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153 IN 1957, the soviet newspaper Komsomol´skaia pravda railed against the Hollywood film Silk Stockings for its “cheap, vulgar” portrayal of Soviet tourists to Paris. Not only were they poorly dressed, but they were purported to know nothing even about “ordinary silk stockings.”1 Notably, Komsomol´skaia pravda did not question the idea of Soviet citizens traveling to Paris, nor that they should be dressed in a contemporary and elegant manner while there. Instead, the newspaper objected to the Hollywood portrayal of Soviet citizens as uneducated about universally accepted norms of “Western” culture. In contrast, Soviet films of the same era portrayed their citizens as contemporary in style, and Soviet cities as desirable destinations for both domestic and international seekers of cultural capital. In the 1965 movie Inostranka (A Foreign Woman), a prerevolutionary citizen of Russia living in France returns as a tourist to her native city of Odessa.2 Scenes of beautiful, sunny Odessa replete with parks, nice cars, and shops—all accompanied by a soundtrack of soft jazz—are meant to suggest to the viewer that between Odessa and Paris, there is not much difference. This chapter explores the place of Soviet film in negotiating Soviet citizens ’ understandings of the “West,” and of their own identity in relationship to the West, during the Khrushchev era.3 I am especially interested in what cHaPter 8 from Iron curtaIn to sIlver screen iMaGininG tHe WeSt in tHe KHruSHcHeV era Anne E. Gorsuch peteri text3.indd 153 8/16/10 10:46 AM 154 anne e. gorsuch portrayals of travel and tourism in Soviet feature films suggest about the mutually constitutive relationship between imaginings of the Western Other and of the Soviet Self. In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet citizens were newly permitted to travel to places previously unexplored or out of bounds, including Siberia and the Baltics but also Eastern Europe and the capitalist West. This was emblematic of a shift away from the ideological rigidity of late Stalinism and unalloyed fear of the Other toward the comparative (if still cautious) openness and universalist yearnings of the Thaw. “Dance and then leap into your saddles,” Victor encourages his younger brother Dimka in Vasilii Aksenov’s popular 1961 novel, A Ticket to the Stars: “Dive into the depths of the sea, climb mountains, fear nothing, all this is your world.”4 Whereas before 1955 almost all Soviet tourism was domestic,5 by the mid-1960s hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens traveled abroad each year, the vast majority to Eastern Europe.6 Fewer traveled as tourists to “capitalist” countries: travel abroad (especially to capitalist countries) required proper political understanding, a squeaky clean past, well-massaged connections with party and trade union hierarchies, and money.7 These fortunate few performed on behalf of a new, post-Stalin, Soviet socialism, singing Soviet songs in trains and on buses, meeting with foreign dignitaries and journalists, answering questions and giving lectures. They also traveled as students of European history and civilization and as consumers (within limits) of leisure and of material items.8 For most Soviet citizens, however, the West remained behind an Iron Curtain. Still, the distribution of the travel experience at home via film was part of an explosion of cultural exchange projects, including travel accounts, exhibitions, and radio broadcasts, that helped introduce a Soviet citizenry to a West now officially available for the public imagination. After years of being told little about the rest of the world except that most of it was dangerous, the comparative permeability of Soviet borders in the Khrushchev era was revelatory. In his memoir, the Russian art critic Mikhail German presents encounters with the West (through language, culture, material items, and travel) as the defining experience of the Thaw.9 Notably, many of the windows on the West that German enjoyed—learning French and English , meeting foreigners at home, traveling—were encouraged or, at the very least, permitted by the regime. In contrast to scholarship such as that of Walter Hixson, who has argued in Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War that it was American “cultural infiltration”—the Voice of America, U.S. exhibitions in Moscow—which led to the eventual collapse of communism by teaching Soviet citizens about Western alternatives,10 I take a less triumphalist approach that emphasizes the importance of Soviet agency over American cultural penetration. Soviet citizens did not need to learn about peteri text3.indd 154 8/16/10 10:46 AM [3.137.218.230] Project MUSE...

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