Abstract
As Julian Graffy has shown us in his excellent recent survey of scholarly work on Soviet cinema (‘Writing about the cinema of the Stalin years: the state of the art’, Kritika 10(4), 2009), this is a field that has taken enormous strides over the last three decades. For too long dismissed as ‘mere’ propaganda, the cinema of the Stalin period has been revealed as a rich and complex cultural phenomenon. Work by Western scholars on Soviet cinema, however, has proceeded along two broad paths. The first, exemplified in the early work of Richard Taylor, has mapped the role of cinema in the broader Soviet propaganda project. The second, more recent, scholarly trend has seen thematic and conceptual ‘histories’ of Soviet cinema (Kaganovsky’s excellent reading of Soviet masculinity through cinema (How the Soviet Man was Unmade, 2008), or Dobrenko’s masterly account of the genre of ‘history films’ in the Stalin period (Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History, 2008). Until now, however, there has been no comprehensive history of the institutions and administration of Soviet cinema in English. Jamie Miller’s book, Soviet Cinema: Politics and Persuasion Under Stalin fills that gap. Part of I. B. Tauris’s excellent KINO series of monographs on Russian cinema, this is a study of the administration of the Soviet film industry from 1928 to 1941. It takes on the formidable task of showing us how that industry actually worked.
This is a work that is methodologically revisionist, but that argues a traditional case. In a sense, Miller returns Soviet cinema to a totalitarian model of history. He insists on the fundamental impact of centralized control on the evolution of cinema during the 1920s and 1930s. He subjects that concept of centralized control to analysis, however, and rejects simplistic monolithic models of state power. In their place, he reveals the complex mechanisms that structured Soviet film administration, the day-to-day functioning and interrelationships of key administrative organs and multiple cinema committees, and the extent to which they were subject to shifting economic and political imperatives. Miller reveals not just the function but also the dis-function of these structures. In a fascinating anecdote on Ivan Kavaleridze’s Prometheus (1935), for example, we learn how Boris Shumiatsky’s order to repress the film was ignored (or misinterpreted) by Ukrainfilm, and the film was initially released in Leningrad, before its eventual censorship. The chapter on the Purges of the 1930s, too, reveals not just the brutal ‘successes’ of the purging of the cinema elite during the 1930s, but also its practical limitations, noting what Miller describes as a ‘recycling’ of key personnel in the early part of the decade, when the industry was in great need of expertise.
The value of the book lies its careful work with the sources, its refusal to generalize, and its attention to neglected areas. For this reader, the most important chapter is that dedicated to the education and training of film directors and other specialists. This is a vital part of Soviet cinematographic history: it had a long-lasting impact on the evolution of Soviet film, establishing patterns that remained in place throughout the twentieth century. Miller’s chapter is short, and cannot hope to be comprehensive, but it lays vital ground for a productive new area of enquiry – one which should ultimately extend through the twentieth century, and take account of the far-reaching influence of Soviet film training on the film industries of the many other communist countries who sent students to study in Moscow. The weakest section of this book is the analysis of individual films. Other scholars have written extensively about films treated here – The Party Card (Kaganovsky, Scherbenok) and The Great Citizen (Cassiday), for example. Miller’s reading is inevitably far briefer and less comprehensive, and the chapter seems out of place in the measured, archive-driven history of institutions that this book otherwise presents.
This is history at the level of detail, and at times its concern with contingency and particularity as agents in historical change can make it hard to discern a consistent argument across chapters. Miller’s ambitious overarching thesis (that a defensive ‘Bolshevik mentality’ determined the evolution of the film industry) is broadly persuasive, but can get lost amidst the evidence. As a history of institutions, this is a strong and much needed work. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars of Soviet film of this period.