Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin didn’t have much time to read film scripts during the war. One exception was Alexander Dovzhenko’s Ukraine in Flames. Dovzhenko was an important Soviet filmmaker, considered by some to be on a par with Eisenstein and Pudovkin. In 1943 he made the documentary Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine. His follow-up fictional treatment of the war in Ukraine was not so welcome and in January 1944 he was summoned to a meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin, who accused him of ‘revising Leninism’, of prioritising national pride above the class struggle, and of blackening the party’s name.³²

Ukraine in Flames never saw the light of day but in 1945 Dovzhenko redeemed himself with another documentary, Victory in Right-Bank Ukraine. And, as we have seen, he was the director selected to make the film about Annabelle Bucar’s book, The Truth about American Diplomats.

In an August 1946 speech to the central committee’s Orgburo, Stalin criticised three films: Vsevolod Pudovkin’s biopic of the nineteenth-century Russian Admiral Nakhimov; part two of Leonid Lukov’s A Grand Life, which dealt with postwar reconstruction in Ukraine; and Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part Two (see p. 140 above).

Stalin’s general gripe was that these filmmakers did not do enough research. He compared them unfavourably to Charlie Chaplin, who worked on projects for several years. ‘You can’t make good films without details,’ said Stalin. ‘Goethe, he worked on Faust for thirty years, that’s how honestly and conscientiously he regarded what he was doing.’

Stalin praised Pudovkin as a capable producer and director, but he detected ‘elements of an unconscientious’ attitude, which had resulted in a film full of trivia and not enough history. The film had been sent back to Pudovkin but Stalin wasn’t confident the filmmaker would make the requisite changes. In the event, Pudovkin was able to rework the film enough to secure its release in 1947.

Part one of A Grand Life, set in the 1930s, had been awarded a Stalin Prize in 1941, but the award’s namesake was scathing about part two, complaining that it was aimed at ‘the undemanding viewer’. Very little of the film was devoted to reconstruction, said Stalin.

It’s simply painful when you look, can it really be that our producers, who live among golden men, among heroes, can’t depict them as they should but must necessarily dirty them? We have good workers, damn it! They showed themselves in the war. . . . What kind of reconstruction is shown in the film where not a single machine figures? They’ve confused what took place after the Civil War, in 1918–1919, with what is taking place, say, in 1945–1946.³³

This film was shelved until 1958.

Stalin was later to level similar complaints against a 1950 documentary, Fishermen of the Caspian. The director, Yakov Bliokh, was accused of using dramatisations that had the effect of ‘distorting real life by showing faked episodes’. Most importantly, ‘Instead of a truthful display of the organisation of labour among Caspian Sea fishermen, as well as advanced methods of fishing and fish processing, the film reproduces the old backward fishing technology based on manual labour.’³⁴

It was not all work and no play on the film front. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana remembered being thrilled by the many films she saw in the Kremlin as a child: ‘The next day at school I could think of nothing but the heroes I’d seen on film the night before.’³⁵ While visiting the United States in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev told President Eisenhower, ‘When Stalin was alive, we used to watch Westerns all the time. When the movie ended, Stalin always denounced it for its ideological content. But the very next day we’d be back in the movie theatre watching another Western.’³⁶ Stalin’s trade minister, Anastas Mikoyan, recalled that Stalin was particularly fond of an English film about a marauding pirate who returned home with a fortune after raids on India and other countries. But the pirate did not want to share the glory (or the loot) with his erstwhile comrades-in-arms so got rid of them by destroying figurines of them.³⁷

ZHDANOVSHCHINA

Having served as Leningrad party secretary, after the Second World War Zhdanov returned to his duties as the party’s ideology chief. At Stalin’s behest he initiated a campaign for a more ideologically orthodox, politically correct and patriotically inclined Soviet literature. A gathering of party propaganda officials in April 1946 was told by Zhdanov that Stalin was dissatisfied with Soviet literary journals. They published ‘weak works’ and there was a lamentable lack of proper criticism. To rectify this situation, the party’s propaganda section would recruit some capable people and involve itself in literary criticism.