Meeting on the Elbe (Vstrecha na El'be): A visual representation of the incipient Cold War from a Soviet perspective

Abstract

The article explores the most important Soviet film covering the incipient Cold War, Meeting on the Elbe. The production involved prominent Soviet filmmakers and actors. By juxtaposing the occupation policies of both superpowers in post-war Germany, the film makes crucial assumptions concerning the Soviet self and the US-American other. It attributes the full responsibility for the outbreak of the Cold War to the US-American political and military elites and argues the USSR has won the trust and support of the Germans due to its superior ‘soft power’.

Notes

Isabelle de Keghel has been teaching and researching at the University of Konstanz since 2007. After studying in Tübingen, Paris and Moscow, she obtained her doctorate at the Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen on the subject ‘Attempts to construct historical identities in Russia during the period of Transformation’. Before joining the University of Konstanz, she has taught at the Free University of Berlin, where she held a scholarship while doing her doctorate, and worked at the Forschungsstelle Osteuropa in Bremen.

 [1] Nye, Soft Power, x.

 [2] See e.g. Buffet, Die vier Besatzungsmächte und die Kultur.

 [3] Kenez, ‘Films of the Second World War’; Schattenberg, ‘Als die Geschichte laufen lernte’.

 [4] Gjunter and Dobrenko, Sotsrealisticheskii kanon.

 [5] Turovskaja, ‘The 1930s and 1940s’.

 [6] The boundaries between feature films and documentaries were not fixed at this time in the Soviet Union. Kenez, ‘Films of the Second World War’, 150.

 [7] Aleksandrov was inter alia co-director of the film classic Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potëmkin) and Strike (Stachka) (both 1925). Cf. ‘Grigory Aleksandrov’, in Sea Gull Films.

 [8] Engel, Geschichte des russischen und sowjetischen Films, 76.

 [9] The films that became the most famous were: The Circus (Tsirk) (1936), Volga-Volga (Volga-Volga) (1938) and Tanya (Svetlyi put', 1940). See Caute, The Dancer Defects, 643, footnote 63. See Aleksandrov's film comedies: Hänsgen, ‘Film als Erbe anderer Medien’.

[10] ‘Tisse, Eduard K’, in The BFI Companion, 210f.

[11] His opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uezda) was strongly criticised in 1936 in a Pravda article entitled ‘Chaos Rather than Music’. This signified a serious blow to Shostakovich's career as a composer. Cf. Redepennig, ‘Chronist seiner Zeit’, 8. During his life the artist obtained however more than 12 Stalin prizes for his compositions, so certainly received official honours from the party state. Cf. Holm, ‘Das Schreckliche ist des Schönen Anfang', 40.

[12] ‘Orlova, Lyubov P’, in The BFI Companion, 125; Engel, Geschichte des russischen und sowjetischen Films, 81, 84.

[13] Engel, Geschichte des russischen und sowjetischen Films, 99.

[14] In Germany, several places by the name of Altenstadt exist, but they are situated in southern Germany, not near the Elbe. The actual encounter between the armies was in Torgau.

[15] Nye, Soft Power, x, 49f.

[16] They bear the messages: ‘The Americans will never forget the heroic actions of the Russians’ and ‘A salute from the Americans to the bold Russian allies’.

[17] Cf. the results of the Potsdam conference: Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg, 44–7.

[18] Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg, 73–5. Zhdanov had already formulated the ‘Two-Camp-Theory’ for the first time in 1934. Cf. Hartmann, ‘Sowjetische “Leitkultur”’, 554f.

[19] Revealingly, only the release of political prisoners and not the release of Jews from the concentration camps is shown in Meeting on the Elbe. This is all the more remarkable as the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. In a film which should show that the Soviet occupational power incorporated all population groups except Nazis into the administrative work, and which works so stringently with documentary elements, this is a very meaningful gap. That is connected with the fact that the Holocaust played a marginal role in Soviet discourse of the past and has been a taboo for decades since the immediate post-war years. Highlighting individual ethnic or cultural groups from the ‘united Soviet people’ was considered as ‘separatism’. Cf. de Keghel, ‘Der Zweite Weltkrieg und der Holocaust’, 52f.

[20] Ahbe et al., ‘Der Handschlag’, 312–18.

[21] Cf. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 202–4.

[22] For the definition of the term Fascism in the communist movement, coined by Dimitroff and Stalin, cf. Classen, ‘Feindbild Faschismus’, 131–4.

[23] Caute, The Dancer Defects, 139.

[24] Nothnagle, Building the East German Myth, 39.

[25] Hänsgen, Film als Erbe anderer Medien, 189–91. As late as 1934 Aleksandrov filmed the ‘jazz comedy’ Moscow Laughs (Vesëlye rebiata) with compositions by Isaak Dunaevskii, and interpretations of the most famous Soviet jazz musician of the time, Leonid Utësov. In the film, jazz played an important and consistently positive role. For further detail concerning the composer Dunaevskii, who created the Soviet mass song, cf. Stadelmann, Isaak Dunaevskij. Dunaevskii's works were strongly influenced by the Viennese operetta and British, as well as American light music (jazz, foxtrot), for which he was occasionally treated with hostility in the USSR. Overall he was certainly considered to be an important protagonist in Soviet cultural life and was a Stalin prize winner.

[26] Similar representations of the gender aspect regarding the USA can also be found in Soviet magazines under the column ‘The Customs of Others’. Particularly in the satirical magazine Crocodile (Krokodil), representations of the USA were printed that were there to show that the gender relations in the USA are characterised by profit seeking, decadence and immorality. The Soviet family, shaped by true love and respect, was opposed to that, which is missing in the film. Cf. Riabov, ‘Ich nravy’.

[27] Engel, Geschichte des russischen und sowjetischen Films, 77.

[28] Hill notes: ‘Take this American open-sesame, for which there are no limits in the world’. Kuz'min says: ‘This ten rouble note is worth more than one million, because one cannot buy the friendship of soldiers with any amount of money’.

[29] Engel, Geschichte des russischen und sowjetischen Films, 73, 98, 337.

[30] Caute, The Dancer Defects, 141.

[31] For multi-staged authorization processes, see for more details: Kenez, ‘Soviet Cinema in the Age of Stalin’, 68.

[32] In 1951 Soviet production sank to a record low of nine feature films. In comparison, 128 feature films had been produced in the USSR in 1930, in 1940 there were still 46 (Engel, Geschichte des russischen und sowjetischen Films, 332). 432 films were shot in the USA in 1951. Cf. Caute, The Dancer Defects, 641, footnote 641; 644, footnote 93 gives slightly different numbers. Caute cites this statistical data from MacDonald, ‘Soviet Cinema’.

[33] Engel, Geschichte des russischen und sowjetischen Films, 68. In addition to that were the restrictive regulations of the central committee, such as the decree of 4 September 1946. Cf. Caute, The Dancer Defects: 119, 125, footnote 30.

[34] Caute, The Dancer Defects, 141.

[35] Caute, The Dancer Defects, 141f.

[36] Meeting on the Elbe appeared in the cinema in the GDR in 1949, only three months later than in the USSR. Cf. ‘Begegnung an der Elbe’, in Lexikon des Internationalen Films, vol. 1, 260. It was shown in 1949 and 1950 in Czechoslovakia. Cf. ‘Meeting on the Elba [sic]’, in kinoglaz.ru. For Meeting on the Elbe and cinemas in the USA see Caute, The Dancer Defects, 142.

[37] In the USSR itself the director Grigorii Aleksandrov, the cameraman Eduard Tissé, as well as the actors Mikhail Nazvanov and Ljubov' Orlova received the first-class Stalin prize in 1950 for their contribution to the Meeting on the Elbe. Outside of the Soviet Union the film became a prize winner at the international festivals in Bratislava and Gotvaldov in 1949, and in 1950 it received an award at the festival of Marianske Laźne. Cf. ‘Meeting on the Elba’, in kinoglaz.ru.