Andrey Shcherbenok Columbia University

Asymmetric Warfare: Cold War Cinema in the and the United States

In this paper, I will address the similarities and differences in the way Soviet and American cinema represented and, in the same move, waged the Cold War;1 in particular, I will consider how the enemy – the other side of the conflict – was portrayed. Although this portrayal varied considerably from film to film and from one historic period to another in both cinemas, I will try to demonstrate that it also reflected deeper and much more persistent ideological matrixes. This persistency allows me to claim that each side's Cold War films were not merely ad hoc statements designed to promote this or that expedient political agenda but also reflected fundamental differences in the way both countries conceptualized the global conflict. Despite the symmetry largely maintained by the two superpowers in military terms, on cinema screens the United States and the Soviet Union each waged its own very different Cold War.

*** Richard Hofstadter argues in "The Paranoid Style of American Politics" that in the paranoid style of political thinking "the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent."2 This description applies very well to the way the Soviet enemy is portrayed in American films in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. The main characteristic of this enemy is the total absence of internal differences – Soviet government, Soviet Union as a nation, Russians as the people, former or current members of American Communists Party and other leftist organizations in the United States, are all portrayed as the units of the totality whose main and only goal is the total destruction of the free world and enslavement of freedom-loving Americans. Although the unmasking of this goal is often supported by the reference to Marxian thesis that the global victory of communism is inevitable, this reference strategically omits the supporting argument of the internal crisis of capitalism.3 On the contrary, American society is portrayed as devoid of any inherent contradictions, and any apparent signs of the labor movement or racial conflicts quickly prove to be

1 By Cold War cinema I will here understand the films produced in the two countries in the 30 years between 1946 and 1986 that directly addressed the conflict between the two superpowers. This conflict may range from domestic struggle against the other side's agents (Communists vs. Anti-Communists in the United States, US spies vs. the KGB in the Soviet Union) to diplomatic conflicts to actual military encounters, from small-scale operations to total nuclear war. 2 Richard Hofstadter. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1966. P. 30. 3 See, for example, the documentary What is Communism? (1963) 1 provocations organized by Soviet agents. Thus, the bloody fight between workers and the police in I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) turns out to be staged by the Communists – not only they incite the workers to go on strike, they also play the part of the cruel police by having their disguised members beat the workers with steel tubes wrapped up in newspapers. When in the Invasion, USA (1952) San- Francisco is being bombed by Soviet planes and some workers confront the local factory owner, it is quite clear that the rhetoric of class struggle is nothing but the disguise for their real desire – to deliver America as a slave nation to the Soviet Union. The paranoid demonization of the enemy in these films correlates with the utopian harmonization of the American society which, just like the Soviet Union, is represented as a conflict-free whole.4 This does not mean, however, that the Manichean vision of the Cold War led to the structural analogy between the demonic Evil and the utopian Good. This dangerous analogy was prevented by insistent emphasizing the personal differences between the members of the opposite camps. The overarching thesis that the Soviet Union stands for slavery and the United States stands for freedom is supported in the actual films by the contrast between communist and non-communist characters. While "normal" American people are individually psychologized and prone to independent reasoning (although all of them arrive at the anti-communist consensus), the Communists and the Soviets are either unthinking automatons5 or monomaniacs, whose determination to advance their cause at any price is only nuanced by their in-born preference for lying and foul play. In either case they adhere to the strictest discipline within their ranks and obey orders unquestionably. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a film that drives this tendency of early Cold War films to its logical conclusion – while the body snatchers are obviously mapped onto Soviet Communists, they are not humans but aliens. Their mode of operation is very characteristic – they grow an exact physical copy of an actual person and when this person is asleep substitute the copy for the original. The new humanoid looks and behaves like the human being but he is deprived of any human emotion except rage and is dedicated to converting everyone into his like. Arguably the most striking scene in the film occurs when the main character and his girlfriend – the last humans in town – are hiding in the cave pursued by the frantic crowd of communist humanoids. They know that they must not sleep, because they will be converted as well, and yet the girl, exhausted, closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them again, still lying on her boyfriend's arms, he immediately knows, by her cold and hating expression, that she is no longer his loving girl; she has become one of Them.

4 This, of course, can be regarded as the real political goal of the whole anti-communist hysteria in the United States – the suppression of the labor movement and internal stabilization of American society. 5 The best example is Soviet pilots in Invasion, USA – they determine targets and bomb American cities without showing any emotion whatsoever. 2 The conception of the "communist character" employed in these films does no allow speaking of the Soviet goal of global domination as a political goal. Indeed, any politicizing of this goal, that is, any explanation of why the Soviet Union and its communist agents inside the US want to enslave America, would introduce a difference into the monolithic enemy. Any differentiation of this kind would be, in its turn, subversive to the monolithic unity of the free world as well. Thus, for example, paying attention to the class nature of the communist project and the Soviet society – the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc. – would raise questions about classes and exploitation in America; differentiating between the goals of Soviet leadership and personal aims of rank-and-file Russian soldiers would also mean differentiating between professional Soviet spies and, say, left-leaning members of American labor movement, which, in its turn, would legitimize the movement and lead to the acknowledgement of the existence of social contradictions in America. The representation of the desire of the Communists to enslave America as a natural instinct rather than a conscious political strategy avoids all these unwanted complications. It also has another effect: in the absence of any rationale for the communist doctrine there can be no reason for someone who is not by nature a Communist to become one – except, of course, if his body is snatched or if he is brainwashed.6 The Manchurian Candidate was made in 1962 and is already different from the films of the 1950s, first of all because it complicates a picture by showing a liberal senator, accused of being a Communist, to be an American patriot and his conservative accusers to be actual conspirators. However, the famous question "What have they built you to do?" betrays the unchanged conception of the possibilities of communist ideological influence upon a freedom-loving American – it is only thinkable as coercive subconscious programming that turns a man into a communist agent and, at the same time, a murderous automaton. It is in the conflation of communist agenda and unconscious automatism that the main ideological stakes of the film are placed.7 This conflation is, of course, the direct inversion of Soviet paramount thesis that it is the raising of consciousness that makes someone a Communist. The real shift in American Cold War cinema occurred in the mid-1960s. Such films as Fail Safe (1964), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) satirized American anti-communist hysteria and, in the same move, humanized the Russians. The destiny of the world in Fail Safe hinges on whether or not the US president will agree that the Russians are reasonable human beings that can be talked to and whose reactions can be

6 An honest person in these films can, of course, be temporarily misguided, but this does not make him or her a genuine communist; such person just does not know what communism is really about. Their calling themselves communists is simply a misnomer – they just do not know what this word really means. 7 The conflation, of course, does not apply to characters like Dr. Yen Lo – as a "natural" Communist, he is quite conscious and even has a sense of humor. Apparently, one can be born a Communist (in the USSR, China, or Korea) but one cannot become one, except through brainwashing. 3 predicted; Dr. Strangelove explains the Soviet apparently demonic plan of creating a Doomsday Machine by the mundane desire of Soviet leadership to save money so that they could supply its people with enough washing machines and other consumer goods; finally, The Russians Are Coming… presents a pretty loveable if sometimes grotesque crew of Soviet submarine and includes a romance between an American girl and a Soviet seaman. At the first sight, the radical change of the Cold War paradigm occurs in these films – the Russians are humanized, while the American society splits not into foreign-sponsored Communists and freedom-loving people but into right-wing conservative hawks prone to start World War III at any moment and reasonable people who are free of anti-communist hysteria and are prepared to communicate with the Soviets. This change, however, is not as radical as it might seem, for these and many other films of Détente do not challenge the previous assumptions about communism; instead, they de-communize the Russians. Although no political dissidence on the part of the Soviet submarine crew is implied, it is the Russians, not the Communists, who are coming to the small American town. A Soviet general, whose family photo the US president contemplates in Fail Safe is a human being and a military man, nothing being mentioned about his communist views. Even the Soviet ambassador and the Soviet Premier in Dr. Strangelove are satirized along the stereotypes of big Russian bears and Khrushchev's hysterical outbursts, not the stereotypes of fanatical communist dictators of the previous epoch. The disappearance of ideological agenda from the Cold War confrontation, of course, supports the argument that this confrontation is avoidable, but it also naturalizes liberal democracy in no lesser degree than the films of the 1950s. What persists in American Cold War cinema despite all the changes is the refusal to conceive of the conflict as the conflict between two competing ideologies; the Soviets may or may not be ideological maniacs, but good freedom-loving Americans are always just "natural" human beings. In the same move, Cold War scenario supports the view that the dividing line that runs in American Society is a line between ideological freaks, be that American Communists or Right-Wing Conservatives, and the moral majority that shares liberal consensus just because it is consistent with their human nature. The persistence of this ideological matrix explains why it was possible for American Cold War cinema after the 1960s to vacillate between the two opposite conceptions of the enemy outlined above. Whether Soviets were portrayed as friendly sympathetic human beings or maniacal agents of the ideological Evil Empire, it did not change much in America's image of itself. *** The first thing that strikes one in Soviet Cold War films is the near absence of the strong propaganda effects profusely employed by American cinema. In Soviet films American soldiers are not shown raping Soviet women or shooting Soviet children, and American planes do not bomb Leningrad of Kiev. Even Soviet military might is rarely displayed in Soviet cinema because there are few actual military confrontations, and when they do occur on screen, they are significantly underplayed. The furthest Soviet cinema ever went in the way of displaying a battle

4 between the USSR and the USA was in 1985 film Solitary Navigation where a Soviet Navy ship and its crew destroy a secret American missile launch site on a Pacific island together with its small submarine and two speed boats. But even here there is no direct military confrontation between the USSR and the USA because the US high command had already sent a strategic bomber to destroy its own base whose personnel went out of control. Soviet cinema has nothing comparable to American tradition of atomic bomb cinema with its cult of awe-inspiring nuclear sublime and the Soviet spectator is rarely invited to admire the recent achievements of Soviet military technology, so that he/she could proudly identify with Soviet military power. There is also no Soviet analog of Rambo who would be shooting US soldiers like rabbits from two machine guns at once, and American spies, although they do appear in many Soviet political detective films, are notoriously unsuccessful and do not provoke much fear or hatred in the spectator. In short, while there are two American films called Invasion, USA (1952, 1985), a Soviet film entitled Invasion, USSR is simply unthinkable. There are many reasons for Soviet Cold War cinema's failure to employ the means it had at its disposal to foster a war-time attitude to the enemy. One of them is, most likely, the legacy of the World War II and the vibrant tradition of its cinematic representation – it is problematic to show a fictional bombing of the city by the Americans when this city was really bombed by the Nazis just several years ago and this bombing was cinematically represented in all its horrific reality. The war might have been so firmly established in Soviet mentality as something intolerably painful and to be avoided at all costs that the representation of the Cold War as an actual military encounter would not work. One may say that a Cold War film Invasion, USSR was not possible because such invasion really occurred in recent history. There were, however, more fundamental ideological reasons for the striking differences between the two Cold War cinemas. Let us consider this important fact: there are very many American characters and American settings in early Soviet Cold War films, some of them even do not include a single Russian character. Instead of the monolithic and largely undescribed Soviet Union in American films of the same period, Soviet films represent American society as the detailed arena of struggle between the rich and the poor, the liberals and the conservatives, the whites and the blacks. Favoring Marxist analysis of American social structure, these films tend to explain the political standpoint of this or that character by his or her socio-economic position and place within the political system. One should not be surprised, therefore, that in Soviet films of this period one can encounter an attractive person who, nevertheless, dreams of destroying the Soviet Union – Soviet films do not adhere to the law of American Cold War cinema where a Russian is either friendly or personally repulsive. Thus, in Meeting on the Elbe (1949), the main Soviet enemy, the special commissioner of the CIA is played by glamorous Lyubov Orlova, the super-popular star of famous Soviet musicals. Humanly rather sympathetic media magnate in The Russian Question (1947) does not hate the Soviet Union organically – he, in fact, supported it during World War II – but he is drawn into virulent anti-communist position by the political climate that does not leave him any choice other than

5 moving his newspaper's position to the extreme right. In short, the Soviet concept of the enemy was anything but paranoid, in Soviet films America was most explicitly "caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history." Marxist demand for socio-historical analysis leads to another distinctive trait of Soviet representation of America – it is a great deal more realistic than American representation of the USSR. Mikhail Romm's The Russian Question, with its brilliantly constructed New York City settings, is especially authentic – not only the film looks as if it was shot on location, it even successfully imitates the style of classical American cinema. Were it not for the , this film might actually pass for a late 1960s liberal American film about McCarthyism and Anti- Communist witch hunt. The predilection for realism and analysis of American society that inaugurated Soviet Cold War cinema had, however, a rather unexpected side-effect – from the very beginning, Soviet films began to play on the field delineated by American anti-Soviet propaganda. Indeed, the central theme of many Soviet films is the exposure of American lies about the Soviet Union. The Russian Question is about how and why American media creates the hysteria about (non-existent) Russian desire to attack the United States, Farewell, America (1951) is about how and why American diplomats in Moscow deliberately misrepresent Soviet reality in their press reports. The connected theme of the United States provocations designed to spoil the international image of the Soviet Union starts from there and runs through Soviet Cold War cinema up to the aforementioned Solitary Navigation which begins with the CIA's unsuccessful undercover operation – an attempt to sink a passenger liner and lay the blame on the Soviet Navy. Here lies a fundamental difference between Soviet and American Cold War cinema. While there are a lot of lying communists and KGB provocateurs in American films, the problem of denouncing Soviet propaganda is never central or even significant in these films.8 The effects of this difference are paramount. The emphasis on disproving capitalist lies about the USSR in Soviet films effectively portrays socialism as a subject of debate rather than self-evidently "natural" social order. Although it does represent Soviet society as harmonious and solidary,9 Soviet

8 This difference cannot be explained away by the fact that American Cold War films were mainly set in the US rather than the USSR. Firstly, because the difference in setting is itself indicative; secondly, because when American cinema abandons the early equation of the Russians and the Communists and starts making films about Soviet dissidents, like Sakharov (1984), it projects upon the Soviet society the ideological models of the 1950s developed in domestic setting: there is no attempt to analyze and denounce communist views of the United States; instead, we once again see normal freedom loving people struggling against communist maniacs, with the only difference that in the Soviet Union these maniacs are in power. 9 In fact, though, there were often fractures visible in the Soviet society itself. Thus, American spies in Soviet films usually find accessories among Soviet people. In the early films such people were usually the remnants of the old regime on the new Soviet territories and/or former Nazi collaborators, but this exclusionary explanation worked worse as years 6 cinema effectively renders Cold War not as conflict between "natural" society and this or that ideological abnormality but as a conflict between two competing ideologies. Whose side the implied spectator takes in this conflict is quite determined in early Soviet Cold War films, but, unlike in American cinema, there is no structural impossibility for a different allegiance. This possibility is getting ever more palpable in later Soviet Cold War films in which the icons of American depraved consumerism (strip clubs, luxurious cars, commercial advertisements, etc.) along with the images of European "high culture" become an increasingly fetishized object of spectatorial desire. Such fetishization of the West works against its analytic representation as the society torn apart by class struggle and inequality, for the fetish disavows the social differences and effectively transforms the West into one total desired object. The emphasis on conscious ideological polemics, along with the traumatic legacy of the World War II, was a crucial factor that led to underplaying American military threat in Soviet Cold War cinema. While Soviet military might is present in these films as a guarantee against aggressive plans of the American imperialists, the real battle is waged on American soil between the American left and the American right. As the hope for leftist America was progressively disappearing,10 Soviet Cold War cinema was loosing ground. At the same time, its ideological matrix did not allow it to transform all Americans into incurable capitalist maniacs and concentrate on military confrontation the way American cinema did in the 1950s. While an attempt to increase the military dimension of the Cold War cinema was made in the 1980s, it did not really succeed. The first and only Soviet film involving total nuclear destruction, this ever present horizon of American Cold War cinema, was made only in 1986. This film, Konstantin Lopushanskii's The Letters of a Dead Man, is very different from American contemporaneous The Day After (1983) or Testament (1983). It is not a Cold War atomic bomb film in American sense of the term; rather, it a Tarkovskii style philosophical parable about humanity and civilization in general, set in an undefined country and populated by people of quite cosmopolitan cultural background. If anything, this film cannot possibly work to define the enemy weather to be destroyed or negotiated with.

went by. Whereas in US films an American communist is always an outcast, an alien, a Russian CIA agent in Soviet films is progressively internalized. 10 There become fewer and fewer Americans who take Soviet side in Soviet Cold War films. While the tradition of representing ordinary American people as potential allies of the USSR persists, they no longer speak up. Thus, in 1982 film The Accident in Sector 36- 80 an American and a Soviet military pilots behave like friends – they see each other often in the maneuvers and communicate about their families. However, when an American pilot is ordered to bring his friend's plane down, he does his best to execute the order. 7