‘More Powerful Than The Day After’: The Cold War and the Making of Dead Man’s Letters (1986)

Abstract

This article explores the production and reception of Dead Man’s Letters (1986), a Soviet response to the American television movie The Day After about the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. It offers a case study of a film that has now largely been forgotten in writing the history of late Soviet-era Cold War cinema. It draws upon original archival research to document both the contexts of production and the political and ideological difficulties encountered by its director Konstantin Lopushansky in bringing to the screen a film that both challenged official Cold War doctrine and represented a form of ‘auteur’ cinema.

Notes

1. Moscow Central Archive for social and political history (TsAOPIM), fond 2820 (Mosfilm Party organisation), opis 1, delo 166, listy 40-1.

2. The film has been alternatively translated as A Dead’s Man Letters and Letters from a Dead Man.

3. For a detailed synopsis and a short formal analysis of the picture, see Nicholas Galichenko, Glasnost–Soviet Cinema Responds (University of Texas Press, 1991), 86–8.

4. For the concept of ‘development hell,’ see David Hughes, Tales from Development Hell: The Greatest Movies Never Made? (London: Titan Books, 2012). On censorship in Soviet cinema see Martine Godet, La pellicule et les ciseaux: la censure dans le cinéma soviétique du dégel à la perestroïka (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2010).

5. This goes against Emmanuel Plasseraud’s main argument in his ‘Les variations apocalyptiques de Constantin Lopouchanski’ in Arnaud Join-Lambert, Serge Goriely, Sébastien Févry, eds., L’imaginaire de l’apocalypse au cinéma (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012): 125–32. See also Clara Darmon, ‘Visions d’un monde menacé: les cinéastes soviétiques et la course aux armes nucléaires’, in Lori Maguire et Cyril Buffet, eds., Cinéma et Guerre froide. L’imaginaire au pouvoir, CinémAction n°150 (Condé-sur-Noireau: Charles Corlet, 2014), 77–84.

6. The most recent publications on The Day After are: Deron Overpeck, ‘“Remember: it’s only a movie!” Expectations and receptions of The Day After’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 32, no. 2 (June 2012): 267–92; Adrian Hänni, ‘A chance for a propaganda coup? The Reagan administration and The Day After (1983)’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, published online on 7 November 2015. Curiously, other post-apocalyptic pictures released in the same period, such as Testament (1983, dir. Lynne Littman) are not mentioned in the Lenfilm archive.

7. Vladimir Gakov and Paul Brians wrote about the ‘unspoken taboo on depicting a future nuclear holocaust as occurring on Earth.’ See their ‘Nuclear-war themes in Soviet science fiction: an annotated bibliography’, Science Fiction studies 16, no. 1 (March 1989): 67–84 (here 68).

8. See for example David Fincher struggling with Fox executives during the production of Alien3 (1997).

9. Andrei Kozovoi studied anti-American propaganda origins and reception in media, including film, in Par-delà le Mur. La culture de Guerre froide soviétique entre deux détentes (Paris: Complexe, 2009); Denise J. Youngblood explored how deeply the Cold War permeated Soviet cinema in Tony Shaw and Denise J. Youngblood, Cinematic Cold War: the American and Soviet struggle for hearts and minds (University Press of Kansas, 2010) and Denise J. Youngblood, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace: literary classic to Soviet cinematic epic (University Press of Kansas, 2014) ; Marsha Siefert studied the permeability of the cinematic Iron Curtain in, among others, ‘Meeting at a far meridian: American-Soviet cultural diplomacy on film in the early Cold War’, Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer, eds., Cold War Crossings: International Travel and Exchange in the Soviet Bloc, 1940s–1960s (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2014), 166–209; Kristin Roth-Ey wrote about the cinematic Cold War in Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). For the origins of the cinematic Cold War, see Valérie Pozner, ‘To catch up and overtake Hollywood. Early talking pictures in the Soviet Union,’ in Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina, eds., Sound, speech, music in Soviet and post-Soviet cinema (Indiana University press, 2014), 60–80.

10. ‘Atomic diplomacy’ is an expression forged by Gar Alperowitz in Atomic diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, first published in 1960. For the US ‘atomic diplomacy,’ see Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War. Eisenhower’s Secret Battle at Home And Abroad (University Press of Kansas, 2006); Paul Rubinson, ‘US Scientists and the Cold War,’ The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2014), 249–58. For the early Soviet disarmament propaganda, see Timothy Johnston, ‘Peace or Pacifism? The Soviet “Struggle for Peace in all the World,” 1948–1954’, The Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (April 2008): 259–82. See also Paul R. Josephson, ‘Atomic-powered Communism: Nuclear Culture in the postwar USSR’, Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 297–324.

11. Gakov and Brians, op. cit., p. 68.

12. Ibid., p. 69.

13. Marsha Siefert, ‘Soviet Cinematic Internationalism and Socialist Film Making, 1955–1972’, in Socialist internationalism in the Cold War. Exploring the Second World , eds. Patryk Babiracki and Justin Jersild (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 161–94. Andrei Kozovoi, ‘A Foot in the Door: The Lacy-Zarubin Agreement and Soviet-American film diplomacy during the Khrushchev era, 1953–1963’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 36, no. 1 (2016): 21–39.

14. G. Tom Poe, ‘Historical Spectatorship around and about Stanley Kramer’s “On the beach”’’ in Hollywood Spectatorship. Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, eds. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: BFI publishing, 2001): 91–102.

15. For the debates under Brezhnev, see Nicholas Thompson, “Nuclear War and Nuclear Fear in the 1970s and the 1980s’, Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 1 (2011): 136–49.

16. See Andrei Kozovoi, ‘Défier Hollywood: cinéma et diplomatie culturelle à l’ère Brejnev’, Relations internationales 147 (2011): 59–71.

17. Gakov and Brians, op. cit., p. 69.

18. For the origins of this resolution and the ones that followed, see Kozovoi, Par-delà le Mur, op. cit., 116–7. This was certainly not the first time the Party called to improve its message domestically and abroad: similar resolutions were proclaimed in 1958 and in 1963.

19. This resolution was published in Kozovoi, Par-delà le Mur, op. cit., 298–9.

20. Central State Archive for Literature and Arts, Saint Petersburg (Tsentralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv literatury i iskusstv, hereafter TsGALI): fond 257 (Lenfilm), opis 37, delo 55, list 53.

21. On the Soviet ‘war scare’ of 1983, see the declassified documents in Nate Jones ed., Able Archer 83: the secret history of the NATO exercise that almost triggered a nuclear war (The New Press, 2016). On the Soviet ‘war scare’ of 1950–1953, see Alan J. Levine, Stalin’s last war. Korea and the approach of World War III (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005).

22. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 1–13.

23. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 12.

24. Andrei Sakharov, ‘The Danger of Thermonuclear War. An Open Letter to Dr. Sidney Drell’, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1983, vol. 61, no. 5, 1001–16. On his positions, see David Holloway, ‘Moral Reasoning and Practical Purpose’, in Andrei Sakharov. The Conscience of Humanity, eds. Sidney D. Drell and George P. Shultz (Stanford: Hoover institution press, 2015), 115–29.

25. This idea is stated by Andrei Kokoshin, military expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences. See his interview in a documentary on the Defense minister Dmitry Ustinov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 9fxMSYKKYL8 (40th min, seen on 13 September 2017).

26. See Lopushansky’s interview for Petersburg’s News, dated 27 May 2016, on http://spbvedomosti.ru/news/gost_redaktsii/konstantin_sergeevich_lopushanskiy/ (consulted 22 September 2016, hereafter interview 1).

27. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, ll. 14-15, 17.

28. ‘Ataka na pravdu’, Izvestia, 21 November 1983, p. 4; A. Tolkunov, ‘Kto gotovit ‘Sleduyushchii den’? Novyi telefilm kotoryi potryas Ameriku’, Pravda, 23 November 1983, p. 5; Vladimir Simonov, ‘Den spustya – vzglyad v nemyslimoe. Film, kotoryi perezhil raspyatie tsenzuroi’, Literaturnaya Gazeta, p. 1 and 9; I. Ignatiev, ‘Chto budet na sleduyushchii den?’, Sovetskaya Kultura, 24 November 1983, p. 7.

29. See Andrei Kozovoi, ‘Dissonant Voices: Soviet Youth Mobilization and the Cuban Missile Crisis’, Journal of Cold War studies 16, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 29–61.

30. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 51–2.

31. Ibid., 1. 19–23.

32. Ibid., 1. 39.

33. On the two types of screenplays, see Maria Belodubrovskaya, ‘The literary scenario and the Soviet screenwriting tradition’, in A Companion to Russian cinema, ed. Birgit Beumers,(Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 251–69.

34. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 44–5. On the Strugatsky brothers, see Yvonne Howell, Apocalyptic realism: the science-fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

35. Ant Skalandis, Bratiya Strugatskie (Moscow: AST, 2008), e-version, 263; see also Bela Kluyeva, Vospominaniya, http://sf.convex.ru/abs/books/klueva.htm (consulted on 9 January 2017).

36. See Lopushansky’s interview for the radio station Echo of Moscow at http://echo.msk.ru/programs/dithyramb/1,159,308-echo/ (dated 22 September 2013, consulted 2 October 2016, hereafter interview 2).

37. See Lopushansky’s interview 1.

38. On post-apocalyptic elements in Solaris, see Lilya Kaganovsky, ‘Thinking again about Cold War cinema’ in Cinema, State socialism and society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989. Re-Visions, eds. Sanja Bahun and John Haynes (London: Routledge, 2014), 24–48, here p. 42. On post-apocalyptic elements in Stalker see Jeremy Mark Robinson, The Sacred cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky (Crescent Moon publishing, 2008), 461. See also the footage of a nuclear explosion in another of his films, The Mirror (1975).

39. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 54.

40. Ibid., l. 68–72, 74–5.

41. Ibid, l. 76–7, 85–6.

42. Ibid, l. 89.

43. Ibid, l. 91.

44. For the 1957 Festival, see two Pia Koivunen’s articles: ‘Friends, “potential friends” and enemies: reimagining Soviet relations to the first, second and third worlds at the Moscow 1957 Youth Festival’ in Patryk Babiracki and Justin Jersild, eds., Socialist internationalism in the Cold War, op. cit.: 219–47; and ‘Overcoming Cold War boundaries at the World Youth festivals’ in Sari Autio-Sarasmo, Katalin Miklossy, eds., Reassessing Cold War Europe (London: Routledge, 2010), 175–92.

45. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 93.

46. Ibid, l. 105.

47. See Lopushansky, interview 1. Before Dead Man’s Letters, Bykov played in 88 feature films, starting in 1954.

48. Rolan Bykov, Ia pobit - nachnu snachala ! (Moscow: Astrel, 2010), see the entry for 26 May 1985 (E-book online).

49. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 109.

50. Ibid., l. 111.

51. Ibid., l. 129.

52. Ibid., l. 130.

53. See TsGALI: f. 257, op. 33, d. 848, l. 1–80. On the defection of Alexander Godunov, see David Caute, The Dancer defects. The struggle for cultural diplomacy during the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 504–5.

54. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 137–9, 160.

55. Ibid., l. 175–7, 182.

56. Ibid., l. 183.

57. Godet, op. cit., p. 110.

58. Ibid., p. 190 (interview by German). Andropov authorized only seven copies of the movie (the norm was 1500), which was released in two theaters in Moscow.

59. Lopushansky, interview 2.

60. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 187–9.

61. See Joshua 6:15 on the famous episode of the battle of Jericho. There was also a film called The 7th Dawn (1964), dealing with a communist uprising in Malaysia, but it is doubtful Goskino was afraid Soviet spectators would evoke it, as they had most likely never seen it.

62. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 193, 207.

63. Rolan Bykov, op. cit., entry of 24 March 1986.

64. TsGALI, f. 257, op. 37, d. 55, l. 200. but in the context of public events related to the fight for world peace, and against the nuclear threat, it is more than justified.

65. Ibid., l. 203.

66. For the joint statement, see https://www.reaganlibrary.archives.gov/archives/speeches/1985/112185a.htm. At that time, according to Dmitri Yazov, minister of Defence in 1987–1991, the Soviet military still considered the Soviet Union could prevail in a nuclear war. See Jack Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev: how the Cold War ended (Random House), 12.

67. On ‘new thinking’, see Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire. The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina press, 2007), 280–3. Aleksandr Yakovlev: perestroika, 1985–1991. Neizdannoe, maloizvestnoe, zabytoe (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond Demokratia, 2008), 19.

68. See Richard Pipes, Alexander Yakovlev. The man whose Ideas Delivered Russia from Communism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015).

69. Zubok, A failed empire, op. cit., p. 281. In the West, Yakovlev was sometimes compared to Kissinger, but contrary to the latter, he never played the role of a diplomat, despite his Canadian experience, remaining largely in the shadow of Gorbachev.

70. Meeting of media decision-makers, 6 December 1985, Aleksandr Yakovlev, op. cit., 15–9.

71. Note translated in Pipes, op. cit., 117–28.

72. Anna Lawton, Before the Fall. Soviet Cinema in the Gorbachev Years (New Academia Publishing, 2002): 58 sqq.

73. Agony was sold abroad in 1981 (in the US, it was distributed under the title Rasputin), but only released in the Soviet Union in 1985.

74. Joshua Rubinstein, Alexander Gribanov, eds., The KGB file of Andrei Sakharov (Yale University Press, 2005), 51.

75. On Sacrifice, see Nariman Skakov, The Cinema of Tarkovsky: Labyrinths of Space and Time (London and New York: I.B. Tauris): 195 sqq.

76. N. Ismailova, ‘Proverka na chelovechnost’, Izvestia, 31 August 1986, 3.

77. These editorials were part of a series called ‘avtoritetnoe mnenie’ (authoritative opinion): Nikolai Kryuchkov, ‘Mir^—eto zhizn’, Sovetskaya kultura, 18 September 1986, 1; Sergei Bondarchuk, ‘Bez nadezhdy zhizni net!’, Sovetskaya kultura, 23 October 1986, 1.

78. ‘Sleduyushchii den’ – bezyadernyi!’, Sovetskaya Kultura, 28 May 1987, 7.

79. ‘Potryasenie!’, a review by one Masharova from Moscow in Sovetskaya Kultura, 7 February 1987, 5.

80. ‘Vim Venders: vizhu svoego geroya Russkim’, Sovetskaya kultura, 16 October 1986, 7. L. Parfionov, ‘Shest’ dnei v Manngeime’, Sovetskaya Kultura, 28 October 1986, 7. ‘Sovetskaya kultura za rubezhom’, Sovetskaya Kultura, 11 November 1986, 1. ‘Moskovskii kinofestival – kakie filmy kupleny?’, Literaturnaya Gazeta, 29 July 1987, 1.

81. There was no public box office statistics for Soviet films. Unofficially though, statistics existed for the most popular pictures – and Dead Man’s Letters was clearly not one of them. For the pictures of 1985–1986, see M.I. Zhabskii, Sotsiokulturnaya drama kinematografa. Analiticheskaya letopis, 1969–2005 (Moscow: Kanon+, 2009), 664.

82. See his subsequent pictures, especially A Visitor to a Museum (1989), Russian symphony (1994) and The Ugly Swans (2006).