Manufacturing Happiness

The production drama and the heroic biography—two genres that came to overlap over the course of the Stalin era—were instrumental in cultivating a public conception of happiness that effaced the distinction between self-realization and self-sacrifice. The drama of socialist construction, which was pushed to put people, rather than technology, centre stage after the cultural revolution, edged ever closer to the biopic in framing Stalinist remaking as a battle for a new, happy existence. This chapter explores how these genres converged in coding Stalinist happiness as both an enjoyment of new rights and privileges and a ‘being-in-debt’. Reflecting a biopolitical modality of power that generated new states of subjection even as it set citizens’ happiness and well-being at the forefront of government, the portrayal of the ‘Soviet good life’ in films like Miners (dir. Sergei Iutkevich, 1937) and Valerii Chkalov (dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, 1941) blurs the boundaries between entitlement and obligation. The chapter proceeds to explore the gradual uncoupling of ‘happiness’ and ‘duty’ after the war. Industry discussions of Miners of Donetsk (dir. Leonid Lukov, 1951) and The Chevalier of the Golden Star (dir. Iulii Raizman, 1951) bear witness to the emergence of a rival ideology of happiness in the late Stalin period. Severing dutiful self-abnegation from the discourse of Stalinist prosperity, these films testify to the rise of what contemporary cultural discussions decried as an ‘American’ understanding of happiness.