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8 “But Eastward, Look, the Land Is Brighter” TOWARD A TOPOGRAPHY OF UTOPIA IN THE STALINIST MUSICAL RICHARD TAYLOR A recent article by Tracy Anderson bore the title, “Why Stalinist Musicals?”1 The manner in which the question was posed is itself significant and reflects the distorting lens through which both Western and “Soviet” scholars have historically viewed Soviet cinema, even though Anderson’s article did much to refocus that lens. We nowadays take for granted that audiences in Western countries look for escapist entertainment in times of collective stress. As the British director David Lean once remarked, “Films are not real. They are dramatized reality,” and, “A shop girl earning three pounds a week doesn’t pay to see an exact replica of herself on the screen—she pays to see what she would like to be, in looks, dress and mode of living.”2 For some years we have accepted that musicals were the most popular form of entertainment in the United States and much of Europe during the Great Depression and even that during the Third Reich German audiences preferred to see musicals like Request Concert (1940) rather than the more obvious products of Nazi propaganda such as Triumph of the Will (1935) or The Eternal Jew (1940).3 Why then should we not accept that, in the midst of the forced industrialization and collectivization programs of the early Five-Year Plans, in the maelstrom of the massive economic and social dislocation that these caused, in the thick of the purges and the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet people might not also have wanted something to alleviate their mass suffering and give them hope in a better future? The question I want to ask first is, why not Stalinist musicals? Why Not Stalinist Musicals? The distorting lens through which Western and Soviet scholars have viewed the construct known as “Soviet cinema” has been analyzed by Ian Christie.4 There is a growing literature on Soviet popular culture, 201 especially on popular cinema, to which a number of scholars have contributed , most notably Denise Youngblood, Richard Stites, and James von Geldern, to name only those writing in English. This literature emphasizes the continuities in Russian cultural history between the pre- and postrevolutionary periods, on one hand, and between the 1920s and the 1930s, on the other, while acknowledging the serious discontinuities and ruptures that have traditionally been the focus of research. I have argued elsewhere that a crucial role in the establishment of a Soviet mass cinema was played by Boris Shumiatsky, who in October 1930 was assigned the task of creating “a cinema that is intelligible to the millions.”5 He maintained that a “cinema for the millions” required the establishment of new entertainment genres such as the musical comedy : “Neither the revolution nor the defense of the socialist fatherland is a tragedy for the proletariat. We have always gone, and in future we shall still go, into battle singing and laughing.”6 As James von Geldern has argued, “In the mid-1930s, Soviet society struck a balance that would carry it through the turmoil of the purges, the Great War and reconstruction. The coercive policies of the Cultural Revolution were replaced or supplemented by the use of inducements .”7 The exclusive cultural policies of the first Five-Year Plan period (1928–32) were replaced by the inducements of inclusive cultural policies following the dissolution of the self-styled proletarian cultural institutions in April 1932 and their replacement by all-embracing Soviet institutions such as the new Union of Soviet Writers. The doctrine proclaimed by the latter was socialist realism, which Andrei Zhdanov, who was effectively Stalin’s cultural commissar, claimed meant depicting reality “not . . . in a dead, scholastic way, not simply as ‘objective reality,’ but . . . as reality in its revolutionary development .”8 Anatoly Lunacharsky, in charge of Soviet cultural policy in the 1920s, tellingly remarked that “the socialist realist . . . does not accept reality as it really is. He accepts it as it will be. . . . A Communist who cannot dream is a bad Communist. The Communist dream is not a flight from the earthly but a flight into the future.”9 In official terminology, this element was called “revolutionary romanticism.” The credibility of revolutionary romanticism, the “flight into the future,” was enhanced by the audience’s apparent complicity in the exercise. Political speeches, newspaper articles, poster campaigns, official statistics, and, above all, cinema—which Lenin had called “the most important of all the...

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