Soviet Sound

Is it possible to pinpoint a particular “Soviet” sound? Or better yet, can we recover the various sonic elements specific to the Soviet experiment? Sound studies, as Jonathan Sterne has written, explore both sonic practices and the discourses that describe them. By using sound as an analytic point of departure, we can begin to grasp “what sound does in the human world” and “what humans do in the sonic world.”¹ The field has been developing over the course of the last three decades, so much so that in 1999 Rick Altman, the prominent scholar of cinema, declared that its “time had come.”² Among the many areas sound studies might help explore are the “sonic worlds” of a particular time and place, including the Soviet Union.

Some work on this concept has already emerged in the field of Russian and Soviet studies. In a pioneering essay published in the American Historical Review, Richard L. Hernandez argued that the Bolshevik war on the old often targeted the sounds of church bells in the countryside: the bells had a particular aural significance that both villagers and Bolshevik activists understood, providing the so-called “Great Turn [Velikii Perelom]” of 1928–30 with a neglected auditory aspect.³ Stephen Lovell later authored a Kritika article that clarified how the introduction of the radio brought about social change. The new state, he argues, “not only felt and looked different, it also sounded different.”⁴ More generally, there have been a number of excellent studies that illuminate the role music has played in Russia, often in terms of how it helped to foster a sense of Russian nationhood.⁵ Finally, a number of scholars have analyzed music, popular songs, and film music in the Soviet Union.⁶ These works notwithstanding, Russian studies has lacked an important text that can act as both a useful “where are we now” statement about sound studies and a source of inspiration for future scholars wanting to make the sonic turn. Perhaps most significantly, with few exceptions, the field of Russian studies has not responded to the “sonic turn” in order to incorporate subjects such as audio technologies, speech practices, and wider media reception.

Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema fills these gaps. As Masha Salazkina writes in her introduction, the volume aims to be “an invitation to ‘deep listening’; to attuning our ears to the complexity of meanings that emerge if we not only take sound as an equal partner in audiovisual representation but also engage with what Steven Field has referred to as ‘acoustemology,’ that is, an investigation of the primacy of sound as a modality of knowing and being in the world” (1). Cinema is a logical source to initiate this invitation, not only because of the role sound plays in films, but also because Soviet directors and film scholars have produced a rich, diverse discourse about the meanings of Soviet sound. In 1928, to take one prominent example, Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigorii Aleksandrov coauthored a treatise titled “Statement on Sound.” The three directors expressed some skepticism about the usefulness of the new “talking films” but suggested that marrying sound to their montage style might make a difference.⁷ The three, as Salazkina notes, deliberately placed the invention of sound films as an outgrowth of capitalist film industries (most notably, Hollywood) and warned that sound might destroy the achievements of cinema as an art form in the Soviet Union. The statement acts in part as a jumping-off point for the articles within the volume: in many ways, the three directors made a first attempt to define what “Soviet sound” might be on screen.

Kaganovsky and Salazkina have arranged their volume in three sections, with five essays dealing with the transition to sound in Soviet cinema, four devoted to speech and voice in film, and five to the sound track. As Salazkina argues, collectively these three themes help us understand “Soviet soundscapes,” which...