Cinema and the Nationality Question in Soviet Ukraine During the Long 1960S

SCENES OF BELONGING: CINEMA AND THE NATIONALITY QUESTION IN SOVIET UKRAINE DURING THE LONG 1960S by Joshua J. First A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History) in The University of Michigan 2008 Doctoral Committee: Professor William G. Rosenberg, Chair Professor Ronald G. Suny Associate Professor Scott Spector Associate Professor Johannes von Moltke © Joshua J. First 2008 Preface While conducting research for this dissertation, I ran across an odd article from 1996 in a short-lived Ukrainian newspaper called Film Currier (Kinokur”er), which excitedly reported on the front page that Planet 3963, discovered by astronomer Liudmila Chernykh from the Crimean Astrophysics Observatory in 1969, had been renamed in honor of the recently deceased Soviet filmmaker Sergei Paradzhanov. The editors thanked Tat’iana Derevianko at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Museum for her efforts at achieving recognition for the change with international organizations, writing that it was important that the “universe have as many of ‘our’ planets as possible.” While affirming the national significance of the re-naming, which fit with the larger project of re-imagining Ukrainian history and its canon of heroes and villains – Turgenev Street in L’viv, for example, became Heroes of the UPA Street – the editors nonetheless kept “our” in quotes, suggesting either an ironic detachment from the possessive pronoun, or an inability to commit to such stellar possessions when the newly independent republic did not even have firm possession over its own coastline. Perhaps they felt the Museum was overstating Paradzhanov’s importance, but just as likely the editors were ambivalent about associating the filmmaker’s name with Ukraine in particular. Despite being the creator of the most internationally heralded Ukrainian film, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Tini zabutykh predkiv) in 1964, the Tbilisi- born, Russian-speaking Armenian Paradzhanov spoke derisively about the “provincial” mind set of Ukrainian writers and artists, once joking that he was the “leader of khokhol nationalism.”1 After his exile from the republic, the director worked in Armenia and Georgia. Today, the city of Erevan claims the 1 TsDAMLMU, f. 655, op. 1, d. 588, l. 15. The word “khokhol” is a derogatory term for Ukrainians referring to the tuft of hair that characterized Zaporozhian Cossacks in the 17th century. ii Paradzhanov museum, and an independent Armenia competes with Ukraine and Georgia for the ethno-national significance of the filmmaker’s life and memorialization. In many ways, Paradzhanov’s life and work highlighted the tensions between particularistic notions of nation in the USSR after Stalin and a Soviet cosmopolitanism proceeding from the vast movements of individuals and whole population groups within the largest geo-political entity the world has ever known. Just as his film became both a highly exoticized ethnographic spectacle of a small Carpathian tribe, with all the problematic associations that this might suggest, and a meaning-producing moment for a new generation of Ukrainian nationalists, Paradzhanov himself skirted between engagement with nationalist discourse and ridicule of those who identified with what he considered narrow- minded concerns. While the “our” remained ambivalently in quotes for director Paradzhanov, the short article in Film Currier concluded with an effusive statement for the “unforgettable Ivan Mykolaichuk,” the actor who played the leading role of Ivanko in Shadows. The newspaper demanded that astronomers also discover a planet for this Carpathian-born actor, writer, and filmmaker.2 While Mykolaichuk’s life and work is associated with Paradzhanov and what continues to be celebrated as “Ukrainian poetic cinema,” his memorialization signified a different tension in post-Stalinist representational politics, this one between an “authentic,” spacialized image of the non-Russian and a historically situated and “realist” conception of Soviet “multinationality.” This dissertation looks at the ways individuals become placed onto particular landscapes within certain formal and aesthetic modes of memorialization and representation. I look at two decades of stability and (relative) prosperity in the Soviet Union, a period absent of Great Events like war, revolution, mass terror and famine. Ukraine, the second-most populous federative unit in the USSR, possessed a diverse economy, geography and social composition, yet its cinema between 1960 and 1980 became fixated on the small portion of the Carpathian Mountains that straddled the Southwestern 2 “Shturm kosmosa,” Kinokur’er, no. 19 (1996), 1. iii portion of the republic along the Romanian border. In discovering a broader significance in this remote region, filmmakers appealed to prior author-architects of the Ukrainian nation, including Taras Shevchenko, Mykhailo Kotsiubyns’kyi, and Oleksandr Dovzhenko, to name just a few. As Roland Barthes suggested in Mythologies, images become a fundamental part of the national landscape, which works in tandem with narratives to locate, articulate, and reproduce myths of collective belonging.3 Images themselves, like narratives, enter canonical usage, and thus narrow their significatory possibilities. Of course, myths are not self-contained systems, closed off from newer narratives, and newer significances for older ones. The singing peasants dressed in bright folk costumes in the Ukrainian films of the 1960s were not the same ones from an earlier cultural discourse, even if we continue to see the shadows of these cinematic ancestors in the films that I examine. In Stalinist cinema, such “national” characters were incorporated into a heroic narrative of the “friendship of peoples,” and the victory of socialist modernity over “feudal” backwardness. These same figures later signified the loss of a particular national history and folkloric mythology, owing to the forces set in motion by the First World War, Revolution, Civil War, collectivization, industrialization, and the Great Patriotic War. These shifts in meaning emerged in large part out of the same convergences of political de-Stalinization in the 1950s and subsequent disillusionment with the limits set upon it over the following decades. In freeing the significatory function of cinematic iconography from Stalinist narrative and stylistic models, however, authorities and filmmakers alike struggled to discover not only something affirmative with which to replace them, but also an audience willing to make sense of these changes. This dissertation concerns a moment in the history of Soviet Ukraine when support for, and opposition to, Soviet power took on particularly national and nationalist dimensions, a period during which supporters of the regime and dissidents alike could appeal to the same structure of feeling contained within a popular iconography and national narrative. Amidst dissident politics and the 3 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 109-110. iv official rejection of de-Stalinization during the mid-1960s, a group of filmmakers, writers, and actors working at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Feature Film Studio attempted to rearticulate and re-imagine a vision of the geographic and ethnic unity of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Surviving members of the group under investigation in this dissertation became part of a self-fashioned nationalist cultural elite in a new independent nation-state. Today, Paradzhanov’s camera man on Shadows, and later one of the most important Ukrainian filmmakers, Iurii Illienko, calls for a “Ukrainian Ukraine,”4 with all of the anti-Russian and, perhaps, anti-Semitic connotations of such a nationalist invective. The era’s deceased, like Mykolaichuk, Paradzhanov and others, became sanctified objects of a nationalist pedagogy. This dissertation emerged from a desire to understand the cultural tensions of the nationality question in the Soviet Union during the emergence of the Brezhnev system. Ukrainian cinema occupied a crucial space lodged between the dissident and nationalist intelligentsia and the stagnant realm of official culture. * * * Since coming to graduate school at the University of Michigan, questions of nationality, ethnicity, and empire have been at the center of my studies, both more generally and specifically in relation to the Soviet Union. The previous decade had seen a plethora of innovative work on how multinational political states – the British Empire, the Hapsburg Empire and the USSR, to name a few – functioned as discursive entities. During my first semester of coursework, I read Yuri Slezkine’s article, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” which, in its subtle complexity, argued that early Bolshevik leaders developed an idea of ethnic and national difference even as they affirmed the Marxist principle of internationalism. In the same way, the state affirmed both the separate space of the individual along with the principle of communalism.5 Later, I became more familiar with the sources of Slezkine’s ideas, in Benedict Anderson’s notion that nations become discursively 4 Iurii Illienko, Za ukrains’ku Ukrainu: vidkrytyi lyst ukraintsiam (Kyiv: Arata, 2005). 5 Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 414-452. v produced through the emergence and spread of print culture, and in Ronald Suny’s

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