Women and Martyrdom in Soviet War Cinema of the Stalin Era

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2019

Mozhgan Samadi

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES 5

ABSTRACT 6

DECLARATION 7

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION 8

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS 9

THE AUTHOR 10

Introduction:

Background and Aims 12 Thesis Rationale: Female Role Models and Soviet Identity-Building 15 Literature Review: Existing Scholarship on Women and Martyrdom in Stalinist War Cinema 20 Aims, Objectives and Research Questions of the Thesis 26 Original Contribution to Knowledge 28 Structure of the Thesis 29

Chapter One: Historical and Ideological Context 1.1 Introduction 32 1.2 Russian Orthodox Political Culture 33 1.2.1 Russian Orthodoxy and the Values of Suffering and Martyrdom 33 1.2.2 Orthodox Princes: The Role Models of Sacrificing the Self for Faith and the ‘Holy’ Lands of Rus’ 35 1.3 The Ideas of ‘Holy’ Rus’ and Russian Messianism and the Adoption of the Russian Orthodox Traditions of Suffering and Martyrdom in the 19th Century 38 1.4 Soviet Reinterpretation of Russian Orthodox Values of Suffering and Martyrdom 44 1.4.1 Resurrection of the Idea of Russian Messianism under the Name of

Soviet Messianism 44 1.4.2 The Myth of the Great Soviet Family 51 1.5 Conclusion 54 Chapter Two: Theory and Methodology 2.1 Introduction 57 2.2 Women and Martyrdom in Russia and the Soviet Union 57 2.2.1 The Russian Orthodox Valorisation of Suffering and Female Believers 57 2.2.2 The Valorisation of Female Suffering in Orthodox Russia before the Establishment of the Soviet Union 60 2.2.3 Soviet Women and Dual Patriarchy under the Stalin Regime 64 2.3 Theoretical Context 68 2.3.1 Soviet Socialist Realism 68 2.3.2 Althusserian Theory of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) 70 2.3.3 Althusserian Theory of ISAs and Stalinist Social Realism 71 2.4 Methodology and Primary Sources 73 2.4.1 Post-1970s Psychoanalytic Film Theory 73 2.4.2 Primary Sources 78 2.5 Conclusion 82 Chapter Three: Cinematic Images of Soviet Women and Martyrdom 1941-1945: Heroines as Fiancées, Wives and Widows 3.1 Introduction 85 3.2 Warrior-Heroine as Fiancée and Symbolic Sister in Frontovye Podrugi (Frontline Girlfriends, 1941) 85 3.3 Heroine as Loyal Wife and Symbolic Sister in Zhdi Menia (Wait for Me, 1943) 97 3.4 Heroine as Widow-Warrior and Symbolic Sister in Malakhov Kurgan (The Last Hill, 1944) 107 3.5 Conclusion 115

Chapter Four: Cinematic Images of Soviet Women and Martyrdom 1941-1945: Heroines as Symbolic Mothers and Chosen ‘Sons’ of the Family

4.1 Introduction 118 4.2 Heroine as Symbolic Mother in Ona zashchishchaet rodinu (She Defends the Motherland 1943) 118 4.3 Heroines as Symbol of the Motherland and Suffering Mothers in Raduga (Rainbow 1944) 127 4.4 Heroine as Ideal ‘Son’ of the Great Soviet Family in Zoia (1944) 136 4.5 Conclusion 150 Chapter Five: Cinematic Images of Soviet Women and Martyrdom 1945-1953: Heroines as Red Army Officers and Symbolic Suffering Mothers and ‘Sons’ of the Great Family in the GPW 5.1 Introduction 154 5.2 Red Army Female Officers in the GPW in Nebecnyi ikhokhody (Sloth of the Skies 1946) 159 5.3 Heroines as Symbolic Suffering Mothers and ‘Sons’ in the Great Family in Molodaia Gvardiia (The Young Guard 1948) 170 5.3.1 Vulnerable Mothers and Brave Daughters of the Great Family 172 5.3.2 Elena, the Symbol of Defenceless Motherhood Appealing for Her Son’s Self-Sacrifice 176 5.3.3 Representation of Suffering ‘Sons’ of the Great Family 182 5.4 Conclusion 185 Conclusion Revisiting the Thesis Objective 190 Revisiting the Research Questions 193 Research Question One 193 Research Question Two 195 Research Question Three 198 Research Question Four 202 Contributions of the Study 205

Bibliography 208 Filmography 223

Word Count: 79,990

LIST OF FIGURES

Figures on page 11: First, Captured Red Army nurse, Smolensk, (October 1941), BARch, Bild 1011-449-0779-20; Second, Nurse Valya Gribkova evacuating a wounded soldier from the battlefield (September 1944), SPUTNIK / Alamy Stock Photo; Tird, A woman and two girls looking at their destroyed house, USSR (1943), RIA Novosti.

Fig. 3.4.2 on Page 109: Admiral Vladimir Alekseevich Kornilov (1806-1854) (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/11970/vladimir-alekseyevich-kornilov, accessed 22/05/2019).

Fig. 4.2.6 on Page 125: Poster The Motherland Calls (Podina-Mat’ zovit!) (1940) by Iraklien Toidze (https://www.pencioner.ru/news/moya-istoriya/istoriya-plakata-rodina- mat-zovyet, accessed on 22/05/2019).

Fig. 4.4.3 on Page 139: Poster Stalin in the Kremlin cares about each of us (O kazhdom pozabotitsia Stalin v Kremle) (1940) by Victor Govorkov (https://gallerix.ru/storeroom/1973977528/N/857362725/, accessed 22/05/2019).

Fig. 4.4.6 on Page 146: Poster Thank You Dear Stalin for a Happy Childhood! (1939) by Nina Votolina (https://artchive.ru/artists/16641~Nina_Nikolaevna_Vatolina/works/540798~Thank_you _dear_Stalin_for_a_happy_childhood, accessed on 18/05/2019)

Fig. 5.1.1 on Page 156: Poster Long Live Mother-Heroine! (Slava Materi-Geroine) (1944) by Nina Vatolina (http://museum-schel.ru/ meropriyatiya/virtualnye-vystavki/247- zhenshchina-v-plakate, accessed 22/05/2019).

Fig. 5.2.7 on Page 170: Poster Glory to the Heroic Soviet woman! (Geroicheskoi Sovetskoi zhenshine − Slava) (1946) by Nina Votolina.

(https://artchive.ru/artists/16641~Nina_Nikolaevna_Vatolina/works/485213~The_heroic_ Soviet_woman_glory, accessed on 18/05/2019).

ABSTRACT

The thesis examines representations of women and martyrdom in Soviet war cinema of the Stalin era through an analysis of eight fictional films made between 1941-1953, that is from the German invasion of Soviet territory to the end of the Stalinist regime. This research draws a comprehensive picture of the evolution of the cinematic imagery of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema through the examination of the primary sources which provide a spectrum of cinematic heroines from different generations with different social, cultural, economic and educational backgrounds and different functions in war. Drawing on the Althusserian theory of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) as well as post-1970s psychoanalytic film theory, this thesis examines the female and martyrdom theme as mediator between, on the one hand, ideal female heroism and patriotic duties, and on the other hand, everyday citizen and family responsibilities. The clash between Soviet planning and social reality resulted in a gap between the intentions of the Soviet leadership and their consequences. Accordingly, the interrelationship between Soviet planning and reality merits consideration within Soviet scholarship. This thesis, hence, studies the impact of Russian cultural heritage on the Stalinist ISAs, which reveals strong connections between Russian particularism and Soviet universalism. This thesis provides the first book-length study of representations of the female in Soviet war cinema. It sheds new light on the employment of pre-revolutionary Russian cultural heritage in the creation of representations of the female in Stalinist war cinema. This study identifies the cinematic images of women and martyrdom as representing suffering mothers, sisters and wives of the male warriors, as well as symbolic suffering mothers and sisters of the Great Soviet Family. It demonstrates that Soviet women in Stalinist war cinema were deprived of the privilege of becoming martyrs for the Motherland while fulfilling functions of an ideal female Orthodox believer. This thesis challenges the widespread belief in the compatibility of femininity and combat under Stalinism, which claims that within Stalinist political culture traditional gender differences were radically undone, and new forms devised and run for different generations and social groups of Soviet women. Having identified the main features of cinematic representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema, and shown them as derived from the expectations of an ideal female Orthodox believer, the thesis at once examines the two-way nexus of (a) Stalinist Socialist Realist war cinema and the submission of the Soviet people to national Bolshevik ideology; (b) national Bolshevism and Russian religious-traditional heritage. In other words, the thesis studies how Russian religious-cultural heritage was adopted to secure the imagination of the Soviet people in relation to their real conditions of existence and their submission to the dominant/national Bolshevik ideology. Examining this imaginary transposition of reality by Soviet Socialist Realist art, whose aim was to ensure the submission of the people to national Bolshevism and the long-term stability of the Stalinist state, this thesis reveals the adoption of Russian religious-cultural heritage on a broader scale, in the service of Stalinist collective identity-building policies and state-citizen relations. As a result, the theoretical approach of this thesis and its findings innovatively contribute to a range of fields within Russian Studies, including gender studies, Soviet cinema studies and the study of Russian/Soviet identity-building and state-citizen relations.

DECLARATION

No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

1. The author of this thesis owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and she has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. 2. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. 3. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. 4. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=24420), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/about/regulations/) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

The language of the primary, and some of the secondary, sources in the Thesis is Russian. The transliteration of Russian names (personal names, book titles, journals, newspapers and organisations) is provided in accordance with the third edition of The MHRA (Modern Humanities Research Association) Style Guide. Bibliographical references also comply with the same style.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This thesis would not have been possible without strong support, wholehearted encouragement and scholarly advice. I owe the deepest gratitude to my main supervisor, Dr Rachel Platonov for her valuable guidance, insightful suggestions, and most importantly, for the patience and time she dedicated to reading and commenting on my work.

I am grateful to the co-supervisor, Professor Cathy Gelbin, and the academic advisor of this project, Dr Maeve Olohan, for their guidance and support. I also wish to express my thanks to Professor Stephen Hutchings and Dr Lynne Attwood for their assistance and guidance at the initial stages of this project.

I hereby express my sincere thanks to the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures for the three-year financial support without which this research would not have been conducted. I warmly thank the Graduate School of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, especially Professor Vera Tolz, Ms Amanda Mathews and Mrs Joanne Marsh for their considerable administrative assistance and support.

My especial thanks go to my mother Banoo Gharloghi, to close relatives in Russia and Iran, especially Viktor Volkov, and to my friends, particularly Professor Oliver Bast, whose support, encouragement and academic guidance helped me to complete this research. I am also deeply indebted to Dr Denis Volkov for his valuable academic advice.

Finally, I owe my loving thanks to my husband Denis and our son Dmitry, without whose love and wholehearted support this thesis would not have been realised.

THE AUTHOR

Having completed a BA (with distinction) in Russian Language and Literature at Azad University of Tehran in 2000, followed by an MA (with distinction) in Creative Writing at Moscow Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature in 2007, Mozhgan Samadi dedicated several years to translating Soviet literary works into Persian (more than ten publications in Iran and the United Kingdom). As an Iranian brought up under the ideological regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, she has always been interested in scholarship examining state-nation relations, and as a woman who spent her childhood during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), she is attentive to the theme of women in war. Her research interests became more focused during the period she worked on translating Soviet novels and plays related to the so-called Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). She plans to expand this PhD research into comparative works on images of women forged under the ideological systems of the Soviet Union and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To the voiceless Soviet women whose immense suffering in WWII is still disregarded.

Introduction Of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema. Lenin Background and Aims The 1917 Russian Revolution resulted in the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922. Solidarity was a necessity to the Soviet leadership, which ruled, according to the 1926 census, almost 200 nationalities under the name of the Soviet people.1 Max Weber identifies nation as a specific sentiment of solidarity expressed by a certain group in relation to other groups.2 The Bolsheviks found the formation of nations unavoidable in the modernisation of the Soviet Union.3 Accordingly, the new government systematically promoted national consciousness of its ethnic minorities with the slogan of the right of nations to self-determination. As a result, large national republics, which represented many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state, were established under the Soviet Union.4 In the 1920s, the strength of national consciousness among the Soviet ethnic minorities developed to such an extent that it increased conflict and mobilised forces against the Bolsheviks, thereby compelling them to devise a new nationalities policy.5 Despite serious disagreement over implementation, both Lenin and Stalin realised the necessity of creating a united non-Russian "national self-determination" to disarm nationalist tendencies on the Soviet territory. From the late 1920s, Stalinist-forced industrialisation and collectivisation emphasised centralisation and a unified form of nationality.6 The Stalinist rehabilitation of Russian pre-revolutionary military and cultural heritage from the early 1930s, represented the Soviet state as heir to the tsarist empire. This strategy led to a move away from the equality of all Soviet nationalities promoted by Lenin. The nation of the Russian’s was identified as the first among those equals, leading the other Soviet nationalities to socialist Bolshevism.7 The Soviet Union was based on Marxist-Leninist materialist ideology. According to Lenin, ‘throughout the modern history of Europe […] materialism appeared the only consistent philosophy loyal to all the teachings of the natural sciences and hostile to

1 Viktor Kozlov, The Peoples of the Soviet Union, trans. by Pauline M. Tiffen (London: Hutchinson, 1988), p. 15. 2 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Vol., II (New York: Bedminster Press Incorporated, 1968), p. 922. 3 See Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, (Ithaca, New York, 1994). 4 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), pp. 1,2. 5 See Ronald Suny, The Revenge of the Past (Stanford, Calif., 1993). 6 Martin, The Affirmative Action, pp. 25-30. 7 David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist mass culture and the formation of modern Russian national identity, 1931- 1956 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 43-62. 12

superstition, cant and so forth.’8 Lenin and the Soviet leaders of the time relied on enthusiasm for rationalism and technology in Marxism, trusting that ‘both sets of values would be implemented and make a harmonious alloy: [the] modern factory and the Athenian agora would somehow merge into one.’9 There is no doubt that this view of modernity appeared to promise ‘to heal the wounds of modernity through a fuller or deeper modernity.’10 Lenin’s admiration for materialism, however, did not correspond to the reality of the Soviet Union on the threshold of its establishment, even to that found in its most progressive republic, Russia, the rule of which up to that point had mainly been based on seventeenth century law.11 Limited property, legal, and political rights had continued to determine the lives of the majority of the population.12 The Church had been the most influential social institution, strongly supportive of central state power.13 There was a huge gap between the backward Russian peasantry, which composed around 90% of the population, and the working class as defined by Marx. Given this social, economic and historical context, as well as the crucial impact of the Orthodox Church on different aspects of Russians’ lives, the overarching research questions of this thesis are how Stalinist leadership exercised control over the numerous Soviet ethnic minorities and how it inspired tens of millions of them to sacrifice themselves and their dearest ones in support of a ruling system established on Marxist-Leninist materialist ideology? Given that cinema functioned as the most powerful Soviet cultural-ideological apparatus (in terms of its tremendous power),14 this thesis searches for answers to its overarching research questions in Soviet cinema. By encouraging the people to suffer for the Soviet state and the Motherland, war-themed films were remarkably important to Soviet cinema. Despite the prominent historical role of World War One and the Civil War, it was, however, with World War Two (known as the Great Patriotic War (1941- 1945) amongst Russians, henceforth, the GPW) that Soviet war film truly took shape.15 It

8 Vladimir Lenin ‘Tri istochnika i tri sostavnykh chasti Marksizma’ in Prosveshcheniye, No. 3, 1913, pp. 43-47 (p.43). 9 Leszek Kołakowski, “Modernity on Endless Trial,” Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 10. 10 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 9 11 Hellie, ‘The Structure of Russian Imperial History’, History and Theory, 44/4 (2005), pp. 95-100. 12 Tracy Dennison and Steven Nafziger, ‘Living Standards in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, Interdisciplinary History, 43/3 (2013), 397-441 (p. 422). 13 Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 3-12. 14 Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998); Neia Zorkaya, The Illustrated history of the Soviet Cinema (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1991); Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953 (Cambridge: University Press, 2001); Lynne Attwood, Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era (London: Pandora Press, 1993); Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London: Cassell, 1999); Peter Rollberg, Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009). 15Zorkaya, The Illustrated History, pp. 170-172; Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp.165-167; Denise Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914-2005 (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2007), pp. 55-56. 13

was the war genre that had the potential to represent heroic and mythical images of suitable figures (either historical or constructed) based on an ideological reading of patriotism, heroism and cultural heritage. The same genre also had the capacity to link the mythical ideals, and heroes of the Revolution and the Civil War, with the GPW. Millions of Soviet women resisted the Nazi forces during the GPW. Anna Krylova, one of the few historians to have focused on Soviet women and warfare, sees the reason for the mass participation of Soviet women in combat not as a response to manpower shortages in the early stages of the war, but rather as an ‘experimental logic that relied on the conceivability and feasibility of the female combatant.’16 This research aims to analyse representations of this female resistance in the most powerful cultural- ideological apparatus of the Soviet Union: cinema. By examining the constructive employment of Russian religious-traditional heritage in creating cinematic images of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema, this thesis will produce two main overlapping outcomes. First, a first book-length analysis of representations of the female in Soviet war cinema; second, an identification of the employment of pre-revolutionary Russian cultural heritage in Stalinist cinema in the service of building an overarching common identity and state-citizens relations. The Introduction begins with a brief background to the research. It then puts forward the rationale for the thesis and continues with a review of previous scholarship on Soviet women in war cinema. This in turn prepares the ground for a highlighting of the gaps in contemporary scholarship and a discussion of the aims, objectives and research questions of the thesis. The subsequent section identifies the original contributions made by this study. The closing part of the Introduction presents the thesis structure. This Introduction does not attempt to introduce the theoretical framework, methodology and the primary sources used in this thesis; they are deferred to Chapter Two, because such significant subjects require a historical-ideological context, which is the main topic of Chapter One. Despite the Soviet regime’s claim to be in conflict with any religious heritage, research reveals that elements of the Russian religious-traditional female values were resuscitated in the representation of the ideal woman propagated by the Soviet

16 Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 28 14

ideological system.17 Given the prevalence of religious-traditional expectations of woman amongst the masses, especially peasants, this project suggests that Soviet war cinema employed the Russian Orthodox tenet of female suffering and sacrifice for the family in the service of Bolshevism, which enabled the exercise of dominance over the imagination of the Soviet citizens with the aim of unifying them around the central power. This study suggests that cinematic representations of Soviet women and martyrdom, on the one hand, were compatible with a religious-traditional legacy that identified woman’s obligations within the framework of the family. On the other hand, they created a chain of heroism that linked cinematic heroines with the characters of pre- revolutionary history, folklore and myths, who sacrificed themselves for the Motherland. These cinematic female images presented the compound of contradictions, which awaits comprehensive analysis. This project aims to present a comprehensive image of Soviet women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema, exposing that there was no real conflict between the pre-revolutionary traditional obligation that Russian women sacrifice themselves for their own families and that of Stalinist cinematic heroines sacrificing themselves for ‘the Great Soviet Family’.

Thesis Rationale: Female Role Models and Soviet Identity-Building Female role models played a crucial role in Soviet nationalities policy. Cinema was a prominent means of representing these role models to a mass Soviet audience. War cinema was a particularly crucial tool for creating the image of women and martyrdom as role models of submission to the central state. The Soviet Union was established based on the Marxist theory of state power, whose worldwide impact promoted world revolution through the Third International.18 Marx construed state power as equal to the state apparatus, which ensured ruling class domination over the economic base.19 Both Marx and Lenin held that the stability of the state was secured precisely by its resting on the lower social layers, and through the reproduction of their submission to the upper (ruling) layer.20 Louis Althusser (1937- 1984) explicates this idea by distinguishing state power from the state apparatus. The

17 Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989); Lynne Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women's Magazines as Engineers of Female Identity, 1922-53 (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1999). 18 The Third International (Communist International, or Comintern) (1919-1943) was an organization of national communist parties which aimed to promote world revolution. 19 Allen Wood, Karl Marx, (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 66-71. 20 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 92-5. 15

latter, according to him, contains two subsets: the collection of politico-legal institutions representing the ‘Repressive State Apparatus’, and the group of institutions, representing the dominant ideology of the state. For the latter subset, Althusser uses the term ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISAs). Althusser suggests that the reproduction of labour power’s submission to the state is largely ensured by the ruling ideology, represented mainly through the ISAs. He indicates that the long-term stability of the state, and the submission of labour power to it, are secured only by the state exercising hegemony in the ISAs.21 The Althusserian thesis is particularly appropriate to this research as in the mid- 1930s, the Soviet state increasingly focused on constructing a new identity based on the historical, cultural and traditional heritage of the dominant/Russian nation of the Soviet Union. Having proclaimed in the name of and underpinned by the international ideals of the Revolution, this new Soviet identity was in fact expedient for the construction of the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ adopted in 1924 to achieve the aims of the 1917 Revolution in a single country, without a broader proletarian revolution.22 This policy, which weakened ‘proletarian internationalism’ in favour of Great Russian nationalism, or ‘national Bolshevism’23 required the Soviet people’s complete submission in the service of the realisation of Stalinist national Bolshevism. Amongst feminist and feminist-influenced scholars of nation and national identity, there is broad consensus that the concept of nation is gendered and that national politics and nation-state relations are also gendered.24 Because of this gendering, even though the Soviet people did not belong to a specific nation, it can be argued that women participate even more broadly than men in the process of building overarching community identity. Women not only participate in national, economic, political and military struggles, but they also underpin biological reproduction, reproducing boundaries amongst national groups and signifying national differences. As Yuval-Davis argues, if a nation is considered to be a natural expansion of family and kinship relations, based on men’s protection of women and children, then the general expectation of the

21 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 95-126. 22 Katerina Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 7. 23 Ibid, p.7. 24Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (University of Nevada Press, 1991), pp. 1-19; Susan Hayward, ‘Framing National Cinemas’, in Cinema and Nation, ed. by Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 81-94; Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, ed. ‘Themes of Nation’, in Cinema and Nation (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 95-110; Julie Mostov, ‘Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body: Politics of National Identity in the Former Yugoslavia’, in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. by Tamar Mayer (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 89-112; Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases : Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 1-36; Nira Yuval-Davis Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997) pp. 21-25. 16

roles women play in the nation/community overlaps with those they fill in the family: caring for others, bearing and raising children, and so forth.25 As a result, women may play a significant role in the transmission of ideological and cultural reproduction in the collective. Given that virtually all spheres of life were heavily gendered in pre- revolutionary Russian society,26 special attention to gender roles, in both family and society, was necessary for the construction of Soviet identity. Keenly aware that an individual’s worldview can be influenced by institutional and artistic realities,27 the Bolsheviks set out to structure an appropriate social and cultural context in which to shape the new Soviet identity. The hegemony of the Stalinist state in its ideological apparatuses accordingly exercised the doctrine of ‘Socialist Realism’, the aim of which was (as presented by Zhdanov in his speech to the first All- Union Congress of Soviet Writers in April 1934) to lead genuinely dialectical art by depicting ‘reality in its revolutionary development.’ Thus, the main function of Soviet artists was considered to involve ‘a combination of the most austere matter-of-fact work with the greatest heroic spirit and grandiose perspectives’.28 Given the Socialist Realist essence of Soviet cultural product and the high rate of illiteracy (more than 80 percent) amongst workers at the beginning of the Soviet era, cinema with its heavily visual (and aural) nature and its significant novelty value, was a more powerful ideological apparatus for the masses than literacy-dependent tools such as books and newspapers. Indeed, Lenin himself suggested, ‘Of all the arts the most important for us is the cinema’.29 Meanwhile, as Hobsbawm argues, the reinterpretation of tradition, such as the use and re-working of popular folklore as religious-cultural heritage, is a recurring identity-building strategy.30 In keeping with this strategy, the Bolsheviks drew upon the longstanding Russian tradition of iconology in their visual propaganda; in cinema the visual was combined with both technological novelty and the novelty of revolutionary values, making cinema the most effective instrument in the

25 Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, pp. 26-29. 26 Barbara Clements, Barbara Engel, Christine Worobec, ed., Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).pp. 29-207; Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia: the feminine myth in Russian culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 3-143; Natalia, Pushkareva Women in Russian History from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1999)pp. 121-255. 27 Shlapentokh, Dmitry, and Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, 1918-1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality (New York: A. de Gruyter, 1993), pp. 3-11. 28A. Zhdanov, ‘Rech’ Sekretarya TSK VKP(b) A.A. Zhdanova’, in Pervyi Vsesoyuznyi S’ezd Sovetskiikh Pisatelei, 1934: Stenograficheskii Otchet, ed. by Ivan Luppol, Mark Rosental and others (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1990), pp. 2-5 (p.4). 29 Quoted in Zorkaya, The Illustrated History, p. 38. 30 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 180-182. 17

service of building an overarching common identity,31 and of exercising the hegemony of the dominant ideology. According to Hayward, national cinema does not represent what actually exists but rather asserts what is imagined to exist.32 Following Hayward and taking into account that Socialist Realism was mandated as the sole artistic method for all arts in the Soviet Union, it can be argued that a replacement of reality with revolutionary reality became the common feature of different genres of Soviet cinema. In order to achieve this synthesis, Soviet cinema had to be capable of dealing with two different realms simultaneously: first, the realm of myth and imagination, which had to be harnessed to popularise abstract, patriotic ideas in the structure of concrete, visual models of heroism, and second, the everyday lives of ordinary Soviet citizens. In the cinematic image of the martyr, however, there is tension between the evocation of myth and imagination i.e. popularising abstract, patriotic ideas in the form of concrete, visual models of heroism, on the one hand, and the everyday lives of ordinary Soviet citizens, on the other. Tension is generated by these simultaneous two functions because martyrs are at once idealised models of heroic devotion to a patriotic cause, and extreme exceptions to normal patterns of behaviour, which throw those patterns into sharp relief in contrastive fashion (though martyrdom appeared to be more normalised in the 1930s and in the GPW). With regard to the relationship between women and martyrdom, this tension acquires a second important dimension: a conflict emerges between patriotic duty to the state and the particular responsibilities that traditional societies assign to women in relation to their families. National defence was proclaimed to be the duty of each and every citizen and Soviet cinema was mobilised to raise the morale of the Soviet people and steel them against the enemy.33 Because of the urgency of this task, it is with the GPW that Soviet war film truly took shape.34 Moreover, for exercising the hegemony of the state in its ideological apparatuses, war-themed films were exceptionally important to Soviet cinema. They had the potential to represent heroic and mythical images of suitable figures (either historical or constructed) based on an ideological reading of patriotism, heroism and cultural heritage. The fruitful alliance between an appropriate patriotic- heroic reading of the past and present offered a very suitable setting in which to implement the policies for building Soviet identity, as Soviet war films had the capability

31 Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, pp. 73-125. 32 Hayward, ‘Framing National Cinemas’, pp. 88-92. 33 Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp. 165-182. 34 Ibid, pp. 165-167;Youngblood, Russian War Films, p. 56. 18

to significantly strengthen state-sanctioned narratives about the past which the Party wanted to promote among Soviet citizens.35 Despite the widespread propaganda around equal gender rights after the October Revolution, and the 1930s declarations about Soviet women playing an equal role in fighting alongside men however, military heroism remained limited to the arena of Soviet men.36 As Kazimiera Cottam observes there was an indirect connection between Soviet socio-economic development and Soviet women’s access to military service.37 Accordingly, as Roger Markwick notes, the predominant image of Soviet women before June 1941 corresponded to the demands of the dominant pre-revolutionary patriarchal role as the wives and mothers of male soldiers.38 One of the reasons underpinning this attitude is the nationalist structure of the Stalinist regime. As Cynthia Enloe notes, ‘nationalism has typically sprung from masculinised memory, masculinised humiliation and masculinised hope’, and women, as the symbol of protection of the honour of men and the nation, have been historically subordinated in nationalist movements and politics.39 For that reason, on the cusp of the GPW Soviet culture still lacked female idols who could rally young women and encourage them to join partisan units to contribute to the war effort.40 Accordingly, Soviet scholarship considers the creation of role models of women-warriors and women-martyrs by Soviet art works as an essential tool for raising patriotic feeling in wartime and the widespread resistance of Soviet women against the Nazi invasion. Scholarly works on Soviet art identify Stalinist war cinema as the medium that best depicted women resisting the German forces and sacrificing their bodies for their Motherland. Films such as She Defends the Motherland (1943), Zoia (1944), and Rainbow (1944) are considered significant creators of appropriate female role models of suffering and self-sacrifice who protected the honour of men and the nation, both for the generation that fought as well as for subsequent generations. The next section examines Russian-language scholarship on, as well as Western (English-language) studies of, the representation of women and martyrdom in Soviet war cinema.

35 Youngblood, Russian War Films, p. 3; Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, pp. 117-118. 36 Karen Petrone, ‘Masculinity and Heroism in Imperial and Soviet Military-Patriotic Cultures’, in Russian Masculinities in History and Culture, ed. by Barbara Clements, Rebecca Friedman and Dan Healey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 172-93 (pp. 184- 190). 37 Kezimiera Cottam, Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies of Soviet Women Soldiers (Nepean Canada: New Military Publishing, 1998), pp. xvii-xxv. 38 Roger D. Markwick and Euridice Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p 18. 39 Enloe, Bananas, p. 45. 40 Anja Tippner, ‘Girls in Combat: Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia and the Image of Young Soviet Wartime Heroines’,The Russian Review, 73/3 (2014), 371–388 (pp. 371-2). 19

Literature Review: Existing Scholarship on Women and Martyrdom in Stalinist War Cinema Despite the significant contributions of Soviet women to the GPW41 and the multidimensional potential of cinema to represent them, cinematic representations of Soviet women in the GPW remains an understudied topic. In Russian-language scholarship, work on Soviet women’s roles in the GPW is very limited, with V.S. Murmantseva’s Sovetskie zhenshchiny v Velikoĭ Otechestvennoĭ voĭne 1941-1945 (Soviet Women and the GPW 1941-1945) (1975) and Svetlana Aleksievich’s U voiny ne zhenskoe litso (War Has no Female Face) (1985) as the only substantial contributions produced during the Soviet era. More recently, Al’mira Usmanova’s Zhenshchiny i iskusstvo: politiki reprezentatsii, (2001) and Kino i nemtsy: gendernyi sub’ekt i ideologicheskii ‘zapros’ v fil’makh voennogo vremeni, (2002) have offered important insights into Russian scholarship on the cinematic image of Soviet women in the GPW. In Western scholarship since the late 1980s, significant interdisciplinary studies that bridge the gap between Soviet cinema and Soviet politics and history have been published.42 Of particular relevance to this thesis is Judith Mayne’s Kino and the Woman Question (1989), which discusses the image of women in conflict in 1920s’ Soviet cinema and emphasises the impact of traditional, pre-revolutionary attitudes towards women in popular Soviet films of the 1920s, such as Mother (1927). Mayne focuses on the relationship between narrative and aesthetic and ideological projects in five films (made between 1925-1929), in terms of equally complex tensions concerning gender and sexual politics as well as the cinematic representations of women. Analysing the nexus between Soviet cinema and the woman question, Mayne observes that the traditional Russian mother-child bond serves the socialist public sphere, such that women are only significant to the extent that they embody nurturing roles in society; and that, as in traditional patriarchy, a woman’s social function (for example as a revolutionary) is

41 During the GPW more than 800,000 Soviet women served in the Red Army and a larger number participated in the war as volunteers. Their role in war was so significant that they were described as a ‘great force’(see Mary Buckley ‘The ‘Woman Question’ in the Contemporary Soviet Union’ in Promissory Notes; Women in the Transition to Socialism ed. by Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Marilyn Young (New York : Monthly Review Press, 1989), p263. 42 See the works Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda; Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988); Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, Inside the Film Factory (London: Routledge, 1991); Judith Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989); Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society; Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, 1918-1991; Attwood, Red Women; Richard Stites, Soviet Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society in Russia Since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991); Movies for the Masses; Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); ‘A War Remembered: Soviet Films of the Great Patriotic War’, The American Historical Review, 106/3 (1994), 839-56; Russian War Films. 20

secondary to her domestic roles.43 Mayne’s work thus extends the argument (common in scholarship on the status of Soviet women in the ideological context of the Soviet Union) that the new ideology was rooted in the cultural values of Russian peasant households of the 19th century and that traditional values ascribed to women in the pre-revolutionary period were resuscitated in the representation of the ideal woman propagandised by the Soviet ideological system.44 In a similar vein, a number of scholarly analyses of Chapaev (1934), the most popular Socialist Realist film of the Soviet era,45 focus on the depiction of Anna, the film’s heroine, in conflict. Although the film aims to display Anna as the incarnation of the New Soviet Woman and her role in a Civil War battle as equal in significance to that of men, Lynne Attwood observes that the heroine provides, rather, a romantic interest by accepting, instead of confronting, the traditional demands of women. Moreover, both Attwood and Youngblood highlight the fact that the film draws on the involvement of women in masculine practices, such as fighting, only in critical situations.46 Concerning the cinematic image of Soviet women in films of the GPW period, there is broad agreement amongst Western scholars that films of this period emphasise traditional, patriarchal gender expectations (i.e. the purity, loyalty and morality of female characters) and allocate Soviet women a central place as icons of the heroic suffering of a wife or mother who sacrifices everything for the sake of revenge against the enemy.47 The majority of these works emphasise the resurrection of traditional symbols and myths in the films of the GPW era and present the heroines as icons of sacrifice, morality and Motherland. Film critics see the purity, loyalty, and morality of female characters in these films as a symbol of ‘Holy’ suffering Russia, the Russian nation and her ‘daughters’ under attack and subjected to violence by the enemy. The main attention of English-language scholarship on the GPW era has been on the three films: She Defends the Motherland, Zoia, and Rainbow. They contend that these films aimed to inspire both those at the front and those at the rear to resist the invasion of the Germans, as well as to perpetuate the myth of female role models for subsequent

43 Mayne, Kino and the Woman Question, pp. 91-110. 44 Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology, pp. 2-4. 45 The film was the biggest box office hit of the 1930s and endorsed by Stalin and the critics (see Kenez, Peter, Cinema and Soviet Society, p 155). 46 Attwood, Red Women, p. 64-5. Youngblood, Russian War Films, pp. 40-41. 47 Zorkaya, The Illustrated History, pp. 185-9; Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 175-9; Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, pp. 118-9; Attwood, Red Women, 67-8; Youngblood, Russian War Films, pp. 61-71; David Gillespie, Russian Cinema (Harlow: Longman, 2003), pp. 131-2. 21

generations.48 One Soviet film critic noticed a connection between the woman and nature in the early films of the GPW period, according to which heroines like Praskov’ia in She Defends the Motherland symbolised the assaulted and raped Russian soil.49 The most widely analysed film of this period, Zoia, which was based on the life story of the famous Soviet GPW martyr Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia, is used to exemplify the view that Zoia and other women-martyrs of the GPW, who manifest a feminine version of the defender of the Motherland, are still regarded as an inspiration for young people seeking guidance.50 Western scholars, in general, see the huge capacity for self-sacrifice in the lead heroines in these three films merely as an inspiration for the Soviet people to fight the enemy, not a device to reveal their subjectivity. In Russian War Films: on the Cinema Front, 1914-2005, the most detailed English-language study of Soviet war cinema, Youngblood asserts how memorable these heroines were in Soviet wartime cinema, although she stresses that it would be a mistake to overemphasise their significance.51 In this respect Attwood argues that the women in these films played the same role in war as the heroines in 1920s’ Soviet films, only with more emphasis.52 Kenez similarly observes: ‘By showing the courage and suffering of women, these works aroused hatred for the cruel enemy and at the same time taught that men could do no less than these women.’53 Nevertheless, he finds the heroines too idealised for the audiences to be able to identify with them.54 Shlapentokh, like Kenez, remarks that these films represent the heroines as idealised avengers.55 Furthermore, David Gillespie in Russian Cinema and Anya Tippner in Girls in Combat offer an analogous argument, according to which the display of violence against the heroines in these three films was employed just to appal the audience and encourage hatred of the enemy.56 Regardless of her belief in the lack of female subjectivity in these heroines, Youngblood implies that the references to religion in such films marks a key change from the anti-religious cinema of the previous decades,57 and can be perceived as

48 Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp. 175-179; Attwood, Red Women, pp. 67-68; Gillespie, Russian Cinema, p. 131; Youngblood, Russian War Films, pp. 66-67. 49 Rostislav Iurenev, Kniga fil’mov: Stat’i i Retsenzii Raznykh Let (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1981), p. 85. 50 Tippner, ‘Girls in Combat’; Adrienne M. Harris, ‘The Lives and Deaths of a Soviet Saint in the Post-Soviet Period: The Case of Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 53/2-4 (2011), 273-304; Mikhail Gorinov, ‘Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia (1923- 1941)’, Otechestvennaia Istoriia, 1 (2003), 77-92; Mikhail Gorinov, ed., Zoia Kosmodem’ianskaia: Dokumenty i Materialy (Moscow: Patriot, 2011). 51 Youngblood, Russian War Film, p. 67. 52 Attwood, Red Women, pp. 67-68. 53 Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, p. 177. 54 Ibid, p. 178. 55 Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, p. 118. 56 Gillespie, Russian Cinema, p. 130-131; Tippner, ‘Girls in Combat’, p. 371. 57 Youngblood, Russian War Films, pp. 62-63. 22

a risk taken by Stalin to open up the cultural space.58 In this respect, Youngblood notes the emphasis on the Motherland in such films, as opposed to the Fatherland (otechestvo) of 1930s’ Soviet cinema.59 This moulds Youngblood’s main point, according to which there was an evolution in representing female heroines in the Soviet cinema of the GPW and that lead heroines played an essential role against the fascist invaders.60 Youngblood, however, notices no significant difference between the lead heroines of these three films, namely Praskov'ia, Olena and Zoia, and merely sees Zoia and Olena as not as lucky as Praskov'ia to survive.61 Lisa Kirschenbaum and Wingfield present an idea similar to Youngblood’s. They consider heroines in Soviet war films as representatives of an important ideological shift which was opposed to Party discipline and devotion to Stalin. Moreover, they remark that female characters, either as mothers, soldiers or war workers, function as part of the ‘counter-narrative’ of individual initiative.62 Such interpretations ignore incompatibility between traditional perceptions of femininity and subjectivity in war and do not explain how the resurrection of traditional features in heroines of Soviet war cinema was permissible alongside their ‘essential role against the fascist invaders’. Graham Roberts, in his research ‘Men and Masculinity in Soviet Cinema’, argues that the importance of gender and gender difference in Soviet war films made in the 1940s was downplayed.63 In this respect, Anna Krylova, unlike Youngblood, Kirschenbaum and Wingfield, sees representations of the compatibility of Soviet women with combat and violence in terms other than that of an ideological shift opposing Stalinist cultural policies. Her book Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (2011) - one of the most notable English-language studies on Soviet women in the GPW – refutes the idea of a return to the old-fashioned view of women in war under the Stalinist regime. She argues her interpretation of gender relations in war by heavy reliance on Soviet archival sources including military memoirs, diaries, correspondence and newspapers and focusing on a small group of educated, military women, who aimed at proving themselves equal to men in combat. As the result, the war is depicted as “bloodless” without any sign of rape, wounding and death and an opportunity to accelerate a shift in

58 Youngblood, ‘A War Remembered’, p. 843. 59 Ibid, p. 841. 60 Youngblood, Russian War Film, p.64. 61 Ibid, pp. 61-67. 62 Lisa A. Kirschenbaum and Nancy M. Wingfield, ‘Gender and the Construction of Wartime Heroism in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union’, European History Quarterly, 39/3 (2009), 465-489 (p. 465). 63 Graham Roberts, ‘From Comrade to Comatose: Men and Masculinity in Soviet Cinema’, in Cinema and Ideology: Strathclyde Modern Language Studies, ed. by Eamonn Rodgers (Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 1996), pp. 70-84 (p. 74). 23

the meaning of combat and the feminine. Krylova argues that ‘the conceivability of women’s compatibility with combat, war and violence was a product of the radical undoing of traditional gender differences that Stalinist society underwent in the 1930s.64 Yuliya Minkova’s Making Martyrs: The Language of Sacrifice in Russian Culture from Stalin to Putin (2018) is the most recent study of the prevalence of the language of heroic martyrdom in Soviet and post-Soviet discourses. Minkova aims to show how sacrificial heroes have been used to ‘sanctify the state’s mythology’.65 The idea of connecting victimisation to the creation of national role models in the service of perpetuating nationalist language is central to Minkova’s book. However, the only primary sources used in her analysis of the language of martyrdom that was developed under the Stalin regime are Pravda articles from the 1930s and 40s. The book contains no real justification for choosing these particular sources, which make the analysis abstract and without any direct connection to sacred victims. Likewise unaddressed by the book is the fundamental issue of the conceptualization of a common socialist language of sacrifice identifiable for Soviet citizens from different nations and its implementation. While there is no agreement amongst Western scholars about female representations even in the three mentioned films, more ambivalent issues exist around the cinematic image of Soviet women in the majority of films of the GPW period. For instance, some scholars observe that, despite the general claim about the role of women in wartime cinema, young heroines in home-front films made during the GPW and immediately afterwards were not a grim symbol of sacrifice and tragedy.66 Moreover, Youngblood observes that many films about the home-front made in the later stages of the war kept a distance from the Soviet cinematic traditions and closely resembled films on the same subject in American and British cinema.67 Youngblood’s observation is close to Shlapentokh’s argument about the Soviet films of this time when he says: ‘Never was Soviet cinematography so close to its Western counterparts’.68 Regarding post-war Soviet films, various English-language scholarship observes that the mother-heroines of Stalinist wartime cinema vanished after the end of the GPW, and that the traditional expectations of women in wartime became dominant.69

64 Krylova, ‘Stalinist identity from the viewpoint of gender: rearing a generation of professionally violent women-fighters in 1930's Stalinist Russia’, Gender and History, 16/3 (2004), pp. 626-653 (p 628). 65 Yuliya Minkova, Making Martyrs, p.3 66 Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp. 175-179; Gillespie, Russian Cinema, p. 132; Youngblood, ‘A War Remembered’, p. 844. 67 Youngblood, Russian War Films, p. 69. 68 Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, 1918-1991, p. 117. 69Gillespie, Russian Cinema, p 132-133; Youngblood, Russian War Films, pp 69-71; Jill Steans, ‘Revisionist Heroes and Dissident Heroines: Gender, Nation and War in Soviet Films of ‘the Thaw’’, Global Society, 24/3 (2010), 401-419. 24

Youngblood suggests that ‘even before the victory, women and partisans disappear from the film annals of the Great Patriotic War’,70 and that ‘the post-war cinema starts, gently and amusingly, mocking the contributions of fighting women to the war and foreshadows their removal from war cinema’.71 The accounts of representations of women in Soviet war cinema surveyed above omit some fundamental points. First, while some scholars find strong representations of female suffering in Soviet war cinema of the GPW era, others do not recognise a grim symbol of sacrifice and tragedy in its young heroines. Moreover, the former group focuses solely on heroines as sufferers, while other aspects of the multi-faceted notion of women and martyrdom have not been paid any attention. Unaddressed by the former group is likewise the fundamental issue of the appearance of influential lead cinematic heroines only at the last stage of the war, when the Red Army regarded itself as victor. Secondly, while incompatibility between the traditional perceptions of femininity and subjectivity in military operations is ignored, some works, on the one hand, highlight the role of Soviet women in combat and their adapting to masculinity in times of war, on the other hand, they emphasise a resurrection of pre-revolutionary features in these heroines. Thirdly, regardless of the opposition of Russian Orthodox culture to social authority for female believers, and its emphasis on women’s complete obedience to men and restricting women’s obligations to within the framework of family,72 some scholarly works have considered the revival of traditional expectations about women in Soviet war cinema as an expression of individualism in opposition to the official collectivist approach. Fourthly, regardless of the strong representations of religious-traditional expectations of women, observed by Western scholars in both the GPW period and post- war Stalinist war cinema, the available scholarship does not address any constructive interactions or potential systematic employment of pre-revolutionary patriarchal expectations of women in Soviet war cinema. This literature review reveals that there is no in-depth analysis of different aspects of the representation of women in Soviet war cinema. Available accounts are self-evident descriptions that are not supported by systematic analysis or do not apply methodologies derived from film theory. As a result, the picture of Soviet women in war cinema, shown

70 Youngblood, Russian War Films, p. 69. 71 Ibid, p. 84. 72 Hubbs, Mother Russia, pp. 87-110; Natalia Pushkareva, Women in Russian History, pp. 7-121; Georgii Fedotov, Sviatye Drevnei Rusi (http://predanie.ru/fedotov-georgiy-petrovich/book/69666-svyatye-drevney-rusi/#toc15 , accessed on 20/07/2016); Kirichenko, O. V., Zhenskoe pravoslavhoe podbizhnichestvo v Roccii (XIX-seredina XX v) (sviato-Aleksievskaia Pustyn’, 2010), pp 415-453. 25

by these works, is generalised (largely observational rather than analytical) and ambiguous. There is a lack of systematic analysis in the English-language scholarship that encompasses both categories of Soviet and pre-revolutionary expectations of women in wartime, while most scholarly works on the New Soviet Woman, before and after the GPW period, have observed a compound of contradictions in her image.73 The contradictions in the image of Soviet women in war are observed in such works due to the fact that Soviet gender policy is presumed to have been based on anti-religious Marxist-Leninist ideology, and thus, it is claimed, to have been in conflict with religious- traditional heritage regarding women. Bolshevik leaders claimed that they strongly opposed what they called the oppressive role of all religions towards women. They encouraged Soviet women to participate in social affairs on equal terms to men.74 However, research on Soviet women reveals that at different periods of Soviet history, and under the pressures of specific policies, given elements of official ideology were emphasised differently.75 Accordingly, in keeping with scholars such as Buckley, Lapidus and Attwood, this thesis suggests that a patriarchal understanding of gender differences, moulded to the requirements of economic, political and demographic policies, was dominant in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime.

Aims, Objectives and Research Questions of the Thesis This thesis highlights how essential it is to move beyond the frameworks that separate Soviet planning and social reality, ideal intentions and real consequences. By examining representations of Russian Orthodox culture in cinematic female role models this study aims to reveal the direct impact of Russian particularism in the civilisational or developmental trajectory of Soviet culture. The main objective of this thesis is to provide an analysis of the representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema. This entails an examination of the constructive employment of Russian religious-traditional heritage in relation to the notion of martyrdom and women’s domestic and societal obligations. This thesis argues that examination of the image of the female and

73 Buckley, Women and Ideology, pp.226-233; Linda Edmondson, Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 1-4; Wendy Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 214-254; Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman, pp.79-149; Olga Issoupova, Motherhood and Russian Women: What it Means to Them and Their Attitudes Towards it (PhD Thesis, University of Manchester, 2000); Katherine Eaton, Daily Life in the Soviet Union (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004), pp. 153-175; Natasha Kolchevska, ‘Angels in the Home and at Work: Russian Women in the Khrushchev Years’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 33/3 (2005), 114-137; Timothy Johnston, Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life under Stalin 1939-1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 43-125. 74 Buckley, Women and Ideology, pp. 25-26. 75 See Buckley, Women and Ideology; Gail W. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (University of California Press, 1979); Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman. 26

martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema leads to two main overlapping outcomes. First, to examine how Soviet women’s role in the GPW was represented by one of the most significant Soviet ideological apparatuses ̶ cinema; second, to depict how the employment of war cinema as a platform for exercising the state’s hegemony ensured the submission of Soviet citizens to the ruling ideology. By drawing on the Althusserian theory of Ideological State Apparatuses and post-1970s psychoanalytic film theory the ground is prepared for an examination of the three-way nexus of (a) the female and martyrdom theme as mediator between the ideal female heroism and patriotic obligations, on the one hand, and everyday citizen and family responsibilities, on the other; (b) Stalinist Socialist Realist cinema and the Soviet people’s submission to Bolshevik ideology; (c) national Bolshevism and Russian religious-traditional heritage. The thesis objective will be achieved in three overlapping stages. First, an identification of representations of female suffering and self-sacrifice in the primary sources. This stage involves a close textual reading of the films. They belong to classic narrative cinema, in which cinematic aspects serve the narrative. Accordingly, the focus at this stage is mainly on a close reading of narratives, plots, visual and acoustic aspects, editing, mise-en-scène and sound. Taking into account the impact of pre-revolutionary heritage on cinematic representations of women and martyrdom, it is anticipated that the films under consideration emulate or directly reference the female expectations in these forerunners. Secondly, the examination of the outcomes of the reading of the films in the first stage draws on the Althusserian theory of Ideological State Apparatuses and post-1970 psychoanalytic film theory with the aim of identifying cinematic representations of women and martyrdom. At this stage, interrelations between the representations and their ideological significations will be identified. Thirdly, an analysis of the findings of the two earlier stages takes into account the outcomes of studies of the Russian Orthodox tradition of martyrdom and Orthodox ruler- believer relations, Russian religious-traditional perception of the ideal woman, the Great Soviet Family and the New Soviet Woman. In this respect, the insights relating to the Russian people’s purported belief in their own universal messianic ‘role’, as the ‘chosen’ nation, which has been a widespread conviction amongst Russian Orthodox believers for

centuries, are of significant interest to this thesis.76 Chapter One will discuss the huge impact of the religious value of suffering and the myth of Russian messianism on the construction of the Russian national consciousness as the main basis of shaping the Soviet identity. This stage precisely determines the key features of cinematic images of Soviet women and martyrdom in relation to the dominant ideology, on the one hand, and Russian religious-traditional expectations of a woman in the family, on the other. The realisation of the thesis objective will require answers to the following research questions: 1. What key models of female self-sacrifice are represented in Soviet war films of the Stalin era? 2. How do narrative, visual and other aspects of these films contribute to developing these models of female self-sacrifice? 3. How do these models of female self-sacrifice relate to pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox traditions of self-sacrifice, martyrdom and women’s social duties? 4. What is the relationship between these models of female self-sacrifice, pre- revolutionary patriarchy and Soviet patriarchy during the Stalin era?

Original Contribution to Knowledge This research will be the first book-length analysis of representation of the female in Soviet war cinema to draw a comprehensive picture of the evolution of the cinematic imagery of women and martyrdom. This thesis has the potential to fill a gap in contemporary scholarship on the representation of women in Stalinist cinema. The cinematic representations of women and martyrdom are investigated as features that served the Stalinist identity-building policies that aimed to build an overarching common identity and state-citizens relations. An examination of these representations that explores the degree to which Stalinist Ideological Apparatuses drew on Russian religious-cultural teaching regarding women involves consideration of the historical, social and cultural context of the Stalinist era. This makes the contribution of this thesis original and multidimensional and also gives the thesis the potential to shed light on new topics in

76 See Mikhail Cherniavskii, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961/2011), pp. 101- 128; Nicolai Berdiaev, The Origin of Russian Communism (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1960); Nikolai Berdiaev, ‘K istorii i psikhologii russkogo marksisma’, Poliarnaia zvesda, 10 (1905), 382-390 (http://www.odinblago.ru/opiti_filosovskie/19, accessed on 15/08/2016); V. Gorskii, ‘Russian Messianism and the New National Consciousness’, in The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’ - an Anthology, ed. by Michael Meerson- Aksenov and Boris Shragin (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977), pp. 353-93; Peter Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 1-62.

different fields of Russian Studies, including Soviet Women’s Studies, as well as the study of Soviet identity and state-citizens relations. The last section of the Introduction is allocated to an overview of the thesis structure.

Structure of the Thesis This thesis is divided into five chapters - two conceptual and three analytical. Chapter One identifies the historical and ideological context and the key concepts necessary for analysing the primary sources. It is divided into three main sections. The first section is devoted to the Russian Orthodox tradition of martyrdom and its significant social and political impact on Russian political culture over several centuries. This section also discusses the popular myths of ‘Holy’ Russia and Russian messianism. The second section discusses the popularity of the Orthodox tradition of suffering, and the two above-mentioned myths in the late 19th century and the impact of these religious concepts on Russian thought and revolutionary movements of the time as well as the creation of the term ‘New Person’ and the social movement narodnichestvo. The third section of Chapter One is dedicated to Soviet reinterpretation and employment of the aforementioned Russian Orthodox heritage and traditional values. This reinterpretation had three aspects: the creation of ‘the New Soviet Person’, the identification of state- citizen relations in the context of the myth of ‘the Great Soviet Family’ and the employment of Russian messianism in the service of Soviet messianism. Chapter Two introduces the theory and the methodological framework used for the examination of the thesis primary sources. The chapter has four sections. The first section follows on from the discussion of the Russian Orthodox understanding of suffering in Chapter One to examine the impact of the Orthodox martyrdom tradition on Russian women. It argues that the main demands made of a female Orthodox believer, i.e. to suffer at an individual level and to sacrifice the self for the family, resulted in Russian women being deprived of social authority for centuries. This section studies how these religious expectations of female believers were deployed as a tool in the struggle against the backwardness amongst Russian peasantry in the late 19th century. This section further discusses how the Orthodox expectation that a female believer would sacrifice the self for the family was adopted by the Soviets in the context of the Great Family with the New Soviet Woman’s main obligation at home and at the workplace.

The second section of Chapter Two discusses the thesis theoretical framework. It begins with an account of the general aspects of Soviet Socialist Realism. Given that the main aim of Soviet Socialist Realist cinema was to reflect reality as it should be, Althusser’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses is an appropriate framework for this research. Althusserian theory, which is the second subject of this section, strives the survival of state power over a long period as ensured only by the exercise of the state’s dominance through its Ideological Apparatuses. The application of this theory prepares the ground for presenting post-1970s psychoanalytic film theory as the most suitable methodology for examining representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema. According to this film theory, cinema functions as an ideological apparatus and female cinematic representations in classic cinema reflect ‘the unconscious of patriarchal society’.77 The third section of Chapter Two is allocated to introducing post-1970s psychoanalytic film theory, together with the primary sources of the thesis and the rationale for choosing these particular sources. The outcomes of the examination of the historical and ideological context in Chapter One, and the discussion of the theory and methodology frameworks in Chapter Two, prepare the ground for the analysis of primary sources in the subsequent three chapters. Chapters Three and Four examine GPW period films, and then Chapter Five examines post-GPW Stalinist war cinema. The unifying feature running through these three analytical chapters is that the engagement of cinematic heroines in the GPW is displayed as limited to womanly, sisterly or motherly functions without indications of individuality in battle. The GPW period films with female characters as leading heroines or significant protagonists are in this research divided into two main categories. The first category, which is the subject of Chapter Three, contains young heroines who take the roles of fiancées, wives or widows of warriors fighting on the battlefield. They are shown to be fighters on the battlefront, unskilled volunteers on the battlefield and young women behind the front who in no way contribute directly to the war. The second category, which is the subject of Chapter Four, contains films whose lead heroines play the part of symbolic mothers or chosen ‘sons’ in the Great Soviet Family. They defend home under the German occupation while men are absent. What has determined this classification of

77 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. by Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 483-94 (p. 483).

primary sources are different generations’ expectations of female members of the Great Family in wartime. In Stalinist post-GPW war cinema, which is the subject of Chapter Five, the threat of war to the position of ‘fathers’ in the Great Family (Soviet leadership) is ignored, and the symbolic mothers of the GPW period films, who resist the enemy at home, disappear and young women represent objects of the male gaze. The final section of this thesis, the Conclusion, is devoted to revisiting the research objective and questions. It clarifies the way in which the questions have been answered and the thesis’s original contribution to knowledge.

Chapter One: Historical and Ideological Context

1.1 Introduction The Introduction argued that the Russian Orthodox Church on the verge of the 1917 Revolution remained one of the main social institutions in Russia. Both the tsarist state and the Church opposed any fundamental reforms in the economic, social and political systems, which would threaten the triangle of state-Church-nation relations.78 Accordingly, the social, economic and cultural circumstances in Russia on the eve of the 1917 Revolution indicate the absence of conditions necessary to establish a state based on Marxist-Leninist ideology. As this chapter will later show, the key discourses on Soviet modernity agree that Stalinist policies were not coherently shaped by Marxist-Leninist ideology, but rather by particularistic traits, above all, traditional Russian features. It was these that were employed to establish Soviet state-society relations and reinforce solidarity amongst the Soviet peoples. The key questions raised in the Introduction were: how did the Stalinist regime exercise control over the people and inspire them to sacrifice themselves and their dearest ones for ‘anti-religious’ Stalinist national Bolshevism? This chapter aims to provide the necessary foundation for answering these questions, a task that will take place in the analytical chapters of this thesis, in the form of an examination of cinematic images of Soviet women and martyrdom. Arch Getty in Practicing Stalinism shows the explicit similarities between the Stalinist era and Russia’s distant past. For instance, he points to analogous practices in political culture exercised simultaneously by boyars in Old Russia and the Bolsheviks. He remarks that Russian and Stalinist history are derived from the same stream.79 Sergei Uvarov (1786-1855), the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences 1818-1855, identified autocracy (samoderzhavie), Orthodoxy (pravoslavie), and nationality (narodnost’) as the Russian ‘three great state principles’, which together sculpted the ‘distinctive character of Russia’.80 Drawing on Uvarov’s well-known triad, this chapter argues that the significant value of suffering in Russian Orthodoxy was the element that connected the three components of this triad. The first section of this chapter discusses the

78 Richard Hellie,‘The Structure of Russian Imperial History’, pp. 88-112; Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, pp. 3-12; Tracy Dennison, and Steven Nafziger, ‘Living Standards in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, Interdisciplinary History, 43/3 (2012), pp. 397-441. 79 Arch Getty, Practicing Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars, and the Persistence of Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) pp.1-24. 80 Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), p 186; Nikolai Barsukov, Istochniki Russkoi Agiografii (Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1882), pp. 82-85. 32

values of suffering and martyrdom in Russian Orthodoxy. It argues that Orthodox princes in Russian political culture were considered role models of suffering for the faith in Orthodoxy and the ‘holy’ Rus’ lands. This quality granted them the right to claim unlimited power over Orthodox believers. The section further discusses the notion of Russian messianism. It argues that due to the belief in the holiness of Rus’ and its universal divine ‘mission’ to save human beings, sacrificing oneself for Rus’ was perceived as far more than a mere patriotic duty. In fact, according to the Orthodox Church, ordinary believers had to consider it an honour to die for their ‘holy’ rulers as the role models of suffering for both ‘Holy’ Rus’ and its universal divine mission. The second section of this chapter examines how the belief in the universal mission for ‘Holy’ Rus’ and Orthodox believers was resurrected in the 19th century and how it prepared the ground for the acceptance of Marxism amongst the Russian intelligentsia. It revived the Orthodox value of suffering for the universal mission of Russia, this time under the tutelage of Marxist messianism. The last section of this chapter is allocated to the Soviet reinterpretation of Russian Orthodox heritage and values. This claim is examined along two lines: First, Russian messianism as the necessary foundation for the establishment of national Bolshevism under Stalin’s regime; second, the construction of the myths of the Soviet New Person and the Great Soviet Family under Stalinism. These two myths are among the key notions of this research, and are accordingly discussed in this chapter.

1.2 Russian Orthodox Political Culture

1.2.1 Russian Orthodoxy and the Values of Suffering and Martyrdom The tradition of suffering came to Kievan Rus’ with its conversion to Christianity in the tenth century. Suffering in life and sacrificing one’s earthly contentment, accepted as the mission of true Christians, soon became highly valorised virtues amongst the people.81 Russian Orthodox texts expressed admiration for self-abnegation and promoted it in statements such as ‘sorrows and pains make the sufferers glorious, as gold in fire becomes still brighter’.82 Truly standing up against evil and defeating it, according to Orthodox teaching, was possible only through denying one’s earthly desires and complete smirenie in life.

81 George Fedotov,The Russian Religious Mind, Vol., 2 (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 81-112. 82 Ibid, p. 93. 33

Linguist Anna Wierzbicka in her semantic analysis explains smirenie as follows: ‘Acceptance of one's fate, achieved through moral effort, through suffering, and through realisation of one's total dependence on God, an acceptance resulting not only in an attitude of non-resistance to evil but also in profound peace and a loving attitude towards one's fellow human beings’.83 The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev (1874-1948) argues that ‘the slavish doctrine of smirinei’ demands obedience and submission ‘even with respect to evil’ so seriously that it excludes any possibility of protest in life.84 Sigmund Freud in his essay on Dostoevsky presents a similar attitude about smirinei’ in Russian Orthodoxy: ‘…after the most violent struggles to reconcile the instinctual demands of the individual with the claims of the community’ [a moral man submits] ‘both to temporal and spiritual authority, of veneration both for the Tsar and for the God of the Christians, and of a narrow Russian nationalism.’ Freud identifies the moral man’s compromise as ‘a characteristic Russian trait’.85 Offering an analogous opinion, the Russian philosopher and theologian George Fedotov (1886-1951) considers smirenie to be a superior moral value which has become one of the most highly valued characteristics of “the Russian religious mind” and a national Russian feature.86 The impact of smirenie on the social lives of Russian Orthodox believers is understood through another significant value in Orthodoxy ̶ martyrdom. The tradition of martyrdom in Christianity as the climax of suffering had three aspects: the individual martyr, the message, and the community. Christ was respected as the eternal role model of suffering and the perpetual witness to the truth of the conviction. The belief that his self-sacrifice was to be followed gave martyrdom in Christianity a strong social aspect. In critical situations when the community’s faith was under attack, the most fervent believers in the community would imitate the action of the eternal martyr by sacrificing themselves to protect the common belief. This achievement ̶ infusing new blood into the body of the community and thus awakening and strengthening it ̶ elevated martyrs to the position of role models for the community. However, the point is that not everybody who sacrificed themselves was recognised as a martyr.87

83 Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations, (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 189. 84 Berdiaev, Towards a New Epoch, (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949), p 68. 85 Freud, Sigmund ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’ in Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, Ed. by D. Rancour-Laferriere, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989), p. 41. 86 Fedotov, The Russian Religious, Vol. 1, pp.94- 110. 87 Karin Hyldal Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory (Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), pp. 21-32; Meir Hatina, Martyrdom in Modern Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 19-36. 34

Historically in the lands of Rus’ and later Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church was the only authority able to grant the title of martyr. The Russian Church’s approach to the concept of martyrdom and canonisation reveals a tendency to restrict the award of the valuable title of martyr to clergymen and princes.88 Justification for this selection was rooted in the role of such individuals in promoting and preserving the Church’s position among Orthodox believers.89 According to historian of religion Elizabeth Castelli, the social importance of martyrdom in Christianity is due to the power of martyrdom to forge a collective memory and identity for commemorated martyrs, since the cult of martyrdom produces a distinct social order, which supports the Christian martyr’s claim to a ‘privileged status in relation to truth and public authority’.90 The Russian Orthodox Church’s definition of martyrdom and its criteria for choosing and canonising sufferers and martyrs support Castelli’s argument. Given that the Orthodox Church in Kievan Rus’ was almost the only source of political thought, and Slavic Orthodox princes and the faith in Orthodoxy were the only real aspects of the state,91 the title of martyr granted a prince unique social authority. In light of the three aspects of the martyrdom tradition, this social position identified him as a sufferer for elevating the significance of faith in Orthodoxy in the community. The next section will argue that Orthodox princes were regarded as role models of suffering, and that ruler-nation relations were constructed by drawing on their sanctity.

1.2.2 Orthodox Princes: The Role Models of Sacrificing the Self for Faith and the ‘Holy’ Lands of Rus’ A Christian ruler as the representative of Christ on earth (i.e. the mediator between God and people) was granted the dual nature of Christ: on the one hand, the ruler as a saint was perceived as having religious-spiritual aspects grounded in his princely nature, and on the other hand, as a secular prince, he was expected to have the weaknesses and mortality of a man. In other words, a ruler was regarded as God in his function and a man

88 John Burgess, ‘Retrieving the Martyrs in Order to Rethink the Political Order: The Russian Orthodox Case’, Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 34/2 (2014), 177-201 (p. 181). See Geoffrey Croix, Michael Whitby, and Joseph Streeter, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 153-201. 89 K.S. Emelyanov, ‘Sotsial’nye aspekty sovremennykh kanonizatsii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi’, Sotsiologicheskii Zhurnal, 1 (2005), 21-36 (http://www.isras.ru/Sociologicalmagazine.01.2005.html?en&printmode, accessed on 11/04/2016); Aleksandr Mazyrin, ‘Istoriia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi v XX veke: Mesto zhenshin v Sobore Novomuchenikov i ispovednikov Rossiiskikh’ (http://pstgu.ru/news/life/history_rpc/2013/10/29/48859/ , accessed on 18/03/2019). See also M.A. Diakonov, Vlast’ Moskovskikh Gosudarei (St. Petersburg, 1889), as cited in Tsar and People, p. 6. 90 Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 198. 91 See Cherniavskii, Tsar and People, pp. 32-40. 35

in his being.92 In Russian Orthodoxy, the assumed duality of the nature of Christian rulers was apportioned between two groups of princes, namely princely saints and saintly princes.93 The first group - princely saints - comprised princes (and a small number of princesses), who were not necessarily sincerely pious or who did not die suffering;94 rather, they were considered saints, and thus canonised, due to their saintly background, as well as their specific support for the institution of the Orthodox Church as the main trustee of the faith in the Orthodox Christian community.95 The second sub-group of canonised princes - saintly princes - comprised warriors- saints, who fought for the sake of the Rus’ lands. Everybody had to obey the saintly prince, because his power was regarded as ordained by God.96 The most popular saint in this category was Prince Aleksandr Nevskii (died 1263), who throughout his life fought against the enemies of Rus’.97 The sanctification of Russian saintly princes is important to this research for two reasons. First, there was no Orthodox princess amongst them. Second, there was no canonised Russian lay saint featured in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church except for saintly princes.98 As the records testify, the Russian Orthodox Church presented only the warriors-princes who died for the sake of Rus’ (especially in critical times as martyrs). For instance, in the Mongol Empire invasion of Kievan Rus' in the 13th century all the Orthodox princes killed in battle were granted the title of martyrs. By contrast, ordinary Orthodox believers killed in wars against the enemies of Rus’ were never counted amongst the martyrs. According to the Russian Church, it was the believer’s duty, not their choice, to die for the Rus’ lands and its Orthodox princes.99 This distinction between ordinary warriors and princes was justified by highlighting the nobility and subjectivity of Orthodox princes. All saintly princes were viewed as coming from a remarkable category of human beings, i.e. the representatives of Christ on earth and the mediators between God and the people. The Russian Church considered warrior princes to be willing individuals who voluntarily accepted their divine mission, i.e.

92 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 28-29. 93 Cherniavskii, Tsar and People, pp. 5-44. 94 Emelyanov, ‘Sotsial’nye aspekty sovremennykh’, p. 29. 95 Barsukov, Istochniki Russkoi agiografii, 82. 96 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 33-42; Fedotov, Sviatoi Filipp Mitropolit Moskovskii (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1928), pp. 78-99. 97 Cherniavskii, Tsar and People, p. 20. 98 Ibid, p. 10. 99 Ibid, p. 23. 36

suffering and sacrificing themselves for Christ and the lands of Orthodox believers. By contrast, ordinary believers were regarded not as individuals, but as masses lacking the capacity for voluntary self-sacrifice. The presented images of both sub-groups of princes by the Russian Orthodox Church promoted the idea of smirenie. Identifying with princely saints as role models promoted the idea of the absence of rational individual choice and individualism amongst Orthodox believers on both private and social levels. The image of saintly princes reinforced the impact of the previous sub-group, for they represented the only lay believers who voluntarily died for Christ and the Rus’ lands. This quality, on the one hand, deprived believers of individuality, choice and the privilege of martyrdom; on the other hand, this represented the Rus’ lands as holy and so significant that dying for them granted the title of martyr to princes. The death of saintly princes in wars against the enemies of the Rus’ lands was considered equivalent to dying for Orthodox Christianity.100 Moreover, the Church perceived Orthodox princes responsible not only for people’s deeds, but also their thoughts and souls;101 thus to oppose their will was equal to opposing the law of God.102 The status of the saintly princes had two far reaching outcomes. First, the distinction drawn between rulers and masses granted them absolute authority to claim privileged status in the community and the right to rule the Rus’ lands. Second, it resulted in the construction of a spiritual foundation for acceptance of a patriarchal political system of power among Orthodox believers. The image of Orthodox princes interconnected Orthodoxy with autocracy and functioned as the foundation for ruler-religion-believer relations. The best path to salvation was considered to be to obediently follow these role models of smirenie, to suffer, and even die, for the ‘holy’ Rus’ lands. Moreover, the historical support of the Orthodox Church for the subordination of Orthodox believers before the paternal figures of the Church and denial of their individuality, alongside the idea of the divine entitlement of Orthodox princes to rule people’s deeds, thoughts and souls constructed a hierarchical father-son type of social relationship in Orthodox Russia103 (later this chapter argues that this patriarchal mentality was employed in the founding of the myth of the Great Soviet Family under Stalin’s regime). Alongside the sanctity of Russian princes, the belief in the holiness of Rus’ resulted in the popularity of the myth of Russian messianism

100 Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 33-42; Fedotov, Sviatoi Filipp, pp. 78-99. 101 Fedotov, The Russian Religious, Vol. 1, pp. 397- 401. 102 Mikhail Priselkov, Troitskaia letopis’:rekonstruktsiia teksta (Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1950), p. 254. 103 Pushkareva, Women in Russian, pp. 36-44. 37

and reinforcement of the ruler-people relations among Russians. Orthodox believers were convinced that in the absence of complete obedience to princes and guidance from them, the universal divine ‘mission’ of ‘Holy’ Russia (Russian messianism) would not be achieved.104 This section argues that the following three factors were essential to the construction of ruler-people relations throughout Russian history: attributing subjectivity to Orthodox saintly princes; depriving the Orthodox masses of individuality; and considering them as dependent on Christ’s representatives on earth. It also argues that the Russian Orthodox value of suffering and the images of Orthodox princes as the role models of suffering linked together the three components of Uvarov’s triad of the Russian character. Discussion of the deployment of the Russian Orthodox tradition of suffering in the construction of national Bolshevism and the Great Soviet Family requires a grasp of this tradition prior to the founding of the Soviet Union. The next part of this chapter argues that the popularity of the belief in a universal divine ‘mission’ for Russia among Russian late 19th century thinkers and social movements, enabled the 1917 October Revolution, and later, the establishment of national Bolshevism. This argument corresponds to the Althusserian argument regarding the survival of Ideological State Apparatuses even after revolutions and crucial social changes,105 which will be discussed in Chapter Two.

1.3 The Ideas of ‘Holy’ Rus’ and Russian Messianism and the Adoption of the Russian Orthodox Traditions of Suffering and Martyrdom in the 19th Century The idea of ‘Holy’ (Sviataia) Rus’ was rooted in the medieval belief in Rus’ as a land ‘exalted by its orthodoxy and purity, entrusted to a princely clan which in common held Russia and in common ruled over it’.106 The Orthodox Church identified the princes of Rus’ as the representatives of Christ on earth, the people of Rus’ as the only believers in Christianity chosen and preferred by God to grasp the Messiah’s prophesy, and the city of Moscow as the centre of Christianity to transmit a specific religious calling and to display the final meaning of history.107 Belief in the holiness of Orthodox princes and of the lands of Rus’ resulted in the foundation of the religious-historical idea of Russian messianism

104 Fedotov, The Russian Religious, vol. 1, p. 398. 105 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 94. 106 Vasilii Kliuchevsky, Boiarskaia duma drevnei Rusi (Moscow, 1883), p. 241 quoted in Cherniavskii, Tsar and People, p. 109. For a discussion on ‘Holy’ Rus’ see Cherniavskii, Tsar and People, pp. 101-114. 107 Aleksandr Kartashev, Essays on the History of the Russian Church (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1959), pp. 368-369. 38

as the divine ‘mission’ of Rus’ to guide all Christians to salvation.108 Once they believed in the two myths of ‘Holy’ Russia and Russian messianism, Orthodox believers were expected to accept suffering and to sacrifice themselves not only for the ‘holy’ home of Christ ̶ Rus’ ̶ but also for the dominance of truth and justice in the world. The belief in the holiness of Rus’ and its universal divine ‘mission’ was essential in the shaping of Russian national consciousness.109 Belief in the holiness of Rus’ and the uniqueness of Russian Orthodox believers ran so deep that even in the absence of a strong image of a holy ruler in some historical periods, myths of ‘Holy’ Russia and Russian messianism still actively survived among the Russian people. For instance, following the reforms of Peter the Great (1696-1725) and the official rejection of the title of ‘Christian Emperor of the East’ and even without the idea of ‘Moscow – the Third Rome’, the general belief in the holiness of Russia did not change amongst Orthodox believers.110 Later, important changes in the political and social structures of Russian society in the 19th century,111 especially in the second half, led to the image of the Russian tsar losing its holiness. Nevertheless, there was a strong common belief amongst ordinary believers, as well as different Russian thinkers and revolutionaries, in the Russian nation possessing the capability for a universal mission.112 This section discusses the impact of the belief in the holiness of Russia and the uniqueness of the Russian nation through examining two significant events of the 19th century, namely the creation of the notion of the New Person (novyi chelovek) and the establishment of the narodnichestvo (popularist) movement which aimed to revive the obshchina community amongst Russian peasantry. This thesis argues that these two events testify that preparation of the ground for acceptance of the notions of the New Soviet Man and the Great Soviet Family was already underway in the last decades of the 19th century. Despite all ideological differences, the majority of Russian thinkers and revolutionaries of the late 19th century identified the Russian peasantry as the key aspect of Russia and as separate from the ruling class. They advocated establishing the peasant collective – obshchina – as the solution to Russian backwardness.113 In the absence of any

108 Ibid, p. 374. 109 Cherniavskii, Tsar and People, pp. 101-114; see also Duncan, Russian Messianism, 14-17. 110 Duncan, Russian Messianism, p. 14. 111Such as the failed reforms of Alexander II, the increasing dissatisfaction of Russian peasants after their emancipation, their immigration into cities, the growth of the urban working class, the implications of increasing political extremism, etc. 112 Duncan, Russian Messianism, p. 18-47; see also Gorskii, ‘Russian Messianism’, pp. 354-358. 113 Aleksei S. Khomiakov, Izbrannye sochineniia, Vol. 4 (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1900), pp. 231- 35. See also James H. Billington, Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 64. 39

emphasis on a strong ruling system, obshchina was defined as a community based on the highest moral principles, ‘a union of the people who have renounced their egotism, their own personality, and who express their common agreement and love’.114 This ideal community was supposed to bring sacred freedom to the people; not a legal freedom, but a spiritual one - freedom of the soul, despite the suffering of an earthly slavish life.115 The notion of subservience to the faith, necessary for the realisation of a Utopian world, was a significant value in Russian mentality. Russian thinkers such as Petr Chaadaev went as far as to claim that all aspects of Russian life including customs, ideals, values, education, even the concept of freedom reflected this aspect of subservience.116 The Russian poet and religious thinker Dmitrii Merezhkovskii (1865-1941) constantly emphasised the importance for Russians of being slave-hearted.117 According to him ‘in freedom they [Russians] are sinful, in subservience they are holy’. He called ‘Holy’ Russia the land of holy slaves.118 Thus, the concept of the ‘holy’ slave in the 19th century still linked earthly slave-service to spiritual salvation. As already mentioned, the Russian peasant, a serf in daily life, was considered ‘holy’ in unification with ‘Holy’ Russia. Note that the definitions of notions such as freedom, slavery, the Russian peasant and obshchina were all imaginary, vague and idealistic. This significant point helps us both to realise the Russians’ fascination with the Marxist prophecy and to frame the intellectual context in which the myths of the New Soviet Person and the Great Soviet Family would later be moulded. For instance, despite his critical view of Russian Marxism and revolutionaries, Berdiaev ‘shared Marx’s prophecy concerning a new world’ in which fate, ‘whether historical, political or economic’, is dominant. However, according to him everything in ‘this world’ is spiritualised.119 This belief in the uniqueness of the Russian peasantry and its universal ‘mission’ to build a Utopian world, a widespread belief in Russia during the last decades of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th centuries, would result in the resurrection of the Christian ascetic value of sacrificing oneself for the sake of one’s convictions. The term ‘New Person’ which referred to revolutionaries eager to sacrifice themselves in the struggle against Russian backwardness, arose in Russia with Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s

114 Konstantin Aksakov, Sobranie sochineniia, vol. 1 (Moscow: Tipografiia P. Bakhmeteva, 1880), p. 291. 115 Nikolai Arsen’ev, ed., Khomiakov, A. Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. 4, p. 115. 116 Petr L. Chaadaev, Stat’i i pis’ma (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), pp. 202-204. 117 Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 15 (Moscow: Tipografiia I.D. Sytina, 1914), p.173. 118 Ibid. 119 Berdiaev, Self-Knowledge: An Essay in Autobiography, (1949, San Rafael, Calif.: Semantron Press, 2009). p. 133. 40

well-known novel Chto delat’? (What Is to Be Done?) in 1863.120The novel illustrates the crucial impact of Russian culture on the Russian revolutionaries of the time, alongside that of Marx, Engels and other Marxists. In this respect, Lenin pointed out: ‘I became acquainted with the works of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov, but it was only Chernyshevskii who had an overwhelming influence on me.’ Lenin described the novel as ‘a work which gives one a charge for a whole life.’121 In fact, the novel had a major popular resonance. Under the influence of Chernyshevskii, the popular revolutionary of the time Sergei Nechaev (1847-1882) presented a definition of ‘a revolutionary’ which intersects with the ideal Christian believer. According to him, ‘the revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion — the revolution’.122 The ‘New Person’ promoted by Russian revolutionaries of the time appears strikingly similar to the profile of a devout Christian in Russian culture with regard to their respective total obedience to their convictions and denial of their individuality before their convictions. Vladimir C. Nahirny’s research shows an inner relationship between personality and ideology amongst Russian revolutionaries, who did not hesitate to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their convictions.123 Tibor Szamuely observes that the cult of suffering and the idea of the necessity of self-sacrifice as a way to cleanse one’s guilt for human beings suffering existed in the philosophy of the Russian intelligentsia of the time.124 Moreover, during the last decades before the 1917 Revolution, especially after 1905, a large number of the Russian intelligentsia, including Marxists, turned to religious and theosophical movements.125 In this respect Joanna Hubbs, an expert in Slavonic religion and mythology, points out that the Russian intelligentsia, having assumed the role of the ‘Humiliated Christ’ for itself, sacrificed personal ambition for the salvation of the people and the Motherland.126 It must be noticed that a significant number of Russian thinkers and revolutionaries of the time were Jews. However, ‘Russian Jews, as a rule, see

120 The term ‘New Person’ (novyi chelovek) was used to refer to the Russian revolutionaries, who eagerly sacrificed themselves to struggle against Russian backwardness. 121 Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin: A Biography (New York: Free Press, 2016), p. 20. 122 Philip Pomper, Sergei Nechaev (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 78. 123 Vladimir C. Nahirny, The Russian Intelligentsia: From Torment to Silence (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1987, p. 87. 124 Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 160-161. 125 See Berdiaev, Vekhi - Landmarks: a collection of articles about the Russian intelligentsia translated and edited by Marshall S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman (Armonk, N.Y.; London : M.E. Sharp, 1994). 126 Hubbs, Mother Russia, p. 230. 41

no problem with being Jewish Christians.’127 Moreover, identification with the ancient Jewish belief in being the Chosen People, chosen by God for a divine mission, lingered on even among secular Jews, and thus it had the capacity to unify Jews and Orthodox members of the Russian intelligentsia of the time as a whole. Alongside the emergence of New Men, the impact of Russia Orthodox culture on pre-revolutionary events is revealed in the establishment of the narodnichestvo movement, which aimed to revive the obshchina community amongst the Russian peasantry. Having linked the old notion of the obshchina to notions such as sociality and humanity, New Men called Russian peasants (kpest’iane) real socialists, while an Orthodox view of humans was evoked in the revolutionaries’ understanding of such modern terms. Nahirny observes that Russian revolutionaries understood ‘sociality’ as the complete commitment of individuals to ideals and convictions, and ‘humanity’ as a community of socio-economic equals similar to the obshchina. As a result, they perceived any individual interests as ‘inhuman’.128 As with their understanding of the idea of the obshchina, Russian revolutionaries’ vision of socialism and humanity was abstract, with strong collective aspects. While there was no room for an independent individual as a member of civil society, their view of socialism was filled with a strong spirit of self- sacrifice, cultivated by ideology, for the sake of human beings.129 In this respect, the narodnichestvo movement of the 1860s and 1870s aimed to educate Russian peasants, because according to the narodniks,130 once educated, Russian peasants would release their own revolutionary potential, and thus they would serve as role models for the realisation of universal socialism.131 The fact that the narodnichestvo movement was supported by an extensive number of late 19th century Russian thinkers and revolutionaries, including the Slavophiles, the Westernizers and materialists,132 testifies that the Russian Orthodox myths of ‘Holy’ Russia and Russian messianism were the common features connecting Russian intellectuals with religious, nationalist and materialist affiliations. This also reveals how Russian Orthodox heritage was resurrected under the name of desirable

127 Shmuel Galai, “The Jewish Question as a Russian Problem: The Debates in the First State Duma” Revolutionary Russia, 2004, Vol.17 (1), p. 50. 128 Nahirny, The Russian Intelligentsia, p.187. 129 Ibid, p. 187. 130 Narodnichestvo (народничество), from the word narod (people), was a social movement popular in the 1860s and 1870s Russia. Narodniks were popular for their slogan khozhdenie v narod (going to the people). The aim of this movement was to trigger revolution amongst the peasantry and thus transform Russian society into one of equality for everyone. 131 Duncan, Russian Messianism, pp. 30-48. 132Peter Duncan, ‘Changing Landmarks? Anti-Westernism in National Bolshevik and Russian Revolutionary Thought’, in Russian Nationalism: Past and Present, ed. by Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 55-76. See also Gorskii, ‘Russian Messianism’, p. 362-363. 42

modern discourses of the time namely Marxism. Accordingly, although the narodnichestvo movement was constructed in the shadow of Chernyshevskii’s novel and its heroes, belief in the uniqueness of the Russian peasantry and its community ̶ the obshchina ̶ brought together advocates of both Russian messianism and Russian Marxism.133 In fact, the significant place of collectivity in Marxism, as in the idea of the obshchina, was one of the main reasons the theory so appealed to the Russians. Alongside the messianic nature of the Russian interpretation of Marxism, which implicitly provoked the revival of the myth of Russian messianism among Russian Marxists, there is evidence indicating a revival of messianism among them. For instance, the well-known Marxists of the time such as Anatoly Lunacharskii, (1875-1933), Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) and Vladimir Bazarov (1874- 1939) admitted that socialism was a religion. They were members of ‘God-building’ (bogostroitel’stvo), a phenomenon that represented a religious interpretation of the world Proletariat’s mission and considered the future of communism to be truly divine. Seeing socialism as a way of entering the ‘promised land’ on earth, God-building considered the working class as the Christ of the day in sayings such as ‘the new Messiah [the Proletariat] claims Golgotha, its blood flows, it is nailed to the cross.’134 As Christopher Read argues, this interpretation of the universal messianic rule of the proletariat influenced Bolshevist Marxism. 135 One can conclude that while the presentation of the Russian peasantry and its ‘remarkable’ ability to establish the obshchina was abstract, the precise characteristics of this promised Utopian community did not receive sufficient consideration from Russian thinkers and revolutionaries of the time. The next section argues that the imaginary perceptions of Russian messianism, the Russian peasantry and its outstanding moral capabilities, popular amongst Russian thinkers and revolutionaries before the establishment of the Soviet state, prepared the ground for accepting the myths of Soviet messianism and the New Soviet Man. These myths were necessary for the adoption of the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ in the mid-1920s, which resulted in the establishment of national Bolshevism under Stalin’s regime.

133 Duncan, ‘Changing Landmarks?’,pp. 66-69. 134 Duncan, Russian Messianism’, p. 52. 135 Christopher Read, Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900-1912: The Vekhi Debate and its Intellectual Background (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 80. 43

1.4 Soviet Reinterpretation of Russian Orthodox Values of Suffering and Martyrdom

1.4.1 Resurrection of the Idea of Russian Messianism under the Name of Soviet Messianism Alongside Russian Orthodox heritage, the notion of New Soviet Man also reflected the impact of Marxism, because the Soviet Union was considered the product of Marxist- Leninist ideology, which rejected individualism. Marx considered the human essence not as an abstraction inherent in each single individual, but as the outcome of social relations136 and dependent on continuous social change.137 Within this framework, the Bolsheviks theorised that modification of social class relations, along with change in the mode of production, would eventually alter the essence of the Soviet Person (sovetskii chelovek). However, the dream of establishing the worldwide rule of the proletariat came to an end after the European Marxist movements failed to gain power and to join the Soviet Union. This resulted in the abandonment of Lenin’s postulation regarding the impossibility of constructing socialism in one separate country without the support of the international proletariat. The policy of ‘socialism in one country’ was adopted in 1924, the realisation of which required extraordinary efforts. Accordingly, in their rhetoric, Soviet officials frequently remarked on the necessity of creating a new type of human being appropriate for the achievement of this ‘mission’. For instance, the first Soviet People's Commissar, Anatoly Lunacharskii pointed out that: ‘Little by little a new man is being born . . . [and] we must follow the exact process of his birth’.138 In this respect, Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) argued that the goal of the Revolution was to ‘alter people’s actual psychology’ and that ‘one of the priorities of scientific planning is the question of the systematic preparation of New Men, the builders of socialism’.139 Mathew Lenoe in his research on Stalinist culture and society reveals that the NEP project of mass enlightenment, which aimed to create the New Soviet Man ceased to appear anywhere in the Soviet print media during the first stage of the Stalin era.140 Furthermore, research on the Soviet Order reveals unscientific aspects of its planning. As

136 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1904), pp. 11–12. 137 Karl Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, ed. by Clemens P. Dutt and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (New York: International Publisher, 1936), p. 124. 138 Ella Winter, Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1933), p. 10. 139 Andrei Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization: A Cultural History, (New York: Arcade Pub, 1991), p. 115. 140 Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp, 103-45. 44

Lynne Viola in her research on Stalinist collectivisation points out Soviet planning ‘shared much more in common with Socialist Realism than with ‘scientific’ social engineering.’141 Given that ideology, science and culture were forcefully interwoven under the Soviet Union, it is necessary to distinguish modernism in different aspects of the Soviet Order.142 Two principal discourses can be found in scholarship on Soviet modernity. First, the ‘Multiple Modernities’ discourse, which identifies modernity as the ‘internalisation of authority’ and different from Westernisation. This perceives the Soviet Order as an important alternative form among broader 20th century modernities.143 In his work on Stalinist values, David Hoffmann identifies ‘social interventionism and mass politics’ as ‘two features common to all modern political systems’ of the time.144 Stephen Kotkin recognises mass politics, mass production and mass culture as the three aspects of Stalinist modernity.145 Kotkin and Hoffmann recognise no contradiction between the planning of modern mass politics and using the mobilisational power of ‘traditional appeals and symbols’ under the Stalin regime,146 because for them modernity is not ‘a sociological process—moving from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ society—but rather a geopolitical process: a matter of acquiring what it [takes]’ to join the great powers, or fall victim to them.’147 It should be noted that, having acknowledged similarities between the Western and the Soviet alternative modernities, Multiple Modernities scholarship perceives the latter to be distinctive and particular, derived from a long-term Russian historical path or from Stalinist civilisation.148 The second key discourse in Soviet modernity scholarship is ‘Neo-traditionalism’, which acknowledges the presence of elements of Western modernity in the Soviet Order, such as industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation, universal education, and literacy. However, these were subordinated to the charismatic-traditional aspects of a unique system.149 Neo-traditionalists regard the Soviet Order to have been a unique system, one which produced ‘a variety of practices that bear a striking resemblance to characteristic

141 Lynne Viola, ‘The Aesthetic of Stalinist Planning and the World of the Special Villages,’ in Kritika 4, no. 1 (2003), pp. 101–28, p.128. 142 See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (NY: Verso Books, 2010), p. 88. 143 See S. N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’ in Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000): 1–29; Yanni Kotsonis, “Introduction: A Modern Paradox: Subject and Citizen in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russia,” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp 1-16. 144 David Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941, (NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 7. 145 Stephen Kotkin, ‘Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,’ Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 1 (2001): pp.111–164. 146 Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 247. 147 Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (New York: Penguin, 2015), 62–63. 148 See David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), pp. 1-16, 306-14. 149 Ronald Suny, Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution (NY: Verso Books, 2017), pp. 53-123. 45

features of traditional pre-modern societies’.150 According to these scholars, modernisation was ‘the theory of Soviet intentions; neo-traditionalism, the theory of their unintended consequences.’ These unintended consequences led the system on to a ‘distinct developmental path to an industrial modernity’.151 The significance of these key discourses in Soviet modernity scholarship to this research is that both confirm a combination of particularistic traits, peculiarly Russian traditional features in the Soviet Order. Both agree that Bolshevik decision-making was not based on a coherent ideology and that the Stalinist leadership frequently elevated heroic operations over scientific rationality.152 Having worked on divisions within Stalinism and clashes between charismatic and scientist approaches, David Priestland considers that ‘a ‘neo-traditionalist’ position emerged within Bolshevism, which, in effect, departed from Marxism.’153 In this respect Michael David-Fox points out that ‘due to [the] unsustainability of permanent revolutionary upheaval within the system, revivalism and hierarchical neo-traditionalist approaches attracted Stalin better.154 One can conclude that while Soviet projects in science, the economy and technology were heirs to the scientific tradition of the European Enlightenment, social and cultural planning was significantly interwoven with ideology. In other words, ‘the question of the systematic preparation of New Men’ under Stalin’s regime, contrary to Bukharin’s argument, reflected aspects of Soviet Socialist Realism rather than of the European Enlightenment. The Marxist idea regarding the malleability of human nature, next to the huge authority assigned to the state in this theory, steered Bolsheviks towards the 19th century Russian thinkers’ aspiration of actuating the outstanding moral capacities of the Russian peasant. The Soviet leadership, having referred to the objectives of the narodnichestvo movement on a pan-state scale, designated a modern type of Russian peasant as the role model of self-sacrifice for the establishment of ‘socialism in one country’ and essential for the realisation of the universal rule of the Proletariat.155 This argument is based on the definition of the Soviet Person, i.e. ‘loyal to Soviet values and ready to sacrifice personal

150 Terry Martin, ‘Modernization or Neo-Traditionalism? Ascribed Nationality and Soviet Primordialism’ in Russian Modernity, p. 175. 151 Ibid, p. 176. 152 David Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization: Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-War Russia, (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 1-57, see also Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), pp. 21-47. 153 Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics, p. 37. 154 David-Fox, Crossing Borders, p. 41. 155 According to Marx, the position of the world proletariat, which was continuously deteriorating, alongside the inevitable economic crisis would result in world revolution and eventually would end with the victory of communism and thus worldwide bliss and happiness. 46

interests for the sake of the collective, whose thoughts and actions must be based on awareness of their responsibilities for building socialism’156. This portrayal of the Soviet Person was analogous to that of Chernyshevskii’s New Man. As Jeffrey Brooks’s research on the characteristics of Soviet heroes in the Party’s 1920s daily newspaper, Pravda, reveals the popular tradition of self-sacrifice during the late 19th century continued after the 1917 Revolution. He observes a frequent emphasis on selflessness, sacrifice and on a complete self-denial of any kind of personal comfort and absolute devotion to revolutionary ideas.157 However, this presentation of the Soviet Person also comprised features expected of a good Orthodox believer in relation to faith. The ideal unconditional affiliation between the Soviet Person and the collective was analogous to that of the Russian believer in Orthodoxy and the obshchina discussed in the previous section. The Soviet Person, like the Orthodox believer, was presumed to enjoy an inner freedom and to possess the capacity for suffering and self-sacrifice not only for the community, but also for the freedom of other nations/the world Proletariat. One can conclude that, as it was analogous to the notion of an ideal Orthodox believer, the notion of the New Soviet Person was acceptable and desirable for the Russian mentality, and thus easily recognised by a Russian person. Given the similarities between the qualities of the New Soviet Person and those of the Russian Orthodox believer, the reproduction of the Soviet Person’s submission to the ruling ideology was to be realised through the construction of a Soviet identity analogous to the ‘distinctive character of Russia’ identified by Uvarov. The emergence of the Stalinist cult of personality, the construction of national Bolshevism and the resurrection of a state-oriented patriotism testify to the resurrection of the three aspects of Uvarov’s triad. With national Bolshevism replacing Orthodoxy, Uvarov’s triad was resurrected as the foundation of Stalinist power. This argument is supported by the return to and focus on Russian nationalist feelings, the Russian language and culture, as well as patriotism and love for the Motherland in Soviet Union particularly in school textbooks from the early 1930s158 such as the Short Course on the History of the USSR (1937) edited by A. Shestakov. Reference to Russian pre-revolutionary values and historical achievements is noticeable in a number of Stalin’s speeches, for instance: ‘old Russia has been transferred

156 Komsomol’skii Rabotnik, 1940, no 8, pp 1,2 157 Jeffery Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 24, 26. 158 See Duncan, ‘Changing Landmarks?’;D. L. Brandenberger and A. M. Dubrovsky, ‘‘The People Need a Tsar’’: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931-1941’, Europe-Asia Studies, 50/5 (1998), 873-92. 47

into today’s USSR […] Amongst the equal nations, states and countries of the USSR, the most Soviet and the most revolutionary is the Russian nation’.159 ‘Do not forget that we are living in Russia, the land of tsars […]; the Russian people like it when one person stands at the head of the state; the people need a tsar.’160 ‘[The Russian tsars] put together an enormous state [stretching] out to Kamchatka. We inherited this state.161 Stalin’s devotion to Russian historical and political heritage was so strong that Trotsky called him a messianic nationalist who intended to construct what Trotsky called ‘national socialism.’162 Admiration for Russian pre-revolutionary heroism was not limited to the leader; Soviet officials like Lev Mekhlis (1889-1953), the head of the main political administration of the Red Army between 1937-1940, emphasised that pre-revolutionary Russian military history should be studied seriously. Mekhlis called Suvorov, Kutuzov and Bagration ‘notable tsarist army generals,’ ‘who will always remain in the minds of the people as great Russian military leaders and who are revered in the Red Army as a legacy of the finest military traditions of the Russian soldier’.163 The emphasis on Russian nationalism in the Stalin era is clearly demonstrated in the lyrics to the Soviet anthem, composed by poet Sergei Mikhaielov in 1943, which open with the declaration, ‘The unbreakable union of free republics has been united forever by Great Rus’. This new anthem staged the Soviet Union as a community of nations gathered around the ‘elder brother’ (the Russian nation), which would be responsible for everything and would guide every Soviet individual. David Brandenberger in his research on national Bolshevism points out that there was no ‘articulate, coherent sense of mass identity’ among the Soviet people before the Stalin era.164 He argues that the employment of Russian history and russocentric traditions from the mid-1930 aimed to increase the patriotic tendency amongst Soviet people and reinforce Stalin-people relations.165 While scholars such as E. Rees observe nationalist sympathies in the Communist Party hierarchy under Stalinism,166 Brandenberger identifies a deliberate adoption of Russian traditional symbols and iconography, the virtues of the Russian past and the revival of Russian nationalism under

159 Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York, N.Y.: Norton, 1992), p. 660. 160 Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny (London: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 223; See also Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (Moscow: Vagrius, 1997), p. 356. 161 Anatolii Latyshev, ‘Kak Stalin Engel’sa svergal’, Rossiiskaia Gazeta, December 22 (1992), p. 4. 162 Quoted in Duncan, ‘Changing Landmarks?’,p. 54. 163 Brandenberger, “The People Need”, p. 881. 164 Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, p.10. 165 Brandenberger, ‘The People Need’, p. 883. 166 E. A. Rees, ‘Stalin and Russian Nationalism’, in Russian Nationalism, Past and Present, ed. by Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service (Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 77-106; Frederik Barghoorn ‘Four Faces of Soviet Russian Ethnocentrism’, in Ethnic Russia in the USSR: the Dilemma of Dominance, ed. by Edward Allworth (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), pp. 55-68. 48

Stalinism as ‘an instrumental complement to official Soviet ideology’ which ‘should not be seen as a shift toward genuine nationalism or a fundamental departure from the regime’s commitment to Marxism-Leninism.’167 He argues that the employment of russocentric traditions aimed only at mobilising popular support for the communist state and proletarian internationalism, not to replace them. Given the great gap between the Soviet leadership’s intentions and their implementation, Brandenberger remarks that this employment would result in the unintended emergence of a popular sense of Russian national identity among the Soviet people. Accordingly, by the end of Stalinism, modem Russian nationalism had been created and the terms ‘Soviet’ and ‘Russian’ had practically become identical.168 The emphasis on Russian tsarist heritage was necessary for nationalist Bolsheviks to prove their legitimacy in power. Their emphasis on autocracy and nationality was due to the historical success of Uvarov’s triad in reproducing the people’s submission to the Russian tsars. The global aims of the policy of ‘socialism in one country’, together with the threat of Fascism in the 1930s, required the maximum submission of the Soviet people to the state. The complete submission of the Soviet people to the state was particularly vital during the GPW. Therefore, as the analytical chapters will show, the promotion of Russian heritage, including the Russian language, religious-cultural values and historical achievements, increased during this war.169 Stalin, in a speech in 1941 addressing the troops being dispatched to the front, praised some of the most popular Russian historical figures as follows: ‘Let the manly images of our great ancestors – Alexander Nevsky, Dimitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, Dimitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov – inspire you in this war.’170 In another significant speech in the same year, Stalin acknowledged that the Russian nation was not fighting for the Party but ‘for Mother Russia’.171 Extensive resistance against the German invasion of Soviet territory in 1941, which required the Soviet people’s complete submission to the state, played a significant role in the resurrection of Russian heritage, particularly the third element of the

167 David Brandenberger, ‘‘Simplistic, Pseudo-Socialist Racism’: Ideological Debates within Stalin’s Creative Intelligentsia, 1936– 39,’ Kritika 13, no. 2 (2012), pp. 365–93, p. 368. 168 Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, pp. 227-249. 169 Hans Knippenberg, ‘State Formation and Nation-Building in the Netherlands and the Soviet Union,’ Geo Journal, 40/3 (1996), 249-262 (p. 257). 170 Quoted in Duncan, ‘Changing Landmarks?’,p. 56-57. 171 Quoted in George R. Urban, ‘Was Stalin (the Terrible) Really a ‘Great Man’? A Conversation with W. Averell Harriman (President Roosevelt's Special Ambassador to Churchill and Stalin, 1941–1946)’, Encounter, 57/5 (1981), 20-38 (p. 25). 49

‘distinctive character of Russia’ ̶ Orthodoxy. As Gleb Iakunin172 points out, the Russian Orthodox Church played the role of a ‘catalyst and cementing component’ in Stalin’s determination to embark on nationalist Bolshevism.173 During the GPW in particular, the Russian Orthodox Church, which traditionally had been the Church of Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians, actively encouraged people to support Stalin in defending the Fatherland.174 The Church resurrected the old tradition of admiring Orthodox princes as sufferers sacrificing themselves for the lands of Rus’. It referred to Stalin with statements such as ‘the first man of peace’ with an ‘all-embracing heart which takes onto itself all the pain of suffering,’175 as well as the one chosen by ‘Divine Providence to lead our Fatherland on the path of prosperity and glory’.176 The presentation of Stalin as God’s chosen one in fact derived from the image of Russian Orthodox rulers such as that presented by Monk Filofei.177 In one of his letters to Ivan III, Filofei writes: ‘It is known to your State, pious Tsar, that all the kingdoms of the Orthodox Christian faith have united in your kingdom. You are the only Christian Tsar in the whole universe. Observe, devout Tsar, that two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be. Your Christian kingdom will not fall to others’.178 With Russian Orthodoxy considered to be the centre of the world, Moscow, which lay at its heart, came to be thought of as the ‘Third Rome’. In the sixteenth century Filofei wrote: ‘Now this Rome [Moscow] of the mighty kingdom ̶ the holy catholic and apostolic Church ̶ will illuminate the whole universe like the sun […] all the Christian kingdoms have come together into thine own, that two Romes have fallen, and the third stands, while a fourth there shall not be’.179 The revival of the messianic presentation of Moscow as the ‘chosen city’ – the ‘Third Rome’ and of Russian messianism under the Stalin regime was acknowledged by the Russian Orthodox Church, especially after the victory in the GPW. In his speech on the 800th anniversary of the foundation of Moscow, Archpriest Khariuzov affirmed that the old doctrines of Russian messianism and Muscovite imperialism were alive and unified with Soviet messianism. In his speech, Archpriest Khariuzov repeated the old representation of Moscow as ‘the centre of the

172 Gleb P. Iakunin (1934-2014) was a dissident Orthodox priest, who spent most of the 1980s in a KGB prison and exile. 173 Iakunin, ‘Moskovskaia’, RV, No. 1 (1978), pp. 103-37 (p.135). 174 Duncan, Russian Messianism, pp. 58-60; Philip Walters, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet State’ The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1986, Vol. 483(1), pp.135-145 (pp. 138-9). 175 Metropolitan, Nikolai of Krutitsy, Konferentsiia vsekh Tserkvei i religioznykh ob”edinii v SSSR (Moscow, 1952), p. 89 as quoted in G Iakunin, ‘Moskovskaia’, RV, No. 2 (1978), pp. 126-7. 176 Patriarch Aleksii, Slova i rechi, Vol. I, 206, as quoted in Iakunin, ‘Moskovskaia’, RV, No. 2 (1978), p. 113. 177 Filofei (1465–1542) was a hegumen of the Yelizarov Monastery in Pskov. His ideas are significant for presenting strong links between the fate of the Russian Orthodox Church and that of ruling the Christian world. 178 Aleksandr Kartashev, Essays on the History of the Russian Church, vol. 1 (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1959), pp. 368-69. 179 Ibid, p. 374. 50

social life of humanity’ and ‘the centre of true Orthodoxy’. He emphasised the unique universal position of Moscow by asserting that ‘the thought of Moscow awakens the best memories of our native country [not only] among us Russian people, but also […] among all the freedom-loving peoples’. He thought Moscow aroused ‘the best, bright hopes for the future’ of the world.180 Such interpretations of the victory in the GPW echoed the official Soviet propaganda that depicted victory as the salvation of other nations by the Soviet Union. This was expanded into the idea that the Soviet salvation of Europe from the Nazis mirrored how Europe had been saved by Russians from the Mongol and Napoleonic invasions. In the light of the parallels drawn with historical Russia, the Soviet Union became united with pre-revolutionary Russia; and this unification testified to the continuity of Russia’s historical path.181 As already mentioned, the resurrection of Uvarov’s ‘three great state principles’ under Stalin’s regime was realised through the creation of two fundamental myths: the Great Soviet Family and the New Soviet Person. These myths played significant roles in the reinforcement of the superior position of Stalin as the Father of the Family, as well as in the resurrection of the Orthodox definition of an individual i.e. a sufferer for the sake of the Father and ‘Holy’ Russia. The significance of the Soviet New Person becomes particularly evident in the light of the myth of the Great Soviet Family, which is the final discussion of this chapter.

1.4.2 The Myth of the Great Soviet Family This section argues the Stalin regime benefitted from the influence of the hierarchy in Russian Orthodox teaching, which had shaped the pre-revolutionary Russian social structure; accordingly, a hierarchical-patriarchal system of social relationship was established under Stalin’s leadership. This model of social structure identified the Soviet people as members of a Great Family under the rule of Bolshevik leaders (‘fathers’), who, analogous to Russian Orthodox princes, were considered the role models of suffering. The term ‘the Great Soviet Family’ is borrowed here from Katerina Clark. According to her, the two common classifications of family union in anthropology, namely along the horizontal axis (i.e. in terms of relationships between siblings, cousins, etc) and along the

180 Archpriest Khariuzov, N.A., ‘Moskva’, ZhMP, 1947, No. 1, pp 25-6 181 Gorskii, ‘Russian Messianism’, pp. 356-386. 51

vertical axis (in terms of generations), are appropriate models for describing 1930s Soviet political and social symbolism.182 Study of Russian peasant households reveals that in them the horizontal axis of kinship was always broad and included more people as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ than real siblings.183 Following the October Revolution, a horizontal system of social relations was popular in Bolshevik rhetoric, which compared society to a machine consisting of a collection of ‘cogs’/ ‘little men’ working together, while Party leadership handled ‘the machine’. Clark sees the structure of pre-revolutionary Russian society, especially that in peasant households, (the basic units of peasant society) as the symbolic pattern of this model of social relations in the first years after the 1917 Revolution.184 By the end of the First Five-Year Plan, in 1932, this focus on ‘little men’ and on technology as the answer to everything185 was being replaced in official rhetoric with an emphasis on the significance of the Bolshevik leaders. Now it was they who were considered ‘the answers to everything’.186 Accordingly, emphasis lay on a vertical structure of the social relationship and it was believed that if the axis of the machine of society was the ‘fathers’187 of the masses, this would result in strong state-citizen relations. Mathew Lenoe in his research on the Stalinist era observes that the Party’s impersonal charisma in the pre-Stalin Soviet Union was replaced by a hierarchical, cadre- oriented tendency in Stalinist society. He identifies this replacement as an indication of the rise of neo-traditionalism.188 The establishment of national Bolshevism led to the “russocentralisation” of Soviet society, which located the Russian nation as the nuclear ‘family’ around which other ‘families’ (the nations of the Soviet Union), would gather. Attributing superhuman features to Bolshevik leaders was a strategy used to confirm their right to power.189 The superiority of Bolshevik leaders was emphasised by Stalin himself in expressions such as ‘we communists are people of a special mould. We are made of special material’.190 ‘[We are] people of a special cut’.191 One of the most

182 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 116-17. 183 Paul Friedrich, ‘Semantic Structure and Social Structure: An Instance from Russia,’ in Explorations in Cultural Anthropology: Essays in Honor of George Peter Murdoch (New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 131-166 (pp. 134-135). See also Boris N. Mironov, ‘Long-term Trends in the Development of the Family Structure in Christian Russia from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries: An Analytical Overview of Historiography’, Journal of Family History, 41/4 (2016), 355-377 (pp. 357-9). 184 Ibid, p. 116. 185 Clark, The Soviet Novel, p. 118. 186 Stalin, ‘Rech Tovarishcha Stalina v Kremlevskom Dvortse na Vyruske Akademikov Krasnoi Armii, 4/5/1935’, Literaturnaia gazeta 1935, no, 26, p. 1. 187 A. Erlich, ‘Sdvig’, Pravda, (1933), p. 25. 188 Lenoe, Closer to the Masses, pp. 245-256. 189 Clark, The Soviet Novel, p. 123. 190 Joseph Stalin, ‘The Lenin Heritage’, in Stalin to Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 353. 52

popular sources of presenting ‘fathers’ as extraordinary human beings was biographies. Standard biographies in the 1930s were divided into two groups; those presenting ‘fathers’ as an exceptional category of human beings with the aim of legitimising their political leadership, and those describing the lives of Soviet heroes to represent role models for the masses. Comparison of these two types of standard biography reveals that Soviet leaders were attributed gifted consciousness and shown to have had free choice ever since childhood as well as an extraordinary level of maturity. Hence such ‘fathers’ could be positioned in a specific category, inaccessible for any ordinary citizens and one that distinguished them not only from the masses, but also from Soviet heroes (chosen ‘sons’ of the nation).192 The most remarkable features belonged to Stalin, who from early childhood was claimed to have been an active individual adoring freedom, showing great discipline and self-control. While there were always signs of childishness, irresponsibility, confusion and spontaneity in chosen ‘sons’, there was no sign of any weakness in Stalin, even during his childhood.193 Moreover, Soviet Ideological Apparatuses followed the Russian Church tradition of justifying the Orthodox princes claim to unlimited power to rule by drawing on the use of saintly image of them. In this respect, Clark observes that the presentation of Stalin in the biographies pointed out signs of a particular kind of consciousness in his childhood. Clark finds these signs ‘just as, in childhood, the saint showed some sign of his saintly qualities’.194 These features positioned Stalin as the father of ‘fathers’ ̶ the main role model of Soviet leaders and heroes.195 The level of maturity and consciousness attributed to ‘fathers’, especially to Stalin, was so high that chosen ‘sons’ of the Fatherland, even the symbolic heroes amongst the Red Army, Stakhanovtsy or professionally trained experts, were not expected to grow into the category of promising Party leaders.196 Soviet heroes were to be perfected models for the nation and ‘the burden of paternity was to fall on very few’ of them.197 Alongside the possession of outstanding features of giftedness, another reason for the perpetual distance between ‘fathers’ and other members of the Great Soviet Family was, it was held, their extraordinary willpower to withstand huge difficulties. In this

191 Joseph V. Stalin, ‘Rech’ Tovarisha Stalina v Kremlovskom Dvortse na Vypuske Akademikov Krasnoy Armii, 4 maya 1935 goda,’ Literaturnaya gazeta, 26 (10 May 1935), p.1. 192 Clark, The Soviet Novel, pp. 122-128. 193 Ibid, pp. 122-126. 194 Ibid, p. 124. 195 Ibid, p. 126. 196 Ibid, pp. 127-128. 197 Ibid, p. 129. 53

respect, Stalin pointed out that ‘it is not given to every man to be a member of such a party; not every man could withstand the storms and tempests connected with membership of such a party’.198 Clark observes that one of the main aims of Soviet bibliographies written about ‘fathers’ was to convince the people that neither ordinary citizens nor Soviet heroes had endured the incredible suffering that their ‘fathers’ had undergone.199 One can conclude that the two reasons for the sanctity of Orthodox princes, and confirmation of the validity of their rule, namely their extraordinary nature and backgrounds, as well as their astonishing capacity for suffering, also featured in the biographies of Stalin and Soviet ‘fathers’. According to both Russian Orthodox and Soviet political traditions, everybody was expected to obey the prince/the Father, for the duty of the ruler/leader was not limited to guiding and directing people’s deeds, but also their thoughts and souls. Stalin, like the Russian tsars, claimed unlimited autocratic power over the people, because in the absence of complete obedience by the people, his guidance would not be sufficiently effective. The analytical chapters of this thesis will show that, as in Russian Orthodox history, the heroism and self-sacrifice of the Soviet people for their convictions and the Motherland were considered to be completely dependent on the mediation of Stalin and Soviet ‘fathers’. As a result, the great achievements of the Soviet people in the GPW were, first of all, attributed to essential personal traits of the Father, Party leaders and the Red Army generals, rather than to the heroism of the Soviet people and their chosen ‘sons.’

1.5 Conclusion Having referred to Sergei Uvarov’s doctrine about the Russian ‘three great state principles’ (autocracy – Orthodoxy – nationality), which, according to him, together moulded the ‘distinctive character of Russia’, this chapter has argued that suffering is the key factor interweaving the three aspects of this triad. It has been shown that the ‘three great state principles’ of Russia and their connecting element (the perception of suffering in Russian Orthodoxy) were employed while establishing national Bolshevism under the Stalin regime. The chapter started with a section identifying the Russian Orthodox traditions of suffering and martyrdom and their roles in Russian political culture. It has revealed that the Orthodox princes of Rus’ were considered the image of Christ on earth,

198 Joseph V. Stalin, ‘On the Death of Lenin,’ a speech delivered at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets, January 26, 1924 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), p. 47. 199 Clark, The Soviet Novel, p. 128. 54

and the role models of suffering for the faith and the Motherland. This quality granted them the right to claim unlimited power over Orthodox believers and to rule the community. Meanwhile, the Russian Church distinguished Rus’ as holy and Christ’s home. Orthodox believers were deemed the sole people preferred by God to grasp the Messiah’s prophesy, to transmit a specific religious calling, and to display the final meaning of history (Russian messianism). This divine mission, present at the core of Russian national consciousness, was regarded as achievable under the complete obedience of Orthodox believers to the role models of suffering ̶ Orthodox princes. The second part of this chapter focused on the revival of the Orthodox myths of ‘Holy’ Russia and Russian messianism by late 19th century Russian thinkers and revolutionary movements. Here it was argued that belief in the uniqueness of the Russian peasantry, its abundant capacity for suffering and sacrificing itself for the sake of the universal ‘mission’ of saving other nations was the element connecting all the mentioned movements. Having discussed the creation of the notion of Russian New Men, this section argued that the Russian intelligentsia of the time came under the influence of the Russian Orthodox tradition of suffering and sacrificing oneself for one’s convictions and Russia. This section identified the narodnichestvo movement as an arena for the revival of the Orthodox traditions of suffering, the holiness of the Russian nation and Russian messianism. Russian New Men (revolutionaries) sacrificed themselves to struggle against the backwardness of Russian peasantry, to awaken its values and the glory necessary for the establishment of the Russian peasant obshchina as a pattern for the construction of the universal socialist Utopia. This belief in a universal mission for Russia and a unique spiritual position for Russian peasants linked the late 19th century Russian intelligentsia, on the one hand, to Russian Orthodox messianism, and on the other hand, to Marxist messianism. Both ideologies were based on the unification of the individual and the collective/obshchina. The outcomes of this section supported the argument that the 1917 Revolution did not indicate the emergence of a qualitatively different ‘modern’ consciousness rooted in notions of human dignity and self-worth amongst the Russian masses and that except for a thin layer of skilled, educated, or politically conscious workers constructed after industrial development in the late nineteenth century, there was a huge gap between the backward Russian peasantry and the working class in Western Europe.200 Considering the lack of an actual working class, as defined by Marx, in Russia,

200 Wirtschafter, Social Identity, pp. 100-160. 55

this section has forwarded the idea that Russian Marxism was in fact a template for struggling against backwardness in Russia and managing the outstanding capacities of its peasantry to achieve Russian messianism. The final part of this chapter argued that the adoption of the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ in the mid-1920s, and the establishment of national Bolshevism under Stalin’s regime, resulted in the resurrection of Uvarov’s triad with the substitution therein of Bolshevism for Orthodoxy. This argument has been examined through the two myths forged under the Stalin regime i.e. the New Soviet Person and the Great Soviet Family. The section argued that the New Soviet Man was expected to sacrifice his individual interests for the sake of the Soviet Union as a model for establishing the Utopia of the universal ruling Proletariat. This concept of a human being was admitted in the context of the Great Soviet Family, a hierarchical-patriarchal structure of social relations, in which Soviet people were considered as masses ruled by remarkable leaders. The attribution of exceptional qualities to Soviet leaders positioned them in a category of excellence inaccessible to any ordinary Soviet Person. These extraordinary qualities were divided into two main groups. First: incomparable backgrounds necessary for being a ‘father’, which since the leaders’ childhoods had differentiated them from ordinary people. Second: the leaders’ exceptional capacity for suffering and sacrificing themselves for the faith. These qualities granted Soviet leaders, as Orthodox princes, on the one hand, the title of ideal role models of suffering, on the other hand, the right to claim unlimited power over the Soviet people. Following on from the three sections of Chapter One, the first section of Chapter Two examines the impact of the Russian Orthodox tradition of suffering and martyrdom on Russian and Soviet women. The second section discusses Soviet Socialist Realist cinema by drawing on the Althusserian theory of Ideological State Apparatuses. These two sections prepare the ground for the final section of Chapter Two, a discussion of the primary sources and the methodology use for analysing these sources.

Chapter Two: Theory and Methodology 2.1 Introduction

The main objective of this chapter is to provide theoretical and methodological frameworks for the analysis of representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema. The chapter is divided into four sections. Following the discussion of the Russian Orthodox value of suffering in Chapter One, the first section starts with an examination of the impact of the Orthodox martyrdom tradition on Russian women. This section identifies suffering at a personal level, and for the family, as the main Russian Orthodox expectation of the female believer. Furthermore, having presented a brief account of the status of Russian women under the pre-revolutionary Orthodox patriarchy, the chapter examines the revival of these religious expectations of female believers by the 19th century Russian intelligentsia as a tool to combat the nation’s backwardness. The section further discusses how the religious-traditional expectation of sacrificing the self for the family was employed in the framework of the Great Soviet Family as the main feature of an ideal Soviet woman at home and in the workplace. The theoretical framework of this thesis is the topic of the second section. This starts with a brief account of the general aims and features of Soviet Socialist Realism. It continues by introducing the Althusserian theory of Ideological State Apparatuses ISAs) to theorise the main argument of this thesis, which is the employment of Russian religious-cultural heritage in the creation of cinematic images of the female and war. The last section of this chapter is dedicated to introducing the primary sources of the thesis, the rationale for their selection and the methodological framework used to analyse them. This section presents Metz’s Apparatus Theory and Mulvey’s Male Gaze as the main contributions of psychoanalytic film theory in the analysis of representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema in the analytical chapters.

2.2 Women and Martyrdom in Russia and the Soviet Union

2.2.1 The Russian Orthodox Valorisation of Suffering and Female Believers In contrast to the social and political significance of the sanctity of Orthodox saintly princes in the history of Russia, discussed in Chapter One, no princesses had a position amongst them. From the 10th up to the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox Church

canonised 379 saints. More than 95% of them were men.201 The first and most popular Russian female canonised saint was Saint Olga, whose sanctity was not rooted in following an ascetic and suffering life-style, but simply because she was the first Christian in Rus’.202 The canonisation of Russian nuns after Saint Olga was also due to their princely background as well as their contribution to founding monasteries. Princesses do not feature amongst the Russian Orthodox saintly princes as they are considered to have played no role in defending the lands of Rus’. Moreover, the small number of canonised nuns implies the insignificant status of female believers, even from the elite, amongst the supporters of the Church’s position in the community over centuries. These two reasons for depriving female believers of canonisation affected their claim for political authority. Alongside the incompatibility between femininity, serving the Russian Church and defending the lands of Rus’, there was another key reason presented by the Church to distance female Orthodox believers from power; that is, the image of the Mother of God. She was held to serve as the best role model for the Russian Orthodox female believer.203 Orthodox texts presented stories from the Mother’s life experiences, which provided all female believers (virgin, orphan, pregnant, widow, mother, etc) of whatever age and background with guidance for imitation.204 These stories attributed a collection of excellent features, expected of ideal female believers, to the Mother such as diligence, modesty, piety, silence and obedience to elders.205 The possibility of imitating the Mother of God in daily life was convincing due to the belief in her eternal involvement in this world. This belief shaped a significant part of the Orthodox traditions,206 and underpinned the sense of belonging to the Orthodox community, with which common believers had identified for centuries.207 The credibility of the Mother’s presence in the daily lives of Orthodox believers was derived from the belief in her attention to particular icons.208 Having portrayed conditions typical of the lives of female believers, the narratives of these icons involved women of all ages and social groups. These narratives conveyed certain messages to female Orthodox believers,

201 Aleksandr Mazyrin, ‘Istoriia Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi v XX veke: Mesto zhenshin v Sobore Novomuchenikov i ispovednikov Rossiiskikh’, a paper presented at the 4th Pokrov International Educational Conference ‘Woman Image in the Heavenly and the Earthly’, Helsinki (October 14-15, 2013) (http://pstgu.ru/news/life/history_rpc/2013/10/29/48859/, accessed on 08/03/2019). 202See Georgii, Fedotov, ‘Sviatye Miriane i Ikh Zheny’, in Sviatye Drevnei Rusi (http://predanie.ru/fedotov-georgiy- petrovich/book/69666-svyatye-drevney-rusi/#toc15 , accessed on 20/07/2016). 203 Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, p. 222. 204 Ibid, pp. 6-10. 205 Ibid, p. 5. 206 Ibid, p. 223. 207 Ibid, p. 214. 208 Ibid, p. 224. 58

which are significant to our discussion. First, these narratives portrayed women as sufferers only at a private level and in the family. Suffering and smirenie helped such people be true servants of God. It must be noted that there was no place for individualism in such narratives; these suffering female protagonists were memorable for receiving the Mother’s help and support, not for possessing strong individualities.209 Secondly, the stories of female protagonists’ suffering promoted a hierarchical-patriarchal view of women. On the one hand, they promoted female suffering and the heroines’ obedience towards fathers, husbands and elders as a prominent value that would result in their salvation. On the other hand, only the Church had the right to interpret these stories because recognition and interpretation of the working of the Holy Spirit in the lives of believers and the reasons for things happening belonged exclusively to the Church authorities.210 Restricting female suffering to the personal-family sphere and promoting a patriarchal-hierarchical perception of relations regarding women in the narratives of Orthodox icons underscored the idea of the insignificance of female believers’ contributions to preserving the Church’s position amongst Orthodox believers, as well as defending ‘Holy’ Rus’. Alongside the narratives of the mentioned icons, the image of the Mother of God directly promoted female passivity in social life. Regardless of the various ways of referring to the Mother, which portrayed her as more intimate and supportive to believers than her son and thus showed her as possessing a status parallel to that of Christ,211 this status did not imply any social authority on the part of the Mother. Her image, before and after Christ’s resurrection, depicted the Mother as silent and passive in the community; in other words, the Mother of God ‘did not mix her voice with the voice of the apostles’.212 This quality was interpreted by the Russian Church as ‘an act of self-effacement’213 from social life and political responsibilities. This socially passive image of the Mother of God, alongside the patriarchal perception of the God-man relationship in Russian Orthodoxy, resulted in highlighting the Mother of God’s motherly authority among believers. Her main privilege was the maternal aspect ̶ being preferred by the Lord as the Mother of God. The Church further depicted the role of the Mother as a vital intercessor before the Lord, and the limiter of

209 Ibid, p. 234. 210 Ibid, p. 236. 211 Ibid, p. 221. 212 Ogor’ Kassirov. Plach Bozhiei Materi (Moscow: Tipografiia Vilde, 1887), p. 20, as quoted in Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, p. 218. 213 Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, p. 218. 59

God’s despotic powers over believers, who ‘covering our bare and shameful lives […] makes us worthy of grace in the eyes of God’.214 The Mother was the symbol of suffering and maternal love, to whom her symbolic children ̶ Orthodox believers ̶ would appeal in times of difficulty. This image of the Mother of God had a fundamental role in confirming the Russian people over the centuries in, as Lev Tolstoi pointed out, ‘an essentially masculine faith rooted in the principles of paternal authority, punishment, and filial love’.215 This led, on the one hand, to the mother-child relationship in Russian culture being very powerful. Maternal functions are so significant in various aspects of Russian life that some Russian thinkers have gone as far as to claim that the mother-child relationship is this culture’s fundamental category of relationship.216 On the other hand, since suffering for the salvation of the soul and the family was considered the main feature of female believers, this religious expectation became extensively promoted over centuries. As a result, the maternal image in Russian Orthodox culture and in the Russian mentality was equated with the suffering woman ready to sacrifice herself for the family.217

2.2.2 The Valorisation of Female Suffering in Orthodox Russia before the Establishment of the Soviet Union The rise of Muscovite Rus’ that began in the mid-13th century resulted in the dominance of a patriarchal idea of femininity, which corresponded to the Orthodox definition of the ideal female believer, as well as with the patriarchal hierarchy of the power structure in Russia: God’s power in relation to the Tsar and the Church, the power of the Tsar and the Church in relation to ordinary men, and men’s absolute authority in relation to their women, children and serfs. Women were considered subservient to men, and thus capable of fulfilling only two functions in life: the satisfaction of men’s natural desires and the bearing of children.218 The family was the only focus for the Russian woman, and within the family, she had the lowest position.219

214 Evgenii Poselianin, V Pokhvalu Presviatoi Boqoroditse (St. Petersburg, 1903), p. 48, as quoted in Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, p. 220. 215 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. by Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York, N.Y.: Norton, 1966), p. 850. 216 Berdiaev, ‘Filosofskaia istina i intelligentskaia pravda’, p. 1-23. See also Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (London: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 140-159. 217 See Hubbs, Mother Russia, pp. 87-110; Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation, pp. 3-29; Pushkareva, Women in Russian, pp. 61- 186. 218 See Pushkareva,‘Women in the Medieval Russian Family of the Tenth through Fifteenth Centuries’ in Russian’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, pp. 29-43; Stites, The women's liberation, pp. 3-11; Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Soul, pp. 137-159. 219 Stites, The Women's Liberation, p. 12. 60

This hierarchical-patriarchal view of femininity was not limited to Muscovite Russia. Even the reforms of Peter the Great did not result in real changes in relation to women in Orthodox Russian society, except for the lifestyles and customs of a very thin layer of the Russian elite.220 Therefore, the widespread attitude towards the status of women in the family and society in the 19th century still looked back to the hierarchical- patriarchal view of human beings in Russian Orthodoxy: obedience to God, the tsar, the landowner, elders, and men. Larisa Kuznetsova observes that women in some parts of pre-Soviet Russia were confined to the roles of ‘house slaves and concubines’.221 She describes the pre-revolutionary patriarchal idea of femininity as ‘concern for a man, submissiveness to him, and obligingness’.222 The state of Russian wives and daughters under the power of husbands and fathers was in many ways analogous to that of the landowner’s serf. In other words, an ordinary Russian woman had almost no independent civil identity. 223 The dominance of Russian Orthodox expectations of female believers together with a centuries-long lack of significant social and political roles for Russian women resulted in discourses around women’s participation in social and political affairs not appearing in Russia until the mid-19th century. Even the social and intellectual reforms of the last decades before the October Revolution did not result in extensive female activism and women’s participation in social activities.224 In this respect, having described the position of post-Emancipation Russian peasant women, Worobec asserts that women accommodated to the patriarchy, even supported it.225 This support, however, was not limited to the Russian peasantry; smirenie and suffering for the family were praised as the main female virtues. Russian folklore is one of the richest sources depicting the representations of these qualities in Russian culture.226 Well-known

220 See Eve Levin, ‘Childbirth in Pre-Petrine Russia: Canon Law and Popular Traditions’, in Russian’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, pp. 44-59; Nancy Kollman,‘Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia’ in Russian’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation , pp 60-73; Stites, The Women’s Liberation, p. 13-15; Valerie Kivelson, ‘Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Changes in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy’ in Russian’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, pp. 74-9. 221 Larisa Kuznetsova, Zhenshchina na Rabote i Doma (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Politicheskoi Literatuty, 1980), p. 109. 222 Ibid, p. 50. 223 Stites, The Women’s Liberationt, p.7; See also Rodney Bohas, ‘Widows and the Russian Serf Community’ in Russian’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, pp. 95-112. 224 Kuznetsova, Zhenshchina na Rabote i Doma, p. 50. It should be noted that the radical political activities following the 1860s reforms attracted women in big cities; by 1870, between 20 to 50 percent of the revolutionaries were female (see Pushkareva, Women in Russian History, p. 205). 225 See Christine Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 177-190. 226 See Elizabeth Warner, and Evgenii Kustovskii, Russian Traditional Folk Song (Hull: Hull University Press, 1990), pp. 38-49; see also Gender and Russian Literature: New Perceptions, translated and ed. by Rosalind Marsh, pp. 41-112. 61

Russian thinkers and writers of the 19th century such as Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Ostrovskii, Nekrasov and Gorki praised female suffering for the family.227 There is no doubt that in the final decades of the 19th century there was a feminist minority among the Russian intelligentsia. While their impetus was a combination of imported Western ideas and humanitarian feelings, they had a different nature and origins from fellow feminists in West Europe. As the Russian historian and political scientist Svetlana Aivazova argues, feminism in Russia ‘was perceived ﬁrst of all as a movement for the emancipation of a person, either male or female’.228 This movement was definitely unwelcome in Russia with its authoritarian social traditions and autocratic political culture. It was also unwelcome among the majority of the revolutionary intelligentsia. Marxism, the most popular political school of thought amongst Russian revolutionaries before the 1917 Revolution, considered patriarchy as just one of the roots of gender inequality. Given the dominance of hierarchical-patriarchal perceptions in all aspects of Russian life, Russian Marxists imagined the whole nation, not only women, to be victims of patriarchy. They identified class, not patriarchy, as the main reason for the oppression of Russian women.229 Despite the lack of any real working class in Russia, Russian Marxists supported bodily and social liberation for women within a framework of the ‘class interest’ of the collective. Accordingly, they considered that the Russian feminist movement represented narrow class interests, not those of the masses. Despite all objections, Russian Feminists of the time, mainly political activists, were relatively successful in legislative lobbies against the inequalities in ordinary life through legal reforms in realms such as inheritance law, marriage and access to education. Nevertheless, the failure of major constitutional reforms such as civil rights and suffrage for Russian women indicated that the realisation of Russian feminist initiatives needed grounds that would only be founded by a larger social-liberal movement. Accordingly, at the turn of the century, the women's movement devoted itself mainly to charitable affairs and women's education, while some feminists joined the leftists. Only after the abdication of the tsar in 1917 did Russian Feminists became

227 See for example the poem Russian Women in which Nekrasov describes the suffering of a noblewoman who has followed her exiled husband to Siberia (Nikolai Nekrasov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 2 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1967), p. 371. 228 Quoted in Natalia Novikova, ‘Early Historical Accounts of the Russian Women's Movement: a Political Dialogue or a Dispute?’, Women's History Review, 20/4 (2011), 509-19 (p. 516). 229 See Joan Landes, ‘Marxism and the ‘Women Question’’ in Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism, ed. by Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Marilyn Young (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), pp. 15-28. 62

reactivated; they then lobbied the Provisional Government for women's suffrage, efforts which were eventually successful in May 19I7.230 According to Russian Marxists, the class interests of the collective were so significantly preferred to individual rights and interests that sexuality and sexual behaviour were considered not personal matters, but part of the class struggle. For instance, Kollontai argued that ‘sexual selection should be based on class, revolutionary- proletarian expediency’.231 Russian Marxists considered the liberation of the peasant woman possible only under the rule of the Proletariat. They identified the main priority of Russian women as serving the coming revolution to establish universal proletarian rule: this would grant them liberation.232 This priority is evident in the image of the first female Russian revolutionary, portrayed by Maxim Gorky in his popular novel, Mother, in 1907. Russian Marxists regarded the maternal image in Mother as a narrative of an illiterate and oppressed Russian woman transforming into an enlightened conscious revolutionary. Within the context of the mother in Russian culture as a sufferer in the framework of the family, the ‘enlightenment’ of the mother in Gorky’s novel did not imply authority and social elevated status for her; she continued to serve her revolutionary son. This mother-son relationship, as the analytical chapters will show, would later serve as the general pattern for Soviet Socialist Realist art works. The fact that the novel Mother was praised by Lenin and his comrades as displaying an appropriate pattern for politically educating the Russian working class shows the fundamental resemblance between the Russian Marxist attitude towards the social duties of Russian female peasantry and that of the Slavophiles and other conservative Russian intellectuals. Having emphasised collectivism and ignored individualism in relation to the social responsibilities of Russian women, the most popular Russian ideas and revolutionary movements before the 1917 Revolution sought a missionary role for the Russian female peasant as the origin of morality and suffering for the family. While, the solution to the backwardness of the Russian peasantry was sought through the unification of the masses within the collective, the Russian female peasant

230 See Linda Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1900-17, (London: Heinemann Educational, 1984), pp. 158-174. 231 Mikhail Geller, Cogs in the Soviet Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man (London: Collins Harvill, 1988), p. 202. 232 Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender form Catherine to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 128. 63

was considered more promising than her menfolk in the stand against the backwardness of Russia.233

2.2.3 Soviet Women and Dual Patriarchy Under the Stalin Regime Rejection of individualism for the sake of the collective was one of the main aspects of the Russian interpretation of Marxism prior to the 1917 Revolution. This resulted in independent feminist movements being considered as bourgeois projects which diverted the female masses from their obligations towards the collective, and led to confrontation with them.234 It needs be noted that the education and employment of women was emphasised in the rhetoric of female Bolsheviks such as Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai, indicating certain feminist emancipatory trends amongst the female Russian revolutionaries.235 However, they did not seek independence for women as an individual right, but as a female obligation for the advantage of their children, families and as members of the collective. Disavowing individualism for the sake of collectivism was also dominant among Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution. This led to all women's organisations independent from the state being banned in Russia in the 1920s. The Zhenotdel (Women's Department) operated directly under the Party committees, whose main aim was to spread the Communist Party’s policies amongst women.236 This strategy was reinforced especially following the adoption of the policy of ‘socialism in one country’ and the establishment of national Bolshevism under Stalin’s regime. The New Soviet Person was expected to sacrifice his/her individual interests for the construction of an ideal collective. The key question is how the rejection of individual female movements and the emphasis on female suffering for the collective by Russian Marxists were compatible with the famous argument of Lenin regarding equal gender rights in Soviet Russia: ‘Apart from Soviet Russia there is no country in the world where women enjoy full equality’.237

233 See Christine Worobec, ‘Victims or Actors? Russian Peasant Women and Patriarchy’ in Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921, ed. by Esther Kingston-Mann, Timothy Mixter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 177- 206; Susan Smith-Peter, ‘Educating Peasant Girls for Motherhood: Religion and Primary Education in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia’, Russian Review, 66/3 (2007),pp. 391-405; Rose Glickman, ‘The Peasant Woman as Healer’, in Russian’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, pp. 148-162; Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union, pp. 18-56. 234 See Elizabeth Waters, ‘In the Shadow of the Comintern: The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-43’ in Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism, pp. 29-56. 235 Aleksandra Kollontai, Novaia moral’ i rabochii klass, (Moskva: Izdatel'stvo Vserossiiiskogo Tsentral'nogo Ispolnitel'nogo Komiteta, 1919); Liubov’ Pchel Ttrudovykh (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1923) and Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (New York, NY: Prism Key Press, 2011). 236 Waters, ‘In the Shadow’, pp. 29-56. 237 Quoted in Buckley, Mary, Women and Ideology, p. 25. 64

Mary Buckley’s research on Soviet women under Stalin’s regime shows that the Bolsheviks’ perception of the role of the Soviet woman in the family and workplace was based on economic and political circumstances. She observes that Soviet women were fervently encouraged to participate in the process of collectivisation and industrialisation of the country.238 Lynne Attwood’s research on Soviet women’s magazines up until the end of the Stalin regime reveals a link between the economic circumstances of the time and the image presented of an ideal Soviet woman. She observes that the redefinition of male and female identities and the issue of gender equality were not discussed in women’s magazines of the 1920s, while women were seriously encouraged to integrate into male affairs. By the late 1920s women’s active participation in industrialisation, collectivisation and other aspects of socialist construction was identified as the full and final resolution of the women question.239 As a result of this policy, an image of the socially active and cultivated New Soviet Woman was disseminated in the 1930s and 1940s through the Soviet press, which depicted her as able to enter any area of the work force. Soviet women were praised in expressions such as ‘a great strength’, ‘a great army of labour’ and ‘a colossal reserve of labour power’, who were ‘the pride of the Soviet people’ and necessary for realising socialism.240 The vital dependence of the Soviet state on the female labour force and the active participation of women in Stalinist industrialisation did not result in the emancipation of Soviet women, but positioned them under a new mode of patriarchy in the workplace. The main reason for this must be sought in the nationalist nature of the Stalin regime, because the culture and ideology of nationalism are closely linked to the culture and ideology of dominant masculinity. National Bolshevism of the 1930s and 1940s reinforced the dominance of the hierarchical-patriarchal structure of social relations in pre-revolutionary Russia. The myth of the Great Soviet Family transferred the hierarchy dominant in Russian peasant households, embedding it into the social lives of the Soviet people. Contrary to Soviet official rhetoric, including Stalin’s statement at the seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 241 regarding female equal rights to men in all aspects of life, it was the pre-revolutionary symbolic father-son relationship which

238 Ibid, p. 108-138. 239 Attwood, Creating the New, pp. 169-171. 240 Izveestiia, March 8, 1931; Pravda, March 8, 1936; Pravda, March 11, 1936; Pravda, March 8, 1939 as quoted in Buckley, Women and Ideology, p 113. See also Attwood Creating the New, pp. 168-74. 241 In that speech Stalin declared that women as half of the population, and an important part of the Soviet labour force, must be promoted to leadership posts (as quoted in Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: the Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 115). 65

constituted the most powerful and exemplary relationship in the Great Soviet Family. The perception of ‘father’ represented an aspect of a hierarchy of maturity and social responsibility amongst male members of society, which might be adapted to all levels of the Soviet hierarchy.242 In this respect, having identified segments in the collective as more progressive and responsible than others, Soviet women’s magazines encouraged their readers to adhere to a hierarchical understanding of social relations.243 As a result, a hierarchical and patriarchal understanding of social relations, justified by the Stalinist Press, was dominant in the workplace. Though Soviet women received numerous work opportunities, the Soviet officials’ common approach towards female labour was within pre-patriarchal gender roles; Soviet women were primarily recruited into low-status and low-paying positions.244 Research on Soviet women under the Stalin regime reveals the dominance of the traditional hierarchical-patriarchal perception of gender differences not only in the Soviet workplace but also at home. Regardless of the early objections of Bolsheviks to the institution of the family, such as the adoption of the 1918 Law,245 which simplified divorce, by the beginning of the 1930s, the emphasis on strong families, motherhood and growth of the birth rate were amongst the priorities of the Soviet state. While marriage and family life were strongly promoted, contraception was discouraged and abortion was outlawed.246 Sidney Monas observes that the Stalinist policy to strengthen family life was similar to that under the Russian tsars, especially in the era of Tsar Nicholas I, in the 19th century.247 As a result of Stalinist family policy, not only were traditional gender roles within the family not sufficiently refashioned, but in fact they became perpetuated.248 Having identified family union as an appropriate means of controlling the sexual behaviour of Soviet citizens and increasing the birth rate, marriage and family construction were promoted by Stalinist family policy. Research on the Soviet Family

242 Clark, The Soviet Novel, p. 129. 243 Attwood, Creating the New Soviet Woman, p. 169. 244 Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, p. 99. Also see David Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929- 1941 (London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 120-122; Olga Voronina, ‘Soviet Patriarchy: Past and Present’, Eastern European Feminism (Hypatia, Vol. 8, No 4, 1993), pp. 97-112; David Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, p. 115-116; Wendy Goldman, ‘Babas at the Bench: Gender Conflict in Soviet Industry in the 1930s’, in Women in the Stalin Era, ed. by Melanie Ilic (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 69-88. 245 It was the elaborated form of the decree of December 20 1917 according to which the Civil Registry Office had authority to announce marriage dissolved. 246 See Wendy Goldman, ‘Women, Abortion, and the State, 1917-36’ in Russian’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, pp. 243-266; Robert Thurston, ‘The Soviet Family During the Great Terror, 1935-1941’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 43, No. 3, 1991, pp. 553-574; Wendy Goldman, ‘Women, the Family, and the New Revolutionary Order in the Soviet Union, in Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism, pp. 59-81. 247 Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 85. 248 See Buckley, Women and Ideology, pp.128-137. 66

during the Stalin era shows that although according to the law Soviet women were independent of the pre-revolutionary strict economic and legal authority of men (fathers and husbands), the official emphasis on growth in the birth rate and family care as the woman’s duties, supported pre-revolutionary patriarchal gender differences in the domestic sphere. While the husband was portrayed as having almost no role at home, all the family responsibilities including child care, their health, nurture, and education were considered as motherly duties.249 According to time-budget studies from the 1930s, while the average time per day spent on domestic chores by full-time female workers in urban areas stood at four to six hours, men spent only one hour.250 Continuity of the pre- Bolshevik institution of the family and the fact that the Bolsheviks did not alter it, are represented by Yuri Slezkine as the reason for the failure of Bolshevism. According to him ‘One of the central features of Bolshevism as a life-structuring web of institutions was that Soviets were made in school and at work, not at home.’ 251 Given that the Soviet Union was regarded as a Great Family, woman’s crucial role in the domestic sphere was not limited to her own family; she was also expected to service the Great Soviet Family.252 This is shown in the social obshchestvennitsa movement popular among activist wives and established in 1936. This movement mobilised tens of thousands of women to make society more hygienic, healthy, organised and cultured.253 Making both home and the workplace organised and comfortable was directly encouraged by this movement as the woman’s supportive responsibility towards her man.254 The emphasis on womanly abilities in the domestic sphere is evident in records about the activities of these women in phrases such as ‘a woman’s touch and a woman’s taste’ and ‘a woman’s cultured eye’.255 This section has discussed the development of the pre-revolutionary attitude towards the woman on the social level under the Stalin regime. It has argued that the Soviet woman’s social role was considered secondary to and supportive of the main/male labour force. This section has completed the discussion begun in Chapter One on how relationships in Russian pre-revolutionary households served as the primary pattern for

249 See Hoffmann, ‘Acculturating the Masses’, in Stalinist Values, pp. 15-56; Tricia Starks, The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the Revolutionary State, (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), pp. 135-162. 250 Susan Kingsbury and Mildred Fairchild, Factory, Family, and Women in the Soviet Union (New York: AMS Press, 1955), p. 249. 251 Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) quoted by Sheila Fitzpatrick in ‘Good Communist Homes’ available online at https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n15/sheila-fitzpatrick/good- communist-homes, accessed on 28/11/2019). 252 See Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, pp.15-56. 253 See Mary Buckley, ‘The Untold Story of Obshchestvennitsa in the 1930s: A Research Note’ Europe-Asia Studies, 48:4,(1996) 569- 586. 254 Ibid, pp.572-574. 255 Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, p. 24. 67

the construction of the Great Soviet hierarchical-patriarchal Family. The resurrection of the pre-revolutionary religious patriarchal expectation of an actual female believer i.e. suffering and sacrificing the self for the sake of her family can be observed in the construction of the notion of the New Soviet Woman, which positioned her under a dual traditional-Stalinist patriarchy. As a result of this dual patriarchy, the image of the New Soviet Woman represented aspects of femininity, romanticism and willpower simultaneously. She was expected to be a suffering mother, a romantic and obedient wife at home, and an active and successful worker in society.256

2.3 Theoretical Context

2.3.1 Soviet Socialist Realism Following the adoption of the policy of socialism in one country, intensified policies aimed at the construction of a Soviet subnational identity and state-citizen relations required the forging of a fitting social and cultural context in which to stage the myths of the New Soviet Person and the Great Soviet Family. Socialist Realism was endorsed as the official aesthetic style of Soviet culture in 1934 by Soviet cultural ideologist Andrei Zhdanov (1896-1948) at the First Congress of Soviet Writers.257 It would remain the only permitted mode of artistic expression in the Soviet Union for more than five decades. Its purpose was to shape the New Soviet Person through – to use Stalin’s phrase – the engineering of human souls.258 As Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol point out, Socialist Realism was ‘an umbrella term for the ideologically correct spirit of literature and the arts, whether it be products of creative activity or the theory according to which such products were supposed to be created, institutions supervising artistic endeavours or the way these endeavours were talked about in the press, official reports and speeches.’259 Accordingly, the distinguishing feature of the New Soviet Person as it appeared in Soviet Socialist Realist works was complete adherence to Bolshevik ideology and Party doctrine. Given that Soviet art addressed the masses, in order to easily convey Soviet ideals and the dominant ideology, cultural products were expected to be very accessible in terms of their form and content. They were also expected to be

256 Starks, The Body Soviet, pp. 135-162. 257 L. I. Timofeev, S. V. Turaev, Sotsialisticheskii realism: kratkaia literatunaia entsiklopediia, ed. by A. A. Surkov (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1972, Vol. 7, pp.92-101 (http://feb-web.ru/feb/kle/Kle-abc/ke7/ke7-0923.htm, accessed on 09/05/2018). 258 Quoted in Helen Rappaport, Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion, (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), p.81. 259 Evgeny Dobrenko Natalia Jonsson-Skradol (ed.) Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures Under Stalin, (New York: Anthem Press, 2016), p 2. 68

realistic, which meant an avoidance of abstract forms and content. Aimed at providing individuals with an imagery of themselves and their lives appropriate to the objectives of the Soviet state, Soviet Socialist Realism deployed a standardised Soviet Person as a role model and typical scenes from the everyday life of ordinary people in the Soviet Utopia. A key Utopian element in Soviet art was its idealised perception of morality: both people and ideas were either right or wrong. As such, fictional characters were either completely positive or wholly evil. Leading heroes and heroines were depicted as positive, action- oriented characters, who persevered against all difficulties and always overcame them. This heightening and idealising of central heroes/heroines aimed at reproducing standard types of Soviet Men and Women. Accordingly, alongside an idealist perception of morality and ideology, the body of the protagonist became the site of performance, and gesture and movement essential. With the impact of social forces displayed on the body of the hero/heroine, it was reflex reaction to those forces that constituted the acting. Heroes were mostly muscular and masculinised, healthy, motivated working-class people from collective farms or factories. Another feature of Socialist Realism was the idealisation of the living conditions of the masses in the Utopia of the Soviet Union. Where art works depicted scenes of rural life in the Soviet territories, they portrayed a high standard of living in prosperous rural areas with new technology in industrial and agricultural centres. Socialist Realism also sought to show that the achievements of the Soviet Union were the result of the consciousness, responsibility, diligence and suffering of Party members and Party leaders, especially Stalin. This Utopia could only be sustained thorough loyalty and obedience to the Soviet leaders. A range of different fields of Stalinist Socialist Realism produced an iconic image of Stalin, which served his cult of personality. The Party was also of the utmost importance, and its values and priorities had to be clearly and gloriously illustrated to impress the masses. By depicting Party members as ever- successful, error-free and without regret, Soviet Socialist Realism represented Bolshevik ideology as the best political system devised and run by the best politicians.260 Given that the image of ‘reality in its revolutionary development’261 on the cinema screen did not correspond with the reality of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet people, a key question asked by this thesis is how the audience came to identify with on-screen “reality.” The

260 See Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), PP, 131-204; Richard Taylor, ‘Ideology as Mass Entertainment: Boris Shumyatsky and Soviet Cinema in the 1930s’ in Inside the Film Factory, pp. 193-216. 261 See Timofeev, Sotsialisticheskii realism. 69

answer to this question is sought in the Althusserian theory of Ideological State Apparatuses, which is the topic of the next section.

2.3.2 Althusserian Theory of Ideological State Apparatuses The theoretical framework for this thesis is grounded in Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology, specifically in his distinction between Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) which together serve to explicate the foundation of the lasting dominance of the state over the nation. Althusser argues that the RSA operates by means of force while ISAs function by means of ideology,262 defining the latter as an imaginary ‘world outlook’ that does not ‘correspond to reality’ but constitutes an illusion of it or an allusion to it.263 Ideology thus represents an imaginary image of the conditions of existence of individuals’ real world. According to Althusser, as long as the state in Marxist-Leninist ideology relies solely on a RSA it will only be able to achieve short- term goals; over the long term it will have to stabilise its power by securing the imagination of the nation, a task that rests on the imaginary transposition of its real conditions of existence. This imaginary transposition is achieved through the operations of the ISAs, which function together to realise the ruling ideology. The subjection of different ISAs to the ruling ideology ensures their unity.264 Using Marxist language, Althusser proposes that both an imaginary representation of existing relations of production and the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production are represented in ideology.265 Althusser posits that ideology in the form of any specific belief (whether in God, justice, etc.) derives from the individual, a subject with a consciousness, which becomes the embodiment of the ideology ‘by means of the absolutely ideological “conceptual” device’.266 The individual’s consciousness inspires him to accept the ‘ideas’ freely and act according to them. Thus, the individual participates in certain regular practices that are part of the ideological apparatus, which are in turn dependent upon the ideas that he has ‘freely chosen as a subject’: ‘the ideological representation of reality’ recognises the existence of a human subject’s ‘ideas’ in his actions. Actions then become practices; and these practices are

262 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 97. 263 Ibid, p. 110. 264 Ibid, pp. 111-112. 265 Ibid, p. 111. 266 Ibid, p. 113. 70

controlled by the rituals in which they are inscribed, the very same rituals that exist in an ideological apparatus.267 Marx had referred to ideology as a system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group.268 Althusser develops Marx’s definition by introducing the notion of interpellation (or hailing). This explains the role played by ideology in constituting the individual as a subject. Interpellation is a process that offers individuals ideas and identities that they are encouraged to accept. Althusser likens the process to the most commonplace everyday hailing — ‘Hey, you there!’ — that prompts the individual to turn around, recognising that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing.269 He argues that ‘ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject’270, and that accordingly, the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.271 The transformation of an individual into a subject via the process of interpellation is underpinned by the fact that there is always a ‘Unique, Absolute, Other Subject’, of which people are mirrors or reflections.272 This structuring of all ideology, namely the interpellation of individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject, is both specular (mirror-structured) and doubly specular: this mirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its function. In all ideology ‘the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Center’; and around the Absolute Subject individuals are interpellated as subjects in a double mirror-connection.273 In this proposition, ‘subject’ means ‘a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission’.274 The reality in this mechanism is ‘the reproduction of the relations of production and of the relations deriving from them’.275

2.3.3 Althusserian Theory of ISAs and Stalinist Social Realism The Althusserian concepts of ISAs and interpellation offer an analytical model that can be used to understand the process by which Soviet Socialist Realism, from the 1930s

267 Ibid, p. 113. 268 Ibid, p. 158. 269 Ibid, p. 118. 270 Ibid, p. 117. 271 Ibid, p. 118. 272 Ibid, p. 121. 273 Ibid, p. 122. 274 Ibid, p. 123. 275 Ibid, p. 124. 71

onwards, presented the Russian ‘three great state principles’ and their connecting factor – that of suffering - as the core of the Soviet collective identity. Once Bolshevism had been established on a pan-state scale, the process of subsuming the USSR’s constitutive nations to the state was thought to depend on the stability of a triangle of Soviet state principles: the Stalinist cult of personality – national Bolshevism – nationalities among whom the Russian nationality was such as the elder brother. In Althusserian terms, this subsumption was to be brought about by means of the Stalinist ISAs, which would generate an appropriate image of the self and of social relations. Thus, the notion of the New Soviet Person and the myth of the Great Soviet Family became popular in official rhetoric of the time. These two terms in fact were to some extent influenced by the terms deployed by the Russian intelligentsia and revolutionary movements of the late 19th century, namely the New Man (novyi chelovek) and the narodnichestvo movement. These two late 19th century social products connected the majority of the Russian intelligentsia of the time to the Russian Orthodox myths of ‘Holy’ Russia and Russian messianism as well as to the Orthodox tradition of suffering and martyrdom. Moreover, belief in the holiness of Russia and its universal mission were deep-rooted in Russian national consciousness. In fact, what led to the Russian Orthodox tradition to be deployed in Stalinist ISAs was the compatibility of these traditions with the primary features of the New Soviet Person and the main aspects of the Great Soviet Family, as well as the popular and long-established appeal of these traditions amongst both Russian thinkers and the nation at large. Therefore, the creation of the New Soviet Person and the Great Soviet Family and their link to the past confirm Althusser’s argument regarding the survival of ISAs even after revolutions and deep social change.276 In Althusserian terms, Stalin Socialist Realist cinema in fact constituted a visual representation of existing relations of production in the obshchina (the collective community) and the imaginary relationship of individuals to the relations of production in that imaginary community. Therefore, viewers’ identification with cinematic works which illustrated the illusions of the consciousness of the audience, was not only possible, but also very pleasurable. The fact that the Stalinist ISAs were preoccupied mainly with the beliefs of the Russian peasantry, which bore a strong imprint of Russian religious-cultural heritage and the social relations of pre-revolutionary traditional society, influenced the

276 Ibid, p. 94. 72

‘patriarchalisation’ and ‘masculinisation’ of Soviet cinema in the 1930s. Relations within the Great Soviet Family on the screen corresponded to a Marxist conception of the structure of society as constituted by that society’s political superstructure and economic base. In the broadest terms, relations between the Soviet state and the Soviet citizens replicated those of a traditional extended family: the Father of the people (Stalin) occupied the most powerful position in the hierarchy; male members of society occupied positions relatively superior to those occupied by its female members; and female members were given subordinate roles in the Great Family.

2.4 Methodology and Primary Sources

2.4.1 Post-1970s Psychoanalytic Film Theory Situated within the Althusserian theory of ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, this project also draws on post-1970s psychoanalytic film theory. Based on the workings of the unconscious, such theory puts sexuality and subjectivity together, engaging with a strand of psychoanalytic theory that is obligated both to Freud’s work (especially his theories regarding the unconscious, subjectivity, and sexuality) and to Lacan’s (which was based on Freudian perceptions).277 Lacan argues that a human being’s relationship with reality is based on three orders: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. The (male) child perceives unity with the mother during the foetal period of its life as perfection – the ‘Real’. The whole subsequent life of an individual, according to Lacan, consists of a series of attempts to overcome the lack of the ‘Real’ and to recapture it via a search in this life, which is a representation of the ‘Real’ but not representable.278 Given that the ‘lost component’ can never be reached in this world, the child seeks to overcome this lack through (mis)recognition of the Self as a unified component. (Mis)recognition occurs during the period of infancy that Lacan terms ‘the Mirror Stage’.279 The child (mis)recognizes its image, and that of others in the mirror, and identifies with a created ‘mirage’ as an entire and complete I to escape from the lack of the ‘Real’ and ‘to preserve the subject’s precarious pleasure from an impossible and non-compliant real’.280 The ego

277 See Philippe Julien, Jacques Lacan's Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Karen Malone, ‘Lacan and Psychological Theory’, in The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists, ed. by Kareen Malone and Stephen Friedlander (New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 19- 22. 278 Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the 'Real', (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), pp 15-44. 279 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. by A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock Press, 1977), pp. 1-7. 280 Jacques Lacan; quoted in Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Imaginary’, in The Talking Cure: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language, ed. Colin MacCabe (London: Macmillian, 1981), pp 132-161 (p.135). 73

̶ I ̶ is formed based on this acquired assumption. Given that the ego’s identification is the result of a (mis)recognition, it carries an alienated trait.281 The Lacanian definition of the ego lies at the core of Althusser’s notion of the subject, which, as has been explained above, is moulded in the course of ideological interpellation by the ISAs. Both definitions are transmitted into the Other and both can conceptualise themselves when they are mirrored back to themselves from the position of the Other’s desire. The Symbolic Order, as the Other’s laws, codes and limitations, is present in the Mirror Stage/ISAs and forms the root of the child’s/the subject’s identity. This identity is necessary for starting social life/entering the Symbolic Order.282 Building on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalyses, post-1970s psychoanalytic film theory sees cinema partly as an ideological apparatus. This section examines attitudes towards cinema in the theories of Metz and Mulvey. Having described the screen as analogous to the Lacanian mirror, Metz introduces the conception of the imaginary signifier. The physically absent world presented on the screen, he argues, involves the (male) spectator in a play of absence and presence, which results in an identification with the cinematic hero. This identification or an imaginary unification is analogous to that of the (male) child with the Other during the Mirror Stage.283 Metz specifies the first and most significant operating process of this play of absence and presence as identification. The moment of imaginary merger with the hero on the screen is, according to Metz, analogous to how the child perceives itself as complete for the first time. However, since the body of the spectator is separated from the screen, and the film is meaningful to those who have passed the Mirror Stage, the spectator’s (mis)identification is implemented via identification with the cinematic hero’s act of seeing and hearing ‘as a pure instance of perception’.284 Metz identifies the second operating process of film-viewing as voyeurism, by which he means the gaining of pleasure in (mis)identification, during which the spectator finds cinematic images not only complete but also pleasurable. Awareness of the imaginary nature of the completeness of the hero might evoke a sense of lack in the spectator’s unconscious. For that reason, Metz identifies the second phase of the film-viewing process as the rebirth of desire that follows this sense of absence by recalling the (male) child’s awareness of

281 Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film theory: An introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 68. 282 See Rose, ‘The Imaginary’, pp. 132-161; Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 167-177; Lapsley, Film Theory, pp. 1-8. 283 See Barbara Creed, ‘Film and Psychoanalysis’ in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. by John Hill and Pamela Gibson (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 77-90. (p. 82) 284 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. by Celia Britton, Annwyle Williams (Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 51. 74

sexual difference and the construction of the Oedipus complex in the Mirror Stage. Cinema, he argues, positions the spectator in a manner that revives the pre-Oedipal moment of identification of the Mirror Stage. The (male) child’s entry into the Symbolic Order results in an acceptance of the mother’s sexual difference, repression of his desire for unification with the mother, and finally, the formation of his unconscious in response to that repression. This repression of desire for the mother revives desire. Having become aware of sexual difference, the child may either accept the mother’s difference and repress desire for her, while he hopes that eventually he will experience love for his own woman; or ignore the mother’s sexual difference and still perceive her as phallic.285 This perception helps the child to disavow the mother’s sexual difference, conjure a reassuring image of her and thus, overcome the fear of castration.286 While the fetishistic image of the mother destroys the castration threat in the child’s unconscious, acceptance of the mother’s sexual difference revives the child’s memory of ‘lack’ and his desire to overcome it. Hence, as Tzvetan Todorov argues, overcoming a ‘lack’ becomes the aim of all narratives.287 Narrative is almost always Oedipal in the sense that it represents a hero continuously striving to overcome a ‘lack’, which is mostly presented as identifying with the Symbolic Order and a desire for union with a woman. Re-enactment of Oedipal trajectory in cinema is not limited to the Oedipal nature of narrative, but is also found within the spectator-screen relationship. The spectator identifies with the hero through the two phases of voyeurism and fetishism. Voyeurism releases the spectator’s anxiety of castration threat and fetishism disavows this threat by means of overinvesting parts of the body of the cinematic heroine to compensate for her ‘lack’ of penis. Accordingly, Metz identifies fetishism as the third operation of the film-viewing process; the imaginary unity offered to the spectator during visual pleasure reconciles the fragmentation of subjectivity and compensates for the lack of the viewing subject.288 According to Metz, not only the cinematic image, but also the cinematic apparatus itself, are fetishistic; both present what is absent and both disavow difference. While the spectator is aware of this quality of film-watching, he still disavows it. As a result, regardless of what is missing, the spectator disavows lack and difference

285 For a discussion on the Phallus see Todd McGowan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus, in Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘Metaphor of the Subject’ ed. by Stijn Vanheule (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1-20; Deborah Luepnitz, ‘Beyond the Phallus: Lacan and Feminism’ in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 221-38. http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/07449/frontmatter/9780521807449_frontmatter.pdf accessed on 10/12/2018), 286 See Lapsley, Film Theory, pp. 81-86; Creed, ‘Film and Psychoanalysis’, pp. 79-82; 287 Quoted in Hill, The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, p. 9. 288 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, pp. 48-49. 75

during the film-watching process. What makes Metz’s theory significant to this research is his interpretation of the on-the-screen-spectator relationship in relation to the Symbolic Order. Metz argues that cinema represents the Imaginary as the ‘Real’ on the screen based on the law symbolised in the Symbolic Order. The voyeuristic and fetishistic nature of the film-viewing process is controlled by the Symbolic Order, which is governed by the law of the father/the laws of society.289 In contrast to Metz, who explains desire as based only on the male Oedipal trajectory, Laura Mulvey introduces the notion of gender identification to psychoanalytic theory defining it by using the term ‘the male gaze’. Mulvey argues that the desire involved in film-viewing is derived from scopophilia, the fundamental drive of the desire to see. Citing Freud’s famous assertion that there is only one libido, which is masculine, Mulvey suggests that cinema plays on both ‘the scopophilic instinct and ego libido’290 and that scopophilia operates through the activity and power of male characters and the passivity and powerlessness of female characters. Accordingly, Mulvey goes on to argue that ‘the unconscious of patriarchal society’ is essential in structuring the form of classic Hollywood films291 since, according to her, ‘the eroticism and cultural conventions surrounding the look’292 in patriarchal society generate a desire for the visual pleasure during film-viewing process. As a consequence, according to Mulvey, the offered pleasure entails ‘the ‘masculinisation’ of the spectator position, regardless of the [spectator’s] actual sex’.293 This argument leads Mulvey to remark that representations of the female in classic cinema are limited to the two female functions in reality identified by Lacan, namely that of symbolising the fear of castration in men (the absence of a penis in the female) and of ushering the child into the Symbolic Order. Having led her child into the Symbolic Order, the mother’s meaning does not transfer into the world of law and language ‘except as a memory of maternal plenitude’.294 Therefore, the body of the cinematic heroine functions as an object of desire for the male gaze (voyeurism) and/or as an object of fetishism. Mulvey argues that the male spectator identifies with the objectivised image of the female character on three levels of the cinematic gaze: character, camera and

289 Ibid, p. 15. 290 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 493. 291 Ibid, p. 483. 292 Laura Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’’, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 15/17 (1981), 12-15 (p. 12). 293 Ibid, p. 12. 294 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 484. 76

spectator.295 Given that cinematic identification is divided into the three stages of pre- cinematic, cinematic, and extra-cinematic,296 during the film-viewing process the first two types of identification, controlled by the Symbolic Order, include both the male spectator gaze and that of the hero on the screen; having identified with the hero’s direct gaze towards the heroine, the male spectator identifies with the gaze of the camera as well. Another of Mulvey’s significant contributions to psychoanalytic film theory used in this research is her examination of the relation between the female spectator and the cinematic image. Given the overwhelming ‘presence-to-itself’ of the female body and the absence of the threat of castration in the girl child’s unconscious,297 the female spectator does not access the voyeuristic and fetishistic phases of the cinematic image. Her relation to the cinematic image is completely different from that of the male spectator. It is usually a passive or masochistic position as a consequence of the female viewer’s identification with the cinematic heroine or as a masculinised spectator with the hero. Nevertheless, there is the possibility that the woman may distance herself from the image as the origin of voyeuristic pleasure, “read” it adequately, and assume the self in a masculine position in order to identify with the hero.298 Mulvey believes that the female spectator may be fascinated by masculine pleasure, as it offers identification with the active point of view. This would allow the female spectator ‘to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity [in the Mirror Stage], the never fully repressed bed-rock of feminine neurosis’.299 Thus, the female spectator may find herself ‘secretly, unconsciously almost, enjoying the freedom of action and control over the diegetic world that identification with a hero provides’.300 Nevertheless, Mulvey highlights the significance of ‘cultural convention’ in creating the cinematic image and of pre-cinematic identification in this process of identification with this image by saying that ‘cultural convention and trans-sex identification and narrative grammar of the story place the reader, listener or spectator with the hero’ and that ‘the woman spectator in the cinema

295 Ibid, pp. 485-6. 296 Anne Friedberg, ‘A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification’, in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. by Ann Kaplan (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 36-45 (p. 36). See Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure’’, 12. 297 This is popular among contemporary feminists such as Sarah Kofman, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Michele Montrelay. See Mary Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator’, in Hollywood: Cultural dimensions: ideology, identity and cultural industry studies ed. by Thomas Schatz, (Taylor & Francis, 2004), pp. 95-110. 298 See Doane, Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), pp. 74-76. 299 Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure’’, p. 13. 300 Ibid, p. 12. 77

not only has her own memories but an age-old cultural tradition adapting her to this convention, which eases a transition out of her own sex into another’.301 Considering the historical and ideological context presented in Chapters One and Two of this thesis, Mulvey’s argument regarding the functions of the female in Hollywood classic fiction, namely symbolising the fear of castration in men and bringing the child into the Symbolic Order, corresponds to the religious-traditional perception of the Russian woman i.e. as capable of fulfilling the two functions of satisfying her man’s natural desires and the bearing of children. Encouraged to think of the Soviet people as a Great Family within Stalin’s regime, Soviet women experienced a reinforced dual form of patriarchy: at home and in the workplace. Despite this fact, scholarly works which support the idea of the compatibility of femininity and war under Stalinism, point to a radical undoing of traditional gender differences through Stalinist political culture, devised and run for different generations and social groups of Soviet women.302 My thesis challenges this argument through an examination of the primary sources which are introduced in the next section.

2.4.2 Primary Sources The primary sources of this project are eight fictional war films made between 1941- 1953, that is from the beginning of the GPW to the end of the Stalin era. These films are classified in this thesis chronologically into the two periods of the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) and the post-war period up to Stalin’s death in 1953. The primary sources have been chosen after a close watching of all the Soviet war films made during the period in question with female characters as warriors in war or with roles relevant to it. Another factor determining this choice of primary sources has been the popularity and success of the films amongst Soviet audiences of the time, as well as their prominence in scholarship on Soviet war cinema. One of the considerations in choosing the primary sources of this thesis has been the comparison of cinematic heroines with different roles in war from different generations, and different social, cultural, economic and educational backgrounds. Films from the first period examined in this research are divided into two main categories: first, those with young heroines as wives or fiancées of warriors; second, those with heroines as mothers of warriors or chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family.

301 Ibid, p. 13. 302 See Krylova, ‘Stalinist Identity’, pp. 628-631. 78

Chapter Three examines three films from the first category, namely Frontovye podrugi (Frontline Girlfriends, 1941), Zhdi menia (Wait for Me, 1943) and Malakhov kurgan (The Last Hill, 1944). The chapter examines the key models of female self- sacrifice in wartime as warriors on the battlefront and fiancées of warriors (in the first film), as young wives of warriors behind the front (in the second film) and as unskilled volunteers on the battlefield and widows of warriors (in the third film). Chapter Four examines three films from the second category, namely Ona zashchishchaet rodinu (She Defends the Motherland 1943), Raduga (Rainbow 1944) and Zoia (1944). This chapter identifies the key models of female self-sacrifice in war as suffering mothers and the symbol of the Motherland (in the first two films), the symbol of the Mother of God (in Rainbow) and the chosen ‘son’ of the Great Family (in Zoia). These three films were the most popular Soviet war films of the GPW period. The heroines in these films are considered to have been afforded the chance to be visible and heard in war. Chapter Five is allocated to analysing war films of the post-GPW period. It examines representations of women and martyrdom in two significant films of the time, namely Nebecnyi tikhokhody (Sloth of the Skies 1946) and Molodaia gvardiia (The Young Guard 1948). Sloth of the Skies was the first post-war comedy and The Young Guard was the most popular and officially admitted film of the time. The chapter reveals that the key cinematic models of female self-sacrifice in the post-war films retreated from those of the traditional suffering mothers, the Motherland and the Mother of God in the films examined in Chapter Four. The key models of female self-sacrifice in these two films are suffering mothers and sisters of warriors and these who have been martyred. There is a suffering image of the Komsomol303 female members as chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family, who sacrifice themselves for Stalin and the Party. This thesis proposes that while Soviet women in Stalinist war cinema were deprived of the privilege of being martyred for the Motherland, as in Russian Orthodox political culture, cinematic representations of women and martyrdom represented suffering mothers, sisters and wives of the male warriors, as well as symbolic suffering mothers and ‘sons’ in the Great Family. It argues that Stalinist war cinema represented traditional expectations of a woman in war, which guided the female spectator to identify

303 The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, a political youth organization, which was known as the youth division of the Communist Party the Soviet Union. 79

with a patriarchal reading of the status of a woman in war. These representations correspond to the outcomes of Linda De Pauw’s research on female participation in war from prehistory to the present. According to this research, the roles women play in war fall into four categories: i) the traditional role of victim; ii) supportive role to warriors; iii) masculine faction role without changing feminine appearance and iv) warrior roles with changing clothing and other gender markers which make a woman like men.304 Large scale research on organised female participation in different wars reveals that when women find a way into combat they can fight, they can kill, they can lead, and men can work under their leadership.305 However, the war system has always tried to exclude women from killing roles except in emergency situations, such as defending their homes and children.306 Thus, within the theoretical framework outlined above, this thesis analyses three distinct categories of representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war films about the Great Patriotic War. The first category comprises films with focus on male-female relationships in wartime. The specific films that will be the focus of analysis are Frontovye podrugi, Zhdi menia, Malakhov kurgan and Nebecnyi tikhokhody. The particular relevance of the films in this category is their portrayal of female participation in war as secondary. In the films of the GPW period the beauty and loyalty of young heroines represent a ‘correct’ image of femininity in wartime: the heroine represents both voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure. She is simultaneously an object for the male gaze and an inspiring supportive means for warriors on the battlefields, while in the post-war films the balance between the two aspects of the ‘correct’ image of femininity in wartime is lost. The body of the heroines represents only voyeuristic pleasure. The second category comprises films with heroines as suffering mothers under the German occupation. The specific films that will be the focus of analysis are Ona zashchishchaet rodinu, Raduga and Molodaia gvardiia. Heroines represent victims of war. In the two first films made during the GPW period the symbolic mothers, without changing their feminine appearance, temporarily play the masculine faction of defending home in the absence of paternal power. Their motherly love and willingness to sacrificing themselves for the Great Family represent strong fetishistic pleasure. In the post-GPW

304 Linda Grant De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 17-25. 305 Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 127. 306 Ibid, pp. 127-8. 80

film, suffering mothers represent the traditional role of victim; they lose the masculine role of defending the home, as well as the position of symbolic mothers of the Great Family. They are shown as dependent on the heroism of ‘fathers’ and of chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family. The analytical chapters argue that female suffering in Stalinist war cinema reproduces the two patriarchal female functions of satisfying the man’s natural desires and the bearing of children, while Soviet women are shown as deprived of the privilege of being martyred for the collective and the Motherland. Depriving Soviet women of this privilege on the screen indicates the authority of the Russian Orthodox view of incompatibility between femininity and defending ‘Holy’ Russia/the Motherland in Stalinist cinema. The third category comprises films with teenage heroines as victims of the war. They are considered as warranting inclusion amongst the suffering chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family defending home under the German occupation. The specific films that will here be the focus of analysis are Zoia and Molodaia gvardiia. Heroines in both films simultaneously represent masculine aggression in war, a high level of morality and ignorance of the femininity of a mature woman. The leading heroine in the GPW-time film Zoia plays the masculine role of fighting with clothing changes and other gender markers which make a woman appear manlike, while in the post-GPW films female chosen ‘sons’ play the masculine role without changing their feminine appearance. Of particular relevance to this category of film is that the central heroine distances herself from the object of voyeuristic pleasure in the first category by representing traditional expectations of an ideal virtuous girl. Meanwhile, her willingness to be sacrificed for the Leader and the Great Family makes her an icon of fetishistic pleasure. These leading ‘masculinised’ heroines are not fighters on the battlefield, but defenders of home under German occupation. They are victims of war and lose their lives. The narratives focus on the idea that they would have been winners in the war and remained alive if only they had exercised complete obedience to the orders of the ‘fathers’. This thesis will reveal that the representation of Soviet female teenagers, who sacrifice their bodies in the GPW, is genderless and identifies them among the chosen ‘sons’ of the Motherland. While teenage heroines in both films have the same right as boys to sacrifice themselves for the Father and the collective, the hierarchical father-son relationship is employed equally for girls and boys. However, this balance is destroyed regarding other age categories of

heroines; only a male chosen ‘son’ can obtain the title of ‘father’ in relation to other members of the Great Family, which means more experience and more respect in society. Once the cinematic heroine represents feminine aspects, she is deprived of that symbolic fatherly privilege and may be granted only the symbolic title of the sister or mother of the Great Family.

2.5 Conclusion The main objective of this chapter has been to introduce the theoretical framework, primary sources and the methodology of analysing the primary sources of this thesis. The chapter has been divided into four sections. The first section examined how the Orthodox traditions of suffering and martyrdom impacted on Russian women. It revealed that while suffering for the faith and the ‘holy’ lands of Rus’ granted Orthodox princes the right to claim unlimited power over believers and rule the community, Orthodox princesses were deprived of political authority for three reasons. The section presented the reasons why femininity was considered incompatible with protecting the position of the Russian Orthodox Church in the community, and women as incapable of defending the ‘holy’ lands of Rus’, as well as why the image of the Mother of God was promoted by the Church as the role model for female believers. The image of the Mother of God encouraged women to suffer at a personal level for salvation and to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the family. Given Russian Orthodox expectations of a female believer and women’s centuries-long deprivation of political and significant social authority, even after the social and intellectual reforms of the late 19th century, Russian women were deprived of a socially independent identity and prohibited from active participation in social activities. This chapter has argued that the religious-historical expectations alongside denial of individualism by Russian Marxists, and their emphasis on collective interests, resulted in the dominant patriarchal view of femininity not only not being eradicated under Stalin, but also finding new manifestations. Therefore, the expectation of an ideal Orthodox woman who sacrifices herself for the sake of the family was considered the main duty of an ideal Soviet woman towards the Soviet Great Family of nations. This resulted in forming the Soviet ‘dual patriarchy’ in the Stalin era: at home and in work-places. The second section of this chapter was devoted to the theoretical framework of the thesis. It started with a general discussion of aspects of the only art method permitted

in the Soviet Union: Soviet Socialist Realism. It continued by introducing the Althusserian theory of Ideological State Apparatuses and interpellation to identify the reasons for the acceptance of the “reality” illustrated by Soviet Socialist Realism. In Althusserian terms, the submission of the Soviet people to national Bolshevik ideology was promised by reproducing an imaginary of the self and of social relations by the Soviet ISAs. This was achieved by creating the image of the New Soviet Person and the myth of the Great Soviet Family by Soviet Socialist Realism. As Chapter One argued, these two Stalinist perceptions were in fact the successors of the New Person and the narodnichestvo movement, popular amongst late 19th century Russian thinkers and revolutionary movements. Thus, Stalinist Socialist Realism in fact illustrated a visual image of the vague imaginary representation of existing relations of production in the obshchina and of the imaginary relationship of individuals to the relations of production in that imaginary community. Therefore, identification with Socialist Realist works, which illustrated the derived illusions from the consciousness of the audience, was not only possible but also very pleasurable. The section concluded that given that the Stalinist ISAs were occupied mainly by the beliefs of Russian peasantry, which strongly reflected the impact of Russian religious-cultural heritage and social relations of pre- revolutionary traditional society, this resulted in the ‘patriarchalisation’ and ‘masculinisation’ of Soviet cinema in the 1930s. The introduction of the methodological framework of this thesis formed the third section of this chapter which was followed by the presentation of the primary sources of this thesis and the rationale for choosing them. Given the strong patriarchal and masculinised aspects of Stalinist art, this chapter referred to post-1970s psychoanalytic film theory as an appropriate methodological framework to examine representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema. This film theory regards cinema partly as an ideological apparatus. In this respect, Mulvey’s theory on the essential role of the unconscious of patriarchal society in the structure of classic Hollywood films and her definition of female functions in classic fiction, have been identified as crucial to this research. The findings in Chapters One and Two will accompany a step-by-step approach to the filmic texts in the upcoming three analytical chapters. This will be achieved through close readings of film-textual and detailed analyses of the characterisations, plots, iconography and narrative structures of the primary sources, as well as identification of

intertextual works. The following analytical chapters will examine how Soviet filmmakers employed key pre-revolutionary values and traditions to reproduce images of ideal Soviet women in wartime, images which would foster unity amongst the Soviet people and reinforce their submission to the state.

Chapter Three: Cinematic Images of Soviet Women and Martyrdom 1941-1945: Heroines as Fiancées, Wives and Widows

3.1 Introduction Chapter Three will argue that the female image in Soviet war films made during the GPW reproduces a traditional patriarchal perception of gender relations, congruent with the young woman’s position in peasant households: positive heroines are symbolic sisters in the Great Family and/or represent loyalty to the marital relationship. The position of the symbolic sister can change into the fiancée or wife of one of the male protagonists (usually the central one). The ideal young fiancée/wife remains loyal not only to her fiancé/husband, but also to his military family by playing the role of a symbolic sister to other of its members. Negative female characters, in contrast, are criticised, excluded from the collective or severely punished for rejecting this role. These arguments will be examined in Chapter Three through an analysis of iconography, characterisation and text in the following films: Frontovye podrugi (Frontline Girlfriends, 1941), in which the leading warrior-heroine assumes the role of a symbolic sister in her military family; Zhdi menia (Wait for Me, 1943), in which the central heroine is both the wife of a warrior and a sister in her husband’s military family; and Malakhov kurgan (The Last Hill, 1944), in which the only warrior-heroine is the widow of a warrior and a sister within her late husband’s military family.

3.2 Warrior-Heroine as Fiancée and Symbolic Sister in Frontovye Podrugi (Frontline Girlfriends, 1941) Frontovye podrugi was popular during the first years of the GPW and in 1942 the Stalin Prize, second degree, was awarded to its director, cameraman, scriptwriters and lead heroine (played by the famous Soviet actress, Zoia Fedorova).307 Released in May 1941, Frontovye podrugi tells the story of a group of female Red Cross members dispatched to the battlefield and serving in a frontline hospital during the Winter War.308 The key conflict of the narrative occurs in the storyline of the group’s commander, Natasha, who is ordered to take special care of Andrei Morozov, a famous military intelligence officer. Suffering from depression after having been injured in a reconnaissance operation,

307 ‘Postanovlenie Soveta Narodnykh Komissarov «O prisuzhdenii Stalinskikh premii v oblasti literatury i iskusstva za 1941 god»’, Pravda, 12 (1942). 308 The Winter War (Zimiaia Voina) was a short military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland that began with the Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939 and ended with the signing of the Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. 85

Andrei refuses to cooperate with the medical team and as a result develops a critical illness. He eventually recovers, thanks to Natasha’s efforts; but her special attention to him also leads to misunderstanding. On the one hand, Andrei (knowing nothing about Natasha’s engagement to Sergei, a Red Army sergeant fighting on the front) thinks that Natasha has fallen in love with him. On the other hand, Natasha’s colleagues question her loyalty to her fiancé. In order to dispel these false notions, Natasha undertakes a military operation alongside four other women, and sustains injury as a result. The end of the film sees Natasha in hospital with Sergei and Andrei — who have become friends — at her bedside, letting her know that the war is over. The group of female Red Cross members (who have returned with two members injured and one killed) are praised by the Red Army. The subsequent analysis will demonstrate how cinematic aspects of Frontovye podrugi graft the religious-traditional obligations of young women (loyalty to one man and suffering for the family) to the responsibilities of Soviet women-warriors towards the Great Family, by drawing attention to the dual meaning of love. This section will argue that the film depicts a fetishistic image of Natasha, the female role model in war, which represents the two moral obligations of an ideal young woman in a traditional family (and in Russian peasant households), namely absolute loyalty in romantic love alongside platonic love to all male members of the family. This image of Natasha serves the narrative as a role model of female obedience to the expectations of the Symbolic Order. As argued in the first two chapters of this thesis, the Soviet Cultural State Apparatus reproduced an image of the ideal woman that matched both pre-revolutionary patriarchal expectations and also those of the Stalinist state. Frontovye podrugi underscores both of these sets of expectations. On the one hand, the film reproduces the post-revolutionary Socialist Realist cinematic image of a young woman in conflict — seen, for example, in Podrugi (Girlfriends, 1935) — and even recreates this image. The similarities between the female function in wartime in Podrugi and that of Frontovye podrugi are instructive in this regard. In Podrugi three young women nurse wounded revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War (1918 – 1921). Podrugi ends with the death of one of the three heroines, and a speech delivered over her corpse by the commander of the revolutionaries, Polidkov (played by Boris Babochkin, who also played the title role in Chapaev [1934], the most famous Soviet film of the 1930s). It can be argued that the female protagonists in Frontovye podrugi represent the addressees of Polidkov, who,

looking into the camera and addressing ‘girlfriends of the future’, asks them not to forget the harsh and uneven road their mothers trod during the Civil War and commands them to be ready for new battles, in which they will need to bear all of humanity on their shoulders. As if taking up Polidkov’s call to action, the young female protagonists in Frontovye podrugi are shown as ideal, multitasking young Soviet women: they perform the routine duties of a housekeeper, such as washing, cleaning, dusting and even milking cattle, while simultaneously nursing wounded soldiers and even fighting the enemy directly. The narrative shows no conflict between the female protagonists’ performance of the masculine (combat) and feminine (nursing) roles. On the other hand, the image of women in Frontovye podrugi is distanced from that popular female image in 1920s’ Soviet society, reflected in Podrugi. This is due to significant changes under Stalin’s rule regarding gender differences and the reproduction of the expedient, pre-revolutionary attitude towards woman’s role in the 1930s. First, the egalitarian relationship between the characters in Podrugi (regardless of their gender) is replaced with a hierarchical one in Frontovye podrugi. In the latter film, no women hold key positions, either in the Red Cross (where they are shown in administrative posts), in the hospital or on the battlefield (where they are deprived of any military rank). Moreover, in contrast to Podrugi, in which free love is depicted as acceptable amongst the revolutionaries, in Frontovye podrugi a dual understanding of love — as romantic love and loyalty to a single male lover, and a sisterly love and loyalty to all other young men in the Great Family — confirms and promotes the duality in the perception of Soviet women. Moreover, this dual understanding of love conforms exactly to what was expected from a young woman in Russian Orthodox teaching. This resurrection can be seen in the film’s recurring references to Russian literary heritage and in particular to Lev Tolstoi’s Voina i mir (War and Peace, 1865-1869). The relationship between the two key characters of Tolstoi’s novel, namely Natasha Rostova and Prince Andrei Bolkonskii introduces this duality of love in the film narrative. In Frontovye podrugi, these two literary characters are presented as role models of the film’s lead heroine and hero, namely Natasha and Andrei Morozov who — significantly — also share their names. Tolstoi’s favourite heroine, Natasha Rostova, is, in his understanding, the embodiment of ideal female nature. Her image symbolises the harmonious combination of a young woman’s vitality alongside the spiritual beauty, inner strength, charm and unbending moral principles expected of an Orthodox female believer. During the difficult

time of the French invasion of Russia in 1812 described in Voina i mir, Natasha Rostova plays a significant role in the fate of a large number of wounded soldiers, hospitalised in the Rostovs’ house, who owe their lives to Natasha’s self-sacrifice and her great efforts in nursing them. Amongst the wounded is Prince Andrei, Natasha’s ex-fiancé. She takes particular care of him, and in return his former romantic feelings for her are transformed into spiritual love. In Frontovye podrugi, Tolstoi’s Natasha Rostova serves as a role model for Natasha not only because she fulfils the same role of caring for wounded soldiers; there are also personal resemblances between Tolstoi’s ideal heroine and this cinematic female role model in war. The narrative displays Natasha’s emotions and intuitive sensitivity via her talent for singing, playing the guitar and her interest in Russian literature. Moreover, her deep determined look, calm facial expression, strong voice and confident gait represent her as a responsible and reliable human being. The attribution of intuitive sensitivity, loyalty next to strong femininity identifies Natasha as a fetishised image ̶ an embodiment of the pinnacle of female qualities for both Stalinist and pre-revolutionary Russia. Identification of the film’s hero and heroine with those of the novel is shown during the scene that begins with a long shot of Andrei’s ward, where Natasha is reading to the patients from Voina i mir. The sense of a loss of reality and growing identification with the characters of the novel is conveyed through the shallow-space composition and low-contrast illumination of the shot, transferred to the viewer by the means of the eye- level angle of the camera. Sitting on a low stool in the middle of the balanced shot, a pose that simulates kneeling, Natasha (in her white nurse’s hat and uniform) overlaps the background and foreground planes with patients lying in their beds listening to her (Figure 3.2.1). The angle of the camera shows the viewer’s perception of Natasha as a nurse caring for all of her patients equally.

Figure 3.2.1

Natasha is reading the specific scene of the novel featuring Natasha Rostova and the wounded Prince Andrei, which runs as follows: ‘Completely still on her knees […] with frightened eyes riveted on [Prince Andrei], [Natasha Rostova] was restraining her sobs.’ The shot then cuts into a medium close-up of Natasha reading the description of Rostova’s facial expression in that emotional moment, thereby drawing the viewer’s attention to her influence on Andrei, who is identified with Prince Andrei and images the nurse as Rostova. His identification is conveyed in the following shots. The camera cuts into a medium close-up of Andrei. He opens his eyes slowly and stares at the ceiling while Natasha is reading: ‘Prince Andrei sighed with relief, smiled, and held out his hand. “[Is it] you?” He said “How fortunate!”’ The camera then cuts to a close-up of Natasha to visualise Morozov’s fantasy at that moment about his nurse and his identification with Prince Andrei, while Natasha continues reading: ‘With a rapid but careful movement Natasha drew nearer to him on her knees, and taking his hand carefully, bent her face over it and began kissing it, just touching it lightly with her lips […] “I love you,” said Prince Andrei…’. The camera then cuts to a close-up of Andrei, visibly entranced by the story and looking at Natasha with a romantic gaze while she continues reading ‘…faltered Natasha in a scarcely audible, broken whisper, and began kissing his hand more rapidly, just touching it with her lips’, […] “I love you more, better than before,” said Prince Andrei, lifting her face with his hand so as to look into her eyes’. In order to make sure that the viewer has registered Morozov’s fantasy about Natasha and his identification with Prince Andrei, the scene ends with a short two-shot of Natasha and Andrei after he calls to her when she is leaving the ward. Andrei asks her in a weak voice: ‘Is your name Natasha, too?’ Natasha answers, ‘Yes’. By listening to the novel, and imaging the scene, Andrei identifies with Prince Andrei and his feelings for Rostova, whom the film’s hero imagines in the body of Natasha. In Metz’s terms, having watched this scene, the spectator (mis)identifies with Andrei’s (mis)identification with Prince Andrei through his act of listening to the novel and seeing Natasha. In Althusser’s terms, through the very precise operation of interpellation the transferred ideology on the screen transforms the spectator into the subject (Andrei), who is, in turn, unified with Price Andrei. By reviving Prince Andrei’s perception of love, Frontovye podrugi pursues specific ideological aims, which will be examined further. First: the duality of love is considered necessary to control the castration threat amongst warriors. Frontovye

podrugi directly implies that war threatens the dominance of masculinity in the Great Family by masculinising women and showing them serving in a battlefield hospital and even fighting the enemy directly. This threat is underscored by the fact that young men in the narrative are shown primarily as patients. Moreover, Andrei’s depressive state indicates the peak of fear of castration amongst male warriors. Neutralisation of this threat is offered in the narrative through the fetishistic image of the key heroine. Historically, male members of Russian society were offered the opportunity to master the castration threat of war through reference to religious symbols and spiritual concepts; for instance by praying to the icons of the Mother of God, as the liberator of Russia against foreign enemies, for help and support.309 The request for a metaphysical immortal source of life to counter fear of death (as the peak of castration threat) is remarkably evident in Voina i mir. In the novel, the threat of castration experienced by Prince Andrei is shown to be neutralised through his contemplation of the meaning of life and death and his realisation of a spiritual meaning of love. Tolstoi asserts that when Prince Andrei ‘came to himself after being wounded […] the flower of eternal, unfettered love had instantly unfolded itself in his soul as if freed from the bondage of life that had restrained it.’310 Prince Andrei’s newfound perception of love is spiritual, not love ‘for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some reason’,311 but because he realises that ‘love is life. […] Love is God, and to die means that [he as], a particle of love, [will] return to the general and eternal source.’ 312 When Prince Andrei’s perception of love changes, his view of Natasha Rostova changes as well; he now perceives her as the fetish of this spiritual perception of love. In Tolstoi’s words, ‘he vividly pictured to himself Natasha, not as he had done in the past with nothing but her charms which gave him delight, but for the first time picturing to himself her soul … her feelings, her suffering, shame, and remorse.’313 By fetishising his spiritual view of love, and of Natasha as the embodiment of this mystical love, Prince Andrei disavows the peak of the threat of castration ̶ the fear of death. Following Tolstoi’s suggestion in the novel, Frontovye podrugi offers the possibility of mastering the castration threat evoked by the war through fascinating the male spectator while looking at a fetishistic image of Natasha as the embodiment of this

309 See Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, p. 247. 310 Tolstoy, War and Peace, vol. 4, p. 1056. 311 Ibid, vol. 3, p. 989. 312 Ibid, vol. 4, p. 1058. 313 Ibid, vol. 3, p. 989. 90

duality of love. In the narrative, the process of mastering the castration threat involves both cinematic methods of mastery over the threat of castration in a woman’s ‘lack’. The first of these is the fetishistic pleasure of the overvaluation of Natasha’s body, personality and beliefs, as the embodiment of aesthetic and ideological perfection. The second is the sadistic voyeuristic pleasure of punishing the negative heroine (Tamara) for disclosing her ‘lack’ to male warriors. This argument is supported by the plot’s three supplementary conflicts: first, the female Red Cross members’ condemnation of free love; second, the significance of the fetishistic image of Natasha in ensuring both unity amongst the group and the group’s submission to the commander; and thirdly, the significance of the fetishistic image of Natasha in ensuring unity amongst male warriors of the Great Family and, ultimately thereby, national security. The first supplementary conflict in the narrative is in the attitude of the young women toward the most feminine and frivolous member of the group ̶ Tamara. When we first encounter Tamara, she is sitting on a sofa in the crowded Red Cross headquarters and trying on a pair of soldier's boots as comfortably as if she were in a shoe shop. Seemingly ignorant of the surrounding tense atmosphere (due to the immediate dispatch of forces to the front), Tamara complains that the heels of her stylish new shoes are broken due to hours of dancing the previous night. A hairstylist by profession, Tamara asserts that she is going to the front voluntarily to avoid being called cowardly. At the Red Cross hospital, while Tamara (like her comrades) fulfils her duties without complaint, she is strongly criticised by her colleagues for enjoying the free sexual relationships she has with soldiers. In one scene, the women are shown in their dormitory anxiously discussing Tamara’s departure from the camp with a driver. Tamara enters the frame from the left and stands on the doorstep. A quarrel begins between her and the whole group of women. Tamara defends her individual rights by asserting that if she is back on time and nobody has to cover the next shift for her, then nobody has the right to interrogate her about her private life. The women, perceiving themselves as a united community, call her behaviour a disgrace that shames the whole group. The intervention of the group commander, Natasha, brings the quarrel to an end. Rising and approaching the group, all of whom are wearing their army uniforms, Natasha is shown in the foreground of a balanced shot united with the women behind her on the background plane. In a medium long shot with eye-level angle (Figure 3.2.2), she angrily shouts at

Tamara, ‘I am speaking to you as the commander’ and warns her firmly that she will be punished, and nobody will defend her.

Figure 3.2.2 Tamara’s determination to be different by following an individual course in relation to male soldiers hints at female subjectivity. She functions as the antithesis of the patriarchal perception of an ideal woman in wartime. Having been kept on the doorstep and thus separated from the group, Tamara faces a dilemma: whether to accept the group’s rules and reconsider her own behaviour in relation to male warriors, which would allow her to re-join the group, or to preserve her independence and individual interests, which would isolate her from the collective. As mentioned in Chapter Two, scopophilia in classic cinema operates through the passivity and powerlessness of female characters. Tamara is the most notable object of visual pleasure offered to the spectator. The visual pleasure of looking at Tamara provided through the gaze of the camera seeks the ‘masculinisation’ of the spectator position.314 In addition, the camera’s eye-level position in the shots analysed above shows that the camera’s point of view is that of the spectator, in other words, the camera represents what patriarchal society expects of a young woman in wartime. Therefore, Tamara is severely condemned by the whole group and warned by the commander to expect punishment unless she reconsiders her behaviour in relation to male warriors and demonstrates her obedience to the Symbolic Order’s expectations of a positive woman in wartime. The second supplementary conflict in the narrative aims to show that the fetishistic image of Natasha ensures unity amongst the group of women, as well as its submission to the Symbolic Order. A key scene, following that of the conflict between Tamara and the group of women, starts with an asymmetrical long shot of the group’s

314 Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure’’, p. 12. 92

dormitory with an eye-level camera angle that shows Natasha sitting at a desk in front of a kerosene lamp (Figure 3.2.3).

Figure 3.2.3 The location implies Natasha’s leading status: she is shown alone on the left side of the frame, in front of the group, awake, while the other women are resting on their bunk beds behind her. Natasha is writing a letter to her fiancé, expressing her happiness at having a role in returning one of the patients (Andrei) to life. At just this moment, one of the young women, Chizhek, starts speaking to Natasha and expressing the group’s confusion about Natasha’s behaviour towards Andrei. While other women listen silently, their concern is conveyed by Chizhek’s anxious look, sad face and upset voice. She asks Natasha a vital question: ‘What if [Andrei] is in love with you?’ Natasha’s calm and quiet reaction results in further suspicion and disappointment in Chizhek. She asks Natasha ‘then, was Tamara right?’ Her question has a dual meaning: both whether Tamara’s suspicion about a loving relationship between Natasha and Andrei was reasonable, and whether Tamara’s own behaviour in relation to male soldiers was acceptable if, as she supposes, Natasha herself has a loving relationship with Andrei. Natasha’s continuing position as commandor of the group depends on her answer to this significant question. In a close-up of Natasha’s profile, she discloses her (asexual) love for Andrei: ‘I paid more attention to him without any personal feelings, merely because his condition was worse than any of the other injured soldiers’. She adds, ‘It is good if he has fallen in love with me. Maybe it helped him more than any medicine’. In psychoanalytic terms, Natasha’s response can be understood to mean that what is good, and what has helped Andrei ‘more than any medicine’ is his unconscious escape from the castration anxiety and being fascinated by fetishistic scopophilia, representing the image of Natasha’s physical beauty not as threatening, but as perfect and reassuring. Having been able to distinguish asexual love towards wounded warriors and sexual-romantic love for her sole beloved, Natasha guides the group successfully and

maintains its unity. Accordingly, in the next sequence of the film, Tamara is shown altering her view of life by submitting to the law of the patriarchal society; she finishes her sexual relationships, becomes more responsible, takes part in a military operation and, at the end of the film, next to Natasha, is amongst the four women praised by the Red Army commissar for her bravery in the war. Hence, the female spectator’s identification with the positive or negative heroines of the film leads to the same result; that is obedience to the traditional expectations of the young woman in wartime. The final supplementary conflict in the narrative aims to show that the fetishistic image of Natasha ensures unity amongst ‘brothers’ (male warriors) in the Great Family. Having identified with Bolkonskii and perceived Natasha as a ‘real living’ Natasha Rostova, Andrei begins to overcome the threat of castration and return to his social identity. Like the wounded Prince Andrei, as Tolstoi asserts, ‘love for a particular woman again crept unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life’,315 Despite the fact that Andrei is aware that his unity with Price Andrei is purely imaginary, the strong fascination with the novel’s structure, which Natasha reads to the patients for a long time, causes a ‘temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego’ 316 in Andrei. This process results in the frequent reappearance of Andrei’s depressive state, which in turn recalls a desire to overcome it by means of (mis)identification with Prince Andrei. This (mis)identification seems possible to Andrei through a close emotional affiliation to the ‘real living’ Natasha Rostova and seeing her constantly. As a result of this (mis)identification, Andrei calls for Natasha even when she is off duty. In one scene, after Natasha has been called by Andrei, in a two-shot with her back to the camera, he, lying in bed exhausted and unkempt, seizes the viewer’s full attention. Weakly and with embarrassment, he asks permission to hold Natasha’s hand. The emotional comfort of holding her hand makes Andrei so excited that, attempting to get up quickly, he asks Natasha if she would like to hear about the reconnaissance operation during which he was injured. Noticing Andrei’s hysterical excitement, Natasha stops him and asks him to sleep, which he does immediately, still holding her hand. Natasha’s reaction in this critical situation, which prevents Andrei from disclosing a military secret, is another significance of this scene, which will be discussed below.

315 Tolstoy, War and Peace, vol. 4, p. 1057. 316 See Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 489. 94

In an analogous scene with the same two-shot, Andrei is shown holding Natasha’s hand in his, expressing his intimate feelings towards her. In Andrei, as Tolstoi describes Prince Andrei: ‘joyful and agitating thoughts began to occupy his mind […] It was the unexpected realisation of the fact that he still valued life as materialised to him through his love for Natasha’.317 Aiming to alter the topic, Natasha asks him to tell her about the reconnaissance mission. Andrei’s facial expression immediately changes; he pulls himself back and turns his face from Natasha with a cold look and serious tone, stating that ‘there is nothing to tell.’ He closes his eyes to avoid continuing the conversation and pretends to be asleep. In these two scenes, the intended dual meaning of love in the narrative is exposed in relation to national security and the individual’s responsibility towards the interests of the state. Natasha’s correct (ideologically appropriate) understanding of her relationship with Andrei is depicted here as crucial to protecting the secrecy of Andrei’s mission and thereby the security of the state. One of the main aims in these two scenes is to convey the message that not only must sexual passion be restrained between symbolic sisters and brothers on the battlefield, but also that sisterly-brotherly intimacy must take place within the framework of national and the state’s interests. The connection between the dual meaning of love and the security of the nation is conveyed once more later, when Sergei and Andrei meet where Natasha is hospitalised, and become friends. While the love triangle might have easily resulted in upsetting the two heroes and distracting them from the significant duty of fighting on the battlefield and securing the Great Family’s interests, Natasha’s love leads to a brotherly relationship between these two chosen ‘sons’ of the Family. The hospital scene ends with a close-up of Natasha looking on and smiling at her fiancé and (symbolic) brother with love and satisfaction. Having (mis)identified with Prince Andrei and fascinated with the fetishic image of Natasha, the leading hero of the film becomes a subject. This subject carries the ideological message of the type of love offered by Prince Andrei. When the spectator looks at the screen and (mis)identifies with Andrei/Natasha, he/she becomes a subject, the real addressee of the ideology, and thus undergoes their experience of (mis)identification with Prince Andrei and Natasha Rostova. This ideological usage, which aims to reinforce unity amongst members of the Great Soviet Family and reproduce their submission to the state, is in fact an example of the revival of Russian

317 Tolstoy, War and Peace, vol. 4, p. 1057. 95

historical and cultural heritage by Soviet Socialist Realism. Because, given the significant impact of Tolstoi’s great novel on the narrative and on the protagonists, the film revives not only the religious-traditional perception of love, but also the memory of a very important historical moment for the Russian nation, the French invasion of Russia in 1812. Hence, considering the impact of pre-cinematic identification on the process of cinematic identification discussed in Chapter Two, the spectator (mis)recognises wholeness and coherence between the self and Tolstoi’s hero/heroine, who lived through one of the most significant historical periods of Russia in the 19th century. This recognition/unification gives the viewer a more perfect and joyful image of the self. The ego libido offered in the narrative reveals how the Russian Orthodox values of earthly suffering and smirenie are used to display the relationship between Andrei and Natasha. According to psychoanalytic film theory, the woman functions as an erotic object, directly, for the hero on the screen, and indirectly, for the spectator; in other words, when scopophilic and/or fetishistic pleasure is followed by ego libido. However, the brotherly-sisterly relationship between Natasha and Andrei in the narrative must remain asexual. Thus it is that Andrei falls in love with Natasha before becoming aware of her engagement to Sergei. As soon as he is informed of this relationship, Natasha departs. Andrei and Natasha next meet each other only in the very final scene of the film, and in the presence of Sergei. Significantly, Natasha’s departure does not result in a return of the threat of castration for Andrei; thus, ego libido appears because her fetishistic image is not limited to her body, but rather is located chiefly in her personality and beliefs. Thus, her departure from hospital out of loyalty to Sergei not only does not decrease Andrei’s love for her, but even enhances it. The war’s evocation of castration anxiety is shown controlled in the film both visually and narratively through the creation of an aesthetic and ethical image of a woman’s moral obligation in the traditional family, which is embodied in the leading heroine. This image offers Natasha as a fetishistic object for the male hero. This aesthetic-ethical image disavows the threat of castration and regulates the position of the hero within the Symbolic Order. By comparing opposing modes of loving feelings towards brothers in the Family, (that displayed by Tamara and Natasha respectively), pre-cinematic identification, constructed by the patriarchal view of woman, guides the male spectator to identify with Andrei and to be fascinated with the image of Natasha. Having employed pre-revolutionary moral expectations of the woman in relation to men,

the narrative also regulates woman’s submission to the Symbolic Law: female protagonists are shown, on the one hand, as possessing positions inferior and ancillary to men, and working under their command, both on the battlefield and behind it. On the other hand, following Prince Andrei’s perception of love in relation to ‘brothers’ in the Great Family, the females represent loyalty to their beloved men and asexual love toward other male members of the Great Family.

3.3 Heroine as Loyal Wife and Symbolic Sister in Zhdi Menia (Wait for Me, 1943) While Frontovye podrugi represents an image of the Soviet ideal woman-warrior, Zhdi menia draws a picture of an ideal Soviet wife in wartime. This section examines Zhdi menia, exploring how the film fetishises the heroine as the embodiment of the moral obligations of young women, according to the Soviet Cultural Stat Apparatus, and links these values to the responsibilities of wives of warriors in the Great Family. In this respect, the marital fidelity of a warrior’s wife is staged as necessary for the warrior’s survival in war as well as for the protection of unity amongst the members of his military family. Aleksandr Stolper and Boris Ivanov’s melodrama Zhdi menia was inspired by one of the best-known poems of the GPW, Konstantin Simonov’s Wait for Me (1941). On the threshold of dispatch to the battlefront as a war correspondent, Simonov wrote the poem for his beloved, the actress Valentina Serova, whom he married later in 1944. The poem immediately became so popular amongst Soviet soldiers that they carried a copy of it and quoted it in their letters to their sweethearts.318 This stereotypical home-front melodrama focuses on two couples — pilot Nikolai Ermolov and his wife Liza (played by Valentina Serova), and army officer Andrei Panov and his wife Sonia — who share similar experiences of the war but are affected by it in very different ways. Nikolai and Andrei, along with their friend, journalist Misha Weinstein, are sent to the front, while Liza and Sonia, who are friends as well as neighbours, remain behind. Despite the stresses and privations of war and the absence of news from her husband, Liza remains positive, steadfast and faithful and refuses to believe reports that her husband might have been killed. Faced with similar trials and tribulations, Sonia is

318 For more information see for example the documentary Zhdi menia i Ia vernus: Konstantin Simonov (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=givd3MeFgWI accessed on 15/05/2016) 97

fearful and unable to work, moving out of her marital home and spending most of her time with friends in order to forget her unhappiness. When Andrei returns safe and sound a few months later, he finds his flat empty; he realises that his wife has not been faithful to him, a discovery that ultimately leads to his death. By contrast, Nikolai returns from heroic exploits at the front a year later and he finds that Liza has indeed waited for him. Both Nikolai and Liza’s marital relationship and their home remain intact. Many familiar traditions of Soviet cinema of the time are absent from Zhdi menia. There are no explicit indicators of Soviet ideology either in the narrative, dialogues, or appearance and behaviour of the characters, or in the scenery. In contrast to the masculinised, Bolshevised working-class heroines of 1930s Soviet cinema, the two lead heroines are delicate, well-dressed, well-educated young women, who enjoy high social standing and easy lives with caring, responsible husbands in Moscow. The key concept in the narrative, marital fidelity, is associated with two other notions: first, home, and second, strong emotions and mutual support amongst friends as representatives of the Great Family. The combination of these three key narrative concepts works as a means of both fetishisation and punishment of the positive heroine to soothe the castration threat of the war for the male viewer. In relation to the concept of home, it is significant that the main setting of Liza’s storyline, and the only place where the friends gather, is her flat. Before leaving for the front, Nikolai takes the flat key from his pocket and tells Liza that, when she feels sad without him, she should remember that far away, her loving husband is looking at this key and missing her greatly. In Zhdi menia, the key to the marital home replaces a photograph of a sweetheart — a common trope in Soviet war films of the time — as a token that the lead hero takes with him to the front. The key as the symbol of locking Liza’s home and heart to any strange man leaves her behind in constant expectation that Nikolai might enter the flat at any time. This symbol, as this section will examine, offers the viewer both voyeuristic and sadistic pleasure. Further highlighting Nikolai’s symbolic presence at home and his observation of his wife, even while he is on the battlefield, is the large portrait of him (rather than of Lenin or Stalin, which were typical in domestic settings in Soviet films of the period) that hangs in the couple’s living room. Liza’s close relationship with this picture offers sadistic visual pleasure: sitting under the picture and staring at it with love and respect, Liza speaks to it often as if venerating a holy icon. Figure 3.3.1 shows Liza kneeling in

front of the portrait with a humble expression and clasped hands, asking her husband for help. Visually, the frame is divided horizontally: in the lower half, Liza’s kneeling figure indicates her insignificance and dependence, while the large image of Nikolai appears to look down upon her from the upper half. This impression is reinforced by Liza’s admiring upward gaze which contrasts with the stern, downward angle of Nikolai’s gaze in the picture. The light that appears to shine from the portrait onto Liza’s face suggests the brightness and guidance that Liza receives during her symbolic communion with Nikolai. The symbolism of the key and of the portrait is united in the film’s final scene: Nikolai enters the flat using his key, while Liza, wearing his favourite dress, is dreaming on the sofa, under his portrait, where they last talked.

Figure 3.3.1 Alongside home, the network of family relationships is the second notion borrowed from pre-revolutionary Russian culture as the proposed template for the relationship between members of the Great Family. The film starts with a narration of fraternal affiliation amongst members of the Soviet Air Forces. Having returned from the front for only a few hours, Nikolai is constantly in the company of his friends, celebrating his new promotion. The photo taken that evening (Figure 3.3.2)319 shows four confident men with significant social positions next to two beautiful young women, who are identified only as wives without any significant social positions or military roles in the war. The opening scene indicates the patriarchal gender identification, which continues throughout the course of the film and requires the heroines to function primarily as objects. As Chapter Two discussed, scopophilia provides the viewer with visual pleasure through his or her identification with the male actors of the film, and rests on the activity and power of the male characters and the passivity and powerlessness of the female characters. That chapter also showed that the dominant image of women in

319 Figure 3.3.2 shows Misha between Sonia and Liza, Feodor on the right and Nikolai on the left and Andrei holding a guitar. 99

pre-GPW Soviet society was that of the wives and mothers of male soldiers. This pre- cinematic gender identification would guide the masculinised spectator to be fascinated by the association of masculinity with activity and voyeurism, and femininity with complete passivity. The patriarchal gender identification in Zhdi menia is clearly conveyed in the film’s opening scene, where Nikolai’s two single friends laugh at him for being married, believing marital relationships to be unimportant to ‘real men’. Having realised that Liza wishes to be alone with her husband for a short time before his imminent return to the front, Misha asks Nikolai ‘to defend his old friends against the woman, who wants to separate them’; and Fedor, Nikolai’s prior navigator, reminds him about his assertions such as ‘an old navigator is better than a wife; more significant than a wife’. As in pre- revolutionary peasant households, the narrative emphasises brotherhood amongst the male members of the Great Family and warns against the entry of women into the collective as a threat to its unity and harmony. Following the pre-revolutionary rule in peasant households, the narrative conveys that a wife is accepted into her husband’s ‘family’/collective only after proving her complete loyalty to her husband as well as to the whole collective. In this respect, Liza and Sonia have opposing experiences.

Figure 3.3.2 Despite his dismissive attitude towards marriage, Fedor is a significant source of brotherly support for Liza: when she receives a worrying official message about Nikolai, she immediately turns to him for advice.320 In the middle of a two-shot with a slightly low angle, Fedor starts reading the note breathlessly (Figure 3.3.3), while Liza hides her tearful face in his back. The eldest of the friends, Fedor often gives sage advice and comfort to them. Now, turning to Liza with sympathy, his profile reveals his tragic

320 The note informs Liza that on August 29th Nikolai, Mikhail (Misha) and two other officers took part in a reconaissance mission on enemy territory from which none of them has returned. 100

predicament: he must accept the terrible news of Nikolai’s disappearance, while also remaining calm to comfort his friend’s wife. He lifts his voice and reads the last sentence of the note: ‘We will not give up hope’. Given that the myth of the Great Family perceives Soviet citizens mainly as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’,321 and that, as an officer, Fedor is an ideal ‘son’ of the Family, he occupies the authoritative position of an elder brother in the Great Family, representing a role model for emulation. Thus, the scene displays a hierarchical relationship between an elder ‘brother’ and his ‘sister’, which prepares the ground for cinematic scopophilia to provide visual pleasure through identification with the powerful actor. The heroine’s passivity is revealed in her tears, shaky voice and uncertain tone, including when she asks Fedor: ‘Is it really alarming that he has not returned from the army operation?’ Adopting a more informal pose, Fedor sits down on the floor, and while the camera slowly zooms in to stage a two-shot composition, Liza turns towards him with her back to the camera. The left side of the frame overlaps the right (Figure 3.3.4), accentuating Liza’s relatively diminutive size and obedient pose before the strong but appealing elder brother’s figure. Speaking intimately, in a manner recognisable to an ordinary male spectator as that of a caring brother to his little sister, Fedor reminds Liza what officials, i.e. representatives of the Symbolic Order, expect from a loyal wife in this situation: ‘They [officials] do not lose hope, so neither must you and I’. He adds: ‘Real men have a good habit; if you wait for them very eagerly, they will definitely come back’, Finally, Fedor emphasises his authority as an elder brother by adding that Nikolai asked him to look after Liza in his absence and suggests that she is evacuated from Moscow.

Figure 3.3.3 Figure 3.3.4 Fedor’s advice to Liza, alongside his body language, the downward angle of his gaze, and Liza’s admiring position, aims to transfer this patriarchal message that men’s

321 Clark, The Soviet Novel, p. 116. 101

survival in war and their safe return home are characterised as dependent on the extent to which women wait eagerly for them. The message of this scene is linked to the notions of home and marital loyalty. Listening to Fedor, Liza notices her flat key in her hand. This prop is used once more to offer voyeuristic and sadistic pleasure to the viewer by reminding Liza that Nikolai could enter the flat at any time, thus she must be there waiting for him. The pleasure offered by seeing the hero active and the heroine passive is reinforced by the pleasure offered by the gaze of the camera in the following shot. In a close-up, with a slightly low angle, raising her thin eyebrows, with a firm voice and determined look, Liza confidently refuses Fedor’s offer to leave Moscow by saying: ‘How do you not understand that I will go nowhere away from Moscow, nowhere!’ Demonstrating Liza’s obedience to the Symbolic Order, the scene also transforms the initially shivering, fearful Liza into a brave woman ready to wait for Nikolai in Moscow, but without giving her any real, individual motivation. As Althusser argues, in all ideology ‘the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre’.322 Ideology transforms individuals into subjects and subjects them to the Subject. Having recognised itself in the Subject, a subject feels saved and secured.323 In this scene, then, the ideology of aligning with officials (‘fathers’) leads Liza to imagine herself as united with the Subject, and thus to feel empowered and safe. Having (mis)identified with Liza, the female viewer is expected to go through the same imaginary Mirror Stage. The impact on Liza of the patriarchal message, which represents suffering for her missing husband as her moral obligation, is further reinforced by a note from Nikolai that is passed on through Misha, who accompanied Nikolai on the mission. Misha explains that Nikolai ordered him to escape with intelligence reports, and letters for the officers’ wives. In a close-up shot, a worried and excited Liza quickly reads Nikolai’s note: ‘Wait for me, I will return. Nikolai’. In the next two-shot (Figure 3.3.5), Liza, with her face lit from the right, commands the viewer’s full attention: as Misha brings out Nikolai’s military medal, she recoils rapidly, putting her right hand on her heart and shaking the note in her left while stating loudly and firmly, ‘Stop it! Here he has written that he will return. I trust him, not you’. This scene emphasises Liza’s absolute belief in Nikolai’s word, despite the horrible reality of the situation. The note confirms her imaginary unification with the Subject and her imaginary subjectivity, which give her strength to

322 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 122. 323 Ibid. 102

believe that her husband is alive. As a result, she returns to her daily life and duties immediately without undue concern.

Figure 3.3.5 Obedience to the Symbolic Order, through identification with the fetishistic image of the young woman’s moral obligation in a traditional family unit, is characterised in the narrative not as optional, but as the only choice that wives of warriors are expected to make. Sonia, the only other married woman in the narrative, is compared unfavourably to Liza. This is effected through a clear emphasis on the absence of the two significant concepts in the patriarchal view of a good wife, namely Sonia’s absence from her marital home and her cutting ties with Andrei’s collective when he is at the front. Sonia’s disloyalty to her husband is symbolised as the main threat both to Andrei’s life, eventually resulting in his death, and to the solidarity of the collective, resulting ultimately in Sonia’s punishment. The youngest amongst the four friends, Andrei is tall and good-looking, with an innocent, intelligent and sensitive face. Returning home one cold night after everybody in Moscow thinks him killed in action, he finds his flat locked, and so waits for Sonia in Liza’s flat. When Sonia does not return home, Andrei begins to interrogate Liza; in a close-up with low-key light, with a tone expressing shame, fear and anger at what he has realised, he asks, ‘Why are you lying? Looking into your eyes, I know everything. Just don’t lie to me! She is not at work… you know that she will not come home tonight’. In psychoanalytic terms, Sonia’s disloyalty results in the revival of sexual difference and the memory of the woman’s ‘lack’ in Andrei’s unconscious and of his desire to overcome the castration anxiety. His first reaction to escape this anxiety is to ‘investigate the woman, demystifying her mystery’ as the guilty object.324 Liza, in a dark dress and a bright woollen shawl, stands on the left side of the frame next to a small table with a

324 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 811. 103

lamp, as shown in Figure 3.3.6. In the dark room, Liza’s bright shawl, the key light on her face and her worried eyes draw the attention of the viewer offering him scopophilic pleasure. Wishing to punish ‘the guilty object’, Andrei raises his voice in bitter criticism of women, but Liza rebuffs him: ‘Do not dare! […] Speak about her [Sonia] as you wish, but do not dare [speak] about me and other [women]’. By interrupting Andrei, Liza also interrupts the process of fascination. Thus, Andrei does not succeed in breaking her down and exposing her ‘guilt’: his curiosity does not prevail and Liza is not punished.

Figure 3.3.6 When Andrei’s unconscious first attempt to escape from castration anxiety is unsuccessful, he makes a second one: complete denial of the castration threat by transforming the image of Liza into a fetish ̶ the embodiment of love and of a woman’s loyalty to her husband and the Family. As a result, Andrei is fascinated by fetishistic scopophilia, which portrays Liza’s physical beauty as perfect and reassuring rather than threatening. However, according to the patriarchal view of cinema, the woman must function as erotic object both directly (for the on-screen hero) and indirectly (for the spectator). Given that, symbolically, Liza is Andrei’s sister, any erotic element in his look at her would turn the spectator against him, since it would be a betrayal of Nikolai, a threat to the unity of the collective and thus, a violation of the Symbolic Order. Andrei’s unconscious experiences a triple relationship analogous to the father-mother-child in the Lacanin Mirror Stage. Scared of being judged or punished by the Symbolic Order, he represses his feelings for Liza, although he has already lost his hope of regaining his woman (Sonia). Thus, neither acceptance of the heroine’s sexual difference nor its denial results in activating the Oedipal crisis to revive the memory of the Lacanian ‘lost component’ in Andrei’s unconscious, that is, to rekindle desire to defeat the enemy. In other words, (mis)recognition of Andrei’s unconscious, and subsequently of the viewer,

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would be complete only if scopophilic or fetishistic pleasure was followed by ego libido, which must result in transforming of the individual into an ideal ego (a subject) unified with the Subject Order. Since this transformation does not occur, the castration threat remains, and thus breaks Andrei completely. This is evident in a conversation between Andrei and Fedor in the next sequence of the film, after it has been revealed that Andrei has experience of defusing bombs. After taking leave of Liza in a formal manner that confuses her and prompts Fedor to criticise him, Andrei reveals to Fedor that he has decided not to visit Liza anymore because he ‘feel[s] jealous of Nikolai, even though he is dead’. Both this revelation itself and his position as he makes it — on a staircase, moving downwards — imply a moral collapse, the symbolic fall of the younger ‘brother’ of the military family/collective. Andrei’s complete ‘fall’ happens in the next sequence of the film. During a bomb disposal operation in Moscow, Andrei is seriously injured. In a two-shot with a high angle, lying in a hospital bed with a beatific look and a wan smile, Andrei overlaps the presence of Liza, with her back to the camera on the right-hand side. Andrei’s fetishistic image of Liza is revealed as he says breathlessly, in a weak, low voice, ‘You are here. I wanted to see you very much. I really wanted you to be with me now at this moment’. Moments from death, he asks Liza to continue waiting for Nikolai; and then, with his eyes on the horizon, he utters his final words: ‘[…] though if everybody, everyone, were like you; loyal and persistent … you are love’. Having realised that Andrei did not want to see her, Sonia appears in the hospital only after his death. While the camera takes sadistic pleasure in displaying her tears as a sign of regret, Sonia confesses that she always loved Andrei very much and that she still loves him. However, no one sympathises with her, and Fedor even suggests that she is responsible for Andrei’s death, looking at her doubtfully and saying, ‘You loved him?! [No], you [in fact] destroyed his life…’ In contrast to Liza, who represents the embodiment of love and loyalty, Sonia signifies castration. Like Tamara in Frontovye podrugi, Sonia represents an individual approach to love. Her act of considering the self as a subject through disloyalty to Andrei is identified as an attempt to challenge masculinity and reject female submission to the Symbolic Order. Hence, she is recognised as being responsible for Andrei’s death and as a danger to the unity of the Family. As mentioned in Chapter One, being a useful and productive member of the Great Family was the main criterion of the Soviet Person.

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Accordingly, Sonia’s confession is not accepted and the most severe punishment for the Soviet Person ̶ rejection by the Great Family ̶ awaits her. While the male viewer is absorbed in a fetishistic image of Liza, he is also fascinated by the sadistic pleasure of listening to Sonia’s regret, looking at her tears and seeing her suffering face as she realises that her husband wished to spend the last minutes of his life not with his wife, but with Liza. Both types of pleasure soothe the castration anxiety in the male viewer and reinforce the significance of female submission to the Symbolic Order. While Andrei provides the male viewer with some possibility for pleasure through identification, Nikolai is the character with whom he can identify best. Nikolai’s return to the narrative, two-thirds of the way through the film, sees him — still on the battlefield as the head of a partisan group — take out his flat key and ask himself whether he will eventually return home. Narrative description of Nikolai shows his unconscious facing the war and controlling the peak of the fear of castration ̶ death ̶ in it by repressing his feelings for Liza in the hope that one day he will experience her love again. As a consequence of this suppression, the Oedipal crisis revives memory of the Lacanian ‘lost component’ in his unconscious more seriously, and thus revives the desire for overcoming it by defeating the enemy. Nikolai represents the attributes of a chosen ‘son’ of the Great Family. He is a war hero, firmly placed within the Symbolic Order. Thus, returning home and accessing Liza’s love again is possible for him only after he has found the ‘lost component’ ̶ defeating the enemy. The narrative stresses the fetishistic image of Liza, the embodiment of a woman’s loyalty to her husband and the Family, as essential for Nikolai if he is to overcome the enemy threat. While defeating the enemy is the key to solving the problem of separation from Liza, the flat key itself gives him strength and hope to overcome the threat of castration. In turn, the narrative examines Liza’s competence as the wife of a chosen ‘son’ of the Great Family. Her purity and worthiness is shown through obedience to officials, her husband, the elder (Fedor) and younger (Andrei) ‘brothers’, who ask her to wait faithfully for Nikolai. A voyeuristic gaze at Liza is associated with the sadistic pleasure of asserting control over her loyalty to Nikolai and subjecting her to the suffering of waiting for her lost husband. Although Liza represents not the bearer of guilt but rather perfection, the sadistic pleasure offered in the narrative is prolonged: it is only in the film’s final minutes that her suffering is alleviated, and the triumph of her fidelity revealed with Nikolai’s return home. The sadistic voyeurism, as well as the fetishistic

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image of her female beauty ̶ the perfect embodiment of the moral obligation of a young woman to her husband and his Family ̶ function in the narrative as two methods of mastering the castration threat in the male viewer’s unconscious. Deprived of a direct voyeuristic gaze at Liza, even through a photo of her, Nikolai portrays the tense experience of struggling with the enemy on the battlefield. This image doubles the viewer’s pleasure both through identifying with Nikolai’s scopophilic pleasure of a fantasised, erotic image of Liza, and through a fascinating gaze at Liza in her husband’s absence.

3.4 Heroine as Widow-Warrior and Symbolic Sister in Malakhov Kurgan (The Last Hill, 1944) While Zdhi menia focused on a wife’s fidelity to her lost soldier husband and the power of this fidelity to bring him home safely, Malakhov kurgan highlights a widow’s fidelity to her dead husband. This section analyses the ways in which the narrative of Malakhov kurgan stages a fetishistic image of a widow as the embodiment of aesthetic and ethical perfection to master the threat of castration amongst male warriors in wartime. This section examines the significance of the widow’s fidelity to her late husband’s military family in the service of the Great Soviet Family. Malakhov kurgan was made by Aleksandr Zapkh and Eufos Kheyfeets in May 1944, a few months after the liberation of Sevastopol, a port city on the Crimean Peninsula. As a strategically important port for both the tsarist and Soviet Black Sea Fleets, the city experienced brutal sieges during the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the GPW. During the Crimean War, Sevastopol was besieged for eleven months. A first- hand witness to the siege, Lev Tolstoi, stressed the unique and superior position of the city and identified the battle for Sevastopol as a battle for Russia.325 During the GPW, Sevastopol suffered extensive bombardment, a 250-day siege, and between 1942-1944, a two-year occupation. After liberation in 1944, Sevastopol was awarded the title of Hero City (Gorod-geroi) and held up by Stalin as ‘an example of heroism for all the Red Army and Soviet people’.326 The strategic importance of Sevastopol resulted in the creation of a mythic image of the city and a tragic narrative of its heroic resistance by the Soviet Cultural State Apparatus. Stories of the heroism of Sevastopol’s defenders during the GPW (known as the second great defence) were merged with those from the Crimean

325 See Lev Tolstoi, Sevastopol’skie rasskazy (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2013), p. 104. 326 Quoted in Zakhar Chebaniuk, Sevastopol: istoricheskie mesta i pamiatniki (Simferopol: Krymizdat, 1955), p 27. 107

War (known as the first great defence).327 The creation of a mythic image of Sevastopol represented a broader policy of the Stalinist ISAs, i.e. to dominate the people’s imagination about the GPW and unify them around one coherent, state-led narrative of the war. Following this general policy, the official narrative of Sevastopol aimed at convincing Soviet citizens that all the suffering, sacrifices and losses incurred in this city had been inevitable and necessary to defend not only Soviet territory, but also the identity, history and traditions, to which Sevastopol had always belonged.328 Malakhov kurgan, named after the site of fierce battles during both the Crimean War and the GPW, draws a mythical image of Sevastopol. The film is a narration of the siege of Sevastopol in 1942, its last resistance and eventually its fall. Having compared the military situation of Sevastopol during the Crimean War and in the GPW, the film connects the heroism of the Red Army in defence of the city and the misery of its defeat to the analogous experience of the tsarist Army. On the verge of the city’s fall, a symbol of hope and life arrives at the city. While the civilians are being evacuated, Mariia Vladimirovna, a young Muscovite woman, comes to Sevastopol to join her husband, a Red Army officer. There, she realises that he has been killed. She receives his final letter to her from his comrade, Captain Likhachev and realises that her husband wished Mariia to come to Sevastopol after the war and to plant poppies on his grave. Having read the letter, Mariia asks Captain Likhachev to let her go to the front. The captain informs her that the whole of Sevastopol is now a battlefield and offers her work in a buffet as a waitress. In the buffet Mariia meets five young, bedraggled sailors, who have just been saved from an operation during which they had to sink their war-craft. Realising that they, and their commander, Captain Likhachev, are the only survivors of her husband’s marine commando unit, Mariia is happy to see the surviving members of her husband’s military family. The main storyline revolves around the heroism of the six men in the last days before the city’s fall and around their relationship to Mariia. Eventually, the five young men are killed, and the Soviet Army is defeated and evacuated from Sevastopol. Mariia accompanies the last group of wounded soldiers as they leave the city, while Captain Likhachev, the last

327 See Karl Qualls, ‘The Crimean War’s Long Shadow: Urban Biography and the Reconstruction of Sevastopol after World War II’, Russian History, 41/2 (2014), pp. 211-223. 328 Malakhov kurgan was amongst the twenty-one historical films, of a total of seventy fictional films made during the GPW (see Rozina, L. A., Sosnovskii, V. M., Fionov, E., Sovetskie khudozhestvennye fil’my: Annomirovannyi katalog, Vol. 2 Zvukovye film’y (1930-1957), (Moscow: “Iskusstvo”, 1961), pp. 252-345.

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surviving member of her husband’s unit, remains in Sevastopol to cooperate with partisan groups and to wait for Mariia. The film thus tells the story of one of the worst experiences of the Red Army during the GPW, when, in psychoanalytic terms, mastering the threat of castration is very difficult. The following analysis will examine the ways in which the cinematic aspects suggest a disavowal of this inevitable threat and facing the defeat. First, the narrative reproduces a mythical image of Sevastopol and a heroic picture of the tsarist Army, with which the heroes on the screen identify. Accordingly, the film begins with a narration describing and praising Sevastopol as ‘a hero city’, a ‘city of ancient glory’, ‘a legendary city’, and ‘a city of Russian glory, where Tsar Vladimir was baptised’. Moreover, the film’s title is taken from the Battle of Malakhov, a significant battle during the Crimean War, which resulted in the fall of the Russian redoubt on the Malakhov Hills. The narrative aims to portray the Red Army Family as the successor of the tsarist Army. This prepares the ground to both perpetuate for ever in Russian history the memory of the Soviet soldiers killed in Sevastopol alongside that of the tsarist Army and to justify the enormous losses in Sevastopol during the GPW in the context of the city’s historical fate. Malakhov kurgan, like other historical films of the time, holds back from praising the historical role of the masses, instead it highlights the heroism and wisdom of extraordinary individuals as the main reasons for change in Russian history.329

Figure 3.4.1 Figure 3.4.2 Thus, the lead hero, Captain Likhachev (Figure 3.4.1), with his physical characteristics (a long face, soft dark hair, and a moustache), personality and military tactics is identified as a modern counterpart to Admiral Vladimir Alekseevich Kornilov (1806-1854), the

329 The film Kutuzov (1943) is a good example of such historical films in which Kutuzov, the commander of the Russian army against Napoleon in 1812, was depicted as a great strategist, even superior to Napoleon. In this respect, the film Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Groznyi) (1944) is another appropriate example. 109

chief of staff of the tsarist Black Sea Fleet and the person responsible for the defence of Sevastopol during the Crimean War (Figure 3.4.2).330 Furthermore, the most symbolic scenes of the narrative display a battle analogous to the Battle of Malakhov in the Crimean War and the location of this unsuccessful battle is Malakhov Hills, where Admiral Kornilov was killed. The monument to Kornilov on these hills is shown several times during this battle and Likhachev frequently repeats Kornilov’s calls to his soldiers to resist the enemy. At the end of the battle, the burial ceremony of the dead soldiers is held next to this monument (Figure 3.4.3). Standing under the monument and addressing the sailors and soldiers killed, Likhachev gives a touching speech, in which he calls their position equal to that of the defenders of Sevastopol in the Crimean War. In other words, Likhachev addresses the killed tsarist and Soviet soldiers equally as brave ‘sons’ of the same Family.

Figure 3.4.3 Alongside identifying the Red Army soldiers as successors of the tsarist Army and seeing the defenders of Sevastopol in the two battles as ‘sons’ of one united family, the narrative presents a female image that tallies with that of an ideal young woman in 19th century Russian culture. Mastery of the castration threat in the male spectator’s unconscious is offered through the fascination with looking at this only heroine as a fetishistic image of hope, rebirth and moral obligations. The identification of the on-screen heroes with an imaginary picture of tsarist officers in the mid-1850s is presented in a scene showing the buffet, in which Mariia meets the five surviving members of her husband’s military family. When one of the sailors appears to flirt with Mariia, she rejects his advances with a slap. His comrades

330 https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/11970/vladimir-alekseyevich-kornilov 110

react angrily, with one reproaching him, ‘you must treat this lady [dama], and in general all women, sacredly. Repeat that!’ The use of dama in reference to Mariia — a simple waitress — is marked as a departure from terms such as zhenshchina (woman), devushka (girl) and tovarishch (comrade), which were more commonly used to address women in Soviet society (and on the Soviet screen) in the 1930s-1940s. Mariia’s reaction underscores the message encoded in her sad eyes, restrained gaze, simple bun hair-style and conservative conduct: she, as the widow of a Red Army officer, belonging to the category of chosen ‘sons’ (role models) in the Family, is too mature to be the amorous object of a young soldier. As already discussed in Chapter One, any commanding figure could be perceived as father, or elder brother, in relation to others with lower ranking roles.331 In addition, the sailor’s response to his errant comrade and his words regarding the necessity of gentle conduct towards ladies reproduces the pre-cinematic identification with the hierarchical relationship, discipline and moral behaviour amongst tsarist officers. Hence, the function of the elder ‘brother’ in the Soviet hierarchy overlaps with that in the tsarist Army; and accordingly, the young sailors must treat the widow of their elder brother (chief officer) with respect. This exchange in the buffet elevates the position of Mariia as a potential sexual object for the male gaze into the only source of hope and female morality in disastrous circumstances. It is notable that Mariia enters Sevastopol when its civilian inhabitants are being evacuated and the city is on the brink of capitulation. In other words, her appearance in the narrative symbolises the peak of the castration threat. The defeat of the Red Army at the hands of the German forces is so serious a matter that there is no room for the narrative to offer sadistic voyeuristic pleasure as one of the two cinematic methods of mastering the castration threat. Hence, disavowal of the castration anxiety evoked by the war is offered through fetishistic pleasure. By determining Mariia’s position as the ‘sister’ in the Groznyi family, the narrative represents her image as a fetish, the embodiment of hope and of loyalty to the marine family. This female image is presented in the next sequence of the film. Coming to the buffet before being dispatched to the marine infantry, the young sailors find it in ruins — but Mariia is still living there. The men, aware of the danger of the situation, decide to hold a ‘ball’ in the ruins to overcome the fear; as one of them says to Mariia: ‘Our situation is serious, but we do not intend to worry’. They invite Mariia to don her best clothes and join them for the

331 See Clark, The Soviet Novel, p. 129. 111

‘farewell’. Imitating the manners of tsarist noblemen, the sailors treat Mariia as a dama, cooking food and setting the table for her. At their request, Mariia sings a pre- revolutionary romans, the Gate332 (kalitka) — which the soldiers identify as Captain Lekhachov’s favourite song — (Figure 3.4.4) and dances with each of them. In the course of the evening, Mariia separately encourages each of the soldiers to talk about their sweethearts, as well as to be positive and hopeful that they will return to them for good.

Figure 3.4.4 The sailors express no interest in knowing about Mariia’s life and she remains completely silent about her sadness and suffering because of the death of her husband. Mariia is a completely voiceless fetishistic object, attentively doing her duty of inspiring her symbolic brothers before the fateful military operation. Listening to Mariia’s voice and dancing with her in Malakhov kurgan function in the same way as does looking at the flat key by Nikolai in Zhdi menia; both tokens revive the memory of the Lacanian ‘lost component’ in the warriors’ unconscious and reactivate the Oedipal crisis in it thereby reviving the desire to defeat the enemy as the only way to return to the sweetheart. Mastery of the castration threat in the male spectator’s unconscious is offered in the film though identification with the heroes, who, having seen Mariia as the reminder of their sweethearts, desire to remain alive in hope of returning to them. According to the Althusserian model, the male spectator (mis)identifies with the sailors’

332 The Gate is a Russian romance, and one of the most popular in Russian musical culture. It was composed in 1898 by Aleksandr Nikolaevich Budishchev (1864-1916): ‘When the evening will turn blue, When the stars will light the sky, Carefully open the gate, And enter the quiet garden, like a shadow, And put on a darker cloak and a veil on the head. Where the branches are thicker, I will pass invisibly, inaudibly And at the very threshold of the garden house I will take the veil off those sweet lips…’

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(mis)identification with the imaginary picture of tsarist-era officers through the act of seeing and listening. As in Frontovye podrugi, having identified with tsarist army men, the on-screen heroes in Malakhov kurgan become subjects. The ideology transferred on the screen transforms the spectator into a subject, who is in turn unified with that imaginary picture of tsarist officers through the very precise operation that Althusser calls interpellation. Given that according to the patriarchal view of cinema, the woman functions as an erotic object and that the process of interpellation is complete only when scopophilic or fetishistic pleasure is followed by ego libido, the scopophilic pleasure offered in the narrative is followed by ego libido through identification with the loving feeling that Captain Likhachev has for Mariia. For this purpose, the above-mentioned sequence ends with Likhachev briefly visiting Mariia after the sailors have left. To the sound of far- away bombardment, a close-up shot with low-key illumination shows the captain’s face brightly illuminated at the right of the frame (Figure 3.4.5). Looking at Mariia eagerly and respectfully, with a tone that conveys reluctance, he says that he has come to say goodbye before taking part in the coming operation. The camera cuts to a close-up of Mariia in a dark scarf on the left side of the frame with the same low-key illumination, while the buffet door fills the right side (Figure 3.4.6).

Figure 3.4.6 Figure 3.4.5

This composition evokes the captain’s favourite song, earlier sung by Mariia, in which the lover asks his sweetheart to come to the meeting place in dark clothes for the sake of secrecy. Now, however, Mariia’s dark clothes and scarf serve to camouflage the embodiment of hope and love from the enemy’s sight. Contrary to the lover’s desire ‘to take the veil off those sweet lips’, the captain asks Mariia to leave Sevastopol on the submarine departing from the city the next day. Leaning on the buffet door — a

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substitute kalitka — Mariia interrupts Likhachev as follows: ‘I do not intend to leave the place where my husband was killed’. This simple statement reveals Mariia’s enduring loyalty: although her husband is dead, she will be loyal to his military family. Suppressing his urge to express his love for Mariia, Likhachev (seen in an extreme close- up) instead describes her as a source of hope by saying: ‘I just want you, Mariia, to remember that your name is familiar to all of us. Will you leave?’ Raising her wet eyes and nodding, she answers brokenly, ‘No’ (Figure 3.4.6). It is no accident that Likhachev emphasises that the heroine’s name — Mariia Vladimirovna — ‘is familiar to all of [them]’. At the beginning of the film Sevastopol is presented as the place where Saint Vladimir was baptised. Mariia’s name evokes the image of the Mother of God, to whose icons Russian warriors historically appealed for help and support in battle. Mariia represents an appropriate female believer according to Orthodox teaching: i.e. a sufferer in the service of her family. Disregarding her own individual (dis)comfort as a mourning widow suffering from losing her husband, she entertains the young sailors on the eve of battle solely as a means to fulfil her obligations toward the husband’s military family. Whereas Sonia’s relationships outside her husband’s military family in Zhdi menia were considered a betrayal of the husband and his collective, Mariia’s singing, dancing and drinking with the young sailors in Malakhov kurgan are not only accepted but also praised by the captain. The scene ends with an extreme close-up of Mariia listening to Likhachev, who takes his leave with the following words: ‘You were for us an example of the faithfulness of a woman to her duty’. The captain’s emotional tone, words and facial expression convey his inner struggle to suppress his desire for Mariia and to postpone it in the hope that one day he will receive her love. Instead, he expresses his respect for her as a fetishistic image of faithfulness to her husband’s military family and of hope and love to her symbolic brothers in that hopeless time. The process of interpellation is complete when the two types of scopophilic and fetishistic pleasure are followed by ego libido offered in the last scene of the film. As the last ship leaves Sevastopol carrying wounded soldiers with Mariia as their nurse, Likhachev opens his heart to her as follows: ‘I do not know whether I prefer you a sister or a fiancée’. Without trace of her personality or social position Mariia is a voiceless woman identifying merely with her late husband’s position in the Groznyi family. She is the symbolic sister who has brought hope and life to this family, and whose continued

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presence is essential for its rebirth. Thus, the captain will be waiting for Mariia in Sevastopol.

3.5 Conclusion

The first objective of this chapter was to examine role models of female self-sacrifice presented in a specific subset of Soviet war films made between 1941-1945. The chapter has analysed the cinematic reproduction of the traditional patriarchal perception of the young woman ready to sacrifice her individual needs and comfort for the family. In the absence of family members (father, mother, brother, sister, child) in the narratives, the heroines of Frontovye podrugi, Zdhi menia and Malakhov kurgan were not explicitly identified as daughters, sisters or mothers but only as the fiancées, wives or widows of warriors. The focus of these three films was on male-female relationships in the context of the Great Soviet Family. In psychoanalytic terms, in wartime when the castration threat seriously preoccupied the male unconscious, the cinematic heroine represented the first function of the woman in the construction of the patriarchal unconscious, namely the castration threat by her ‘lack’ of a penis. The chapter has shown that overcoming the enemy on the battlefield in the three films was presented as dependent on overcoming the castration threat in the image of a female body. While the heavy burden of the war in these three films was presented as resting on the shoulders of men, men’s victory or defeat was represented as dependent on the extent of women’s loyalty to them. For this reason, feminine beauty was used to offer scopophilic pleasure. Moreover, the positive heroine functioned as the bearer of moral obligations, hope and love. She was praised for hiding her ‘lack’ of penis from men and fascinating them with her purity as an inspiring means to overcome the castration threat. Despite all difficulties and suffering, the positive heroine was obliged to preserve her purity and loyalty as the essential source of hope and inspiration for warriors to resist the enemy. In other words, overcoming the enemy in these three films was presented as directly dependent on the woman’s loyalty to her man and his military family. The worse the situation of Soviet forces on the battlefield, the more vivid the presentation the fetishistic image of the positive heroine. Likewise, the worse the situation of Soviet forces on the battlefield, the more severely punished the negative heroine. Hence, in Frontovye podrugi, there was a balance between the two types of sadistic voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure. The positive heroine represented the expectations of both the state 115

and the old patriarchy. The negative heroine was warned of punishment for disobeying the Symbolic Order. The castration threat in Zhdi menia was considered more seriously, the two types of pleasure offered, sadistic-investigative voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia, reflected the high level of patriarchal expectation of the woman in wartime. Nikolai’s return from the battlefield was shown as dependent on his wife’s purity and loyalty to him, while Sonia’s rejection of expectations and her disloyalty were considered as the reason for her husband’s defeat (his failure to overcome castration anxiety) and of his death. In Malakhov kurgan, the story of one of the Red Army’s most bitter defeats during the GPW, there was no space for offering sadistic voyeuristic pleasure; as a result, the narrative focused on presenting the only heroine of the story as a fetishistic image of purity, loyalty and hope. The second objective of this chapter was to analyse the relationship between the cinematic representations of the traditional model of female self-sacrifice and the Stalinist identity-building policies. The analysis presented above demonstrated that the fetishistic image of the positive heroine as the bearer of hope and morality was not presented in the films as an optional choice limited to a private level, but as the only appropriate option every woman must choose. In the absence of relatives, the hero and his military colleagues were considered as members of a family. The positive young woman represented complete loyalty not only to her fiancé or husband but also to his military family by playing the role of a sister to the man’s ‘brothers’ (colleagues), while the negative heroine was criticised and excluded from the family for rejecting both components of this dual loyalty. The third and final objective of this chapter was to consider the role of the heroine in the man’s military family and the patriarchal expectations of the woman in wartime in the three films. These were shown to originate in pre-1917 Russian historical, cultural and traditional heritage. The narratives of Frontovye podrugi and Malakhov kurgan connected contemporary events to two significant 19th century Russian conflicts, namely Napoleon’s invasion of Russia (1812) and the Crimean War (1853-1856). Pre- cinematic identification guided the spectator to be fascinated by seeing and hearing the cinematic heroes/heroines identifying with heroes/heroines from Russia’s pre-1917 era, who had gone through those two bloody wars. Hence, the spectator identified with tsarist period heroes/heroines in the stories of the films indirectly, through identification with the heroes/heroines on the screen. Although the narrative of Zhdi menia did not

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reproduce any pre-1917 Russian historical event, it represented a completely traditional view of the young woman, whose main contribution to the war was shown to be that of waiting for her warrior husband at home and remaining loyal to him and his family. This chapter analysed female representations in the GPW era films as fiancées, wives and widows of Soviet warriors and their relationships to the Great Family. The narratives of the films showed heroines as fighters on the battlefront, unskilled volunteers on the battlefield or young women behind the front. Chapter Four will examine female representations of the second category of GPW-time films the images of mother and sister in the Great Family resisting the enemy under the German occupation.

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Chapter Four: Cinematic Images of Soviet Women and Martyrdom 1941-1945: Heroines as Symbolic Mothers and Chosen ‘Sons’ of the Family

4.1 Introduction Having examined three films from the first category of the GPW period war cinema with central female characters, Chapter Three identified a fetishistic image of young heroines as bearers of hope and morality, a means of overcoming the war-evoked castration anxiety of male warriors. Amongst the forty-nine war films made between 1941 and 1945,333 She Defends the Motherland (1943), Rainbow (1944), and Zoia (1944) are the most significant in terms of cinematic features and subjectivity of heroines. These films have drawn the attention of Soviet and Western Russian film critics more than any other films of the time. By examining the cinematic aspects of these three films, this chapter will track the use of the Soviet ISAs in representing female images in war. It will reveal how Russian traditional-religious expectations of women in wartime are employed in the second category of GPW era films. Chapter Four will show how these films reproduce traditional images of a suffering mother (in She Defends the Motherland), the Motherland (rodina) (in Rainbow), the Mother of God (in Rainbow) and an ideal ‘son’ of the Motherland (in Zoia) as the key models of female self-sacrifice of the time. The chapter will demonstrate how Russian messianic attitudes are used in She Defends the Motherland and Zoia to inspire resistance to the enemy and the reinforcement of people’s obedience to the state. The chapter will also show that these films’ particular affiliation to the Symbolic Order is dramatised in their heroines’ deep desire to suffer for the sake of the Great Soviet Family.

4.2 Heroine as Symbolic Mother in Ona zashchishchaet rodinu (She Defends the Motherland 1943) This section will examine Fridrikh Iermler’s She Defends the Motherland, focusing on the presentation of female self-sacrifice. This cinematic representation in war corresponds to the image of a mother in Russian Orthodox culture, discussed in Chapter Two. This analysis will show how the film employs the traditional mother-child relationship in the service of the Great Soviet Family; and how the Great Family is connected to the notion of Russian messianism.

333 L. Rozina, V. Sosnovskii, E. Fionov, Sovetskie khudozhestvennye fil’my: Annomirovannyi katalog, Vol. 2 zvukovye film’y (1930-1957), (Moscow: “Iskusstvo”, 1961), pp. 252-345. 118

She Defends the Motherland tells the story of a rural woman, Praskov’ia Ivanovna (played by Vera Maretskaia 1906-1978), who, in the absence of fatherly authority, plays a significant role in her region against the German army. The film opens with a sequence depicting her village, on the threshold of the GPW, as particularly prosperous, and its people completely fortunate. Praskov’ia Ivanovna is a beautiful, happy young wife and mother (Figure 4.2.1). In one of the first scenes, having heard her loud laugh, one of the neighbours asks if this is a celebration day for her, Praskov’ia answers: ‘Every day is a celebration in our life’. However, this Utopia is soon shattered by a German army attack: men are fighting on the front or are killed in the war, families are destroyed, and women, children and the elderly suffer greatly. Praskov’ia’s personal Utopia ends too: her husband is killed on the front, her son is crushed by a German tank before her eyes, and she herself becomes homeless. Fleeing the ruins of her former life, Praskov’ia encounters a group of fellow villagers, who have absconded in the woods. They take Praskov’ia in and shelter her. Soon Praskov’ia encourages the group to take up arms and kill the Nazi forces. Over the course of the film, Praskov’ia not only commands this underground group of partisans, but also, having heard news about the fall of Moscow, she secretly visits other occupied villages in the region to convince them of the impossibility of Moscow's submission and to rouse the villagers against the occupiers in the name of Moscow. Eventually her identity is revealed by the enemy and she is sentenced to execution. To secure Praskov’ia’s release, a considerable number of residents in the area attack the place of execution. They kill the Germans, occupy their headquarters and liberate the region.

Figure 4.2.1 The development of the image of Praskov’ia over the course of the film, and the symbolic significance thereof, can be illustrated through a close analysis of several key scenes. In the first of these, the exhausted Praskov’ia has just met a group of fellow 119

villagers and is led by them to a hut to rest. Her need for rest and support is contrasted with quarrelling amongst the villagers outside. The elderly village teacher's plea for calm (‘Tikho! Vy ee, khot’ pozhaleite’ Hush! Have a pity, at least, for her) suggests that such quarrelling is commonplace and that in the absence of a fatherly authority, the villagers have lost any sense of unity and discipline. In the absence of paternal power, however, Praskov’ia is transformed from an exhausted widow into a strong maternal figure. The first stage in her transformation occurs in the next scene: leaning over a barrel in the hut to drink some water, Praskov’ia catches sight of her reflection in the water and realises that her face is old and wrinkled, and her hair grey (Figure 4.2.2). Shakily and hastily Praskov’ia covers her hair with a dark scarf. Her physical transformation indicates the extent of her suffering, simultaneously convincing both the heroine and the viewer that in a short space of time trauma has significantly aged her. The male gaze of the camera highlights Praskov’ia’s anxiety that she is no longer the same beautiful young woman as before the war. As the result of losing the two main valuables of a woman in a patriarchal community, namely her womanly attraction and her own family Praskov’ia is shown as prepared to take revenge for both. Having heard that the frightened villagers are talking about a group of Germans approaching their hiding place, Praskov’ia leaves the hut and stands in front of the people in a medium shot with a little low angle, (Figure 4.2.3) with no trace of that young beautiful woman in Figure 4.2.1 in her appearance. Holding an axe, and with the make-up and expression of a harsh and decisive rural woman, she angrily screams: ‘Where are they?’

Figure 4.2.2 Figure 4.2.3 In the next scene, while the group of Germans passes through the woods, the frightened villagers try to flee. Praskov’ia, however, holding the axe, commands the

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villagers to resist and to defend their home: ‘Don’t run!’, she shouts, ‘Kill them! Kill the beasts!’ Striking the first blow against the enemy and encouraging others to resist, Praskov’ia provides the unity and discipline that the villagers had previously lacked. The climax of Praskov’ia’s evolving image takes place in the next scene, during which it shifts from that of a broken suffering widow into a visualised image of the Motherland standing up to command ‘her children’ to defend home. It starts with a long shot displaying a group of male villagers sitting around the fire discussing how to resist the enemy without a commander and military facilities. The insignificant position of Praskov’ia amongst the men is effected through the high angle of the camera, which shows her in a medium close-up shot lying down at a distance from the others in silence, but listening to them carefully. She is the only community member in that position, which indicates her union with the Motherland. The village teacher suggests going out into the region and mobilising people to resist the enemy. On hearing that, Praskov’ia is shown in the background of a long shot resting up on one elbow waiting for the decision of the group in the foreground. The idea seems impractical to the others. The teacher moves on to suggest resisting the enemy using the facilities they have. Praskov’ia is now shown in a seated position in the background of a long shot, again in silence. The group wonders how to survive the cold and hunger with thirty-eight children, let alone resist the enemy. As the meeting fails to reach a consensus on resisting the enemy, one of the men suggests returning to the village and cooperating with the Germans. Praskov’ia is shown in a medium close-up eye-level angle shot looking from one man to the other in silence with a worried and angry expression. Despite the sign of fear and shock on the faces of the men no one dares to stop the man who suggested cooperation. As he walks away from his companions, the anxious Praskov’ia is shown this time in a close-up angle shot looking around impatiently, waiting for the reaction of the men. In the absence of any reaction, she quickly stands up, picks up a gun and kills the traitor.

Figure 4.2.4 121

The next medium close-up shot, this time with a little low angle, shows her standing in front of the sitting men. Looking down at the group sadly, Praskov’ia, as the visualised image of the Motherland, presents ‘her word’ with a firm voice: ‘poka zhivye, drat’sia budem… (we will fight, as long as we’re alive)’ (Figure 4.2.4). This scene reveals three significant issues in the narrative. The traitor intends to leave the collective and cooperate with the Germans not only to survive the difficult war; he also announces his rejection of the dominant/Bolshevik ideology by saying: ‘I am fed up with “the happy” kolkhoz life! I've worn out the seat of my pants. See you there soon!’ The quarrel amongst the villagers, their inability to come to a conclusion at the meeting and their silence when faced with the traitor’s rejection of the dominant ideology take on metaphorical significance, hinting at the chaotic social bonds amongst the members of the family of villagers in the absence of fatherly authority, and thus pointing to their need for a leader to fill the role of fatherly power. The Motherland “interferes” only when the village men (her children) demonstrate their inability to keep the privileged position of masculinity in the Symbolic Order. Presenting the heroine as the commander of a group of male villagers, one who orders them to kill the betrayer, resist the enemy and defend the home, implies that the war poses a threat to masculinity, and its privileged position as the bearer of the dominant ideology in the Symbolic Order. Mastering the war’s evocation of castration anxiety in the male unconscious is projected in the film visually and narratively through the viewer’s fascination with the voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasure offered by the images of the two heroines, namely Praskov’ia and Fen’ka. As discussed in Chapter One, the promoted pattern of relationships amongst members of the Great Family was that found in traditional Russian households, where women were mainly identified as mothers, sisters and wives, who acted in service to the family. Presenting Praskov’ia as a beautiful young widow with authority amongst the villagers would not have accorded with the common traditional perception of the status of women in a traditional Russian household. Significant changes in the appearance, clothing, mood and behaviour of Praskov’ia, that eliminate her feminine beauty, lead to the creation of a fetishistic image as the embodiment of Motherland, motherly love, inspiration and hope. Given the pre-cinematic identification, the spectator could easily identify with such a mothering image thereby ensuring unity amongst the community/family, their resistance to the enemy and the return of the dominance of

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masculine position in the Symbolic Order. Accordingly, by rejecting any individual interests and subjectivity in army operations, the narrative represents Praskov’ia as a symbolic mother in the service of the community. This is shown immediately after the key determinant scene discussed above. The opening shot of the next scene shows Praskov’ia in the foreground, her back to the camera, as the sole woman seeing off the male villagers, who are leaving to attack one of the locations of the German forces in the region. Having accomplished the mission successfully, the partisans leave a note saying: ‘Done by Comrade P’. Large scale research on organised female participation in different wars reveals that when women find their way into combat they have fought as well as men have; they can fight, they can kill, they can lead and men can work under their leadership.334 However, over the course of the film, Comrade P is generally shown doing washing, cooking, sewing clothes and organising family affairs such as a wedding party for a beloved couple; that is, she is shown performing duties consistent with those of a traditional, caring mother who looks after her children. The narrative implies that the hopeless collective is transformed into a successful partisan troop as the result of her motherly love and the belief in values of the Symbolic Order, not her military capability or management. The image of Praskov’ia restores hope and unity to the villagers so successfully that they are very positive about the future of the war. The symbolic mother even arranges a wedding party for a young couple (Sen’ka and Fen’ka) rescued by the villagers during their first attack on the German forces. However, the war poses such a threat to the Great Soviet Family that the ‘mission’ of the Motherland’s symbolic representative cannot be limited to the framework of a small collective; it has to develop into a national scale. News about the fall of Moscow destroys the celebratory wedding party. Praskov’ia is the only person not to believe the report. Addressing her comrades, she gives the following touching speech: This is not true! Do you really believe it? Here we are fighting for Osinovka, and watering the soil with our blood, and there - Moscow! Moscow! After all, if there is no Moscow, then how can one live? […] Lies! Lies! Moscow is ours. The people could not give away their most precious, the dearest thing. I know! I see, I see! All our people gathered together, and were repulsed, fought off. They did not let [the enemy] in. […] And you ... believed it. You burst out snivelling, like women! It’s shameful! You are tired of hiding in the woods, so you believed it! But I do not believe it! I do not believe! And I will prove it!

334 See Goldstein, War and Gender, p. 127. 123

Furthermore, the titles appearing on the screen inform the audience that Praskov’ia’s heart does not lie to her; Moscow has not capitulated to the enemy. She goes from one village to another to tell ‘the truth’ to people and expose the lies and defamation about the fall of Moscow. This is the beginning of a new stage in Praskov’ia’s ‘mission’. In the final sequence of the film her motherly image gains a wider dimension; as the symbol of the Motherland, she becomes the pivot of hope and union for a larger number of the Great Family. Comrade P’s efforts to preserve faith among locals of the region that Moscow is unconquerable and undefeated make her so popular that the Germans hunt her down; eventually Praskov’ia is arrested and sentenced to death. In a medium close-up shot, Praskov’ia is shown at the Germans’ headquarters awaiting execution. With her make-up, headscarf and grey hair, the image of Comrade P in this scene (Figure 4.2.5) corresponds to that of the Motherland in the poster The Motherland Calls (Figure 4.2.6).335 The poster represents a majestic image of the Motherland. The strong figure fills practically the whole poster, and with a captivating penetrating glance looks directly into the camera, firmly appealing to her children to resist the enemy. Having delivering the petition with one hand, she passionately guides ‘her children’ with the other towards German forces, seen in the background. Unlike in the Motherland poster, in the film the hands of Comrade P are tied, a bayonet and a gun threaten her life, the left /‘West’ part of the shot is occupied by the enemy, while a German officer ironically offers his arm to accompany her to the gallows. In contrast to the majestic Motherland of the poster, Praskov’ia, seems completely hopeless as she stares at the horizon, desperately sad. At this very moment, a group of partisans attacks, shoots the officer, releases Praskov’ia and takes back the whole region. The similarity between Praskov’ia’s image and that of the Motherland is fully exposed in this scene: when the astonished Praskov’ia asks her comrades how they have managed to mobilise people to attack the enemy, they answer, ‘in your name; we gathered people in your name’. Without any pivotal role in army operations Praskov’ia in fact plays the role of an ideal bearer of the Symbolic Order. Her image as a suffering mother in the service of the Great Family is illustrated not only through her make-up, behaviour and relationships, but also through her complete belief in the invincibility of Moscow. In fact, in the absence of fatherly authority from home during wartime, Praskov’ia’s main role in the

335 https://www.pencioner.ru/news/moya-istoriya/istoriya-plakata-rodina-mat-zovyet, accessed on 22/05/2019. 124

narrative is to resolve any doubt about the validity of the dominant/Bolshevik ideology to rule the Great Family. Given the historic significance of Moscow as the pivot of unity and strength amongst Russians and ‘the most precious value for the Russian people’, as Praskov’ia phrases it, the narrative emphasises the legitimacy of Stalinism by underscoring the significance of Moscow in this ruling system. As Chapter One argued, the belief in the uniqueness and holiness of Moscow was essential in the myth of Russian messianism, which occupied a significant place in Russian mentality and culture. Thus, Praskov’ia, the sole sincere and total believer in the uniqueness and invincibility of Moscow in the narrative is shown as the representative of the Motherland, the perpetual bearer of the Symbolic Order.

Figure 4.2.5 Figure 4.2.6

While heroines in the films analysed in Chapter Three represented the first female function in classic films, identified by Mulvey, — to symbolise the fear of castration in men through a ‘lack’ of a penis — the image of Praskov’ia represents the second function, — to usher the child into the Symbolic Order. The above scene shows that the fetishistic image of Praskov’ia as the symbolic mother masters the castration threat amongst the male members of the collective. Given that the mother’s function ends after the child’s access to the Symbolic Order, it is significant that Praskov’ia’s temporary ‘mission’ in the Family is accomplished when fatherly authority returns to the region, liberates the Motherland and the male members of the Family reoccupy their position in the Symbolic Order. Alongside the fetishistic image of the mother, there is another female character, Fen’ka, who symbolises a fear of castration in men through her ‘lack’ of a penis and who offers scopophilic pleasure narratively and visually. Following capture by the enemy,

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Fen’ka and her fiancé, Sen’ka, are then released during the villagers’ first attack on the German forces and subsequently considered members of the partisan group. Showing no enthusiasm for taking part in the resistance, Fen’ka simply wants to start a family with Sen’ka. While accompanying her fiancé on a military mission to dynamite a bridge and to destroy some tanks, she is immersed in her dreams. Therefore, without considering the significance and danger of their task, she expresses her greatest desires as follows: to have a hut in the woods, to bake bread and to wait for Sen’ka to return home (Figure 4.2.7). Fen’ka is a beautiful, talkative, naïve young woman, who symbolises the loving rural sweetheart waiting for her warrior, who Fen’ka describes as a beloved ‘hungry and dirty’ man. Her naïve and womanly view of life represents her incompatibility with battle and her insistence on sexual intercourse only after marriage indicates her traditional point of view and thus, her obedience to the Symbolic Order. As mentioned in Chapter Three, reviving the memory of the Lacanian ‘lost component’ in the male warrior’s unconscious and reactivating the Oedipal crisis in it are considered necessary to master the castration threat evoked by war, and hence awaken the desire to defeat the enemy as the only way to return to the sweetheart. Fen’ka reveals her ‘lack’ to Sen’ka’s unconscious in wartime. This results in deactivation the Oedipal crisis in his unconscious, immobilisation against the enemy, and thus, his death. Her punishment, losing her beloved man, is however, punishment at a private level. The storyline of Fen’ka and Sen’ka offers both voyeuristic and sadistic pleasure.

Figure 4.2.7 While looking at Fen’ka offers scopophilic pleasure to the male gaze and identification with Sen’ka results in a temporary overcoming of castration anxiety, his death and Fen’ka’s suffering awaken the castration threat in the male spectator, which is controlled through the fetishistic image of the mother and identification with the partisans defeating the enemy in the last sequence of the film.

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4.3 Heroines as Symbol of the Motherland and Suffering Mothers in Raduga (Rainbow 1944) The image of women and martyrdom in Ona zashchishchaet rodinu displayed the use of the pre-revolutionary patriarchal view of the woman in the context of Stalinist war cinema. Here the arena of heroism and subjectivity in military operations are occupied by men, while the film representes the two female functions in classic films, identified by of Mulvey, with the aim of mastering the castration threat in the male viewer’s unconscious. This section will analyse female images in war in Mark Donskoi’s Rainbow. With a multi-line story and more female characters than appear in She Defends the Motherland, Rainbow depicts the desperate atmosphere of a Ukrainian village occupied by the Germans, who cruelly torture and execute its residents. The film dramatises the hopeless state of the village in wintertime and the depressed, scared and hungry villagers, trapped in misery and unable to do anything except wait for a miracle. In this hopeless situation, one of the villagers, Partisan Olena Kosmiuk (played by Nataliia Uzhvii 1898- 1986) returns home to give birth. She is immediately captured and interrogated by the Germans, since they are aware of her involvement in blowing up a bridge a week earlier. As Olena refuses to reveal the whereabouts of other partisans, she is subjected to dreadful torture. Olena withstands the torture, refusing to betray her comrades. After the birth of her son, having counted on Olena’s motherly feelings, the fascists threaten to torture the new-born boy. However, even the murder of her son cannot force Olena to break her silence. Eventually Olena is punished for her resistance. She is taken to a field and shot, while she is holding her murdered baby. Following Olena’s sacrifice, the village is attacked by a group of partisans and liberated. Depicting the resistance of the peasant community in Rainbow, where religious- folklore symbols are admired, required the director to move away from the 1930s Soviet cinematic traditions of Socialist Realism. Accordingly, the film iconography, including the make-up and attributes of the characters, are unlike those in 1930s Soviet films, which propagandised happiness and prosperity in the Soviet Union. The coldness and darkness of wintertime, long shadows, a lack of food, the poor clothing of the villagers, their frightened and nervous looks, the long unkempt beards of the men and signs indicating the religious belief amongst the villagers (like crossing themselves), convey an atmosphere which symbolises the depth of desperation in an old-fashioned Orthodox community in a critical situation, able to do little but wait for a miracle. The narration of

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Rainbow is also far from the traditions of the 1930s. Despite She Defends the Motherland, which opens with a depiction the happy life in the 1930s, Rainbow avoids direct admiration for the Soviet state, the Party or Stalin. Likewise, the sense of humour in She Defends, inherited from 1930s Soviet cinema, has no place in Rainbow. The film begins with a collection of shots showing the village under occupation by German forces, who march through the village and control it, while corpses are seen hanging in different places. The absence of paternal authority in the village and the horrible picture of suffering villagers under German occupation indicates the war’s evocation of castration anxiety. This section will examine how the narrative involves both female functions of mastery over the castration threat. The first function, namely ushering the child into the Symbolic Order, is presented in the story lines of the suffering mothers. Displaying the suffering of these mothers, especially as witnesses of the execution of their children, offers great fetishistic and sadistic pleasure. The function of symbolising the fear of castration in men for the ‘lack’ of a penis is presented by the negative heroine, Pasha (Pusia). The narrative also offers sadistic voyeuristic pleasure in her punishment by the agency of an active and powerful hero – a Red Army officer. As does She Defends the Motherland, Rainbow reproduces the suffering image of a mother in pre-revolutionary peasant households in the service of the Motherland and the Great Family. This aim is achieved through the presence of a number of folkloric symbols in story lines of the mothers, which will be examined below. The situation of the occupied village is conveyed by introducing it by means of a medium close-up shot, at an eye-level angle, from the ground, where the frozen corpse of a young partisan lies. The occupied land symbolises the Motherland bearing witness to the massacre of her sons by German forces. This symbol of the Motherland is visualised through the image of an old woman who appears to be drawing some water from the common village well. Having noticed a head protruding from the ice, the old woman kneels next to the corpse, strokes his hair and with love and pain calls him ‘son’. The low angle of the medium shot renders an image of the Motherland that is majestic and ethereal, derived from earth and reaching to the sky, and filling most of the frame (Figure 4.3.1). The woman’s/the Motherland’s heavenly head and shoulders, in the top part of the shot, merge with the sky, while her figure in the lower part of the frame coalesces into the ice and snow – covered land. On the right side of the frame, amongst the ice-clad corpses, some hands reach out to the sky as though appealing for help. The scene

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symbolises the harshness of the Nazis compared with the ‘sons’ of the Motherland; the bent figure of the Motherland and her miserable expression in Figure 4.3.1 symbolise the Motherland in mourning for the loss of her ‘sons’ and for the collapse of her divine glory. The number hanging on her chest symbolises the lack of identity and slavery under enemy occupation. Furthermore, the medium close-up shot of the young corpse is repeated, this time his hair, after being touched by the old woman, waves in the light breeze, which symbolises the return of life to that dead land under severe violence. The return of life and hope to the village thanks to the mediation of mothers begins in the last shot of this scene. Having placed the yoke of her water buckets on her shoulders, the old woman rises up with her back to the camera and goes to the village. There is more evidence indicating that the old woman is the symbol of the Motherland. For instance, her house has been taken over by the German commander in the village (Kurt), who lives there with his Russian mistress, Pasha. The old woman, who secretly collaborates with partisans, is called ‘mother’ by them and she returns this by calling them ‘dear sons’. She represents the bearer of traditions and values in the Symbolic Order. It is she who brings the yoke – the symbol of the rainbow – to the village; later, she interprets the appearance of the rainbow in the sky as dobroe predznamenovanie (a good omen); she frequently warns Pasha about the consequence of breaking the Symbolic Order in sayings such as: ‘be scared of people; they will not forgive you;’ the privilege of masculinity in the Symbolic Order is partly revealed in her sayings such as: ‘When our men come back, they will punish you [Pasha] properly’.

Figure 4.3.1 The second suffering mother and the mediator for the return of life and hope to the village is represented by Olena and based on the image of the Mother of God. The very morning Olena comes home to give birth she is arrested and sent to the German headquarters for interrogation. It is then that her labour pain starts. Having noticed the

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rainbow in the sky, Olena’s face becomes shiny with happiness and she breathes with ease. The rainbow is noticed by other villagers as well; staring at the sky joyfully the old woman says: ‘This is a dobroe predznamenovanie (good omen).’ The rainbow in Slavic folklore is described as a curved yoke, a dobroe predznamenovanie (an eternal covenant between God and people), a bridge from Heaven to earth, a sign of being divine intervention in human affairs. In the story of Noah in the Bible, having blessed Noah and his sons, God adds ‘I am putting my rainbow in the cloud that it be a sign of a covenant between me and between earth […] When I put a cloud on the ground, there will be a rainbow in the cloud [... ]and I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and between every living soul [...] This is the sign of the covenant that I set between me and between all flesh that is on the earth’.336 While the bent figure of the symbolic Motherland, in Figure 4.3.1, can be interpreted as a bridge between the sky and earth, the yoke she carries to the village together with the rainbow, which appears later that morning in the sky, indicate a belief among the villagers in ‘the everlasting covenant between God and between every living soul’. The narrative links the two Orthodox values of martyrdom and female suffering to the Slavic folkloric perception of the rainbow. In Orthodox Christianity, as mentioned in Chapter Two, God is considered a strict father, while the Mother of God is perceived as an intercessor for her ‘children’ (believers) before the Lord, and as the limiter of God the Father’s despotic powers over her ‘children’337 The suffering of the Mother of God and the sacrifice of her son for human beings resulted in a privileged position before the Lord, who ‘makes us worthy of grace in the eyes of God’.338 Thus, the Orthodox believed that they would receive the Lord’s mercy through the intercession of the Mother. Having imitated the suffering of the Mother of God, the two suffering mothers in the narrative sacrifice their innocent children ‘pered bozh’im tronom’ (before God's throne) to remind the Lord of his ‘covenant’ with people. The first innocent victim is the eight- or nine-year-old Misha. When in darkness Misha tries to approach the stable where Olena has been imprisoned that day, and to give her a piece of bread, he is shot by the German forces. In order to avoid retribution for collaboration with the partisans, Misha’s mother and her four little children bury the corpse in their hut secretly. The narrative and the camera take maximum sadistic pleasure

336 ‘Book of Genesis’, The Bible, 8:18-22; 9:1-17 (https://www.bibleonline.ru/children/ibt/9/ , accessed on 08/03/2019). 337 Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, p. 220. 338 Evgenii Poselianin, V Pokhvalu Presviatoi Boqoroditse (St. Petersburg, 1903), p. 48, as quoted in Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, p. 220. 130

in displaying the cruelty of the Germans in shedding the blood of the innocent Misha and the suffering of his family. The mother’s astonishing suffering, especially at the moment she buries her child with her own hands, is viewed by the narrative as simply an obligation. During the burial, one of her little children says the mother ‘you should not have let Misha go.’ In a two-shot of the weeping mother and Misha, at an eye-level angle, the mother looks at the little girl with sad, tearful eyes, and answers with a trembling voice full of anger and pain: ‘I must. Oh, my dear daughter, I must!’ (Figure 4.3.2).

Figure 4.3. 2 The depth of the savagery of the German forces and of the villagers’ desperation is depicted in the next scenes; having imprisoned some of the inhabitants and threatened them with death, the Germans force the villagers to disclose the name of the person who has hidden the boy’s corpse, and to provide the occupiers with bread. In psychoanalytic terms, the threat of castration is so strong that even the fetishistic image of Misha’s suffering mother cannot overcome it; in fact, a simulated image of the Mother of God is required. The apex of hopelessness in the village is shown as coinciding with Olena’s childbirth. The next sequence of the film displays the desperate state of the villagers as they wait for the birth of the most innocent member of the community, one who must be sacrificed to revive ‘the everlasting covenant between God and between every living soul’. Olena is shown lying in a stable on a bed of straw, a setting analogous to that of Christ’s birth. The shot cuts to a long shot of the frozen village, followed by a few shots of the old woman, Misha’s mother and other positive heroines in the narrative, all with sad worried waiting expressions. The waiting pose for help from God is shown more clearly further on in the scene, which continues with a high angle medium close-up shot of a peasant old woman who looks up with an expression of one praying for help (Figure

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4.3.3). With the same angle, the camera pans to the left to show a whole chain of villagers in the same position.

Figure 4.3.3 A sign of God’s mercy appears to the village though the birth of Olena’s child. The praying shot cuts to a long shot of the horizon in the early dawn, followed by a medium close-up of Olena, while the scene’s march music is replaced with a piece of modern Orthodox choir chanting. There is then a cut to a close-up with an eye-level angle shot of Olena’s profile, which indicates the secret her story line carries. Yelling soundlessly, while the shot cuts to the next long shot of the sun rising over the village in the horizon, the crying child accompanies the chanting choir. The shot then cuts to a medium close-up of Olena’s profile. Turning her tearful face to the camera and looking at the horizon happily, Olena breathes peacefully and addressing her absent husband, discloses the secret: ‘Ivan, our dream has finally come true’. Olena’s statement indicates that the couple has been waiting for this moment for a long time. This gives the reason for Olena’s happiness on seeing the rainbow that morning; in Slavic folklore it is considered as the sign of the birth of a child with a gender which has long been waited for. Given the yoke that the symbolic Motherland carried to the village, together with Olena’s happiness at the sight of the rainbow and the villagers’ anticipation and prayer on the threshold of a birth, one can conclude that the villagers were waiting for the birth of this child as a sign of God’s mercy. Furthermore, the narrative stages Olena339 imitating the Mother of God by sacrificing her only child to secure her community. In addition to suffering severe torture prior to the birth of her son, Olena continues to resist persecution afterwards. As soon as the child is born, both are brought to the Nazi commandant’s office. Having realised that Olena does not intend to cooperate with him, the commandant warns her to choose

339 The name Olena is a simplified form of Elena, which means ‘preferred’, ‘luminous’. 132

between the child’s life and the safety of her comrades in the woods during the following dialogue: Show whether you are a Bolshevik or a mother? I am a mother! Then, you will tell us where they [the partisans] are. No, I will not. Do you have only this child? - […] I have [many] sons, only sons… they are there; in the woods…

A sound of a gun interrupts her; the child is killed. The coming shots show Olena, holding her murdered child, being taken away from the village while the horrified villagers watch her from behind ice-covered windows. Having climbed snow-covered hills, Olena stands at the top of the highest hill. The last image of Olena shows her in medium close-up at a low angle shot, holding the child tightly to her heart (Figure 4.3.4). A halo of sunlight shining from behind glorifies her innocent eyes and sad expression like the icon of a saint. Olena is shot from behind and falls into the river. The image of Olena in Figure 4.3.4, where she resembles the icon of the Mother of God, reveals why the film-director asserted that ‘I have filmed a Ukrainian Madonna’.340 In what for the villagers is a hapless wartime, Olena, climbing to the top of ‘Golgotha’ sacrifices herself and her only child to assuage the Lord’s anger, mediate God’s mercy and enlighten ‘the night’ of the despairing villagers. The Orthodox Church’s perception of Russia was as the Mother of God’ home.341 She was perceived as ‘the defender of Rus’ against its enemies.342 Orthodox Christians believed they were protected by the Mother of God, especially when they left for war or were attacked. She, according to the Orthodox Church, materialised in several icons as the protector of Russia’s national identity.343 The reproduction of the image of the Mother of God in Rainbow is justified given prevailing belief amongst the Orthodox of the involvement of the Mother of God with this world, discussed in Chapter Two,344 and, likewise, their understanding that imitation of the Mother of God is the best way to imitate Christ.345 Given these two issues, the impact of the Russian religious-cultural heritage on creating a fetish image of female suffering in war in Rainbow becomes clearer; by calling in ‘heavenly’ reinforcements and by depicting feminine suffering in a

340 A few decades after making Rainbow Donskoi wrote: ‘I have filmed a Ukrainian Madonna’. (Natal’ia Uzhvii, Fil’my, Druz’ia, Gody (Moskva: Biuro propagandy sovetskogo kinoiskusstva, 1977), p. 34). 341 See Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, p. 247. 342 Cross, The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurention Text, (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America,1953), p. 27. 343 Ibid. 344 Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, pp. 223-4. 345 Ibid, p. 222. 133

fashion that relates to divine legacy, Rainbow converts voiceless peasant women into a fetish of the sacrificial as a way to overcome the castration anxiety in the male viewer’s unconscious.

Figure 4.3.4 The second cinematic female function i.e. symbolising the fear of castration in the male consciousness for her ‘lack’ of a penis is emerged with the image of the only negative heroine, Pasha. A beautiful young woman and the wife of a Red Army officer whom she believes dead, Pasha has come to the village as the mistress of the Nazi commandant (Kurt). While the villagers suffer under German occupation, Pasha is completely indifferent to the disaster of war. In that peasant community, Pasha’s behaviour, make-up, hair-style and clothes, reminiscent of beautiful Western film stars of the time, mark her out as chuzhaia (alien) to the Family. Pasha, like the negative heroines in the films analysed in Chapter Three, is condemned in the narrative for putting her individual interests above her obligations towards the collective. Her indifference to the war is rendered as equivalent to a rejection of the dominant ideology. In a conflict with her old hostess, Pasha, like the negative hero in She Defends the Motherland, reveals her serious doubts about Soviet ideology and her unwillingness to live in the Soviet Union, where, she asserts, even in normal conditions a woman can’t buy a pair of socks without difficulty. She trusts that Kurt will take her to Germany to start a new life. Having focused on her femininity, the narrative then represents Pasha as the embodiment of sensual pleasure, a passionate and appetitive character. She is mainly shown in shiny silk bathrobes lying in bed or sitting in front of the mirror and putting on make-up. Pasha, like Sonia in Zhdi menia, is an object for the male gaze, offering scopophilic pleasure. Both the narrative and the camera offer the sadistic pleasure of showing her disclosing her ‘lack’ to the enemy in wartime. In an eroticised scene, Kurt and Pasha suck a piece of chocolate together. Her image indicates the enemy’s dominant

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position and the acknowledgement and admission of the castration threat to male members of the Great Family. In other words, Pasha’s desire to reveal her ‘lack’ to the enemy is identified in the narrative as not only a stance against the dominant ideology, but also against the people and the Symbolic Order. The old hostess, the symbolic bearer of the Symbolic Order, frequently warns Pasha of the potential punishment for failure to meet the expectations of a good woman in wartime in phrases such as: ‘Tremble! [...] Cry with fear! Be afraid of people; they will not forgive you!’ In both categories of Soviet war films of 1941-45 examined in Chapters Three and Four, the only choice shown as open to Soviet women in wartime is identification with the fetishistic image of a woman’s moral obligation in a traditional mode of family, and any woman disclosing her ‘lack’ to men results in her punishment. Pasha with her self-indulgence, passion and greed – seriously reproved by Orthodox teaching as signs of sensuality and evil – represents the contrary of Olena. Whereas disclosing the woman’s ‘lack’ to Soviet warriors in Frontovye Podrugi was intolerable, and in Wait for Me it results in Sonia being rejected from the collective, She Defends the Motherland shows it to result in the death of Sen’ka as the punishment of Fen’ka, in Rainbow unveiling the woman’s ‘lack’ to the enemy results in Pasha being condemned to death. When the village is taken back by a group of partisans and the fatherly authority comes back home, Pasha is shot in bed by her own husband. Rainbow, like She Defends the Motherland, on the one hand, emphasises not the individuality, femininity or subjectivity of the lead heroine, and other positive heroines in the war, but their motherhood. The title of mother, associated with female passivity and male activity, is traditionally identified only in the framework of the family. Thus, Misha’s mother and Olena represent millions of Soviet women, and thereby are easily identifiable for any ordinary Soviet woman. On the other hand, the function of ushering the child into the Symbolic Order in Rainbow, and likewise in other Stalinist war films, is equal to the sacrifice of a child, all to secure the return of the privileged position of masculinity to the Symbolic Order. There is no sign of male subjectivity during the first fifty-six minutes of the film. As soon as Misha and Olena’s son are executed, partisans attack the German forces, defeat them and liberate the village. The rainbow appears for the last time in the village sky, bringing joy to those looking at it. Hence mothers suffer and sacrifice their own innocent sons to revive ‘the everlasting covenant between God’ and the people, thereby

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signalling the return of male authority to the collective. In other words, the female function of ushering the child into the Symbolic Order overlaps with the Orthodox female value of suffering for the family, because Olena calls herself the mother of partisans, who are fighting against the enemy in the woods. This requires that she considers herself and partisans as members of a family. Moreover, the audience knows that the partisans are protecting the Soviet state, which is based on Bolshevism. In other words, the protectors of the dominant ideology are perceived as so important to Olena that she sacrifices her only child to protect them. Accordingly, the Orthodox female value of suffering for the family, as shown in Rainbow, is used in the service of both the Soviet Family and the dominant/Soviet ideology. By sacrificing herself and her new-born son to protect her ‘sons’ (the Family members) Olena displays complete obedience to Orthodox Christian expectations of an ideal female believer. Besides, as mentioned in Chapter Two, being an appropriate and worthy member of the Great Family was considered the obligation of every single Soviet New Person. Therefore, Olena’s sacrifice of her son and herself for the sake of the family of partisans also represents her as an object subordinate to the Soviet state. Thus, the fetishistic image of suffering mothers in Rainbow clearly demonstrates the significant role played by the Russian religious-cultural heritage in the reproduction of the Soviet viewer’ submission to the state.

4.4 Heroine as Ideal ‘Son’ of the Great Soviet Family in Zoia (1944)

Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia (1923-1941) was the most popular female fighter of the GPW. The story of Zoia’s suffering and death by hanging, with upsetting photographs of her dead body mutilated by the German forces, were published for the first time as a Pravda article on January 27, 1942.346 The impact of the story on the public was so profound that Zoia’s image was transformed into an icon; people cut her photographs out of Pravda and framed them.347 Indeed, the Pravda article became so popular and influential that, in less than a month after its publication, Zoia was proclaimed the first heroine of the Soviet Union in the GPW, and therefore, the female role model of self-sacrifice in the GPW. Later, Zoia’s story became the most detailed partisan biography in the USSR. In 1944, the film Zoia was made by Lev Arnshtam based on the life story of Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia. The film was so successful that it achieved third place at the box

346 See P. Lidov, ‘Tania’, Pravda, (27 January 1942). 347 Adrienne Marie Harris, The Myth of the Woman Warrior and World War II in Soviet Culture (PhD thesis, University of Kansas, 2001), p. 70. 136

office in 1944 and was seen by almost 22 million people.348 The story told by Zoia takes place in the first months of the GPW. When the German army is very close to Moscow, a group of partisans is dispatched to villages behind the German front on a mission to burn down quarters lodging German forces, along with a warehouse holding their equipment. The film starts with the act of burning the German quarters in a village, during which Zoia (played by Galina Vodianitskaia 1918-2007) is captured and sent for interrogation. The film further continues with a long flashback to Zoia’s life from birth until the moment of her arrest by the Germans. The film finishes by portraying Zoia’s last hours of life, triumphant resistance and execution. Zoia, like She Defends the Motherland and Rainbow, was made when the Soviet Union was confident about beating Germany and the Red Army regarded itself as victor. Hence She Defends the Motherland and Rainbow use pre-revolutionary cultural-religious symbols and values, and display the resistance of ordinary women in the peasant communities of the western border of the country, whereas Zoia aims to praise Stalin and the Bolsheviks as the main winners of the war. For this purpose, on the one hand, having used Slavic mythical and Russian historical heritage, the narrative regards the achievements of the Soviet Union under the Stalin regime as significant as if mythical stories had come true. On the other hand, the film exaggerates the image of Zoia as the representative of a generation that had grown up under the Stalin regime. She is shown as happy and honoured to sacrifice herself in the GPW for Stalin, the Motherland and the Soviet people’s universal ‘mission’. As Chapter Two discussed, Russian princely saints were considered role models of suffering for the Motherland. This quality awarded them the right to rule the believers. Given this divine excellence, a model of the relationship between the faith − Orthodox rulers − believers was perceived as necessary for the realisation of the historical ‘mission’ of Orthodox Russia, for the sake of which every Russian believer may be honoured to be sacrificed. This section will argue that Zoia aims to stage Stalin as the role model of self- sacrifice for the chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family and to confirm that an analogous model of relationship i.e. the faith –Stalin – Soviet citizens is already constructed in the Soviet Union. By displaying an exaggerated image of the Stalinist generation’s obedience to the Soviet Order, this film aims to reinforce Stalin – Soviet people relations and reproduce their submission of the Leader and the dominant ideology.

348 Youngblood, Russian War Films, p. 67. 137

In the very opening scene, Arnshtam draws an invincible icon of the Stalinist generation by showing Zoia as a brave masculinised young woman in front of a diminutive old Nazi officer. The scene starts with a low angle long shot of the room in which Zoia is about to be interrogated (Figure 4.4.1). During the shot, due to the angle of the camera and her oversized army greatcoat, Zoia appears as the tallest and strongest person in the room. Her refusal to answer questions and her angry loathing gaze at the Nazi officer, shown in low angle close-up shots, especially when he asks, ‘where are your comrades?’ represent her strength and resistance so effectively that it compels the officer to stand up and slap her face. The camera quickly cuts to an over-the-shoulder shot showing more indignation and hostility in Zoia’s look at him, which this time makes the officer return to his chair. This prepares an effective location for using shot reverse shot and eye-line matches between them. Zoia breaks her silence only when the name of Stalin is mentioned in the officer’s next question: ‘Where is Stalin right now?’

Figure 4.4.1 Having looked contemptuously at the interrogator, she answers confidently and proudly that ‘Stalin is at his post’ (Figure 4.4.2). ‘What does that mean?’ asks the German officer. Quickly, firmly and with a loud commanding tone Zoia explains as follows: ‘It means that day and night, even at this moment, infinite numbers of regiments are going to the front, as the boundaries of my country are infinite. War planes soar into the sky, partisans are in the forests around campfires on the roads; everywhere death is waiting for you because the Party is at its post. I will not be saying anything else’. The medium close-up with low angle shot displays Zoia as brave and admirable. The camera angle, which is the German’s perspective, reveals his cowardice and helplessness before the bravery of the prisoner. Not only the angles, but also the eye-line running between the

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two characters in these shots, as well as their expressions, aim to display how the interrogator is humiliated by the courageous captive.

Figure 4.4. 2 During the interrogation the only question Zoia finds worthy of attention is about Stalin. Zoia states that the Soviet Union’s rigid resistance of the enemy is beholden to the efforts of Stalin and the Party. Pre-cinematic identification highlights the significance of Zoia’s statement, which stages deep appeal to the Soviet audience for their having a trustworthy leader and for the Party looking after them.

Figure 4.4.3 In particular, Soviet iconography displayed Stalin as a suffering Leader sacrificing himself for his people. For example in the popular poster of Stalin in the Kremlin cares about each of us349 (Figure 4.4.3) drawn by a popular Soviet painter, Victor Govorkov in 1940.

349V. Govorkov, ‘O kazhdom pozabotilsia Stalin v Kremle’ (https://gallerix.ru/storeroom/1973977528/N/857362725/ , accessed on 24/01/2019. 139

The narrative aims firstly, to illustrate the testimony of Zoia ̶ a role model of self-sacrifice ̶ , that happiness in life is to sacrifice the self for the sake of the Father (Stalin), the Party and the Soviet Union; secondly, to validate Zoia’s testimony through displaying her happiness and willingness to be tortured, and eventually executed, for the sake of the Leader and the Soviet Union. These goals are realised through the sixty- minute flashback of Zoia’s life story, which is simultaneously merged with documentaries illustrating the Soviet Union under Stalin’s regime as Utopia. Pre- cinematic identification recalled through watching documentaries in the film aims to reinforces the fascination of cinematic pleasure. Employing documentary footage in fiction films is a cinematic method deployed to fade the border between cinema and reality and to give the film greater authenticity. As this section will show, employing documentaries helps Arnshtam shoot a Socialist Realist film connected to the real world, whose cinematic image carries its myths and falsehoods.350 The cinematic representation of Zoia exerts a strong referential influence, seeming to point beyond the text and the acting to the Symbolic Order. As a result, the audience can reassure itself by saying, this is not only a movie telling the life story of partisan Zoia, but of a whole generation. Thus Arnshtam employs a narrative which, on the one hand, claims to display a visual report of partisan Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia’s life to ensure that her testimony is authentic, and on the other hand, having benefitted from Russian cultural heritage, it forges an image of a hierarchical son-father relationship, as the peak of the son’s obedience before the father, compatible with the obligations of an ideal Soviet Person. Zoia’s life story starts with a documentary scene showing the burial ceremony of Lenin, a time which is associated with Stalin’s attainment of complete power. The scene finishes with Zoia’s birth. This portrays Zoia as a representative of the first generation to grow up in the Stalin era. The film continues with a scene showing Zoia on her first birthday, with her mother wishing her happiness. Happiness is the key notion in the film, running through the whole narrative. The film continues by presenting the philosophy based on which Zoia grew up i.e. a definition of happiness. The next scene displays three-year-old Zoia listening to a folk story told by her mother. The story is about Tsar Ivan, a Slavic mythical hero, who travels around his land looking for happiness. Tsar Ivan’s definition of happiness comprises three components: finding new ways in life, helping weak people, and reminding people of the meaning of truth. While listening to

350 For a discussion of the relation between the impression of reality and cinema see Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. by Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan Press, 1980), pp. 121-42. 140

the story, Zoia’s father comes home and gives Zoia a newspaper headlined and showing (a) Giant Hydropower Station in Ukraine. The shot is then replaced with a documentary film showing how the station was built. Thereby, the narrative connects the story of Tsar Ivan with the reality of the Soviet Union, implying that as a result of the efforts of Soviet ‘Ivans’ (Ivan is the most common male name in Slavic folklore) looking for happiness around the country, myths have been realised. Tsar Ivan’s happiness has no individual aspect; instead, it is a realisation of collective prosperity; he is totally selfless, finding happiness on a human mission for others and for his faith. Tsar Ivan’s story reflects the meaning of true freedom for individuals in Orthodox Christianity, discussed in Chapter One. It rests on the idea of suffering for the prosperity of the community (mir). Tsar Ivan’s notion of happiness is further presented in the narrative as the philosophical foundation on which the first generation of ‘Ivans’ under the Stalin era is raised. Accordingly, the film shows Zoia and her friends as members of the collective rather than of their families. The traditional family union and father-child relations are absent in the film, instead the image of the collective is highlighted. Zoia is her parents’ only child. Very soon after her birth she loses her father and her mother almost disappears from the story when Zoia begins school. Zoia’s personality is shaped under the crucial influence of school teachers, with whom pupils spend most of their time. Ivan’s journey in life for happiness is displayed in the narrative as an ‘actual’ pattern to be followed by Soviet children, the first step of which is membership of the School Pioneer Movement. On the verge of joining the movement, Zoia asks her mother ‘what is a hero?’ The mother answers: ‘A hero is always brave and not afraid of dying to make others happy’. Holding in mind this definition during the initiation ceremony, Zoia thinks of Pioneer membership as a step towards those heroes who have sacrificed themselves for the sake of happiness in her country. She also describes the scarf around the pioneer’s neck as ‘impregnated with the blood of hundreds of thousands of warriors.’ The Stalinist generation’s understanding of collective happiness is staged beyond the geographical boundaries of their country and linked to what they understand to be the Soviet Union’s global mission. In the late 1930s, Zoia and her schoolmates seriously follow news about the misery that Fascism has brought to Europe. Zoia expresses her deep sympathy for the European nations that are suffering from invasion by Fascism in statements such as ‘how is it possible to live on earth, when fascists exist?’ Zoia’s history

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teacher predicts an eventual victory over Fascism as the fate of the Soviet people even before the German invasion of Soviet territory by saying ‘we will defeat them. Destroying them is our duty.’ The teacher’s claim is rationalised in the narrative through two issues. First: the Soviet Union distinguished as having the best equipment and specialists in the world and being the most powerful country, on which other nations rely to defeat Fascism. The next scene shows the pupils happy and proud of being informed of the achievement of Chkalov,351which is followed by a documentary showing Muscovites delightfully welcoming Chkalov home. The sequence closes with a montage scene showing Zoia and her friend Boris taking part in that welcoming ceremony. Belief in the Soviet Union’s unique position in the world is expressed in Zoia’s conversation with Boris, during which she wishes she had been able to listen to all the admiration and respect that other nations have expressed for the Soviet Union and then to scream out: ‘That is us, that is our country!’ Second: after Fascism has been identified as the main enemy of humankind, and its defeat part of the Soviet universal ‘mission’, the narrative further connects this universal obligation of the Soviet people to Russian resistance at different historical moments. Accordingly, in the next scene, the history teacher tells the class that ‘Russian history shows that people come together when foreigners invade.’ He focuses on the unity between Russian tsars and people, as well as ordinary people’s self-sacrifice as the keys to Russian victory against their enemies during smutnoe vremia.352 He calls the period ‘a great era,’ because ‘aristocrats and common people united to save the Motherland; not only do the leaders of the people show extraordinary courage and heroism, but also, following them, the people.’ Following his lesson, Zoia tells the class the story of Ivan Susanin, a mythical figure from Russian folk history, who allegedly died in 1613.353 Numerous narratives about Russian slaves suffering under the oppression of the tsars were popular from the late 19th century, especially after the October Revolution, when any peasant opposition against the tsars was praised. Zoia’s narrative ignores

351 Valery Chkalov (1904-1938) was a Soviet test pilot, famous for practising long-distance flights, including a non-stop distance of 8,811 kilometres in June 1937, from Moscow to Washington, which lasted sixty-three hours. 352 One of the most difficult periods in Russian history from 1598 to 1613, with severe state-political and socio-economic crisis, as well as natural disasters, civil war and wars with Poland and Sweden. 353 According to legend, Ivan Susanin, a Russian peasant slave, was forced by the enemy – the remains of the Polish army after its defeat, which was still roaming round Russia – to guide them to Moscow. Instead, he guided the Polish unit in the completely wrong direction, to a snowy forest where they incurred many casualties. This resulted in him being severely tortured and executed by the invaders. 142

Susanin’s position as an indigent slave, highlighting instead his self-sacrifice for and loyalty to the Motherland and the tsarist state. Whereas the folk hero Tsar Ivan calls on Soviet ‘Ivans’ to search for collective happiness, Ivan Susanin, from one of the darkest periods of Russian history, calls on them to sacrifice themselves for the sake of Moscow, the heart of the Motherland. The end of this scene shows that Susanin’s message has been received by the heroine. In the next medium close-up shot, and to the sound of a march, Zoia, is shown sitting at her desk in her pioneer uniform writing in her diary: ‘I want, I really want to be a person, not a little creature. If one is not a hero, courageous, useful, is it worth taking up space on earth?’ Given Zoia’s understanding of a hero from previous scenes i.e. ‘a brave person, not afraid of sacrificing the self for the sake of others’ happiness’, her writing shows that for Zoia self-sacrifice is not only an admirable moral quality, but also an index of real humanity and the only reason for being alive. A fifteen-minute sequence about Zoia’s Komsomol life is the last stage of the flashback, which initially portrays Zoia as a leading Komsomol member. The sequence also depicts Komsomol life as intertwined with heroism for, and obligations to, the Motherland and the Soviet Union’s universal mission. Furthermore, the Komsomol life- style is represented as the realisation of happiness.

Figure 4.4.4 Zoia is elected by the entire class as the class captain. Figure 4.4.4 shows her standing in front of her class-mates and explaining her plans immediately after the election. The medium close-up draws the viewer’s attention to her importance amongst the group. Zoia’s superiority is conveyed through the low angle of camera, which is the view of the class while listening to her. Zoia’s profile displays all the positive qualities expected of a leading Komsomol member. She is honest and a good friend and engaged in various forms of social activity, which revolve in one way or another around assisting people in different situations. 143

These qualities, however, are prerequisites for the main value of a Komsomol member i.e. being prepared to sacrifice the self for the collective. During her interview for Komsomol membership, having recited the most important part of the Komsomol charter to herself, Zoia summarises the definition of a Komsomol member as follows: ‘A member of the Komsomol must be completely devoted to the Motherland (rodina), and prepared to give it all their strength, even their life, if necessary’. The story further conveys that by the end of 1930s, ultimate ‘happiness’ had been achieved by Soviet citizens and thus the people were ready to fulfil the universal Soviet ‘mission’ of sharing its happiness with other nations. This is evident in Zoia’s conversation with her best friend, Boris, on the eve of the German invasion of Soviet territory, in which Zoia expresses her complete happiness in life. The two friends are shown sitting on a bench, while in the background a cheerful rural Russian landscape on that sunny day depicts the ‘heaven’ she feels so happy in (Figure 4.4.5). She acknowledges that she is not completely comfortable with being so happy in life when other nations are at war with Fascism. She is so happy and considers her country so prosperous that she thinks it must be in the service of a larger collective than her people.

Figure 4.4.5 She anticipates that a global mission lies in the future for her country by saying: ‘When I pay attention to our life, to whatever I have seen with my own eyes, I am sure that it is precisely us, our country, who are destined to realise what has never happened before’. Two significant points of the narrative are illustrated in this scene. First, the Stalinist generation is characterised as believing itself to have an extraordinary global reputation, and for the Soviet Union to be on a ‘mission’. Thus, having ignored the cultural diversity amongst Soviet people, the narrative focuses only on Russia, Russian history and culture, and the Russian nation. Given the significance of Moscow in the myth of Russian messianism, discussed in Chapter One, the narrative emphasises the

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GPW as a serious matter, as it is a war directed at the heart of ‘the redeemer of mankind’ – Moscow. The film repeatedly stresses Moscow as a holy place. For instance, when the German army attacks Soviet territory, the narrator of the film announces passionately that thousands of Komsomol members have gathered around the Komsomol Central Committee in Moscow with one aim – to defend Moscow! In another scene, a Komsomol authority in a passionate speech addresses these young people: ‘Remember, forever remember that you are Muscovites, you are the Komsomol members of Moscow. Let your combat deeds be worthy of the honourable title of the Komsomol members from Moscow’. Other details of the story further emphasise the revered position of Moscow amongst Russians. In addition, Zoia is a Muscovite, and Susanin sacrifices himself for the sake of Moscow. Having realised that Zoia is from Moscow, an old woman in the village where Zoia is arrested asks her with a shaky voice: ‘How is Moscow?’ Concern and excitement are both evident in her voice. Although the enemy is occupying her village, not Moscow, she is more concerned about Moscow, and refers to Moscow as if it were a shrine. In this respect, it is observed that one of the main reasons for the extent of Zoia’s impact on the Soviet people is the time and place of her execution. In her study, Cottam mentions that in late November 1941, when the German army was very close to Moscow, the image of this Muscovite girl became a symbol of resistance and self- sacrifice, the qualities that the Soviet state demanded from the people more than at any other time.354 This observation is understandable in the light of the Orthodox belief in the significance of believers’ self-sacrifice for their faith and Orthodox princes in the realisation of Russian messianism and the significance of Moscow in this myth, as discussed in Chapter One. Given that the film depicts Russian cultural heritage, and not Marxist-Leninist ideology, as the Stalinist generation’s only source of faith and inspiration, the narrative regards the realisation of the Soviet global ‘mission’ as possible only through following Tsar Ivan’s philosophy of life and Susanin’s submissive belief in ‘fathers’. Second, Zoia’s extreme sense of happiness evokes the pre-cinematic identification offered to the audience by various art works in the 1930s including many posters with grateful inscriptions from the Stalinist generation addressed to Stalin for providing it with a happy life. Nina Votolina’s popular poster Thank You Dear Stalin for a

354 See Cottam, Women in War, p. 298. 145

Happy Childhood! (1939)355 illustrates a group of joyful Soviet children looking at a smiling Stalin with love and respect (Figure 4.4.6). The high number of such posters with inscriptions of gratitude to Stalin aimed at maximising appreciation and obligation amongst the Stalinist generation and a sense of a debt to the Father’s generosity.

Figure 4.4.6

The narrative expresses this sense of obligation, of a need to pay back for the care received from the Father, as a desire to sacrifice one’s self, which is simultaneously equal to happiness. In the next sequence, with the country on the brink of war, Zoia writes in her diary: ‘Throughout our lives we wondered about the meaning of happiness. Now I know that happiness means to be a fearless warrior for our country, for my Motherland. I know that I owe, and this means…’. What Zoia means by ‘I know that I owe’ is displayed in the last sequence of the film, which is in fact a continuation of the first sequence, displaying her suffering, and eventually her execution by the Germans. Zoia is shown as desiring to reach the ‘finish line’ of her life’s competition, namely to approach the summit of happiness, through suffering the highest level of self-sacrifice – execution. To accomplish this, she has only one option: to suffer until she embraces death. Having successfully crossed ‘the competition finish line’ by being chosen as the most responsible, selfless and leading Komsomol member, and while so excited about ‘the award’ (execution), she is shown as confused at the sight of the gloomy and sad witnesses around her gallows. In an attempt to dispel their concern Zoia presents them with her definition of happiness in life. In a medium close-up shot Zoia is shown in front of the people with a happy and confident expression (Figure 4.4.7). The low angle of the camera conveys the admiring look of the villagers. The gallows in the middle-ground is shown as the mediator between her and the village church on the left in the background of the frame. Zoia addresses the villagers kindly and states blissfully that she is not afraid

355 https://artchive.ru/artists/16641~Nina_Nikolaevna_Vatolina/works/540798~Thank_you_dear_Stalin_for_a_happy_childhood, accessed on 18/05/2019. 146

of death because according to her ‘death for our own people, country and for the sake of truth is happiness’.

Figure 4.4.7 Without a trace of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the only source of faith and inspiration in Zoia’s life is identified as Russian cultural heritage and her only role models as the two mythical heroes Tsar Ivan and Ivan Susanin. Thus, in Zoia Russian cultural heritage is identified as the source of the faith and inspiration that produces ‘intelligent’, ‘serious’, and ‘responsible’ Komsomol members like Zoia, who having followed the models of Tsar Ivan and Ivan Susanin, seek happiness in being sacrificed for the Motherland and the people. The impact of these two role models on Zoia is also revealed in her definition of happiness i.e. to sacrifice the self for the collective, and in her complete satisfaction at the moment of execution. The impact of Russian cultural heritage in creating the New Soviet Person is summarised in Figure 4.4.7. The three components of the shot, i.e. Zoia, the gallows and the church, indicate the relationship between the believer, as a member of the Orthodox collective (mir) and God. As discussed in Chapter Two, according to Orthodox Christian teaching, closeness to God, real freedom and happiness are achieved through smirenie and the highest level of suffering in life. This analysis corresponds to Althusser’s view of subjectivity as the result of interpellation, which takes place through the establishing of a mirror relation between Zoia and an Absolute Subject. Having (mis)identified with Tsar Ivan and Ivan Susanin, Zoia becomes a subject; she realises the meaning of happiness in sacrificing herself for the Motherland and human beings. Given that the narrative represents only one storyline, that of Zoia as the most responsible member of the Komsomol, and that no other Komsomol member in the story appears on the front, except for Zoia,356 she is the cinematic character with whom both male and female spectators identify. Taking into account the impact of pre-cinematic

356 The audience is informed that Boris is also dispatched to the front. 147

identification on the process of cinematic identification discussed in Chapter Two, when the spectator looks at the screen and (mis)identifies with Zoia, he/she becomes a subject, and thus, undergoes her experience of (mis)identification with Tsar Ivan and Ivan Susanin. This recognition gives the viewer a more perfect and joyful image of the self. Thus, the spectator becomes complete, a subject, the real addressee of the ideology of the film. In psychoanalytic terms, Zoia’s enthusiasm for facing the enemy and sacrificing herself in order to unify with the source of happiness is interpreted as her desire for the phallus. Given that according to the patriarchal view of cinema, the young woman functions as an erotic object, directly for the on-screen hero, and indirectly for the viewer, it is possible to notice a contradiction in the image of Zoia. This ambiguity is explained by considering that Zoia represents a desexualised heroine, masculinised in wartime. As mentioned in Chapter One, the tradition of ignoring gender differences and representing desexualised images of girls and boys had been popular in Soviet fiction for children and teenagers since the 1930s.357 Both the narrative and the camera avoid offering scopophilic pleasure in the image of Zoia. Accordingly, the femininity of Zoia’s image is minimised through two means: i) the highlighting of asexual features in her image; ii) the masculinising of her image as a partisan. From the outset of her Komsomol life, the iconography of the film is restrained in showing Zoia’s feminine beauty. Figure 4.4.4 shows Zoia’s make-up and clothing during this period of life. Her long hair is now gathered at the back and her simple dark dress lessen her femininity; instead, her thin figure, facial expression and piercing glance mark her as a hard-working, responsible, conscientious and sensitive young person. These qualities are supported by Zoia’s functions in different situations. Figure 4.4.5 shows Zoia as a young woman. However, her short hair-style, the absence of make-up, and a dress with a tight collar and three- quarter length sleeves serve to conceal her feminine beauty. Despite Boris’s gesture expressing his readiness to hug her during this scene, Zoia’s expression and gestures lack any sign of womanly seduction and flirtatious manner. Her words about happiness, as already quoted, are also free of any female wishes, such as falling in love, being loved or having children. The heroine’s femininity is minimised through the ignoring of Zoia’s feminine qualities, focus on her human qualities through her way of dressing, behaviour

357 See Tippner, ‘Girls in Combat’, pp. 375-377. 148

and use of words, and especially in the display of a pure friendship between Zoia and Boris without any erotic overtones. The second way that Zoia’s femininity is minimised is through the use of a masculinised image of partisan Zoia in the first and last sequences of the film: the way she acts, her male haircut, masculine stance, confident and piercing look, harsh tone of voice and unyielding tolerance of pain in complete silence. Given that she represents the Stalinist generation, her masculine resistance against the enemy until death is aligned with that conventionally expected of a Komsomol member as a partisan, thus, fascinating, and able to be identified by any ‘masculinised’ viewer. Zoia tells the storyline of the first Soviet heroine in the GPW. Heroism in war is usually associated with individuality, subjectivity and military success. However, Zoia is not a heroine in military terms, but a victim. She fights only for a short time behind enemy lines and is caught because of her lack of success in burning huts. Soviet fighters were not allowed to be captured alive by the enemy. Zoia’s execution is, indeed, the punishment caused by her disobedience to military orders. The narrative displays the only representative of the Stalinist generation in war as victim and loser, when in reality thousands of women bravely fought alongside men on the front.358 Instead, the narrative dramatises Zoia’s complete submission to the Symbolic Order in sacrificing the self for its values. Zoia was among the Stalinist cultural productions shot in the last phase of the GPW presenting the coming victory in the war as primarily due to the efforts of Stalin, Party members and the Red Army generals while disregarding the suffering of ordinary people. Chapter Five will show that post-war Stalinist war cinema continued to highlight a suffering defeated image of Komsomol members, sacrificing themselves to prove their loyalty to ‘fathers’. Thus, according to Zoia, in wartime what was expected from a leading Komsomol member was not subjectivity and heroism in military operations, but complete obedience to the Symbolic Order. In Zoia this image of the leading Komsomol corresponds perfectly to the expectations of an ideal woman in wartime introduced by the Soviet ISA, discussed in Chapter Three. The process of mastering the castration threat in the narrative draws on the fetishistic pleasure of overvaluation of Zoia’s image as the embodiment of aesthetic and ideological perfection. Hence, ego libido appears in the viewer, because Zoia’s

358 For instance, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the well-known Soviet Army sniper, fought for a long period on the Sevastopol Front and even survived the war (see ‘Lady Sniper’, Time, 28 September 1942 (available online at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,773683,00.html , accessed on 08/03/2019). 149

fetishistic image is located mostly in her personality and beliefs, not her body. Zoia, as the sufferer for the sake of the Family, has a huge capability to be identified by the Soviet male as well as a ‘masculinised’ female audience. The narrative and the camera offer great sadistic pleasure in subjecting her to stunning suffering. Although Zoia represents perfection rather a bearer of guilt, the film’s sadistic pleasure is prolonged; her suffering is alleviated by execution. Zoia is proclaimed as a national heroine precisely as a result of her female qualities such as innocence, chastity, suffering for the Family, and especially her complete obedience to the Symbolic Order even under the most brutal torture, which is portrayed in the film with a strong aggressive tendency. By allocating the expectations of an ideal woman in wartime to Zoia, the narrative attaches the female attribution of complete obedience to the Symbolic Order, to both genders of Komsomol members in wartime. Thus, the representative of chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family in Zoia is shown as far from heroism and subjectivity in military terms, while she proves her complete submission to ‘fathers’ by sacrificing her life for them. The obedience of Zoia, the role model of suffering, before the Father and Party members positions them in higher status position than that of this role model of suffering, and denies the threat of castration to the ‘fathers’. This stability, according to the narrative, testifies to the right of the members of the category of ‘fathers’ to rule the community and to appeal for complete submission from the nation.

4.5 Conclusion The first objective of this chapter has been to examine the role models of female self- sacrifice presented in the three films She Defends the Motherland, Rainbow and Zoia as representatives of the second category of the GPW era war films, that is those with central heroines describing the Soviet people resisting the enemy under German occupation. At first glance, the three films, especially Zoia, seemed to deny the vulnerability of conventional femininity in wartime in a patriarchal society due to portraying the heroines resisting the enemy. This sense was reinforced considering the fact that the films adopted very similar attitudes towards the absence of male subjectivity in combat. This absence could be understood as different narrations of male castration and the failure of the paternal function in wartime. However, given the ideological paradigms derived from Soviet patriarchal society, which demanded faith in the

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superiority of the male subject and the unity of the Great Family, the crisis of the stories was resolved by constructing a privileged image of male subjectivity and reinforcing the ruins of masculinity against the threat of castration in wartime. Accordingly, first of all, neither Zoia nor the other heroines were part of the regular military; all of them were volunteers without any expertise in army affairs. Therefore, the subjectivity of female characters in these films touched not so much the mind as the heart, because they all represented victims of war rather its victors. Moreover, the iconography of the films minimised the heroines’ femininity, and the narratives staged them not as independent individuals, but as members of a family defending home. While the heroines in the films of Chapter Three represented Soviet women as fiancées, wives and widows of Soviet fighters and their relationships to the Great Family, the cinematic key models of female self-sacrifice in Chapter Four represented the traditional suffering mother, with the Mother of God being the implicit prototype, the Motherland, and Komsomol members of the Stalinist generation as chosen ‘sons’ of the Motherland. This compelled the audience to perceive the heroines as members of the Great Family rather than as independent individuals in the war. The focus of the first two films of this chapter was on motherly love for the sake of the family and the Motherland in wartime. In psychoanalytic terms, in critical wartime, when the Motherland was under German occupation, the castration threat seriously preoccupied the male unconscious. Unlike in the films of Chapter Three, where the male unconscious accepted the mother’s difference, repressed its desire for her with the hope that the male would eventually experience love for his own woman, in the first two films of this chapter the mother’s sexual difference was ignored and she was perceived as phallic. This fetishistic image of the mother reassured the male unconscious by representing the religious-traditional perception of the mother in Orthodox Christianity as the symbol of hope and self-sacrifice for the family. Positive young heroines functioned as the bearers of moral obligation, as well as hope and love for the family, while their feminine beauty was not employed to offer pleasure to the scopophilic male gaze. Leading heroines in the three films, especially Zoia, were praised for hiding the woman’s ‘lack’ of a penis from men and fascinating them with female purity and loyalty to the Family as an inspiring means of overcoming the threat of castration. The fetishistic image as the symbol of sacrificial motherly love or the self for the sake of the family was shown as necessary to give hope to male fighters. This hope

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would activate the Oedipal crisis to revive the memory of the Lacanian ‘lost component’ in the unconscious of the warrior, to inspire him to ignore castration anxiety and thus motivate him to overcome the enemy. In other words, overcoming the enemy in these three films was regarded as directly dependent on the woman’s suffering of the self for the Family until the male warrior returned home. The worse the situation of Red Army on the battlefield became, the more vividly the fetishistic image of the mother, or of the chosen ‘son’, as the bearer of hope and loyalty to the Family, was illustrated. One can conclude that the heroines’ desire to suffer and sacrifice themselves for the Family in these three films dramatised their particular affiliation to the Symbolic Order. Furthermore, the three films ended with triumphant interference of paternal power as the accomplisher of the heroines’ affairs, which emphasised the domination of male subjectivity in wartime and dramatised the centrality of the penis/phallus equation in the Symbolic Order. As discussed in Chapter Two, self-sacrifice for the family in Russian Orthodox culture is an apparent feature of the female believer. Moreover, the concept of motherhood has traditionally been perceived as a symbol of spirituality and self-sacrifice in Russian culture. This led us to the second main outcome of this chapter, according to which the role of the heroine in the Great Family and the patriarchal expectations of her in wartime in the three films were shown to originate solely from a pre-1917 Russian historical, cultural and traditional heritage. Without any reference to Marxist-Leninist ideology, the films generated patriotic feelings as a means to inspire the people against the enemy and to reinforce their submission to the state. In this respect, Russian nationalism and defence of the Motherland in the first film of this chapter was the main issue emphasised by the lead heroine. In Rainbow, Marxist-Socialist terminology and Stalinist propaganda rhetoric were substituted by praise for a resurrected Orthodox Christian heritage. A correspondence between the Stalinist Bolshevik ideology and Russian nationalism reached its zenith in Zoia; having praised the Russian heroic past, the Russian national character, and its heroes and myths, a fundamental coherence between Russian and Soviet messianism was emphasised through the character of Zoia. The stress on the idea of Russian messianism and patriotism in Zoia aimed to support the autocratic state, which gathered together the huge Soviet state in order, according to the film, to accomplish the Soviet universal mission – to save other nations. Due to the importance of this ‘mission’, the film Zoia commended Stalin as the commander-in-chief

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and showed his authority to be unlimited and his power not to be questioned since he, like rulers before the 1917 Revolution, was considered the Father of the Russian nation and the other Soviet people. This observation formed the third main outcome of this chapter, which was an analysis of the relationship between the cinematic representation of the traditional model of female self-sacrifice and the values of the Stalin era. The three films demonstrated a harmonious employment of the Orthodox view of female obedience to the Symbolic Order, and of Russian nationalist values, in the service of the Soviet state. Taking into consideration the prominence of the Great Family in the Stalin era discussed in Chapter One, the primary sources of Chapter Four demonstrated the deep desire of the heroines to suffer, and to sacrifice themselves, for the sake of the Great Family. Attributing the traditional-religious expectations of an ideal female believer to the positive cinematic heroines in Stalinist war films, and representing heroines as suffering for the sake of Soviet ideology, showed a harmonious use of Russian Orthodox cultural heritage in the service of ‘anti-religious’ Soviet Ideology. While this chapter has examined the most significant films of the GPW period with lead warrior-heroines and inspirational aims helping to mobilise the Soviet people against the enemy, the next chapter is dedicated to analysing the images of women and martyrdom in post-war Stalinist war cinema. We will observe a greater emphasis on the traditional perception of woman as the assistant to and subordinate of her man, and heroines with subordinate roles in the GPW.

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Chapter Five: Cinematic Images of Soviet Women and Martyrdom 1945-1953: Heroines as Red Army Officers and Symbolic Suffering Mothers and ‘Sons’ of the Great Family in the GPW

5.1 Introduction Chapters Three and Four examined representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema of the GPW period as symbolic sisters and mothers of warriors ready to sacrifice themselves or their motherly love for the Soviet Great Family and the Motherland. These heroines also represented ideal fiancées, young wives and widows loyal not only to their husband-warriors, but also to the military families of these male warriors. Chapter Five argues that despite the active contribution of women in the GPW, and the relatively high profile representation of this in several war films of the GPW era, post-war Stalinist war cinema avoided showing Soviet women taking on any significant role in the GPW.359 This section examines how the image of Soviet woman during the GPW distances itself from those sacrificing symbolic mothers and sisters under German occupation in the GPW era films analysed in Chapter Four. It argues that, having re-feminised and demobilised the image of the woman-warrior and ignored female subjectivity in the GPW, post-GPW Soviet films emphasised the traditional perception of a woman in wartime. This chapter argues that the dominance of a conservative and traditional understanding of gender differences in wartime in successful Soviet war films of 1945-53 testifies to an intensive collaboration between post-war Soviet cultural politics and the authority of pre-revolutionary patriarchy in Soviet society. As a result of this cooperation, post-GPW war films reinforced the cinematic traditions of the 1930s, when, despite all the propaganda around gender equality in fighting in the event of war, the dominant image of women in war was as the wives and mothers of male soldiers.360 The victory over Germany and the expansion of Soviet territory into Eastern Europe after WWII transformed the Soviet Union into a superpower and resulted in a political-cultural battle between West and East, namely ‘the cold war’. Post-war Stalinist cultural policy was adjusted to meet the new political changes, and involved more

359 Ignoring the role of women in the war started even before the victory, both amongst the officials and ordinary people. The success of war films such as Pirov’s comedy At 6 pm after the War (1944), in which heroines played no role in the war, supports this claim. The film reached 26 million viewers, and was awarded the 1946, second degree, Stalin Prize. 360 For a more detailed image of the woman in war in 1930s Soviet society see Markwick, Soviet Women on the Frontline. 154

emphasis on Soviet patriotism, stability, prevention of any opposition in society and the reinforcement of the submission of the nation to the state.361 As discussed in the Introduction, Stalinist cinema was the most effective artistic means for reproducing the submission of the people to the ruling ideology. Chapters Three and Four examined the exceptional importance of war-themed films of the GPW era in creating role models of submission to the Symbolic Order. In the post-GPW era, Soviet filmmakers, according to the Central Committee Order issued on 4th of September 1946, were expected to focus on national interests, social issues and the significant role of the Party in their films, while avoiding paying major attention to personal experiences.362 As a result of this policy, the notable war films of the time, as this chapter will examine, significantly reinforced the state-sanctioned interpretation of the GPW. Such films, on the one hand, focused on victories and denied failures, and on the other hand, attributed the victory over Germany mainly to Stalin’s leadership, the efforts of the Party and the Red Army generals. While there was no space for individual interpretations of the war and displaying the heroism of individuals in it, admiration of Stalin and the ‘fathers’ of the Great Family was considered equivalent to patriotism. The cinematic representations of women-warriors in the post-GPW period were forged following the same cultural policy. As Linda De Pauw’s research reveals, historically, women have been very clearly visible in different wars, however, ‘when wars are over and the war songs are sung, women disappear’.363 De Pauw’s observation is evident in the post-GPW Soviet Union: the number of female warriors amongst the Heroes of the Soviet Union stands at about ninety, out of more than ten thousand in total.364 Sharon Macdonald in her research on the status of women-warriors in post-war periods argues that there are two common approaches to demobilise women in post-war cultures: i) stressing the ‘feminine nature’ of the woman and regarding her as the upholder of feminine qualities such as nurturing the family; ii) identifying the presence of women-warriors in war as unnatural, abnormal, comical, and thus exceptional, due only to an urgent temporary situation.365 This argument is proved by a general overview of the research on the representation of women

361 See Youngblood, Russian War Films, pp. 82-106 and ‘A War Remembered: Soviet Films’, pp. 839-56; Shlapentokh, Soviet Cinematography, pp. 121-251; Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, pp. 187-204. 362 Ordinance of the Organisational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party about the cinematic film 'Bol'shaia zhizn'', 04/09/1946 (http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/USSR/cinema.htm, last accessed 08/03/2019). 363 De Pauw, Battle Cries, p. xiii. 364 See Rosalinde Sartorti, ‘On the making of Heroes, Heroines and Saints’, in Cultural and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. by Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 176-93 (pp. 176-82). 365 Macdonald, Images of Women, p. 7. 155

in war in post-GPW Stalinist culture. After millions of Soviet men had been killed, post- GPW Stalinist art displayed the nurturing of orphan children and the reproduction of a new generation as female heroism and the main duties of Soviet women to the Motherland. Promoting these female duties began even prior to the end of the GPW, as the poster Long Live Mother-Heroine! (1944)366 drawn by the well-known Soviet graphic artist Nina Vatolina (1915-2002) illustrates (Figure 5.1.1).

Figure 5.1.1 Research on the representation of Soviet women-warriors in post-GPW Soviet cultural products shows that both approaches suggested by De Pauw were employed in Soviet art. In her research on Soviet airwomen, Reina Pennington argues that in the post- war period Soviet women were expected to devote themselves to nurturing families. She observes that the demobilisation of Soviet women-warriors coincided with their absence from post-war fictional works about the war.367 Adrienne Harris, in her research on the image of women-warriors in Soviet culture, argues that various tactics were employed in literary works to support the post-war state policy of demobilising women-warriors. She observes that women’s contributions in the war were completely ignored; instead, most Soviet writers of the time focused on women in traditional nurturing roles. Harris asserts that in the best-known works of the time women-warriors ‘either conformed to a traditional feminine role by being emotional, desirable nurturers, or fought incompetently, hindering the war effort rather than contributing to it, or both’.368 Therefore in the process of revision of the GPW, literary works of the time, neglecting

366 http://museum-schel.ru/meropriyatiya/virtualnye-vystavki/247-zhenshchina-v-plakate. 367 See Reina Pennington, Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007), pp. 143-160. 368 Marie Harris, The Myth of the Woman Warrior, p. 147. 156

any of the significant roles women had played in the war, which had been traditionally considered a male arena, implicitly demobilised women-warriors via their image. Harris observes that Soviet post-war literature had little interest in strong, independent women- warriors, and paid little attention to martyred heroines, since such works were supposed to recreate and celebrate the heroism of the typical Red Army soldier, who was a man. Soviet literature of the time returned the woman to her traditional functions in war i.e. acting in insignificant, secondary roles in the war and being the warrior’s beloved. Harris also observes that women were not depicted as involved in any official military body. Some literary works even supported the assumption that the presence of women in war had distracted male soldiers.369 Given the coherence of Soviet cultural policy, an overview of the female image in Soviet post-GPW films confirms the outcome of Harris’s research. Amongst the twenty- four long fictional films relevant to the GPW shot between 1945-1953, ten films were the focus of film critics’ attention and were awarded the Stalin Prize: Life in the Citadel (1947), The Young Guard (1948), Story of a Real Man (1948), The Third Blow (1948), The Battle of Stalingrad (1948—1949), The Fall of Berlin (1949), Konstantin Zaslonov (1949), Encounter at the Elbe, (1949), Secret Mission (1950), Brave People (1950). There is no heroine-warrior in the films The Battle of Stalingrad, The Third Blow, The Fall of Berlin, Encounter at the Elbe and Secret Mission. Women are shown as completely absent from fighting against the enemy on the battlefields or defending the Motherland under German occupation. Instead, women symbolise the suffering, patience and humility (smirenie) of the Soviet people at war. The victory over Germany in these films is regarded as the result of the Red Army generals’ obedience to Stalin’s leadership, and there is no space for showing the heroism of the people during the GPW. The films Konstantin Zaslonov, Brave People, and The Young Guard display the life of the Soviet people under German occupation. There is no woman-warrior in these films. The heroines perform no important role behind the battlefront; however, the third film portrays a group of teenagers (boys and girls) resisting the occupiers and being executed.370 In terms of female images in the GPW, the other fifteen war films of the time can be classified as follows. The two films The Turning Point (1945) and Son of the Regiment

369 Ibid, pp. 143-213. 370 The Estonian Language film Life in the Citadel portrays the state of Estonia under the German occupation. 157

(1946) contain no female character. There is no woman-warrior in Simple People (1945), Story of a Real Man (1947), It happened in Donbass (1945), The Great Life (1946), Our Heart (1946), or The Story of The Furious (1947). Instead, there are a few female protagonists with secondary roles in the story as victims of the war or making insignificant contributions behind the battlefront. Marita (1947) is a Lithuanian language film about the life story of a female Lithuanian teenager partisan with a fate similar to that of the eponymous heroine of Zoia (1943). The film received no attention either from Soviet or Western film critics. The films Return with Victory (1947), Soldier Alexander Matrosov (1947), A Noisy Household (1946), Unnamed Island (1946), and The Star (1949) can be grouped together. In each film a beautiful young heroine serves on the battlefield as a volunteer nurse or radio operator. The young heroine represents an object for the male gaze, without any significant role in the war. There is an emphasis on how her female characteristics ease the rough atmosphere for male warriors. This romantic female character usually plays a musical instrument, sings and dances, while expressing her dreams such as being a wife and mother after the war. While her femininity prevents her from being aggressive, and thus a real fighter, her actions in the war are mostly motivated and guided by her love for one of the heroes ̶ usually her commander. The heroine’s romantic relationship with the hero is displayed in terms of the military hierarchy and reveals her lack of positive self-image and confidence. The heroine’s complete dependence on the hero and her obedience to him in their private relationship positions the woman in a doubly subordinate situation both in military and private terms. The film Sloth of the Skies (1946) also falls into this category of post-war war films. Whereas female warriors in this group represent volunteers without military training and rank, Sloth of the Skies is the only film of the time which portrays the professional life of a group of Soviet military women during the GPW. These arguments are examined in Chapter Five through the analysis of two significant films of the time, namely Sloth of the Skies (1946) and The Young Guard (1948). Sloth of the Skies was the first post-war comedy, and a box office success in 1946 with more than 21 million viewers. The second film of this chapter, The Young Guard, was the most popular and officially accepted film of the time in terms of fitting the dominant/Soviet ideology and displaying the degree of patriotism prevalent amongst Soviet youth. The film was awarded the Stalin Prize, first-degree, in 1949.

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5.2 Red Army Female Officers in the GPW in Nebecnyi ikhokhody (Sloth of the Skies 1946) Written and directed by Simon Timoshenko (1899-1958), Sloth of the Skies was released in April 1946. It was the first Soviet post-war musical comedy. This section will examine the film, exploring how the female image in war distances itself from that fetishistic icon ̶ the embodiment of hope, loyalty and morality ̶ in the films of the GPW period, examined in Chapters Three and Four. The lead hero in Sloth of the Skies is Major Bulachkin, a popular fighter-pilot played by Nikolai Kriuchkov (1911-1993). Having rammed an enemy aircraft in an air battle, he is left injured. After his discharge from hospital, his health does not immediately allow him to continue serving on high-speed aeroplanes. The convalescing pilot is directed to command a squadron of light bombers, U-2s. The prospect of flying on such ‘celestial sloths’ with a speed of around only 100 km/h is discouraging for the pilot, accustomed to agile fighters.371 He is further disappointed when on a visit to the squadron he finds it all female. Bulachkin and his two bachelor friends, senior lieutenant Tugo and captain Kaisarov, have firmly vowed not to fall in love until the end of the war. During a warm welcome party from the women, with tasty home-made food, dance music and songs for the three friends, their vows appears under threat. At the same party the viewer realises that Kaisarov has secretly married one of the officers. Meanwhile, Tugo falls in love with the head of the squadron. It soon becomes apparent that none of the female officers is worth Bulachkin breaking his oath for. However, with the arrival of a newspaper correspondent at the base, it is Bulochkin’s time to fall in love. By the end of the film, as the whole aviation base celebrates Bulachkin’s new heroic operation, we see the three friends next to their beloved women. Only then does it become clear that the young woman who deserves Bulachkin’s love is no ordinary woman, but the divisional commander’s daughter. The GPW era films examined in Chapter Three represented a fetishistic icon of young heroines as a means of mastering the war’s evocation of castration anxiety amongst male members of the Great Family. These narratives enabled the hero-warrior to repress his feelings for his sweetheart as a stimulant for the Oedipal crisis to revive the memory of the Lacanian ‘lost component’ in his unconscious more seriously, and thus, the desire to overcome it by defeating the enemy, in order to return to the woman and

371 The fastest Soviet fighter of the time was the La-7 which reached 600 km/h, however, the narrative announces the speed of Soviet fighters as more than 1000 km/h, which implies an enormous difference between the military skills of the male and female pilots. 159

experience her love again. This approach to controlling castration anxiety was offered to the viewer through (mis)identification with cinematic heroes. Although the story of Sloth of the Skies takes place during the war, the film was made immediately after the victory over the enemy, when the warrior was expected to have returned to his sweetheart. Thus, in contrast to the films examined in Chapter Three, Sloth of the Skies completely denies that Red Army male officers experienced castration anxiety and cinematic pleasure is offered merely to make the film entertaining. The film portrays fighting against the Germans as a specialised affair confined only to super- skilled and courageous Red Army officers, without any participation by the broader people. Fighting is shown as so easy for Red Army officers that Bulachkin is capable of singing songs during military missions. The locations of the film are limited to military bases, with no sign of a war being fought. The military hospital in which Bulachkin is confined, and the aviation base are presented as analogous to summer resorts in peacetime. Blue sky, sunshine and a flourishing landscape are the notable features of the outdoor settings. The story reflects no wartime difficulty such as hunger, cold, violence, blood, death or even anxiety. In such an atmosphere, what is missing from the narrative is the symbolic sisterly-brotherly love amongst male and female warriors found in Frontovye podrugi, as well as the fetishistic icon of Natasha, Liza and Mariia that featured in the films of Chapter Three, all of whom display caring aesthetic and ideological perfection. The narrative also lacks the motherly fetishistic icon found in She Defends the Motherland and Rainbow, who sacrifices herself for the sake of the Family, and the suffering picture of Zoia as the chosen ‘son’ of the Great Family. In fact, the absence of any symbolic family relationship in Sloth of the Skies prepares the ground for a patriarchal gender identification in the course of the film, which requires the heroines to function primarily as objects for the male gaze with secondary roles in war. The absence of explicit indicators of Soviet moral and ideological values either in the narrative, dialogues, or appearance and behaviour of the characters, or in the scenery, prepares the ground for the presence of the patriarchal view of the cinema, according to which the woman must function as an erotic object both directly (for the on-screen hero) and indirectly (for the spectator). As already discussed, cinematic scopophilia, and thus visual pleasure is provided through the identification of the viewer with the male actors of the film. Thus, cinematic scopophilia operates through the activity and authority of the male character

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and the passivity and powerlessness of the female. With regard to Sloth of the Skies, having highlighted the femininity of the female Red Army officers, the narrative dissociates them from the expected image of an officer. Alongside the narrative, the iconography of the film also aims to display female beauty as much as possible. In addition to the presence of a group of beautiful young protagonists, who have no direct role in the story, the camera takes advantage of every opportunity to offer pleasure to the male gaze. For instance, the beautiful young correspondent Valia appears at the aviation base in outfits implausible for a war zone, such as a short white skirt, sheer stockings, high-heels and a shoulder-bag. In such a context, the main challenge of Sloth of the Skies appears to be male-female relationships among the young officers in wartime. The common belief in the incongruity between femininity and military service arises as an appropriate theme to amuse the viewer. Comic moments of the film are created, first of all, due to the heroes’ strong sense of humour, used to mock the military expertise of their female colleagues while at the same time they are falling for their feminine charms. The scopophilic pleasure in Sloth of the Skies is offered narratively and visibly from the time the new commander, Bulachkin, and the viewer simultaneously encounter the squadron. This occurs in the women’s dormitory, outside their working hours, and without prior notice. No sign of military life can be seen in the officers’ residence. Instead, it displays a comfortable, domestic atmosphere; the radio broadcasts classical music, flowers adorn the bedside tables, a sewing machine stands in one corner, a pair of female shoes lies on the floor, and one of the officers is ironing. Having realised that the squadron is female, the commander expresses his dissatisfaction by grumbling about the feminine atmosphere and calling the dormitory the perfect setting for a lover such as Tat’iana to write letters to her beloved, Onegin. His next reaction is to the gender of the officers. Having been informed of the presence of only three male pilots within the three squadrons, he shows his annoyance by saying ‘that is a pity because I thought I was the only man trapped in this nunnery…’. Having ignored the officers who are still standing in a line waiting to be individually introduced to him, Bulachkin leaves the dormitory to see their planes, or ‘air giants’ as he sarcastically calls them. When Bulachkin enters the women’s dormitory, a two-shot with eye-level angle shows the commander and the head of the squadron, senior lieutenant Kutozova (Katiusha), in the position anticipated by the viewer; Bulachkin appears as a superior officer on an official visit to a group of officers and Kutozova with her short haircut, cold

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facial expression and a figure represents a well-organised and confident officer (Figure 5.2.1). Having discovered that the squadron is female, Bulachkin not only starts teasing the women, but also adopts a more informal manner and body language. A few minutes later, while visiting a U-2 bomber, the commander is introduced to senior lieutenant Mariia (Masha) Svetlova . She is popularly known as ‘the queen of camouflage,’ since the women believe that the enemy cannot find the aerodrome due to her expertise in hiding planes. Having heard the word ‘camouflage’, Bulachkin smiles and using an informal tone and gesture asks Kutuzova whether they are real pilots, or whether all of this is also camouflage (Figure 5.2.2). If Figure 5.2.1 stresses the expertise and discipline of officer Bulachkin, in Figure 5.2.2 his informality and gender take precedence over his military position. He behaves not as an experienced pilot who has trained and worked with female pilots, but as a civilian completely unfamiliar with the reality of the female officers’ service. In fact, opening the door of the female dormitory without advance warning, and showing the officers engaged in the activities of any ordinary housewife, the narrative not only claims to be allowing the curious viewer into the life of the female officers, but also brings into the plot an old-fashioned perception concerning an incompatibility between femininity and combat, and loudly too, with the lead hero played by one of the most popular Soviet actors of the time.372

Figure 5.2.1 Figure 5.2.2 Introducing the female officers to the viewer by using a completely feminine atmosphere, alongside Bulachkin’s sharp wit in describing it, devalues the professional reputation of the female Red Army officers. This intention is reinforced in the final shots of the sequence which associate the technological backwardness of the U-2 bombers with the female officers. This association aims to underline that Bulachkin’s dissatisfaction at being the commander of the squadron can be traced back to the backward roles of both

372 The surname Bulachkin sounds ordinary, and the role is played by Kriuchkov, acceptable and identifiable for the spectator as simple, modest and friendly due to his previous roles, particularly that of mechanic Klim in The Tractorists (1939). 162

female officers and the military equipment. In a long shot of the officers standing around a U-2 plane in the middle and background, Bulachkin enters the frame and takes a few steps from the camera to the aircraft. Approaching it, he turns to the camera and, touching the aircraft looks at the horizon with a sad dissatisfied expression (Figure 5.2.3). His figure in the foreground with his medals shining prominently overlaps the image of the female officers in the middle and background without any insignia. While the officers stand still eagerly looking at the new commander, his lack of enthusiasm is conveyed through his casual, hunched gesture with his back to the officers. His taking a few steps away from the camera symbolises the regression in his professional rank. Dissatisfaction appears in his sad look at the horizon implying his concern about being caught in an unworthy situation as a retreat from his real, highranking position. He gets into the machine reluctantly. Once Bulachkin is sitting in the plane, the camera shows him in a medium shot at an eye-level angle touching the machine with contempt and turning back to the officers simultaneously. His worried look shows him lost in thought (Figure 5.2.4). The camera cuts to a long shot of the officers standing in line while a part of the machine is seen in the shot and with its shadow cast on the women’s uniforms (Figure 5.2.5). The eye-level angle of this shot is in fact Bulachkin’s point of view, seeing the women and the plane as a whole. Once he has sat in the plane and though of himself as a U-2 pilot, Bulachkin realises that he is the women’s equal. He gets out of the pilot’s seat and stands on the machine (Figure 5.2.6). Although the camera does not tilt up, the angle of shot is now low, showing his high position from the vantagepoint of the viewer. Using the gesture, facial expression and informal language typical of male managers of collective farms addressing a group of female workers and explaining issues to them simply, a trope popular in 1930s Soviet films, Bulachkin informs the officers that he will not be flying with them and will discuss this with the division commander. In three of these shots Bulachkin is shown touching the aeroplane. In Figure 5.2.3, while the U-2 bomber and the female officers are in one frame as a whole, Bulachkin’s touch and look imply that he is imagining what it would feel like to belong to this squadron, given his high rank. To get a better sense of what cooperation with this squadron would involve, Bulachkin sits in the plane to visualise himself as part of that collective from a fighter’s point of view. This is suggested by the way he touches the machine and looks at his potential colleague in figures 5.2.4 and 5.2.5. Figure 5.2.6 shows Bulachkin touching the machine and pointing at the women at the same time as an expression of the two reasons for his

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reluctance to join the squadron. The low angle of the shot implies his high rank, which is under threat. His naïve facial expression, gesture and words portray him as a non-military rural man, with whom every male audience member would easily identify. This scene identifies the position of the female officers as analogous to that of rural kolkhoz-women. The female officers are completely voiceless in this scene; neither the narrative nor the camera conveys their points of view. Therefore, in addition to the residential setting, which highlights the femininity of the officers, the shift in Bulachkin’s manner, gesture, tone of voice and language from those of an officer in the beginning of the sequence to those of a kolkhoz manager at the end lead the viewer to perceive the military position of the cinematic heroines as secondary and insignificant.

Figure 5.2.3 Figure 5.2.4

Figure 5.2.5 Figure 5.2.6

Incompatibility between femininity and active presence in military operations is further stressed in the narrative when after Bulachkin’s arrival at the squadron the employment of U-2 bombers is increased although no progress is shown in the role of the female officers in military operations. Having asked the divisional commander for

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redeployment, Bulachkin is informed of the possibility of a post in low-speed U-2 bombers for specific operations against the Germans. The general emphasises is on the importance of bravery and intelligence as two qualities required from a pilot taking part in such operations. When the general asks Bulachkin who he would recommend for such operations from amongst the female officers, Bulachkin names himself. Having successfully navigated a few military operations, Bulachkin not only displays the strength of the Red Army officers, but also enhances the reputation of the fighting qualities of this modest type of machine. In other words, a productive interaction between the pilot and the U-2 bombers is shown; on the one hand, owing to Bulachkin’s ‘bravery and intelligence’, the technological shortcomings of this type of machine, and its role in the war, are elevated. On the other hand, the opportunity of flying such air ‘giants’ offers Bulachkin the chance to prove his outstanding provisional reputation as a Soviet hero-pilot even without a fighter-plane and despite his recent serious injuries. As the story turns around Bulachkin’s heroism, it generates no opportunity for the display of the female pilots’ military expertise. Thus, the second reason for Bulachkin’s unwillingness to command the squadron remains unaddressed. Except for Katiusha and Masha, the other female officers are completely voiceless, without any role in the war. A twelve-minute sequence allocated to celebrating the success of Bulachkin’s first operation with U-2 bombers is the only chance for the squadron to take part in the story. In terms of appearance, make-up, manner and body language, there is no difference between these officers and the voiceless female kolkhoz/factory protagonists in Soviet cinema, apart from their uniforms. During the party the women eagerly welcome Bulachkin’s two friends, Tugo and Kaisarov, with home-made food. By eating, laughing, singing and dancing with the fighters, the heroines appear as objects of the male gaze. The role of the female protagonists in the story is so insignificant that they are not introduced individually either to the commander, in the previous sequence, or to his friends at the party; they are even nameless in the story. During the party, Katiusha becomes the centre of attention, the voice of the female squadron, who boasts of the importance of female pilots in the war and challenges the belief that femininity and military service are incompatible, an opinion loudly expressed by Tugo. Her points of view are framed in the narrative as amusing, and a means to entertain the guests. Kaisarov excitedly asserts: ‘I never thought a ‘U-2’ would be able to knock out ‘a fighter’ in a fair fight, especially a fighter like [Tugo]…’ Having overlooked any proficiency in

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the female pilots, Bulachkin in defence of his ‘girls’ addresses his friends: ‘You guys better not bother our girls. I already know all their secrets…’ and Tugo interprets Katiusha’s challenge as a woman’s trick to attract his attention. From the whole squadron, only Katiusha and Masha perform roles in the story. And these largely fall into insignificance with the arrival of Valia in the fortieth minute of the film. Masha’s story line tells of a secret romance between a beautiful female officer and a young fighter, captain Kaisarov. While Masha is introduced to Bulachkin as ‘the queen of camouflage’, her ability to camouflage planes is not staged in the story as a military initiative, but as a trick by a female to conceal her marriage from the collective. The only scene showing her working is when Bulachkin and Valia intend to fly to the city. Masha appears and asks Bulachkin to deliver a few letters to the headquarters. This short conversation arouses envy in Valia for Masha, whom she regards as Bulachkin’s sweetheart. This misunderstanding leads to Valia’s suffering, which is used by the narrative and the camera as the sole source of sadistic pleasure the film offers the viewer. The only heroine with an ancillary role in war is Katiusha. The eldest of the attractive young officers and the only heroine with short hair, and masculinised make-up and character. In comparison to the other female protagonists, there is less femininity and charm in her facial expression, movements and looks. Her language, gesture and manners are free of womanly seduction. During the story, Katiusha takes part in two operations as Bulachkin’s navigator. However, in both of them Bulachkin’s heroism is completely independent from her cooperation. Katiusha’s role in the first mission is limited to smiling admiringly, looking down and accompanying the pilot by singing Russian songs. During the second mission, she establishes communication with the operational headquarters to inform them of the geographical coordinates of the enemy’s base. In other words, despite the fact that there are three female aviation squadrons in the bases, no female officer is shown taking part in military operations as a pilot and the sole woman-warrior of the narrative plays the usual role typical for cinematic women- warriors of the time ̶ a radio operator. The subsidiary position of the female officers in war is repeatedly stressed in the story by the male officers’ denial that their female colleagues possess sufficient bravery and reliability to navigate U-2 bombers, let alone fighters. Another scene suggesting the same sentiment occurs when Kaisarov’s fighter jet crashes, and a U-2 aircraft is sent to bring him back. Tugo opposes the choice of Masha and Katiusha for this operation

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because, according to him, a woman cannot be a real pilot. Claiming himself more capable, Tugo asserts the following: ‘How can a young woman bring back a male ilot- fighter; if a U-2 aircraft is required, then at least a fighter, a real pilot, should navigate it, that is, one of Kaisarov’s two friends.’ The general brings this disagreement to a close by giving the mission to Bulachkin, as ‘the more experienced pilot’. In the story, public opinion is also shown as uninterested in the expertise of female pilots as the Red Army male officers. The reporter Valia, who represents the interests of her newspaper’s readers, pays no attention to the female pilots and interviews none of them. The importance of the man-machine relationship in Sloth of the Skies replays one of the key topics of Soviet cinema from the pre-GPW period. Hence, the image of Bulachkin reminds the viewer of Kriuchkov’s role of Klim in Ivan Pirov’s 1939 successful comedy, The Tractorists ̶ the story of a community with two tractorist brigades (a male and a female).373 Both films display competition between the expertise of two differently gendered groups, and in both a super-hero enters the community to improve the man-machine relationship. However, these films are completely antithetical when it comes to the presentation of public opinion regarding the technical skills of a woman. By showing Soviet women’s successful engagement with new technology, The Tractorists represents Soviet ideology as standing in contrast to the pre-revolutionary patriarchal perception of the secondary position of a woman in social affairs. It displays a group of rural women in the abandoned Ukrainian steppes working on new models of tractors more accurately and elegantly than their male co-workers, and the male workers accepting the superiority of their female co-workers.374 In contrast, Sloth of the Skies represents the patriarchal perception of an incompatibility between femininity and military expertise; the femininity of the officers is a reason for Bulachkin leaving the squadron. The narrative provides various situations in which the male pilots tease their female co-workers. The atmosphere of the film is so masculine that even Katiusha’s verbal attacks on the men’s belief in the incompatibility of femininity and military service is imagined by Tugo as an instance of womanly wiles deployed to attract his attention. In The Tractorists the head of the female workers, Mar’iana, represents a nationally famous tractorist who receives dozens of letters a day from men who wish to marry her. The film finishes with the marriage of the two role models, Klim and

373 Klim was a demobilised Red Army tankist who arrived on the Ukrainian steppes to work as a mechanic. The Tractorists was awarded the Stalin Prize, first degree, in 1941. 374 Under the disciplined approach of Klim, the male-tractorists were eventually able to change their relationship to the machines. 167

Mar’iana, while in Sloth of the Skies none of the female officers represents a role model worthy of Bulachkin’s love. In other words, the film shows that the time for war heroines is past, and it is time for a new generation of female role models. Thus, Bulachkin marries the daughter of his general, recently graduated from high school, who knows about war and military equipment not through the real war, but through her father’s journals. The Tractorists emphasises teamwork for the success of the collective and highlights the role of women in terms of demand for an active workforce in agriculture and industrial production centres. In contrast, Sloth of the Skies aims to represent the victory against the Germans as achieved only through the bravery of Red Army male superheroes like Bulachkin without the participation of other members of the Great Family. For this purpose, the backward position of U-2 bombers in war is regarded as a result of the female officers’ unprofessional approach towards machines. The employment of these bombers in military operations is shown only after Bulachkin’s arrival and as the result of his high level of expertise. The differences between these two films in regard to the woman-machine relationship reveals that in different periods national interests and economic policies were the dominant factors shaping the features of Soviet female role models which were represented by the Soviet ISAs. In the post-GPW era, when there was a fall in demand for the inspiring cinematic role of suffering mothers, sisters and loyal wives in the service of mastering the castration anxiety in male warriors, suffering heroines disappeared from war films. The dominant image of women in war reverted to sweethearts, wives and mothers of male soldiers, as in the pre-GPW period. Soviet pre-cinematic gender identifications in the post-GPW period guided the spectator to be fascinated by the association of masculinity with heroism in war and voyeurism, and femininity with victimisation and passivity. By presenting an exaggerated image of the bravery and courage of the male Red Army officers Sloth of the Skies aims to identify ‘fathers’ and chosen ‘sons’ of the Family as the only winners in the war and their position in the Symbolic Order during the war as stable and firm. Pre-cinematic identification guides the audience to be satisfied with the strong tendency of the narrative to consider war and heroism a masculine arena. The image of the strong male in the film allowed millions of Soviet fighters, ignored in the notable films of the time, to identify with the brave successful cinematic super-hero, Bulachkin and, through the family relationship between Bulachkin and the general, with ‘fathers’ as well. This exaggerated image of Red Army

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male officers leaves no space in which to show the war’s evocation of the castration threat to war heroes. The whole process of repressing a warrior’s feelings for his sweetheart (as a means of controlling the castration threat, activate the Oedipal crisis and revive the desire to defeat the enemy), is summarised in Sloth of the Skies by means of two simple ideas. First, in the opening scene of the film Bulachkin and his friends sing a song that runs: ‘we are pilots, our first priority is planes, and then girls’. The second idea is the three officers’ vow not to fall in love until the end of the war. The neutralisation of the castration threat and the deactivation of the Oedipal crisis in male warriors are symbolised in the last scene of the film starting with a quick shot of the rotation of an aircraft engine, which is replaced by a shot showing a woman’s skirt while dancing. This scene finishes by showing the three Red Army officers alongside their beloved women. Displaying a group of women as Red Army officers corresponds to the pre-war propaganda that seriously encouraged women to integrate into all -male affairs.375 Meanwhile, the strong patriarchal perception of gender differences in the narrative and the emphasis on the incompatibility between femininity and military expertise, which had been expressed directly by the positive heroes of the film, confirm the arguments given in Chapter Two regarding the dominance of the pre-revolutionary perception of a woman, that is, as a sufferer in the service of the family on the basis of the myth of the Soviet Great Family. The re-feminised and demobilised image of the female officers in Sloth of the Skies implies the return of Soviet women to their pre-GPW obligations. Pre-cinematic identification guides the female viewer to identify with the on-screen heroines, who are happy to return to a peaceful normal life, as beloved wives and nurturers of the family. As mentioned in Chapter Two, ISAs of the Soviet 1930s portrayed the ideal Soviet woman as a happy mother, obedient to her husband, and at the same time, as a devoted worker in society. This portrayal was revived by post-GPW Soviet art as is shown in another of Nina Votolina’s posters, Glory to the Heroic Soviet woman! (1946)376 (Figure 5.2.7). The roles of Soviet women in the GPW are consigned to a secondary position: they are located in the lower half of the poster, while their significant functions in national industry are illustrated in the upper half. However, their main and the most crucial obligation ̶ reproduction ̶ is illustrated in the centre.

375 See Attwood, Red women, p. 169. 376 https://artchive.ru/artists/16641~Nina_Nikolaevna_Vatolina/works/485213~The_heroic_Soviet_woman_glory, accessed on 18/05/2019. 169

Figure 5.2.7 The lack of an ideal role model amongst the female officers in Sloth of the Skies confirms the conclusions of the previous chapter. There it was argued that the Soviet cinematic images of women in war representing symbolic mothers and sisters ready to sacrifice themselves for the collective is significant as the defender of home only in the absence of fatherly authority. In the post-GPW war films, fatherly power (that of Party members and the Red Army officers) has a strong presence behind the front; thus the image of suffering and self-sacrificing mothers and sisters as the main defenders of home in the films of the GPW period disappears and young heroines represent mostly the third category of women in the traditional structure of the family, namely the beloved women of warrior- heroes with no significant role in the war. This argument will be further examined in the next section of this chapter.

5.3 Heroines as Symbolic Suffering Mothers and ‘Sons’ in the Great Family in Molodaia Gvardiia (The Young Guard 1948) Chapter Four examined the representations of symbolic mothers and ‘sons’ of the Family under the German occupation, defending home in the absence of fatherly power, and representing the source of courage and hope for the return of the dominance of masculinity in the Symbolic Order. This section will examine representations of women and war in one of the most popular post-war Stalinist war films, Molodaia Gvardiia. It will argue that the absence of male authority from home in the significant films of the GPW period is compensated for in post-GPW films by the presence of the Party authorities, who command youth to defend their home. The active presence of Party authorities and of youth in defending home in The Young Guard signals that there is no

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need for women to participate in combat. The film resurrects an old-fashioned image of woman in war as the symbol of the defenceless masses who depend on the sacrifice of their men and children. Komsomol members of the Young Guard, like Zoia, are presented as victims of the war, who sacrifice themselves for the Father and the dominant ideology, while the real winners of the war are shown as ‘fathers.’ Molodaia Gvardiia was an underground group founded in September 1941 by a few young Komsomol members in Pervomaiskoe, an occupied village near Krasnodon, a small city in eastern Ukraine, after the occupation of the Donbass by fascist German forces. In February 1943 some of members of this organisation were hanged by the occupiers. In the same year, novelist Aleksandr Fadeev (1901-1956), Secretary of the Soviet Writers’ Union from 1939-1954, received the commission to commemorate the feats of the heroes of the Young Guard. Fadeev, one of the writers closest to Stalin, and a believer in the educational goals of Socialist Realism, transformed the legend of the Molodaia Gvardiia from a local tale into the most famous myth and successful propagandist fictional account of Soviet history around the GPW.377 The publication of the novel in December 1945 was warmly welcomed by the Soviet press as a positive event for Soviet literature and culture. It praised the educational value of the novel and predicted that it would become the most popular fiction book amongst Soviet young people.378 Cultural authorities, the Party and the Komsomol approved the novel, which was awarded the Stalin Prize, first-degree, in 1946. In 1948 the film The Young Guard was shot by Sergei Gerasimov (1906-1985). The film, like the novel, was certainly successful; it was watched by 42.4 million viewers in a few months after its release379 and was awarded the first-degree Stalin Prize in the same year. The film begins with the German attack on the Krasnodon region. The local Party committee orders the residents of Pervomaiskoe to evacuate the region. However, the command comes to too late and many of the residents become trapped under the Germans’ siege. Having returned home, a few local teenagers gather their friends and organise an underground partisan group: the Young Guard. The story turns mainly around the lives and activities of five of the adolescents: Oleg Koshevoi, Ul’iana Gromova,

377 See Juliane Fürst, ‘Wartime Heroes for Post War Youth: The Rise and Fall of the Young Guard’, in Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 137-66; see also Arshaluis Arsharuni, Vstrechi s proshlym (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Sovetskaia Rossia, 1972), pp. 235–52. 378 See ‘Geroi Nashego Vremeni’, Komsomol'skaia Pravda, 14 Mar. 1946, p. 3. See also ‘Plemia Molodoe’, Literaturnaia Gazeta, 6 April 1946, p. 3. 379 See Sergei Zemlianukhin, Domashnaia sinematika: Otechestvennoe Kino, 1918–1996 (Moscow: Dubl’-D, 1996), pp. 253–4. 171

Liubov’ (Liuba) Shevtsova, Sergei Tiulenin and Ivan Zemnukhov. Oleg, the main hero, and the commissar of the organisation, symbolises leading Komsomol members. He lives with his mother, Elena, and his grandmother. With their house occupied by the German commander, they are forced to live in their small barn. Sergei is the most adventurous of the five protagonists. He is not a Komsomol member and has the experience of cooperating with a group of partisans against the enemy; it is he who puts forward to the organisation the idea that they kill the occupiers. The two significant female members of the organisation are Ul’iana and Liuba. Ul’iana is a beautiful, serious, pure and responsible ‘sister’ to the young heroes. Liuba is an attractive energetic girl with artistic interests, who sings and dances well. The Young Guard, which is under the control and guidance of Party members in the region, carries out a series of partisan operations against the Germans, including the hanging of a local traitor, a former kulak, for cooperating with the Germans, and the release of several prisoners from a camp. On the 25th anniversary of the October Revolution the teenagers raise red flags on the Germans’ administrative buildings. Later, they organise a concert for the Germans with the aim of distracting their attention and set fire to a few of their strategic locations in the region. When the underground identity of the organisation is betrayed as the result of inside treachery, Oleg conveys the order of the commanders given for such a situation: leave the city immediately. However, the majority of organisation members disobey the order, as a result of which they are arrested, tortured, and finally executed. This section will examine the fundamental utilisation of the notion of motherhood in wartime and of the mother-son relationship in Russian Orthodoxy in the narrative. This section will analyse the representation of women in war shown as vulnerable mothers under German occupation appealing to their children to sacrifice themselves for the liberation of the Motherland and the nation. This section will also argue that the film represents the Komsomol members of the Young Guard as the symbolic chosen ‘sons’ of the Soviet Great Family, sacrificing themselves to testify to the truth of the dominant ideology and the ideal suitability of Soviet ‘fathers’ to rule the collective.

5.3.1 Vulnerable Mothers and Brave Daughters of the Great Family The first hour of the film draws a general picture of the situation in the city and of the teenagers’ family lives from the moment of the German attack up to the formation of the Young Guard. Fathers and elder brothers are completely absent from the story. Amongst

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the five central protagonists, Ivan’s family life is not mentioned in the narrative and Sergei’s mother has no place in it. However, there is a scene showing Liuba alongside her mother and also a few shots showing Ul’iana’s mother in the first sequence of the film. By shedding light on the image of the mothers of these two main female members of the organisation, Ul’iana and Liuba, the narrative highlights a privileged icon of the generation who have grown up under the Stalin regime and shows that they have a more extensive understanding of the notion of responsibility among the members of the Great Family than did the previous generation. While the residents hastily evacuate the town, Ul’iana looks for her best friend, Valia. Passing near home, Ul’iana meets one of her friends, Anatoly, who is waiting for her in her house-yard to enable her to leave town in his carriage. Ul’iana does not intend to leave without Valia, so she decides to refuse Anatoly’s offer and leave town on foot with Valia. On hearing this, Ul’iana’s mother runs forward, concerned, and says to Ul’iana: ‘how will you carry our belongings then? The clothes and bed linen? I have put everything in a suitcase.’ The horrified mother starts crying despairingly, while the teenagers display more self-control: Ul’iana pacifies her mother and Anatoly decides to leave town on foot and give his place in the carriage to Valia (Figure 5.3.1).

Figure 5.3.1 The camera’s low angle presents Ul’iana in the foreground as strong, calm and confident and her mother in the background as short, frightened and vulnerable. Touching the house-yard wall and crying in despair with her figure bent, demonstrates the extraordinary pressure on the mother’s weak shoulders. Her words represent her as trapped within the bounds of a restrictive personal-family life, unable to distinguish priorities at a critical time. Her profile reveals her discomfort and confusion in that critical situation, while Ul’iana is shown outside the yard wall, which symbolises her

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wider understanding of intimacy and responsibilities amongst members of the Soviet Family; she will not leave town without her friend Valia. Liuba’s family life is also touched on briefly in the first sequence of the film. One evening, Andrei, the Party representative in the local mine, comes to tell the family that Liuba’s father has been killed in a bombing raid (Figure 5.3.2). Like Ul’iana in Figure 5.3.1, Liuba, sitting firmly in the foreground, is shown as stronger, more confident and significantly taller than her mother, who is stooped in the background at the table. In reaction to the news of her husband’s death, the mother stands up shakily, draws near Liuba slowly and throws herself into her arms. In contrast to the mother, Liuba appears so strong and self-contained that Andrei feels able to discuss an important issue with her; he invites Liuba to join their action against the enemy. The passivity of the mother and her dependence on her daughter becomes even clearer when two German officers arrive at their house. Liuba embraces her terrified shaking mother, kisses and pacifies her and implores her mother to behave calmly. Liuba promises the mother that she will manage the situation herself.

Figure 5.3.2 In both figures 5.3.1 and 5.3.2 the camera represents the frustrating reality observed by the two young heroines: disappointed, weak mothers, broken by the disaster of the war and unable to defend their home. Ul’iana’s mother is unable to defend the house-wall that she touches despairingly, nor can Liuba’s mother sit at that table as the owner of the house, when the Germans enter the door behind her. Meanwhile, the settings emphasise the distance between the two generations of women; in the first figure, this is displayed by the wall, and in the second, by the table. In this Socialist Realist art work, the camera’s low angle in both shots represents an exaggerated view of the status of the Stalinist generation. Both teenagers are portrayed in the foreground as

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stronger, taller, more confident and much more dependable than their mothers in the background. The next scene also confirms this argument. Although it is a difficult time for Liuba, having just received the news of her father’s death, she controls her emotions effectively and deals with the Germans very successfully. The young girl in Figure 5.3.2 with braided hair and an immature appearance wears a colourful dress and make-up, and gives the officers a friendly welcome like an experienced hostess. She sits with them at the same table and later amuses them by playing the guitar. While Liuba sensibly gains the German officers’ confidence, appearing to make friends with them, her mother appears completely silent and ineffective, representing a naïve subordinate woman standing behind them in the role of a servant observing the situation without any part to play in it. Uncertainty and confusion are delivered through her profile in Figure 5.3.3.

Figure 5.3.3 The mothers of Ul’iana and Liuba with their small, fragile figures, anxiety, timidity, rural clothes make-up, strong local accent and non-standard language represent the voiceless women of the town, who in the absence of their menfolk are trapped in the disaster of occupation. The film represents a stereotypical passive image of mothers without a direct part to play either in the war or in society; throughout the film they are shown only as doing housework and in the service of their children. They are confused and uncertain about the critical situation and rely on their children, who are shown as more comfortable, confident and stronger. Representing such a motherly image as dominant in the community prepares the ground, as the next section will examine, to employ the holy Russian Orthodox mother-son relationship in the narrative and to show the defenceless mother appealing to her son to sacrifice himself in the name of the Motherland and the dominant ideology.

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5.3.2 Elena, the Symbol of Defenceless Motherhood Appealing for Her Son’s Self- Sacrifice Oleg’s mother, Elena, is the only woman in the narrative with confidence and an intelligent appearance, however, without any social position or direct role in the war. She is shown only as a mother in the service of her child. Elena appears in the story on the eve of the enemy’s attack on the city. In a medium shot of her bedroom, with her profile to the camera, she is sitting in front of the mirror. She takes a picture from the desk showing Oleg and herself happily smiling at the camera (Figure 5.3.4). An approaching medium close-up of Elena’s profile emphasises the discomfort and confusion she feels by looking at that reminder of the Soviet pre-war Utopia (the photo) and the symbol of reflecting reality (the mirror). This is the moment that Elena’s mother rushes in and informs her daughter of the occupation of the city by the Germans. The medium close-up shot is repeated showing Elena raising her head, turning to the camera and frowning. Uncertainty and confusion are revealed not only in her face but also in her voice; with doubt as if she cannot believable the dreadful news she asks, ‘what?’ Elena’s light clothes and long braided hair symbolise the happy pre-war period. Appearing in the interior of her home, in front of the reflector of reality (the mirror) and recalling pre-war peace, Elena symbolises fearful Soviet mothers worried about the fate of their children.

Figure 5.3.4 With her hair-style, make-up, behaviour, dignified expression and language, Elena is distinguished from ordinary women in that region. Younger and stronger than the other mothers of the story, and with a relatively more active presence in it, Elena represents a more significant image than those of the two confused, hopeless mothers without any roles in the narrative.

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In a following scene, Elena displays an even more profound image of suffering motherhood. Having shown Elena’s house as occupied and serving as the residency of the German commander in the region, the assaulted motherhood of her yard under the Germans’ violence is visualised by means of Elena’s image. In a long shot of the vast Ukrainian plains, the German forces are shown approaching from the background. Elena, on the left side of the frame in the foreground, is shown as standing on the threshold of her yard entrance, the only visible house on the road. To the sound of victorious march music, the occupiers arrive, the camera zooms in on Elena, and shows her tying her braided hair on her head. With the camera’s panning to the right, Elena’s image leaves the frame and a medium shot shows the German general dismounting from the car. Having completely ignored the hostess, he steps into the yard without any resistance. The violence of the German occupiers is symbolically shown by the general’s first reaction. Pointing at the trees alongside Elena’s house, he orders them to be cut down. A group of soldiers rush towards the yard and cut down the trees. Standing silently in her yard alongside a tree, not reacting to what is happening around her, Elena’s presence gives the impression that she, like the tree, is completely indiscernible and invisible. With her left hand on the trunk of the tree and the right on her heart, Elena portrays her motherhood as united with that of her tree/land, trapped in that violence; both serves as witnesses to the Germans seizure of the house and brutally felling of the young trees (Figure 5.3.5).

Figure 5.3.5 With her hand on her heart, tilting her head to the side and bent down, Elena represents suffering motherhood under the invasion and its deep aversion to the occupiers’ disrespect of ‘its privacy and purity’. In the middle of that ultimate aggression, Elena’s silence, gentle posture and profile represent the confusion and discomfort of suffering motherhood from both the grief of losing her children (the young trees), and the pain and

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humiliation of the disgraceful ‘rape.’ This voiceless image of defenceless motherhood trapped in the humiliating invasion is definitely far from that of the lead heroines in the films of the GPW era, such as She Defends the Motherland, where the mother took an axe and attacked the enemy to teach her children how to defend their home. This delicate icon of Elena, representing suffering motherhood of her piece of land, reveals the extent to which the mother and the land call for defenders. However, employing Slavic female folk symbols such as Elena’s long hair in Figure 5.3.4, which symbolises her pivotal position in the family as the source of support380 and her tying up her hair after the German occupation, which symbolises a womanly way of getting ready to work,381 do not imply that Elena plays any direct part in the war. Elena’s role in the war is identified in terms of the traditional female function of ushering the child into the Symbolic Order, which in Stalinist war films means being sacrificed in the name of the Motherland and the collective. Oleg, the process of crossing the threshold of the Symbolic Order begins with his return home after the unsuccessful attempt to evacuate the town. Those occupying the house do not let him return and instead force the teenager to leave his own home. After his unsuccessful attempt to leave the occupied city, this is Oleg’s second unpleasant experience. It implies that escape from the enemy is impossible, since the whole Motherland suffers from their attack. The narrative links the suffering of the Motherland to the suffering of the representatives of the dominant ideology. For this purpose, the first hour of the film ends with a dramatic scene of the massacre of the Stakhanovtsy and the Party members of the region. This two-minute scene with strong surrealist overtones symbolises the motherly function of ushering the child into the Symbolic Order by appealing to him for self-sacrifice. In a long shot with the low-contrast of night-time, Elena and Oleg are shown in unidentified fields. Having heard the sound of the massacre and horrified by realising the disaster, shivering Oleg holds his mother’s hand and begs her to run away from those horrible surroundings. Although they run and wander, no matter how far they get way from the scene of the crime, the sounds of shots and shouts accompany ever them more clearly. Eventually, the crime scene vividly appears in front of Oleg’s eyes. Realising that there is no way to escape from facing the enemy, Oleg falls to his knees desperately and

380 According to Ukraine folklore, there is a power in a woman’s hair that can support her family. 381 In Ukrainian culture, arranging hair into two plaits and twining it around the head as if a crown symbolises preparation for work. 178

cries out: ‘how can we carry on living, mother?’ In a two-shot, with the camera zooming in and the Shostakovich piece accompanying it reaching its climax, with a tearful face, but a firm expression and strong voice, Elena appeals to her son to be strong to the last breath (Figure 5.3.6).

Figure 5.3.6 The scene aims to convey that when fathers and elder brothers are either on the battlefront or executed behind the front, and the Motherland is under threat of annihilation, direct encounter with the enemy is inevitable for teenagers. In this critical situation when war is widespread, Elena, confused and uncertain when she realises the potential fatal destiny of her beloved son at the outbreak of war, now sacrifices her motherly feelings and opts for patriotism; she appeals to Oleg to accept his fatal destiny bravely for the sake of the Motherland and the collective. Elena, who has already expressed suffering motherhood through her piece of land (Figure 5.3.5), now in a more significant position, represents motherhood through the Motherland. The deliberate juxtaposition of this scene with one showing the swearing in ceremony of the founding members of the Young Guard, that immediately follows, confirms that the mother’s’ appeal to ‘the son’ has been accepted. The camera cuts into a shot with high-contrast illumination showing Oleg and his friends standing still, taking their oaths (Figure 5.3.7). To the accompaniment of a piece by Shostakovich, Oleg starts reciting the oath, while the camera zooms in to a close-up shot of him, and subsequently close-up shots of his friends. Having listened to Oleg cautiously, the comrades accompany him actively with their eyes and facial expressions revealing their willpower, decisiveness and devotion. The culmination of comradeship and endorsement of the young protagonists is expressed by the stimulating climax of the Shostakovich piece. The

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scene displays the friends as a united whole, and Oleg as their representative (he bears the title of ‘organisation commissar’). The ceremony acknowledges that Elena’s appeal to her son for self-sacrifice has met with response not only from Oleg, but also by the young Komsomol members. Having stood together as a group and sworn to sacrifice their lives for the sake of the ‘suffering land’, the young represent ‘the son’ responding to the Motherland’s call for their self-sacrifice.

Figure 5.3.7 As well as representing the Motherland suffering from ‘rape’, Elena symbolises Soviet mothers sacrificing their sons for the sake of the Great Family and Soviet ideology. Elena is the only mother in the story who appears in the teenagers’ gatherings. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the October Revolution, the Young Guard holds a party for its members, during which the German forces suddenly arrive. Elena locks the young people in a room, and stands in front of the locked door with hands locked on her heart. Her expression reveals her seriousness and determination to die, but not to surrender the young to the enemy. Elena’s strong motherly love, displayed repeatedly in different sequences of the film, must instinctively stand in opposition to any call for deploying children to the battlefield. This dilemma is solved in the narrative through the employment of the Orthodox mother-son relationship; the mother’s appeal to her own son to sacrifice himself appears with the prerequisite of the sacrificing of her own motherly love. In psychological terms, The Young Guard, like other war films of the time, sought to deny that the war posed a threat to the position of ‘fathers’ in the Symbolic Order. Given that a woman might always pose a threat because she invokes a man’s unconscious anxieties about sexual difference and castration, the narrative of The Young Guard compensates for this possibility. It does so by limiting the female function

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to that of mother leading the child into the Symbolic Order, while ‘her meaning does not transfer into the world of law and language’, 382 which means remaining in the framework of serving the family without any significance in society or in the war. After the identities of the Young Guard members have been exposed, Oleg leaves for the battlefront. His readiness for entrance into the Symbolic Order is displayed in the goodbye scene. The setting is the same as that of Elena’s introductory scene. Having sat on the same low stool as in Figure 5.3.4, Elena packs her son’s belongings. Her expression, her shaky voice, tearful eyes and attempt to conceal her worries from Oleg stage the climax of the suffering of a mother leading her beloved son to ‘Golgotha.’ Elena’s image in the mirror aims to reflect the reality of the Great Family by symbolising Soviet mothers who like Elena have chosen to sacrifice their motherly feelings and encourage their children to sacrifice themselves for the Motherland and the Family. To the sound of Shostakovich, Oleg calmly approaches Elena and asks her to sew his Komsomol membership card inside his clothes. The camera angle in Figure 5.3.8 shows Oleg’s maturation; the timid fearful Oleg of Figure 5.3.6 is now shown as completely mature and ready to become an icon of suffering who deserves praise. At the same time, the position adopted by Elena suggests kneeling to pray to a holy icon. Known as the ‘organisation commissar’, Oleg’s title indicates that he represents the chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family, completely believing in Soviet ideology. Thus the ‘holy icon’ in front of which Elena is shown metaphorically kneeling is the chosen ‘son’ of the Family holding the emblem of his complete belief in Soviet ideology. The female function of serving the family overlaps with the duty of the New Soviet Person, namely to be completely in the service of the dominant ideology. This female function is equal to the sacrifice of the son for the return of the privileged position of masculinity in the Family, which is discussed in the next section. In this scene the deployment of the relationships within a traditional family union is linked to the mother-son relationship in Russian Orthodoxy. As discussed in Chapter Two, the status of the Mother of God as the symbol of collective Orthodoxy was so respected in Russian Orthodox culture that Orthodox scholars promoted the idea that the status of the Mother of God paralleled that of Christ.383 However, this parallel status did not imply any social authority on the part of the Mother, but was rather a sign of God’s

382Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, p. 484. 383 Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, p. 221. 181

grace, which placed the Mother under the authority of her own son.384 The same pattern of motherly image is distinguished in The Young Guard. As already argued, the narrative displays the Stalinist generation as superior to their mothers, who lack any social authority and function only as mothers in the service of their children. Even though Elena symbolises the suffering Motherland and Soviet mothers, she represents no authority or significant role either in society or in the war. Her function is limited to sacrificing her motherly love, essential for the son to enter the Symbolic Order, which in Stalinist war cinema is identified as sacrificing the self for the Father and the Great Family.

Figure 5.3.8 5.3.3 Representation of Suffering ‘Sons’ of the Great Family To encourage teenagers to resist the enemy, the narrative displays a strong presence of Party members at home under occupation. This reinforces the idea that the GPW poses no threat to the privileged position of ‘fathers’ in the Symbolic Order. Accordingly, the narrative shows that not only was the Young Guard organisation under the control of the Party, but that its every little action was guided by Party members. As soon as the region is attacked by the Germans, the idea of resisting the enemy comes up amongst the teenagers simultaneously with their efforts to contact Party officials in the region and to receive advice and help from them. Meanwhile, the Party secretary of the regional committee, comrade Protsenko, and his colleagues are shown seriously investigating ways of organising partisan groups in the region and providing them with equipment. In the first sequence of the film, Liuba comes to ask permission from Comrade Protsenko to stay in town so as to infiltrate enemy forces using her artistic abilities of singing and dancing. During this meeting, Prosenka clarifies that every single step of Liuba’s must be under the control of the Party officials. He emphasises as follows: ‘You do not make any

384 Ibid. 182

decision by yourself. Wait for the order [...] Your task is to carry out instructions carefully; word for word and letter by letter’. Immediately after the organisation has been formed, Liuba, who plays the role of the intermediary between the Young Guard and Comrade Protsenko, meets him and asks for the Party’s ‘advice and help’. Protsenko promises the organisation a ‘specific mission’ from the following day. This scene finishes with an inter title informing the viewer that ‘the Secretary of the Regional Committee informed his comrades of the Young Guard. The partisan operations of the group would be commanded by the communists of the underground organisation of Krasnodon namely Loutikov and Barakov’. The Young Guard is shown as a successful underground organisation for only so long as it is under direct Party control, while its failure is attributed to the young people’s disobeying Party’s order. Having fulfilled a series of successful partisan operations against Germans in the region, the identity of the organisation is betrayed. In accordance with the commander's order in the event of such a happening, Oleg asks its members to end activities and leave town. However, the majority of them stay in the city. Given that the Young Guard’s partisan activities are portrayed as achieved thanks only to the careful following of Party orders, the narrative deprives the teenagers of subjectivity in military terms. Members of the Young Guard, like Zoia in the film Zoia, are failed warriors. Execution is, indeed, a punishment for disobeying Party orders. Nevertheless, the failures, in combat terms, of the small region of Krasnodon are proclaimed national heroes, when thousands of young partisans were bravely fighting alongside the Red Army. Hence, the heroism of the Young Guard, as in Zoia’s case, lies precisely in their victimisation and suffering, not their military success. The female spectator of both films Zoia and The Young Guard may be fascinated by a masculine pleasure of identification with the active point of view offered by the heroic image of these suffering teenagers. This would allow her, as Mulvey argues, ‘to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity [in the Mirror Stage], the never fully repressed bed-rock of feminine neurosis’.385 The female spectator may find herself ‘enjoying the freedom of action and control’ over the narrative that identification with the teenagers in both films provided.386 Nevertheless, Mulvey underlines the significance of ‘cultural convention’ in creating the cinematic image and of pre-cinematic identification in this process of identification when he writes, ‘the woman spectator in the cinema not

385 Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure’’, p. 13. 386 See Ibid, p. 12. 183

only has her own memories but an age-old cultural tradition adapting her to this convention, which eases a transition out of her own sex into another’.387 Given the youths’ qualities of innocence, suffering, obedience to ‘fathers’ and love of the Motherland, their image perfectly coincides with what is expected of an ideal obedient son in relation to a father in a traditional family union. In other words, the teenagers of the Young Guard represent heroes due to their faithfulness to the Symbolic Order, even under the most brutal torture, which is portrayed in the film with a strong aggressive tendency. To convert the martyred Komsomol members into role models of suffering, the narrative accentuates their purity, innocence, loyalty to their comrades, and enthusiasm to sacrifice themselves for the Motherland and the Party. By rejecting any sexual relationships amongst the lead protagonists, the film displays them as brothers and sisters ˗ a whole ˗ i.e. an aggregated icon of the innocent ‘Son’ of the Motherland. Presenting Soviet teenagers as brothers and sisters is definitely not limited to this cinematic narrative; from the 1930s onwards, Soviet fiction for children ignored gender differences and tended to emphasise friendship amongst desexualised images of girls and boys.388 The suffering of the teenagers and their execution induced compassion and pity towards the attacked Motherland and her suffering children. This suffering image also enhanced the significance of the victory of ‘fathers’ and reinforced their position within the Symbolic Order during the GPW. These arguments are confirmed by evidence from the last sequence of the film, when the scene of the teenagers’ execution cuts to the only documentary used in the film. It shows how courageously ‘fathers’ take revenge on the enemy on the battlefields and eventually return home in triumph. As mentioned in Chapter Four, the use of documentary footage in fictional films minimises the boundary between cinema and reality and gives the art work greater authenticity. It enables a film maker to shoot a work more connected to the real word, while carrying its myths and falsehoods within it.389 The documentary cuts to the final scene of the film showing Comrade Protsenko delivering a fervent speech in a commemorative ceremony in the presence of the Young Guard’s families and townspeople, who have gathered together at the site of their execution. In a medium close-up, at a low angle, of Protsenko, several medals shine on his chest, his Party comrades stand in the middle-ground on his right and a group of school pioneers and Komsomol members stand on his left in the background

387 Ibid, p. 13. 388 See Tippner, ‘Girls in Combat’, pp. 375-377. 389 For a discussion on the relation between the impression of reality and cinema see Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, 121-42. 184

listening to him carefully. He addresses the mothers and asks them not to lament, as the image of their executed children is immortalised forever, and their saintly names will be passed down from generation to generation. The speech reveals that the suffering image of the young had huge capacity to make for a glorious icon of the martyrs as part of the collective memory of the GPW, which, according to the narrative, was essential for reinforcement of the male position in the Symbolic Order. As mentioned in Chapter Two, in a critical situation when the community’s convictions are under attack, the most faithful believers of the community sacrifice themselves to protect the common belief. This achievement, to infuse new blood into the body of the community and to awaken and strengthen it, positions victims (martyrs) as role models. This image of the Young Guard victims (martyrs) merges the trad perception of family in the service of the Soviet Great Family with the holy mother-son relationship in Russian Orthodoxy. Having sacrificed her own motherly feelings, the symbolic mother appeals to her ‘sons’ to sacrifice themselves for the Motherland, as the territory of the Great Family. The teenagers’ suffering leads to reinforcement of the state of ‘fathers’ in the Symbolic Order. As mentioned in Chapter Two, the mother-son relationship in Russian Orthodoxy is the principal agent for the conversion of the population into an allied collective who believe in an essentially masculine faith, rooted in principles of paternal authority and filial love.390 The popularity of the film proves the success of this employment in appealing to the audience to identify with the male and female images of it

5.4 Conclusion By analysing the two popular films Sloths of the Skies and The Young Guard, this chapter has aimed to draw a clear picture of the representations of women and martyrdom in post-war Stalinist war cinema. The first objective of this chapter has been to examine the role models of female self-sacrifice in the war films of the time. Having corresponded to the post-war cultural policy discussed in the Introduction, both films aimed at focusing on the significant role of Red Army officers and of Party members in the victory over Germany and avoiding individual interpretations of the war. This chapter has demonstrated that without any explicit indicators of Soviet values either in the narrative, dialogues, make-up and behaviour of the characters or in the scenery, Sloths of the Skies lacked the cinematic fetishistic image that had been

390 See Hubbs, Mother Russia, p. 87. 185

present in the significant films of the GPW era. The heroines did not represent suffering mothers and sisters ready to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Great Family or the embodiments of aesthetic and ideological perfection completely loyal to their men and their military collectives. In psychoanalytic terms, given that the castration threat amongst the Red Army superheroes was denied, there was no need for a representation of a fetishistic image of the heroines as the carriers of moral obligations and hope to overcome the castration threat evoked in male conscious by the war. Hence, the victory of the Red Army officers over the enemy was, unlike in the films of Chapters Three and Four, represented as completely independent of any moral support from women of the Great Family. The neutralisation of the castration threat of the woman’s ‘lack’ of a penis to the male unconscious after the victory in the war, as well as the removal of the requirement for fetishistic images of suffering mothers and sisters in post-GPW cinema prepared the ground for the reproduction of a patriarchal view of the cinematic female image i.e. an erotic object for the on-screen hero as well as for the viewer. Denying that the GPW posed a threat to the privileged position of ‘fathers’ in the Symbolic Order, the second film examined in this chapter, The Young Guard, aimed at reinforcing hierarchical relations among the Soviet Great Family members, as well as their submission to the dominant ideology. Accordingly, the narrative reproduced a traditional image of family relationships to describe the situation of the people trapped in a siege by the enemy. While fathers and elder brothers were on the battlefields, defenceless mothers sacrificed their motherly love to encourage teenagers to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Motherland. Displaying an asexual love amongst the teenaged Komsomol members in the narrative characterised them as symbolic brothers and sisters in the Family. Both films represented a strong patriarchal view, perceiving battle as a male arena. This has led the chapter to its second objective, which is to examine the impact of the patriarchal expectations of an ideal woman in wartime on the post-war cinematic image of the woman in the GPW. Having followed the traditional perception of incompatibility between femininity and military expertise, heroism in the war in Sloth of the Skies was distinguished as limited to male Red Army officers. The narrative reduced the professional reputation of female Soviet pilots by showing them in a completely feminine atmosphere, without any sign of military discipline. The heroines in Sloth of the Skies functioned primarily as objects for the male gaze with secondary roles in war.

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The strong image of ‘fathers’ both as warriors and behind the front in The Young Guard, likewise in Sloth of the Skies, left no possibility for perceiving the war as a threat triggering castration anxiety amongst heroes. Accordingly, there was no requirement for female warriors (like in Frontovye podrugi and Malakhov kurgan) even with secondary roles; or for brave mothers behind the front to replace ‘fathers’ and inspire the Family to resist the enemy (like in She Defends the Motherland and Rainbow); or for loyal wives as the embodiment of morality and hope for male warriors (like in Wait for Me). The only role for women in the narrative of The Young Guard was fulfilling Lacan’s second function for a woman in reality i.e. ushering the child into the Symbolic Order. The revival of the significant image of the mother-son relationship in Russian Orthodox culture evoked the pre-cinematic identification with the aim of showing this female function as easily identified by the viewer. The narrative drew a strong image of female members of the underground organisation as the representatives of the generation of young women who had grown up under the Stalin regime. The heroines in The Young Guard as in Zoia had the right, equal to that of male teenagers, to sacrifice themselves for the Father and the collective. The masculine pleasure of identification with the heroic image of the female teenagers might fascinate the female spectator and let her ‘rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity’391 in the Mirror Stage. However, The Young Guard like Zoia presented the teenagers as failures and victims in the war, not heroines. None of them was able to reach the front and take part in combat; all were executed behind the front. They were praised in the narrative not for heroism in the war, but for their loyalty and obedience to the values of the Symbolic Order to death. The defenceless image of mothers and the victimised icon of the teenagers aimed to highlight the powerful image of ‘fathers’ and minimise the contribution of other members of the Great Family in the victory. This image emphasised the significance of hierarchy in the relationships amongst the Soviet Family and the stable position of ‘fathers’ in the Symbolic Order. Identifying the representations of ‘fathers’ and superheroes of the Great Family in Sloth of the Skies and The Young Guard has led the chapter to its final objective, which was to examine the relationships between the female representations in the films and the values of the Stalin era. By regarding the victory in the GPW as the outcome of the bravery and intelligence of Soviet ‘fathers’, both films aimed to show the status of ‘fathers’ in the Symbolic Order during the GPW as stable and firm. Sloth of the Skies

391 Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure’’, p. 13. 187

represented the Red Army male officers as superheroes, who defeated the enemy very easily. This exaggerated image of male warriors in war left no room for the heroines to play any significant role in war either as professional officers in army operations or as symbolic suffering mothers, sisters and wives. This male image was so strong that there was no negative heroine in either narrative to make any objection against the values of the Symbolic Order. Sloth of the Skies reinforced a traditional view of feminine beauty to offer scopophilic pleasure to Red Army officers. This female representation reproduced the promoted image of a Soviet woman in the 1930s representing the aspects of femininity and romanticism.392 In The Young Guard not only were battle and heroism in war perceived as a male arena, occupied by mature Red Army forces and Party members without any room for female warriors, but also, unlike in the films of the GPW era, male authority had an active presence at home. The image of fatherly authority in The Young Guard was so all-encompassing that all partisan activities and successes behind the front were displayed as under of the strict control of ‘fathers’. Thus, the military operations of the members of the organisation were shown to be successful owing to complete obedience to Party’s orders word for word, while the failure and execution by the German forces were in fact the punishment for disobedience to the ‘fathers’. In the shadow of a strong image of ‘fathers’, other members of the Family were shown as members of a traditional family union, whose lives, security and successes would depend on complete submission to ‘fathers’. By depriving the young of military heroism, the narrative coresponded the post- war cultural policy, i.e. attributing the victory over Germany only to Stalin, the Red Army and Party members without any significant contribution of other members of the Family. The teenagers were proclaimed as national heroes precisely due to qualities such as innocence, chastity, suffering for the Family, and especially complete submission to the faith in the dominant ideology, even under the most brutal torture portrayed in the film with a strong aggressive tendency. As in Zoia, the submission of the Komsomol members ˗ the role models of suffering in the Great Family ˗ before the Father and Soviet ideology positioned Stalin in a superior position to that of the martyrs in the community – the role model of the martyred role models of the nation. This superior position awarded the Father, and the members of the category of ‘fathers’, the right to claim absolute

392 See Attwood, Red Women, p. 170. 188

authority over the community and the complete submission of the nation to national Bolshevism.

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Conclusion This conclusion revisits the research objective and questions raised in the Introduction and Chapter Two. This is done in the light of the historical and ideological background presented in Chapter One, the theoretical and methodological frameworks set out in Chapter Two, and the outcomes of the analytical detailed in Chapters Three to Five.

Revisiting the Thesis Objective The main objective of this research was to draw a clear picture of the representations of women and martyrdom in Soviet War Cinema of the Stalin Era through examining eight major films of the time. This research identified the resurrection of Russian traditional-religious expectations of an ideal woman by Stalinist ISAs to construct female role models during the GPW. This research ascertained that the female cinematic role models in Stalinist war cinema enabled the state to dominate society’s image of itself, thereby reproducing the people’s submission to the ruling ideology. Drawing on the Althusserian theory of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), Chapter Two proposed that the stabilisation of Soviet power over the long term required that the imagination of the people be secured, a task that rested on the imaginary transposition of people’s real conditions of existence. According to Althusserian theory, this imaginary transposition, which promised the lasting dominance of the state over Soviet citizens, was achieved through the operations of Soviet ISAs. These were influenced, among other things, by the beliefs of the Russian peasantry, which presented itself as bearing a strong imprint of Russian religious-cultural heritage and the social relations of pre-revolutionary traditional society. Chapter Two proposed that, following the adoption of the policy of socialism in one country, in 1924, the Russian ‘three great state principles’ identified by Uvarov, and their connecting factor – that of suffering – were revived to construct the core of Stalin’s state principles. Once Bolshevism had been established on a pan-state scale, the process of subsuming the Soviet nations to the central power was regarded as dependant on the stability of a triangle of Soviet state principles: the Stalinist cult of personality, – Bolshevik ideology, – and nationality. In Althusserian terms, this subsumption was to be brought about by means of the Stalinist ISAs, which would generate the suitable image of the self and of social relations. The construction of a fitting collective identity and state-people relations required an appropriate social and cultural context. For that reason, Socialist Realism was endorsed 190

in 1934 as the sole official aesthetic style of Soviet culture, whose purpose was to shape the myths of New Soviet Man and Woman and the Great Soviet Family through the “engineering of human souls” by means of representing reality not as it was, but as it should be. This thesis has studied the russocentric nature of the Stalin regime and the employment of Russian religious-cultural heritage to ‘patriarchalise’ social relationships. This resulted in authorising in society a hierarchical-patriarchal perception of relationships, developed out of and reaching back to the structure prevalent in pre- revolutionary Russian peasant households. As a result, Soviet people were considered as members of one family - the Great Soviet Family. Chapter Two argued that this hierarchical-patriarchal system of social relations within the Great Family was also linked in Soviet Marxist-Leninist ideology. Marx’s conception of society as comprised of two hierarchical components of the economic base and political superstructure. Accordingly, the reproduction of the submission of the economic base ̶ the Family members (the people) ̶ to political superstructure ̶ ‘fathers’ (officials) as practiced under the communist regime was assured through an imaginary transposition of the real conditions of the Family members by Soviet ISAs, especially by the cultural ISA best suited to the task – cinema. Chapter Two also drew on the function of interpellation, presented by Althusser, as a process able to well explain how an ordinary individual could be transformed into a New Soviet Person (an ideal Family member) by imitating the ideal role models represented by Soviet Socialist Realism. The Althusserian perception of interpellation corresponds to post-1970s psychoanalytic film theory, which identifies cinema partly as an ideological apparatus. Based on Freud’s theories, especially those regarding the unconscious, subjectivity, and sexuality, as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis, which identifies individuals’ relationship with reality as based on the three orders of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, post-1970s psychoanalytical film theory was introduced in Chapter Two as the methodological framework of this thesis. As the main external threat to the ruling ideology, the GPW appeared to offer the best prospect for the Stalin regime to appeal for extreme submission to the dominant ideology. Given that cinema was the most powerful ideological means available within Soviet art capable of transforming individuals into subjects, forging cinematic role models of self-sacrifice in the name of the Motherland would endorse the absolute devotion of the martyrs of the Great Soviet Family to

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national Bolshevism. Chapter Two argued that culture and ideology in national political systems accorded with the culture and ideology of dominant masculinity in society and the existence of consistent images of the nation as mother, and also images of the place belonging to the nation as the Motherland under nationalist ruling systems.393 By displaying the image of the Motherland as a symbolic mother protected by the brave male warriors of the Fatherland, Stalinist war cinema appeared the ISA best fitted to depict representations of the Soviet female in the GPW, and thus provided a fitting research context for this thesis’ examination of the images of women and martyrdom. Martyrdom was another notion key to this research. Drawing on the significance of the Russian Orthodox tradition of martyrdom in Russian political culture, this thesis has proposed that this Orthodox tradition was appropriated by Stalinist war cinema to ensure the stability of Stalin’s authority and the Soviet state-citizen relations; it did so by transposing people’s imaginary of their real conditions in the GPW. The thesis has identified cinematic role models of suffering and self-sacrifice represented as absolute believers in Stalin and national Bolshevism. Soviet cinematic martyrs’ complete obedience to the Leader and other supreme authorities implied the right of Bolshevik leadership to claim the most privileged status in relation to truth and ruling the community. A step-by-step approach based on the findings in the historical and theoretical Chapters One and Two provided the foundations for presenting detailed sustained analyses of the films in Chapters Three to Five. Post-1970 psychoanalytic film theory was particularly suited to analysing the representations of Soviet women and martyrdom in the GPW cinema, since it identifies the functions of the cinematic heroine in classic films structured by ‘the unconscious of patriarchal society’.394 The application of psychoanalytic film theory in Chapters Three to Five was accompanied by a step-by-step approach to the filmic texts. This was achieved through close readings of film-texts and detailed analyses of the characterisations, plots, iconography and narrative structures of the primary sources, as well as the identification of intertextual works. These intertextual works evoked significant pre-cinematic codes, symbols and myths, easily recognisable, and thus accelerated the process of cinematic identification for the viewer. By examining Soviet war films of the period 1941-1953 with leading or significant female characters, this thesis has suggested that sacrificing the self in Stalinist

393 See Mostov, ‘Sexing the Nation/Desexing the Body’, pp. 92-96. 394 Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, p. 483. 192

war cinema functioned as authorisation to access the Symbolic Order. Accordingly, the thesis has highlighted the absence of cinematic heroines attaining the peak of self- sacrifice and thus being martyred in the GPW except for Olena, the image of the Mother of God in Rainbow. Despite huge suffering and misery, the other leading heroines in the GPW were not awarded the right to sacrifice their bodies and thus to access the Symbolic Order. These insights were related to the discussion in Chapter Two, which suggested the unity of the maternal image in Russian Orthodox Christianity and that of the sufferer in classical Russian literature in the service of the family and which point out the completely submissive position of the female believer in Russian Orthodox Christianity towards the (religious)/ideology and to paternal authority. The findings of Chapters Three to Five also confirmed the validity of post-1970 psychoanalytic film theory, which identifies the functions of the cinematic heroine in classic films as limited to symbolising the castration threat in the male unconscious (the absence of a penis in the female) and ushering the (male) child into the Symbolic Order.

Revisiting the Research Questions

Research Question One The main objective of this research generated four research questions. With regard to an examination of the interaction between pre-revolutionary expectations of a female Orthodox believer in wartime and those of the Soviet woman, the first research question addressed the key models of female self-sacrifice in Soviet war films of the Stalin era.

The war films made in the GPW period with leading heroines playing roles in war were divided into two main categories in Chapters Three and Four. Narratives within the first category depicted a common patriarchal image of a young woman in war rather than having subjectivity in military operations. This image represented the main source of hope for the heroine’s man and his comrades on the front. Having examined three films from the first category, Chapter Three identified the key models of female self-sacrifice in war as fiancées in Frontovye podrugi, wives in Zdhi menia and widows of warriors in Malakhov kurgan. Despite the fact that the heroines in the first film functioned as fighters on the battlefront, that in the second they were shown as young wives behind the front without any direct role in the war, and in the third film as unskilled volunteers on the

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battlefield, a common approach to male-female relationships in wartime gathered these heroines into one category. Chapter Four examined the second category of war films made in the GPW period, films in which heroines, in the absence of fatherly authority, resisted the enemy at home under occupation. Chapter Four identified the key models of female self-sacrifice in war as suffering mothers and the symbol of the Motherland (in She Defends the Motherland and Rainbow), the symbol of the Mother of God (in Rainbow) and the ideal ‘son’ of the Motherland (in Zoia). The images of suffering mothers in these films symbolised the female function of ushering the child into the Symbolic Order, which implied sacrificing it in the war. Unlike the young women in the films of Chapter Three, the teenager Zoia was presented as an inappropriate character to symbolise the castration threat in the male unconscious. Moreover, as a virgin teenager she had no capacity to fulfil the motherly function of bringing the child into the Symbolic Order. In fact, Zoia’s image matched neither of the two common female cinematic functions introduced by Mulvey. By ignoring Zoia’s femininity and masculinising her image, a desexualised picture of the only Komsomol member warrior of the narrative was drawn, and it was this which symbolised the generation that had grown up under the Stalin regime. The life priority of this leading Komsomol member was depicted as that of seeking happiness in being sacrificed for the Leader and the Motherland. By analysing two popular films of the post-GPW Stalinist cinema, namely Sloth of the Skies and The Young Guard, Chapter Five demonstrated how the female image in post-war Stalinist war cinema lacked the social significance of those loyal suffering young women in the films of Chapter Three and of those suffering symbolic mothers in Chapter Four. As with the films in Chapter Three, Sloth of the Skies accentuated male- female relationships in the context of the GPW. However, in contrast to those films, both the castration threat evoked by the war for Red Army officers, and accordingly the request for a suffering image of young women to master it were denied. Unlike Sloth of the Skies, which portrayed the war as a military affair carried out solely by Red Army officers without any participation by civilians, The Young Guard, similar to the films of Chapter Four, concentrated on depicting the resistance of the Soviet people under German occupation. The Young Guard, like other post-GPW films, denied that the ‘fathers’ of the Great Family were subjected to castration threat. Chapter Five proposed that suffering mothers in post-war Stalinist cinema were shown as not

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obliged to fight the enemy directly or to endeavour to sacrifice their bodies for the Motherland. Women’s social authority as the symbolic mothers of the community had also disappeared and their function of leading the child into the Symbolic Order was presented as limited to a private level, i.e. sacrificing one’s own child in the war. By representing a desexualised image of the Komsomol members of the Young Guard Organisation and rejecting any sexual relations among them, the film The Young Guard depicted them as brothers and sisters - a whole -, i.e. an aggregated icon of the ideal innocent ‘son’ of the Great Family. Sacrificing the self for the collective in the films Zoia and The Young Guard was portrayed as the main feature of leading Komsomol members and the only way to verify their eligibility to enter the Symbolic Order. Within the theoretical framework outlined in Chapter Two, the analytical Chapters Three to Five identified three distinct representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war films about the Great Patriotic War. These are, first, an ideal image of beautiful young fiancées, wives and widows as symbols of inspiration for warriors in wartime through their absolute loyalty to their warrior men and to their men’s military families; second, a fetishistic icon of mothers suffering under German occupation and inspiring their own children (or symbolic children, that is, the community) to sacrifice themselves for the collective; and third, a picture of suffering teenage heroines who represent the chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family (Komsomol members) defending home under the occupation and being martyred.

Research Question Two The second question addressed how narrative, visual and other aspects of the films contributed to developing models of female self-sacrifice.

The representations of suffering young women and mothers in the films examined corresponded to the two female functions expected by patriarchal society. In the films examined in Chapter Three, while feminine beauty in the three narratives offered scopophilic pleasure to the male gaze, the moral values of the positive heroines provided the main source of hope and inspiration for male warriors, so that they could overcome the castration anxiety, and gain a desire to defeat the enemy in order to return to their loyal sweethearts. Given that the female images in these films symbolised the fear of castration in male warriors, mastering the fear was suggested through the scopophilic and

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fetishistic pleasure offered by the image of the positive heroine as well as the sadistic pleasure of the punishment of the negative heroine. Alongside the narrative and the camera, other cinematic aspects such as acting, make-up, the facial expression and body language of the heroines depicted beauty, femininity and morality in the positive heroines as inseparable features that identified them as embodiments of both Stalinist and pre- revolutionary expectations of ideal young women. In contrast to the films of Chapter Three, which presented delicate images of beautiful young educated women living in Moscow and Leningrad, and which offered scopophilic pleasure to the male gaze of warriors from urban communities, the femininity of the leading heroines in the first two films of Chapter Four, namely She Defends the Motherland and Rainbow, faded away and romantic love disappeared from the narratives. Make-up, acting, setting and other cinematic aspects in both films fitted the requirements of peasant communities trapped under the occupation including their expectations of uneducated rural women in wartime. In contrast to the fetishistic images of the leading heroines in the films of Chapter Three, which aimed at reviving the memory of ‘lack’ in the male unconscious and the male’s desire to overcome it, the castration threat in the narratives of these two films was so serious that the male unconscious ignored gender difference and perceived a phallic image of the mother. In these narratives, this phallic image of the mother recalled the significant mother-child relationship in Russian Christian Orthodoxy. Suffering for the family, that was the duty of all female Orthodox believers, was presented in both narratives as the mother’s main commitment to the Great Soviet Family. The central heroine in She Defends the Motherland symbolised the suffering mother of the Great Family and the Motherland; however, in the more critical phase of the GPW depicted in Rainbow, the narrative represented three suffering mothers simultaneously. Given that the most phallic motherly image in Russian Orthodox culture belongs to the Mother of God, Olena, the symbol of the Mother of God, sacrificed herself and her new-born son for the sake of the Great Family. A significant amount of sadistic pleasure was offered through the suffering and even execution of positive heroines, regardless of the high level of moral obligations they fulfilled. Scopophilic pleasure in both films, especially in Rainbow, was crucially minimised and mostly offered alongside the sadistic pleasure of the punishment incurred by the heroines for exposing their ‘lack’ to men.

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Chapter Five examined Stalinist post-GPW cinema that sought to deny that the war aroused the castration threat in the ‘fathers’ of the Great Family. In the absence of any indication of wartime difficulties in the first film in this chapter, Sloth of the Skies, fighting was shown as as easy for superheroes as playing games. The victory in the GPW was confidently assigned to Red Army superheroes completely self-sufficient in a female’s body to master the threat of castration. Accordingly, the female image in Sloth of the Skies distanced itself from the fetishistic icon of the loyal young women who had featured in the films of Chapter Three, and who had been the embodiment of the moral obligation and the source of hope for male warriors, features that enable them to overcome the castration fear. The fetishistic pleasure offered by the positive heroines of the films in Chapter Three disappeared and the heroines in Sloth of the Skies functioned primarily as objects for the male gaze: all the focus of the narrative, iconography and the camera was centred on offering scopophilic pleasure. The second film analysed in Chapter Five, The Young Guard, similar to Sloth of the Skies, denied that the war aroused the castration threat in the ‘fathers’ of the Great Family. Unlike in the war films made during the critical phase of the GPW, ‘fathers’ in The Young Guard were depicted as seizing the pre-GPW dominant authority within the community under German occupation. Denying that the war had posed a threat to the stable position of ‘fathers’ during the war resulted, on the one hand, in the elimination of the significant fetishistic image of the young heroines of the first category of the GPW era films, examined in Chapter Three. No warrior-heroine was shown on the front nor any young fiancée, wife or widow with an inspiring role in the war. On the other hand, this denial resulted in the disappearance of the fetishistic image of the symbolic mothers in the films of Chapter Four. Having lost the social significance to carry their symbolic children (community members) into the Symbolic Order, as had the leading heroines in She Defends the Motherland and Rainbow, the motherly image in The Young Guard represented the female function as limited to a personal level. Unlike the representations of suffering young women and mothers, the image of suffering female teenagers in The Young Guard, as in Zoia, did not correspond to the traditional patriarchal perception of gender relations in a patriarchal society. These teenagers functioned neither as a symbol of the castration threat in the male unconscious nor to bring the child into the Symbolic Order; the suffering female teenagers in both

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films symbolised the obedient son-believer before the father in the hierarchical- patriarchal Russian Orthodox community, discussed in Chapter One.

Research Question Three The third research question addressed the ways in which the cinematic models of female self-sacrifice relate to pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox traditions of self- sacrifice, martyrdom and woman’s social duties.

Chapter Two discussed the significance of female suffering and self-sacrifice that is extensively promoted in Russian culture. It argued that the maternal image in Russian Orthodox teaching and in the Russian mentality has been compared with the suffering woman ready to sacrifice herself for the family. Chapters Three to Five depicted the impact of Russian Orthodox expectations of an ideal female believer on the forging of representations of Soviet women in Stalinist war films. In the absence of any indication of Marxist-Leninist ideology in the narrative, Russian mythical and folkloric heroes, religious, cultural and historical values, tropes and figures functioned as the sources of faith and inspiration guiding the cinematic heroines in the disaster of wartime. The main obligation of the leading heroines in the three films discussed in Chapter Three, which represented young educated women in wartime, was depicted as complete marital fidelity, alongside platonic love for the comrades of their fiancé/husband. Distinguishing this duality of love and its strict implementation in private and social relationships were staged in the narratives, exactly as in Russian Orthodox culture, as compulsory for every young woman; accordingly, the negative heroines were punished for disobeying this obligation. Natasha in Frontovye podrugi was praised as the female role model in wartime for her platonic love for wounded male soldiers, on the one hand, and absolute loyalty to her fiancé, on the other. This duality of love was staged in the narrative by drawing on historical and cultural Russian heritage. The leading heroine and hero of the film were identified with an analogous relationship between Natasha Rastova and Prince Andrei Bolkonskii, the two key characters in Lev Tolstoi’s War and Peace, which is set during the French invasion of Russia in 1812. The second film in Chapter Three, the home-front melodrama Zhdi menia, presented a stereotypical female wartime obligation. The two key heroines of the film represented beautiful young wives without any significant social or military roles, whose

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main duty in wartime in the absence of their warrior husbands was depicted as limited to preserving their marital fidelity. In the narrative, the function of this female duty was portrayed as so powerful that it caused the central hero to miraculously survive and return home, and the negative heroine’s infidelity to result in her husband’s death and pose a real danger to the unity of the community. The third film of Chapter Three, Malakhov kurgan, was named after the site of a fierce battle in Sevastopol during the Crimean War (1853-1856). The film drew on 19th century Russian historical and cultural heritage to portray the leading on-screen heroes, Soviet soldiers defending Sevastopol during the GPW, as a symbol of the mythical image of the tsarist Army defending this city during the Crimean War. The narrative represented an analogous dual meaning of female love in Frontovye podrugi, as expected of the tsarist officers’ wives. Mariia, the only heroine of the film, who remains loyal to her dead husband, a Red Army officer, is transformed into an icon of morality and hope, a woman who fascinates and inspires the few survivors of her husband’s marine commando unit to resist the enemy. The employment of the religious-traditional expectations of a young woman in wartime was driven by a desire a support the dominant aims of Soviet gender policy. While these stereotypical obligations were considered as the main female duty in wartime and completely compulsory for every Soviet young woman, they aimed to repress the male’s unconscious desire for unification with the mother/ other women while fighting on the battlefront and to offer him the best source of hope to defeat the enemy and return to family life. The female cinematic function represented in the films of Chapter Three was accomplished alongside that of mothers in the films examined in Chapter Four. Due to the critical situation of the Red Army in battle, and the serious threat of castration, men were absent from the narratives while symbolic mothers were shown resisting the enemy to ‘rebirth’ the privileged pre-war status of masculinity in the community. Having suffered from losing her son and husband within a short space of time, the leading heroine in She Defends the Motherland is transformed from a beautiful young wife into an exhausted widow and eventually into a strong symbolic maternal figure. In the absence of paternal power at home, which might lead ‘family’ members to resist the enemy, this rural woman symbolised the Motherland trapped under enemy occupation. Alongside the resurrection of the pre-revolutionary perception of a mother as a sufferer in

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the service of her family, the film emphasised the myth of Russian messianism and the significance of Moscow in this idea. Accordingly, what primarily motivates the central heroine to suffer and to thus inspire the inhabitants of the region to defeat the enemy is displayed in the narrative as her faith in the uniqueness of Moscow as an unconquerable and undefeatable city, and as she called it ‘the most precious value for the Russian people’. Rainbow, similar to She Defends the Motherland, described the severe suffering of a rural community under German occupation as a result of the absence of a privileged masculine authority in the community. Unlike in the previous film, the image of one suffering mother would have appeared too weak in that catastrophic situation to master the castration threat in the male unconscious; therefore, the narrative simultaneously represents three motherly images: a symbolic Motherland, a young mother sacrificing her little son and a symbolic Mother of God, who sacrifices her new-born child and herself. Only after the enormous suffering of the mothers do male warriors attack the village, reclaim masculine authority, and defeat the enemy. Without any reference to Marxist- Leninist ideology, the resistance of peasant communities in these two narratives, especially in Rainbow, the suffering of mothers and regulation of the masculine authority in the community were depicted as the result of the inspiring role of religious-folkloric symbols, such as the appearance of a rainbow in the sky, the birth and execution of Olena’s new-born child - the most innocent member of the community, the execution of the symbol of the Mother of God, villagers praying as well as their acting and make-up, and so on. Although the story of Zoia, the last film of Chapter Four, takes place in the first few months of the GPW, it was made in the final months of the war when victory over the enemy was all but assured. The film thus aimed to assign the coming victory to the Leader, the Party and the Red Army. By choosing the life story of the female role model of self-sacrifice in the GPW, Zoia Kosmodem'ianskaia, and displaying her extreme suffering and execution at the hands of the German occupiers, the film shows an image of Zoia as completely obedient, an ideal Komsomol member ready for self-sacrifice as the only way to enter the Symbolic Order. While the main part of the narrative was allocated to Zoia’s life story as the representative of the generation that had grown up under Stalin’s regime, there was no indication of the impact of Marxist-Leninist ideology on this generation. Instead, the only source of faith and inspiration in Zoia’s life was

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presented as Russian cultural heritage; her role models were two mythic heroes: Tsar Ivan, looking around for happiness, and Ivan Susanin, sacrificing himself for Russia. The impact of these two role models on Zoia was displayed in her last words before her execution. Addressing the people, she said: ‘Death for our people, country and for the sake of truth is happiness.’ Happiness in the narrative evoked the Russian Orthodox value of smirenie discussed in Chapter One. Alongside the depiction of Russian historical and cultural heritage as shaping the mentality of Komsomol members, the narrative also directly discussed belief in the uniqueness of Russia and the Russian nation in the world and its universal ‘messianic mission’ to save other nations. The impact of pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox traditions on the forging of models of female self-sacrifice in post-GPW Stalinist war films was examined in Chapter Five. A traditional perception of the woman in war was observed to have been deployed in the war films of the time; this involved the re-feminisation and demobilisation of the image of the woman-warrior, ignoring her social significance in the GPW and limiting her wartime functions to within the framework of the traditional family unit. This corresponded to the emphasis of post-GPW Stalinist cultural policy, which rejected the threat of castration evoked by the war to masculine authority, and subsequently, denied the significance of female functions’ capacity to master it. Accordingly, the majority of war films in this period did not present any female characters or any female warriors. In the remaining war films, there was one beautiful young female-warrior volunteer without military education and rank, whose beauty and youth made the film more entertaining. Sloth of the Skies was the only film of the time to claim to portray the professional life of a group of Soviet female pilots serving in the war. However, only one heroine represented a secondary role in the war, while the remaining female officers were presented as objects of desire for the male gaze without the inspiring function of the loyal young women in the films of Chapter Three or the significant role of suffering mothers in war in the films of Chapter Four. An engagement with the pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox traditions of suffering and martyrdom and the traditional motherly image as a sufferer in the service of family was also clearly observed in the most popular fictional film of the time, The Young Guard. Unlike the symbolic mothers of the Great Family in the films of Chapter Four, mothers in The Young Guard were depicted merely in the frame of their family lives, playing the old-fashioned role of serving the family. The female function of bringing the

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child into the Symbolic Order was symbolised in the narrative as limited to a private level through the sacrifice of maternal feelings and the mother’s appeal to her own son that he sacrifice himself for the Motherland. An old-fashioned patriarchal-hierarchal perception of gender identifications was portrayed in the narrative as dominant in the community. The active presence of Party members and their commanding position in the younger generation’s resistance to German occupation compensated for the absence of male authority in the films of the previous chapters. This presence implied that there was no requirement for women to be directly involved in the defence of the Motherland; their function was shown as confined to the old-fashioned female duty of serving the family. Resurrection of a patriarchal-hierarchical perception of relations in the traditional family union was also observed in the image of teenagers, who represented the chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family. Their highest level of loyalty and submission to the Symbolic Order was depicted through their sacrifice of their bodies for the Father and the values of the community.

Research Question Four The last question of this research addressed the relationship between the models of female self-sacrifice, pre-revolutionary patriarchy and Soviet patriarchy during the Stalin era.

The analytical Chapters Three to Five depicted the extensive indications of Russian national values and cultural heritage in the service of the most popular and effective tool of Stalinist ISAs – cinema. These chapters demonstrated the dominance of a patriarchal perception of social relations, as well as a conservative and traditional understanding of gender differences. Having illustrated cinematic heroes and heroines as members of a family (the Great Soviet Family), Stalinist war cinema represented the high level of submission of the Family members (the Soviet people) to ‘fathers’ (representatives of national Bolshevism). In doing so, women were depicted as fulfilling the two female functions in patriarchal society (identified by Mulvey in classic Hollywood cinema). These two functions corresponded to the obligation of sacrificing the self for the family that had been historically promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church as the main feature of real female believers. This Orthodox duty shaped the dominant feature of cinematic heroines as fiancées, wives, widows and mothers of male warriors in their private

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(individual) family as well as their main social obligation as symbolic mothers and sisters in the Great Family. In critical wartime, when the dominant position of masculinity in society was under threat, symbolic mothers fulfilled the function of bringing the male child (appealing to him to sacrifice himself) into the Symbolic Order on a pan-state scale. For this purpose, as the father’s provisional successors in the community, children were granted social authority. Significantly, the motherly function of bringing the male child into the Symbolic Order, despite all the suffering of the mother, did not result in her accessing the world of law and language, in psychological terms, i.e. it did not award her the privilege of being martyred for the Motherland. In Stalinist war cinema this honour was exclusively assigned to only one heroine ̶ the one who represented the image of the Mother of God. Once the threat had passed, not only was the mother’s social authority dismissed, but her motherly function on a national scale was also completely denied. While in the absence of fatherly authority from home in the films of Chapters Three and Four the Orthodox tradition of female suffering for the family was employed in the service of the Great Soviet Family, post-GPW war films denied that the authority of ‘fathers’ declined during the GPW. As Chapter Five showed, these films identified the war as a solely military affair, successfully carried out by the ‘fathers’ of the Great Family under the command of the Father of ‘fathers’ (i.e. Stalin) without any significant role for other members of the Family. As a result of the stability of masculine authority at home during the war in these films, the image of suffering young women as symbolic sisters of warriors, necessary for mastering the castration threat, and the suffering image of mothers as the temporary surrogates of ‘fathers’ at home, which had played such a key role in the films of Chapters Three and Four, were nowhere to be seen in the films discussed in Chapter Five. Accordingly, the two main cinematic images of women and martyrdom in the post-GPW period corresponded to the two female functions in patriarchal society and expected of women in Russian pre-revolutionary culture: first, a re-feminised and demobilised image of the beautiful young woman-warrior; and second, a suffering icon of mothers with a function restricted to the private level. Sloth of the Skies, which represented the majority of the films of the time, portrayed fighting against the Germans as a specialised affair only undertaken by super-skilled and courageous Red Army male officers. It drew a re-feminised and demobilised image of heroine-warriors as objects of the male gaze without any significant role in the war. Having eliminated the participation of Soviet young women on the battlefield, The Young Guard represented a

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demobilised image of mothers under occupation dependent on the self-sacrifice of their children. The third image of female self-sacrifice identified in this research was that of the Komsomol members in Zoia and The Young Guard, who represented the chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family. Along with the male function of fighting, female teenagers in both films represented the high level of morality expected of ideal virtuous girls in the Orthodox tradition. Accordingly, in the absence of femininity in these mature young women, the image of these female teenagers did not correspond to those objects of voyeuristic pleasure in the majority of Soviet war films. As a result, the third image of the woman and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema represented a genderless image of leading female Komsomol members, with whom both male and female spectators could identify. The heroines in both Zoia and The Young Guard had a right equal to that of male teenagers to sacrifice themselves for the Father and the collective. The masculine pleasure of identification with the heroic image of the female teenagers fascinated the female spectator, and thus allowed her ‘to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity’395 in the Mirror Stage. Given the significance of ‘cultural convention’ in creating the cinematic image and of pre-cinematic identification in this process of identification, presenting both boys and girls as victims of the war, positioned the male teenagers as occupying the same dependent and submissive position towards the ‘fathers’ as the female teenagers. The narratives deprived the teenagers of independence and subjectivity on the battlefield and portrayed them as failures behind the front, in military terms, and victims of the war. The superiority of ‘fathers’ and the dependency of ‘sons’ were emphasised in the narratives, especially in The Young Guard, through denying the castration threat of the war to the secure position of ‘fathers’ both on the battlefield and behind the front, controlling everything successfully. In the absence of the teenagers’ biological fathers, both narratives drew on the crucial hierarchical father-son relationship in Russian Orthodox culture to represent these teenage heroes and heroines as the chosen ‘sons’ of the Great Family, completely dependent on ‘fathers’ and the values of the community. Not only was the completion of military missions by these teenagers shown as

395 Mulvey, ‘Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’’, p. 13. 204

dependent on their absolute obedience to the ‘fathers’, but their very lives, too, were shown to rest on this obedience. Dramatising the suffering of the teenagers under interrogation and their execution by the enemy aimed at perpetuating a collective memory of the GPW martyrs. As Chapter One argued, martyrdom awards the martyr a privileged status in relation to truth, which results in the martyr being respected and imitated by the community. Accordingly, the features attributed to the GPW martyrs and the messages conveyed to the community through their images were crucial to Stalinist ISAs. For that reason, the heroism of the teenagers in both films appeared to rest precisely on their faithfulness to the Father, the ruling ideology and the Motherland, even under the most brutal torture. The main message of the martyrs both in Zoia and The Young Guard was the same: suffering and sacrificing the self for the Father and the ruling ideology is equal to happiness and the only way to verify eligibility of entering the Symbolic Order. Identifying the self- sacrifice of the teenagers as their complete devotion to their ‘fathers’ endowed the Father/Stalin and ‘fathers’/ Bolshevik leadership a more advanced and significant status than that of the martyred role models of the community. This outstanding status confirmed the claim of ‘fathers’ to a supreme right to rule the community. This image of Stalin and of Soviet ‘fathers’/leaders in Stalinist war cinema corresponded to that of the canonised saintly princes in Russian Orthodox political culture, discussed in Chapter One.

Contributions of the Study Given the gap between Soviet planning and implementation on the one hand, and conflicts between Soviet leadership’s intentions and their consequences, on the other hand, studying interrelationship and dynamic between Soviet planning and reality merits consideration within Soviet scholarship. Examining the impact of Russian cultural and historical heritage on Stalinist ISAs, this thesis shows how Russian particularism and Soviet universalism were forcefully interwoven under Stalin’s regime. This thesis makes a contribution to at least three fields of academic research: Soviet women’s studies, Soviet cinematic studies and the study of Soviet identity- building and state-citizen relations. By drawing a comprehensive picture of the evolution of the cinematic imagery of women and martyrdom in Soviet war cinema of the Stalin period, this study provides the first book-length analysis dedicated to the representation

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of women in Soviet war cinema. By drawing on post-1970 psychologic film theory, this thesis identifies the functions of heroines in Stalinist war cinema as analogous to those of the female in Western classic fiction, as identified by Laura Mulvey. These functions, however, correspond to the main religious-traditional expectations of the female Orthodox believer in the pre-revolutionary patriarchal-hierarchical social system in Russia. By proposing that the pre-revolutionary Russian Orthodox heritage was appropriated to forge representations of the female and martyrdom in Stalinist cinema, this study brings a corrective to the image common in Soviet scholarship of the radical undoing of traditional gender differences, devised and run by Stalinist political culture for different generations and social groups of Soviet women. Having investigated cinematic representations of women and martyrdom in Stalinist war cinema as implements serving Stalinist collective identity-building policies and state-citizen relations, this thesis offers the only sustained analysis of the operation of Russian religious-cultural heritage in Soviet cinema. It proposes a theoretical framework which on the one hand sheds new light on contemporary scholarship on Soviet Women’s Studies, and on the other hand, on a more extensive scale, provides a fresh perspective on the study of Soviet identity politics and state-society relations. This study demonstrates that the construction of Soviet collective identity, state- citizen relations and the three principles of the Stalinist state, namely the Stalinist ‘cult of personality’, ‘Bolshevik ideology’, and ‘Soviet collective identity’ were realised through the adoption of the three components of the ‘distinctive character of Russia’ (autocracy – Orthodoxy – nationality) and their connecting factor – the value of suffering, which even in the Stalinist post-revolutionary context continued to be influenced by the Orthodox tradition. Indebted to the myths and ideologies presented in Russian tsarist ISAs, easily identifiable in Russia down the centuries, Stalinist Social Realism represented the Soviet people as living in a hierarchical-patriarchal system of social relations and functions analogous to those dominant in pre-revolutionary peasant households. It positioned Soviet leaders as Slavic Orthodox princes occupying an extraordinary level of maturity inaccessible to ordinary human beings. Alongside this superior social status, which assigned Soviet leaders an extraordinary capacity to suffer and identified them as role models of suffering too, it represented them as entitled to claim unlimited autocratic power over Soviet citizens.

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Drawing on Althusser’s argument regarding the survival of ISAs even after revolutions and crucial social changes, this thesis proposes that the Soviet regime fundamentally benefitted from Russian Orthodox heritage and tsarist ISAs. These were drawn on by Soviet Socialist Realism to secure the imagination of the Soviet people about their real conditions of existence, a process which created the opportunity for the regime to legitimise itself for a long term. This study suggests that methodological approaches that draw on the appropriation of Russian religious-cultural heritage in Soviet political culture and cultural policies will be useful to future analysis of different aspects within the Soviet and contemporary Russia’s cultural and political spaces.

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222

Filmography

A Noisy Household (Bespokoinoe khoziaistvo), dir. Mikhail Zharov, 1946.

At 6 pm after the War (V 6 chasov posle voiny), dir. Ivan Pyryev, 1944.

Brave People (Smelye liudi), dir. Konstantin Iudin, 1950.

Chapaev, dir. Grigorii Vasil’ev and Segrei Vasil’ev, 1934.

Encounter at the Elbe (Vstrecha na El’be), dir. Grigorii Aleksandrov and Aleksei Utkin,

1949.

Frontline Girlfriends [The Girl from Leningrad] (Frontovye podrugi), dir. Viktor

Eisymont, 1941.

Girlfriends (Podrugi), dir. Lev Arnshtam, 1935.

It Happened in Donbass (Eto bylo v Donbasse), dir. Leonid Lukov and Vladimir

Sukhobokov, 1945.

Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Groznyi), dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1944.

Konstantin Zaslonov (Konstantin Zaslonov), dir. Aleksandr Faintsimmer and Vladimir

Korsh-Sablin, 1949.

Kutuzov, dir. Vladimir Petrov, 1943.

Life in the Citadel (Zhizn’ v tsitadeli), dir. Gerbert Rappoport, 1947.

Marite (Marite), dir. Vera Stroeva, 1947.

Mother (Mat’), dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1926.

Our Heart (Nashe serdtse), dir. Aleksandr Stolper, 1946.

Rainbow (Raduga), dir. Mark Donskoi, 1944.

Secret Mission (Sekretnaia missiia), dir. Mikhail Romm, 1950.

She Defends the Motherland (Ona zashishaet Rodinu), dir. Fridrikh Ermler, 1943.

Simple People (Prostye liudi), dir. Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, 1945.

Sloth of the Skies [Heavenly Slug] (Nebesnye tikhokhody), dir. Semen Timoshenko, 1946. 223

Soldier Aleksandr Matrosov (Soldat Aleksandr Matrosov), dir. Leonid Lukov, 1947.

Son of the Regiment (Syn polka), dir. Vasilii Pronin, 1946.

Story of a Real Man (Povest’ o nastoiashem cheloveke), dir. Aleksandr Stolper, 1948.

The Battle of Stalingrad (Stalingradskaia bitva), dir. Vladimir Petrov, 1949.

The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina), dir. Mikhail Chiaureli, 1949.

The Great Life (Bol’shaia zhizn’), dir. Leonid Lukov, 1946.

The Last Hill (Malakhov kurgan), dir. Aleksandr Zarkhi and Iosif Kheifits, 1944.

The Star (Zvezda), dir. Aleksandr Ivanov, 1949.

The Third Blow (Tretii udar), dir. Igor’ Savchenko, 1948.

The Turning Point (Velikii perelom), dir. Fridrikh Ermler, 1945.

The Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia), dir. Sergei Gerasimov, 1948.

Tractor Drivers (Traktoristy), dir. Ivan Pyr’ev, 1939.

Unnamed Island (Ostrov Bezymiannyi), dir. Adolf Bergunker and Mikhail Egorov, 1946.

Victorious Return (Vozvrashenie c pobedoi), dir. Aleksandr Ivanov and Pavel Armand,

1947.

Wait for Me (Zhdi menia), dir. Aleksandr Stolper, 1943.

Zoya (Zoia), dir. Leo Arnshtam, 1944.

224