Soviet cinema and the early Cold War: Pudovkin's Admiral Nakhimov

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Notes

1. See Patrick Major and Rana Mitter in the Introduction to this volume.

2. Peter Holquist, ‘“Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Modern History 69/3 (1997); David Hoffman, ‘Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Social History 34/1 (1999); Stephen Kotkin, ‘Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Inter-war Conjuncture’, Kritika 2/1 (2001).

3. For a recent study of Soviet cinema under Stalin which sees post-war developments primarily in terms of domestic politics, see Natacha Laurent, L'Oeil du Kremlin: Cinema et Censure en URSS sous Staline (Toulouse: Editions Privat, 2000).

4. Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War (New York: M'E. Sharpe, 1998).

5. See, for example, the pieces by Cull and Shaw in this volume.

6. See Major and Mitter in the Introduction, p.12.

7. Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945–56 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

8. On the malokartin'e see Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society (London: I'B. Tauris, 2001).

9. Ibid., pp.194–8.

10. Tony Shaw, ‘The Politics of Cold War Culture’, Journal of Cold War Studies 3/3 (2001), p.74.

11. Also known as That Hamilton Woman, it starred Leigh and Olivier.

12. On the huge popularity of American cinema in the USSR in the 1920s, see especially Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

13. Richard Taylor, ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s’, in R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds.), Inside the Film Factory (London: Routledge, 1994); R. Taylor, ‘Red Stars, Positive Heroes and Personality Cults’, in Richard Taylor and Derek Spring (eds.), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993).

14. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, p.120

15. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstv (RGALI), 2456/1/773/1.77; Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), 5283/21/19/2–3.

16. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial'no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), 82/2/960/81–83; 17/125/292/93.

17. RGASPI, 17/125/214/4–20.

18. RGALI, 2456/1/1042/12.

19. RGALI, 2456/1/1224/154–55.

20. RGASPI, 17/125/291/84–94.

21. RGASPI, 17/125/292/31–32.

22. RGALI, 2456/1/946/18.

23. RGASPI, 17/125/372/19.

24. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses, pp.54–67

25. RGASPI, 17/125/372/49.

26. RGASPI, 17/125/372/201.

27. I. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. xvi (Moscow: Pisatel', 1997), pp.5–24.

28. V.O. Pechatnov, ‘“Strel'ba kholostymi”: sovetskaia propaganda na Zapad v nachale kholodnoi voiny (1945–1947)’, in A.O. Chubarian (ed.), Stalin i kholodnaia voina (Moscow: Institut vseobshchei istorii RAN, 1997), pp.173–4.

29. Jeffrey Brooks notes that neither Churchill's Fulton speech nor the Novikov telegram sparked an open anti-American campaign in Pravda, and that the press continued to promote the possibility of continued Allied cooperation into 1947: Thank You Comrade Stalin: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp.207–8.

30. GARF, 5283/14/385/45; I.A. Pyr'ev, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, vol. i (Moscow, 1978), pp.343–5.

31. The significance of the Khudsovet is discussed in Laurent, L'Oeil du Kremlin, pp.128–33.

32. RGALI, 2456/1/1337/49.

33. RGALI, 2456/1/1337/45.

34. RGALI, 2456/1/1337/51; Tsentral'nyi arkhiv obshchestvennykh dvizenii Moskvy (TsAODM), 2361/1/16/10–19.

35. Rossisskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (RGANI), 2/1/7/21. The Ministry was disbanded after Stalin's death, and cinema affairs were taken over by the Ministry of Culture.

36. RGASPI, 17/125/378/6.

37. A. Artizov and O. Naumov (eds.), Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’, 1999), pp.581–4.

38. RGALI, 2456/1/1337/29, 32.

39. RGALI, 2456/1/1240/10, 17. On Simonov's trip to the US, see Joshua Rubenstein, ‘Ilya Ehrenburg – Between East and West’, Journal of Cold War Studies 4/1 (2002), pp.44–65.

40. RGASPI, 17/125/378/81.

41. RGALI, 2456/1/1240/16.

42. RGASPI, 17/125/378/82.

43. RGALI, 2456/1/1240/30–31.

44. RGASPI, 17/125/378/59. Discussions about the need for a Russian national cinema first appear to have arisen at meetings of film-makers during 1943 and 1944.

45. On European attitudes to the US after the war see, for example, Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), and R. Pells, Not Like Us (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

46. L. May, The Big Tomorrow (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), p.177.

47. RGASPI, 17/125/213/89.

48. RGALI, 2372/6/125/28.

49. RGASPI, 17/125/291/12–19.

50. RGALI, 2453/2/2/1–2.

51. V. Pudovkin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. ii (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1975), pp.87, 92.

52. RGALI, 2456/1/1034/35–7.

53. RGALI, 2456/1/1034/61–64, 75–6.

54. I. Lukovskii, Admiral Nakhimov: Istoricheskaia drama v 4 deistviiakh (Moscow, 1941).

55. RGALI, 2372/6/57.

56. I. Lukovskii, Admiral Nakhimov: Istoricheskaia drama v 4 deistviiakh (Moscow, 1944).

57. I. Lukovskii, Admiral Nakhimov: Literaturnyi Stsenarii (Moscow, 1944).

58. RGALI, 2453/5/1/8–9.

59. On this, see Eduard Mark, ‘The War Scare of 1946 and its Consequences’, Diplomatic History 21/3 (1997), pp.383–415; B. Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

60. G. Mar'iamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor: Stalin smotrit kino (Moscow: Kinotsentr, 1992).

61. RGASPI, 17/125/378/81.

62. RGASPI, 17/117/605/85–97.

63. RGASPI, 17/116/262/73–4; Artizov and Naumov, Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, pp.554–5.

64. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, p.582.

65. RGALI, 2456/1/1234/16, 20–21.

66. RGALI, 2456/1/1236/11–16.

67. RGALI, 2453/5/12/4.

68. RGALI, 2456/1/1533/21.

69. Kul'tura i zhizn', 31 Dec. 1946; Vechernaia Moskva, 2 Jan. 1947; Sovestskoe iskusstvo, 1 Jan. 1947; Krasnaia zvezda, 4 Jan. 1947.

70. RGASPI, 629/1/71/1–8, 18.

71. It would be interesting to know more about how the film was received abroad. Certainly at the Venice film festival in September 1947 it apparently only won a specially instituted prize - for the best mass scenes - thanks to pressure from the Soviet judge. But as the festival itself was a heavily politicized phenomenon of the Cold War, we obviously cannot read too much into this. RGALI, 2456/1/1537/217–28.

72. See, for example, Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), ch. 6; May, The Big Tomorrow.