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.

Emotional Education

Soviet cinema’s ‘affective turn’ in the 1930s took shape in the context of far-ranging scientific debates about emotion and perceptual management. The Soviet film industry’s attention to emotional appeal and push to develop its genre repertoire at the end of the 1920s were closely linked, this chapter shows, to a broader re-evaluation of emotional life in Soviet psychology, as well as to a new scientific interest in the effects of cultural production on audiences. At the end of the 1920s, psychologists including Lev Vygotsky and Aleksandr Luria began to discredit the physiological reading of emotion that had held sway over the human sciences. Alongside its integration into the processes of the mind by the 1930s, emotion was rendered inextricable from the social environment and thereby amenable to cultivation and direction. The setting forth of ‘emotional education’ as a crucial cultural agenda spurred a wave of enquiries into the emotional impact of Soviet cinema. I explore how these sociological and psycho-physiological investigations not only re-conceptualized film viewing as predominantly an emotional experience, but established a correlation between the spectator’s emotional engagement and a film’s use of familiar narrative structures and clear genre markers. The chapter concludes by discussing Stalinist cinema’s commitment to increasing genre variety as both the corollary of an increased audience mindedness, and a symptom of its desire to better manage and guide audience response.

Epilogue

The epilogue probes the anxieties at the root of Soviet cinema authorities’ distrust towards ‘excessive’ emotionality. Contemporary discussions and reviews repeatedly conflated bourgeois filmmaking with the cultivation of ‘thoughtless’, ‘mechanical’, and ‘empty’ affective responses. Soviet cinema, by contrast, emerged as the cinema of reasoned emotion and a sense of measure. Examining the writings of Leonid Sobolev and Béla Balázs on sentimentality, as well as the psychologist Pavel Iakobson on ‘meaningful’ aesthetic emotions, the epilogue shows how the Stalin-era suspicion of ‘unruly’ forms of emotional response was fuelled by affective life’s uncoupling from the domain of the body and its investment with social and political significance.

Learning to Hate

With the return of the thriller genre onto Soviet screens in the late 1930s, cinema took a direct role in cultivating feelings of paranoid hatred for enemies. A body of films staging conspiracy, sabotage, and dark plots deployed the image of a persecutory ‘other’ to draw the defensive contours of Soviet identity. The Stalinist thriller’s mechanisms of paranoid projection and ‘splitting’ manufactured a sense of narcissistic self-mastery by directing outwards the ego-hostile forces internal to the subject. These paranoid defence strategies depended, however, on a risky process of negotiation. To create an image of a unified and harmonious social order, the thriller vividly represented threats to Soviet borders and identity, exposing their precariousness and fragility. Focusing on the genre’s deployment of the figure of duplicitous enemy and the narrative strategy of suspense, this chapter shows how the thriller’s characteristic unsettling of familiar patterns of identification turned the enemy’s ‘otherness’ into an object of fascination as well as repulsion. The thriller’s capacity to collapse boundaries between ‘Soviet’ and ‘unSoviet’ was nowhere more apparent than in the body of ‘dark’ films that emerged during the post-war period. Gesturing towards film noir’s pervasive sense of enclosure, loneliness, and anxiety, post-war thrillers like Secret Mission (dir. Mikhail Romm, 1950) and A Scout’s Exploit (dir. Boris Barnet, 1947) no longer permitted the spectator to identify with a position of narcissistic self-mastery. These ‘dark’ post-war thrillers conjured up a universe in which systems of knowledge proved unstable and identity structures vulnerable to contamination.

Introduction

In the wake of the cultural revolution (1928–32), the medium long held to be uniquely attuned to the feelings of the masses became Soviet power’s key ally in building the emotional landscape of a new historical epoch. The development of Soviet cinema’s repertoire of genres became vital to this task of emotional education. The belief that film genres gave form to the ‘psycho-ideology’ of a specific historical period pushed the Soviet film industry towards the creation of genres that could articulate the unique emotional values of the Stalin era. Soviet cinema’s ambitions in the sphere of emotional education are explored in this Introduction with reference to debates over Soviet laughter, whilst the limitations of this project are highlighted in sections on the critical disputes over Sergei Gerasimov’s 1948 film The Young Guard. The Introduction concludes by using the case of Stalinist emotional management to explore the questions that have dominated critical theory since the affective turn. Psychoanalytic theory’s conception of affect and discourse as co-entangled, the Introduction shows, offers a means of accounting for the role of emotions in securing the hold of Stalinism’s ideological agendas without nullifying their capacity to shift and expand official models of ‘Sovietn ess’.

‘If we cannot laugh like that, then how can we laugh?’

Elaborating an appropriate form of Soviet laughter was one of the most pressing tasks faced by the film industry in the 1930s. Increasingly sensitive to the ideological perils of failing to deliver more Soviet comedies to the public, industry bosses turned the development of this genre into a high priority. Such efforts, however, were persistently hindered by anxieties about facilitating the ‘mindless’ laughter of comic gags rather than the ‘meaningful’ laughter of triumphant celebration or satirical condemnation. Drawing on psychoanalytic readings of the comic, this chapter explores how the play with process of signification and disruption of habitual sense-making patterns became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the objectives of socialist realism. The thorny debates surrounding Konstantin Iudin’s two pre-war comedies, A Girl with Character (1939) and Hearts of Four (1941), are used to demonstrate the ways in which the project of creating film comedy based on Soviet material had come to a standstill by the beginning of the 1940s. The war against ‘mindless’ and ‘mechanical’ laughter pushed filmmakers to abandon the comic mode that had been so central to early Soviet cinema in preference for ego-affirming humour. The new paradigm of realistic comedy purged from the ‘excess’ of comic devices, however, little satisfied the expectations of Soviet audiences. Whilst the stultifying demands previously placed on the genre briefly eased as the Soviet public’s right to the ‘laughter of victors’ was granted after the end of WWII, the onset of the Zhdanovshchina brought post-war concessions in the sphere of comedy to a halt.

Pathos, Powerlessness, and the Persistence of the Melodramatic Mode

This chapter uncovers the new generic guises assumed by the melodramatic mode after the cultural revolution—the ‘literary adaptation’ and the ‘bytovaia drama’ (the drama of everyday life). From the late 1930s, the Stalin-era screen saw an influx of films about the problems of contemporary byt which set new standards of gender relations, ethics, and morality in Soviet society through melodramatic unmasking of discrepancies between seeming and being, public duty and private desire. Offering tear-jerking portrayals of gender and social exploitation of the pre-revolutionary era, screen adaptations of literary classics similarly deployed the melodramatic mode to articulate the new contours of Soviet morality. Whilst the melodrama’s moral Manichaeism was highly amenable to Stalinism’s inquisitorial drive to unmask the ‘true’ essence of the individual, filmmakers struggled to fully align the affective structures of melodrama with the new demand for ‘optimistic tragedies’ that would inspire confidence in the power of the human will and arouse a desire to fight injustice. Even as Stalinist melodramas took on obligatory happy endings, their pathos continued to rest on the representation of insurmountable conflicts. The imperative of establishing an emotionally direct mode of address during the Great Patriotic War secured the continued release of dramas that drew audience tears by staging the dislocation of desire and fulfilment and placing the spectator in a position of powerlessness. The leniency towards melodramatic pathos did not persist into peacetime; in the post-war period, the ideological task of moral education came to dwarf the considerations of emotional effectiveness. Yet industry discussions reveal that even as post-war Stalinist cinema experienced a ‘waning of affect’, pressures to make Soviet cinema more emotionally resonant were steadily mounting behind the scenes.