soviet regime. They provided their audiences with an ideal
depiction of today's reality and of the world of tomorrow,
as 'it is bound to become, when it bows to the logic of
Marxism'. [6] In addition, these 'engineers' strove
to portray the seeds of this bright future in the present,
which ordinary men and women, enmeshed in their daily
routines, could not see. Socialist realism's juxtaposition
of 'what is' and 'what ought to be' represented 'an
impossible aesthetic'. [7] The artist endeavored to
introduce the communist ideal into the consciousness of
Soviet citizens, and convince them of the value of that
ideal, whatever the reality, by molding and transforming his
audience's consciousness. Long before socialist realism
emerged as the primary literary model in the 1930s, many
Soviet literary groups in the 1920s accepted the idea that
'the subconscious dominates human consciousness and can be
logically and technically manipulated to construct a new
world and a new individual'. [8] Socialist realism
built on their ideas and predispositions. These socialist realist
artists relied to a great extent on the celebration of the
positive hero, a paragon of Bolshevik virtue, as a role
model for readers and viewers. The hero's life should 'show
the forward movement of history in an allegorical
representation of one stage in history's dialectical
progress'. [9] The positive hero, as the Russian
critic Andrei Siniavsky defined him: '[He] is not
simply a good man. He is a hero illuminated by the light of
the most ideal of all ideals . . . He firmly knows what is
right and what is wrong; he says plainly 'yes' or 'no' and
does not confuse black with white. For him there are no
inner doubts and hesitations, no unanswerable questions, and
no impenetrable secrets. Faced with the most complex of
tasks, he easily finds the solution -- by taking the
shortest and most direct route to the Purpose.'
[10] Although the statutes of
the Writers' Union reassured its members that socialist
realism, with its emphasis on the positive hero, guaranteed
'excellent opportunities for the display of creative
initiative and choice among its various forms, styles, and
genres', they did not provide a clear set of rules
instructing artists how to produce such works. Already in
the late 1920s the party launched a campaign against
'formalism' and the avant-garde, which narrowed the choices
for the creative masters. Although the party demanded
clarity, an emphasis on the socialist present and the
communist future, and adherence to the party line, these
criteria constituted a vague, not a specific checklist.
Employing them would not necessarily attract the masses,
especially not in the field of filmmaking, which demanded a
skillful coordination of sight, sound, and message.
To present the Communist
Party's ideological messages to a mass audience weaned on
imported comedies and action-adventure films, Soviet
directors had to create films with simple plots and
characterizations. Hollywood-style films with a communist
point of view attracted the average peasant and worker, who
sought entertainment, not art on a grand scale. The leading
Soviet directors, however communist in their points of view,
sought to explore the boundaries of art frame by frame. By
the early 1930s, Stalin's party would no longer tolerate
avant-garde or experimental films. Although such films had
won Soviet cinematography international acclaim, very few
peasants or workers could understand them. The Stalinist
party leadership, moreover, hated avant-garde art as well
escapist entertainment. They wanted to educate the masses
politically, to communicate the 'message that there was only
one way to look at the world, their way, and that every
deviation from their point of view was necessarily hostile'.
[11] Films had to be comprehensible, even by the
half-educated, and politically correct. Soviet socialist realist
filmmaking slowly evolved over the course of the 1930s as
the party and filmmakers revised, re-interpreted, and
renegotiated the implementation of this ideology on film.
Directors felt reticent at first, but they soon learned from
their mistakes and successes. Easily understandable films
with party-approved political messages then emerged on the
screens. These films dealt with contemporary themes: the
socialist construction in the city and in the countryside,
the struggle with class enemies, and the legacy of the past
in the people's consciousness. But _Chapaev_ (1934),
directed by Sergei Vasiliev and Georgi Vasiliev (who were
not related), became the most popular and most influential
socialist realist film ever made in the Soviet Union,
selling over 50 million tickets. _Chapaev_ proved that
directors could create a popular film conforming to the
principles of socialist realism. Competently made and easy
to understand, this exciting action film, depicted the
relationship between V. I. Chapaev, an uneducated peasant
Soviet partisan commander, and D. A. Furmanov, his political
commissar, during the civil war. An uneducated peasant who
fights courageously, the hero possesses good political
instincts and understands that the Bolshevik party
represents the future. But without the guidance of Furmanov,
Chapaev would have met with defeat. Under the commissar's
supervision, Chapaev's class consciousness grows, and he
wins on the battlefield. Although he dies a heroic death in
battle at the end of the film, his Red division triumphs.
Audiences could readily
identify with the film's characters. Although a drama,
_Chapaev_ included many humorous touches. Most importantly,
this film -- 'popular in form' -- featured a plot 'socialist
in content'. In a subtle manner, it promoted three Bolshevik
myths concerning the Revolution and Civil War. The guiding
role of the Bolsheviks in the struggle against all
counter-revolutionaries constituted the most important
post-revolutionary invention. Although successful on his
own, Chapaev would not have achieved his greatest victories
without the commissar, the party's representative. In
dealing with the relationship between workers and peasants
in the partisan commander's ranks, the film celebrates
another fiction, the 'worker-peasant alliance', or more
accurately, the hegemony of the workers over the peasants,
who by all Marxist accounts displayed a less developed class
consciousness than that of the workers. The film, moreover,
concludes with an allusion to the fantasy of the 'radiant
communist future'. After Chapaev dies a heroic death in a
struggle with the Whites, his troops avenge his death by
vanquishing their enemies. The hero might die, but the
Bolshevik cause marches on. _Chapaev_ took its place
as an exemplary socialist realist film not only because it
presents two positive heroes, Furmanov (the Bolshevik) and
Chapaev (the proto-Bolshevik), but because it successfully
harnessed the past (even revolutionary turmoil) to the
Stalinist present and to the communist future. Communism, it
asserted, constituted the grand design of history. The
leading role of the Bolsheviks in the revolution and civil
war, in effect, legitimized the Stalinist political system.
Dovzhenko Dovzhenko's _Ivan_, which
appeared two years after _Earth_ and two before _Chapev_,
did not present such a clear message. Although the main
protagonist, a 'good man' at the beginning of the film,
became a productive Soviet citizen, he never evolved into a
positive hero. Although he became a conscious member of the
working class at the film's conclusion, his political
self-actualization did not develop clearly. In a period when
politicians and intellectuals hotly debated socialist
realism and its characteristics, Ivan's hesitant and
self-doubting personality traits disqualified him as worthy
of emulation. Not surprisingly,
Dovzhenko found it difficult to adopt the emerging, but
poorly-defined, socialist realist model. Conforming to the
new principles of filmmaking presented enormous problems for
him, as well as for other Soviet directors, such as Grigory
Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, and Sergei Eisenstein. Although
critics brutalized Dovzhenko's film for failing to show a
heroic and positive hero, _Ivan_ represented a stage not
only in Dovzhenko's evolution towards socialist realism, but
the evolution of the style in general. From his beginnings as a
filmmaker in the mid-1920s, he defined his mission as the
creation of a Ukrainian national cinema equal to that of
other cinemas. In order to achieve his goal, he wanted to
produce high quality films reflecting Ukrainian dreams and
to forge a common identity for his countrymen at a time when
they could not discuss their national identity freely. By
grounding his films in the Ukrainian historical memory and
by conjuring images taken from folklore and superstition, he
hoped not only to portray his compatriots, but also to speak
on their behalf. The Ukrainianization policy nurtured his
mission. With _Zvenyhora_,
_Arsenal_, and _Earth_, Dovzhenko reached the height of his
creative powers. Despite the tensions between what he wanted
to film and what the censors allowed him to show, these
three films, especially _Earth_, constitute his
masterpieces. Complex transitions, ambiguities, and doubt
appear in each of these films. The filmmaker raised
important questions about the relationship between the old
and the new, between honored tradition and revolutionary
innovation, between the countryside and the cities, between
life and death, and between the people and their soil. Using
his Ukrainian and peasant sources as a base, Dovzhenko
attempted to connect the tradition-bound Ukrainian national
identity to the modern, Soviet world. He became a cultural
entrepreneur. But political
circumstances beyond his control checked his efforts to
create a 'perfect' work of art. Although he may have agreed
with many of the party's political positions and desperately
fought to fit in, Dovzhenko's ambition to reflect Ukrainian
dreams resisted political simplifications. In the
newly-emerging Stalinist universe, filmmakers -- the most
important of the 'engineers of human souls' -- had to
conform to the party's political line, which often shifted
mercurially. Like his colleagues in the
first generation of Soviet filmmakers who had begun their
careers in the twenties -- Grigory Kozintsev, Leonid
Trauberg, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga
Vertov -- Dovzhenko experienced problems adjusting to
Stalinist politics and to socialist realism. As innovators,
these filmmakers wanted to explore creative avenues in their
own ways and at their chosen speed. They resisted
ideological strait-jackets and opposed filming Soviet life
as a Potemkin village. Critics recognized them as
'innovators' with 'authentic and original voices'. When
forced to conform to the contours of the new model, which
despite its promises did not tolerate originality or
experimentation, they experienced great psychological and
political strains. Although they displayed a willingness to
satisfy the new needs of the Stalinist state, they had a
hard time changing their artistic approaches and
compromising their standards. Unlike his five
colleagues, Dovzhenko could not readily conform to the
Russocentric model of Soviet nationality politics introduced
in the 1930s. Overturning the moderate policies of the
1920s, which had promoted a multi-cultural Soviet Union,
this new model severely restricted his ability to present on
the screen his Ukrainian visions, which fueled his creative
drive. Throughout his life,
Dovzhenko sought to overcome the party's awareness of his
past anti-Bolshevik commitments. During the 1930s he feared
for his life and protected his political reputation. But he
did not succeed. Ironically, his own films and screenplays
damaged his reputation with the party. As an artist, he
impeded his own efforts at party conformity. Almost every
time he attempted to compromise his vision, it resurfaced
unconsciously, perhaps even consciously, in the details of
his work. He found it very difficult, if not impossible, to
subordinate his vision and his creativity to the Stalinist
slogans of the day. His vision, after all, propelled his
creative drive. Without the possibility of expressing even a
small aspect of his vision, he could not create. Much in the
same way that artisans felt betrayed by the mass production
of the Industrial Revolution, Dovzhenko experienced a
difficult transition from Ukrainian cultural entrepreneur to
Soviet cultural engineer. As a result of his
compromises, he experienced serious physical illness and
grave psychological doubts. The films he produced after
_Ivan_ express less ambiguity and creativity than those in
his Ukrainian 'trilogy'. Dovzhenko accepted these artistic
and political compromises as the price he had to pay, not
only for the continuation of his career in cinema, but also
for his own personal survival. Even this acceptance,
however, contained a muted spark of rebellion. While his
post-_Ivan_ films, especially _Aerograd_ (1935), _Shchors_
(1939), and _Michurin_ (1949), outwardly demonstrated his
political loyalty, a subversive subtext softens their
central, politically approved messages. His 'compromise'
films fulfilled the party's requirements, bought him time,
and encouraged the hope, however slight, of the possibility
of more tolerant supervisors in the future. Inasmuch as he
claimed to fear exclusion from artistic creation even more
than death, he played for time. Dovzhenko compared the
prohibition of capturing his visions, dreams, and illusions
on celluloid or on paper to deprivation of vital air. Having
his avenues of expression blocked and censored, this
emotionally volatile artist alternated between the extremes
of accommodation and resistance. He felt traumatized by his
isolation after Stalin condemned his screenplay _Ukraine in
Flames_ in late 1943 and early 1944. Although he lost faith
in the supreme party leader after January 1944, Dovzhenko
sought to win back the political trust he had enjoyed. He
desperately wanted to ingratiate himself with anyone (except
Beria, head of the secret police) who could alleviate his
solitude. Most of all, he wanted to
return to Ukraine, but Stalin and his senior colleagues
insisted that he stay in the Soviet capital. Exile in Moscow
limited his creativity, which Dovzhenko claimed his homeland
best nurtured. The filmmaker imagined that Stalin's death
would clear the way for him to return permanently to
Ukraine. Until the end of his life, however, the Soviet
authorities refused him permission to do so, and iving in
Moscow, he could not directly influence Ukrainian
cinematography. Soviet leaders rendered impotent the most
assertive advocate for Ukrainian national filmmaking.
In assessing his problems,
Dovzhenko must have often asked himself if he would not find
it easier to participate in the much larger and more
sophisticated Russo-Soviet culture, rather than try to raise
an underdeveloped nation's cultural standards. To embrace
this option, however, would have nullified the very source
of his creative drive. University
of Alabama at Birmingham,
USA Notes 1. Benedict Anderson,
_Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread
of Nationalism_ (London: Verso, 1983), p. 6. 2. James E. Mace, 'Famine
and Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine', _Problems of Communism_,
vol. 33 no. 3, 1984, p. 43. 3. _Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi
s'ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet_
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934; reprint:
Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1990), p. 712. 4. See Katerina Clark,
_The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual_, 3rd ed. (Bloomington,
Indiana and London: Indiana University Press, 2000), p.
6. 5. 'Engineers of human
souls' is a cliche, attributed to Stalin. 6. Abram Tertz (Andrei
Siniavsky), _The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism_ (New
York: Vintage, 1960), p. 200. 7. See Regine Robin,
_Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic_ (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1992). 8. Boris Groys, _The Total
Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and
Beyond_ (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1992), p. 19. 9. Clark, _The Soviet
Novel_, p. 46. 10. Tertz (Siniavsky),
_The Trial Begins_, pp. 172-173. 11. Peter Kenez, _Cinema
and Soviet Society, 1917-1953_ (Cambridge, England and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 158. Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 George O. Liber,
'Re-examining Dovzhenko's Political Environment: A Response
to Riley', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 38, October 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n38liber>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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