How The Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity Under Stalin 9780822943211, 0822943212, 9780822959939, 0822959933, 2008015490

357 117 10MB

English Pages 241 Year 2008

Report DMCA / Copyright

DOWNLOAD FILE

Polecaj historie

How The Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity Under Stalin
 9780822943211, 0822943212, 9780822959939, 0822959933, 2008015490

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction: “Bodies That Matter”
Chapter 2. How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made
Chapter 3. Visual Pleasure in Stalinist Cinema
Chapter 4. Heterosexual Panic
Chapter 5. What Does Woman Want?
Chapter 6. Epilogue: “Female Masculinity”
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

How the Soviet Man Was Unmade

PITT SERIES IN RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

Jonathan Harris, Editor

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS UNMADE LILYA KAGANOVSKY

UNIVERSIT Y OF PIT TSBURGH PRESS

Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2008, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaganovsky, Lilya.   How the Soviet man was unmade : cultural fantasy and male subjectivity under Stalin / Lilya Kaganovsky.     p.  cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-4321-1 (cloth : alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 0-8229-4321-2 (cloth : alk. paper)   ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-5993-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 0-8229-5993-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)   1. Russian literature—20th century—History and criticism.  2. Motion pictures—Soviet Union—History.  3. Masculinity in literature.  4. Masculinity in motion pictures.  5. Men in literature.  6. Men in motion pictures.  7. Socialist realism in literature.  8. Socialist realism in motion pictures.  9. Socialist realism—Soviet Union.  I. Title.   PG3026.M37K34 2008  891.709'3521—dc22                      2008015490

For AWR, RAR, Н.И.П, А.Я.К., и О.И.П.

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix 1 Introduction: “Bodies That Matter”  1 2 How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made  19 3 Visual Pleasure in Stalinist Cinema  42 4 Heterosexual Panic  67 5 What Does Woman Want?  119 6 Epilogue: “Female Masculinity”  154 Notes  175 Bibliography  203 Index  217

vii

Acknowledgments

The image on the cover and on page ii of How the Soviet Man Was Unmade is of Vera Mukhina’s 1937 monument Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa (Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer), under construction. In many ways, this image is perfect for visualizing the intentions of this book, for thinking about the process by which Soviet (and specifically Stalinist) masculinity was constructed and represented in Stalinist culture. The image of the socialist body in “bits and pieces” is not the one we typically see. Indeed, we know the iconic image of the Worker and Peasant well from pictures of the Paris 1937 World’s Fair, from the entrance to Moscow at VDNKh, from the logo of the Mosfil’m studio. Caught in motion, mid-stride, with the hammer and sickle raised high in the air, the “pair” has always represented the monumentalism of Stalinist art, its totalizing vision of Soviet power. Taken in pieces during the process of “montage,” on the other hand, the incomplete male figure speaks to its representational and discursive construction, to the moment before the totalizing vision, when we can still see cracks, breaks, and gaps in its ideological surface. Throughout this book, I have made reference to titles from the fields of queer theory, gender theory, and cinema. My intention has been to show that “bodies” do indeed “matter” for socialist realism, that paying attention to gender construction and corporeal representation gives us a new angle on Stalinist cultural production. I want to acknowledge the work of Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam, Laura Mulvey, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kaja Silverman, and Slavoj Žižek, as particularly important for formulating my argument about Stalinist masculinity. This project as a whole owes ix

x   ★   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

much to my training as both a Slavist and a comparatist, to my colleagues in both fields, to conversations on film, literature, gender, psychoanalysis, and ideology. This book is infinitely richer for the people it has come into contact with, and I am grateful to have the opportunity to thank them here. My first thanks go to my advisors and mentors, Eric Naiman, Kaja Silverman, and Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy. Their work, as much as their friendship, nourished and sustained this project, which in turn reflects their intellectual generosity, rigor, and unfailing enthusiasm. Moreover, I am very grateful to Harriet Murav for her guidance and friendship, for conversations about the book, and for her sense of humor, and with equal amounts of admiration and awe. In the past few years (five, six, or seven), I have come to know a number of scholars whose work I greatly respect and whose opinion I greatly value. I would like to thank Tony Anemone, Francis Bernstein, Eliot Borenstein, Helena Goscilo, and Joan Neuberger for reading the book as a whole or in parts, but more important, for being engaged listeners, mentors, and friends. Likewise, the colleagues of my two departments, Slavic and Comparative Literature and faculty from History have been invaluable sources of inspiration and intellectual engagement. I want especially to thank Nancy Blake, Mike Finke, Diane Koenker, Michael Palencia-Roth, Mark Steinberg, and Richard Tempest for their help and guidance and enthusiasm. My thanks also go to Christina Kiaer and Andrea Lanoux, in whose volumes my work on socialist realism has appeared. I am lucky to count Polina Barskova, Zhenya Bershtein, Luba Golburt, Misha Kunichika, Kostia Klioutchkine, Serguei Oushakine, and Borya Wolfson as both colleagues and close friends, for whom I have great admiration and affection. And I am forever grateful to Promita Chatterji, Barry Cowan, Dena Debry, Caroline Grant, Tony Grant, Mark Herman, Alexandra Lenzer, and Jeremy Yun for friendship sustained over long distance, and for time spent together in California sunshine and Bay Area fog. Institutionally, this project was generously supported by a Mellon Faculty Fellowship and by the Illinois Research Board, which provided release time, travel grants, and research assistantships invaluable for archival work and writing time on the book. My thanks also go to the editors of

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS   ★   xi

the University of Pittsburgh Press for their interest in the project and for their careful attention to its production. But most vitally and personally, and in no particular order, my deep deep thanks go to my friends and colleagues at the University of Illinois:Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz, Nancy Castro and Gillen Wood, Matti Bunzl, Brett Kaplan, Zachary Lesser, Jim Hansen and Renée Trilling, Valeria Sobol, John Randolph, Nora Stoppino and Manuel Rota, Jed Esty and Andrea Goulet, Cathy Prendergast and Dara Goldman—for conversation, for food and drink, for movies and books, for their encouragement and their friendship. Finally, this book is dedicated to my family. To my son, Sasha, who watched all the movies. To my husband, Rob, who read all the pages. And to my parents—my mother, Natasha, my father, Anatoly, and my Aunt Olga—who lived through it all. Earlier versions of chapter 2 and chapter 3 appeared in Slavic Review 63 (Fall 2004) and in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, ed. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Material from chapter 6 appeared in Slavic and East European Journal 51 (Summer 2007). I am grateful to Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Indiana University Press for permission to republish that material here.

How the Soviet Man Was Unmade

  

1 ★ INTRODUCTION  “Bodies That Matter” “Andrei! Don’t you recognize me?” whispered Meres’ev, feeling that he was beginning to tremble all over. Andrei looked for another instant at the living skeleton covered with dark, seemingly charred skin, trying to discern the merry features of his friend, and only in his eyes, enormous and almost quite round, did he catch the frank and determined Meres’ev expression that was familiar to him . . . —Boris Polevoi, A Story About a Real Man, 1947

What does the socialist realist hero look like? Is he strong and healthy, handsome and virile, broad shouldered and square chinned? Is he “stern,” “determined,” “shiny-eyed,” and “proud”?1 Or does he resemble a “living skeleton covered with dark, seemingly charred skin”?2 How do we begin to make sense of this double image that works like a double exposure, the one body overlaid on the other, the healthy and happy Soviet man obscuring the skeletal remains of this second fantasy, this “other scene” taking place in the unconscious? Fedor Gladkov’s 1925 novel Tsement (Cement), opens with Gleb Chumalov’s return home from the front to find his house empty, his wife distant, and the factory that was the heart and soul of the town abandoned. Furious, Gleb speaks to the recalcitrant and backward Worker’s Club “Comintern,” and when words fail, he “tore off his tunic and his soiled shirt and flung them on the floor,” revealing his naked body, “knotted and scarred.” This wounded body appears precisely at the moment 1

2   ★   INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”

when we expect it the least: ready for a display of virility, we, like Gleb’s comrades, are unprepared for the vision of the “pallid and purple scars that cover his chest, neck, and side.” What begins seemingly as a play of muscles, pointed to by Gleb’s invitation to “come and touch them,” turns instead into an exhibition of wounds and a brash invitation: “‘Shall I take down my trousers? Do I have to? Oh, I’m not ashamed; I am wearing the same sort of decorations lower down . . .” This conflict of tropes—the muscular body of the hero lacerated by scars; pride taken in the possibility of castration—in Gladkov’s novel appears as a unified signifier of Gleb’s heroism, of his masculine power and authority.3 Twenty-five years after the first publication of Gladkov’s novel, Boris Polevoi relies on a similar set of contradictions to describe Squadron Commander Andrei Degtiarenko, Aleksei Meres’ev’s friend and comradein-arms in Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke (A Story About a Real Man, 1947). Roused by the sound of a “young, resonant, booming bass voice,” Meres’ev opens his eyes to see Degtiarenko appearing before him as in a dream: Aleksei opened his eyes, but he thought he was still asleep and that it was in a dream that he saw the broad, high-cheeked, roughhewn, good-natured, angular face of his friend, with the livid scar on his forehead. . . . The vision did not melt away. It really was Degtiarenko . . . standing there, tall, broad-shouldered, with his tunic collar unbuttoned as usual. . . . The rushlight was burning behind him, and his golden, close-cropped, bristling hair shone like a halo.

With almost the entire history of Stalinism between them, these two novels participate in the creation of the New Soviet Man (novyi sovetskii chelovek)—that rhetorically constructed figure rising above the Soviet masses to lead them to victory and the bright future of communism.4 The square jaws, the broad shoulders, the “halo” that emanates in and around his presence—all these elements contribute to the grandeur of the new being, the hero of socialist labor. And yet, as both Gladkov’s and Polevoi’s texts suggest, these men are set apart by more than simply their monumental stature: they are also wounded and maimed, proudly offering to show off their “decorations lower down.” The “real man” referred to by the title of Polevoi’s novel is of course not Andrei Degtiarenko, but Aleksei Meres’ev, the “charred” and emaciated body that Degtiarenko, in the

INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”   ★   3

same scene, fails to recognize as his former comrade and friend. Blind or paralyzed, limping, one-legged, or wearing prostheses—the world of the Stalinist novel and Stalinist film is filled with damaged male bodies. Their sacrifices to the Soviet cause make them worthy of elevation to the status of “hero”; yet their extreme forms of physical disability reveal what might be called an ideological and cultural fantasy of Stalinism: the radical dismemberment of its male subjects.

The Stakes Traditional critical approaches have taken for granted Stalinist culture as productive of untroubled Soviet heroes, virile bodies, and heteronormative paradigms of masculinity. Yet against the background of Stalinist monumental art—such as Vera Mukhina’s colossal monument Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa (Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer, 1937), to name but one example—socialist realist novels and films of that period surprisingly often rely on the figure of the wounded or mutilated male body to represent the New Soviet Man. Early literary works such as Gladkov’s Cement and Nikolai Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934) as well as later Stalinist creative productions such as Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man and Mikhail Chiaureli’s classic propaganda film The Fall of Berlin (1949) help to frame the argument about an acceptance of an emasculated male subjectivity that may be understood as the condition of “living with lack.” Ivan Pyr’ev 1936 melodrama The Party Card and Eduard Pentslin’s 1939 film The Fighter Pilots, along with a series of other standard but less “canonical” examples of Stalinist socialist realism, demonstrate the ways in which marginal texts also disseminate this socialist realist convention. Finally, post-Soviet writers like Viktor Pelevin and filmmakers like Sergei Livnev rework socialist realist—and specifically Stalinist—tropes. Together these texts construct the Stalinist fantasy of masculinity, turning the New Soviet Man into a heroic invalid. Psychoanalytic theory and the theories of sexuality (Freud, Foucault, Lacan), queer theory and gender studies (Butler, Halberstam, Sedgwick), and film theory (Doane, Mulvey, Silverman, Žižek), articulate Western philosophical and cultural discourses of masculinity. They therefore serve as the background against which the stakes of Stalinist masculinity may be elaborated. Limping, bandaged, bedridden, grounded, unwilling or unable to marry, the New Soviet Man, in socialist realist novels or films,

4   ★   INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”

looks quite different not only from his Western counterpart, but also from the other model of exemplary masculinity—the iconic Bolshevik / blacksmith / Stakhanovite of early Soviet and high Stalinist art—from the “fantasy of extravagant virility,” as Toby Clark names it, that we associate with Stalinist masculinity.5 Several interlinked notions guide the readings that follow. First is the discursive construction of the figure of the New Soviet Man as it is found in early, seminal works of socialist realism. The loss of bodily mobility, coupled with an insatiable drive to keep moving forward toward the bright future, constitutes one of the main plot devices that underpin the socialist realist text, in particular in its larger, novel form. The second feature of Stalinist ideology, expressed in novels and film, is the prohibition against and simultaneous demand for love, romance, and heterosexual marriage, complicated by the maimed or invalid status of the hero. Here, the damaged body in part enables the hero to remove himself from the sphere of heterosexual and heteronormative desire, opening up a space for homoerotic bonds. The figure of the woman, left behind on the shore, in a rations line, or in the “rear,” suggests male flight from the norms and conventions of the patriarchal family back toward the promise of masculine utopia. Yet, because this flight is no longer encouraged and sustained by dominant ideology—because there is a shift from the utopianism of the Soviet twenties to middle-class values of High Stalinism—heterosexuality returns to haunt the Stalinist text. Thus, the mutilated male body is only the starting point for a discussion of the production of Stalinist masculinity as a whole. Physical disablement is not taken here as a psychoanalytically driven textual response to early socialism’s hyperemphasis on the enhanced, virile, or ideal body— quite to the contrary, my argument returns again and again to the idea that the two forms of masculinity exist together, that together they create the ideal Stalinist man: hyperbolically strong, yet without arms or legs; committed to the cause, yet permanently chained to his bed; visionary, yet blind. At stake here is the notion of limitation, of certain disciplinary and structural parameters that the Stalinist subject (of either gender) is not allowed to cross. In other words, themes of mutilation, discipline, and heterosexual panic together articulate the paradox of Stalinist masculinity.

INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”   ★   5

The Fantasy Before turning to the narrative of “deviant” masculinity, let us consider the figure of virile, undamaged masculinity in Stalinist art. As many scholars have noted, both early Soviet and high Stalinist culture was greatly preoccupied with the body.6 The body as a physical site for spiritual transformation—the provenance of Fedorovian philosophy, the dreams of the futurists and the avant-garde, at stake in the physical culture movement as well as in the praise lauded on Stakhanovites, aviators, and engineers— plays a central role in Bolshevik and Stalinist discourse. Leon Trotskii focused on the body’s transformations at the end of his 1924 Literature and Revolution, Vsevolod Meyerhold made it the object of his biomechanical training for actors, Vera Mukhina monumentalized it in steel, while her husband, Aleksei Zamkov, an endocrinological therapist, injected it with gravidan in the hopes of promoting its health and longevity.7 A “parodic recipe” for the proletarian hero listed ingredients such as a spike for his “iron sinews, iron heart, and iron nerves,” lightning for the “flashes of class enthusiasm” in his eyes, and “a thermometer to register the heat of his enthusiasm.”8 Visual depictions of the worker needed to represent him with a “healthy, lively, intelligent, intellectual face,” since he was the “the prototype of the new man, a combination of physical strength, energy, fortitude, and intelligence.”9 “Clean-cut and square-jawed,”10 the New Soviet Man towered above the population, his gaze always directed out or beyond, into the bright future: [The worker] is strikingly youthful and handsome, in the clean-cut masculine way that became standard for male workers in the Stalin era. Rather than a static pose of the conventional hammer striking the anvil, his left arm is thrust forward on the diagonal. He holds up a hammer (the woman raises a sickle) not in an act of labor but rather in a gesture of triumph. His intense expression and direct gaze, brows slightly furrowed, indicate strong emotion and determination. He is the prototype of the new Soviet man.11

Capturing the “look” of the New Soviet Man, Stalinist monumental art fashioned the new Soviet body from iron and steel, and in gargantuan

6   ★   INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”

proportions: Mikhail Blokh’s ten-meter statue of a metal worker was conceived entirely in the nude and intended to rival Michelangelo’s David; Mukhina’s Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer was over twenty meters in height and seventy-five tons in weight; the statue of Lenin intended for the top of the future Palace of the Soviets was to be over a hundred meters in height.12 Like monumental art, films (fictional and documentary) also went out of their way to represent model citizens as healthy, virile, and handsome. Documentary films of the physical culture parades on Red Square, with titles like Stalinskoe plemia (Stalin’s Tribe, 1937) and Pesnia molodosti (The Song of Youth, 1938), glorified the strong athletic body of the Soviet youth.13 Thousands of young, physically fit, and handsome students, representing republics from around the Soviet Union, marched together under banners declaring “A Fiery Hello to the Best Friend of Athletes, Comrade Stalin!” and “Thank You, Comrade Stalin, for Our Happy Childhood!” while members of the Politburo watched from the podium of Lenin’s mausoleum. The participants rode on floats constructed to replicate Mukhina’s Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer and on tanks made out of flowers; they performed feats of athleticism and agility. Like the giants of monumental art, the young men and women in the parades demonstrated not only the prototype of the new Soviet person, their health and vigor also spoke to the health and vigor of the collective, of a new nation marching together toward the bright future. Familiar figures of Stalinist iconography—actors such as Boris Andreev, Sergei Batalov, Mark Bernes, and Boris Chirkov; images of the blacksmith, the Bolshevik, and Stakhanovite, “conceived of as a perpetual builder of socialism, and usually shown in motion”;14 and famous heroes of Stalinism (Chapaev, Chkalov, and Stalin himself)—together with monumental art and physical culture parades, represent the easily recognizable “fantasy of extravagant virility” of Stalinist culture. The protagonist of Lev Kassil’s novel and film, Vratar’ (The Goalie, 1936), is not only blond, handsome, and physically robust, he is also obsessed with his health. Anton Kandidov (Grigorii Pluzhnik) is “naturally” athletic, an “impenetrable goalie.” He is first spotted unloading watermelons on the banks of the Volga by a team of Moscow engineer-sportsmen, surrounded by a crowd of women, and the film’s erotic attention returns again and again to the sight/site of Kandidov’s body, as he stands “half-undressed” (polurazdetyi) in front of

INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”   ★   7

an open window, flexing his biceps. “I’m so healthy, Karasik!” he tells the short, pudgy engineer-inventor, “Oh, so healthy! Like a bull!” This fantasy of virility embodied by the images of the “iconic” or “ideal” man comes in direct conflict with the damaged and mutilated male body that I have briefly sketched out above. While “cinema and soccer formed two poles of socialist popular culture,” and in the summer happy citizens were said to “frolic” in the shadow of various life-size statues of Stakhanovite workers, Soviet aviators, and Soviet leaders,15 other symbols of the Stalinist body were being offered by literature and film. Bandaged, blinded, limping, paralyzed—these “disabled” heroes represented the inverse of the fantasy of extravagant virility, of the “flesh to metal” narrative that imagined the body tempered rather than undone by Bolshevik commitment. And yet, the damage to the male body should not be read apart from the narrative of virility. The “fantasy of extravagant virility” is precisely a phantasy in the psychoanalytic sense: a mediator between reality and desire; the primary content of unconscious mental processes.16 It is an expression of a simultaneous desire for, and the impossibility of belief in the extreme models of masculinity promoted by Stalinist culture, its obsession with shock workers, border guards, pilots, Arctic explorers, and Bolshevik leaders. The radical dismemberment of the male body found on the pages of socialist realist novels and on Soviet screens is a response to the narrative of “extravagant virility” produced by Stalinist art, pointing to the mediation between reality and desire, of what it means to be so close and yet so removed from power.

Collective Make-Believe To demonstrate better the workings of masculinity in socialist realist texts, I want to articulate for Stalinist culture a notion of a “dominant fiction”: that is, the ideological fantasy by which the subject of a historical discourse is both produced and “captated.”17 As Kaja Silverman notes, in Western philosophical discourse, the dominant fiction may be said to solicit “our faith” in the unity of the family, and the adequacy of the male subject. Images of unimpaired masculinity, produced by ideological discourse and sustained by popular culture, create the normative identification of the male subject with integrity, action, ability, and strength, while placing the female subject in the position of alterity, specularity, and lack. The

8   ★   INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”

dominant fiction represents a compromise that seeks to erase the discrepancy between the two laws that organize our symbolic order: the Law of Kinship Structure that organizes patriarchal systems in the Name-of-theFather, thereby erecting a master signifier from which all meaning proceeds; and the Law of Language that “dictates universal castration,” permanently disjoining signifier from signified and leaving meaning vulnerable to slippage, misunderstanding, and contradiction. By systematically denying the possibility of male lack and yoking the image of unimpaired masculinity to the discourses of power, “classic masculinity” sustains itself through images of virility, through metaphors of strength, and through symbols of patriarchal privilege.18 The notion of the dominant fiction takes as its starting point the normative discourse of sexual difference elaborated by Sigmund Freud in his 1925 essay, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” and the 1927 essay “Fetishism.”19 Positing a reaction-formation on the part of the “little girl” that sees “the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions,” and immediately understands herself as “lacking” (“She has seen it and she knows she is without it and wants to have it”), Freud notes that for the little boy, the reaction is quite different: he either does not see or disavows what he sees.20 Moreover, the little boy does not yet universalize what he has seen (or failed to see) to a principle applicable to all women. Only when confronted by the absence of a “particular and quite special penis,”21 to which he has been used to assigning great meaning and importance, does the little boy come to simultaneously accept and reject what he has seen. The formation of a “fetish,” produced by the sight of female difference and its implicit consequences of castration, projects onto the female body a substitute object as a surrogate “penis”—a plait of hair, an undergarment, a shoe. It is an attempt, as David Eng puts it, “to obviate the trauma of sexual difference by seeing at the site of the female body a penis that is not there to see.”22 Octave Mannoni’s famous formulation, “I know very well . . . but all the same . . .” (“Je sais bien que . . . mais quand-même . . .”),23 captures the double consciousness and “splitting of the ego” of fetishistic belief, founded on the spectacle of sexual difference and female “lack.” Jacques Lacan reformulates the notions of castration and lack (manque, manque-à-être) not as the physical absence of a penis, but as a precondition of subject formation and the individual’s entry into language

INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”   ★   9

(the symbolic order). Freud’s notion of castration is defined by Lacan as a symbolic lack of an imaginary object; castration does not bear on the penis as a real organ, but on the imaginary phallus.24 More vitally, for Lacan, “a relation of the subject to the phallus . . . is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes,” again, because the law of language dictates universal castration.25 Entry into the symbolic order, marked for Lacan by the successful negotiation and resolution of the Oedipus complex, is signaled, as Freud suggests, by the acknowledgment of the prohibition/imperative: “‘You ought to be like this (like your father).’ ‘You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.’”26 This prohibition/imperative marks the subject as “decentered,” always attempting to accede to a fullness of being (being like the father) forever foreclosed to him or her. In a sense, Freud already formulates the notion of all subjectivity as lacking when he considers that the fetish is a reaction formation against the threat of castration. It is not the woman who is ultimately found lacking in Freud’s text, but rather the man: he, the male subject, projects what he sees (or fails to see) back onto himself, threatening himself with the possibility of lack. To defend against the perceived threat of castration, the male subject re-projects plenitude back onto woman, “seeing at the site of the female body a penis that is not there to see,” mistaking penis for phallus. Through the mediation of images of unimpaired masculinity (the Bolshevik/blacksmith/Stakhanovite of the Stalinist imagination) cultural texts urge both men and women to disavow knowledge of male castration (You may not be like this [like your father] . . .) by putting their faith in the commensurability of penis and phallus, of masculinity with symbolic structures of power. Thus, “classic” male subjectivity rests upon the denial of castration, while the “phallus/penis equation is promoted by the dominant fiction, sustained by collective belief.” Because the male subject’s identifications with power and privilege are constantly threatened (formed as they are through the maintenance of a fetish), there are numerous obstacles that threaten to expose masculinity as masquerade. History may “manifest itself in so traumatic and inassimilable a guise, that it temporarily dislocates penis from phallus, or renders null and void the other elements of the dominant fiction.”27 Certainly, in the case of Stalinist culture, history may be said to have manifested itself in just such a “traumatic and inassimilable guise.” The

10   ★   INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”

ideological fantasy of Stalinist culture that installed Stalin, rhetorically and psychically, as father of the people, leader, master (“otets naroda,” “vozhd’,” “Khoziain”); the mass terror and mass destruction that accompanied the slogans of being “dizzy from success,” and insisted that “life has become better, comrades, life has become more joyous!”—these structures make it possible to see that the mechanism by which masculinity organizes itself around the disavowal of castration was brought under immense pressure. In opposition to the monumental figures of Stalinist poster art described by Victoria Bonnell or the “flesh-to-metal” fantasies described by Rolf Hellebust, socialist realist novels and films of the Stalin period manifest what might be called a “wish fulfillment” of the inadequacy of the male subject. Films consistently rely on the image of a bandage wrapped tightly around the hero’s head to signify his sacrifice, but also his status as “less than” and “not quite.” This is particularly legible in the final sequence of Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin, which brings together the bandaged Alesha Ivanov, his fiancée Natasha, who has eyes only for Stalin, and Stalin—a colossus, dressed all in white, towering over the hysterically joyous crowds that have rushed to greet him. Alesha’s bandaged head emphasizes what the film has repeatedly shown: in the love triangle of Alesha, Natasha, and Stalin, Alesha occupies the place of the subject “almost like but never the same as” Stalin. As The Fall of Berlin and other texts demonstrate, the male hero’s visibility before the gaze of the big Other (either Stalin or history),28 his exposure, specularity, and alterity—categories traditionally assigned to woman—are mobilized as markers of a masculinity that no longer disavows castration and lack. In its representations of the wounded body, Stalinist art charts a trajectory from the visual arts—posters and painting, in which damaged bodies do not appear—to cinema, where they are marked by covert signs, such as a bandage or a set of crutches—to literature, where the nature of the wounds is described vividly and at length. Stalinist films address the question of masculinity obliquely. The focus, as I will show, is on the production of a circumscribed masculinity, a masculinity that openly acknowledges and privileges its own undoing, that insists on weakness, on blindness, on distance from power. Stalinist novels, on the other hand, are free to dwell on the details of their heroes’ dismemberment. Thus, Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered and Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man revel in the

INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”   ★   11

pain and damage sustained by their heroic subjects, describing in excruciating detail the nature of their heroes’ suffering and inviting not only the female characters but also the readers to acknowledge and fetishize the damaged male body as a model of exemplary masculinity.

From “Worker and Peasant” to Hammer and Sickle To examine the conflicts of gender and power in Stalinist texts, I want to keep in mind the historical and political circumstances that made those conflicts visible, isolating not only textual moments in which the Soviet male subject is able to sustain certain idealized gendered identifications (with Stakhanovites, with blacksmiths, with Stalin) but also, more vitally, those instances when these identifications fail or threaten to break down. Socialist realist novels and films construct a model of masculinity that is not afraid to show off its “decorations lower down,” that, like Gleb Chumalov, invites others to “come and touch” the scarred and lacerated body and to see lack as a precondition of Stalinist male subjectivity. Chapter 2 analyzes what is perhaps the model socialist realist text, Nikolai Ostrovskii’s novel Kak zakalialas’ stal’ (How the Steel Was Tempered), published serially in the journal Molodaia gvardiia from 1932 to 1934. The publication of Ostrovskii’s novel coincides with the adoption of the doctrine of socialist realism as the official method of the Soviet arts and provides a model, along with the Georgii Vasil’ev and Sergei Vasil’ev’s screen adaptation of Chapaev (1934), for what a socialist realist text ought to be. The novel’s hero, Pavka Korchagin, charts the path of true Soviet heroism: in his class origin, in his choice of occupations, his immediate and unwavering commitment to the Soviet State—Pavka never once veers from the path of ideal Soviet subjectivity. His commitment comes at a price: for every step he takes toward the ideal, Pavka pays with the disintegration of his body. Removed to sanatoriums, blind, paralyzed, and permanently confined to his bed, Pavka never gives up on his desire to “move forward,” to (re)join the ranks of the party, to remain a soldier on the front lines of the battle for socialism, always ready to give a “little more of himself” to the party. This masochistic relationship underscores the psychic economy of debt that marks exemplary Stalinist masculinity. Payment for participation in the system is made explicit by Pavka’s progressive disabilities: first one eye, then the other, then

12   ★   INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”

the nervous system, then paralysis of one side of the body, and finally, permanent immobility turn Pavka into a “living mummy,” a persistent reminder of Stalinist masculinity structured by/as lack. Chapter 3 places the question of Stalinist masculinity within the broader paradigm of sexual difference, focusing on the production of female guilt in Ivan Pyr’ev’s 1936 film Partiinyi bilet (The Party Card). The film is set in a context of show trials, party card exchanges, and rumors of war that underscore the sexual and political vulnerability of the Stalinist subject. Where Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered asked us to read metaphorical plenitude at the site of the emaciated, paralyzed male body, Pyr’ev’s The Party Card asks us to see metonymical lack at the site of the perfectly healthy female body. Evoking nearly every Freudian definition of femininity as alterity, specularity, and difference, and fetishizing the party card as a symbol of plenitude, Pyr’ev’s film displaces the threat of (political) castration onto the female subject, as if lack belonged only to woman. Though no one escapes the threat of universal castration that Pyr’ev’s film stages and then disavows, The Party Card helps to turn this threat into visual pleasure. We enjoy watching Anna admit her guilt and condemn her for her reckless sexuality. But Anna is a “good party member,” a “loyal” friend, and in prosecuting her, the film simultaneously acknowledges and disavows the terror and uncertainty of Stalinist subjectivity. This too is a kind of visual pleasure, in briefly identifying with one who has temporarily escaped the operations of power. This chapter reconceives Laura Mulvey’s work on visual pleasure as determined by the historical and cultural contingencies of Stalinism. It shows how the traditional paradigm of sexual difference remains at work in Stalinist texts, even when compromised by competing fantasies of emasculation, heterosexual panic, and male hysteria. Chapter 4 focuses on cinematic examples of male subjectivity as circumscribed, disciplined, and feminized. The heroes of these films from approximately 1935 to 1945 are models of “extravagant virility” (sailors, soldiers, and pilots), who refuse to occupy the position of virile, heterosexual masculinity. The patriarchal norms of relations between men—what Eve Sedgwick terms “homosexual panic”—alongside the implementation of Stalinist “family laws” limiting divorce and abortion and the criminalization of homosexuality show that the discourse of normative desire (heterosexual love, marriage, family) is consistently undermined by quite a

INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”   ★   13

different form of “panic.” None of the male protagonists can securely align his desire with the heteronormative structures seemingly demanded by the state. Rather, the protagonists of these films attempt to “remain men together,” and to preserve, in the words of Major Tucha in The Sky-Barge, their “holy male union.” This attempt is marked by hysterical symptoms— headaches, leg cramps, blindness, hospitalization29—produced at the site of the male body, acknowledging a prohibition against a repressed wish that leaves male pilots “grounded.” Chapter 5 discusses Boris Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man, which tells the story of the fighter pilot Aleksei Meres’ev, who, after having his feet amputated at the shins, nonetheless returns to the front. It is a narrative about undaunted Soviet heroism, about a real man “minus two feet.” The loss of mobility is seen here as a specifically “male” problem, and amputation becomes synonymous with castration: legless, Meres’ev cannot fly, cannot marry, cannot rejoin the fighting ranks, but must live out his days either in the hospital with other damaged men or with “the women in the rear,” resigned to the position of the Stalinist “abject.” Yet this “pinned” and “disabled” state may in itself be the “real” goal of Stalinist masculinity. The mechanism of the desire/compulsion to return “to ranks and to life” at work in How the Steel Was Tempered is repeated in Polevoi’s novel. Asked to imagine a “real” man, Meres’ev recalls “the big, bloated body” and “the waxen face” of Commissar Vorob’ev, and the woman “standing like a statue over him in the eternal posture of feminine grief.” Meres’ev’s progress through the novel is marked by the loss and reacquisition of subjectivity—understood here in the sense that Louis Althusser provides, an answer to an ideological “hail.” The reacquisition of subjectivity is marked not only by an acceptance of lack, but also by the display of this lack for all to see. Thus, we find Meres’ev’s legs frequently lying “some distance from him,” underscoring the distance between the “fantasy of extravagant virility” and its representation in socialist realist texts. Chapter 6 takes a broader view of Stalinist culture by examining its post-Soviet “return” in films from the late eighties and early nineties, set during the Stalin era, specifically in Sergei Livnev’s 1994 film Serp i molot (Hammer and Sickle). Like the novels of Viktor Pelevin, Livnev’s film is a post-Soviet take on the myths and fantasies of Stalinism that asks what it might have meant to be a “man” in a world where the relationship between maleness and power was denaturalized and unhinged. Livnev’s

14   ★   INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”

parody relies on taking many of the tropes of Stalinist culture—the desire to produce the New Soviet Man; subjects without will that exist at the behest of the state; Stalin as the “big Other”—to their literal and absurd extremes.30 And yet, despite its emphasis on the production and construction of (male) subjectivity, the ending of Hammer and Sickle nevertheless proposes a naturalized relation between maleness and power, between masculinity and action. In other words, Livnev’s film tries to undo the structures it sets out to parody by disavowing the possibility of masculinity as lack, and returning the New Soviet Man squarely back into the fold of heteronormative desire and phallic identification. Hammer and Sickle concludes with the image of the paralyzed “hero,” yet one more mummy lying in state in a “m(a)us(ol)eum”31 named after himself. Thus, chapter 6 underscores the pervasiveness of the trope of damaged masculinity for Stalinist culture, showing that we cannot understand socialist realism or the culture of Stalinism without addressing the construction and performance of gender; regimes of discipline/power/pleasure; bodily mutilation and exemplary masculinity; sexual difference and visibility before the big Other.

Questions of Method How the Soviet Man Was Unmade brings together two fields of study—Soviet and post-Soviet studies and psychoanalytic theory—that are typically seen as disparate. As one of the dominant critical tools for theorizing the relationship between gender and sexuality, between identification and desire, between subjectivity and collective belief, psychoanalysis helps to reveal the multiple ways in which subjects are constructed and deployed, but also how cultural products reflect and translate a given society’s structuring illusions and fantasies. Moreover, psychoanalysis (in particular in its later, Lacanian turn) has had a profound effect on the field of film studies, which considers questions of spectatorship and identification, the roles of fantasy and ideology, and the effects of projection and mechanical reproduction. Nevertheless, this book’s theoretical approach might give pause to some scholars of Slavic studies. In its relationship to a century of predominantly French and German literary theory, the field has come to embrace some of these with ease (formalism, structuralism), some with a certain degree of reluctance (deconstruction, postmodernism, postcolonialism,

INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”   ★   15

queer studies), and some with mistrust (Marxism, feminism). Yet psychoanalysis, from its inception as a field of scientific study to its literary and cultural theoretical applications has had a long and difficult path through Soviet history and Slavic scholarship, even though the influence of Freud in Russia can be traced to the earliest developments of psychoanalysis in Europe. As Martin Miller points out, “Freud’s works, beginning with his Interpretation of Dreams (published in 1899), were translated from German into Russian before they appeared in any other foreign language. Psychiatrists who had traveled to study with Freud, Carl Jung, and Karl Abraham in western Europe organized a training institute in Moscow years before any existed in London, Paris, New York, or Buenos Aires.”32 This influence did not end with the public denunciation of Freudianism at the Congress on Human Behavior in Moscow in 1930, when all matters relating to Freud and psychoanalysis were declared retrograde, bourgeois, and counterrevolutionary. Instead of disappearing, psychoanalysis became the favorite target of critique, continuing to generate articles and books that attacked Freud’s methods and conclusions, keeping them in intellectual circulation: “Throughout the Stalin era, and well into the postwar period, this critical discourse was sustained by people who were in fact genuinely interested in Freud in spite of the fact that they could neither practice as clinicians nor publish as academics with a psychoanalytic identification.”33 Psychoanalytic approaches to Slavic studies, however, continue to be debated.34 And though most would agree that we are, all of us, “Freudians” (culturally and historically, if not by choice), scholars of Soviet studies still cite the Bolshevik hatred of psychoanalysis, or V. N. Voloshinov’s critical study, Freudianism (1927), as a good enough reason to reject the methodology tout court. And yet, when Isaac Babel writes about masculinity in “Moi pervyi gus’” (My First Goose, 1926), or Andrei Platonov about the death drive in “Ivan Zhokh” (1927), or Iurii Olesha about the father-son relationships in Zavist’ (Envy, 1927), or Mikhail Zoshchenko about the traumas of childhood in his autobiographical Pered voskhodom solntsa (Before the Sunrise, 1943), they are relying on Vasilii Rozanov and Nikolai Fedorov; Otto Weininger and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing—but more vitally, on Freud and his theories, which, however discredited at the time or after, helped to shape a century of modern thought, even in Soviet Russia. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, critics of the Soviet regime

16   ★   INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”

have used the tools of Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis to think through the problems of Soviet history. The rejection of psychoanalysis itself (from its total dismissal in 1930 to its slow reemergence in the 1970s) has become emblematic of Soviet Communism as a system that, as Aron Belkin argues, “obliterated the nation’s collective past.”35 One of the first films to deal explicitly with psychoanalytic themes, Andrei Zagdanskii’s Tolkovanie snovidenii (Interpretation of Dreams, 1989), showed extensive documentary footage of Freud and other historical figures, with Nicholas II inspecting the troops, Stalin in 1920, Hitler and staff at Nuremberg in 1927, and Nikita Khrushchev and Kliment Voroshilov applauding Viacheslav Molotov in 1930. As Miller notes, The filmmaker’s attitudes toward psychoanalysis were hardly subtle: he juxtaposed graphic footage from the savage history of imperialism, warfare, and revolution during the first half of the twentieth century against quotations read from Freud’s works which, uncannily, seemed to interpret the events. . . . To underscore the connection between repression, whether individual or societal, and the long-standing intolerance of psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union, the film closed with these words alone on the screen: “From 1929 to 1989, Freud was not published in the USSR.”36

Not only Freud, but also post- or neo-Freudian psychoanalysis became a possible topic of discussion in the Soviet Union in the early seventies. V. M. Leibin published on the works of Erich Fromm, and in 1973 N. S. Avtonomova published an article on the “Psychoanalytic Conceptions of Jacques Lacan.”37 In particular, Leibin’s book, Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Neo-Freudianism, discussed the vast influence of psychoanalysis in Europe and America in the fields of psychiatry, philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, and art—in other words, precisely the kind of influence that initially opened up psychoanalysis to vast criticism and ultimate rejection by the Soviets. As Miller puts it, quoting from the Large Soviet Encyclopedia (1978), the Soviets made a distinction between psychoanalysis as a study of unconscious phenomena and Freudianism as a theory that elevated “the tenets of psychoanalysis to philosophical and anthropological principles.” There was concern “that Freud’s dangerous influence could be found in other fields, extending from psychology and psychiatry to philosophy, aesthetics, art, sociology, literature, and his-

INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”   ★   17

tory.”38 And indeed, since the republication of Freud’s works began in the late eighties, a new field of study—psychohistory—spearheaded by Belkin, was founded in Russia. In Western academic discourse, Freud’s influence on feminist theory, queer theory, and film theory was shaped in large part by the work of Lacan, who began his “return to Freud” by bringing together knowledge from such diverse fields as structural linguistics and cultural anthropology, and from thinkers such as Hegel and Kojeve. Film studies, gender studies, Marxist studies were influenced directly by the psychoanalytic work of Lacan, by his formulations on the subject of language, on femininity, on the “look and the gaze.” The application of these concepts to the study of Stalinism should be no more radical than their application to the study of Italian or German fascism, Chinese Communism, or American capitalism—indeed to any political system in which ideology acts as a force that shapes the subject without his or her knowledge, but which can nevertheless be read through cultural texts: through novels and films, through advertisements and laws. This is not to say that in each case the answers will be the same— Jacques Derrida’s famous formulation that psychoanalysis looks at texts but finds only itself; or Freud’s own suggestion that each case opens easily to his “collection of pick-locks.”39 Rather, as Michel Foucault suggests in “Questions of Method”: “What I say ought to be taken as ‘propositions,’ ‘game openings,’ where those who are interested are invited to join in; they are not meant as dogmatic assertions that have to be taken or left en bloc.”40 Here I provide a kind of “game opening,” a different way of looking at and thinking about the culture of Stalinism. Indeed, many scholars have already successfully proven the usefulness of psychoanalysis for thinking together mass culture and ideology: Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, Kaja Silverman, and Slavoj Žižek, to name just a few. Moreover, the work of the Ljubljana School of Theoretical Psychoanalysis—whose participants include Mladen Dollar, Renata Salecl, and Žižek—has demonstrated the ways in which theoretical psychoanalysis maps onto the study of socialist and postsocialist culture. The work of these critics has been the next step in the intellectual project began by Freud and continued by Lacan, and it has been historically conditioned by “living socialism,” by an understanding from within of the workings of Soviet power. Here I seek to provide a new insight into Stalinist culture, exploring the concepts of psychoanaly-

18   ★   INTRODUCTION: “BODIES THAT MATTER”

sis—bodily imago, mirror stage, the phallus, lack, and the big Other—to understand some of the means by which Stalinist ideology operated on its subjects, using theoretical psychoanalysis (and related theories of gender and sexuality) to read Stalinism and Stalinist socialist realism through an alternate lens.

  

2 ★ HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

In 1938 the Leningrad branch of the State Publishing House of the USSR (Gosizdat) published a volume of critical essays on the image of the Bolshevik in Soviet literature, which included, among other works, an essay by I. Grinberg entitled: “Geroi sovetskogo romana” (The Hero of the Soviet Novel).1 The essay covered Maksim Gor’kii’s volume of short stories Rozhdenie cheloveka (The Birth of a Man, 1927) that, according to Grinberg’s formulation (borrowed from Gor’kii’s own speech at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers), demonstrated “the problem of ideological remaking and the growth of the working class in the spirit of socialism” (zadacha ideinoi peredelki i vospitaniia trudiashchikhsia v dukhe sotsializma). Grinberg’s essay reviewed Marietta Shaginian’s novel Gidrotsentral’ (The Hydrocentral, 1931), finding that it lacked the proper range of vocabulary to describe the “New Soviet Man,” and resorted instead to such shorthand as “humpbacked” and “silent.” And it criticized Leonid Leonov’s Doroga na okean (The Road to the Ocean, 1935) in which the protagonist spent the 19

20   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

second half of the novel ill and then died following an unsuccessful operation. Grinberg quotes from the novel: “A man of his generation, Kurilov always wanted to reach that far away place, that lodestar guiding his party,” adding: “Kurilov spends his life trying to reach this place [the ocean] but fails. This movement forward without end, this dedicated, tense battle for conquest determines the hero’s existence.” Soviet literature, Grinberg suggests, needs heroes that end suffering, not ones who continue to suffer from sorrow, from melancholy, from unrequited love.2 On the other hand, Grinberg praised a number of Soviet novels from the thirties, including Iakov Il’in’s Bol’shoi konveer (The Large Conveyer, 1934), Aleksei Tolstoy’s novel Khleb (Bread, 1937), and Aleksandr Fadeev’s novel Poslednii iz Udege (The Last of the Udegs),3 finding that each one showed that heroism in the Soviet Union had long ago ceased to be an “exception” and that people who only yesterday were just beginning to live a conscious life already could accomplish heroic feats of exceptional worth.4 Grinberg’s highest praise, however, was reserved for Nikolai Ostrovskii’s novel Kak zakalialas’ stal’ (How the Steel Was Tempered, 1932–1934), the novel in which, according to Grinberg, the main characteristics of other novels and the best images of Soviet literature were most clearly expressed.5 Appearing serially in the journal Molodaia gvardiia from 1932 to 1934, Ostrovskii’s novel coincided with the mounting tension over the future of Soviet literature that had its culmination in the First Congress of Soviet Writers (August 1934) and the official implementation of the term socialist realism for all Soviet art.6 Dismissed by the press in 1932 because of the “unreality of its characters,” in 1934 the novel was noted at the congress as an example of successful socialist realism and overnight became a model socialist realist text, its hero, Pavka Korchagin, hailed as the model socialist realist hero. Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered is perhaps the best example of how a Soviet man can overcome physical infirmity through sheer willpower, and—more important—why he might want to do so.7 Without reservation, consideration, or foresight, Pavka undertakes one task after another that destroys his body: he helps the Bolshevik underground, he fights in the Red Army; he works as a stoker, a digger, a border guard; he withstands injury, disease, cold, hunger, pain, and finally blindness and paralysis, each time returning to the ranks and continuing to fight for the

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   21

“great cause” of Soviet socialism. As the Soviet critic F. Leven wrote in his review of Ostrovskii’s novel: “Pavel Korchagin appeared in our literature as one of the first successful figures of the positive hero, one that can be and must be the model and the object of imitation.”8 Though not precisely an autobiographical novel, How the Steel Was Tempered was written by an author who was himself blind and paralyzed, and it records the process by which a young soldier, after sustaining one kind of bodily injury after next, comes to write a novel about his life. Following the slogan of the age, “Nothing is impossible for a Bolshevik,” and creating what has been called by some critics the “first personality in Soviet literature to be portrayed in complete conformity with society,”9 Ostrovskii’s novel nevertheless points to an ambiguity of rhetoric that creates the New Soviet Man—or the socialist realist hero, his fictional counterpart. Obliged to work beyond human capacity, obliged always “to strive forward” toward the bright future, obliged to withstand hunger, pain, torture, and illness—obliged, finally, in the words of Andrei Platonov, to be a “crippled invalid”10—the new positive hero emerges from the pages of Ostrovskii’s novel as a fantastic figure, blind and paralyzed, yet nevertheless yearning for his place in the Stalinist system, demanding always to “return to ranks and to life” and once more to make his life “useful.” Similar to Leonov’s Kurilov in his never-ending movement toward a fantastic and unreachable goal, Pavka’s success lies in his limitless devotion to the party: wounded, ill, stricken from records, abandoned by friends, Pavka returns again and again to fight his way forward into the ranks of the “sound and the fit.” Pavka Korchagin’s “bodily obligation” fits squarely into the context of the dominant fiction of Stalinism, of the ideological fantasy that both produces and binds the Stalinist subject.11 Ideological fantasy, as Slavoj Žižek suggests, names a reality structured by disavowal (the “I know very well . . . but all the same . . .” of the fetishist) in which fantasy acts as a structuring illusion.12 For the Stalin period, this fantasy finds one mode of articulation in the doctrine of socialist realism that, from its official adoption in 1934, posits its task not as the representation of everyday reality but as the representation of “reality in its revolutionary development”—that is to say, a coming into being of a world and the subjectivity of Stalin’s New Man. That this new reality centers on the production of the new subject is unsurprising. What is surprising, however, is that in its attempts to articulate

22   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

the coming into being of the New Soviet Man, socialist realism (governed by the ideological fantasy of which it is the discursive expression) produces a mangled or mutilated (male) body as frequently as it produces the hyperbolically healthy and strong Stalinist man. The dominant fiction allows us to trace the effects of power by which the subject is produced as a subject; or to identify models of exemplary masculinity to which the male subjects will and will not measure up. Under Stalinism, exemplary masculinity, at least as it appears in the literature and films of the period, consists of two contradictory models: the virile and productive male body on the one hand and the wounded, long-suffering invalid, on the other. Ostrovskii’s protagonist, Pavka Korchagin, is an example of a socialist realist hero whose radical bodily dismemberment parallels his rise through the bureaucracy of Soviet ranks, each wound gaining him membership in the new Soviet state. Pavka Korchagin’s case is exemplary for Stalinist literature because Pavka becomes and remains (throughout the existence of the Soviet Union) an ideal male subject despite his failure to look like the healthy model of Stalinist virility. The body, whose physical shortcomings the Soviet subject was earlier called upon to overcome—sexual discourse from the early 1920s, for example, called on women to overcome nature, reproduction, and menstruation; while the Bolshevik man could overcome hunger, sexuality, violence, and all other forms of bodily desire—returns to haunt the New Soviet Man.13 More than a matter of displacement or return of the repressed, the blind, limping, paralyzed, hysterical male body seems to be offered by Stalinist art as a new kind of masculinity, one that does not, at least on the surface, depend on “collective make-believe in the commensurability of penis and phallus”—that is to say, of the male subject and power—but rather, one that stages the radical incommensurability of the two.14 In Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, the male subject’s coming into being as a Stalinist subject depended first on being able recognize power as located outside himself, and second on internalizing that knowledge in the form of the mechanisms of self-surveillance. According to the logic of the novel, the hero’s commitment to the Soviet cause took precedence over all other aspects of existence, marked by hunger, exhaustion, illness, or death. How the Steel Was Tempered gives us not only a model socialist realist text and a model Soviet subject—it also, perversely, points to the obscene enjoyment of lack (both physical and psychic) of its forever

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   23

suffering protagonist. In his overly zealous commitment to the revolution, Pavka returns again and again to the site of his trauma—his work in and for the party—forcing us to ask what mechanism drives Pavka’s quest for total self-annihilation. Clearly, a product of a compulsion to repeat, Ostrovskii’s Pavka Korchagin comes to radically embody the “bodily obligation” of the New Soviet Man.

The Making of a Hero To begin to see how this new man is (un)made, however, it may be useful to consider consider the biography of its author and the history of the novel’s publication, since both provide an insight into the workings of Stalinist culture and the creation of the Stalinist hero. Born 16 September 1904, in the village of Viliia in western Ukraine, Nikolai Ostrovskii grew up in Shepetovka, where he attended two grades of the local primary school and later worked in the kitchen of the railroad station, the timber yard, and as a stoker’s mate in a power station. In 1918, at fourteen, Nikolai ran errands for the local Bolshevik underground and the following year joined the Ukrainian komsomol and left for the front, serving first in the brigade commanded by G. I. Kotovskii, and then in the First Cavalry Army. In August 1920 he was severely wounded in the head and the stomach during the cavalry’s raid on Lvov, and by October 1920 he was demobilized on medical grounds, ending his career as a soldier at the age of sixteen. Ostrovskii’s party work began in 1921 but was punctuated by protracted stays in hospitals and sanatoriums. Helping to extend a branch of the railroad to the Boiarka station and to save timber rafting on the Dnepr River, he became ill with typhoid and rheumatism, and in October 1922, at the age of eighteen, was officially declared an invalid by the medical commission. The following year the Ukrainian komsomol sent him to Berezovka as a secretary of the local chapter, and commissar of the second battalion of general military instruction, but because of his severely deteriorating health, Ostrovskii was forced to spend the next two years in and out of clinics and sanatoriums in Slaviansk, Khar’kov, and Evpatoriia. By December 1926 polyarthritis had deprived him of almost all mobility, and he became permanently bedridden. Nonetheless, he continued to work as a propagandist, conducting political education meetings from his bed and starting work on his first novel. As Ostrovskii told the Moscow correspondent for the British newspaper News Chronicle on 30 Octo-

24   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

ber 1936: “Major work on myself made me into an intellectual. . . . I studied the most when I was ill: I had free time. I read twenty hours a day. In the six years of immobility I read a huge number of books.” In 1928 Ostrov­ skii send his manuscript about the adventures of the Kotovskii brigade to his former comrades in Odessa, but the manuscript was lost in the mail. In November of that year he lost his vision. Undaunted by blindness, the paralysis of both his legs and his arms down to the wrists, kidney stones, jaundice, tuberculosis, and rheumatism, Ostrovskii began work on How the Steel Was Tempered, finishing part 1 in November 1931.15 After an initial rejection, the manuscript was approved by the editors of the journal Molodaia gvardiia in February 1932. Part 1 was published in book form in December of that year, while part 2 came out in September 1934. On 1 October 1935 Ostrovskii was awarded the Order of Lenin, and the day after receiving news of his award, Ostrovskii addressed Stalin in a letter in which he warmly thanked the party and the Soviet government for his high honor and expressed his love and commitment to the nation, the Communist Party, and Stalin, “the great leader and teacher.” For the next year, Ostrovskii gave radio talks from his bed and was elected to a number of posts, including the post of foreign correspondent and brigade commissar in January 1936. He was also given two residences: a house built by the Ukrainian government in Sochi and an apartment in Moscow. On 16 December 1936, Ostrovskii suffered complications from kidney stones and uremia, and on 22 December, at exactly 7:50 p.m., he died at the age of thirty-two. The popularity of Ostrovskii’s one completed novel, How the Steel Was Tempered, was overwhelming. It easily rivaled such socialist realist classics as Maksim Gor’kii’s Mat’ (Mother, 1906), Dmitrii Furmanov’s Chapaev (1923), and Mikhail Sholokhov’s Tikhii Don (And Quiet Flows the Don, 1928–1940). In 1934, shortly after the publication of the first full text of How the Steel Was Tempered, Ostrovskii received 1,700 letters from readers. By the end of 1935, he had received another 5,120. His novel was mandatory reading for every third grader. Soldiers fighting in World War II were said to still be reading the book on the eve of battle, gathering strength and courage from Pavka Korchagin, the novel’s hero. Hundreds of monuments to both Nikolai Ostrovskii and Pavka Korchagin were erected in Russia, Ukraine, and throughout the USSR. His two main residences—Gorky Street, 14, in Moscow and Dom N. Ostrovskogo in Sochi—were converted

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   25

into museums upon his death. Not only streets, but also airplanes, locomotives, steamships, tanks, and combines were named after him, while brigades of workers or soldiers were named after Pavka Korchagin. When Ostrovskii died, his body was displayed for three days in the hall of the Union of Soviet Writers, while writers, sailors, soldiers, aviators, young Pioneers, polar explorers, parachutists, architects, Chapaev’s son and Furmanov’s daughter, delegates from Kiev, Leningrad, Shepetovka, Sochi, Khar’kov, Rostov, and other cities, all came to pay their respects. His short life has been recorded with admirable attention to details and dates, down to the exact time of his death and the length (two hours, forty minutes) of his funeral service.

The Octopus Eye Like his biography, with which it is often conflated, Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered tells the story of bodily sacrifice for the Soviet cause. Though no other socialist realist protagonist comes close Pavka’s extreme state of physical debility, Pavka is not an exceptional case for socialist realism, but rather a model subject, the new “positive hero” of Stalinist art.16 In How the Steel Was Tempered we find the body characterized first and foremost as a battle zone. Pavka is waging a war against corporeality, in which ideology (the belief in progress, movement forward, in usefulness) can overcome material nature. After fighting the Poles and the Whites, Pavka begins a “civil” war against this new type of enemy. In Fedor Gladkov’s Tsement (Cement, 1925) Gleb Chumalov manages to catch Sergei’s brother, the one-armed man, who has been successfully resisting the new Bolshevik regime and sabotaging the attempt to restart the factory. In a sense, How the Steel Was Tempered resituates Cement’s conflict by turning Pavka’s own body into his bitter enemy. Pavka is both Gleb and the onearmed man, his Bolshevik will acting in direct opposition to his traitorous body. Three moments from How the Steel Was Tempered mark the figuration of the body as traitor, as that which must be resisted and put down in order for proper Soviet subjectivity to emerge. The first moment stages the appearance of an external and alien presence that watches Pavka from the outside. The second translates that silent watcher into the state. And, finally, the third shows how Pavka becomes his own “watcher,” learning to police the desires of his traitorous body. As the prototypical socialist realist hero, Pavka is making his way from “spontaneity to consciousness,”

26   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

but this process involves not only the acquisition of Soviet-style discipline (not fighting when insulted, not swearing, keeping his military coat buttoned à la Chapaev), but also Foucauldian discipline—that is, learning to see himself as subject to the operations of power that “coerces by means of observation.”17 The novel begins with Pavka’s childhood in Ukraine. In the first chapter, he is kicked out of school, falls in love with Tonia Tumanova, a rich neighbor’s daughter, and eventually enlists with the Red Army as it fights to liberate Ukraine from German and Polish invaders. The first part of the novel ends with Pavka, wounded in battle, fighting for his life in a field hospital. A shell fragment has lodged itself in his eye, his skull is fractured, and the entire right side of his head is paralyzed. In part 2 we follow Pavka from one work site to the next, following the disintegration of his body as each assignment takes its toll on his constitution. As his body weakens, Pavka spends more and more time in sanatoriums, unhappy that he cannot continue to fight for the revolution. Finally, on the brink of exhaustion, blind, and having lost the use of his right arm and both of his legs (as well as having damaged his nervous system), Pavka contemplates suicide but resolves instead to make his life “useful.” Instead of dying, Pavka marries a young girl named Taia and writes a book: the story of his life. Part 1, which takes place during the Red Army’s campaigns against the Germans and the Poles, concludes with Pavka’s near death from a shrapnel injury. Seized with rage over the death of his commanding officer, Pavka rushes into battle, “blindly slash[ing] at a figure in green uniform.” In the next moment, “there was a blinding green flash before Pavka’s eyes, thunder smote his ears and red-hot iron seared into his skull.”18 Waking up in the field hospital, disoriented and unable to properly locate himself in his new surroundings, Pavka experiences a series of hallucinations that make him perceive the pain from within his head as an attack from the outside world. A piece of shrapnel has lodged itself in Pavka’s right eye, partially blinding him. The injury, however, manifests itself as an “octopus” (sprut), whose tentacles creep near Pavka’s immobilized body: The octopus has a bulging eye the size of a cat’s head, a dull-red eye, green in the center, burning, pulsating with a phosphorescent glow. . . . The octopus moves. He can see it close to his eyes. The tentacles creep over his body; they are cold and they burn like nettles. The

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   27

octopus shoots out its sting, and it bites into his head like a leech, and, wriggling convulsively, it sucks at his blood. He feels the blood draining out of his body into the swelling body of the octopus. . . . He tries to move but his body is strange, it refuses to obey him, it is not his body. . . . Something stirs next to him. Is it the octopus crawling near again? Here it comes, here is the red color of its eye.19

The image of the octopus is striking for several reasons, not the least of which is the sexualized nature of its potential attack, penetrating Pavka’s body and draining it of blood. The language echoes Aron Zalkind’s earlier discourse on sexuality, replete with images of emasculation and the terror of sexual contact: according to Zalkind, sexuality was “feeding upon the cut off [urezannoi] collective powers of the human organism,” a gross, engorged prostate “swelling without limit” and “sucking the juices from other, biologically more valuable forces.”20 The image of the octopus is also borrowed from early Soviet political cartoons, in which the octopus represents the capitalist system, squeezing and choking the proletariat in its tentacles. And the octopus is also the “organ without a body,” the partial object that invades the ordinary biological body and mortifies it, the “undead” wound which, while parasitizing upon the body, prevents it from dying.21 The octopus turns out finally to be an observer—Pavka’s doctor, Nina Vladimirovna, who nurses him back to health. The terror of the octopus signals the terror of an uncontrollable body: unable to move, Pavka must watch in horror as his body is penetrated from without by an alien invader that mortifies it, turning an ordinary biological body into an “undead” wound. Pavka’s body has joined the ranks of the opposition: the body is “strange . . . it refuses to obey him.” The green color of the octopus points back to the Polish enemy and the moment of trauma: Pavka blindly slashes at a “figure in green uniform,” and the last thing that he sees before he falls unconscious is a “blinding green flash” before he is thrown from his horse and everything goes completely dark. The (male) figure and the (female) caretaker are here merged into one terrifying creature, keeping Pavka suspended in permanent darkness. Yet, what seems particularly vital about this episode is that both Pavka’s attack and subsequent wounding are described in terms of vision, blindness, and observation. “Night” closes in around him when he

28   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

is thrown from his horse by the force of the explosion. Perceiving himself to be under attack by an external terror, Pavka imagines that the octopus “has a bulging eye the size of a cat’s head, a dull-red eye, green in the center, burning, pulsating with a phosphorescent glow.” Not only is Pavka’s own eye the location of the wound and the consequent aim of the octopus’ attack, but also the shrapnel-octopus is itself an octopus eye. Bulging, pulsating, the octopus is a terrifying watcher that threatens to penetrate his body. In the midst of his delirium, Pavka hallucinates an alien presence that wants to keep him under surveillance. Here again we might return to Nina Vladimirovna, the “junior doctor of the military clinical hospital,” who, it turns out, does indeed have Pavka under observation. The novel at this point changes into her diary entries, underscoring the fact that she is monitoring Pavka’s recovery, keeping him under her watchful eye.22 Nina Vladimirovna is part of the medical establishment, and her observations form part of the network of power in which Pavka is enclosed. The military camp, the hospital, the school—these institutions are mobilized for the purposes of discipline and the production and maintenance of subjectivity. Pavka’s rehabilitation at the military hospital is structured by the loss and reacquisition of vision, the initial blindness translated into the extrasensory perception of the octopus eye, finally followed by the partial recovery of movement and sight. His rebirth (here and throughout the novel) is described through the metaphors of vision, and the octopus becomes the first in a series of objects of surveillance monitoring the progressive disintegration of Pavka’s body as he appears to move closer and closer to the Stalinist ideal of disciplined masculinity. This logic of surveillance is made more explicit in the railroadbuilding episode, during which Pavka almost dies from exposure and typhus. Without a coat, with one torn boot, one snow-filled galosh, and a towel instead of a scarf, Pavka pushes himself past the brink of exhaustion, sleeping less and working more than what is already required of the diggers. For this, he receives recognition from the visiting authorities. Noticing Pavka’s thin jacket and “fantastic footwear,” the party supervisor Zhukhrai quietly offers to send him a pair of winter boots in return for his labors, asking in a low voice, “You haven’t frozen your feet yet, I hope?” Pavka, however, dismisses this concern with the words, “They’ve begun to swell a bit,” and instead counters the offer with a request for more cartridges for his revolver. Catching Pavka’s disappointed look (bullets are

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   29

in short supply), Zhukhrai unstraps his Mauser and offers it to him as a present, saying: “Go ahead, take it! I know you’ve had your eye on it for a long time. But be careful, don’t shoot your own men. Here are three full clips to go with it.” The others turned to look at Pavel with clearly envious eyes. “Hey, Pavka,” someone yelled, “I’ll swap with you for a pair of boots and a sheepskin thrown in.” Pankratov nudged Pavel provokingly in the back. “Come on, you devil, swap with me for a pair of felt boots. Anyway, you won’t make it ’til Christmas in that galosh of yours.”23

The “envious eyes” with which the other diggers watch Pavka suggests that this episode is also structured by observation and surveillance. More than of mere “use value,” the goods offered by the state represent objects of symbolic exchange and the distribution of power. Pavka’s desire is to be recognized by the disciplinary forces that Zhukhrai and the visiting authorities represent. His willing sacrifice of his body (he is sleeping on a cement floor and working barefoot in the snow) shows his correct orientation toward the larger goals of the communal project. And it demonstrates “symbolic payment”: that “little bit of flesh” demanded by the big Other as payment for recognition. All the other men at the work site try to participate in this exchange of commodities. They offer Pavka real goods—warm boots and an overcoat—in exchange for Zhukhrai’s gun. And they threaten Pavka with the consequences of his overly zealous commitment to work: one of the workers suggests that Pavka will soon end up in a box (sygraet v iashchik), while the other warns that he won’t make it until Christmas. Even Zhukhrai’s joking warning not to shoot any of his own men suggests that Pavka is in some way a threat to the others—his commitment is too ardent, too extreme, he pushes himself and his men too far.24 This becomes most obvious in what follows Pavka’s acquisition of the Mauser: it is now his turn to repay the government, to sacrifice more of himself and his men. A contest, proposed by Zhukhrai in order to get the railroad built by January 1, is begun. The workers are divided into six groups, and whichever group finishes their assignment first gets to return to Kiev. Pavka, rising “long before dawn,” throws off the entire competition by getting his men to the job site hours before anyone else is awake. Rumor has it that

30   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

he wants to finish the job by December 25—not because he wants to return to Kiev, but because he wants to do it “faster” and “better,” to “throw out a challenge” to the other groups. Working nearly barefoot in the snow, exhausted and hungry, Pavka finally falls ill—yet even his 106-degree fever is not enough to get him to quit. Found in a snowbank, unconscious from illness and exhaustion, Pavka is loaded onto a passenger train and sent home. Only in this state is Pavka finally removed from the ranks—and, in a wish fulfillment stemming from a misunderstanding, presumed dead. The railroad-building episode is an answer that anticipates the question asked a couple of pages later: how is the government repaying Pavka for everything that he has done? Why has Pavka remained a simple “worker” in ragged clothes and worn-through boots? These questions are asked by Tonia Tumanova—Pavka’s childhood love and now what Ostrovskii calls a “pickled bourgeois lady”—when they meet unexpectedly at the site of the unfinished railroad. Taken aback by Pavel’s unexpected appearance, Tonia cannot bring herself to shake hands with the unbelievably shabby man whom she used to love: “Tonia with difficulty recognized this tramp as Korchagin. Pavel stood before her in torn and tattered clothing, fantastic footwear, with a dirty towel around his neck and a face that had not been washed in a long time. Only his eyes blazed with the same inextinguishable fire. His eyes.”25 Pavka’s distressing appearance is particularly striking this far along in the novel, because Pavka has already joined, fought, and suffered for the new Soviet state. After a series of hostile exchanges, Tonia makes one final attempt at renewing their friendship: “I must say I never expected to find you like this,” she says to Pavka, “Can it be that you’ve earned nothing better from the government than digging in the dirt? I thought you’d be a commissar or something like that by now. What a pity life has been so unkind to you.”26 Yet Pavka has been paid. The party has noted his bodily sacrifice—his exertion and refusal to protect himself from the cold—and he has been given a rifle and bullets, to protect the commune from threats from without (the gang of bandits) and from within (his own men). Moreover, Pavka receives his payment in front of everybody, under their “envious eyes.” Like the earlier episode in the field hospital, this scene is structured by the metaphor of observation. Zhukhrai notices Pavka’s “disappointed look.”

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   31

When giving him the rifle he says, “You’ve had your eye on this for a long time” (“u tebia na nego davno glaza goriat”). Other men gaze enviously as Pavka receives his payment. Even Tonia is able to recognize Pavka by his burning eyes. At stake here is not simply recognition of symbolic advantage (after all, with or without his new rifle, Pavka still has to work in unbearable conditions, worsened by his own decision to ask for a gun he does not really need instead of accepting the boots he really does), but the recognition of a subject disciplined by means of observation. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that the chief function of disciplinary power is “correct training,” and that instead of bending all its subjects into a single uniform mass, disciplinary power “separates, analyses, differentiates, carries its procedures of decomposition to the point of necessary and sufficient single units.” Discipline “makes” individuals, writes Foucault, “it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise.”27 Again, Pavka’s exchange with Zhukhrai illustrates this point: Pavka is singled out by the state, selected to become both the object and the instrument of its power. In return, he is “made” an individual—that is to say, Pavka is created as a subject, standing out and above the other men. Tonia Tumanova does not recognize Pavka’s newly constructed subjectivity because she herself has remained outside the structures of power—she is merely passing through on her way to some town, she is the state’s “abject.” Zhukhrai and the men, however, can see that Pavka has been separated, analyzed, differentiated, “trained.” This training is performed in part through the sacrifice of the body (the “pound of flesh” to the big Other) and in part through an exchange of gazes that produce subjects of observation. Zhukhrai himself, a member of the Cheka and Pavka’s former commander and boss, is missing an arm—like Pavka, the discipline to which he has subjected himself makes him “clearly visible” as an object and instrument of power. Observation, surveillance, and discipline produces the model Soviet subject. Under the envious eyes of others, with swollen and frostbitten feet, Pavka continues to sleep on the cement floor, work in the snow without adequate clothes, and ignore his mounting fever. Under the approving gaze of the party, Pavka disregards his own survival in exchange for ensuring the survival of the collective. In the Soviet order, Pavka is “clearly

32   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

visible,” and the signs of this visibility are written on his damaged body. The alien watcher from the field hospital is here converted into the state— represented both by the visiting members of the Kiev Cheka and by his fellow diggers—an external force that keeps Pavka constantly in its field of vision. The trope of observation, however, is not exhausted by the above scenes. Indeed, as a recurrent motif, observation structures the novel until we understand that Pavka, the New Soviet Man, installs the means of surveillance within himself, so that his “burning eye” (like his Mauser) is as easily turned inward as outward. This self-surveillance is made legible in the climactic moment of How the Steel Was Tempered: the moment of Pavka’s decision not to take his own life. As he sits at the edge of the sea, with a revolver in his pocket, Pavka reviews his life—all twenty-four years of it—like “an impartial judge” (bespristrastnyi sud’ia).28 Already the notion that Pavka can serve as his own impartial judge suggests Freud’s model in which the superego, standing apart from the ego, punishes the ego for its desires.29 The incorporation of the father’s voice “at the time of the ego’s weakness” splits the I (ego, moi) into the observer (super-ego, censor) and the subject/object of observation. The episode with the revolver makes the metaphor of superego/ego explicit. Later that evening, Pavka gives an account of this event to his soon-to-be wife Taia, claiming to have “held a meeting of my own private ‘political bureau’ and adopted a decision of tremendous importance.”30 The Politburo—the elite segment of the Central Committee that sits in judgment above all the other organizations—is the place from which Pavka is able to view himself impartially.31 Pavka has been called upon to investigate his own treason, his inability to continue to fight for the revolution because of the rapid disintegration of his body. The investigation leads Pavka to the decision to “remove himself from the ranks,” and then, faced with the barrel of his revolver, to the opposite conclusion—to continue to make himself useful to the state: What was there to live for if he had already lost what was most dear to him—the ability to fight? How to justify his life today and in the cheerless tomorrow? How to fill it? Merely eat, drink, and breathe? Remain a helpless bystander watching his comrades fight their way forward? Be a burden to the detachment? Or liquidate his treacherous body? A bullet in the heart—and be done with it! A timely end to a life

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   33

well lived. Who would condemn a soldier for putting himself out of his misery? His hand felt about in his pocket for the flat body of the Browning and his fingers gripped the handle familiarly. Slowly, he drew out the revolver. “Who would have thought that it would come to this?” The muzzle stared him in the eye with cold contempt. Pavel laid the revolver on his knee and cursed bitterly. “Fictional heroics, brother! Any fool can shoot himself, always and at any time. It’s the most cowardly and the easiest way out. Life’s too hard—so shoot yourself. But have you done everything possible to break the iron trap? . . . Hide that gun and never breathe a word of this to anyone. Learn how to go on living when life becomes unbearable. Make it useful.”32

As in the earlier scene in the hospital, here is a protagonist divided against himself, capable of sitting in (impartial) judgment over his actions, a subject constantly under observation by an external power. It is not surprising that the muzzle of the Browning “stares Pavka in the eye with cold contempt.” Like the Mauser, this revolver is a tool of discipline and power that ensures Pavka’s participation in the Stalinist order. But it is also the watchful eye of the octopus, again exteriorized in order to make legible the mechanisms of surveillance by which Pavka is trained and coerced. Pavka no longer needs the envious eyes of others to be able to see himself as a subject of observation. Foucault’s notion of the “perfect camp” in which each gaze forms a part of the overall functioning of power is here reduced to the individual and his own eye, perfectly visible and exposed, alone on the edge of the sea. “The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect,” these, like the dungeon, argues Foucault, can hide the individual from sight. Disciplinary power, like Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, on the other hand, divides and separates individuals, making them visible and inducing a “state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”33 As Foucault suggests, the guard does not need to remain in the tower in order to ensure that the Panopticon is functioning properly—indeed, it is better if the prisoners/madmen/children remain unsure that there is anyone there to watch them. By internal-

34   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

izing the mechanism of surveillance, the subjects of disciplinary power understand that they exist in a field of visibility, always under the watchful eye of an internalized Politburo.

Return of the Living Dead The difference between Ostrovskii’s biography and the semiautobiography that is How the Steel Was Tempered lies in part in Ostrovskii’s glorification of Pavka’s predicament. Invalided at the age of twenty-four, Pavka nevertheless continues to beg the party to let him rejoin its ranks. He wanders around work sites with a 106-degree fever, he angrily refuses his pension, he undermines his treatments at the various hospitals and sanatoriums to which he has been directed—but, most important, both for the novel and for the ideological fantasy of Stalinism—he refuses to die. In The Soviet Novel Katerina Clark writes, “All Stalinist novels include some kind of ‘death’ . . . because death is involved not only in the preparatory or liminal phase of the rite [of passage] but also in the moment of passage itself.”34 The rite of passage is made up of a series of “ordeals” that involve “not only suffering, but the transcendence of suffering.”35 Both parts of How the Steel Was Tempered end on such an ordeal—a moment of suffering, an encounter with chaos—signified in both cases by death and rebirth. The episode in the field hospital that ends part 1 concludes with Pavka’s miraculous recovery from a head wound. Writing in her diary, his doctor Nina Vladimirovna makes the motif of rebirth clear, “We wheeled Korchagin out onto the big balcony today for the first time,” she writes. “His head is swathed in bandages and only one eye is open. And that live, shining eye looked out on the world as if seeing it for the first time.”36 Similarly, the episode on the seashore toward the very end of the novel concludes with Pavka’s rediscovery of his usefulness to the collective: the possibility of “assisting at the birth” of a new human being, his soon-tobe wife, Taia. The novel finally ends when Pavka receives news that his autobiographical novel Rozhdennye burei (Born of the Storm) has been accepted for publication. This, of course, is also a moment of (re)birth and it confirms Pavka’s earlier decision to live on, despite the weakened state of his body. At this moment, Pavka the writer emerges from the immobilized remains of Pavka the soldier. At first, the two near-death experiences (the episode in the field hospital and the episode on the seashore) appear to give logical structure to

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   35

the novel. Yet, upon closer examination, they are only two of the four, or five, or six (depending on how you count them) near-death experiences to which the novel seems continually to return. Perhaps the most striking and, for the purposes of this argument, telling moment comes in the middle of the novel, after the railroad-building episode, when Pavka nearly dies of typhus. After sleeping on the cement floor of the workers’ barracks for months and working without warm clothes or boots in the middle of a Ukranian winter, Pavka falls ill with pneumonia and typhus. The 106degree fever, however, is still not enough to get Pavka to abandon work— he finally collapses in the snow on the railroad platform and is only discovered by his comrades two hours later. Despite protests from the other passengers who fear infection, Pavka is loaded onto a train car and sent home. On the way, the dead body of another young man is removed from the train and, in the confusion that follows everyone assumes that Pavka is dead. When Pavka returns from his mother’s house, where he has had yet another miraculous recovery, he discovers that his friends and comrades have moved away and that he has been declared dead and stricken from all party records. This episode is illustrative precisely because Pavka’s “death” does not bring him closer to full Soviet subjectivity or party membership as a ritual “ordeal” is meant to do but, instead, removes him from the collective altogether. Congratulating Pavka for not succumbing to typhoid, a fellow Bolshevik says, “Good for you, Pavlusha, for not dying! What good would you be to the proletariat if you were dead?”37 Seeming at first to predict a glorious future of usefulness for the newly returned Pavka, this question actually in turn begs another: what good is Pavka to the proletariat if he is not dead? After all, Pavka is now blind in one eye (his right, which makes it difficult to aim a gun), weakened by typhus and gangrene, and now, with a possible threat to his mobility emerging from an old trauma to the spine (which prevents him from being able to sit still, walk, or ride a horse), completely uneducated (which keeps him from becoming the writer and educator that he will eventually want to be), Pavka is in no shape to return to work. It is no wonder that his comrades have left him behind and the party has declared him dead: it is a moment of wish fulfillment on the part of the state, the elimination of this invalid body from its healthy and virile ranks. As Tufta in the personnel department says, speaking (unintentionally, perhaps) for the system as a whole, “So you didn’t die after

36   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

all? And what are we going to do now? You’ve been struck off the lists. I myself turned in your card to the Central Committee. What’s more you’ve missed the census, and according to the circular from the komsomol C. C. those who weren’t registered in the census are out. So the only thing you can do is to file an application again in the regular way, like the others.”38 Not only has Pavka been stricken from the lists and missed by the census but also the individuality and subjectivity that his commitment and sacrifice to the cause were supposed to ensure have been completely erased. If Pavka wants to rejoin the party, he must do so “the regular way, like the others” (na obshchikh osnovaniiakh). And yet, as Pavka makes clear in a letter to his brother at the end of the novel, none of this is enough to discourage him. After enumerating his multiple losses (blind in one eye, Pavka has by now lost the use of his arm and both legs and can only move about his room), Pavka asks Artem the following question: “Can there be a greater tragedy than that of a man who combines in him a treacherous body that refuses to obey him, and the heart and will of a Bolshevik who passionately yearns to work? . . . I still believe that I will return to the ranks, and that in time my bayonet will take its place in the attacking columns. I must believe that, I have no right not to. For ten years the party and the komsomol taught me to fight, and the leader’s words, spoken to all of us, apply equally to me: ‘There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot take.’”39 Indeed, the number of near deaths (by Ostrovskii’s reckoning Pavka had already had three near-death experiences by the time of the shrapnel episode that concludes part 1) and the degree of bodily damage that Pavka suffers seem to prove the point about the perseverance of the Bolshevik spirit in the face of adversity. But they also point to something else: Pavka’s insistent return to the site of his trauma—his commitment to the party—can only be understood as an example of what Žižek has called “idiotic enjoyment”—that is, an instance of pure drive, separated from any aim or goal except for the drive itself.40 Pavka does not seem to realize that in the eyes of the system he is already dead—he has been removed from the lists and stricken from the records. The party has been too successful in its desire to create the perfect self-sacrificing subject: discipline, training, self-criticism, bodily obligation—Pavka has taken all of these too far. He is the specter haunting Stalinism, socialist realism’s always returning “dead.” Though How the Steel Was Tempered certainly became one the most

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   37

famous works of socialist realism, its recognition and success did not come right away. Originally rejected by the editors on the basis of the “unreality” of its characters (nereal’nosti vyvedennykh v nei tipov),41 How the Steel Was Tempered, published from 1932 to 1934 in the journal Molodaia gvardia, produced little enthusiasm or reaction in the Soviet press. The journal editors initially offered Ostrovskii help in rewriting the novel— ridding it, among other things, of dialect and colloquial speech—and in its first journal publication, the novel appeared in severely abridged form, owing to a “shortage of paper.”42 According to Semen Tregub, who made his career writing about Ostrovskii, he continued to rework the novel for the next four years, and the novel was “corrected” and edited from edition to edition. A few early reviews of How the Steel Was Tempered appeared in 1932, and in 1933 the journals Molodaia gvardiia, Rost, and the newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda each had a small article about part 1 of the novel. The novel’s popularity, however, came later. In August 1934, V. Stavskii included Ostrovskii in his report on young new writers to the First Congress of Soviet Writers (published in Pravda on 17 August 1934). And later that year one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent journalists, Mikhail Kol’tsov, was dispatched to Sochi to write an article on Ostrovskii.43 In an article in Pravda entitled “Muzhestvo” (Courage, 17 March 1935), Kol’tsov described the “mummy” that was Nikolai Ostrovskii.44 He wrote, “Nikolai Ostrovskii is lying prone, flat on his back, absolutely still. The blanket is wrapped around the long, thin, straight column of his body, like an eternal, irremovable case. A mummy. But inside this mummy something is alive. Yes. The thin hands—just the hands—move slightly. They are damp to the touch.” Ostrovskii’s own biography, Kol’tsov wrote, should have already inspired novels. The Soviet public should not have had to wait for a man with such a history to write the story himself. Kol’tsov’s image of the living “mummy” was frequently repeated (or rejected) in later Soviet biographies, essays, and articles on Ostrovskii. Some biographers argued that it was impossible to see Ostrovskii as a “paralyzed invalid permanently chained to his bed” because of the strength of his voice and the depth of his eyes, which were completely blind yet nonetheless full of emotion. Ostrovskii’s first editor, M. B. Kolosov, noted that the blind man’s brown eyes looked as if they could see, that they lacked the glassy immobility typical of the blind. And Kolosov felt that though immobile,

38   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

Ostrovskii made an internal movement, “as if coming toward me.” Like his fictional hero, Pavka Korchagin, Ostrovskii was a “living” man, full of strength, energy, and movement.45 By its sixty-second edition in 1936, only two years after the original publication of part 2, How the Steel Was Tempered had sold 2 million copies. By 1950, the total publication for the two novels combined (How the Steel Was Tempered and the unfinished Born of the Storm) had reached almost 6 million. As a result of his enormous popularity, Ostrovskii spent the last fourteen months of his life in a house the government built for him in Sochi on the Black Sea coast, where he lived, according to his biographer Lev Anninskii, “like a living legend [zhivaia legenda] on the street named after himself,” his house being a “site of countless pilgrimages and an object of the greatest interest for foreign journalists” (mestom palomnichestva beskonechnykh delegatsii i predmetom ostreishego liubopytstva zarubezhnykh zhurnalistov).46 Anninskii’s description of Ostrovskii reveals the degree to which what was alive was no longer a human being but a fictional, mass-produced construct. Even Kol’tsov’s description of the “mummy” bore the marks of a literary antecedent: Lev Tolstoy’s description in Anna Karenina of Konstantin Levin’s younger brother, Nikolai, dying of consumption: In the dirty little room . . . on a bed drawn away from the wall lay a body covered with a blanket. One arm of that body lay outside the blanket, and the enormous hand, like a rake, seemed to be attached in some incomprehensible way to a long thin spindle that was quite straight from the end to the middle. The head lay on its side on the pillow. Levin could see the moist thin hair on the temples and the drawn transparent-looking forehead. “Impossible that this terrible body [strashnoe telo] can be my brother Nikolai,” he thought. But he drew nearer, saw the face, and doubt was no longer possible. In spite of the dreadful change on the face, Levin had only to glance at those living eyes raised toward him, to notice the slight movement of the mouth beneath the clammy moustache, in order to understand the dreadful truth that this dead body [mertvoe telo] was his living brother.47

Both Tolstoy and Kol’tsov’s descriptions stressed the same elements: the initial encounter with the frightening body (strashnoe telo), wrapped in

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   39

blankets that give it the appearance of a mummy or a corpse; the sudden realization that something is still alive inside that blanket, signified in both cases by facial movements (the eyes, in the case of Nikolai Levin, the voice, in the case of Nikolai Ostrovskii); and the final realization that the dead body (mertvoe telo) is still living. Moreover, Anninskii’s description of Ostrovskii as a “living legend” was meant to remind readers of another famous living corpse—Vladimir Lenin, whose body was displayed for all to see in a building created for just that purpose and bearing his name. Lenin, of course, was proclaimed to be the model of the “new man,” “the most human of all human beings,” “more alive than anyone” (Lenin zhivee vsekh zhivykh). Like Lenin, Ostrov­ skii was similarly entombed in what Alexander Prokhorov has called the Stalinist “m(a)us(ol)eum” (a museum/mausoleum where the nearly mummified body is both preserved and displayed) and similarly heralded as the embodiment of the new man.48 Platonov, in his critical observations on literature, wrote that the half-dead Ostrovskii was nonetheless happier than the genius Pushkin.49 “There are many works of Soviet literature,” writes Platonov, “that are written with more skill; but there is none that answers the need of the masses more than How the Steel Was Tempered. This novel reveals the end result of many years of effort of the Socialist revolution—the new, better human being: the most complex and the most necessary ‘product’ of the Soviet people, justifying all their sacrifice, all their struggles, their effort and their patience.”50 Writing about “Korchagin’s Happiness” in The Making of the State Reader, Evgenii Dobrenko similarly suggests that one very important characteristic of the “ideal” Soviet reader is his complete identification with the hero, which carries over into a desire to replace a literary character, to turn life into literature.51 As both Anninskii and Raia Ostrovskaia suggest, generations of youth can be raised on the example of Ostrovskii’s limitless drive for self-sacrifice. The novels and films under consideration in this book all have Ostrovkii’s How the Steel Was Tempered as a precursor. Their fictional heroes are always in part modeled on the kind of socialist commitment and bodily sacrifice made visible by Ostrovskii’s novel. Two more texts—no longer contemporary but post-Soviet—likewise take this socialist realist model of bodily dismemberment to its logical extreme, once again repeating the trope of wounded but nevertheless heroic masculinity: Victor Pelevin’s novel Omon Ra (1992) and Sergei Livnev’s film Serp i molot (Hammer and

40   ★   HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

Sickle, 1994). Hoping to become a cosmonaut, the protagonist of Pelevin’s novel is taken to the Mares’ev flight school—named after another famous mutilated socialist realist body, Alexei Mares’ev, who lost both of his legs in combat but continued to fly. At this flight school, boys are made into “real men”: “The next morning I was awakened by loud groans of pain and confusion right in my ear,” narrates Omon, “The surrounding beds were alive with a strange squirming and muffled bellowing. . . . From the next bed I met the pain-filled eyes of Slava; . . . where Slava’s legs should have been, the blanket fell straight down in an abrupt step, and the freshly starched blanket cover was stained with red blotches like the marks left on cotton towels by watermelon juice.”52 The “heroic invalid,” the “living mummy,” the mortally wounded yet enduring subject returns to postSoviet texts as an easily recognizable symbol of ideological commitment— the nearly but never completely dead Soviet hero. Thus, when “the colonel in the wheelchair” turns to face Omon and removes his glasses to reveal that he is blind and that “the lids of one eye had completely fused together, and whitish mucus gleamed dully between the lashes of the other,” we understand both from his name, Urchagin (stressing his connection to Korchagin), and from his damaged body that we are not merely in the presence of Soviet heroism, we are also in the presence of Soviet myth: the maimed, disabled, but nevertheless stubbornly alive male subject.53 Similarly, Sergei Livnev’s film recreates the Ostrovskii “m(a)us(ol)eum,” in which the paralyzed hero is entombed. At the end of the film, Evdokim Kuznetsov appears lying prone on a giant bed in the middle of the museum, with a cutout of the hammer and sickle on the headboard. He is paralyzed but still dressed in military uniform and surrounded by editions of his numerous novels, said to have been written after the accident and dictated to his wife by the merest of glances, each of which she has learned to interpret correctly. These examples literally equate bodily damage with Soviet heroism and lay bare the device of the ideological and cultural fantasy. Moreover, Livnev’s film (set during Stalinism) also underscores the visibility of the Stalinist subject. A model for Vera Mukhina’s Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer before the “accident,” after the “accident” Evdokim is displayed on a podium/bed, strikingly visible in the empty space of the room. Like Pavka Korchagin and Nikolai Ostrovskii, Evdokim has earned recognition from the state—in the field of disciplinary power, he has been isolated and exposed for all to see.

HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE   ★   41

It is worth noting, however, that in both of the post-Soviet examples, the protagonists are allowed a way out of the system. In Omon Ra, Omon leaves Lubianka, where he has spent most of the novel, and boards the red line of the metro, heading southwest. At the end of Hammer and Sickle, Evdokim motions to his daughter to pick up his gun and is shot. In both of these post-Soviet fantasies of totalitarianism, the subjects of discourse are ultimately set free by their authors. Even Ostrovskii the living mummy is finally allowed to die (though the length of his funeral service and his three-day postmortem display at the Union of Soviet Writers might suggest that the state was not ready to part with its most successful subject). Like Lenin, however, Ostrovskii’s hero Pavka Korchagin lives on. Invalided, humiliated, rejected, removed, Pavka nevertheless continues to return, begging for one more chance at Soviet subjectivity. The novel does not end with Pavka’s death, but instead with yet another metaphor of rebirth: “His heart beat fast. His cherished dream was realized! The steel bonds had burst, and once again, armed with a new weapon, he was returning to the fighting ranks and to life.”54 The imperfective tense of the last line “he was returning” (on vozvrashchalsia) points to the fact that Pavka’s most cherished dream is the return itself, the never-ending road back to Stalinist subjectivity. “Desire,” as Peter Brooks suggests, “is the wish for the end, for fulfillment, but fulfillment delayed so that we can understand it in relation to origin, and to desire itself.”55 Desire presupposes a goal and the possibility (no matter how far removed) of its fulfillment. The compulsion to repeat, on the other hand, has no goal, no aim, no end point. It is a “drive”—a mechanical act that takes the form of an imperfective tense, a “returning” but never a “return.” As Ostrovskii’s novel shows, full Stalinist subjectivity remains forever foreclosed for the Soviet subject, whose act of “returning” to Stalinist ranks marks the distance between the fantasy of inclusion and the reality of dis/memberment.

  

3 ★ VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA Giant workers’ hands grab at the world Feeling the earth—there’s something missing . . . O Party, tell me, tell me what are you looking for? And a solemn voice answers me:—the Party card. —A. Bezymenskii, “Partbilet # 224332” (24 January 1924), on the death of Lenin.

In 1994, director Leonid Trauberg opened his tribute to Ivan Pyr’ev with the following story. He wrote that when Partiinyi bilet (Party Membership Card [The Party Card], 1936) first appeared in theaters in Moscow, the film caused a stir: “My friend, the Leningrad director F. Ermler, who, from the very beginning of the revolution had worked in the party, in the Cheka, secretly confessed to me: ‘You see, I saw this movie and now, more than anything, I’m afraid for my party card, what if someone stole it? You won’t believe me, but at night I check under my wife’s pillow, to see if maybe it’s there.’”1 Trauberg goes on to describe his positive feelings about Pyr’ev as a director and as a human being, yet his opening story looms over the narrative. Ermler’s fears about his own safety are confirmed a paragraph later by the story of Elena Sokolovskaia, deputy director of the Mosfil’m studio who brought The Party Card to Leningrad for its Leningrad premiere. She also warned Trauberg that this was a movie to be watched “very seriously”

42

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   43

(ochen’ ser’ezno). Despite Sokolovskaia’s exemplary record as a Bolshevik, Trauberg tells us, “the legendary Elena” was arrested and perished in Siberia only a year later.2 Ivan Pyr’ev’s The Party Card is a sinister melodrama about the dangers of trusting your spouse. Anna Kulikova (Ada Voitsik), a good Communist from solid proletarian stock, marries Pavel Kuganov (Andrei Abrikosov), a newcomer from Siberia who seems to have all the credentials of Soviet heroism but who turns out instead to be an unreformed kulak, murderer, and traitor. Because of Anna’s blind trust, Pavel is able to join the plant where she works, to move into her apartment in Moscow, to get himself elected to the Communist Party, and to make plans for a work transfer to a high-security military plant. He is also able to steal Anna’s party card— that precious symbol of Communist membership dear to every Bolshevik 3—and to deliver it into the hands of Soviet enemies. The theft allows the enemy to move about Moscow freely and causes Anna to be expelled from the Communist Party for the negligent loss of her card. When Iasha (Igor’ Maleev), Anna’s true love and the “positive hero” of this film, comes back to Moscow, he discovers Anna’s dishonor. The film ends with Iasha, Fedor Ivanovich (head of the local party cell, played by Anatolii Goriunov), and the NKVD bursting into the couple’s apartment to find the brave Anna holding her villainous husband at gunpoint. As Ermler’s worries make clear, what appears to be a story about the dangers of trusting a husband is actually a story about the dangers of trusting a wife—and the The Party Card stages Anna’s ideological fall in gendered terms. Sokolovskaia’s fate and Ermler’s fears certainly suggest that the film contained an implicit threat directed at the most devout Bolsheviks (those who had fought in the revolution, had worked for the government, and even had ties to the Cheka). This threat stemmed from the thirties’ rhetorical construction of the party as a monolith whose “purity” had to be maintained through thorough investigations of the biographical, political, and sexual behavior of its members. In The Party Card Anna’s political purity is couched in specifically gendered terms—she is guilty not just as a party member, but as a female party member—and the projection of guilt onto woman temporarily relieves the putative masculine spectator’s anxiety that he too might be guilty of political adultery. As Ermler’s fear of finding his party card under his wife’s pillow makes

44   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

clear, no spectator ultimately escapes the threat of (political) castration that Pyr’ev’s film stages and then disavows. By projecting the guilt onto Anna, however, The Party Card turns this spectacle of political castration into visual pleasure, locating the “discourse of the purge” specifically in the purging of woman and temporarily safeguarding its male subjects.4

Purity and Danger A prolific director, decorated with two Orders of Lenin and four Orders of the Red Banner (ordena Trudovogo Krasnogo Znameni), Ivan Pyr’ev had a forty-year career in cinema that started with his first black comedy, Posto­ ronniaia zhenshchina (The Foreign Woman, 1928), and ended with the screen adaptation of Brat’ia Karamazovy (The Brothers Karamazov, 1968). Yet during the Stalin period, Ivan Pyr’ev was known best for his “tractor musicals,” which, like those of Grigorii Aleksandrov, captured on celluloid Stalin’s mantra, “Life has become better, life has become happier” (zhit’ stalo luchsche, zhit’ stalo veselee).5 Pyr’ev’s musical comedies—Bogataia nevesta (The Country Bride, 1938), set on a communal farm in Ukraine; Traktoristy (The Tractor Drivers, 1939), also set on a communal farm in Ukraine; Svinarka i pastukh (The Pig Farmer and the Shepherd, 1941), set on communal farms in Belorussia and Georgia; and Kubanskie kazaki (The Cossacks of Kuban, 1949), set on a communal farm in Kuban’—all starred Pyr’ev’s wife, Marina Ladynina, who drove a tractor, danced with pigs, and was always willing to sacrifice her own happiness for the happiness of the collective. These comedies showed the prosperity of the great Soviet state through well-choreographed musical numbers depicting the joys of backbreaking industrialized farming. The Party Card predates these musical comedies. A melodrama about a class enemy (klassovyi vrag) who worms his way into the heart of a young Communist woman and into party ranks, the film, starring Voitsik rather than Ladynina and set in “new Moscow,” is in every way the reverse of Pyr’ev’s communal farm musicals.6 Indeed, The Party Card in many ways represents the underlying threat to the great Soviet prosperity promised by the musical comedies. If Pyr’ev’s tractor musicals showed the happy life of the countryside, his urban melodrama showed the need for “Bolshevik vigilance” necessary to preserve that happy life. As Soviet film reviewers in 1936 were fond of repeating, The Party Card showed the enemy’s new

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   45

methods of operation and demonstrated the ease with which a class enemy could pass himself off as a loyal Soviet citizen.7 Released in 1936, The Party Card appeared in a moment of political and cinematic uncertainty, in terms both of Communist Party policies of the mid-thirties and Pyr’ev’s own career. For at least three years, Pyr’ev made one false start after another, including a failed collaboration with Mikhail Bulgakov on a screen adaptation of Gogol’s Dead Souls.8 Finally, in 1935, Pyr’ev found “what he had been looking for”: a previously rejected screenplay written by Katerina Vinogradskaia called Anka.9 Vinogradskaia had initially intended her screenplay for director Mikhail Romm, who refused to take it on for reasons that are not given but perhaps could be inferred from Pyr’ev’s own subsequent history: at its first internal Mosfil’m screening, the film was rejected and Pyr’ev was nearly expelled. Even the film’s release did not save Pyr’ev’s career at Mosfil’m—he left the studio and moved to Kiev, where he proceeded, as Maia Turovskaia puts it, to make nothing but “fairy tales” (stat’ rasskazchikom skazok).10 Written in 1933–1934, Vinogradskaia’s screenplay for Anka was meant to be, as an early reviewer reported, “the first serious work of art about love. The heroine’s love for Pavel, who turns out to be a very subtle (tonkii) class enemy, ends in tragedy, from which Anka, as a Communist, emerges grown up, richer in political and life experience.”11 The original narrative was set at a biology institute and the original Anka was a student—in his memoirs Pyr’ev remembers her as a “small, red-haired girl”—seduced by the older Pavel, whose only goal was sabotage.12 Unmasked as an enemy, Pavel moves on to a different location and presumably a different girl, while Anka is transformed into a mature woman and Communist (this is the story of the birth of the New Woman) worthy of our admiration. Indeed, the last line of the screenplay, delivered by Iasha in a state of euphoria, reads: “Comrades, these are the kinds of women that live in our country!” (“Vot kakie zhenshchiny u nas v strane, tovarishchi!”).13 Despite Vinogradskaia’s reputation and talent,14 however, this “first serious work of art about love” clearly centered too much on love, or perhaps more accurately, on sex. Pyr’ev includes the following passage from the screenplay in his memoirs, to demonstrate everything that was wrong with the original version. One of the key scenes, he writes, was the “night of love” (liubovnaia noch’) between Anka and Pavel that took place in the

46   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

institute’s garden, in the company of the various laboratory animals that Pavel had just mistakenly set loose: Dogs play in the garden, doing somersaults in the grass. . . . Jumping white bundles of rabbits. . . . Cats glide by with silky backs. . . . The trees move quietly. The leaves rustle gently in the night. Shadows chase each other. The jumps of a hunt, the call, the chase. . . . Attic night. Paradise. . . . Two figures under a tree. . . . Pavel stands back, having let go of Anka, but now she presses against him herself. Her neck glistens in the dark. She is no longer trying to get away. She is listening to the other, strange heart, this mute Eve. Her arms have grown heavy.15

“The above passage,” comments Pyr’ev in his memoirs, “clearly explains both the direction that the author wanted to take the screenplay in, and the reasons why so many directors rejected it.”16 The above passage does in fact show that the screenplay conceived of Anka’s vulnerability and seduction in purely sexual terms. In a “wild” nighttime garden, filled with shadowy movements and mysterious animal noises, the young Anka—this “mute Eve”—falls prey to temptation. Her consequent “maturity” comes about as a result of sexual knowledge, of love and betrayal, and of the realization that she has been seduced by the enemy. Through this misplaced emphasis on sexual seduction, however, Pyr’ev claimed to be able to see in this story the element of contemporary relevance (aktual’nost’) that he had been looking for ever since he had first watched Chapaev—the moment when the seduced Anka first recommends Pavel for membership in the Komsomol, but, discovering his true kulak origins, runs to stop the election process.17 This element—Anka’s political commitment taking precedence over her love—convinced Pyr’ev that the screenplay could be rewritten and made into a film. After considerable revision either by Pyr’ev and Vinogradskaia or by the State Directorate of the Film and Photo Industry (GUKF), the screenplay shifted radically from love story to political melodrama.18 The new version centered on the loss of Anna’s party membership card, her subsequent trial, expulsion, and eventual vindication. As Soviet critics and later Soviet viewers repeatedly noted, the film’s central problem was Bolshevik vigilance (bol’shevistskaia bditel’nost’), while “the main star of the film [was] the party card.”19 Despite the timeliness of its political message, which coincided with the nationwide campaign of party card exchange and verification, Pyr’ev’s

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   47

film was almost not released to the public, and the history of its eventual appearance on the Soviet screen seems typical of the vicissitudes of the Stalinist film industry. The years 1935–1937 marked a period of particular uncertainty for both films and filmmakers. In 1935 Sergei Eisenstein delivered his famous apology for cinematic formalism and intellectual montage and then went on to make Bezhin Lug (Bezhin Meadow), a film that could never be finished because of its “formalist” tricks.20 Meanwhile, Boris Shumiatskii, the head of the recently centralized Soviet film industry (Soiuzkino), traveled to the United States to study the Hollywood studio system, proposing, on his return, to build a “Soviet Hollywood” on the Black Sea coast—an idea that initially earned him great fame and later was partially responsible for his arrest.21 Out of 130 planned films for 1935, only 45 were completed (46 out of 165 in 1936; and 24 out of 62 in 1937).22 Reorganization and centralization led not only to internal instability but also to the introduction of new bureaucratic administrative units in charge of censorship and review. Screenplays as well as finished films were now vetted by many different organizations whose authority conflicted and overlapped. In Cinema and Soviet Society, Peter Kenez details the extent of censorship and control exercised by various organizational bodies on Soviet filmmaking, commenting that “even after all these discussions, censorship, evaluations, additions and deletions, a large number of completed films in the 1930s remained unreleased and were considered ‘ideological rejects’ (ideologicheskii brak).”23 Pyr’ev’s The Party Card was such a reject. Pyr’ev remembers even the shooting of the film as a series of episodes of wrecking and sabotage. The Mosfil’m newsletter regularly blamed the crew for various shortcomings, their sets were struck before they could finish filming, they were not given equipment, on days of the shoot they were prevented from using the sound stage, someone cut the wires of the sound camera with an axe, making synchronous shooting impossible, and every two to three weeks the studio changed administrative heads. Finally, once it was finished, the leadership of the Mosfil’m studio found the film to be “unsuccessful, false, and distorting of Soviet reality” and shelved it.24 Suffering the consequences of studio infighting and external pressures, The Party Card would not have been released but for the sudden involvement of the Central Committee. According to Pyr’ev’s memoirs, the film was selected by the assistant director of Mosfil’m, A. M. Slivkin,

48   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

to be shown at a closed screening at the Barvikha sanatorium to “major party officials” (krupnym partrabotnikam), where a discussion of the film’s merits and drawbacks lasted until two in the morning, “despite the strict rules of the sanatorium.” Next, the film was rushed to the Kremlin, where it “was judged to be politically correct, of contemporary relevance, and where instead of Anka it was given the title The Party Card” (posle prosmotra v Kremle fil’m nash byl priznan politicheski pravil’nym, aktual’nym, vmesto “Anki” emu bylo prisvoeno nazvanie “Partiinyi bilet”).25 Initially about membership in the Komsomol, the corrected version of The Party Card dealt with a theme of truly contemporary resonance—membership in the Communist Party—a theme recognized and approved of by the highest ranking Soviet officials and by Stalin himself. 26 In the thirties, Communist Party membership was indeed a topic of contemporary relevance. The ongoing political purges and document verifications of 1933–1936 were aimed at reducing the number of members of the party, that elite core of citizens who proudly possessed party membership cards. Membership in the Communist Party had reached unprecedented numbers: during the collectivization and industrialization campaigns of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) it had grown by 1.4 million members.27 Bad record keeping, easy access to blank party cards, and a lack of central control over membership elections meant that thousands of politically illiterate, “alien,” “parasitic,” “unreliable,” and “unsteadfast” persons had entered the party since 1931.28 The 1933 purge (chistka), the 1935 verification (proverka), and the 1936 party card exchange (obmen) were all meant to rid the party of these undesirable elements. As J. Arch Getty and others have pointed out, in the thirties, a party membership card was an extremely valuable commodity. It entitled the bearer to special privileges, entrance to party buildings, special rations of food and clothing, and, before the mid-thirties, it made the party member immune from arrest by civil authorities.29 As a symbol of power, however, a party membership card also demonstrated the radical contingency of the Stalinist political system and the arbitrary exercises of discipline deployed by the Central Committee. The initial unionwide party purge, regulated by a central directive sent in April 1933, was one in a series of “cleansings” of incompetents, drunkards, and thieves that had been taking place periodically since 1917. It had, however, a more sinister theme: “An enemy with a party card in his pocket,” wrote the editors of Pravda (11 Decem-

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   49

ber 1932), “is more dangerous than an open counterrevolutionary.”30 In a scene much like the one enacted in The Party Card, party members were called in front of ad hoc commissions formed by representatives of local party leaders. Approaching the front of the room, Communists placed their party cards on a red-draped table (this procedure entered colloquial speech via the command, “Party card on the table!” [“Partbilet na stol!”]), and, with portraits of the party’s leaders in the background, recited their political biographies and answered questions.31 In The Party Card, the revelation of Anna’s missing card and the meeting of the party’s ad hoc commission both take place under the prominently and centrally placed portrait of Politburo member and head of the Leningrad party organization, Sergei Kirov. The choice of this portrait was not accidental. It showed both the attention to matters of political timeliness (the already mentioned aktual’nost’ that had so attracted Pyr’ev and Stalin) and the stakes of Anna’s expulsion from the party. Kirov’s assassination on 1 December 1934, at Leningrad party headquarters in Smol’nyi, by Leonid Nikolaev, a former party member still in possession of his party card, meant that the party was indeed in danger of enemy intrusion.32 Anna’s loss of her party card and its use by a female spy to penetrate buildings of national security echoed the circumstances of Kirov’s murder, visually signaled by his portrait and Pavel’s reference to “the traitorous shot at Smol’nyi.”33 The purges, originally scheduled to end in November 1933, were still not officially complete in May 1935, when the party leadership in Moscow decided to extend the purge to a party document verification, or proverka, in order “to restore Bolshevik order in our own party house.” This verification appeared to be designed to catch those who had “slipped through” the purge, who remained in the party by means of deception (obmannym putem) and who may also have been hidden “class aliens.” The ascension to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler in 1933, the revelation of a “Leningrad Center” responsible for Kirov’s assassination, followed shortly by a notice of discovery of a “Moscow Center” that had ties to White Guard organizations, and the trials and death sentences for the accused brought the rhetoric of “vigilance” (bditel’nost’) to a fever pitch. In August 1935 the Central Committee annulled the results of the verification campaign and announced the necessity of repeating the entire process.34 The May release of Pyr’ev’s The Party Card coincided with a third wave

50   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

of “cleansing.” The 1936 party card exchange served as yet a third verification and was governed by even tighter disciplinary procedures. Only the local first secretary could hand out the new cards, received directly from the Central Committee by NKVD field courier and filled out in special ink provided by Moscow.35 Moreover, local party organizations were to submit to the Central Committee specimens of all the signatures to appear on the cards. Each card was to have affixed to it the photograph of the member— otherwise, it was void.36 Central Committee instructions warned against party cards falling into the hands of enemies, declaring that “never before has the title of a party member been so high.” The instructions equally stressed the need for party members’ purity in light of the presence of enemies both without and within.37 In September, Pravda was still calling on the Soviet people to maintain vigilance in order “to guarantee the safety of the party from intrusions into its ranks of foreign [chuzhikh], antagonistic [vrazhdebnykh], or accidental [sluchainykh] elements.”38 This emphasis on “intrusion” of foreign, antagonistic, and accidental elements may be seen in terms of Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt as “matter out of place” or Judith Butler’s definition of the “abject.”39 At stake here is a system guarding itself against pollution through self-cleansing, a system whose goal is the production of “subjects.” Approaching dirt as “matter out of place,” writes Douglas, implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting of inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity. We can recognize in our own notions of dirt that we are using a kind of omnibus compendium which includes all the rejected elements of ordered systems. . . . In short, our pollution behavior is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications.40

To maintain itself as a closed system, the Communist Party under Stalin guarded itself against pollution through continuous checkups of the purity of its members.41 The ritual of party card exchange, during which former party members confessed their wrongdoings and sought rehabili-

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   51

tation, was a prelude to the mass arrests and confessions that would find their fullest expression in the show trials of 1937–1938. The marking off of “foreign, antagonistic, and accidental elements” ensured that loyal Stalinist subjectivity could be constructed through erasing that which remained in place after all other elements were stripped away. However, the word purge itself—chistka—already spoke to the process of systematic and symbolic elimination. Following the evolution of the word chistka from its mundane usage (removal of dirt or impurity) to its political connotations, Oleg Kharkhordin notes that the Bolshevik reinterpretation was not particularly novel and that the term purging had been applied to recruiting members of the Orthodox clergy to serve in the fighting army at least since the time of Catherine the Great. As with the earlier church historians, the Bolsheviks’ use of the term reconceptualized the mundane word chistka to become the central term of their discourse. “The aim of the purge in the political sense of the word,” writes Kharkhordin, “is taken to be a cleansing of the body—the church’s or the party’s—of malignant elements, so that in the end a tightly united corps, ready to preach or fight, is produced. Stress on the unity of the corporate body is a recurrent theme in early Bolshevik sources.” Thus, in 1921, the resolution on the first general purge of the party stated that penetration of the party body by bourgeois elements made it necessary to conduct the purge so that “the party would be cast as a monolith” (vylita iz odnogo kuska).42 Though Kharkhordin points out that the notion of the “body politic” in its Western sense was never developed in Russia, nonetheless, he notes the medical and bodily metaphors that proliferated in party discourse. The 1928 Central Control Commission plenum talked about “ulcers” and issued a call to “uproot the degenerate elements in our organizations”; and in 1933 Iaroslavskii wrote in his brochure on the general purge: “A cadaver of (bourgeois society) . . . is decaying in our environment, this cadaver rots and infects us.”43 Similarly, Stephen Kotkin points out that “discussions of the verification, like the purge, combined the rhetoric of hygiene with that of inquisition”44—rhetoric that made explicit the Soviet Union’s attempt to reconstitute the nation and the party through the systematic expulsion of its abject subjects. Most important, however, the party’s activities as a kind of “spiritual guide,” as Kotkin has suggested, “turned out to be a source of strength but also a deadly burden for both the party and the country. Life in the

52   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

party was characterized alternatively by feelings of omnipotence and utter vulnerability, by smug complacency shattered by periods of unremitting tension, by proclamations of ironclad ‘truths’ amid threatening uncertainties.”45 Pyr’ev’s film turned out to be perhaps of even more contemporary relevance than he had at first imagined: it staged precisely this anxiety— perceived immediately by Ermler and Sokolovskaia—that stemmed from the party’s desire for what Kotkin refers to as “iron discipline, absolute purity and supreme personal sacrifice” in the light of its own vulnerability and “threatening uncertainties.” In other words, The Party Card did not simply recycle Stalinist rhetoric, turning its party membership card into a fetish object and punishing its female protagonist for the object’s loss. Rather, the film simultaneously acknowledged and (through displacement onto woman) disavowed the terror and uncertainty of Stalinist subjectivity, of what it meant to be so close to and yet so far from power.

Visual and Other Pleasures Pyr’ev was not alone, of course, in dealing with contemporary subject matter or even specifically, with the question of internal enemies. Kenez notes that in the seven years 1933–1939 Soviet directors made eighty-five films, fifty-two of which dealt with the struggle against saboteurs. The hero, writes Kenez, “could never be too vigilant: In Dovzhenko’s Aerograd the enemy turned out to be his best friend, in Eisenstein’s unfinished Bezhin Meadow it was the protagonist’s father, and in Pyr’ev’s Party Card, it was the heroine’s husband.”46 In The Party Card, the rhetoric of hygiene (of purity and cleanliness, as well as contamination) translated into the rhetoric of virginity and the sins of sexuality.47 Here the topic of national safety from enemy attack was presented in terms of bodily integrity and resistance to sexual penetration. Anna is pure and whole before her card is “taken from her,” before she gives the enemy that which is most precious. Through her “loss,” Anna not only loses her place in the Communist Party, but also “opens” herself and her country up to the enemy. Indeed, in The Party Card, the integrity of Anna’s body as the integrity of the Soviet nation-state is overtly articulated. Holding Anna in his arms, Pavel calls her his “Moscow”: “the party, my life, my love, Anna!” (“Partiia, zhizn’ moia, liubov’, Anna!”). This linguistic conflation of feminine nouns shows that the party itself is threatened by Anna’s loss; after all, enemies use her card to penetrate buildings of highest national security, to enter

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   53

what the film poetically calls “the heart” of the party. In Vinogradskaia’s original screenplay, Pavel steals a set of keys from Anka, enabling him to commit acts of sabotage. In the final film version, the keys become metaphoric: Pavel claims that by losing her card, Anna has given the enemy the “key” to the heart of the Communist Party. The Party Card is particularly interesting because of its attention to Anna’s position as a betrayed and dishonored wife and Communist. At her trial, Anna is humiliated by fellow party members (including her own husband) and expelled from the party for her “loss of vigilance.” 48 Clearly this loss is more symbolic than actual: a loss of vigilance that is coded as a loss of virginity. The language used during the trial is charged with sexual innuendo. The Russian verb dat’/davat’, to give, has the connotation in spoken Russian of sexual activity, translated most closely perhaps by the idiom “to put out.”49 Thus, the numerous statements made by the party members about what Anna did with her card, whom she “gave it to,” where and when she might have lost it, as well as the concern about the enemy “using” her card, all point to Anna’s status as a sexually promiscuous woman. “Who’d you give it to? Did you lose it?” (“Ty komu davala? Ty teria­la?”), asks Fedor Ivanovich, the head of the local party cell and the main prosecutor at Anna’s trial. The card, he says, is “a symbol of honor, pride, and the struggle of every Bolshevik” (simvol chesti, gordosti i bor’by kazhdogo bol’shevika). By losing the card, Anna “loses her right to be in the ranks of the party” (poteriala pravo byt’ v riadakh nashei partii). One party member suggests that even if in the place of Anna stood his own daughter or the daughter of any of the other party members, he would still have to tell her “with pain and anguish,” that “by losing her party card, she has lost his trust” (raz ty poteriala partbilet, to ty poteriala nashe doverie). As this speech makes clear, anyone’s daughter can be substituted for Anna (this is a female problem), and the rhetoric of honor and trust further underscores Anna’s loss as a sexual misstep. Fedor Ivanovich tells Anna that her negligence is “that crack in the strong wall of our vigilance through which the enemy can crawl inside” (nebrezhnost’, eto ta shchel’ v krepkoi stene nashei bditel’nosti, v kotoruiu prolezaet vrag).50 Her own husband, turning on her in a moment of overzealous patriotism, tells Anna that she has lost vigilance and “given the enemy the key to the heart of our party” (Ty dala vragu kliuch k serdtsu

54   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

nashei partii, ty poteriala bditel’nost’). And Anna herself, though defending her unmarred status, declares, “I didn’t lose my card, I didn’t give it to anyone—but I . . . I am . . . guilty” (“Bilet ia ne teriala, bilet ia nikomu ne davala—no ia . . . ia . . . vinovata”). During the trial scene, Anna sits in the corner with her head down—the picture of a disgraced and fallen woman. Cowering, not willing to look up, she sinks under the insistent investigative eyes of her fellow party members, now members of the prosecution. She has been fully invested with guilt (in Laura Mulvey’s theorizing of the term as applied to narrative cinema), and the camera takes great pleasure in investigating Anna’s misbehavior.51 As Mulvey notes, “The magic of Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence), arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure.”52 Visual pleasure—the pleasure in looking, voyeurism, scopophilia—is at the heart of cinema, and the image of woman is the central object of its look. Yet, as Mulvey argues, the presence of the female figure on screen always poses the problem of sexual difference: though pleasurable to look at, she connotes something that the look continually circles around and disavows, “her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure.” The “male unconscious” has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of film noir) or else, complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that is becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence overvaluation, the cult of the female star).53

The logic of the fetish—“Je sais bien . . . mais quand-même . . .” (I know very well . . . but all the same . . .)54—is based in a dual belief; in order to deny woman’s lack, one must first acknowledge it. In order to save the woman, one must first find her guilty. Pyr’ev’s memoirs make clear that in The Party Card one type of visual pleasure has been replaced by another: the romantic plot line has been subsumed by the political one. Yet traces of the former’s existence not only peek through the political narrative, they also help to make that narrative

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   55

pleasurable. Ada Voitsik has not been made to look particularly attractive on screen—she is not dressed, made up, or coiffed to elicit the spectator’s erotic attention—but she nonetheless serves as the object of the viewer’s look, as the central and only female figure of the film.55 As noted earlier, the original story line depicted Anka’s relationship with Pavel in sexualized terms. A description of Anka from Vinogradskaia’s screenplay reads as follows: “Wearing only a tee-shirt, all sweaty, [Anka] is working, surrounded by blindingly sparkling glass” (V odnoi maike, vsia vlazhnaia, ona rabotaet sredi oslepitel’nogo bleska stekla).56 Her meeting with Pavel in part 2 of the screenplay has undeniably erotic undertones: Anka is leaning distractedly against the cool wall, making use of a minute of rest. Pavel looks her up and down quickly. Against the wall the girl and her shadow. Long bronze legs, made even longer by the shadow, a youthfully tight, well-worn tee-shirt, eyes heavy from the heat. [It looks like we were incorrect regarding the appearance of this girl.] A small stream of water runs slowly between them. A sign on the container on the wall: Boiling water. Cooled. 57

The tight, well-worn tee-shirt, the emphasis on the heat, the description of Anka’s long bronze legs and Pavel’s looking, as well as the small stream that runs between them, all point to a highly sexualized vision of Anka. Anka’s status as young woman, girl (devushka or devchonka) again helps to produce her as a sex object. However, the inserted editorial remark regarding a mistake in Anka’s appearance suggests that Anka’s age is disturbing even to Vinogradskaia herself. Anka begins this screenplay as a young girl, and her maturation into the New Woman takes place not through political education but through sexual experience. In The Party Card Anna is older, has short hair, and is dressed appropriately in a conservative smock. Her name, too, changes to show an age difference: no longer called by the diminutive “Anka,” she is now “Anna,” a name that underscores her mature status. She is already politically wise; nonetheless, the basic elements of the seduction and betrayal of a young, sexually inexperienced girl remain the same. Anna’s legitimate marriage to Pavel has all the trappings of an illicit love affair; Anna’s loss of her party card is coded explicitly as an unintentional loss of virginity and the revelation of her “difference” from her fellow party members. The film begins with a love triangle and Anna as the amorous object

56   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

of two men, Iasha and Pavel. Though de-eroticized by the filmmakers from her original conception (recall here that the first screenplay was about love not politics), Anna, the perfect Communist, is nevertheless the focus of male fantasy, representing access to a kind of Communist plenitude. For Pavel in particular, Anna represents “Moscow”—his way of getting a job (Iasha and Anna recommend him to Fedor Ivanovich), a place to live (he moves in with Anna’s family), membership in the Communist Party (in the film Anna does not reveal his kulak origins), and the ability to move up through the ranks of the Soviet system (Anna’s brother can get him work at the military plant). The head of the foreign intelligence for whom Pavel secretly works explicitly mentions Pavel’s marriage to Anna as an example of his success in making a place for himself in the Soviet system. Marriage to Anna represents wholeness and plenitude, signaling entrance into a “true Bolshevik family.” This can be seen most clearly during the wedding dinner, when Anna’s father speaks sternly to Pavel about the Kulikov family. After listing off the accomplishments of the two sons, he tells Pavel, “The country already knows us a bit. We are the Kulikov family. An ordinary name. But it’s with the Kulikovs now that you are going to live. Live according to our traditions. Traditions that are firm, true, and honest. Hold up high the banner of our name! Don’t muck it up!” (“Derzhi-zhe vysoko znamia nashei familii! Smotri, ne podgad’!”) This speech could easily be translated into the language of what Katerina Clark terms the “Great Family.”58 This marriage, in other words, is more than a union with Anna, or even with the imposing Kulikov family—it is a union with the state itself. From this discourse of plenitude we understand that the film’s actual concern is not with Anna’s lack but with Pavel’s. An outsider, without connections, rejected by his relatives, Pavel enters the film by “missing the boat” on which Anna and Iasha celebrate May Day. Only by insinuating himself into their friendship, into their lives, and into their place of work, does Pavel gain the attributes of privileged Soviet citizenship. From the very beginning of the film, Pavel does not belong—and father Kulikov’s warning that he not “muck up” the family name is another indication of Pavel as “matter out of place.” It is no wonder then that Pavel’s celebration of his inclusion turns into a reminder of his lack, and Pavel is denied true “possession” of Anna precisely at the moment that appears to be the con-

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   57

Fig. 3.1. The “rape” of Anna. Image courtesy of Mosfilm-info.

summation of their marriage and the celebration of his success. Instead, Anna’s imagined loss of virginity is displaced onto Pavel’s theft of her party card, a symbol of Communist plenitude and ultimate belonging. Having returned from a picnic in the countryside with Anna’s family, and having just been assured by Anna’s brother that he will get the work transfer to the military plant, Pavel is beside himself with joy. Grabbing hold of Anna, Pavel begins to threaten someone off-screen, boasting of his accomplishments. He says, “I came to Moscow with a small suitcase, begged under fences, asked for things, bent over backwards before the likes of Iasha—now just try it! Not just anyone, but a Muscovite! Not just anyone, but a party member! I am happy, Anna! I am happy that I have you! [ia raduius’, chto ia imeiu tebia!] I am happy that I am in Moscow! [You are] the party, my life, my love—Anna!” This speech is a celebration of belonging, a celebration of place (in Moscow, in the party), and it culminates in Pavel’s attempted possession of the object that has made his union with Moscow and the party possible—Anna.

58   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

Indeed, to underscore the moment of possession, the entire scene is visually structured by the trappings of a wedding night. Anna, dressed in white and holding a bouquet of flowers, runs breathlessly into the dark and empty house, illuminated only by the occasional searchlight. Since the rather somber wedding dinner presided over by Anna’s father, this is the first time that Anna and Pavel have found themselves alone in an apartment usually occupied by Anna’s family.59 Frightened by Pavel’s excessive force, Anna tries to escape and their final struggle on the bed looks very much like attempted rape. Even the choice of the verb “to have” (imet’— “ia raduius’, chto ia imeiu tebia”)—connotes sexual possession. 60 Anna’s (sexual) virtue is saved by the ringing telephone, marking the film’s displacement of sexual purity onto political purity. The telephone call from the head of the foreign intelligence for whom Pavel secretly works ensures that the political is put above the personal by channeling Pavel’s sexual desire into political action. Instead of staying home with his wife, Pavel goes to receive his new assignment. Instead of taking her virginity, Pavel steals her party card. Still more can be said about this moment because it reveals not only the film’s desire to code political disenfranchisement in sexual terms, but also again points us back to Pavel’s inadequacy as a Soviet subject. If, as Kaja Silverman suggests, “classic male subjectivity rests upon a denial of castration,” and hence manifests itself in the “refusal to acknowledge the defining limits of subjectivity,” then Pavel’s drama of dispossession works as a reminder of his (political) castration.61 Pavel’s great speech of belonging is frightening precisely in the way it underscores his méconnaissance, his denial of lack and (subsequent) belief in his own plenitude, refusing to acknowledge the limits of his subjectivity. The call from the foreign intelligence reminds him of his symbolic debt as it underscores his lack: Pavel is simply a tool in the larger game of power, made to steal what he does not have. The theft of the party card leads to Anna’s investigation, trial, and eventual expulsion from the Communist Party. Since Fedor Ivanovich initially believes that Anna lost her card through negligence, the emphasis during the trial is not on theft but on loss—the loss of the card coded as a loss of virginity. The initial investigation takes place in Fedor Ivanovich’s office, under a portrait of Sergei Kirov. Indeed, throughout the scene, Fedor Ivanovich and Anna stand to the left and right of the portrait, re-

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   59

Fig. 3.2. The party card. Image courtesy of Mosfilm-info.

Fig. 3.3. Mis/recognition. Image courtesy of Mosfilm-info.

60   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

spectively, framing it between them. The portrait of Kirov again reappears during the trial, reminding the viewer of the real-world consequences of Anna’s imagined negligence. The details of Anna’s investigation provide an insight into the film’s construction of psychic and political plenitude that recalls Mulvey’s argument about guilt and visual pleasure. They also help us to understand better the stakes of Pyr’ev’s film and, indeed, of Stalinist culture. Unexpectedly called upon by Fedor Ivanovich to produce her card, Anna rushes around the factory, but the card is neither in her briefcase nor in her desk. When she returns, Fedor Ivanovich holds up the “mutilated” party card: Anna’s picture has been removed and replaced by a photograph of another woman, a member of the foreign intelligence, who for five days used the card to penetrate the most secure buildings and organizations in Moscow before being apprehended. Anna first jumps at the chance to claim the card as hers (she thinks she recognizes it from its cover), but seeing the picture inside, steps back in horror. In this failure to recognize herself in the picture, Anna reveals her distance from the “plenitude” which, until this point, the film has ascribed to her. Thus, even before she is expelled from the Communist Party, Anna is already barred from its membership. The initial overvaluation of Anna as the perfect worker, party member, and comrade should remind us of Freud’s observation that the fetish is not a substitute for “any chance penis,” but for a “particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost.” The fetish, writes Freud, is the substitute for “the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up.” The loss of the party card and the revelation of Anna’s lack displaces the original overvaluation of Anna onto the card itself, turning it into a fetish object in the full sense of the term: something that takes the place of the original and “has been appointed as its substitute.”62 The party membership card is the key that opens the doors to Soviet power. Anna’s loss of this key and her inability to reclaim it upon its return—indeed, her inability to recognize herself as its true owner—mark her as castrated in relation to that power. The loss of the party card marks Anna’s temporary transformation from idealized Stalinist subjectivity to the abject. Yet the discovery of the loss is also a moment of wish fulfillment: the open circulation of the party card, freed from the state-controlled corre-

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   61

spondence between the document and its bearer, suggests that the party card, as much as being a tool of power (access to buildings, rations, privileges) is also a tool of discipline (exact record keeping, surveillance). To be power’s abject is also to be outside its purview, beyond its attention, and no longer subject to its operations. This too is a kind of visual pleasure: pleasure in briefly identifying with the abject subject, the one who has temporarily escaped the operations of power. In The Party Card, the loss (perceived as lack) is contagious. Anna’s loss of her card has made possible the substitution of one woman for another and, as an elderly party member makes clear in his denunciation, “anyone’s daughter” could be guilty of Anna’s crime. Anna’s loss shows that not only Anna, and not only the female spy, but all women are potentially guilty: guilty of sexual difference, translated as lack, translated as castration in relation to power—in this case, specifically Communist, Stalinist power. Anna does not have the key—indeed, she never really did. But in the overvaluation typical of the fetishist, we might argue that Anna herself initially stands in for this key. Particularly for Pavel, for whom marriage to Anna has made possible his permanent residence in Moscow, his acceptance into the Communist Party, and his work transfer to a privileged military plant, Anna is the key that opens all doors. Only with the discovery of lack and its consequences (Anna will be permanently expelled from the party) does her place in the film’s symbolic change from the overvalued object of desire to the guilty object of persecution and punishment. Moreover, whereas Anna’s expulsion from the party is explicitly posited as a male defense against female lack, the film nonetheless shows this instead to be a defense against what is, in the final analysis, male lack. Anna’s expulsion is the result not only of loss, but also of the externalized displacement onto her of masculine—specifically Pavel’s but also Iasha’s— insufficiency. Pavel is the dislocated (he is a Siberian and not a Muscovite), class alien (son of a kulak) subject employed by the foreign intelligence to infiltrate the Soviet state. Yet, as his declamations about belonging make clear, he really does come to believe in the limitless possibilities of his own subjectivity. Through the projection of lack onto Anna and her subsequent rejection, Pavel protects himself from the political and psychic castration he recognizes but disavows. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Pavel is Anna’s main accuser. In the fetishistic logic of the film, Pavel takes great

62   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

pleasure in discovering and denouncing Anna’s guilt and in separating himself from her. “Maybe it’s inappropriate for me, the husband, to speak out,” he says, “But nevertheless, I will!” By speaking out against his wife, Pavel ensures that her guilt does not contaminate him. He has taken Mulvey’s first “avenue of escape” from castration anxiety: “preoccupation with the reenactment of the original trauma” (Pavel reminds everyone of the “traitorous shot at Smolnyi”), counterbalanced by the “devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object” (at home he tells Anna not to worry, that it will all work out, “you’ll get your membership back, you won’t be lost with me around”). Mulvey’s argument, however, has repercussions beyond the gender dynamic that she outlines in her essay. The trial scene in The Party Card takes Mulvey’s model further, making Anna’s guilt political as well as psychic. A standard trial scene in Stalinist films is itself an instance of “visual pleasure”: the on-screen persecution of a hidden enemy puts the viewer temporarily into a position of power, identifying with the prosecutor against the culprit. As Julie Cassiday points out, the action of The Party Card revolves around the ubiquitous triad of “party leader, simple person, and wrecker,” which appears in all genres of Soviet film of the time.63 Yet in The Party Card, the trial is “unjust” because it is the product of an inversion—the trial of the good Communist Anna and not the traitor Pavel. The knowledge that Anna is being tried for a crime she did not commit puts this film’s viewer at risk of “unpleasure.” No longer able to identify with the prosecution, we are now forced to identify with its victim. Anna is a good worker, a loyal Communist. She did not lose her card, but had it stolen from her. Thus, whereas most Stalinist films disavow the possibility of anxiety and guilt about being a good Bolshevik, The Party Card allows that guilt into representation but struggles to contain it within the bounds of gender. It is clear, however, that anyone—man or woman—could be guilty of Anna’s “crime.” The characters in The Party Card can recognize their radical contingency in relation to power only when they witness Anna’s “castration” (her public trial and humiliation), and the meaning of the party card and its loss acquires its full weight only when it becomes lack. That is why, at her trial, Anna says, “I didn’t lose my card, I didn’t give it to anyone—but I . . . I am . . . guilty.” Anna is guilty of both ideological and sexual impropriety—thrown off by Pavel’s obvious qualifications for heroism and

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   63

Fig. 3.4. Iasha’s return. Image courtesy of Mosfilm-info.

rugged good looks, she loses her vigilance and allows an enemy into her family and into her marriage bed. But she is also guilty of making visible the mechanisms of castration: in a time when every citizen may suddenly turn out to be a hidden enemy and when anyone’s party card could be permanently taken away, Anna’s misstep and distress over the loss of her party card makes manifest the anxiety of every Pavel, Iasha, and Fedor Ivanovich living in the Soviet Union, implying that their position vis-à-vis power is as precarious as Anna’s. And whereas it could be argued that on the level of the narrative Anna’s innocence is restored to her and that she is free, presumably, at the end of the film to marry the true hero Iasha, on the level of the film’s enunciation, she remains guilty of creating unpleasure, reminding us of our own subjective limits vis-à-vis Soviet power. When Iasha returns from Siberia and learns of Anna’s disgrace while holding her in his arms, his first reaction is to let go immediately and push her away, suggesting that her condition is catching. Iasha’s initial repulsion of Anna and the investigation he and Fedor Ivanovich undertake into her affairs (ostensibly to prove her innocence) again play out the “heterosexual

64   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

male response to female lack”: that is, “the pleasure that lies in ascertaining guilt, asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness.”64 The investigation further suggests that Anna’s lack threatens them as well. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the dénouement comes in the form of documents proving Pavel’s true identity as a class enemy and murderer. As Anna holds the guilty Pavel at gunpoint, Iasha and Fedor Ivanovich rush in, clutching the revelatory pieces of paper. As Kotkin points out, during periods of party card exchange and verification newspapers frequently employed the preferred party euphemism, “documents came forward,” to characterize someone as a “class-alien element.”65 These documents, however, are also echoes of the film’s fetish object, the party card, and their discovery temporarily seals the gap opened by Anna’s loss, protecting Iasha and Fedor Ivanovich from implicit castration.

Is My Party Card Safe? The 1936 audience clearly understood that the threat of The Party Card was directed at them. Theaters in Moscow handed out questionnaires asking viewers for their opinion of the movie, and newspapers throughout the Soviet Union ran columns devoted to viewers’ reactions to The Party Card (columns entitled “Viewers on the Film” [“Zriteli o fil’me”]).66 The nature of Anna’s guilt was one topic of discussion. A. Pisarev, perceiving the sexual subtext of Anna’s loss as well as the film’s fetish object, wrote: “This woman lives through two [sic] tragedies: she is betrayed by her husband (‘ee obmanyvaet muzh,’ a term used to speak about an extramarital affair), she is expelled from the party, she loses what is most precious: the party card.”67 “I cannot forgive Anna for her unnecessary (izlishnei) trust,” wrote I. Ia. Makarov, head of the party cell organization (partgruporg) of the Stalin Boiler Plant, “She did not demonstrate vigilance, for which she rightfully paid.”68 Similarly, the students of the Tula Communist Party School felt that though Anna was rehabilitated, her future place in the Communist Party was not assured. They pledged to continue the discussion of the film, concerning specifically Anna’s subsequent behavior and “future” in the party.69 Some audiences were moved to conduct “spontaneous” party card checks upon exiting the movie theater, only to find that most party members were not in fact in direct possession of their documents; many had left them either at home or at the office, whereas a few clearly had no knowl-

VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA   ★   65

edge of the cards’ whereabouts. A column titled “How [Well] Do You Keep Your Party Card?” (“Kak vy khranite partbilet?”), appearing in Rabochaia Moskva (9 April 1936), describes a party card check following the screening of Pyr’ev’s film. The article lists by name where each party member kept his or her card—only four members had cards in their possession, while eleven claimed to have left them at home. The personal nature of this inquiry (and consequent public humiliation through the publication of names) restaged the tension between the political and the personal set up by The Party Card. Anna’s tragedy is private as well as public, and film viewers understood that their personal choices may not have been any better than Anna’s. A. T. Mironova, representing the Communal Farm of the Red Army and Navy, claimed that while watching the movie, she involuntarily thought about herself: “It has now become very clear to me that we— women Communists—must be especially careful. We must not lose class vigilance even toward the ones we love, lest we become tools in the hands of a fierce enemy.”70 Comrade Tolchennikova, Communist Party secretary of the Samoilova plant, wrote, “You cannot watch this picture without emotion (ravnodushno). When before your eyes you see the theft of Anna’s party card, you are involuntarily seized by anxiety: is my party card safe? (tsel li moi partbilet?)”71 K. Zaitseva noted that watching Pavel testify against his wife at the trial “makes us, women, think about how our husbands treat us and where we should be keeping our party documents.”72 And one Kolesov, a worker at the transportation plant, wrote in response to the film: “A wonderful picture . . . I will definitely go see it for the third time, and bring my wife.”73 These responses echo Fridrikh Ermler’s secret confession: “I’m afraid for my party card; . . . at night, I check under my wife’s pillow, to see if maybe it’s there.” Like Kolesov from the transportation plant, Ermler understands that his wife’s proximity to the party card puts it (and him) in danger.74 Like the guilt-ridden Anna, members of the audience understand the loss as a revelation of lack. Pyr’ev’s film tries very hard to make this a “female problem,” to contain Anna’s castration within the bounds of sexual difference. Yet ultimately, The Party Card suggests that the failure of vigilance and the resulting “breach” or “penetration” happen because the Soviet citizenry itself is unprepared, unwatchful, and easily seduced. Taking a broader look at the “castration fantasy” staged by The Party Card,

66   ★   VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

I would like to suggest that Pyr’ev’s film charts the distance (already notable in Pavka Korchagin’s repeated return) between the Stalinist subject and Stalinist subjectivity, a traumatic revelation that can be covered over only by a fetish. As the next series of readings show, the gender trouble at work in Pyr’ev’s film makes it possible to read Stalinist masculinity as a series of reaction formations against the threat of (political) castration, on the one hand, and as the enjoyment of lack on the other.

  

4 ★ HETEROSEXUAL PANIC In the interests of revolutionary expediency a class has the right to interfere in the sexual life of its members. Sexuality must be subordinated to class interests; it must never interfere with them and must serve them in all respects. —Aron Zalkind, Polovoi vopros v usloviiakh sovetskoi obshchestvennosti (1926)

What does Ivan Pyr’ev’s The Party Card teach us about heterosexual love and conventional marriage? In a world where no spouse can be trusted and all subjects are guilty before the law (of Stalinism, of language, of universal castration), how do we avoid heterosexual desire and the trauma of sexual difference? Writing about the “deadlock” of sexuality, Jacques Lacan suggests that courtly love is “an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation [l’absence du rapport sexuel] by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle to it.” He adds, “For the man whose lady was entirely, in the most servile sense of the terms, his female subject, courtly love is the only way of coming off elegantly from the absence of sexual relation.”1 Something similar can be said of socialist realist films, where the conventions of prudishness, mistrust, loyalty to the state, and the removal of desire together allow the Stalinist hero—handsome, virile, and strong—to “come off elegantly” from the absence of sexual relation. Conventional films with conventional heroes and conventional plots 67

68   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

avoid what should be a conventional desire: marriage between a man and a woman. For example, Boris Barnet’s U samogo sinego moria (By the Blue Sea, 1935) and Leonid Lukov’s Dva boitsa (Two Soldiers, 1943)—establish a model of deviant sexuality, one that only tangentially takes woman as its object of desire but whose real aim is the perpetuation of “relations between men.” Though quite different in mood or mise-en-scène (By the Blue Sea is a light comedy about two motor mechanics stranded in the middle of the Caspian Sea, while Two Soldiers is a grim account of the siege of Leningrad), both are organized around the same basic plot devices. Each film opens by foregrounding the initial male-male friendship, then introduces woman as an object of affection for both men and structures the love plot via the familiar device of triangular desire. Finally, the conflict is resolved not in favor of heterosexual marriage but in favor of homosociality: the men remain men together, while the woman is left on the outside—on the seashore, waving good-bye, in By the Blue Sea; or standing in a rations line, clutching her love letters, in Two Soldiers. Again, in these films, woman appears both desirable and suspect, staging, as Laura Mulvey puts it, the “male response to female lack”: that is, the overvaluation of the “fetishist” on the one hand, and the disgust of the “homosexual” on the other. Male friendship is characterized here as true love, while heterosexual relations are fraught with anxiety, misrecognition, and mistrust. Yet this panic over heterosexual relations and the attempt to get away from woman are part and parcel of a larger undertaking: the refusal to participate in traditionally assigned gender roles; the realization and acceptance of Stalinist masculinity as lack. Male protagonists negotiate the patriarchal demand of Stalinist culture—the demand for heroism and discipline, for giving up their “holy male union” in favor the “mixed union” of heteronormative familial bonds—through the production and maintenance of hysterical symptoms: hospitalization, blindness, leg cramps, and heart palpitations. Iulii Raizman’s Letchiki (The Pilots, 1935), Eduard Pentslin’s Istrebiteli (The Fighter Pilots, 1939), and Semen Timoshenko’s Nebesnyi tikhokhod (The Sky-Barge, 1945) move from heterosexual panic to male hysteria, the mechanism by which the men can “enjoy” their “symptom” and yet negotiate the trauma of patriarchal identification. It is also a way for the heroes to elegantly avoid the entanglements of heterosexual desire and the possibility of sexual difference: homosociality, male

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   69

bonding, and the utopian (if lost) world of male companionship offer these protagonists a way out of the heterosexual relation.

There Is No Sexual Relation Numerous scholars of the Soviet novel, from Katerina Clark to Irina Gutkin, have pointed to the missing or underdeveloped love plot as one of the key features of the socialist realist master plot.2 Construction novels, devoted to the building of socialism, seem to leave little room for the personal question of love or desire. Indeed, we might argue that, as Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered demonstrates, heterosexual desire threatens to undermine the socialist realist hero by forcing him away from the path of ideal Soviet subjectivity. Sexuality must be sublimated and redirected toward the construction project—whether the immediate goals of restarting a factory or flying combat missions against the Nazis, or the broader goal of building socialism—and its sublimation makes possible the mechanical repetition of self-sacrifice in the face of adversity, the theme so common to socialist realist texts. Revolutionary sublimation, sexual economy, spermatic economy—these notions operated in twenties’ discourse on sexuality and the obligation not to squander the precious resources of the self that could be turned toward the betterment of all. Woman—whether dismissed as merely flesh, nature (priroda), good for nothing other than procreation, having been corrupted by bourgeois society; or embodying the revolution and the Red Terror as a sexual force—in each case was linked directly to sexual promiscuity and the squandering of sexual energy. To harness energy, to use the scarce resource for the production of a classless society, to move away from sexuality toward willpower and self-control, meant to stay away from woman.3 Though socialist realist fiction under Stalin differed considerably from works of the avant-garde, it nonetheless retained a number of elements of such “revolutionary thinking,” seeming to ensure that, as Katerina Clark suggests, love remained “an auxiliary ingredient” of the socialist realist master plot, serving only to aid the positive hero in attaining “consciousness.” In the West, writes Clark, “the standard Stalinist plot has been somewhat snidely dismissed as ‘Boy gets tractor.’ This quip could be expanded slightly by the addition of ‘plus or minus girl.’ Whether he ‘gets girl’ or not is of little importance as long as he gets tractor, i.e., successfully completes

70   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

his public task, which is inextricably tied to his quest for consciousness.”4 The same sexual sublimation recommended for Soviet youth by Aron Zal­ kind continued to dictate the rules of socialist realism: sexuality as a force had to be channeled and contained, or, in Galia Bystrova’s words in The Pilots (1935): “I just don’t have enough komsomol self-possession not to be interested in him” (“Absoliutno ne khvataet komsomol’skoi vyderzhki, chtoby on mne ne nravilsia”). Yet more is at stake in the privileging and simultaneous repression of the heterosexual love plot in socialist realist texts. The Pilots goes out of its way to set up a love triangle between the student pilot Galia Bystrova and her two senior ranking officers—the handsome student commander Sergei Beliaev and the aging flight school commander Nikolai Rogachev— only in the end to postpone the happy resolution to an unspecified future time when Galia is able to fly the enormous distance of 12,000 kilometers to Sakhalin, where Rogachev will be stationed. Like the earlier film Odna (Alone, 1931), in which the heroine agrees to leave her fiancé in order to fulfill her obligation to the state, or like Fro’s husband in Andrei Platonov’s short story “Fro” (1936), who is always happier away from home than in it, Rogachev easily leaves Galia when he is restationed in Sakhalin. He only wonders if Sakhalin has everything that he needs: the sun, the party, and Soviet power (“Nu, a solntse tam est’? A partiia? A vlast’ sovetskaia?”). Heterosexual union, it seems, can always be postponed in favor of interminable service to the state. Sublimation fuels the massive construction projects of socialist realist novels, but its consequence is a kind of “return of the repressed”: suppressed and rechanneled sexual desire reemerges in the rhetoric of an excessive love for one’s country, the leader, and the party. As Mikhail Heller puts it: “Intimate relations between men and women were moved well into the background, making room for intimate relations between man and the Leader, man and the Motherland.” He continues, quoting Aleksandr Avdenko’s editorial in Pravda (19 March 1935): “Soviet patriotism is a burning feeling of unlimited love, of unqualified devotion to the native land, and of the deepest sense of responsibility for its fate and for its defense, and it is born deep in the hearts of our people; . . . in our country Soviet patriotism burns with a mighty flame. It carries life forward. It heats the engines of our fighting tanks, of our heavy bombers and cruisers, and it loads our weapons.”5 Heller quotes Wilhelm Reich, who compared

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   71

such “unnatural” feelings of love for one’s country to “an impotent man’s erection brought on by special devices.” It is no wonder, suggests Heller, that the model of the Soviet positive hero is Pavka Korchagin, “a paralyzed impotent, living only out of love for communism and the party.”6 As I have argued, however, Pavka’s devotion to the party constitutes a model of Stalinist masculinity that is structured not only by lack (his paralyzed impotence) but also by drive (his never-ending task of “returning to ranks and to life”). As such, this masculinity veers away from every possibility of erotic attachment or desire, forcing itself instead to continue in its pursuit of the ever-elusive goal of ideal Stalinist subjectivity. Few other socialist realist heroes can come close to Pavka’s devotion and must negotiate instead the slippery terrain between their heterosexual obligations to home and family (demanded by the state) and their devotion to Stalin, the party, the motherland. In The Party Card, Pavel’s marriage to Anna represents his (mistaken) belief that heterosexual marriage can provide political legitimacy. The film’s true hero, Iasha, leaves Moscow for Siberia and is thereby able to save Anna and serve the state at the same time. Socialist realist texts, in other words, try not to stage heterosexual desire, or at the very least, to postpone its resolution to a time beyond the end of the narrative, allowing the marriage plot to take place in some unspecified and highly speculative future. Pavka Korchagin can marry Taia only at the point when that marriage can be nothing more than friendship. The rechanneling of desire away from heterosexuality opens up a curious space for the homoerotic in socialist realist texts. Certainly, as Eliot Borenstein observes, the Soviet novels of the 1920s set in a world of “men without women”—such as those of Isaac Babel, Iurii Olesha, and Platonov—always point to the homoeroticism lurking just underneath the homosociality of their all-male utopias. The word envy, used repeatedly by both Babel and Olesha, only barely masks its more sexualized counterpart of desire. The Stalinist socialist realist text, however, free as it generally is of sexuality, does not immediately suggest either erotic or homoerotic ambiguity.7 Yet in its attempt to rechannel sexuality, the socialist realist text inadvertently produces desire at the site of male bonding. The erotic triangle becomes the means of working out desire between men, and the socialist realist text, in its attempt to get away from the heterosexual love plot, creates what might be called, in a reworking of Eve Sedgwick’s paradigm, “heterosexual panic.”

72   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

Let me briefly turn to Sedgwick’s argument and its implications for an analysis of Stalinist socialist realist texts. In Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick constructs a model of discourse that is based first and foremost on a privileging of male-to-male bonds and the systematic exclusion of women from the functioning of patriarchy.8 Yet because the line between homosocial bonds and homosexual desire is both negligible and porous, patriarchal discourse and practice are frequently under the threat of what Sedgwick, expanding from legal terminology, calls “homosexual panic.” Male bonding, particularly at the expense of or to the exclusion of women, always leaves open the space for homosexuality—erotic desire for sexual sameness and sexual identity—and the concomitant fear that somewhere, somehow, the line between the homosocial and homosexual will have been crossed. Male relations (as they are manifested within the bounds of patriarchy, defined as “relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women”)9 for the most part exclude woman, turning to her only as an object to facilitate exchange, but not as a subject—that is to say, an actor or player—in the system. Sedgwick argues that patriarchy’s emphasis on male homosocial bonds (firmly rooted in compulsory heterosexuality) creates the potential for homosexual panic. If such relationships as male friendship, mentorship, admiring identification, bureaucratic subordination, and heterosexual rivalry all involve forms of investment that force men into the arbitrarily mapped, self-contradictory, and anathema-riddled quicksands of the middle distance of male homosocial desire, then it appears that men enter into adult masculine entitlement only through acceding to the permanent threat that the small space they have cleared for themselves on this terrain may always, just as arbitrarily and with just as much justification, be foreclosed.10

The acute feeling of vulnerability and manipulability that stems from this double bind translates often not only into the instability of male entitlement—as the many texts of the Soviet twenties acutely show—but also into a violence directed against weakness, homosexuality, and woman as the radical other of the homosocial continuum. Babel’s stories in Konar-

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   73

miia (Red Calvary, 1926–1931), in particular, “Moi pervyi gus’” (My First Goose), like Olesha’s novel Zavist’ (Envy, 1927) and film Strogii iunosha (A Severe Young Man, directed by Abram Room, 1934) each in its own way walks the fine line between male entitlement and homosexual panic, between homosocial desire and compulsory heterosexuality. As Borenstein notes, female characters found in the Soviet literature of the 1920s are much more notable for their absence than presence. In Envy, he writes, “Valya is an ethereal, underdescribed entity whose significance and role is determined by the men around her, hence the repeated associations between Valya and empty vessels, such as vases and incubators.”11 It is clear that in this novel woman serves only as the means by which men work out their relationships of admiration, identification, jealousy, rivalry, and envy. The final erotic triangle of Kavalerov, Ivan, and the repulsive widow Anechka in the “frightening bed” only underscores the double bind of patriarchy, at once holding up the barrier against homosexuality through the maintenance of compulsory heterosexuality and at the same time drawing men into closer and closer contact, or as Babel’s Liutov puts it in “My First Goose,” into the “affection” (laska) of his new comrades.12 The desire to eliminate woman altogether from a future masculine utopia is a staple of twenties writing, and it continues to resonate with socialist realist conventions which, although no longer permitting the same kind of utopian longings of their avant-garde and fellow-traveler texts, nonetheless treat woman with suspicion. Combined with the puritanical tendencies of Stalinist culture, antifemale and anticorporeal forces paint a portrait of the new Soviet woman as a young man. Examples include Dasha Chumalova, dressed in a man’s shirt from Fedor Gladkov’s Cement (1925); the “virginal, pure, modest, and rather boyishly mischievous” Olia Pyliaeva from Vasilii Il’enkov’s The Driving Axle (1933); the “boyishly masculine” Fenia, from Gladkov’s Energy (1938), “with her skinny body,” like a child or “a little boy”; Fenia from Fedor Panferov’s Bruski (1928–1937), “a tomboy . . . endowed with a slim boyish body”;13 or finally, Meres’ev’s Ol’ga from Boris Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man (1947), dressed in military uniform: “tunic, sword belt, Order of the Red Banner, and even the Guard’s badge . . . she looked like a lean, good-looking boy in an officer’s uniform.” In part, this “boyishly masculine woman” allows the socialist realist novel and film to remain puritanical: as Katerina Clark notes, by the time

74   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

the conventions of socialist realism were being formulated, “naturalism” and “zoologism” were rejected as evidence of the darker side of human nature, so that when the hero does get the girl, “he cannot get her as an erotic object, she must be his spiritual companion and a means of adding to the new generation of the ‘family.’”14 The new “middle-class values” of Stalinism privileged the family, and, as Gutkin argues, provided new models of ideal Soviet womanhood.15 No longer the red-kerchiefed Dasha Chumalova, whose maternal instincts are repressed in order to better serve the party and whose sexual escapades constitute the main trauma of Cement, the new ideal of Stalinist femininity seemed to mark a return to traditional notions of maternity and reproduction. Victoria Bonnell notes that by 1934, the beginning of the “great retreat,” the female collective farmer (kolkhoznitsa) “had begun to fill out and acquire a fuller, more rounded look. The large bosoms and corpulence [of the baba] of the 1920s did not return, but the trim and athletic look of the early 1930s also faded from the scene.”16 This is seen most clearly, as Gutkin points out, in the last book of Bruski, where the painter Arnol’dov tries to capture the ideal of womanhood in the new socialist society: “Civil War, destruction, typhus, hunger made us forget that a woman, besides being a political activist, is also a mother. Woman’s greatness lies in being a mother, in maternity (materinstvo). . . . If she did not have the maternity in her, she would have turned into a homeless cur.”17 Again, we might here point to Dziga Vertov’s 1937 film Kolybel’naia (Lullaby) as an example of the new obsession with motherhood: as woman after woman brings Stalin a beautifully wrapped newborn baby, we understand that Soviet motherhood is the new privileged element of Stalinist culture. And yet this new attention to the family was as negative as it was positive. The old prejudices remained and new laws were introduced to strengthen them. Heller points out that the 1930 edition of the Small Soviet Encyclopedia still quoted P. Stuchka, a Bolshevik lawyer, saying that “the family is the basic form of slavery” and promising that the family would die out in the near future.18 The popularity of Pavlik Morozov continued unabated and unchallenged, and the 1934 criminal code introduced a new category of criminal: the “Ch. S.,” that is, a “member of a family” of a traitor to his country.19 Thus, the introduction of the “family law” reforms of 1936—making divorce and alimony more difficult to obtain and limiting abortion to extreme cases, as well as the earlier recriminalization of male

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   75

homosexuality—signaled less a return to traditional family values than the ever-increasing involvement of the state in family life.20 In other words, instead of “withering away,” the state had become, in Heller’s words, “a fully-fledged family member.” Tellingly, the sentence, “I know the party is not concerned with family matters,” along with similar passages, disappeared from the later editions of Bruski.21 Or, as Cynthia Hooper puts it, “the Soviet regime, while it never succeeded in displacing the family, never fully managed to make peace with it, either.”22 The desexualized and defeminized model of woman plays into the anti­heterosexual paradigm of socialist realist texts. By giving primacy to “socialist construction” and by allowing only the boyish woman to enter into relations “between men,” these texts manifest a desire for sexual sameness, for an erasure of signs that mark woman as different from man. Like Sedgwick’s homosexual panic, the heterosexual panic evident in the films here discussed is a by-product of patriarchal demands, though the double bind of the Stalinist subject may be better expressed through the Freudian prohibition/imperative, “‘You ought to be like this [like your father].’ ‘You may not be like this [like your father]—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.’”23 That is to say, to be a male subject under the conditions of Stalinist patriarchy is to be simultaneously valorized as a model of “extravagant virility” and to be found lacking. In a compensatory gesture (so as not to acknowledge that the hero is really the heroine, or, to reverse Freud’s formulation, that “the little boy is really a little girl”), socialist realist texts dress their women in men’s clothing. This masquerade raises the possibility of the erasure of sexual difference and noncompliance with heteronormative demands. The women are camouflaged as men, while the men “enjoy” the patriarchal prohibition: “You may not be like this [i.e., like your father]—that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.” The five films under discussion here show how their protagonists—in themselves unquestionable models of the fantasy of extravagant virility, as mechanics, soldiers, welders, blacksmiths, and pilots—refuse to occupy the position of virile, heroic, heterosexual masculinity. Not one of the men is able to securely align his desire with the heteronormative structures seemingly demanded by the state. Rather, the protagonists of these films consistently shy away from heterosexual love and conventional marriage, attempting, in the language of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), to

76   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

“remain men together.” Together with male hysteria, the notion of heterosexual panic forms part of what Judith Butler calls heterosexual melancholia: the loss of the possibility of an alternative to heterosexuality, the foreclosure for the subject of object choices that might not conveniently line up with the heteronormative structures of patriarchal demand. The particular form of this demand addressed by all the films considered here stems in part from the recriminalization of male homosexuality in 1934, the implementation of the family law reforms of 1936, and in the forties, in the new cult of maternity. These laws come in direct conflict with a stable and necessary feature of the socialist realist master plot—its missing, underdeveloped, or sublimated love plot—by promoting the values of marriage and family, while at the same time continuing to demand unlimited commitment to the Soviet state.

Plus or Minus Girl Boris Barnet’s By the Blue Sea (1935) opens with a storm raging over the Caspian Sea and two bodies holding miraculously onto a raft and to “their young lives” as the waves crash around them.24 The bodies are those of two motor mechanics who have been commissioned by the town komsomol to help out a fishing kolkhoz, “The Flames of Communism” (Ogni kommunizma), located on an island in the middle of the Caspian Sea, somewhere in Soviet Azerbaijan. Found floating unconscious after two days of exposure, the men are brought to the island in a fishing boat, still sporting, as Emma Widdis points out, their jaunty sailor’s hats and clutching a musical instrument.25 We are given an overhead shot of the boat, the two bodies in identical striped sailor’s shirts, one lying on top of the other in what appears to be an embrace. Indeed, the two men—Alesha (Nikolai Kriuchkov) and Iusuf (Lev Sverdlin)—are the closest of friends, and their friendship is the first obstacle standing in the way of fulfillment of properly heterosexual desire. Despite the initial setup of the two men embracing in the boat, Barnet’s film moves firmly toward a standard heterosexual love plot. Indeed, for once, this plot does not seem auxiliary but appears to be the only plot of the film: which of the two men will marry Masha (Elena Kuz’mina), the pretty blond leader of the collective? From Alesha’s initial happy observation, “All broads!” (“Odni baby!”), to Iusuf’s corrective, “Women” (“Zhenshchiny”), the film appears to be about erotic desire and heterosexual

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   77

union, leaving only the question of which of the two men is more deserving of the one woman. More than simply a sign of respect, the correction from “baby” to “zhenshchiny”26 serves as the first sign of character—the blond, handsome, and excitable Alesha represents the uncontrolled and undisciplined subject, while the darker, more physically and verbally awkward yet stalwart Iusuf stands in for the forces of discipline by which Alesha will eventually be brought in line with “conscious” Soviet masculinity. Iusuf’s polite correction produces precisely the effect aimed for by politically correct speech, turning Alesha’s confession of sexual desire (baby) into a mere observation of sexual difference (zhenshchiny). Yet this “mere observation” is also an insistence, an emphasis on sexual difference that will, in the end, preclude Masha’s marriage to either of the two men. From the first, it is clear that the conflict generated by the love triangle (Alesha-Masha-Iusuf), as René Girard points out, is as much about the relationship of the two men to each other as it is about the relationship of either one to the woman.27 From the beginning, Alesha and Iusuf vie for Masha’s attention, attempting various ploys to get her alone. Yet when Iusuf succeeds in taking a walk with Masha down the beach, Masha, with her tousled blond hair and her striped sailor’s shirt, resembles no one so much as Alesha, left behind. A series of alternating shots match Masha’s stripes to Alesha’s, her blond hair to his.28 There is an obvious suggestion here that Masha and Alesha are a better match than Masha and Iusuf (their names are alliterative, and ethnically they are unmarked, unlike the dark, accent-inflected Iusuf), yet there is also the suggestion that Iusuf’s interest in Masha stems directly from his interest in Alesha—she is simply the female version of his best friend. Indeed, considering the possibility of marriage, Iusuf announces that he and Masha “will be as one” (“My s Mashen’koi, dva kak odyn [sic] budem”), but then immediately reconsiders, saying he would feel sorry for Alesha, who would then be left all alone. As the more “conscious” (which is to say, disciplined) male subject, Iusuf understands that his male friendship has already ensured that he and Alesha are “two as one,” while affection for Masha introduces the threat of sexual difference and the dissolution of the same-sex bond. Despite Iusuf’s “Caucasian” looks and accented Russian,29 Barnet’s film constructs him as the proper Soviet subject, disciplined and contained within the limits of Stalinist masculinity. Alesha, on the other hand, is the male subject out of bounds. The uncontrolled force of his raw (as raw as

78   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

Fig. 4.1. Alesha and Masha are “two as one.” Image courtesy of British Film Institute.

it could be in a socialist realist film) sexuality is signaled by his frequent state of undress, his messy hair, and his wild behavior. His attempts to get Masha’s attention are also more radically transgressive than Iusuf’s, going beyond what is allowed by either komsomol education or socialist realist convention. Indeed, Alesha nearly assures Masha’s preference for himself, when, instead of going out on the fishing boat with the other men, he fakes illness and instead goes to town to buy Masha a necklace. This episode stresses precisely the threat posed by heterosexual desire to the homosocial continuum, making manifest as well the boundaries of Stalinist subjectivity. Alesha shirks work, and as such, he shirks the male collective (they all go out on the boat together, feeling sorry for their “sick” comrade back on the shore). As soon as they are out of sight, Alesha steals a boat and goes alone to the city. In this way, he literally finds himself out of bounds, beyond the rules of the kolkhoz or the contract under which he has come to work on the island. As punishment for placing (hetero)sexual desire above the needs

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   79

of the collective, Iusuf calls a meeting of the kolkhoz in which he denounces Alesha, “his best friend,” as a “malingerer and truant” (simuliant i progul’shchik). Progul is formed from the verb of motion, guliat’ (to wander, to take a walk), and as such, suggests the possibility that Alesha might walk off, might stray from the path, might venture beyond the boundaries of what is allowed to him as a Soviet subject (three months on the island, two days on the fishing trip). As Iusuf denounces Alesha, Masha tears off the string of beads that Alesha has brought her, a sign that she can have no erotic desire for a boundless and unruly male subject. Her disappointment reunites Alesha with his fellow men, while distancing him from the possibility of conventional marriage. This deadlock between homosocial and heterosexual desire plays out until the very end, when we discover the entire setup to have been false, since Masha is already engaged to a sailor serving with Commissar Kliment Voroshilov somewhere out at sea. Before we are given this crucial bit of information, however, the film tries out several solutions to its central problem of triangular desire. While Alesha and Iusuf fight on the deck over who will marry her, Masha is washed overboard in a storm and presumed drowned. It is clear that this ending, though unhappy, would provide a way out of the deadlock: while Masha lives, one of the men has to marry her and thereby be forever removed not only from his close male friendship, but also from the male community in general. If Masha dies, the two men can mourn her together, strengthening the male bond through mutual loss. This solution is particularly satisfying because it enables the film to keep its ostensible object of desire (Masha, heterosexuality), but to relegate it to the status of a lost object, forever foreclosed from possession. Appropriately, Masha’s return from the sea (a violent wave sweeps her back into the cabin of the boat) is marked by elements of the supernatural and ghostly.30 Alesha and Iusuf actually back away from her as she emerges from the water, seeing her as something uncanny. In this scene, Masha is the “return of the repressed,” the irruption of the unconscious, the symptom of heterosexual panic. Repressed by the film and mourned by the male characters, she returns from the water, placing heterosexual desire once more in the path of relations between men. Iusuf’s frequent confusion of linguistic gender is one of the standard ways in which Soviet cinema isolates the cultural other, but in the case of By the Blue Sea, this element of linguistic play points beyond gram-

80   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

Fig. 4.2. Masha’s return from the sea. Image courtesy of British Film Institute.

mar or cultural stereotype to the possibility of the elimination of gender difference—and with it, heterosexual desire—altogether. When the nearly drowned Masha, in a dirty sailor’s shirt and dripping wet, enters the communal hut flanked by our two seminaked heroes, we are reminded that her body cannot be exposed to view in the same way—not only because of the prudish conventions of Stalinist cinema, but also because of what will then be revealed as sexual difference. “Who’s dead?” (“Kto umer?”), she asks, noticing the grim faces all around her. “You’re dead!” (“Ty umer!” [masc. form]), declares Iusuf merrily, only to be immediately corrected by an equally thrilled Alesha: “You’re dead!” (“Ty umerla!” [fem. form]). One might note the inappropriateness of affect attached to the words “You’re dead!” as another symptom of the work of repression. Ostensibly, Iusuf and Alesha should be happy that Masha is alive, yet their exclamation betrays a wish that cannot be expressed except through censorship and inversion. They cannot be sad that she is alive, so instead they are happy that she is dead. Iusuf’s mistake with grammatical gender further plays into an “unconscious” desire to control and eliminate sexual difference. As long

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   81

as Masha is “one of the guys” and, moreover, dead, the homosocial structure can remain firmly in place, and two can still be as one. But Masha is not one of the boys, as her clothes and Alesha’s correction underscores, so with her return we also have the return of sexual difference that produces heterosexual panic. This panic takes an almost literal form as the narrative draws to a close, as Iusuf and Alesha chase one another around the village to prevent each other from proposing to Masha. While Iusuf tries on a fancy new suit, suggestive of preparations for marriage, Alesha sneaks off to Masha’s cabin. Iusuf follows, half undressed, repeating that he must “find Alesha.” Though we might be tempted to read this “straight”—Iusuf, who wants to marry Masha, needs to prevent Alesha from getting to her first—the film will not let us. Iusuf is indeed looking only for Alesha, whom he then follows down the beach, leaving the startled Masha alone. As it turns out, Masha cannot marry either of them—she has always been engaged to someone else—and this final resolution allows the two men to go home together. Once more reunited, the two motor mechanics get back on their boat, while Masha remains on the shore, waving good-bye. In a telling paraphrase of his earlier conversation with Masha, Iusuf explains why she has rejected them both in favor of some other man, far out at sea: “And what if you and I were engaged”? (“A esli my s toboi zhenikhi budem?”) he asks. What he means, of course, is that if he were out at sea and had left his fiancée behind, he would want her to wait. But the grammatical construction of the sentence leaves open (and even invites) the semantic possibility of Alesha and Iusuf being engaged to each other. In Barnet’s film heterosexual panic may be read as a series of wish fulfillments: first, the wish that Masha should drown and thus the problem of heterosexual union would disappear with her; second, that Masha should be a man, again, eliminating the threat of sexual difference; and finally, that she should be removed from the field of desire by her engagement elsewhere—to a man who cannot be seen, who will probably not return, but whose existence makes her sexually unavailable and thereby unthreatening to male companionship. This series of alternating wish fulfillments suggests that Barnet’s film struggles with the double bind of the conventional necessity and cultural insistence on marriage, on the one hand, and the desire for an all-male utopia, on the other. The invocation of Klim Voroshilov contributes to this paradigm. An outstanding Red Army com-

82   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

mander in the civil war (1918–1920), a commissar for military and naval affairs, and later defense (1925–1940), and in World War II the commander of the northwestern front, Voroshilov was also a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1926 and a member of the Supreme Soviet from 1937. A close associate of Stalin, he became chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Council of the USSR on Stalin’s death in 1953. Like Stalin, Voroshilov embodies Soviet power, and service to him represents the call of duty par excellence. Instead of being with Masha, the fiancé is with Voroshilov, “somewhere out at sea,” in that no place that Soviet heroes prefer to the confines of heteronormative domesticity. The improbability of his return holds out but never delivers on the promise of a happy heterosexual union.

I Had a Friend Like That Once Leonid Lukov’s 1943 film Two Soldiers is similarly structured by the fear of a heterosexual union that will dismantle homosocial bonds, echoing many of the mechanisms of heterosexual panic at work in By the Blue Sea.31 Two Soldiers is also a story of two men—the first and second machine gunners—whose friendship is interrupted by the possibility of love for a woman. Like The Party Card, Two Soldiers stages the “male response” to sexual difference in terms of overvaluation of woman, on the one hand, and repulsion, on the other. Here, the mutual interest of the two men is nearly undisguised, while their interest in the one female character is clearly forced. As a recent synopsis of the film suggests, the heterosexual love plot occupies an auxiliary position in the plot: “This is a film about the heroic defense of Leningrad, about courage and the love for life; . . . this is a simple and straightforward story about the front-line friendship of two soldiers . . . and, of course, about love.”32 The mechanisms of heterosexual panic at work in Two Soldiers point in a curious interpretive direction: that is, toward the possibility of homosexuality in Stalinist films (in this case, disguised as homosociality, male bonding, friendship forged in war) staged as an infantile stage of development toward mature (hetero)sexuality. Heterosexuality in Two Soldiers (and in The Fighter Pilots, as well as in The Sky-Barge, discussed later) appears as a singular path toward an unavoidable goal, from which the male protagonists do their best to deviate. Set in 1941 during the siege of Leningrad, Two Soldiers opens in the

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   83

trenches, where a platoon debates a plan of attack. A soldier, Arkadii Dziubin (Mark Bernes), rushes toward the enemy, quickly followed by his best friend, Sasha Sintsov (Boris Andreev), who responds to the lieutenant commander’s protest: “But we are always together!” The scene then shifts inside the dugout, where Arkadii is busy telling the story of Sasha’s misadventures with an enemy Mauser. Sacha attempts to have a little target practice with his new weapon and ends up single-handedly fighting a German division. The focus of the story, though told in a disparaging tone, is to show that Sasha is truly heroic—a blacksmith by occupation, silent, brave, always rushing ahead alone, drawing fire. But it also establishes Arkadii as the joker, the one who would “sell his father for a pretty word,” the one who consistently undermines the masculinity of his friend. His nickname for Sasha is “Sasha s Uralmasha,” a play on words that both refers to a machine plant in the Urals (Uralmash) and actually lends the hypermasculine blacksmith a feminine tinge (Masha). His first story of Sasha’s target practice with an enemy Mauser is equally castrating: the Mauser, he claims, was missing its most important part—the head of its owner (“Glavnaia chast’ kazhdogo oruzhiia est’ golova ego vladel’tsa”). The two men spend much of the movie chasing after each other. Sasha rushes after Arkadii into battle. Arkadii wanders around the camp lost until he finds the sleeping Sasha and wakes him. Sasha goes to see his girl and brings Arkadii with him. Arkadii rescues Sasha, and Sasha rescues Arkadii. The friendship of the two men is clearly articulated as love. Arkadii has no letters to write, because there is only “one friend,” sitting next to him in the dugout, worth writing to. When Sasha leaves quietly to see the major (who commends him on taking out seven Germans with his bare hands), Arkadii claims that he is not “worried” but simply needs to clean his machine gun, then rushes to find his friend. Finding him unwilling to talk, Arkadii presses him: “I love you like a brother,” he says; “A friendship like ours doesn’t exist in the world. Where have you been?” (“Ia zhe tebia kak rodnogo liubliu. Takoi druzhby, kak nashei, na vsem svete net. Ty gde byl?”). Yet, lest we think this sentiment is one-sided, Sasha returns to the topic by fretting that the end of the war will force them to part. “Friendship made in war,” he says, “is really friendship” (“Druzhba spaiannaia na voine, samaia druzhba”). Arkadii suggests that there is no reason why a welder from Odessa and a blacksmith from the Urals cannot live together

84   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

after the war. “But will you take me with you to Odessa, after the war?” asks Sasha. Finally, the major tells the story of his own special friendship: “I had a friend like that once,” he tells Sasha over tea, “It’s true that we never declared our love, but we loved each other to the end” (“Byl i u menia drug. Pravda, my s nim nikogda v liubvi ne ob”iasnialis’, no liubili drug druga do samoi smerti”). By marginalizing heterosexual desire, a standard socialist realist narrative opens a space for homosociality that emerges, as in By the Blue Sea, as an alternative to a threatening heterosexual union. In Two Soldiers, however, the love plot is pushed so far out of the way, and appears so much as an afterthought—“and, of course, about love”—that same-sex desire comes to the forefront. The fulfillment of this desire must be marked as untenable (separation and death lurk just around the corner, which is why Arkadii never lets Sasha out of his sight), because it directly conflicts with the new rhetoric aimed at strengthening the family and valorizing motherhood. In the language of the film, the impossibility of continuing their friendship is expressed through geography: a blacksmith from the Urals would have no place in the world of Odessa sailors. It is also underscored by the introduction of the “auxiliary” love plot: suddenly, out of nowhere, we discover that Sasha has a “girl,” or not precisely a girl, but a “pal,” a “student,” a “fellow countryman” (priiatel’, student, zemliak [all masc. gender]). “Wait a minute,” says Arkadii, beginning to catch on, “This countryman of yours, he’s not [in] a skirt, is he?” (“A tvoi zemliachok, chasom ne v iubke?”).33 The “countryman” turns out to be a civil engineer named Tasia (Vera Shershneva), who fails to recognize Sasha when he and Arkadii come to pay her a visit. From this inauspicious beginning, Sasha’s courtship is fraught with difficulty: Arkadii, the more talkative and charming of the two, plays the piano and sings; when an air raid siren forces everyone into a bomb shelter (and while Arkadii keeps Tasia company, Sasha saves an entire building from fire); the consequent fight between Arkadii and Sasha separates the two friends, and Sasha is severely wounded in battle. Finally, as he is passing through town four days after his release from the hospital, Sasha runs into Tasia and discovers that she is in love with him. She is clutching a bundle of letters that Sasha immediately recognizes as having been written by Arkadii on his behalf. Declaring that every word of those

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   85

Fig. 4.3. The happiest day of his life. Image courtesy of British Film Institute.

letters is true, Sasha rushes off to find his best friend, leaving the startled Tasia in the rain, still clutching “his” letters. Again, we would like to read this as a happy resolution of the heterosexual love plot: Tasia has fallen in love with the silent, morose Sasha because of the letters and packages of food and poems that he has sent her. Before leaving her, Sasha kisses her firmly and promises that he will be back soon. Yet the truth of the letters and the mise-en-scène prevents this happy ending. Tasia’s letters were not written by Sasha, but by Arkadii; and they were not written for her, but for Sasha. In a long shot, we see Tasia slowly rejoin the column of women waiting patiently in the rain for their rations. Her facial expression is one of irresolution, or perhaps, resignation, and it contrasts sharply with the broad smile on Sasha’s face as he is shown riding the back of the motorcycle on his way to the front. “Do you know what today is?” he asks the driver, “Today is the happiest day of my life!” When he emerges from the battlefield at the end of the film, he is carrying the wounded Arkadii in his arms, like a bride. The film ends with the friends leaning on each other in the middle of the battlefield. Arkadii

86   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

is half-standing, half-sitting on Sasha’s knee, precariously balanced and supported upright by his friend.

Heterosexual Melancholia In the examples of homosexual panic analyzed by Sedgwick, we see a mechanism at work that prevents the homosocial from transgressing into the homosexual. The standard love triangle keeps same-sex desire always mediated through heterosexual longing. Socialist realist narratives, while relying on a similar structure, perform the opposite task. Even when the idealized homosociality of the collective eventually gives way to conventional marriage, the longing for the collective, for the utopia located elsewhere, for the “holy male union,” remains. Two conflicting mechanisms in socialist realist texts turn homosexual panic into heterosexual panic: the first is the fear and mistrust of the (sexual) other (articulated in The Party Card); the second is a form of melancholia that mourns the loss of heterosexual desire, of a world where the love plot was not auxiliary to the master narrative. World War II texts continually reinforce the difference between the front and the rear (front i tyl), marking the first as masculine space, and the second as feminine. Vasilii Azhaev’s Daleko ot Moskvy (Far from Moscow, 1948) opens with the protagonist’s refusal to go to the East, to the rear, away from Moscow and the front line. In Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man (discussed later), the wounded men frequently lament their emasculated position as patients, forced to remain among the women in the rear. Two Soldiers similarly structures the two spaces shown in the film—the war zone on the other side of the tram tracks and Leningrad—as masculine and feminine. When Sasha and Arkadii return after their leave in town, many of their men have been wounded and killed. “So, while we were cooling our heels [prokhlazhdalis’] in the bomb shelter with the women, our men were dying?” asks Arkadii. In these socialist realist narratives, woman is consistently placed in the rear, and her vulnerable position as potential target and victim of enemy aggression is undone only by the frequent suggestion that she is dishonest, will not wait, is not to be trusted. We see this model played out in Zhdi menia (Wait for Me, directed by Aleksandr Stolper and Boris Ivanov, 1943) in which the heroine believes against all evidence that her husband is alive, while her best friend gives up waiting because she feels “scared”; in A Story About a Real Man,

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   87

in which Meres’ev tries to seduce his friend’s girl in order to “test” her; in Mikhail Kolotozov’s Letiat zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying, 1957) in which Veronika is blamed for her own rape; and in the general mistrust of the rear as a place where soldiers become cowards, and men become women. Again, this may be one explanation for the pervasive figure of the boyish woman in World War II texts—the transvestitism hides the fact of sexual difference, turning her troubling presence into a symbol of reassurance (she is not a “skirt” and a traitor, she is a “boy,” a “pal,” a “comrade,” a “countryman”). The longing for camaraderie and collective utopia and the threat inherent in woman makes it difficult to direct desire into proper heteronormative channels. The response to woman is thereby twofold: overvaluation of the fetishist, on the one hand; and disgust and dismissal of the homosexual on the other. Thus, Sasha, suddenly delirious with happiness after his first encounter with Tasia, declares that he loves her more than anything—almost as much, he says, as he loves Arkadii. “Do you know how much I love her?” he asks, “Almost as much as you!” (“Znaesh’, kak ia ee liubliu? Pochti kak tebia!”). This is the reaction of the fetishist (“I know very well that I just met her, but nonetheless, I feel like I’ve known her all my life”), the overvaluation of the love object, which is part and parcel of the other response: suspicion, rejection, repulsion. “The girl is nothing special,” Arkadii tells the other soldiers in the dugout, “there are thousands like her.” The two responses form the libidinal matrix within which Two Soldiers tries to negotiate between the privileged, yet impossible same-sex desire (living together after the war) and marginal, yet obligatory heteronormativity (I love her almost as much as I love you). This heteronormativity is the by-product of cultural demands—the criminalization of male homosexuality, the strengthening of the family as a unit of social cohesion, the cult of motherhood—that comes in conflict with the utopian ideals of an all-male world, untroubled by sexual difference. In many ways, this is the world of immature male longing. It belongs to early Soviet literature, it is the provenance of Babel, Olesha, Platonov, but not of high, “middle-class” Stalinism. It is what Freud might term an infantile phase of sexual development: from autoeroticism to narcissism, to homosexuality, to heterosexuality. To pause here, to fixate on the “holy male union” is to leave yourself open to panic, to hysteria, to produce a “deviant” masculinity precisely where it is least expected: in the socialist realist hero.

88   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

Writing about “gender melancholia” in Bodies that Matter, Butler suggests that drag allegorizes heterosexual melancholy, the melancholy by which a masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the masculine as a possibility of love; a feminine gender is formed (taken on, assumed) through the incorporative fantasy by which the feminine is excluded as a possible object of love, an exclusion never grieved, but “preserved” through the heightening of feminine identification itself. . . . To the extent that homosexual attachments remain unacknowledged within normative heterosexuality, they are not merely constituted as desires that emerge and subsequently become prohibited. Rather, these are desires that are proscribed from the start. And when they do emerge on the far side of the censor, they may well carry that mark of impossibility with them, performing, as it were, as the impossible within the possible.34

Butler’s suggestion is that homosexual desire represents an ungrieved loss (melancholy) for heterosexuality, a foreclosure of the possibility of one kind of love in deference to another—and we can see the mechanism of this logic at work in both Barnet’s By the Blue Sea and Lukov’s Two Soldiers. Both films incorporate a musical performance: Masha (Elena Kuz’mina) sings her song about a lover far away in the opening sequence of By the Blue Sea; and Mark Bernes performs his famous “Dark Night” (“Temnaia noch’”) in Two Soldiers. Both performances are melancholic, seemingly produced by an ungrieved loss for an object that never existed. Masha’s song appears to refer to the arrival of the two men (Alesha and Iusuf) to whom she has just been introduced. But instead, it is our first clue that Masha loves someone else, someone who, in fact (at least not in the film) may never return. The performance of “Dark Night” is even more melancholy, sung at night in the dugout, while the other soldiers write letters home. The soldiers pause to listen, and the song of the woman waiting at home unites them in the loss of this nonexistent love. Arkadii as we know, has no one to write to, his only correspondent is sitting next to him. The song represents the loss of heterosexual union, and it performs, in Butler’s words, “the impossible within the possible.” In fact, the impossible love is perfectly possible and easily represented. What cannot be represented, what requires delay, misunderstanding, and miscommu-

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   89

nication, is the love between Sasha and Tasia, the love that for whatever complicated set of conventions remains outside the narrative. Again, the socialist realist standard of giving love a secondary or auxiliary place in the master plot disrupts paradigmatic narrative conventions. What is grieved in these films is (ironically) the impossibility of heterosexuality, the foreclosure of that desire from the text. Between the utopian ideals of an all-male community and the demands of self-sacrifice, the Stalinist text leaves little room for the conventional marriage plot, and the socialist realist hero emerges terrified of the possibility of heterosexual relations that he nevertheless mourns.

Male Hysteria The fear of heterosexual union at work in Stalinist texts is produced, in part, by a desire for movement and exploration (serving with Klim Voroshilov somewhere in the outskirts of the Soviet Empire, for example), and the privileging of male-male relations on which patriarchy may be said to be based. In its Stalinist version, however, patriarchy is never the means by which men achieve power while women remain objects of exchange. Rather, Stalinist patriarchy, while still privileging the masculine—Stalin arrests the wives of his fellow Central Committee members and hosts all-night all-male drinking parties (vecherinki) at his dacha; socialist realist heroines look more and more like “boys”—at the same time works to undo the confluence of men and power, to expose masculinity (of all but Stalin) as nothing more than another version of femininity. This is a masculinity that lacks, that takes pleasure in remaining outside, behind, in the rear, or in the discourse of the pilot films of the thirties, “on the ground.” It invites men to enjoy their symptom as a sign of political compliance, and it invites woman to eroticize male lack over the fantasy of extravagant virility. In the three films examined below the pilot-heroes are weakened by a series of hysterical symptoms produced at the site of the male body. Blindness, dizziness, leg cramps, and heart attack are all forms of somatic compliance to a prohibition against a repressed or forbidden wish. The wish for travel (a desire of the pilots in particular) cannot be expressed through language but must instead be acted out bodily. This wish may be read metaphorically as the desire to escape the circumscribed subject position to

90   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

which the Stalinist films of the thirties and forties relegate their heroes. In acquiescence to the prohibition against travel and movement, the men are grounded: disciplined, punished, and coerced; unable or unwilling to fly. The heterosexual panic operating in these films results from the obligation to marriage and family demanded by the state, and it produces what can only be described as hysterical symptoms at the site of the male body. In 1886 Freud described a case of male hysteria in the following way: [The patient’s] illness dates back for some three years. At that time he fell into a dispute with his dissolute brother, who refused to pay him back a sum of money he had lent him. His brother threatened to stab him and ran at him with a knife. This threw the patient into indescribable fear; he felt a ringing in his head as though it was going to burst; he hurried home without being able to tell how he got there, and fell to the ground unconscious in front of his door. It was reported afterwards that for two hours he had the most violent spasms and had spoken during them of the scene with his brother. When he woke up, he felt very feeble; during the next six weeks he suffered from violent left-sided headaches and intracranial pressure. The feeling in the left half of his body seemed to him altered, and his eyes got easily tired at his work. . . . The left side of his body felt as though it had been affected by a slight stroke; his eyes became very weak and often made him see everything grey; his sleep was interrupted by terrifying apparitions and by dreams in which he thought he was falling from a great height; pains started in the left side of his throat, in his left groin, in the sacral region and in other areas; his stomach was often “as though it was blown out.” . . . In addition, the patient is subject to violent pains in his left knee and his left sole if he walks for some time; he has a peculiar feeling in his throat as if his tongue was fastened up, he has frequent ringing in his ears, and more of the same sort.35

Working mainly with cases of female hysteria, feminist critics have suggested that the disease be read as a form of social protest, as a mode of resistance to patriarchal demands and the refusal of the female subject to occupy her assigned place in the political, economic, and familial structures within which she is circumscribed. Hysteria is the disease that “speaks,” with legible symptoms that can be retranscribed into the language of political resistance to normative structures of identification. As

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   91

David Eng suggests, going beyond the definition of hysteria as a “wandering womb”: “As a mode of political resistance, hysteria signals the refusal of the female subject to occupy her proper place within a patriarchal society, her refusal to submit to dominant modes of identification, and her refusal to comply with conventional mores—a social, not an anatomical, wandering from one’s culturally assigned position.”36 In this sense, male hysteria presents a particularly odd case of deviant behavior, because it is a form of resistance to paradigms working to bolster and protect the male subject. A typical male subject does not find himself “at the margins” of patriarchal structures, but firmly rooted in them. His desires should line up precisely with the demands of patriarchal culture, and he therefore should never be “at a loss for words,” unable to express in language his impossible wish.37 And yet, the exemplary male subject of a socialist realist text frequently finds himself in a problematic relation to his body, where the excess of symptoms of disability take on the role of somatic compliance to the irruption of a repressed wish. A sudden onset of blindness, inexplicable hospitalization, insistence on bodily aches and pains—these are the signs of hysterical conversion, produced by the inadmissibility of a desire that comes into direct conflict with censorship or prohibition. The inadmissible desire that emerges from Stalinist aviation films is the desire for movement, for speed, for distance—for the limitless possibilities of flight. This desire is inadmissible because it offers the Soviet subject a way out of the “bounded and mapped” space of the Soviet Empire, the newly established and delineated space of Stalin’s Russia.38 The privilege of flight is curtailed, while the resistance to the prohibition against movement takes the form of male hysteria. What the Stalinist subject must learn above all is to enjoy his symptom as that which allows him at once to obey and to resist the demands of Stalinist patriarchy.

Grounded The 1935 Iulii Raizman film The Pilots opens with a conversation between the handsome daredevil pilot Sergei Beliaev (Ivan Koval-Samborskii) and the older mechanic Ivan Matveich Khrushchev (Aleksandr Chistiakov), whose distinguishing feature is his Gorky mustache.39 Flying high above the ground, Beliaev wonders aloud what it would be like to travel, to take the plane out of its limited air space around the flight school and really

92   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

reach another destination—“Cairo, Egypt,” for example. As an answer, he is told that the mechanic who has been flying the same route for the last sixteen years has never wanted to go anywhere else, while he, Beliaev, is bored, “like Eugene Onegin.” The curious reference to Onegin, and with him, the nineteenth-century paradigm of the “superfluous man,” demands explication. Beliaev, who immediately begins to perform aerial stunts in order to prove himself a man of action, remains nonetheless superfluous (lishnii), both at the flight school and in his romance with the young female pilot Galia Bystrova (Evgeniia Mel’nikova), whose role it is to make the ideologically correct love-object choice. Unruly and undisciplined, Beliaev is moved aside to make room for the “grounded”—both physically and emotionally—Commander Nikolai Rogachev (Boris Shchukin), an older and wiser man with a prominent scar running across his forehead.40 The plot of the film turns on a catastrophe that takes place during a public test flight of a new airplane sent by “the authorities.” Beliaev, who is more interested in putting on a successful show for the public than in his own safety or the safety of the airplane, takes off without permission, while the mechanic and Rogachev argue about the right course of action. “The mood is falling, and we’re losing airtime” (“Nastroenie padaet, ettekt sorvesh’”), he tells the mechanic. For this, he is im­mediately punished by an accident that injures him and destroys the plane, and when he returns from the hospital, Beliaev is surprised to learn that he is grounded, and that his name has become synonymous with recklessness and lack of discipline. A large banner on the school fence reads: “Down with Beliaevism!” (“Udarim po beliaevshchine!”), while the girl he loves can only remonstrate with him for his rash behavior, using prescribed language that comes directly from “above.” Claiming that no process of reeducation would work on him, Beliaev continues to believe in the possibilities of travel. Seeing that Galia, too, has been grounded for reckless flying, Beliaev offers her the chance to leave together, to go south, to move away. Beliaev’s individualistic and unheroic behavior, however, is really brought home to the audience a couple of scenes later when, after being reprimanded by the commander and rejected by Galia, he is discovered sitting forlornly in an empty room, holding a gun. This brief sketch of the first third of the film reveals that what the Soviet system demands above all is discipline and what it must prevent is

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   93

Fig. 4.4. Beliaev at the scene of the accident. Image courtesy of British Film Institute.

escape. Beliaev wants to leave, to travel, to experiment—even to die—but none of this can be allowed by a system focused on keeping, in Michel Foucault’s words, “everyone in his place.” A disciplinary system demands visibility and location; it places its subjects within view and in limited parameters and, as such, it is able to keep them under surveillance. Beliaev performs aerial stunts with his plane in order to create a sense of freedom from disorientation that he cannot get from the limited space provided by the flight academy. Galia, however, understands that leaving means the end of her career as a pilot. Her refusal to go with Beliaev is vital because she occupies the closest subject position to that of the viewer: initially seduced by Beliaev’s “heroism,” she must learn to love the more mature Rogachev. Moreover, in formulating the refusal she speaks “the truth” of the film. “I’m not going anywhere!” she says, “I’m going to be a pilot!” (“Ia nikuda ne poedu! Ia budu letchikom!”) Pilots, the film wants to say, are people who go nowhere—that is, people who know their limits, who respect borders, who wait for orders. They are exemplary men and women, “conscious” and disciplined. They “see all,” which is to say, they see that there is nowhere left to go.

94   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

This state of discipline is not one we expect to find in socialist realist texts about the achievements of Soviet aviation.41 Katerina Clark notes that the “iconic attributes of the aviation hero represent a positive but childish brand of ‘spontaneity.’” In both fiction and nonfiction, the aviation hero is presented as a man of “impatience, high spirits, reckless daring, and indefatigability.” From the very beginning, writes Clark, “these gifted but high-spirited children needed greater discipline and self-control (‘consciousness’),” and it was Stalin who most often performed the ritual role of father or teacher. All pilots testified to the transformative meetings that took place in the Kremlin, and Clark quotes Valerii Chkalov’s words from after his meeting with the great leader: “The content of my life became richer; I began to fly with greater self-discipline than before.”42 The myth of Valerii Chkalov—at least as it appears in Mikhail Kalatozov’s film and Chkalov’s official biography—is indeed the myth of an unruly and undisciplined subject brought to earth by the forces and constraints of Soviet power.43 Like Beliaev, Chkalov performs radical aerial maneuvers that initially cost him his position in the army and nearly lose him his girl. At stake here, Clark makes clear, is the spontaneity/consciousness paradigm, the force of education and reformation making it possible for the naturally gifted Stalinist subject to achieve goals he himself has never dreamed of.44 (Clark and others have noted, for example, that a pilot’s attempt at a record-breaking flight was usually made on Stalin’s direct orders, while Chkalov’s own 1936 arctic flight followed a flight plan outlined by Stalin.) And yet the force of Stalinist “education” aimed at more than simply the production of “conscious” citizens—it also aimed at the production of disciplined subjects, ones who know and understand their limitations. Arguing with his commander about his daredevil flight, Kalatozov’s Chkalov voices a concern that Soviet authorities may not necessarily have his best interests at heart. “Are they afraid of novelty?” he asks, “Or . . . don’t they like how I fly? How I fight? Do they see me as a danger?” (“Boiatsia novogo? Ili . . . im ne nravitsia, kak ia letaiu? Kak ia derus’? Ia im opasen?”) Chkalov concludes by adding that he has written to the party, and indeed, it is possible to read the opening of Kalatozov’s film as Chkalov’s threat to Soviet power. Too fast, too bold, too gifted—these are the qualities that earn Chkalov not recognition or promotion, but dismissal. And though his story is ultimately one of

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   95

Soviet triumph, at its inception can be found the anxiety over the toosuccessful and inadequately disciplined Soviet subject. As The Pilots demonstrates, the Stalinist subject cannot break ranks, commit suicide, or leave town—true masculinity lies in recognizing and adhering to borders and limits converted into internal mechanisms of discipline and self-surveillance. In The Pilots, this model of masculinity is embodied by Nikolai Rogachev, the commander of the flight school who is under strict medical orders never to fly again. Suffering from a heart condition that requires immediate operation and bed rest, frequently glancing at himself in the mirror to check his aging face and prominent scar, Rogachev, the film suggests, is the ideal model of Stalinist masculinity. Rogachev’s helplessness is underscored by his relationship with Galia Bystrova, the enthusiastic and extremely capable aviation student. Their first interaction suggests a reversal of the traditional power relations: though older, wiser, and more authoritative, Rogachev repeatedly demonstrates his inferiority when matched against the spirited Galia. As he stumbles over his compliments on her flying, Galia suddenly notices his beard: “It’s an atavism!” she says, and a few scenes later, we find Rogachev asking the barber for a shave. He then spends a long time in front of the mirror, examining his newly shaven face and prominent scar. This examination is repeated during his next meeting with Galia in which she talks about her inappropriate and childish love for Beliaev—again, Rogachev’s examination of his scar appears to point to lack: Rogachev is damaged, old, old-fashioned, ill, unable to fly, emasculated by his younger, energetic student and no match for the handsome, daredevil Beliaev. At the moment of his greatest patriarchal and paternal authority—as he is trying to discipline Galia for her recklessness—Rogachev suffers a heart attack. He collapses onto the table and has to be supported by his staff. From this point until the last scenes of the film, Rogachev is in the hospital, bedridden. Galia’s attentions are now the attentions of a nurse and mother—she brings him flowers, tucks in his sheets, tells him the news of the flight school. Rogachev is permanently grounded, unable even to supervise the construction of his new airplane—a job he must hand over to Beliaev. But his final humiliation comes during the air show meant to demonstrate the capabilities of “his” new airplane when he is not even allowed to leave the hospital. Breaking hospital rules, Rogachev runs

96   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

Fig. 4.5. Galia and Rogachev at the hospital. Image courtesy of British Film Institute.

from window to window trying to catch a glimpse of “his” airplane. He finally makes it onto the roof with the other patients, wearing his hospital gown—an unlikely picture of heroic masculinity. If we compare Rogachev’s symptoms with those enumerated by Freud for his male hysteric, we might begin to see a curious pattern. In every instance when he is called upon to act with “authority,” Rogachev instead finds that he is incapable of speech, of reprimand, of administering punishment. He stammers, he wavers, he clutches at his heart, he cannot work; his impotence is made manifest by the final rooftop shot: an old man in a flapping hospital gown opening in the back, trying to see up to where “his” airplane is performing for the authorities. We are a long way from the dominant paradigm of elevation, for flight as a metaphor for clarity: “raised above the world, [the pilot] can see more clearly.” On a hospital rooftop, in a gown, straining desperately against the sun, Rogachev is the very antithesis of the heroic pilot soaring through the sky, or looking down on the bounded and mapped space of the Soviet Empire.

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   97

Earlier, as our heads spin along with Beliaev’s airplane, we understand that masculine prowess comes from being able to skillfully operate this machine. Alternately coded as phallus (in The Pilots), as woman (in The Fighter Pilots) or as the extension of the male body (A Story About a Real Man), the airplaine in socialist realist texts is a sign for masculinity, and Rogachev’s chase through the hospital ward for a glimpse of his own plane, like his long examinations of his scarred face in the mirror, describes nothing less than the discovery of lack. Again, this revelation is not presented as the catastrophe we might expect. The conditions of the dominant fiction that we recognize from the standard alignment of penis with phallus and masculinity with power are reversed again and again by Stalinist socialist realism. Weak, failed, impotent masculinity is ultimately privileged by the Stalinist text—displayed for our enjoyment and eroticized by female desire. Galia Bystrova falls in love with Rogachev precisely because he is old, sick, grounded, and weak. Her task, like that of so many female characters in socialist realist texts is to make good on male lack, to choose the invalid over the ace. Unlike Beliaev, who must be punished, disciplined, restrained, and finally dismissed, Rogachev understands and accepts his own limitations. He is reminded of them every time he sees in the mirror the scar that speaks to an earlier sacrifice to the Soviet state (or perhaps, to his younger days as a daredevil pilot) and to the missing beard that he shaved off in compliance with Galia’s demand. Whenever he is called upon to act with authority, Rogachev produces instead a series of hysterical symptoms. His body is the site for working out the wishes and prohibitions of Stalinism: the demand for extravagant virility on the one hand, and the “obligation to be a crippled invalid” on the other. The wish to travel expressed by Beliaev is countered by prohibition against movement (Rogachev confined to his hospital bed, even during the air show); the desire to identify with models of exemplary masculinity is countered by the impossibility of such identification. In the end, Rogachev gets “out,” and the closing shots from inside his airplane show us Soviet Russia, bounded and mapped, through the “omnipotent gaze” of the pilot. And indeed, in the perverse language of socialist realism, we must read this as a happy ending: Rogachev has been sent to the island of Sakhalin, 12,000 kilometers away from his fiancée (a distance she has to be a better pilot to cross).45 The choice of location is telling here, since Sakhalin is about the farthest one could travel

98   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

and still be in the Soviet Union. It speaks to both desire for movement and its limitation, as well as heterosexual panic: Rogachev is getting as far away from Galia as he can and still remain within the USSR. Sakhalin, he believes, will have everything he needs: “the sun, the party, and Soviet power”—in other words, it is the ideal utopian location, full of socialist promise and little chance of a marital future.

Blindness and Insight Like Boris Barnet’s By the Blue Sea, Leonid Lukov’s Two Soldiers, and Raizman’s The Pilots, Eduard Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots (1939) is structured by triangular desire and heterosexual panic.46 This film brings together several of the themes discussed throughout this book: heterosexual panic and homoeroticism, the limits of Stalinist masculinity and payment for (dis)obedience, the mutilated male body and female desire. The film centers on the rivalry of two men, Sergei (Mark Bernes) and Kolia (Vladimir Dashenko), to whom we are first introduced at their high school graduation. Sergei and Kolia openly dislike each other—each is going off to flight school and both are glad to learn that they will receive their training in different places. As the film makes clear, however, their dislike has less to do with their mutual love for Varia (Evgeniia Golynchik), than it does with the fact that in the world of Stalinist overachievement, there is nothing to distinguish Sergei from Kolia. Both graduate from high school with top marks, both succeed in being “number one” at their respective flight schools, both return home to enter the same unit to train as fighter pilots, and both continue to court the same Varia, who, at least initially, does not seem to distinguish between them. Their rivalry, on the other hand, takes almost comical form (in a movie that is more tragedy than comedy and takes very seriously the plight of its three protagonists). Constantly thrown together by “circumstances”—the fact that they live in the same town, have the same job, and love the same girl—Sergei and Kolia exchange hostile remarks that seem to underscore their interest in each other. Every encounter involves an unpleasant exchange, always on the verge of the homoerotic. Purposefully disturbing Sergei and Varia, the happy couple, Kolia opens the movie by getting rid of the girl: “Varia, could you leave us alone?” he says, “Go away, we need to talk!” (“Varia, ty mozhesh’ ostavit’ nas vdvoem? Uidi, nam nado pogovorit’!”). Unlike Alesha and Iusuf from By the Blue Sea, who

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   99

take turns courting Masha, Sergei and Kolia are always together. Having come to see her, they linger outside Varia’s apartment, wondering why they are there: “Why are you standing here?” asks Sergei. “I’m waiting for you,” says Kolia. “What do you need me for?” asks Sergei. “I don’t need you at all,” says Kolia (“Ty zachem tut stoish’?” “Tebia dozhidaius’.” “A ia zachem tebe nuzhen?” “Sovsem ne nuzhen.”) At Varia’s birthday party, it is Kolia who comes to stand by the piano (the place always reserved in classic film for the love interest) as Sergei performs the sentimental song “A Comrade Flies to Distant Lands” (“Liubimyi gorod”) while Varia moves onto the balcony. The song lyrics speak of a friend (tovarishch) whose absence at war will be mourned by his hometown and whose welcome back from battle will be met with a house that he loves, a garden in bloom, and a tender gaze (Kogda zh domoi tovarishch moi vernetsia, / Za nim rodnye vetry priletiat. / Liubimyi gorod drugu ulybnetsia, / Znakomyi dom, zelenyi sad i nezhnyi vzgliad.)47 It is perhaps not surprising that Varia absents herself during the performance: the song is not meant for her, but evokes an “impossible love” like that of Arkadii and Sasha played out in Two Soldiers. Meanwhile, the ending of the film is a clear instance of heterosexual panic, with Kolia denying the possibility that Sergei might have been married. Not allowed out onto the field, Varia lingers inside the aviation building, timidly asking after her husband. “Kozhukharov’s wife is asking for him,” says the cadet, “I don’t know, is it right?” (“Ne znaiu, udobno li?”), to which he receives Kolia’s determined reply: “Tell her she’s lying. Kozhukharov never had a wife and never will!” (“Vret. Zheny u Kozhukharova ne bylo i net!”). Yet, along with heterosexual panic, we are also faced here with a crisis of identity. Sergei and Kolia are so similar as to be interchangeable. They are identical in the eyes of the government and the woman they purportedly love. To get rid of woman would, of course, preserve the all-male utopia, but it would pose a problem of differentiation: without womanas-difference, where would difference—and with it, recognition, visibility—be located? Over and over, Pentslin’s film underscores the similarity between Sergei and Kolia: their major, for instance, explains their animosity in the following way: “Partly, there’s a girl, but more important, they are both first, even from back in high school” (“Otchasti, est’ i devushka, a glavnoe, oni oba pervye, eshche so shkoly”). The trouble with Sergei and Kolia, the major suggests, is that they are exactly the same. There is, of

100   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

course, something absurd in the notion of “both first” (“oba pervye”), and the film tries hard to determine what will be the act that will set one of the men above the other. Interestingly, the film visually restages the duality that plagues its two male subjects: the focus of the shots is always on couples—there are two majors, two mechanics, two pilots—the film constantly returns to the image of two identical men equal in height and in identical military uniforms. Sergei’s mother underscores this double vision when she comments to his two friends who have dropped by for a visit that, “We are not forgotten—yesterday, there were also two” (“Nas ne zabyvaiut—vchera tozhe bylo dvoe”). The difference between Sergei and Kolia is ultimately produced by an accident. Out on a test flight, Sergei notices that the train tracks below are blocked by fallen trees and makes the quick decision to fly off-course and warn a passenger train of the approaching catastrophe. Kolia, meanwhile, has stuck to the flight plan and returned to the base. One act of bravery immediately follows another: at the town fair, where he has gone with Varia and Kolia, Sergei rescues a boy from an explosion, but his own eyes are badly burned. Sergei’s heroism is rewarded the following day when an article on him appears in Pravda and he is recommended for a medal. Taking off on his next flight, Sergei is the prototypical Stalinist subject, “the aviation hero as the paradigmatic New Man.” As the plane rises higher and higher in the sky, we are shown the Soviet countryside from Sergei’s point of view—but as he begins to rub at his eyes, the shots get more and more blurry, until at last there is nothing to be seen but a terrifying incomprehensible vastness. Having taken the airplane for a test run, Sergei is unable to bring it back: the sudden onset of blindness, which he initially mistakes for fog, forces Sergei to give up control of the airplane and rely on his mechanic to land the plane. As Iasha, his terrified copilot, turns to Sergei for an explanation, Sergei rises slowly out of the cockpit, saying, “Give me your hand, Iasha, I have gone blind.” His words are delivered over a medium shot of Sergei—the handsome, physically fit, blond model of virile masculinity—staring into the distance with unseeing eyes. This turning point in the film—Sergei’s blindness—again shows socialist realism’s constant return to male lack as the site of ideological and erotic investment. From the beginning, Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots is concerned with the possibilities of movement: the graduation ceremony that opens the film stresses the myriad roads and paths that lie ahead. The

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   101

school principal, the song preformed by the students, and Sergei’s sister all underscore the freedom of choice and the paths open to the new graduates. The principal declares that with their life before them and no barriers to block their paths, no matter which road they pick, “it will be the honest and direct path of a true Soviet patriot” (“Vsia vasha zhizn’ vperedi. Dlia vas net nikakikh pregrad. . . . No kakie by puti vy ne izbrali, my uvere ny v odnom—eto budet chestnyi i priamoi put’ nastoiashchikh, sovetskikh pat­ riotov”). Reinforcing this point, the song reiterates, “All roads are before us, we have everything in front of us, our fatherland, from edge to edge” (“Pered nami puti, vse u nas vperedi, vsia otchizna ot kraia do kraia”). And Sergei’s sister brings the point home when she announces with wild enthusiasm: “They are so lucky . . . they could go anywhere . . . become any kind of heroes!” (“Schastlivye . . . ved’ kuda ugodno mogut idti . . . v liubye geroi!”). Emma Widdis in Visions of a New Land describes the bounded, mapped, and knowable territory of the Soviet Union that presents itself to the pilot’s superior view. Looking down from the cockpit, the pilot can “see clearly.” Not only is Soviet territory given to the pilot (and to us) as a knowable space, but this position also echoes an extraordinary talent: the pilot is naturally brave, gifted, and possessed of the self-discipline and guidance of the party and the leader that enables him or her to rise above and to see all, “the fatherland from edge to edge.” The cruelty of The Fighter Pilots, however, lies precisely in the fact that the characters go nowhere and see nothing. Not only do the two men return to the same town, the same job, and the same girl, but even their flight path is circumscribed and delimited, while they perform the same aerial maneuvers (the same ones that Beliaev was so bored by that he wanted to fly to Cairo), and the airplane spinning in a barely controlled dive acts as a visual signature of compulsive repetition. Thus, if we take a closer look at Sergei’s decision to fly off-course to rescue the train, we can see that what first appears to be an act of bravery is actually an act of political suicide. In a socialist realist text, as in Soviet reality, travel and movement are severely restricted and limited to the dictates of the state.48 Just as The Pilots opens with Beliaev’s unorthodox desire to go to Egypt, or Pyr’ev’s The Party Card with Pavel’s illegal arrival in Moscow, Sergei’s flight “off-course”—though seemingly heroic—is also impermissible. Sergei’s blindness is a reminder of limitation: while Sergei is busy playing the hero, the film makes clear that the

102   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

state does not need subjects who go off-course or plunge recklessly into danger. What it needs are subjects who know their place. The next time that we see Sergei, he is no longer the unfettered pilot gazing down at the earth from on high. Instead, he is pacing the confines of his single room, enclosed in a tightly buttoned uniform. The accident teaches Sergei the proper lesson in Stalinist discipline. As a result, he is blinded, grounded, and isolated. Typical of Bolshevik pride, Sergei remains “in the ranks,” continuing to wear his uniform and, like Pavka Korchagin (and Nikolai Ostrovskii), to type incomprehensible messages on the typewriter. Most important, however, though unable to fly, he gains a more profound insight into the plane’s operations, and blindness allows him to find a solution to a mechanical problem that eludes Kolia. Sergei has literally learned to function in “another landscape,” one that can be accessed “by a kind of productive imaginative vision born of a frequently intoxicating and often terrifying blindness.”49 Though the film restores Sergei’s eyesight through the miracle of Soviet science, the film’s ultimate lesson lies in the disciplining of the male subject. The high school principal’s assurance that no matter which road the students pick, “it will be the honest and direct path of a true Soviet patriot,” and Sergei’s sister’s similar formulation that “They are so lucky . . . they could go anywhere . . . become any kind of heroes!” both point to the fact that in The Fighter Pilots, Soviet patriotism and Soviet heroism are categories that limit the paths open to male subjectivity. There is, in fact, only one “honest and direct path of a true Soviet patriot,” the path of discipline and bodily obligation—the more limiting, the more heroic. The disciplining of the Stalinist subject addresses Varia as well. Ini­ tially a model New Soviet Woman, Varia is a head architect (“nachal’nik chetvertogo stroitel’nogo uchastka”), so that even when she is at home (which is rare) she is working, clearly putting her job above any sexual desire. Like Galia Bystrova’s choice in The Pilots, and even Masha’s in By the Blue Sea, Varia’s choice of husband mirrors the desires of the state: the more disciplined the subject, the more erotically desirable he is. And the more he is out of reach—at sea, in the hospital, on his way to Sakhalin, blind, paralyzed, or amputated—the more desirable he becomes. The Fighter Pilots ends with Sergei’s successful flight and the arrival of his family. Sergei’s father repeats the words “Vidish’! Vidish’!” which translate ambiguously as either “You can see!” or “Look! Look!”

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   103

Seen from the standpoint of dominant fiction and cultural fantasy, the film suggests that ideal Stalinist masculinity (the privileged place ocupied by pilots in the Soviet imagination) requires two seemingly contradictory, but instead mutually constitutive, elements: on the one hand, bodily mutilation produces the superior Stalinist subject. On the other hand, bodily mutilation reminds the Stalinist subject of where he may and may not go—Sergei cannot change his flight plan—not all paths are open to him. Arguably, the proper acknowledgment of one’s limitation— the ability to see what cannot be done and what paths are not open—is a necessary component of exemplary Stalinist subjectivity. Sergei is better than Kolia because he finds out how to live within the boundaries of Stalinist masculinity/subjectivity. His blindness not only shows him the inner workings of the airplane, it also shows us the inner workings of Stalinism. Sergei’s blindness, however, may be read in another way. Faced with the possibility of heterosexual commitment (marriage to Varia), and identification with heroism (the article in Pravda and his medal), Sergei produces a hysterical symptom: he goes blind. A “symptom” is a sign of a compromise: where language fails the hysteric, somatic symptoms are produced in its place, “speaking” the wish that has been repressed. Shown a picture of himself in the newspaper, Sergei is told by his superior officer that he “doesn’t know how to report,” is not able to properly tell his story. What Sergei cannot express in language—his fear of Varia and his fear of being a “hero”—he expresses through the body. Blindness ends his career as a pilot and puts Varia out of reach because he refuses to marry her while he is an invalid. His eventual recovery only adds to the im­ plication that the blindness he suffered was not produced by physical but psychic causes, a hysterical symptom produced by a subject attempting to resist certain normative and patriarchal identifications, to wander away from his culturally assigned “position.” And indeed, as Timoshenko’s The Sky-Barge makes clear, hysteria might just be the way for a male subject to avoid, however temporarily, the limits of Stalinist masculinity.

The Feminine Position Semen Timoshenko’s 1945 film The Sky-Barge opens with an accident.50 Shot down by a German Messerschmitt, pilot Major Bulochkin (Niko-

104   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

lai Kriuchkov) manages to bail out of his burning plane, only to have his parachute punctured by the German aircraft. His fall from 6,000 meters, however, is unexpectedly cushioned by the force of the plane’s explosion, hurling Bulochkin’s body away from the ground and into some nearby trees and allowing him to survive what should have been a mortal fall. This opening sequence that, on the one hand, underscores the heroism and indestructibility of the Soviet pilot, also motivates the events of the film by subjecting Bulochkin to a series of humiliations that begin with his reassignment from the fighter plane (istrebitel’) to the slow-moving U-2 (У-2), away from the company of his male comrades to a squadron of women and away from his status as a confirmed bachelor to a married man. The film leaves little doubt about the hysterical nature of its hero’s condition: Bulochkin, named after a sweet roll, suffers from vertigo, has a weak heart, and has sustained some kind of unspecified damage to his leg. As a result, he is not allowed to fly faster than the 100 kilometers an hour—a speed unworthy of a true ace and one reserved for the old, nearly out-of-commission U-2 planes that have been handed over almost entirely to the care of women. However, the plot of The Sky-Barge does not, as we might expect, center on the reacquisition of masculinity—or, to put it another way, on covering over lack—but rather, on the acceptance of masculinity’s permanent loss. Woman here plays a key role, as in other socialist realist texts in which acceptance of male inadequacy requires her loving gaze, in first contributing to the humiliation of the male subject and then making good on the male subject’s lack. Though seeming at first to be attracted only to the ace, she too must learn to prefer the U-2. Beginning as yet another vivid example of heterosexual panic, The Sky-Barge is never­theless a film in which heterosexual union prevails over homosociality, but in doing so, it demonstrates the myriad ways in which the Stalinist male subject is beset on all sides by limits that he must learn not only to accept but even to enjoy. Indeed, the film moves its three male protagonists away from the pleasures and freedoms of male bonding to the gentle fetters of heterosexual domesticity under the supervision of the big Other (in this case, the commander general of the Soviet air force). In Timoshenko’s film, heterosexual desire, and with it the attraction of women, is presented as one of the ways in which the male subject’s enjoyment is constrained rather than engaged. The film’s establishing sequence, following Bulochkin’s heroic crash, underscores the threat posed

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   105

by women to male enjoyment. Led by Senior Lieutenant Tucha (Vasilii Merkur’ev), whose name, unlike Bulochkin’s, underscores his “stormy” masculine temper, Major Bulochkin and Captain Kaisarov (Vasilii Neshchiplenko) make a pact not to fall in love until the end of the war and the conclusion of their tours of duty. Seemingly a straightforward patriotic pledge to put one’s country before one’s own desires, the pact— and more specifically, the song that introduces it—points to the threat posed by woman to the rituals of male bonding. As the three men stroll through the hospital grounds, the two uniformed pilots accompanying Bulochkin in hospital pajamas, the song they sing explains that because they are pilots, women take second place to their first love, airplanes. How would it be, they ask, if you see her, meet her, fall in love, and next thing you know —you are called away on your next flight? (“Nynche vstretish’, uvidish’, poliubish’ / A na zavtra prikaz uletat’!”)51 The song is followed by a moment of true Russian male bonding: the two pilots lead Bulochkin to a secret place in which they have hidden a bottle of vodka and a string of sausages. This impromptu picnic makes it clear that women are neither needed nor desired, their presence being only a disruption. The song’s reference to being called away on a flight and leaving behind the woman you love appears as less a concern than a wishful thought: with a little help from one’s country, one could always find a way of leaving a woman at home. Tucha, the most committed of the bachelors, goes so far as to name the condition of the all-male utopia in which the three comrades temporarily reside. Interrupting the tearful Bulochkin as he searches for the right word to describe their relationship—friends, fighter pilots, comrades—Tucha suggests that the three of them are mizogeny, a word, he claims, that can be found in any Soviet encyclopedia. A mizogen, he patiently explains, is a woman hater (zhenonenavistnik). Male bonding, in other words, does not so much require the elimination of woman as her absent presence. Woman, we might say, is the structuring lack around which male bonding is organized. It is not enough to be friends, fighter pilots, comrades—to sustain homosociality, the three friends must also be misogynists. This movement from camaraderie to misogyny is one that Eve Sedgwick might ascribe to the usual functioning of patriarchy—the privileging of malemale relations to the exclusion of woman. In this film, however, misogyny represents a utopian state—a holy male union (sviatoi muzhskoi soiuz), as

106   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

Tucha calls it—that can exist only in the ideal. The message of The SkyBarge, like that of many other socialist realist texts described here, is discipline. The always unruly male subject must be brought in line with the requirements of Stalinist patriarchy for docile and disciplined subjects. His enjoyment (even the enjoyment of hating women) must be curtailed, and his recognition of his own inadequacy in the face of Soviet power must be ensured. Thus, before Bulochkin is able to toast their holy male union, he is called away by a (female) nurse to see a (female) doctor. The observation sequence that follows may be read as a series of female restraints placed on male pleasure. Twice the nurse prevents Bulochkin from drinking his shot of vodka, forcing him to arrive at the doctor’s office still hiding the shot glass behind his back. The (female) doctor then proceeds to palpate his torso, insisting that he admit to feeling pain, instructs him to quit smoking, and suggests that he drink nothing stronger than milk or juice. Taking literally his metaphorical remark that a fighter pilot cannot walk on the earth, but only run, she insists that running, too, is out of the question. And she finally secures his position as an emasculated subject by ensuring that he is transferred from his usual fighter plane to the U-2, an aircraft that, as Bulochkin puts it, “is only good for carrying milk.” It does not take much interpretive imagination to read that comment in gendered terms: a vessel for carrying milk is of course a female, and Bulochkin’s final act of rebellion against his new orders—finally grabbing his shot of vodka and downing it in one gulp—ends precisely as one might imagine it would: the vodka in the glass has been surreptitiously replaced with milk. Woman, it appears, is at once disruptive, restrictive, and domesticating. When Bulochkin arrives at his new post, he is surprised to learn that here most of the pilots neither smoke nor drink. All becomes clear when he meets the members of his new squadron—they are all women, and their barracks are filled with the attributes of female domesticity: a clothes iron, a sewing machine, pretty high-heeled shoes, and even home-made bliny. Again, smoking and drinking represent specifically male pleasures enjoyed in male company, while hot irons and sewing machines represent the incursion of the domestic into the military space. “Are you sure you’re a real pilot?” Bulochkin asks Senior Lieutenant Kutuzova when she shows him the camouflaged U-2, “or is this, too, just camouflage?” Kutuzova (whose name echoes the great Napoleonic War General Kutuzov) responds to this

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   107

question by assuring him that even though they are women, and therefore likely to fall in love, they have made a pledge not start any romances until the end of the war. In other words, she understands his question as one of essence: to be a pilot means not to be a woman, whose nature is flighty and romantic—or, as the correspondent Valia Petrova puts it later in the movie, only a thoughtless flirt (fintifliushka) would consider starting a romance in the middle of a war. The question of camouflage is generated in part by the concern that woman’s sexual identity as other might be more mobile than it first appears. Imagining a scene from Eugene Onegin, Bulochkin finds instead that Kutuzova is camouflaging herself as a man—instead of a Tat’iana, she is a senior lieutenant. (Or, as Jacques Lacan would put it, he finds that woman as such does not exist.)52 The question of camouflage, however, is not put to rest here, but comes up again when Tucha and Kaisarov are introduced to the women of the squadron, and in particular to Senior Lieutenant Svetlova, “the king of camouflage” (korol’ kamufliazha). Tucha immediately points out that camouflage is “women’s work,” as, indeed, it turns out to be: Svetlova and Kaisarov are secretly married but are keeping up the appearance (polnaia maskirovka) of never having met. As in Barnet’s By the Blue Sea and Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man, the play with titles and grammatical gender here suggests trouble with biological gender and the possibility of its mutability. In Polevoi’s novel, Meres’ev writes long letters to the “meteorological sergeant,” whose name he does not know, instead of writing to his fiancée, Olia, an all-too-real and all-too-female addressee. The title of “meteorological sergeant” makes it possible for Meres’ev not to think of her as a woman, which in turn makes it possible for him to confess the true nature of his injuries (the feet amputated at the shins) and his state of extreme depression. Similarly, in The Sky-Barge, gender-neutral titles—which is to say, masculine titles that are used for female professions—allow Bulochkin and others to temporarily set aside the question of gender difference, which nevertheless always returns. Faced with his female doctor, Bulochkin does not know how best to address her, referring to her in his excitement alternately as Comrade Professor (Tovarishch professor! masc., masc.), Dear Professor (Dorogoi professor! (masc., masc.), and finally Dear Professor (Dorogaia professor! fem., masc.). This gender confusion is continued by Tucha, who, in saying goodbye to Kutuzova, suddenly realizes that there is literally no difference

108   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

between them: Comrade Senior Lieutenant (Tovarishch starshii leitenant) is a term that applies equally to him and to her. And finally, Bulochkin himself inadvertently becomes what he most fears to be—between his loss of fighter pilot status, his vertigo, his weak heart, and his wounded leg—he finally succumbs to being called “Bulochka”—a little sweet roll (fem.). Gender mutability suggested by the possibilities of camouflage, which, as Tucha reminds us, women are particularly good at, means that one can no longer tell a woman from a man. What is at stake in this notion of camouflage and masquerade with which Timoshenko’s film is so insistently engaged? The linguistic genderplay alone—Svetlova as the king of camouflage—suggests that questions of mastery, desire, and transvestitism play a significant role in the ideological underpinnings of this movie. In her chapter on “Film and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” Mary Ann Doane argues that the notion of masquerade—woman dressing so as to hide or flaunt her femininity—is closely tied to issues of power and mastery: The transvestite wears clothes which signify a different sexuality, a sexuality which, for the woman, allows mastery over the image and the very possibility of attaching the gaze to desire. Clothes make the man, as they say. Perhaps this explains the ease with which women can slip into male clothing. . . . The acceptability of the female reversal is quite distinctly opposed to that male reversal which seems capable of representation only in terms of farce. . . . Thus, while the male is locked into sexual identity, the female can at least pretend that she is other—in fact, sexual mobility would seem to be a distinguishing feature of femininity in its cultural construction. . . . The idea seems to be this: it is understandable that women would want to be men, for everyone wants to be elsewhere than in the feminine position.53

The Sky-Barge, in fact, seems to be engaged precisely in answering this question of why anyone would want to be in the “feminine position.” From the beginning, the men with their misogyny and their holy male union insist on separating themselves as far as possible from the condition of femininity. The women of the U-2 squadron also seem to be equally at pains to remake themselves in the male image: not only their uniforms,54 but also their pledge to not fall in love (in the logic of this film: not to be women) suggests that in order to be taken seriously they must hide the

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   109

evidence of their femininity (the clothes iron, the pretty shoes, the beauty rituals) away from the male gaze. Even the newspaper correspondent Valia Petrova, the only one in the film to dress in civilian clothes and therefore actually look like a woman, disavows her femininity by rattling off the models, technical specifications, and national characteristics of all Soviet, German, Italian, and British planes, showing vastly more knowledge than Bulochkin, Tucha, and Kaisarov combined, and distancing herself from love and romance as signs of female weakness. There is no question, therefore, that mastery is seen here to be a masculine quality—Valia admits that she knows all of this because her father is the commander general of the Soviet air force—that is under threat of appropriation by women. And if women are indeed successfully camouflaging themselves as men, what are the paths left open to actual men? The Sky-Barge gives a somewhat unexpected answer to this question. The “female reversal,” as Doane calls it, pushes the men into the feminine position, but it is a position they are ultimately happy to occupy. Timo­ shenko’s film opens with the utopian possibility of a holy male union (sviatoi muzhskoi soiuz) and ends instead with a mixed union (smeshannyi soiuz), soon to be made holy by the state wedding ceremony. The desire to keep the sexes apart, evident in the beginning by the pledges given by both groups (the male trio and the female squadron) to stay away from love and romance until the end of the war, is a homosocial desire, keeping each sex to its own allotted and unadulterated space. Heterosexual desire is coded as betrayal: finding Bulochkin surrounded by women, Tucha claims that he will “destroy the enemy both morally and physically” (predatelia unichtozhaiu i moral’no, i fizicheski); Kutuzova calls Senior Lieutenant Svetlova a “traitor” (izmennitsa, lit.: a changed woman), while Tucha calls Kaisarov a Judas of the air (vozdushnyi Iuda). Indeed, here the notion of an adulterated or smeshannyi union speaks directly to the problem of heterosexuality: when brought together, the two sexes create a heterogynous mixture, a combination of two disparate elements, an introduction of something foreign into an otherwise pure substance.55 We already know that in order to get here, the women have had to masquerade as men, but the men too have had to be revealed as—if not precisely women, then at least as “not quite” themselves. The series of humiliations suffered by Major Bulochkin are all instances of emasculation. Dressed in hospital pajamas, forced to admit

110   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

to feeling pain, barred from flying fast or even running, finally ready to admit that because of his vertigo, weak heart, and wounded leg he will never fly anything but the slow-moving U-2 plane, and having fallen in love—“Bulochka” is an obvious candidate for the “feminine position.” His friend Sergeant Kaisarov is no better—he, it turns out, was married three months before and is therefore ineligible for either the masculine status of bachelor, or mizogen. And finally, Tucha, who seems safest from the “feminine position,” is repeatedly put there by the camouflaged Kutuzova. Toasting her squadron’s successful bombing raid, she does not fail to point out that Tucha, on the other hand, missed his target by overshooting the site. Tucha’s sexual humiliation is ensured, however, when he declares that his heart is made of an armor (bron’), that no type of weapon could breach except possibly a Katiusha, and is laughingly told that “Katiusha” just happens to be Kutuzova’s first name. Humiliated, castrated, penetrated—Tucha is the last of the confirmed bachelor/misogynists to be squarely placed in the feminine position. Since to be in love is also to be in the feminine position, all three of our male leads, along with the main female leads, end up feminized despite all their earlier efforts to masquerade as men and stay away from love. In the last sequence of the film, the three couples—Kaisarov and Svetlova (who have been secretly married), Tucha and Kutuzova (who agree to form the “mixed union” in light of having lost their other comrades to love), and Bulochkin and Valia Petrova—all face Valia’s father, the commander general of the Soviet air force. The threat of this meeting has been brewing throughout the film, ever since Valia suggested that she would introduce her father to the man she loved, with the words, “Here is my father” (“Vot moi papa”). I suggest that this paternal threat is not incidental and that much of Timoshenko’s movie actually revolves around the issue of coming face to face with true patriarchal authority. As noted, part of the discipline exacted by this movie, as by other socialist realist texts, takes the form of the male subject’s recognition and acceptance of his own lack and the female subject’s recognition that what she in turn desires is a lacking male subject. Storming into the commander’s office, Bulochkin believes he will convince him to give him back his fighter plane—but instead, leaves the office happy to be flying the U-2. The moment of Bulochkin’s conversion takes place under a bust of Stalin—a standard device of socialist realist films, yet one that does not rid it of all meaning. Bulochkin accepts his

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   111

demotion and his new status as U-2 pilot—indeed, he is in the end thrilled by the assignment—under the watchful gaze of the leader. From this point forward, Bulochkin reiterates his shortcomings: “I get dizzy, often, and my heart is not so good, and then, there’s also my leg . . .” (“U menia golovokruzhenie chasto, i serdste, da vot eshche—noga”) as an excuse for why instead of an ace, he is now “a U-2.” This binary opposition—ace versus U-2—is first proposed by the allknowing Valia. Disappointed to find that she will be flying back to town in the U-2, and confused at finding Bulochkin at the helm, she humiliates him by insinuating that what he flies is not even an aircraft: “I thought that you flew an airplane, but you’re flying a U-2!” (“Ia dumala, chto vy letaete na samolete! A vy, okazyvaetsia, na U-2!”); and that Bulochkin is no fighter pilot: “I thought you were an ace, but you are a U-2?” (“Ia dumala, vy as—a vy, udvas?”). If we recall that a U-2 is fit only to carry milk, milk that we have seen Bulochkin consume at the beginning of the film, we can easily see that The Sky-Barge strives at every turn to emasculate its male protagonist. Yet Valia, also, must come to love Bulochkin not as a heroic father substitute but as the one who will never be able to measure up to the father. Only when Valia gives up on the idea that Bulochkin will ever fly anything but the U-2, when she accepts the old, antiquated, wood-and-canvas structure as a plane worthy of some respect, only then does she succeed in introducing Bulochkin to her father. The commander general, like the leader for whom he is a substitute, looks down upon the three men and their brides, and approves of the new unions. The SkyBarge, like all good comedy films, ends with the promise of marriage—the three confirmed bachelors, aces of the skies, finally firmly brought down to earth and bound by femininity, with Bulochkin once more enumerating his list of hysterical symptoms, which up to now have successfully kept him out of heterosexual troubles. Like the bandage frequently employed by Stalinist films to mark off the hero, Bulochkin’s last line, “I get dizzy, often, and my heart is not so good, and then, there’s also my leg . . .” is meant to recommend him to Valia’s father as a “son” who can never replace the “father.”

Super-vision Timoshenko’s The Sky-Barge ends with a medium shot of the three couples, seen from the point of view of Commander General Petrov, and the

112   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

ironic statement, “And all three confirmed bachelors!” As the image fades to black, we continue to hear the last verses of a song, performed at two other times in the film—once, in chorus sung by the women’s squadron, and once by Bulochkin as he watches over the sleeping Valia.56 The song is a travel march that calls out for movement, voyage, duty, recalling the earlier lyrics about leaving the loved one behind: It’s time to go on a long road . . . / Over your dear doorstep, I will wave to you with my silver wing / Let fate throw us far away, I don’t mind! / Only don’t let anyone near your heart / I will be keeping an eye on you / Just know—I can see everything from above!57

This refrain introduces a somewhat troubling note into the happy mixed unions with which the movie concludes. The possibilities of infidelity and betrayal opened up by the need to leave the beloved doorstep behind are held in check only by the threat of “super-vision”: an eye that can see everything from its position of absolute mastery.58 The notion of watching from on high echoes Widdis’s argument about aerial shots in pilot films of the thirties—that is, the superior vision granted to pilots (and by extension, the audience) that made the space of the Soviet Union appear “bounded and mapped.” In Visions of a New Land, Widdis identifies a shift in the language and representation of travel and space from the early railroad train views of the twenties to the aerial shots of the aviation films of the thirties and forties. Her argument hinges in part on the notion of conquest, a survey of the bounded and secured Soviet space that separates Stalinist socialist realism from the unbounded and exploratory spaces of avant-garde films. The illusion of mastery is guaranteed by the aerial shot that seems to suture the film’s spectator to the pilot-hero and gives the impression of a mapped and knowable space. Certainly, the verse with which The Sky-Barge concludes, cited above, points to precisely this notion of omnipotence granted to the pilot—he (and possibly even she) can see everything from on high. “The aerial gaze,” writes Widdis, “is, implicitly, available to all: it represents the totality of knowledge and power that the future generation will inherit.” Air travel conquered the territory, and the aerial view echoed this dominance.59 Widdis gives the example of Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Aerograd (1935), in which “a strategy of assimilation and mapping” mirrored osvoenie at the stylistic level, giving us the pilot “as conqueror, mastering the skies.”60

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   113

Similarly underscoring the emphasis on the “all-seeing eye,” Vic­toria Bonnell points out that in posters of the Stalin period, the new, active, towering, larger-than-life supermen and superwomen confronted the viewer with “a penetrating direct gaze,” altering the conventional relationship between the viewer and the image: “The image confronted the viewer,” writes Bonnell, “It might not be far-fetched to compare this phenomenon with the presence of the all-seeing eye (velikii glaz) in Orthodox iconography.”61 The “controlling gaze” and “totalizing heroic vision” offered by Stalinist cinema to its protagonists and (by extension) to its viewers, was misaligned, giving Soviet subjects the perception of a totalizing vision they in fact lacked. Like the all-seeing cinematic eye, the controlling gaze of the aerial shot gives the impression of mastery while obfuscating the mechanisms by which such mastery is made possible. By aligning the camera eye first with the vision of the protagonist, and after with the view given to the spectator, the film obscures the mechanisms of its production—the decisions made in the cutting room, during censorship meetings, and at Kremlin screenings about what could and could not be shown. As the framing of The Fighter Pilots underscores when, in the closing shots, it centers the bust of Stalin above and between the film’s characters, there is indeed a controlling gaze and totalizing vision that Stalinist cinema tries to reproduce on the level of its enunciation—but that gaze is only incidentally aligned with the male hero or female star. More often, it is aligned with the frame: the limit of knowledge, vision, and movement beyond which the Soviet subject must not go. Discussing both The Pilots and The Fighter Pilots, Widdis writes: “with elevation comes consciousness: raised above the world, [the pilot] can see more clearly. Thus flight becomes a metaphor for clarity . . . a new perspective in which the world was rendered comprehensible.” This clarity comes at the price of there being nothing further left to explore. In contrast to the films of the twenties that depicted the Soviet landscape as open to exploration—limitless—Stalin’s Russia appears bounded and mapped.62 It is a space that could be known, not a space of infinite possibility. This feeling of finite space, of the end of exploration, produces hysterical symptoms at the site of the (male) Stalinist subject, marking his restricted movement through a system he does not fully comprehend, enclosed by borders he dare not cross.63 Blindness, immobility, and paralysis represent the condition of the Soviet subject as beset by limitation: “all-seeing” and yet blind;

114   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

going “higher, farther, faster,” and yet, maimed, limping, constrained. As Widdis herself notes, the blind pilot in The Fighter Pilots is “a curious reworking of the metaphor of flight as clarity of vision.”64 Widdis’s argument dovetails with theories of the cinematic apparatus that attempt to elaborate the conditions of the production of the cinematic subject as an effect of the basic operations of cinema: découpage (shot breakdown before shooting), montage (assembly), the use of perspective and point-of-view shots.65 Jean-Louis Baudry, in his fundamental work on apparatus theory, writes that the technology of cinema, aimed at imitating the human eye, also makes it possible to free that eye from the body by which it is normally constrained. He writes: If the eye which moves is no longer fettered by a body, by the laws of matter and time, if there are no more assignable limits to its displacement—conditions fulfilled by the possibilities of shooting and of film—the world will be constituted not only by this eye but for it. The mobility of the camera seems to fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the “transcendental subject.” There is a phantasmatization of objective reality (images, sounds, colors)—but of objective reality which, limiting its powers of constraint, seems equally to augment the possibilities or the power of the subject.66

When Baudry speaks of the transcendental subject, he is of course concerned with the subject in the sense of that for whom cinema is made, while Widdis speaks of characters—the pilot-heroes with whom we can identify on screen, but who are not fundamentally us. Though seeming available to “all,” Widdis argues, the aerial shot is actually the provenance of the pilot and not the spectators and is careful to separate the allseeing eye of the pilot from the spectators and audience left below on the ground: “The consolidation of the myth of the pilot . . . and the emergent aesthetic of the aerial shot separates the gaze of the pilots from the gaze of those who admired them.”67 The air show—a key feature of pilot films of the thirties—makes this shift explicit, “with the camera assuming the perspective of the spectator.” And yet, cinematic dis-identification is not secured by this occasional separation. Too many other elements—the point-of-view shot from the cockpit of the plane, for one, as well as our desire to always identify with the idealized characters of the silver screen, to

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   115

map ourselves onto the projected image—ensure that the operations of the cinematic apparatus, the ideological suturing taking place within cinema, guarantee our desire for identification with the extraordinary individual and our belief in ourselves as the unfettered, transcendental subject. Aviation films from the thirties and forties like to remind their spectators that their identifications—whether with the camera or with the hero—are merely illusory. What is more, the omnipotent gaze only appears to be granted to the pilots—those extraordinary individuals, “Stalin’s fledglings.” Rather, over and over again, they too are denied the kind of omnipotence and super-vision that the aerial shot initially promises. One need to look no further than The Fighter Pilots for an example of a film that initially gives its pilot “sight”—Sergei can see farther and better, he can see the catastrophe for which the passenger train is headed—and then takes it away. Sergei’s loss of vision is shot as a point-of-view shot, and as Sergei leans out the cockpit of his plane, our magnificent aerial view of Soviet territory is replaced by a blurry, indefinable, terrifying mass. The Pilots is equally ambiguous about its message of aerial conquest. The shots that accompany Beliaev’s crazy aerial stunts destabilize our perspective. The air show, seen from the perspective of the spectator, further reveals Beliaev’s instability: we watch the same aerial stunts being performed on the new plane, and then we watch the new plane, caught in a death spin, come crashing to the ground. Finally, the last air show is shot exclusively from the perspective of the hospitalized Rogachev as he runs between hospital beds and occasionally catches glimpses of his plane outside the hospital window. Only the final shots of the film give us Soviet space as knowable and mapped—as Rogachev looks down on the carved-out land below. The film, however, does not linger on this perspective (which in any case is not that of the pilot, but that of the passenger), choosing instead to close on a conversation taking place inside the airplane, ending on a close-up of Rogachev’s smiling face. In The Pilots, the extraordinary individual is the one who stays grounded, the one who does not occupy the privileged position of the all-seeing eye, the one who chooses to look inward not outward. The question of point-of-view shots in Soviet film has a long history beginning with early cinema technology. Oksana Bulgakowa, writing on the “Spatial Figures in Soviet Cinema of the 1930s,” argues that early film

116   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

tableaux were oriented toward the camera, “which acted as a mirror or an impersonal eye.”68 The close-up ruptured the integrity of this space and shaped understanding of spatial representation as dependent on a character’s point of view, limiting the viewer’s vision to the mediations of characters. Avant-garde cinema fought against this limitation, attempting to recapture the “impersonal”—that is to say, inhuman—vision of cinema. Thus, as Bulgakowa points out, El Lissitzky wrote that “we no longer want space that will be understood as a painted coffin for our bodies,” while Dziga Vertov attempted his experiments with “total vision,” “panoptic,” “cine-eye” that would transcend and transform space.69 Microscopic, telescopic, X-ray vision; Sergei Eisenstein’s deformation, fragmentation, discontinuity, simultaneity, penetration of space, “pulverized space”—all of these represented the desire to liberate the camera from the domination of the human gaze, making it possible to produce and “assemble” film not as a mimetic reality that strives to accurately represent the world (André Bazin’s myth of “total cinema”), but as a construct, a fantasy, a screen for mediating between reality and desire. Socialist realist filmmaking rejected this wild avant-garde experimentation and went back to the model of “total cinema” mentioned above.70 Cinema was the perfect apparatus to accurately represent reality—and that reality, or its perfect simulacrum, was recreated in the studios where, as Bulgakowa notes, from the thirties to the fifties, you could find everything from the desert, to the North Pole, the Ural Mountains, and even the Volga River.71 What the myth of total cinema guaranteed was the stability of the cinematic gaze, the suturing of the cinematic spectator to the eye of the camera. Rarely offering the destabilizing perspective of twenties cinema (of which Widdis’s train shots are but one example), the socialist realist film proffered the illusion of mastery and dominance. The illusion of mastery—whether granted to the extraordinary individual but made temporarily available to the viewer through primary and secondary identifications (with the character and with the camera); or denied to the viewer, who is left standing on the ground, looking up at the sky—was in each case an illusion: a fantasy of conquest and possession offered to the duped spectator by the all-seeing camera eye. I would like to argue, in conclusion, that the fantasy of conquest as it is imagined over and over again by socialist realist films and their aerial

HETEROSEXUAL PANIC   ★   117

gaze is repeatedly undercut by the operations of the cinematic apparatus whose task it is to “map” the spectator onto the cinematic screen. The double definition of screen is vital here, in that a screen is at once a device that obscures and conceals; and, at the same time, a surface onto which images are projected. In other words, cinema’s projections have precisely the role of obscuring or concealing the true relations of power (between director and spectator, state and citizen), while keeping the subject held in thrall by illusions of mastery. Again, we might turn to Baudry for his clarification of the place of the subject in cinema. The center of the space of Western easel painting, from which cinema takes its perspectival cues, “coincides with the eye which Jean Pellerin Viator will so appropriately call the ‘subject.’” Baudry quotes Viator, noting that “the principal point in perspective should be placed at eye level: this point is called fixed or subject.” Monocular vision of the camera, continues Baudry, “calls forth a sort of play of ‘reflection.’” Based on the principle of a fixed point by reference to which the visualized objects are organized, it specifies in return the position of the subject, the very spot it must necessarily occupy.”72 This means that cinema, which generally aims at restoring the “habitual perspective” of human vision—of the eye of the human subject—also limits that perspective, creating the place the subject must ultimately occupy. The cinematic apparatus, in other words, aims at giving us an illusion of mastery while rigidly controlling not only the images that are given to us to be seen, but even the place from which we might come to see them. Cinema in general, and socialist realist cinema in particular, reproduces the world from a particular position and for a particular gaze. We can return to the closing verse of The Sky-Barge, with its romanticized vision of surveillance that will ensure the proper behavior of those subjects left behind, on the ground. Writing about the Stalinist portrait, Jan Plamper notes that its formal composition is structured by circularity. “This is not to suggest,” writes Plamper, “that linear movement was banished altogether from the Stalin portrait. Stalin quite simply monopolized linear movement: his gaze came to figure as the only axis pointing outside the circular pictorial patterns.” Thus, while Stalin’s gaze was directed “into no-time and no-place-utopia,” looking at Stalin “required a celestial, upward gaze.”73

118   ★   HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

Valerii Chkalov, who was the first to reach the United States by a polar route from Moscow in June 1937, published an article entitled “Our Father” shortly after his flight. Referring to Stalin, he wrote: He is our father. The aviators of the Soviet Union call Soviet aviation, Stalinist aviation. He teaches us, nurtures us, warns us about risks like children who are close to his heart; he puts us on the right path, takes joy in our successes. We Soviet pilots feel his loving, attentive, fatherly eyes on us every day. He is our father. Proud parents find affectionate, heartfelt, encouraging words for each of their sons. Stalin has dubbed his aviators “falcons.” He sends his falcons into flight and wherever they wander keeps track of them and when they return he presses them close to his loving heart.74

The various texts under discussion here all point beyond themselves, to a higher authority and power. Whether this power takes the form of Klim Voroshilov, for whom love must be sacrificed in service to the state in By the Blue Sea; whether it takes the form of “visiting authorities” and stationing orders in The Pilots; or the form of a bust of Stalin in The Fighter Pilots; or finally, the form of the commander in chief of the Soviet air force in The Sky-Barge—the great leader and teacher watches from on high and directs the movements of his subjects. Stalin’s gaze operates within socialist realist cinema as its transcendental subject, the eye for which all phantasmic reality is organized, and this is something its subjects are taught never to forget. And, as Mikhail Chiaureli’s 1949 film The Fall of Berlin demonstrates, the damaged male body grants the properly disciplined Stalinist subject visibility before and beneath the gaze of the big Other—in this case, of Stalin personified on the screen.

  

5 ★ WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

Boris Polevoi’s novel Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke (A Story About a Real Man, 1947) tells the story of a fighter pilot, Aleksei Meres’ev, who, after having his feet amputated at the shins, nonetheless returns to the front on prosthetic legs to fly combat against the German army.1 Based on the biography of a real fighter pilot, Aleksei Mares’ev, a World War II airman decorated with the title of Hero of the Soviet Union,2 and making explicit references to Nikolai Ostrovskii’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered, as well as to the famous description of Ostrovskii himself as a “living mummy,” A Story About a Real Man is a narrative about undaunted Soviet heroism, about a real man “minus two feet.”3 The novel leaves no doubt that the heroism of its protagonist is specifically Soviet: having read a newspaper account of a Russian World War I pilot, Lieutenant Karpovich, who lost one of his legs but returned to service on a prosthetic one, Meres’ev is quick to understand that what was possible for a non-Soviet man must be doubly so for him. The novel also 119

120   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

leaves no doubt that this type of heroism is not universal but specifically masculine. When one of the inmates in the hospital ward decides that he has had enough of fighting, Meres’ev compares him to a woman: “Put in an application,” he says, “please grant me my discharge as I want to join the women in the rear” (“Otpustite, mol, k babam v tyl, a drugie puskai menia ot nemtsa zashchishchaiut”).4 The discourse of front and rear operates in this novel as a marker of sexual difference and, despite the use of the nominally uninflected “person” (chelovek) in the title, Polevoi’s novel codes its protagonist’s accident in gender-specific terms. The failure of the body is initially equated with the failure of masculinity, and amputation becomes synonymous with castration: without his feet, Meres’ev cannot fly, cannot face women, cannot rejoin the fighting ranks, and must live out his days either in the hospital with other damaged men or with “the women in the rear”: At the end of this amusing note there was the signature: “The meteorological sergeant.” Meres’ev smiled, but his eye again caught the words “come back soon, everybody is expecting you,” which were underlined. He sat up in bed and with the air of one who is searching in his pockets and finds that he has lost an important document, he groped convulsively in the place where his feet had been. His hand touched empty space. Only in that instant did Aleksei fully realize the gravity of his loss. He would never return to the regiment, to the Air Force, to the front. He would never again go up in a plane and hurl himself into an air battle, never! He was now disabled, deprived of his beloved occupation, pinned to one spot, a burden at home, unwanted in life. And this would go on until the end of his days.5

Amputation reveals Meres’ev’s distance from ideal male subjectivity (from the army, from Soviet citizenship, from masculine virility), leaving him in the position of the Stalinist abject. Aviation, war, and marriage are foreclosed for him now that he is “disabled,” “deprived,” “pinned to one spot,” and “unwanted” (Teper’ on invalid, lishennyi liubimogo dela, prikovannyi k mestu, obuza v dome, lishnii v zhizni).6 Yet, as I have argued throughout this book, this “pinned” and “disabled” state may in itself be the real (which is to say, impossible to articulate as such) goal of Stalinist masculinity. The mechanism of the desire/compulsion to return “to ranks and to life” at work in How the Steel

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   121

Was Tempered is repeated in Polevoi’s novel. On the day after Meres’ev undergoes amputation surgery, Ostrovskii’s novel appears in the ward, but Meres’ev rejects it: “He had an immense respect for Pavel Korchagin since his boyhood, he was one of his favorite heroes. ‘But Korchagin was not an airman,’ Aleksei reflected now. Did he know what ‘yearning for the air’ means?”7 Meres’ev’s “yearning for the air” represents a desire for unfettered subjectivity—a desire that at once continues and stands in opposition to Korchagin’s bodily deforming devotion to the Soviet state. Like the pilots in Stalinist films, Meres’ev must come to recognize and accept the limit by which the Stalinist male subject is defined, a limit the novel calls “Soviet heroism.” Written during the Nuremburg trials in Germany, turned into a film and an opera,8 A Story About a Real Man is a model socialist realist text: an account of Soviet heroism during the Great Patriotic War. Yet it is also a novel about the initial overvaluation of the self, the subsequent revelation of symbolic castration, and finally, covering over that castration with a fetish (“I know very well . . . but all the same . . .”).9 The recognition of a symbolic order by which any subject is limited and constrained and beyond the limits of which it must find itself desubjectivized, “unfettered,” and “unpinned” is necessary for participation in that order, and A Story About a Real Man marks the process of the resubjectification of its hero, who briefly finds himself outside Stalinist symbolic structures. A Story About a Real Man opens with Meres’ev’s fall from the skies, and much of its narrative is devoted to the description of the catastrophe, Meres’ev’s heroic crawl toward safety, and his prolonged recovery and retraining as a pilot. Indeed, only the final section of the novel describes Meres’ev’s participation in the battle of Kursk-Salient and the subsequent air battles that finally earn him the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Like Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, the novel is also mostly concerned with Meres’ev’s fight to return “to ranks of the sound and fit” (zdorovykh, polnotsennykh liudei),10 adding to it his great desire to avoid being left in the rear. A Story About a Real Man concludes with a postscript from the author, Boris Polevoi, describing his experiences as a war correspondent for Pravda and his participation in the Nuremburg trials. It is there, at the trial of Hermann Goering, that Polevoi finally decides to tell the story of one of the most unusual cases of Soviet heroism—the pilot amputee that flies combat missions on artificial legs. As in the case

122   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

of Nikolai Ostrovskii, however, Polevoi’s text is a work of fiction rather than historical truth, a novel rather than a biography. A Story About a Real Man reveals the mechanisms of Stalinist culture, the constructions of its fantasies and myths, and its use of masculinity as a site for the production of ideology. Like other socialist realist texts discussed in this book, it makes central the production of wounded and mutilated male bodies. The damaged male body becomes symbolic of exemplary Stalinist subjectivity, while woman is called upon to desire—and thereby validate the existence of—the heroic invalid as a real Soviet man.

To Infinity and Beyond! A Story About a Real Man opens with an accident. “Tempted by easy prey,” Senior Lieutenant Aleksei Meres’ev had gone after an enemy transport plane, finding “delight in stitching its motley-colored, rectangular, corrugated duralumin body with several long bursts from his machine gun.” Having destroyed the transport, Meres’ev turns back toward his own unit, only to discover that in his absence his own men have come under heavy attack, being outnumbered three to one. Again, Meres’ev rushes recklessly into battle, attempting to repeat his earlier success by targeting a fighter plane that had separated itself from the rest of the unit, but “the enemy craft slip[s] by unharmed.” It is at this moment that Meres’ev discovers the full extent of his “fatal blunder”: because of his attack on the transport plane, he has run out of ammunition. As a result, Meres’ev is caught in a “double pair of ‘pincers’” (popal v dvoinye ‘kleshchi’): he is surrounded by four enemy planes that try to take him prisoner and lead him back to their base. Meres’ev escapes by pointing his aircraft down into the trees below, is thrown clear by the impact of the crash, and, upon returning to consciousness, finds that he is being sniffed out by a “hungry and angry” bear.11 There are several important elements to note in this opening sequence. First is the criticism of Meres’ev’s actions, which we can see operating in this text. Meres’ev is “tempted by easy prey”; he is so “self-confident” that he does not “trouble to see the enemy craft hurtle to the ground.” One might wonder, however, about the nature of this self-confidence, which has particularly masculine overtones. Striking out on his own, finding delight in stitching the enemy transport plane with bullets, proud of his individual achievement, only to find that because of his actions his unit

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   123

has come under attack—Meres’ev seems the very picture of masculinity as heroically overconfident individuality. This belief in his own powers is immediately replaced by a realization of symbolic castration: suddenly understanding that his delight over the destruction of the transport plane was misplaced, Meres’ev is so ashamed that he “could feel his cheeks burning under the helmet.” Pressing the trigger in hopes of firing on the enemy, he this time fails “to feel the vibration that every airman feels with his whole body when he discharges his gun.” And, having been caught in a “double pair of ‘pincers’”—the “worst thing that can happen to a man in an air battle,” Meres’ev manages to escape only by “getting out from under the enemy craft.”12 Meres’ev’s fear of capture, which causes him to crash his plane into the pine forest and thus escape with his life (though with significant damage to his body), is coded by the text as a fear of emasculation. Meres’ev realizes that he has “fallen into the clutches” of “air wolves,” “the finest aces in the fascist Reich,” under the patronage of Goering himself. He recalls seeing a German prisoner, his “long, ashen-gray face” and “his staggering footsteps.”13 Having run out of ammunition, enclosed on all sides by German “aces,” Meres’ev nevertheless manages to get out “from under” them, only to find that both he and his plane have plunged into “a stretch of dark, warm, thick water” where “something big and warm of indefinite shape emerged from the chaos and breathed hot, stinking breath on his face,” an “unknown horror that was hovering above him” (iz khaosa vyshlo chto-to bol’shoe, goriachee, neopredelennykh form i zadyshalo na nego zharkim smradom). “Lying face downward” in the snow, Meres’ev remembers his pistol in the thigh pocket of his flight suit, and now he can feel the “sharp points of his pistol against his thigh,” while the “German” next to him sighs “in a rather queer way” (kak-to stranno).14 The “German” turns out to be a “hungry and angry” bear, with the bear’s attack on Meres’ev coded in a language of rape: And so [the bear] was now squatting next to Aleksei. The pinch of hunger fought its aversion to carrion. Hunger was beginning to gain the upper hand. The beast sighed, got up, turned the body over with his paw and tore at the flying suit with its claws. The leather held, however. The bear uttered a low growl. It cost Aleksei a great effort at that moment to suppress a desire to open his eyes, roll aside, shout

124   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

and push away the heavy body that had flung itself upon his chest. While his whole being was prompting him to put up a fierce and furious defense, he compelled himself, slowly and imperceptibly, to slip his hand into his pocket, grope for the ribbed handle of his pistol, cock it carefully so that it did not click, and imperceptibly withdraw his hand grasping the weapon. The beast tore at the flying suit with greater fury. The stout leather crackled, but still held. The bear roared in a frenzy, gripped the suit with his teeth and through the fur and wadding nipped the body. By a last effort of will Aleksei suppressed a cry of pain, and just at the moment when the bear pulled him out of the snowdrift he raised the pistol and pressed the trigger. The shot rang out in a sharp, reverberating crack. . . . The bear slowly released its prey. Aleksei fell back into the snow, keeping his eyes fixed on the bear. The latter was squatting on its haunches; its black purulent eyes expressed bewilderment. A stream of thick, dull-red blood trickled between its flanks on the snow; . . . the bluish snow slowly assumed a scarlet hue. . . . The tension under which Aleksei had been laboring suddenly relaxed. . . . Falling back on the snow he lost consciousness.15

If we read this scene keeping in mind the thrill of “discharge” that Meres’ev feels with his whole body when he fires his “guns,” as well as the later discourse of castration that runs through the novel—“He sat up in bed and with the air of one who is searching in his pockets and finds that he has lost an important document, he groped convulsively in the place where his feet had been. His hand touched empty space” (ruka nashchupala pustotu)—we can see how the bear’s attack has placed Meres’ev in precisely that same position of vulnerability that he feared after being caught in the double pair of German “pincers” and “having spent all his ammunition” was “practically unarmed when four German aircraft surrounded him and, giving him no chance to dodge or change his course, tried to force him to proceed to their base.”16 Meres’ev is in a precariously feminine position: the bear tears at his clothes, pins him to the ground with his heavy body, and finally manages to penetrate the clothes to the body within. Meres’ev’s own struggle not to cry out, not to fight, not to “put up a fierce and furious defense,” all point to submission to the greater strength of the other. And yet, such a reading—Meres’ev as the weak feminine, the bear as the overtly masculine—misses the identification of the bear with

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   125

precisely those features of femininity that masculinity fears most and to which the “unknown horror” of its “big” “warm” “indefinite shape” already points. “Squatting on its hunches,” with its “half-open maw,” bleeding and staining the snow with red—the bear is the manifestation of the terrifying feminine that threatens to swallow Meres’ev in its “stretch of dark, warm, thick water.”17 In its terrifying power, in its link to the incomprehensible and unknowable feminine, in its inhuman, purely animal nature, the figure of the bear suggests an encounter with something out of the order of the real. It is an encounter with death, which takes place after Meres’ev’s fatal blunder and suicidal plunge into the forest, in the middle of a white, snow-covered field, strewn (as Meres’ev learns after he returns to consciousness) with dead bodies and exploded equipment: Dotted over [the] lacerated field were a number of tanks painted in the motley colors of pikes’ scales. They stood frozen in the snow, and all of them—particularly the one at the extreme end which must have been turned on its side by the explosion of a grenade, or a mine, so that the long barrel of its gun hung to the ground like an exposed tongue from the mouth—looked like the carcasses of strange monsters. And all over the field, on the parapets of the shallow trenches, near the tanks, and on the edge of the forest, lay the corpses of Red Army men in between those of German soldiers. There were so many that in some spots they lay piled on top of each other; and they lay in the very same frozen postures in which death had reached these men in battle only a few months before.18

These “carcasses of strange monsters” with their guns hanging out like “an exposed tongue from the mouth,” repeats the problem of death or dismemberment as one of emasculation. Having fallen into a German trap, assaulted by a bear, and coming to consciousness surrounded by mangled and dead bodies of Soviet and German soldiers (suggesting another version of a “mixed union”), Meres’ev loses the sense of himself as a Soviet soldier and as a Soviet man. For Meres’ev, breaking out on his own, swerving from the path prescribed for him by the big Other (in the case, in the guise of the Soviet army), also means losing his place as the interpellated Stalinist subject. This loss of place in the symbolic order is marked in

126   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

Polevoi’s novel first by the threat of being taken prisoner by the Germans, then by the airplane’s suicidal dive, and finally, by Meres’ev finding that he has been immobilized in the middle of a “lacerated field” filled with the “carcasses of strange monsters.” Looking over the field of broken bodies and mangled equipment, Meres’ev thinks to himself: “I might have been lying here like them,” and begins “to ponder what to do, where to go, how to get to his own forward lines” (“chto . . . delat’, kuda idti, kak dobrat’sia do svoikh peredovykh chastei”).19 It is precisely this thought, this desire to get to “his own forward lines,” that puts Meres’ev on the path of Pavka Korchagin, that never-ending road back to Stalinist subjectivity.

The Infant Before the Mirror It may be worthwhile here to consider Louis Althusser’s definition of interpellation, so that we can better see how Meres’ev undergoes both its loss (a disinterpellation and return to a primal state of nonsubjectivity) and reacquisition (a successful reinterpellation and resubjectification). Considering the production and reproduction of subjects of power in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970), Althusser describes the workings of ideology in the following way: “All ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.”20 Althusser isolates two functions of ideology: the first is recognition (the function by which we as subjects recognize the obvious fact that we are subjects—“free, ethical, etc.”—and have the “inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the ‘still, small voice of conscience’): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!”; the second is recognition’s inverse—the function of misrecognition or méconnaissance. The function of recognition allows us to perform the necessary rituals that constitute subjectivity (we shake hands, call each other by name, have names that are “unique” and individual). This function performs the ritual but does not give us information about the mechanisms by which ideology “hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.” Althusser writes, Ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   127

(or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around. By this mere one-hundred-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him, and that “it was really him who was hailed” (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed.21

A “hail” produces subjects out of mere individuals. Failing to answer the hail would mean remaining an individual outside of subjective construction, no longer subject to ideological recruitment, to the call of the big Other. This is precisely what takes place in the opening scenes of A Story About a Real Man. Going back once more to the opening passages of the air battle, we can read Meres’ev’s “fatal blunder” and his moment of going off course as the moment of his loss of subjectivity. “Tempted by easy prey”—a slow-moving and unguarded transport plane—Meres’ev breaks away from his unit, which is supposed to be guarding the area of attack, disregarding orders and acting as an “individual” rather than as a “subject.” It is no wonder that later he cannot easily “swerve from the course the Germans are dictating.” By leaving his post, by breaking out on his own, by self-confidently delighting in his action, Meres’ev disregards the limits that define him as a Soviet/Stalinist subject. By “going too far,” Meres’ev finds himself on a course dictated by others, with certain death as his only chance of escape. We have seen this paradigm at work in the pilot films of the thirties and forties: the pilot who longs for movement and travel must be disciplined to accept limitation; the ace who wants to run, must learn to crawl. A Story About a Real Man presents itself as the story of the Soviet hero who learns to surpass his circumstances, to push his body beyond its limit, to accomplish the “impossible.” And yet, precisely the opposite is the case: A Story About a Real Man is the story of limit, discipline, and conscription. It is the story of a man who learns exactly what it means to be circumscribed, what it means to accept the limitations of his body, learning to fetishize his artificial limbs as his own. The path to this acceptance is the path of resubjectification, the moment (or moments) of Meres’ev’s re-

128   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

interpellation into Stalinist subjectivity, whose initial loss is marked as symbolic death. One of the early signs of this relentless pursuit of recognition and reinstatement is evident in Meres’ev’s terrible crawl toward some imaginary forward line. Knowing himself to be alone in “the depth of a virgin forest, in the enemy’s rear,” Meres’ev resolves not so much to “walk” as to “move forward.” Discovering that his feet have been shattered, he first attempts to take steps, supporting his weight with a pair of walking sticks. Then he crawls. Then he slithers on his belly. Finally, Meres’ev begins to roll: “When his arms ceased to support him, he tried to crawl on his elbows, but this proved to be awkward, so he lay down and, using his elbows as levers, tried to roll. This proved to be successful. Rolling over and over was easier than crawling and did not call for much exertion. But it made him giddy, and every now and again he lost consciousness. He was obliged to stop often, sit up and wait until the earth, the forest and the sky had stopped whirling round.”22 Like Pavka Korchagin’s insistent return to the ranks and the party, Meres’ev’s movement toward the front line is described to suggest a mechanical, inhuman action: Aleksei continued mechanically to push forward. Big tears rolled down his unshaven cheeks and dropped into the snow. . . . And so Aleksei crawled on for another day, two, or three. He had lost count of time; everything had merged into one continuous chain of automatic effort. At times sleep, or perhaps, oblivion overcame him. He fell asleep as he crawled, but the power that drew him to the east was so strong that even in this state of oblivion he continued to crawl slowly until he collided with a tree or bush, or until his hand slipped and he fell face downward in the melting snow. All his will, all his vague thoughts were concentrated on one spot like focused light: crawl on, keep moving, moving onward, at all cost.23

This mechanical movement forward is a compulsion, a relentless and idiotic (inhuman, instinctual) pursuit of a goal “at all cost.” One of the truths of Stalinism revealed by socialist realist literature is the way in which its model subjects (Korchagin, Meres’ev) are turned into creatures of pure drive—made to move forward not through desire or willpower,

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   129

but through some “automatic effort” whose source seems to lie elsewhere, outside the control of the subject. In A Story About a Real Man, the goal is the rumble of the guns that Meres’ev hears (or imagines hearing), which lets him know that he is not “alone in the virgin forest” and that somewhere out there lies the front line. This rumble of the guns is consistently described in terms of a call or hail (in the Althusserian sense), an insistent hail whose nature is as much ideological as psychological: The rumble of the guns put new courage into him, called him persistently, and he responded to the call [Kanonada pritiagivala, bodrila, nastoichivo zvala ego, i on otvetil na etot zov]. He got up on all fours and ambled on like an animal, at first instinctively, hypnotized by the sounds of the distant battle, and later consciously and deliberately. . . . Aleksei crawled into the forest, almost instinctively striving toward the place from which the sounds of artillery fire were now distinctly heard. They drew him like a magnet, and the nearer he approached them the greater was their power of attraction.24

And again, after having refused to drink the water that shows him a frightful and uncanny vision of what he had become: “‘Is that me?’ Aleksei asked himself, and fearing to look again he did not drink the water but put some snow into his mouth instead and crawled on further, to the east, drawn by that same powerful magnet.” The persistent call of the guns and Meres’ev’s “instinctual” response, and later his “mechanical” recognition of himself as a “Soviet airman,” draw Meres’ev on, remaining the source of Meres’ev’s automatic movement forward throughout the novel. Indeed, we can read this early section describing his time in the forest as a miniature version of the larger plot: Meres’ev spends the novel in relentless pursuit of the front line, of the rumble of guns that hypnotizes him and whose power of attraction he cannot resist. Though Meres’ev begins the novel in the ranks and in the forward lines, from the very first pages, from his first act of “going too far,” “setting out on his own,” we can see that he is not yet a properly disciplined Stalinist subject. His path toward subjectivity, therefore, is marked by a symbolic death (Meres’ev is carrion) and rebirth (once rescued, Meres’ev is treated like a newborn babe).25 It is vital that the death here is purely symbolic, but

130   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

the bodily damage is real; the feet never heal, in fact, they must be amputated and replaced with artificial prosthetics. Symbolic death marks the death of Meres’ev as a subject, making possible his second, more proper interpellation into the symbolic and ideological structures of Stalinism. Bodily damage is the price paid for answering the hail of ideology, the sacrifice demanded by the big Other in order to earn its recognition, in order to be allowed to return to the ranks of the sound and the fit on the forward line. Writing on “suicide as the only successful act,” Slavoj Žižek points out that the effect of de-subjectification—that is, what Lacan calls symbolic death—is more profound than the mere exclusion from a concrete human community (in the case of Meres’ev, his unit and the greater Soviet army, nashi): “What is at stake here is a far more radical experience of exclusion from—of asserting a distance with respect to—the big Other itself, the symbolic order.”26 Beginning with his “fatal blunder,” Meres’ev finds himself isolated from the rest of his unit and perilously vulnerable to capture by the enemy. Once enclosed in the double pair of pincers, Meres’ev has the choice between suicide and capture, rightly understood here as joining a different symbolic order of the German military, even if only as its unwilling prisoner. Suicide then becomes the only true action worthy of a Soviet pilot—and moreover, the only true act. And by the time Meres’ev wakes up “alone in the depth of a virgin forest, in the enemy’s rear, where to meet a human being meant not relief but death,” he has already been lost as a Soviet subject.27 If recognition of yourself as a subject of a hail is always, in some way, a misrecognition—the hail, after all, is never actually addressed to you, but simply functions as a general call, looking for subjects to recruit—then the failure of méconnaissance is a moment of desubjectification. For Lacan’s baby in front of the mirror, the moment of méconnaissance is the moment of mistaken recognition: that’s me, over there, in that image.28 The function of the mirror stage, writes Lacan, “is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality,” a relation that situates the agency of the ego first and foremost “in a fictional direction.” The mirror stage “is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body . . . to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity” that rigidly

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   131

structures the subject. The first of these fantasies is the identification—the assumption of an image—of the “precipitated I” with its mirror image, which Lacan calls the je-idéal. The je-idéal rigidly structures the ego in/by its own image, while the recognition of the fictional nature of this identification precipitates the return of the “fragmented body” (le corps morcelé)—a fragmented body that “is regularly manifested in dreams when the movement of an analysis reaches a certain level of aggressive disintegration of the individual.”29 The point of the mirror stage is of course the production of subjectivity—it is the first moment by which the individual, in an infantile and prelinguistic state, understands itself as a self and in a relation to its world. Lacan suggests that there are moments, however, when that recognition fails, when the mechanisms of identification by which a two-dimensional image is mistaken for our selves come apart and all that is left is the “fragmented body,” the disintegrated individual whose place in the symbolic structures is no longer assured or easily grasped. This is precisely what happens to Meres’ev, when, after many days of crawling through the virgin forest, he encounters his own image in the “mirror.” He has just hungrily attacked an anthill, eating the insects “with great relish, feeling in his dry, cracked mouth the spicy, tart taste of formic acid.” Feeling thirsty, he notices among the clumps a small puddle of brownish forest water: [Meres’ev] stooped down to drink, but at once drew back in horror; out of the dark water, against the background of the blue sky reflected in it, a strange horrible face had peered at him. It was the face of a skeleton covered with a dark skin and overgrown with untidy, already curling bristle. Large, round wildly shining eyes stared out of the deep sockets, and unkempt hair hung down on the forehead in bedraggled strands. “Is that me?” Aleksei asked himself, and fearing to look again he did not drink the water but put some snow into his mouth instead and crawled on further, to the east, drawn by that same powerful magnet.30

What is notable about this event is not only that it replicates, in reverse, Lacan’s suppositions about the function of the mirror stage, but also that it sets up a series of failed recognitions. Starting with the boys who find Meres’ev’s skeletal and exhausted body in the woods, and ending with Polevoi himself, who is “shocked” to discover that Meres’ev moves on artificial legs, A Story About a Real Man stages over and over again the

132   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

failure of recognition. This failure goes beyond the purely commonsense and obvious problem of physical change—after all, Meres’ev has crawled for eighteen days through the snow, dragging behind him his broken legs and eating nothing but ants and hedgehogs, so of course he does not “look like himself.” Rather, it is the failure to recognize Meres’ev as a Stalinist subject, a real Soviet man. We can see this failure operating in Meres’ev’s encounter with the two small boys from the village. Finally discovered after eighteen days in the forest, Meres’ev has to prove his Russian identity. The boys are convinced that they have stumbled on a German soldier, a “Doitch,” a “Fritz,” and only document proof is sufficient to change their minds. Convinced that he is a German, the boys demand documents that will prove Meres’ev’s claim that he is “Russian, Russian! An airman.” Overcome with sudden weakness at discovering that “his own people were behind those trees, Russian, Soviet people,” Meres’ev feels “absolutely done in”: “he felt that he could not move either hand or foot, neither move nor defend himself. Tears rolled down the dark hollows of his cheeks. . . . Aleksei had no alternative but to put his hand in his tunic pocket and take out his certificate.” Meres’ev requires no proof of the boys’ identity—he recognizes them at once and immediately as “his own.” Yet to the boys, the strange man lying in the middle of the snow lacks any clear identifying marks that point, without a doubt, to his place in this rigid order of “us” and “them.” Only documents (that could, of course, have been stolen, falsified; that have miraculously been retained all this time fighting with bears and crawling through pine woods; that Meres’ev never burned in order to make a fire), those great fetish objects of Stalinist and Soviet culture manage to cover over the lack of belief: “The sight of the red officer’s booklet with the star on the cover had a magical effect upon the youngsters. It was as if their childhood, which they had lost during the German occupation, was suddenly returned to them by the appearance of one of their own beloved Red Army airmen. They simply tumbled over each other in their eagerness to talk.”31 Like the documents that “come forward” in Ivan Pyr’ev’s The Party Card to exonerate Anna and accuse Pavel, Meres’ev’s certificate in A Story About a Man covers over the recognition of lack. As the scene by the water makes clear, Meres’ev can no longer (mis)recognize himself as a coherent subject. He is the terrifying body in bits and pieces that at each encounter

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   133

threatens to unravel the myth of normative (male) subjectivity. Yet until his amputation, Meres’ev remains firm in his belief in his place in Soviet aviation. It is only by touching the “empty space” where his feet had once been that he fully realizes the gravity of his loss: “He would never return to the regiment, to the air force, to the front. He would never again go up in a plane and hurl himself into an air battle, never! He was now disabled, deprived of his beloved occupation, pinned to one spot, a burden at home, unwanted in life. And this would go on until the end of his days.”32 If Meres’ev can still attempt to misrecognize himself as a Soviet subject while alone in the forest (and thus try to claim a Russian identity when confronted by the two boys), he can no longer do so once he is surrounded by other men and faced with the direct consequences of his “suicidal act.”

The Unmade Man Over and over, Meres’ev rejects examples of other men living in paralyzed, paraplegic, or otherwise disabled states as not applying to his own situation. He rejects the model of Pavka Korchagin; of a man with paralyzed legs who holds a big public post; of the doctor who had only one arm, “but for all that he was the best doctor in the district, could even ride a horse and go hunting, and could handle a gun so well with one arm that he could hit a squirrel in the eye”; and of Academician Williams, “whom he had known personally, and who was half paralyzed, could use only one arm, and yet he directed the work of the Agricultural Institute and conducted activities on a vast scale.” Over and over he refuses the hail of Soviet subjectivity, addressed to him by Commissar Vorob’ev, who “persevered in his efforts to ‘unlock’ him” (otomknut’ ego). Whereas earlier Meres’ev’s mind had been filled with the stories of famous airmen—Liapidevskii’s rescue of the Cheliuskin expedition, Vodopianov’s landing at the North Pole, Chkalov’s unexplored air route to the United States—now Meres’ev is pleased that at every turn he can reject all cases of heroic invalids as not applicable to himself. Whereas before, “at night, when everybody was asleep,” Meres’ev would imagine himself next to Liapidevskii, Vodopianov, and Chkalov, performing all those acts of heroism for which the men became famous, he now listened to all the stories “with a smile”: “it is possible to think, to talk, to write, to issue orders, heal people and even go hunting without legs, let alone feet, but he was

134   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

an airman, a born airman.”33 Having fallen out of the skies, Meres’ev can no longer imagine himself back in that place about which he had always dreamed. Eighteen days in the virgin forest and surgery to remove his feet have made it impossible for him to reclaim that subjectivity to which he had always aspired. In fact, Meres’ev wallows in his uninterpellated and subjectless state, taking particular pleasure in confiding his sad condition to the “meteorological sergeant,” the girl back at his unit who has taken to writing him letters: Meres’ev grew feebler every day. In the next letter he wrote her, he even told the “meteorological sergeant,” the only person to whom he now confided his grief, that he would probably not leave the hospital alive, but that this would be for the best, for an airman without feet was like a bird without wings, which could still live and pick its food, but fly—never! He did not want to be a wingless bird and was prepared for the worst, if only it came soon. It was cruel to write like that, for in the course of their correspondence the girl had confessed that she has long had a soft spot in her heart for “Comrade Senior Lieutenant,” but that she would never have confessed it had not this misfortune happened to him. “She wants to get married. Our stock is very high just now. What does she care about bad feet as long as the pension is good,” commented Kukushkin, as surly as ever.34

The knowledge of his own cruelty, the anticipation of his own demise, and the wallowing in self-pity not generally allowed to real Soviet men betrays a certain amount of enjoyment on Meres’ev’s part, enjoyment that comes precisely from the knowledge that he is “disabled, deprived of his beloved occupation, pinned to one spot, a burden at home, unwanted in life.” Meres’ev has escaped from the “heroic” path of male subjectivity. He has refused to model himself on the sacrifices of others, on the deeds of famous men who happily make do with their limitations, continuing to write novels, ride horses, shoot guns, and “conduct activities on a vast scale.” Lying in the hospital in Moscow, surrounded by examples of Soviet heroism, Meres’ev “enjoys his symptom”: the physical manifestation of his symbolic powerlessness. But the goal of every socialist realist text, which is part of the ideologi-

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   135

cal state apparatus whose task it is to reproduce the conditions by which subjects are made, is to hail individuals and restore to them their lost or not yet acquired subjectivity. Therefore, Meres’ev cannot be left alone to enjoy himself in his “unwanted” state. A “key” must be found. The right “call” has to be made. And that “key” is a World War I Russian army airman, Lieutenant Valerian Arkadievich Karpovich: One day, when [Meres’ev] was in his usual state of indifference to everything around him, Aleksei heard the commissar say: “Lesha! Read this. It is about you.” Stepan Ivanovich hastened to pass the magazine that the commissar was reading to Meres’ev. It contained a short article marked with a pencil. Aleksei ran his eye down the page looking for his own name, but did not find it. It was an article about Russian airmen during the First World War. Gazing at him from the page of the magazine was the unknown face of a young officer with short moustaches twisted to fine points and wearing a pilot’s cap with a white cockade on one side of his head so that it touched his ear. “Read it, read it, it was written for you,” the commissar urged.35

Already in this initial setup, even before Meres’ev actually reads the article on the Russian airman with an amputated leg, we can see a repeat of Lacan’s mirror stage: the function of the article is to give back to Meres’ev his own image in such a way that he will misrecognize it as himself. As the commissar points out (twice), the article is “about” Meres’ev. And though initially Meres’ev fails to find his own name on the page handed to him by Stepan Ivanovich, he finally understands that this article is really about him: Meres’ev read the article once, twice, and a third time. The lean young lieutenant with the tired but determined face gazed at him with a rather strained, but on the whole, gallant smile. Meanwhile, the entire ward intensely watched Aleksei. He ran his fingers through his hair; keeping his eyes glued to the magazine he groped for a pencil on his bedside cupboard and with deliberate strokes traced a square around the article. “Have you read it?” enquired the commissar. “Well, what do you say?” “But he lost only one foot.”

136   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

“But you are a Soviet airman.” “He flew a ‘Farman.’ D’you call that an airplane? It’s a whatnot. Anybody could fly one of those. Its steering gear was so simple that you didn’t need either skill or speed.” “But you are a Soviet airman!” the commissar persisted. “A Soviet airman,” Aleksei repeated mechanically, still keeping his eyes glued to the article. Then his face lit up, seemingly from an inner light, and he looked around at each of his fellow patients with eyes filled with joy and amazement.36

There are two scenes of interpellation taking place in this exchange. The first follows the line of Lacan’s “infant in front of the mirror,” who finally understands with jubilation that the image he sees in front of him is his own.37 Lacan describes the function of the mirror stage as one of misidentification, as an orientation of the ego in a fictional direction and the assumption of an alienating identity that follows the jubilant identification of the infant with an image. We see this function of fictional and alienating identification clearly at work in Polevoi’s novel (Meres’ev hides the article under his pillow at night, but pulls it out often to “gaze at the smiling face of the lieutenant, . . . as if addressing himself to him”).38 Meres’ev’s joyous discovery that the article is indeed “about” him and his intense identification with the wounded airman shown in the picture stages the scene of méconnaissance: a (mis)recognition of plenitude and the possibility of possessing a totalizing body image, despite all earlier evidence to the contrary. The artificial legs here play an important role of covering over the reality of amputation, allowing the subject to act “as if” the experience of totality really belonged to him. The second scene of interpellation performs an ideological function, not merely producing a subject, but producing a subject of ideology. As Commissar Vorob’ev famously repeats and Meres’ev “mechanically” echoes, Meres’ev is not merely an airman—he is a Soviet airman. And whereas earlier Meres’ev refused to see a connection between his mutilated state and Soviet heroism, now he is ready to answer the hail of Soviet subjectivity—to become what the state needs him to be. This task, as Meres’ev notes, addressing himself to the beaming picture of Lieutenant Valerian Arkadievich Karpovich, is not an easy one. “You had a hard job,” he says to the picture, “but you pulled it off. Mine is ten times harder, but

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   137

Fig. 5.1. Meres’ev learns to walk on prosthetic legs. Image courtesy of Mosfilm-info.

I’ll pull it off too, you’ll see!”39 Meres’ev’s “job” is harder not only because he has lost both his feet and his airplane is a more sophisticated machine than Karpovich’s Farman, but also because Meres’ev is trying to rejoin the ranks of the Soviet collective, a collective whose perverse fantasy is the elimination and exclusion of its citizens from its ranks. (One only has to

138   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

take another look at the purges and show trials to see how Stalinist culture operated through the exclusion and elimination of its “own,” always finding that unseen enemy under the “mask” of a loyal citizen.) Having once swerved from the path allotted to him, Meres’ev must now fight to return to the forward lines. His struggle—for recognition, for reinstatement, for a place in the ranks—makes up the plot of the novel and takes the form, much like Pavka’s, of a relentless and inhuman pursuit of the ever-elusive goal of rejoining the party. Since the moment in the Moscow hospital when the commissar, who “attracted people like a magnet,” shows him the article on Lieutenant Karpovich and Meres’ev decides to brave life on artificial legs, he begins his second crawl toward the front to answer the call of the guns, the hail of Soviet heroism: “He now had a goal in life: to pilot a fighter plane; and he set out to pursue that goal with the same fanatical stubbornness as he had displayed when, having lost the use of his feet, he crawled on all fours toward his own people” (s tem zhe fantasticheskim upriamstvom, s kakim on, obeznozhev [lit. without legs], vypolzal k svoim, stremilsia on k etoi tseli).40

What Does She Want? In “Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Rehabilitation of the Male Body in World War I France,” Roxanne Panchasi writes: The experience of men in combat, the loss of limbs, and the technological reconstruction of the disabled male body during and after the war produced a number of uncertainties as soldiers returned home from the front with physical and psychological damage that could never be completely repaired. For many, the experience of the war not only confused the boundaries between men and women—home front versus battlefront—but had challenged the distinction between reality and fantasy, between the living and the dead. The rehabilitation of disabled soldiers that included the use of various technological extensions of the body to compensate for the sacrifice of flesh and bone—to fill the absences and chase away the “phantoms”—also held the potential for the production of another set of confusions between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic, human and machine. If technology seemed to hold the promise of recovery and regeneration, it also produced an uncertainty about the future

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   139

of the human body in relation to that technology. In addition to the blurring of traditional gender roles, the war experience raised a new set of questions about the precariousness of a masculine subjectivity dependent upon a notion of the “whole,” organic, productive body.41

The disabled and patched-over male body, disrupting as it does a series of what otherwise appear to be stable binaries (animate/inanimate; organic/ inorganic; human/mechanical; and, in a different set: male/female; battle front/home front), points to a crisis in the dominant fiction, precariously balanced on the beliefs in the adequacy of the male subject and the commensurability of penis and phallus. A Story About a Real Man appears to tell a story of the loss and reacquisition of belief in the dominant fiction of male plenitude (Meres’ev learns to love his artificial limbs as his own); whereas in fact it consistently points to that fiction’s disintegration and the impossibility of final belief. Meres’ev’s artificial legs, which can be consistently found some distance from him, “lying there as though somebody were hiding under the bed with his feet in new, brown boots, spread wide apart, protruding from under it,” “lying on the ground glistening with moisture and distinctly visible in the gray light of dawn,”42 return us over and over again to the site of trauma: to the realization that the heroic invalid is the exemplary Stalinist subject, to the male body in “bits and pieces.” In Polevoi’s novel, the discourse of masculinity hinges on Meres’ev’s acceptance of his status as a disabled amputee. He is aided in his acceptance not only by the commissar and the picture of Lieutenant Karpovich, but also by numerous women who are called upon to eroticize the castrated male body, claiming to desire it precisely because of what is not there. Gender confusion, produced, as Panchasi suggests, by the technologies of war that leave male bodies damaged and female bodies hardened by labor, operates in this novel as well. Meres’ev’s love, Ol’ga, whose “strong, tanned legs” constantly haunt him with the knowledge of what he no longer has, is transformed by end of the novel into Meres’ev’s double: a “familiar and yet almost unrecognizable face. . . . It was Ol’ga in military uniform: tunic, sword belt, Order of the Red Banner, and even the guard’s badge—and it all suited her so well! She looked like a lean, good-looking boy in an officer’s uniform.”43 As is typical for the socialist realist novel, woman can be desired only through a homoerotic lens: equally wounded

140   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

and decorated, having also served on the front line, Ol’ga’s feminine status is erased in favor of a masculinizing discourse of heroism. Male desire resists sexual difference, while female desire is called upon to make good on male lack. Woman is the mechanism by which Meres’ev and others like him learn to accept castration (amputation, disability, scarring, wounding), to no longer be troubled that his artificial legs are distinctly visible as belonging to someone else, “lying there as though somebody were hiding under the bed.” The discourse of castration begins early in the novel, from the moment of Meres’ev’s rescue and his initial recovery at the house of Grandpa Mikhail. Being undressed by Mikhail and his daughter-in-law, Meres’ev notices for the first time that Varia is a “girl” and he is “ashamed of his nakedness.” His shame is nothing, however, compared with the mortification he feels when he looks down on his skeletal body: “Aleksei saw a look of horror in the young woman’s large, dark eyes. Through the swaying curtain of steam he saw his own body for the first time since his catastrophe. On the golden straw lay a human skin-covered skeleton with prominent kneecaps, sharply outlined pelvis, an absolutely hollow abdomen, and sharp, curved ribs.”44 Noticing Varia’s fascination with Meres’ev’s naked body, Grandpa Mikhail accuses her of being a “hussy” (sramnitsa) and reassures Meres’ev that they “won’t let that fellow with a scythe” get at him. Yet, Meres’ev’s “absolutely hollow abdomen” already suggests that Varia’s horror and fascination come from seeing, for the first time, the male body as lack. By the time that other “fellow with a scythe”—the surgeon in the Moscow hospital—amputates Meres’ev’s feet, Meres’ev already understands that he has become a thing of horror not only to Varia, but also to the entire group of “girl medical students” who attend the operation and from whom his body calls forth “terrified glances.”45 Meres’ev’s catastrophe is imagined in the novel as both symbolic and actual castration. “What always fills the tormentingly long hospital days of the ‘severely wounded’ man,” writes Polevoi, the thing on which all his thoughts are concentrated, is his wound, which has torn him out of the ranks of the fighters, out of the strenuous life of war, and has flung him on to this soft and comfortable bed which he began to hate from the moment he was put in it. He falls asleep thinking of this wound, swelling or fracture, he sees it in his

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   141

sleep. . . . How could he return home to Kamyshin a cripple? How was he to show Ol’ga his wooden stumps? “Amputate? No! Anything but that! Far better to die. . . . What a cold, frightful word: ‘amputate’, —sounds like a dagger thrust. Amputate? Never! That must not be!” thought Aleksei. He dreamed of this frightful word in the shape of a steel spider of indefinite shape, tearing at his flesh with its sharp, crooked claws.46

The image of amputation as a steel spider tearing at his flesh is familiar both from earlier in the novel (the big, warm, indefinite shape of the bear who tears at Meres’ev’s clothes) and from Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered (the octopus that crawls near Pavka’s eye and sucks out his lifeblood). The “unknown horror” that Meres’ev experiences in the woods with the bear, the “look of horror in (Varia’s) large, dark eyes,” and the terrified glances of the female medical students all speak to the uncanny vision of the male body as lack and the male subject as lacking. Moreover, Meres’ev rightly imagines that if he is now excluded from the ranks of the sound and fit, growing “soft” in his hospital bed, he will become even more unnecessary—and feminized—with the amputation of his feet. The discourse of humiliation parallels the discourse of castration. In Polevoi’s novel, those not at the front, the ones left in the rear are shamed by their precariously feminized position. Meres’ev does not admit to Ol’ga the loss of his feet, but he does claim that he will soon be leaving “his job in the rear” and returning to the front lines.47 He shames a fellow patient who wants to return home after the hospital by claiming that he wants a discharge so that he can join the women in the rear, while the notion of the rear itself undergoes a transformation to mean not only that which is not the front line, but also the shameful and exposed flank. So, for example, a lengthy section describes Major Struchkov’s heroic feat in one-on-one aerial combat with the German Junker, in terms that make frequent use of rear, tail, and ramming: [Struchkov] was flying a splendid Soviet machine, one of the type with which the fighter units were being equipped at that time. He overtook the German plane high up in the air . . . skillfully maneuvered into the enemy’s rear, got him clearly into his sight and pressed the trigger of his gun. He pressed it again, but to his surprise he failed to hear the familiar rattle. The trigger didn’t work. . . . For an instant Struchkov

142   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

felt like an unarmed man upon whom a robber had turned his gun, and he did what plucky, unarmed men do in such a situation—he hurled himself upon the enemy, but not with his fists, as he would have done on the ground; he jerked his plane forward and aimed the glistening circle of his propeller at the enemy’s tail; . . . he saw out of the corner of his eye the cigar-shaped hull of the Junker, minus its tail, hurtling past him and revolving like a maple leaf torn off by the autumn wind. Swinging helplessly from the parachute ropes, Struchkov . . . fell unconscious into the festive streets of a Moscow suburb, the inhabitants of which had watched his magnificent ramming operation (velikolepnyi taran) from the ground.48

An unrepentant womanizer, Struchkov is “all man” even if he is not a “real man” (as the novel goes on to show). The language used to describe his heroic defeat of the German Junker, left without a tail after Struchkov’s “magnificent ramming operation,” points to the highly charged meaning of rear as it appears in the novel. As a feminized, vulnerable space, the rear is also marked by inconstancy, infidelity, and betrayal.49 Thus, the “meteorological sergeant” with whom Meres’ev corresponds believes she knows “how the women in the rear were behaving,” the tank operator Kukushkin worries that “all broads are alike” (vse baby takie) and therefore cannot be attracted to his “scorched and disfigured face,” while Major Struchkov claims that “Women are no more impregnable than fortresses, and there isn’t one that cannot be taken” (“Nepristupnykh zhenshchin net, kak net i nepristupnykh ukreplenii”) and being both “a woman lover and a woman hater” (zhenoliub i zhenonenavistnik) is “particularly severe in his criticism of the women in the rear.”50 And yet men like Major Struchkov are wrong both in their assumptions about “real women” and “real men.” Even Meres’ev, when he notices the horror on Varia’s face, misunderstands the true nature of her look. Though whenever her eyes “involuntarily lighted upon Aleksei’s leg, or arm, a gleam of horror flashed in them,” Varia’s thoughts are actually turned to her husband, “with whom she had lived only one spring, a big, stout fellow . . . with enormous, powerful hands.” She imagines that the “fascist monsters” had reduced him to this state, and that it is her “Misha’s seemingly lifeless body that she was holding in her arms.” This fantasy of weak masculinity persists throughout A Story About a Real Man. Meres’ev’s

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   143

own anxiety about showing Ol’ga his “wooden stumps” is echoed by his friend Kukushkin, who grows a beard in order to hide his “scorched and disfigured face” from the young medical student Aniuta. But Aniuta, it turns out, is not horrified: “genuine girls are not scared by a soldier’s disablement. . . . Aniuta did not approve of the beard. She thought it was superfluous.” It is no wonder, therefore, that throughout the novel, Meres’ev is always ready to show off his stumps, to remove his artificial feet, never to mistake the supplement for the thing itself. Before every medical commission, before every representative of authority, before Polevoi himself, the journalist that comes to write a story of his heroism in aerial combat, Meres’ev turns up his trousers to expose his “leather feet.”51 Like the exposure of his artificial feet, Meres’ev carries a walking stick that always betrays his invalid status. The “quaint, heavy, ebony walking stick ornamented with a gold monogram” is a present from Commissar Vorob’ev, and as such it serves as a reminder of what it means to be a “real man”: [Struchkov] darted away from the window to Aleksei’s bed, shook him by the shoulder, and bending over him, shouted: “What does she want? What am I, tell me? Chaff in the field? Am I ugly, old, just dirt? Anybody else in her place. . . . Leshka, Leshka! You knew him, that other one. . . . Tell me, in what way was he better than me? What did he get her with? Was he cleverer? Better looking? What sort of hero was he?” Aleksei recalled Commissar Vorob’ev, his big, bloated body, the waxen face against the pillow, the woman standing like a statue over him in the eternal posture of feminine grief. . . . “He was a real man, Major, a Bolshevik. God grant that we become like him.”52

In this paradigm of the heroic invalid as a real Soviet man, the category of real changes its dimension away from merely genuine (a word used to describe women not scared by a soldier’s disablement), to a terrifying portrait of the uncanny. Bloated, with a waxen face, the dead commissar is precisely real: he represents an encounter with the truly horrific, with a limit beyond which the Stalinist (male) subject cannot go, but toward which he always strives. The woman standing over this “little piece of the real” ensures his desirability, making it possible that others in turn “become like him.” In answer to Struchkov’s question, “What does she want?” Meres’ev

144   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

imagines the big, bloated, dead body of the commissar. Woman, left in the rear, accepting of lack, fantasizing about the “lifeless” male body, validates the production of this new exemplary masculinity—the real Soviet man. This encounter with the real (of female, of Stalinist, desire) is in itself too traumatic to be sustained and ultimately must be contained within the parameters of more familiar and less horrific cultural fictions. In this way, Polevoi’s postscript to the novel, which gives us a detailed account of his meeting with the “real” Aleksei Mares’ev and Mares’ev’s own, perfectly normative future (he marries Ol’ga, they have a son), performs a kind of “cultural binding,” resituating the story within a classic paradigm of love, marriage, and family—what Polevoi himself calls his “happy ending.” Yet, if historical trauma must first be registered before it can be bound (as Kaja Silverman argues),53 then the novel itself is a moment of cultural “unbinding,” a moment when we, as readers, are invited to look upon, acknowledge, and even embrace male castration, before the marshaling of protective measures of “projection, disavowal, and fetishism” can take place.

Never Let the Father Know That He Is Dead In How the Steel Was Tempered Pavka’s wish to rejoin the ranks appeared as an “idiotic” (senseless, nonintelligent, inhuman) movement forward toward a goal always out of reach. A Story About a Real Man stages this impossible wish as a subject’s response to a cultural system bent on not simply excluding, but making manifest the mechanisms of systematic exclusion of its subjects from its ranks. The dominant fiction that the Soviet man is capable of anything, that “nothing is impossible for a Bolshevik”—or, to quote Stalin, that “there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks can’t take”—the fiction that operated in How the Steel Was Tempered and drove its hero to perform self-annihilating tasks to stay in the ranks is here revealed as a screen covering over a much more deep-seated fantasy of the annihilation of men. Just as Victor Pelevin’s assistant flight political instructor promises in Omon Ra, to “make real men of you . . . in the shortest possible time,”54 A Story About a Real Man argues that it is not enough to have simply been, as Stepan Ivanovich puts it, “through three wars: the imperialist war, all through the civil war, and a bit of this one.”55 In other words, “Soviet heroism” becomes yet another way, along with show trials, arrests, and purges, that Stalinist culture isolates, disciplines, limits the

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   145

mobility, and circumscribes the subjectivity of its citizens. And socialist realist texts are where this fantasy of the elimination of men is carried out. Once again, the reader of Polevoi’s novel is called upon to identify true masculinity with powerlessness rather than power, with lack rather than plenitude, and with abjection rather than subjectivity. Dziga Vertov’s 1937 film Kolybel’naia (Lullaby) is another text where the mechanisms of systematic exclusion can be seen operating in full view. The film’s title refers to the new lullaby that Muslim women sing to lull their babies to sleep, and yet the metaphors of sleeping and dreaming obviously extend far beyond the simple device of showing the new happier life of children in the Soviet Union. The film splices footage from May Day parades and other moments of cultural celebration, interviews with women parachutists, and Stalin working in the Kremlin, together with images of laughing babies, to create an intimate portrait of the leader (vozhd’). Stalin is shown receiving mothers and babies in his office in the Kremlin or the Palace of the Soviets as row after row of healthy and cheerful women in national costume parade through Red Square, some carrying banners of Stalin with Ardan Markizov’s daughter dressed in a sailor’s suit56 and the slogan “Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood!” This film is itself a lullaby, a repeated melody meant to lull us to sleep. And its dream is the dream of a country without men: in Vertov’s fantasy, Stalin appears not just as the metaphorical but literal father of the people, the only man among all those women and children. This fantasy of the total elimination of men is an extension of the motif of heroism present in socialist realist novels and films and promoted on the pages of Pravda. It points to Stalinism’s replacement of the dominant fiction—the conflation of male subjectivity with the structures of power on which it is dependent—with a cultural fetish: the creation of the heroic invalid as a model of exemplary masculinity and citizenship. Our dominant fiction effects an imaginary resolution in the contradiction between the two opposing laws—the law of kinship that organizes the rules determining marriage, reproduction, lineality, abode, inheritance in the “name-of-the-father”;57 and the law of language that dictates universal castration (maintaining the bar between signifier and signified that can never be crossed or removed). This contradiction is easy to see in terms of Stalinist Russia because unlike Western discourse that hides the name-of-the-father and its ideological demands under the guise of

146   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

religion, democracy, liberalism, capitalism, and the belief in individual sovereignty, Stalinism openly conflated the name-of-the-father with “The Genius of All Times and Peoples and the Coryphaeus of Total Knowledge,” giving Stalin the power (both rhetorical and political) to act as if all meaning emanated from him. Placing Stalin so directly in the position of plenitude and totality, Stalinist culture opened up a hole in the dominant fiction, a gap in which collective belief could falter. By embodying power so entirely, Stalinist discourse dismantled the belief in unimpaired masculinity—there was always someone out there more Soviet, more true, more heroic, more of a “real man.” By locating Stalin at the site of the “signifier that does not signify,” Stalinism undid the fiction of the commensurability of penis and phallus, of masculinity and power, bringing Soviet culture face to face with its own castration, that “empty space” usually covered over with ideological belief. The result was the creation of a culture of fetishism whose fictional production staged the continuous process of the loss of belief and its triumphal, if fantastic, reacquisition. The heroic invalid as a cultural fetish also appears in Mikhail Chiaureli’s epic film Padenie Berlina (The Fall of Berlin, 1949) as an example of the failure and reacquisition of belief in the dominant fiction of Stalinism.58 Chiaureli’s film answered the demands of Stalinist culture so accurately that it was denounced by Nikita Khrushchev in his “Secret Speech” and was buried deep in the archives of the Soviet film industry. And yet this film demonstrates, above all, the perverse logic of Stalinism: the desire to produce maimed, wounded, and disabled male bodies whose damaged forms would point to notions of sacrifice and submission. As the film ultimately shows, the Stalinist (male) subject must acknowledge again and again that power lies elsewhere. In 1956, in a special report to the closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev addressed the problem of Stalin’s cult of personality and its “harmful consequences” for the Soviet nation. “After Stalin’s death,” said Khrushchev, “the Central Committee of the party began to implement a policy of explaining concisely and consistently that it is impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior.”59 Speaking explicitly of such films as Kliatva (The Vow,

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   147

directed by Chiaureli, 1946) and The Fall of Berlin, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s cinematic image as one example of his cult of personality. In The Fall of Berlin, argued Khrushchev, “only Stalin acts. He issues orders in a hall in which there are many empty chairs. . . . Stalin acts for everybody, he does not reckon with anyone. He asks no one for advice. Everything is shown to the people in this false light. Why? To surround Stalin with glory—contrary to the facts and contrary to historical truth.”60 And yet what stands out about the depiction of Stalin in The Fall of Berlin is the truth: Chiaureli’s film is neither lie, mystification, nor exaggeration, but something else entirely—an attempt to stage the perverse logic of Stalinism. The Fall of Berlin depicts the process by which the Stalinist subject comes face to face with his own limit, with the big Other as the empty void on which the symbolic order rests. The film stages the loss and reacquisition of belief in the dominant fiction of Stalinism—not the fiction of unimpaired masculinity, but the belief that somewhere out there exists the “subject supposed to know,” the “nonduped,” the one “pulling all the strings.” Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin opens with a victory celebration in a Belo­russian steel town: Alesha Ivanov (Boris Andreev) has just received the Order of Lenin for his grandiose achievements at the mill and has been invited to Moscow to speak with the great Stalin. In proper cult-ofpersonality fashion, The Fall of Berlin depicts Stalin’s godlike nature through Alesha’s genuine fear of him. Alesha’s towering figure is magically dwarfed by Stalin (Mikhail Gelovani), while their first meeting is emblematic of the kind of fear Stalin produces in his (male) subjects. Alesha is so nervous about meeting Stalin that he twice tries to avoid going to see him. First, he refuses the invitation, shrinking back in his chair and protesting that he would have nothing to say. (The camera work helps to underscore Alesha’s fear: as he shrinks back, the camera pushes in for a closeup, showing us Alesha’s terrified face filling the screen.) Even on his way to meet Stalin, Alesha again tries to escape, asking the guard for permission to leave. He is made so nervous by Stalin’s approach that he backs away into a flower bed, mumbling, “For God’s sake, let me go!” as Stalin comes toward him to shake hands. And finally, not sure of how to handle himself or of what to say, Alesha misspeaks Stalin’s name, calling him “Vissarion Ivanovich” and thereby literally hailing Stalin with the “name of the father.” This sequence illustrates precisely the conse-

148   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

Fig. 5.2. Alesha dreaming of Natasha, Natasha dreaming of Stalin. Image courtesy of British Film Institute.

quence of assigning power to a single source, of relegating all authority to a single, living individual—that consequence is the failure of traditional masculinity, the loss of belief in the commensurability of penis and phallus. Stalin stands before Alesha as the embodiment of power; while Alesha—son of the revolution, Stakhanovite worker, a hero of labor decorated with the Order of Lenin—whimpers, stumbles, and tries to get away. This position of failed or inadequate masculinity is further reinforced by the Stalin-mediated relationship between Alesha and his love interest, Natasha Rumiantseva (Marina Kovaleva). Stalin’s mediation becomes at once the means by which the sexual relationship between Alesha and Natasha is both made possible and permanently elided. Alesha and Natasha first meet after the speech she gives in his honor. Alesha has set a new record in steel production and Natasha, the local schoolteacher, has been chosen to speak about his achievement. When preparing her speech, Natasha interviews Alesha’s mother, who explains that her son has the same birthday as the country (25 October 1917, old

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   149

style), and adds that though the family used to live in the Ural Mountains, they were invited by Stalin to relocate in order to set an example in steel production. Clearly falling in love with this image of Alesha, a record-breaking steelworker whose birthday matches the birthday of the nation, Natasha is nevertheless somewhat distracted from her purpose when it comes time to actually give her speech. As she stands high on the podium, with a large painting of Stalin behind her, the camera frames them together: she is slightly right of center and turned halfway toward the painting. Stalin, much larger than life size, is turned to his left, gazing down on her. It seems that Natasha herself can feel Stalin looking at her from above. Halfway through her speech, as if drawn by an invisible power, Natasha turns her back on the audience and suddenly addresses the painting. “It’s all ours,” she says, beginning to falter, “the steel that we found, the machines that we build with this steel, . . . but here is what I wanted to say: . . . who has brought us to today’s victory? Who has given us these opportunities? You know whom I’m thinking about . . . but right now I want to say something else. It would be my greatest happiness to see him and to tell him . . . that I . . . But because this isn’t possible,” she says, turning back to the audience, “I will just say, long live Stalin, who gave us this great and happy life!” Stalin’s direct involvement in Alesha’s love troubles, his fatherly coaching and instructions, make it possible for Alesha finally to declare his love. And yet what is made quite obvious by Natasha’s speech and her subsequent actions is that Stalin stands directly in the way of her appreciation of Alesha. Despite his exemplary masculinity (he is a steelworker, a record-setter, he is tall, handsome, and rugged), she cannot see him because her eyes are turned to Stalin. Because the image of unimpaired masculinity belongs to Stalin rather than to Alesha, the “mediation” of this image prevents rather than enables Natasha’s recognition of and desire for the proper masculine subject. Natasha eventually settles for Alesha, but only after she finds out that Stalin himself has sanctioned their relationship. As they walk together through the wheat fields, Alesha tells her that Stalin had advised him not to be afraid, that he told him “to love her and she will love you.” However, Stalin said, “if she doesn’t love you, then you write to me.” “Since I fell in love with you,” Natasha answers, once again looking somewhere off-screen, “the lives of others have become for me three times dearer and better.” It is not necessarily clear from

150   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

this answer that the “you” with whom Natasha professes to be in love is Alesha.61 Again, the scene specifically underscores Alesha’s “fear”: his fear of Natasha, his fear of “poetry” (Natasha is a schoolteacher, and therefore better educated), his fear of disobeying Stalin. Alesha is the very picture of inadequate masculinity—a picture reinforced by the attack of the German bombers and tanks during which Natasha is taken prisoner, while Alesha lies wounded and unconscious. Alesha’s weakness, represented by his loss of consciousness and protracted stay at the local hospital, is directly responsible for the loss of Natasha to the Germans. In For They Know Not What They Do (1991), Žižek describes the paradox that lies at the center of the belief in the king’s “two bodies”: his sublime, immaterial, sacred body and his terrestrial body subjected to the cycle of generation and corruption. It is a common illusion, writes Žižek, that it is not the murder of the king but the dissolution of the symbolic network of social relations within which he had acquired the status of king that actually removes the king from power: “We thus reach the comforting conclusion that the greatest punishment for the king is to let him live outside his symbolic function, as an ordinary citizen.”62 Yet, the logic of the king’s “two bodies” implies that more than simply serving as a support, symbol, or incarnation of his sublime body, the king’s transient material body actually itself undergoes a kind of transubstantiation: it becomes an object of fascination precisely in the way it remains a physical and fallible body, effecting “an unconscious meditation between the human and the divine.” Žižek writes, “What is at stake is thus not simply the split between the empirical person of the king and his symbolic function. The point is rather that this symbolic function redoubles his very body, introducing a split between the visible, material, transient body and another, sublime body, a body made of a special, immaterial stuff.” As Lacan suggests in his seminar on Hamlet, quoting the well-known exchange (“‘The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing.’ ‘A thing, my Lord?’ ‘Of nothing’”), the “thing” is the objet petit a, a sublime, evasive body which is a “thing of nothing,” a pure semblance without substance.63 This paradox may be explained by an example from Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin, the way Chiaureli introduces the figure of Stalin in the film. From the initial story line concerning Alesha Ivanov, we cut away to a sequence of Stalin planting trees in his garden. The sequence opens with a

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   151

shot of the sky and the tops of trees. From this the camera pans down toward the earth until a reverse shot of Stalin’s approving gaze makes us understand that we have been seeing these trees with Stalin’s eyes. He looks downward, and a reverse long shot now shows us Stalin tilling the earth with a hoe around some newly planted trees. We understand that Stalin is taking care of Russia, that he is raising a new generation that will grow tall and strong. But it is not incidental that the opening shot is mostly of the sky. As in the final sequence in which Stalin descends from the sky, Stalin is here metonymically sutured with heaven. This suture is again repeated toward the end when Hitler, alone and in the dark, threatens the invisible Stalin with his raised fist. Shot from above, Hitler’s body is made small, his fist raised toward the sky in a gesture of impotent rage. As if able to see Stalin approaching on his plane, Hitler literally threatens heaven—for him Stalin now exists somewhere above and beyond not only his reach but also all human powers.64 The by now famous concluding sequence is equally attentive to the heavenly metaphor. As the Soviet and Allied troops celebrate their victory in the streets, three white airplanes appear in the skies over Berlin. Everyone rushes to the airstrip and, in fulfillment of some kind of unspoken promise of reward for victory, Stalin appears before the people, clad all in white. The two sequences—the opening one of Stalin tilling the earth, and the closing one of Stalin descending from the skies—represent the paradox of the king’s “two bodies.” The first shows the “physical and fallible body,” the caring gardener alone with his thoughts; the second, the symbolic body of the king, the “sublime body,” a body made “of a special, immaterial stuff.”65 The all-white uniform that differs so markedly not only from the dirty and torn uniforms of the soldiers, prisoners, and duped German citizens, but also from the standard (brown) military uniform worn by Stalin through the rest of the film, represents that special “immaterial stuff” by which Stalin can be easily distinguished from the common man. And yet, this immaterial stuff redoubles on the original body. Stalin has descended from heaven. Stalin is the representative of the triumphant forces of history that have led the Soviet Union to this moment of victory and the fulfillment of its historical mandate. Stalin is beyond the realm of the physical—he is, as André Bazin suggests, pure myth. Stalin, in other words, is none other but “a pure semblance without substance,” a ghost, a memory, a thing of pure seeming.66

152   ★   WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

Fig. 5.3. Alesha before Stalin. Image courtesy of British Film Institute.

If the Great Patriotic War undermined the authority of the great leader (as Nikita Khrushchev suggests it had),67 then Chiaureli’s films works hard to restore belief: the film, through its fetishistic attention to the king’s “two bodies” attempts to cover over the crisis—the moment of realization that the king is not with the body. And yet what the film consistently points to instead is that if Stalin were to remain alive, all evidence of his failure has to be hidden from his sight. The male subject—the twice-decorated Stakhanovite hero Alesha Ivanov—has to take failure onto himself, has to accept castration in order to keep it out of Stalin’s knowledge. Again here we have the same logic of fetishistic belief that we saw in The Party Card: knowledge must be suppressed and guilt must be misplaced in order to preserve the big Other (and with him, the symbolic order) from discovering the truth. “We know very well . . . [that Stalin hid in the Kremlin, failed the people, lied about our abilities, resources, casualties], but all the same . . . [we will act as if he rallied the country and single handedly won the war].” Because otherwise the entire structure of symbolic belief would falter and fail. And the country would be left looking into a void.68

WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?   ★   153

The Fall of Berlin performs this task of keeping the big Other as the “subject supposed not to know.”69 Accepting castration, Alesha must bear the mark of his sacrifice, of his inferiority, for all to see, and in particular, for Stalin to note. In the final sequence of The Fall of Berlin, as Stalin descends from the sky in his white airplane, wearing a blindingly white military uniform, Alesha, with a freshly bandaged head, makes his way through the crowd toward the great leader. The fear that was present in the initial meeting is gone, but it has been replaced by the bandage—the physical sign of lack, the symbol of the incommensurability of penis and phallus, of masculinity with the structures of power. Alesha is no longer afraid because he no longer believes in the unimpaired masculinity of the Stalinist subject, but instead faces the source of his castration: Stalin as the embodiment of history.

  

6 ★ EPILOGUE  “Female Masculinity”

The problematics of gender construction and identification, the historical contingencies of Stalinism, and the stakes of faith in and eventual abandonment of collective belief are played out in the literature and the film of the era. The conflict between the two types of masculinity produced by Stalinist culture are illustrated by these two descriptions, written six decades apart. First, a passage from Iurii Olesha’s diary from 1931: Saw a man at the barber’s, the kind I would like to have been myself. He was getting a shave. A peasant, probably. The face of a soldier, maybe forty years old, healthy, lips like Maiakovskii’s, blond. It’s the kind of face you want to call modern, internationally masculine: the face of a pilot—the modern type of manliness. A man like that stands somewhere between courage, magnanimity, and technology. He flies across the ocean, he loves his mother, he stops a car from sliding into the river by grabbing on to one of the wheels, he turns up when an electric cable 154

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   155

falls onto the street and he materializes atop the fire ladder that has arrived on the scene of an accident, wearing his rubber gloves.1

On the one hand, Iurii Olesha’s observations from his 1931 diary encapsulate the “fantasy of extravagant virility” of a culture obsessed with pilots, arctic explorers, steel workers, and other models of ideal manhood. The diary’s private observations reflect the collective fantasy of what it means to be a man—or, at the very least, what it meant, in 1931, to be a New Soviet Man. This fantasy relies on the metaphors of health, youth, strength, and virility to bring together masculinity and the male body—myths and fantasies that “guarantee that maleness and masculinity cannot be pried apart.”2 By 1994, the succinct enumeration of a critic, Igor’ Smirnov, of the wounded bodies to be found in Stalinist fiction points once again to the “unmaking” of the New Soviet Man, to the consistent reappearance of the mutilated (male) body in socialist realist art. Smirnov writes: It is striking that the larger part of the characters, those who have won back their place in life despite their physical ailments, suffer from constraints on their mobility, as does, for example, the one-legged Voropaev . . . the legless Meres’ev, the paralyzed Korchagin. The motif of limping finds standard expression in the Stalinist text: we will mention here. . . . Vikhrov who leans on a cane; the engineer Kovshov in Far from Moscow, who injures his leg twice; Semen Goncharenko in Cavalier of the Gold Star, who suffers the same fate; and Varia, from the same novel, whose leg is maimed by a bull.3

Strikingly, however, Olesha’s slippage between the three terms (“saw a man at the barber’s,” “It’s the kind of face you want to call . . . masculine,” “the modern type of manliness”), between seeing a man whose likeness elicits a long string of masculine qualifiers and recalling all of the ways in which “men” can appear “manly,” brings into question the very notion of what it means to be (that is to say, to look and act like) a man. Here, masculinity does not necessarily “reduce down to the male body and its effects,”4 but rather, seems to exist as a separate set of qualities, that may or may not always successfully map onto the male subject (“Saw a man at the barber’s, the kind I would like to have been myself ”). Olesha diary captures in his works the spirit of the age—the desire for an exemplary masculinity, embodied in early Soviet posters of Bolsheviks and blacksmiths, in monu-

156   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

mental art, and in the socialist realist heroes of literature and film. His vision of the peasant-cum-soldier-cum-pilot-cum-superman-cum-fireman encapsulates the “essence” of the New Soviet Man.5 Yet, as Igor’ Smirnov’s list points out and as I have argued throughout this book, Stalinist masculinity is represenated not only by figures of hyperbolically virile men, but equally so in the mutilated male protagonist, the heroic invalid. In this case, masculinity (as health, strength, virility, power) is pried apart from the male body, which becomes a site not for “the fantasy of extravagant virility” but for an altogether different fantasy: that of the Stalinist hero as a maimed, blinded, crippled, but nevertheless stubbornly alive Soviet subject. Here I turn to Sergei Livnev’s 1994 Serp i molot (Hammer and Sickle) which, like a number of films made after the collapse of the Soviet Union, returns to the myths and fantasies of Stalinism, attempting to recapture history in its “traumatic and unassimilable guise.”6 Hammer and Sickle restages the double fantasy of Stalinist masculinity that I have been tracing throughout How the Soviet Man Was Unmade.7 Through its manipulation of sex and gender, Livnev’s film reveals the distance between the male body and masculinity, between masculinity and power, once again staging the unmaking of the New Soviet Man.

The Alienating Armor of Identity The perception of masculinity as a set of attributes that may but do not necessarily naturally belong to the male subject pervades Livnev’s 1994 Hammer and Sickle.8 The film is a story of an ordinary girl who becomes an extraordinary man. Through a sex change operation, Evdokiia Kuznetsova, a young peasant woman from the provinces, is transformed into Evdokim Kuznetsov (Aleksei Serebriakov), a Stakhanovite worker, a builder of the Moscow metro, a member of the Supreme Soviet, and Vera Mukhina’s model of the worker for the Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer monument. In every way, Livnev’s film makes the construction of Stalin’s New Man literal: everything about Evdokim—his sex, his gender, his body, his desire—is “given from the outside,”9 created and imposed on him by others (by doctors, by Soviet culture, by Stalin). Evdokim appears to have no choice but to go along with his assigned path, marrying the woman picked out for him by the NKVD, adopting a daughter chosen for him among the orphans of the Spanish civil war, rising through party ranks to occupy better and higher posts.

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   157

Fig 6.1. Evdokim/Evdokiia. Private collection.

Unable to sustain his own myth as the perfect Soviet subject, however, Evdokim attacks Stalin, hoping to take back some measure of control over his life. Instead, he is shot by Stalin’s bodyguards and his wounded body becomes the site of the second fantasy of Stalinist masculinity: the mutilated body as a cultural fetish. Paralyzed from the neck down, Evdokim spends the remaining few scenes of the film immobilized on a giant bed with a hammer and sickle on the headboard, in a museum dedicated to acts of bravery he never committed, and surrounded by objects he never possessed. Finally, he is shot and killed by his own daughter—and the smile on his face, given to us in close-up, indicates that he has finally been released from this particular form of symbolic (and physical) captation. In Livnev’s film, the Stalinist fantasy of gender construction is extended to its extreme and absurd form: by taking the body of a woman and grafting onto it the organs of a man. This new man becomes the model Stalinist subject: handsome, brave, strong, healthy, heterosexual, granted all of the privileges of Soviet citizenship, including a lovely and dedicated wife, a convertible car, and a large apartment. But before he can become this model Stalinist subject, Evdokim must first learn what kinds of words and actions constitute Stalinist masculinity. An early moment in Hammer

158   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

and Sickle points to precisely the fluidity of sex and gender, the distance between maleness and masculinity. Just prior to the sex-change operation, we catch a brief glimpse, among the jars of formaldehyde holding different surgical tools, of the male member, erect and isolated in its jar, being rolled before us on a cart. Because the cart with the organ is immediately followed by the table bearing Evdokiia Kuznetsova’s unconscious body, we can read this image for the radical distance between maleness and masculinity, penis and phallus. The organ will be grafted onto the unwilling body of woman, creating the new man and conferring upon him all the privileges of Stalinist masculinity. And yet, having been surgically attached, this organ (and symbol of male privilege) can easily be taken away, returning Evdokim to his preoperative status—not of a woman, but of a docile and castrated body. The distance between the sexual organ and the body serves as a marker for the distance between the body and masculinity (its “learned” characteristics) and between masculinity and power. Instead of a conflation of all these terms (of the kind we find in Olesha’s diary), here we have a radical separation. The (male) body does not confer masculinity, which in turn does not guarantee access to power. As Judith Halberstam argues, “Masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects,” referring to “dominant masculinity” as a naturalized relation between maleness and power.10 Yet, where the dominant paradigms of Western culture insist on such commensurability, Stalinist culture stages the incommensurability of these terms, producing hybrids of female masculinity, of injured and paralyzed male bodies, of weakness that appears as strength, and powerlessness that appears as power. This is the Stalinism that Livnev’s film parodies and constructs, making us believe in the fluidity of gender and the arbitrary nature of its construction. Here, masculinity does not “reduce down” to the male body—indeed, the male body must be put through a series of learned and sometimes tasking steps in order to assume masculinity in its heteronormative, “classic” form. In Livnev’s vision of Stalinism, there is little room for “inherent” or “natural” gender assignment. Instead, gender is treated here in its “performative” function, the product of studied practice and reiterative discourse.11 As Aleksei, the NKVD officer who authorizes the sex change operation, explains in a conversation he supposedly has with Stalin, “There

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   159

are some women in our country for whom it is not enough to be a woman, they want to be something more—[to be] a man.” Biological sex is not a determinate of gender identity, but merely an inconvenience one could either ignore or change. Masculinity is the potential goal of every Stalinist subject, its assumption both desirable and impossible—if anyone can be a man, how will we tell “real men” from everyone else? To produce a man from the body of a woman, the doctors wipe the slate clean, returning Evdokiia’s body to its (imaginary) prior, unsexed and ungendered state. “The plan of the operation is clear to me,” the main surgeon tells Mariia, the doctor responsible for this new invention: “There is only one question left: should we increase the dosage of hormones?” “No,” replies Mariia, “Remove them altogether” (“sovsem uberem”). Here we have the body in its “natural” state, without the imposition of difference that will take place as soon as the penis is attached and the process of the assumption of masculinity begins. This process is visually signaled to us when we see postoperative Evdokim enclosed in a large upright metal tube, a phallic structure meant to show from the outside what it cannot show from the inside: Evdokiia’s transformation into a man. The tube marks Evdokiia’s (and Evdokim’s) assumption or donning of the “armor of an alienating identity,” that, as Jacques Lacan tells us, “will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure.”12 The upright metal tube makes this “rigid structure” (of masculinity, of Stalinist subjectivity) visible from the outside. To assume his new “alienating identity” Evdokim begins a series of acts by means of which he comes to inhabit his new body and his new role: he lifts weights, does push-ups, learns to urinate standing up and to make love to a woman. These acts are “performances” in the sense that they are studied attempts at masculinity rather than the products of “natural” desire or need: for instance, Evdokim must think first about how to urinate like a man, before remembering to do so the unequivocally male way. These acts are also performances in that somebody is watching: Vera lurks in the bathroom doorway and her smile lets Evdokim know that he has passed the first test. Finally, the performance must be rehearsed, must be made believable. Visually, Evdokim is still caught in between the two gendered spaces: he exercises by doing bicep curls with two teakettles and is at first too weak to do a real push-up. Thus, when he first tries to kiss Vera, he is slapped and called “dura” (fool, n. fem.). “A woman must

160   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

be proud,” Vera tells him, to which he replies, “And a man must be decisive—and what am I?” As Livnev’s film makes clear, masculinity is a series of learned behaviors, and it is also a learned language (both bodily and verbal) that must be studied and practiced and that does not and cannot come from “within,” as some kind of innate or natural effect of the body.13 Evdokim’s next step as an actor in his new role is to make love to Vera. This is the second instance in which Evdokim “acts as a man” and here his performance involves learning the right lines, as well as the right moves. Asked to “say something” (chto-nibud’ govori), Evdokim repeats the lines that Evdokiia’s lover had repeated to her: “We’ll plow the tundra, we’ll seed it with flowers, turn it into a garden . . . we’ll make fairy tales come true” (“Tundru raspashem, tsvetami zaseem, v sad prevratim . . . skazku byl’iu sdelaem”). As we watch, Evdokim’s face is replaced by the face of an unknown man, moving in and out of focus of a point-of-view shot. We hear him chanting the meaningless slogans and lyrics of Soviet propaganda, and then we hear and see Evdokim repeating these same lines to Vera.14 The clichéd nature of the dialogue serves to underscore language’s iterative and performative function. Evdokim does not speak in his own words—indeed, no one ever does—but his word choice makes it possible for him to be what he needs to be, to “perform” (Stalinist) masculinity. This masculinity, Livnev’s film tells us, is “given from the outside,” “citational,” learned rather than innate, a set of coherent actions and words that can be appropriated by anyone. Evdokim’s acceptance and assumption of masculinity is marked by two prominent signs. The first is a memorial plaque for Evdokiia Kuznetsova (1911–1936) that Evdokim finds on the wall of the Novodevichii Monastery. The second, which immediately follows, is the sign “Men Wanted” (Trebuiutsia muzhchiny), advertising jobs building the Moscow metro. Between them, the two signs produce Evdokim as a male subject. The first clearly marks the death of his female self, while the second sign “hails” him as a man. No longer consciously performing masculinity (as he did with Vera, while in the confines of the monastery/prison/hospital), Evdokim now recognizes himself in and answers the call of the state: “Men Wanted.” In the next sequence, shot as documentary footage, we see Evdokim on the front lines of Moscow’s underground construction project, wielding a massive sledgehammer and instructing others on how

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   161

Fig. 6.2. “The hail.” Private collection.

Fig. 6.3. Men Wanted. Private collection.

to do the job right—a fine specimen of the “fantasy of extravagant virility” of Stalinist culture. Indeed, throughout Hammer and Sickle we are reminded that Stalinist “masculinity” and Stalinist “subjectivity” are closely linked. As Evdokim becomes an exemplary “man,” he also becomes a model Soviet subject: a

162   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

Stakhanovite decorated with the Order of the Red Banner for his superhuman achievements on the work front; husband of an equally successful peasant woman-turned-tractor driver-turned-brigade leader; father to a Spanish civil war orphan named Dolores; a member of the Supreme Soviet. His every move is chronicled by a photojournalist and the sculptor Vera Mukhina, who uses Evdokim and his future wife Elizaveta as her models for the Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer monument being prepared for the 1937 Paris Exposition. Evdokim’s status as model speaks precisely to the notion of gender as a “copy with no original”:15 Evdokim is a construction of male attributes grafted onto a biologically female body that nevertheless achieves the iconic status of exemplary and desirable masculinity. As Birgit Beumers observes, Evdokim is an “artifact,” which is to say he is an object made by human hands; but he is also an “artifact” in another way as well: he is a remainder, something that appears as a by-product of an operation.16 As such, Evdokim is infinitely reproducible: photographs, newsreels, monuments all repeat Evdokim as an endless series of hollow constructs. As Aleksandr Prokhorov suggests, the site for the production of these hollow images—the projector that can be started and stopped, the photojournalist herself, the inclusion of historical documentary footage of the assembly of the monument—always works to remind us of the “making” of the Stalinist subject.17 The photojournalist and the sculptor continue to produce Evdokim in the same way as his doctors did earlier: like his postoperative metal tube, the frozen film still and the giant steel monument limit and define what Evdokim is and is not allowed to be. Again, we are here in the presence of the “assumption of an alienating identity,” an identity that is given from the outside and that marks the subject with a rigid and foreign structure. Asked to identify with his own on-screen image, Evdokim in fact fails to achieve the proper cinematic or even psychological identification: asked if he likes the movie, Evdokim can only answer, “It’s strange to see yourself from the side” (Stranno na sebia smotret’ so storony).

“Que voi?” Neither the sex change operation, nor Stalin’s role in arranging his marriage to Elizaveta, nor his status as a “model” Soviet citizen prepares

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   163

Evdokim for the realization that Stalinist subjects are constructed and mobilized according to the requirements of the state and not according to their desires. As he sits sullenly at his desk surrounded by typical items of Soviet luxury (art deco lamps with green lampshades, busts of Lenin, and other items of Stalinist high style), ignoring phone call after phone call, we realize that something has gone wrong with this model Stalinist subject. What follows, is a breakdown that leads Evdokim first to abandon his job and his family, then to drunk and disorderly conduct, and finally, to the Kremlin screening room and his confrontation with Stalin. The breakdown is exacerbated on the one hand by Evdokim’s love affair with his nurse, Vera, and her sudden death, and on the other, by his unexpected meeting with his former lover, the man whose words Evdokim ardently repeats to Vera during lovemaking. Drunk, disappointed, and confused, Evdokim suddenly finds himself face to face with a group of sailors, one of whom he immediately recognizes as his former lover, Evdokim’s model of masculinity, the role on which he bases his own performance. But this man cannot see (or refuses to see) past Evdokim’s male appearance, he cannot “recognize” Evdokim, cannot provide him with the answer to his fundamental question: “What am I?” Indeed, as Livnev’s film goes to show, this answer can only come from one source: Stalin himself, who may be laughable when seen up close, but is nevertheless the “mastervoice,” the big Other from which all meaning proceeds and without which no subject can be recognized as such.18 Evdokim’s attack on Stalin, like his earlier attack on the sailor, is driven by the desire to understand who and what he is, to be recognized as a subject of a master discourse—of love, of masculinity, of Stalinism. In attacking Stalin, Evdokim is seeking a response from the big Other, an acknowledgment of his own existence as a subject. This acknowledgment, however, comes at a price: in order to be recognized as a subject of a master discourse, one must first recognize that entity from which the discourse proceeds. “In true speech,” writes Lacan, “the Other is that before which you make yourself recognized. But you can make yourself recognized by it only because it is recognized first. It has to be recognized for you to be able to make yourself recognized. . . . It is through recognizing it that you institute it, and not as a pure and simple element of reality, a pawn, a puppet, but as an irreducible absolute, on whose existence

164   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

as subject the very value of speech in which you get yourself recognized depends.”19 In other words, before getting his answer to “What am I?” Evdokim must first acknowledge the existence of someone capable of giving him that answer. He must first recognize Stalin as absolute master before he, in turn, can be recognized as a subject and as a “man.” Evdokim does not immediately realize that in Stalin he faces the big Other, “an irreducible absolute.” Like us, he sees a small, aging man, weak and docile, watching a Chaplin comedy. Evdokim asserts his independent existence by claiming that, since he is a man and “the master of his life” (khoziain svoei zhizni), he has the right to quit his job, leave his wife and daughter, and, most important, cease to be the model Stalinist subject that the party expects him to be. At the same time, Evdokim seeks recognition: he wants Stalin to see him as “the master of his life,” an equal. Thus, in some sense, Evdokim here is aware of his symbolic captation. Even the choice of language—the use of the word master (khoziain)—hints at the power given to Stalin by Soviet rhetoric: there is only one Khoziain and, by extension, only one man: Stalin himself. Again, the slippage here between Stalinist subjectivity and male subjectivity cannot be overlooked. Evdokim wants to know if he is a man, if as a man and “master of his life” he can do as he wishes. He is taught instead that he is “Comrade Dusia” (tovarishch Dusia), an insult that points back to Vera’s insult (dura) and Evdokim’s constructed and unnatural existence. “You were a hysterical country broad,” says Stalin, “And now you want to be the master of your own life? Impossible, Comrade Dusia!” (“Ty byl isterichnoi derevenskoi babenkoi, a teper’ khochesh’ stat’ khoziainom svoei zhizni? Ne vyidet, tovarishch Dusia!”) Judith Butler writes that naming is the “setting of a boundary,” a moment that shifts an it into a he or a she, and we see in this case how Stalin’s use of “Dusia” immediately undoes all the previous gender construction undertaken in the film, setting up a boundary that effectively prevents Evdokim from laying claim to his masculine identity.20 Evdokim, in other words, gets the recognition he has been seeking. Looking ardently into the sailor’s eyes, Evdokim tried to make him see that he is the same as before—he is still the Evdokiia the sailor once loved. The sailor may be Evdokim’s model of masculinity, but he is not the big Other that possesses ultimate knowledge. Only Stalin can see Evdokim for what he really is—what the New Soviet Man ultimately is—a “hysterical country broad,” a “Comrade Dusia.”

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   165

Men Wanted In an interview at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam in 1995, Sergei Livnev made the following observation about his film: The hammer and sickle were for years the symbols of my country. People recognized these frightening and sinister symbols of proletarian labor as the umpteenth variation on a theme: the relation between man and woman. The hammer is the vagina, the sickle is the penis. I wanted to show how normal human emotions are born and live and die in abnormal conditions under the Stalinist regime. That is why it starts as a political adventure and ends as a tragic love story.21

If Stalinism’s fantasy of “extravagant virility,” its desire to construct the New Soviet Man, is clearly parodied by Livnev’s film, then we might consider the conclusion of Hammer and Sickle as an instantiation of the second modality of that desire: the fantasy of the mutilated male body, the Stalinist subject as a heroic invalid. The scene taking place in the Kremlin screening room ends as Evdokim nearly succeeds in killing Stalin and is shot by Stalin’s bodyguards. The movie might have ended at this point— and indeed, the blackout at the end of this sequence suggests that we have reached the end—and we would have been left with the knowledge that Stalinism manipulated and constructed its subjects and got rid of them when they became dangerous or disruptive or simply insubordinate. Instead, the film opens onto yet another scene taken directly from Stalinist mythology: a paralyzed invalid, “a living legend,” living in a museum named after himself, his house a “site of countless pilgrimages and an object of the greatest interest for foreign journalists.”22 In the final segment of the film, Evdokim is lying prone on a giant bed in the middle of the museum, with a cutout of the hammer and sickle on the headboard. He is paralyzed but dressed in military uniform and surrounded by editions of his numerous novels, which were said to have been written after the accident and dictated to his wife via the merest of glances, each of which she has learned to interpret correctly. His body, still an artifact of the state, has been deployed for one final purpose: instead of a traitor who nearly kills Stalin, Evdokim becomes Stalin’s savior, the man who (legend has it) takes a poisoned bullet in order to protect the great and wise leader. From Stakhanovite worker and model Stalinist subject (literally, the model for

166   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

Fig. 6.4. The living mummy. Private collection.

“The Worker and Collective Farmer”), Evdokim has come to fulfill the second role accorded to Stalinist masculinity: the docile, mutilated male subject. Like the earlier attempt on Stalin’s life, we might read this final sequence for its elements of post-Soviet fantasy—that is to say, a fantasy that could only have been imagined after Stalinism and the Soviet Union had ceased to be; a fantasy that expresses the desire to give back to its protagonist some semblance of subjective will. In Livnev’s film, Evdokim wants to give up his place as a Stalinist subject—something that no actual socialist realist hero can or is willing to do. From examples of such heroes as Pavka Korchagin and Aleksei Meres’ev we know that the more they are hurt, wounded, and removed from power, the more fiercely they insist on participating in a system that no longer has any need for them. Conversely, Evdokim is perfectly willing to give up his beautiful wife, his membership in the Supreme Soviet, his large apartment, and his famous daughter. Unlike true Stalinist heroes, Evdokim wants to be the “master of his life,” a desire that is incompatible with the demands of the Stalinist subjectivity. Paralyzed and permanently confined to his bed à la Nikolai Ostrovskii, Evdokim lives out his days in a museum, built for him by the state,

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   167

Fig. 6.5. Dolores as a young Evdokim. Private collection.

of which he is the main attraction. His wife Elizaveta is the museum’s curator. No longer an uneducated peasant girl learning to operate a tractor, Elizaveta now is a severely dressed bureaucrat whose pleasure at Evdokim’s simultaneous immobility and heroic status is expressed through her perverse sexuality—she manages to have sex with the paralyzed and unwilling Evdokim in the fully aestheticized environment of the museum. The museum’s other occupant, Evdokim’s adopted daughter, Dolores, has also been transformed. Cross-dressed as a boy (indeed, as a young Evdokim, who, in his new history, performed many heroic acts even as a young boy), Dolores studies sharpshooting and plays war games modeled on Evdokim’s false past. What we are seeing here, of course, is the next transformation of girls into boys and women into men. Both Elizaveta and Dolores, through dress, through action, through fantasy, are performing masculinity. And, in Dolores’s case in particular, this performance is every bit as studied, imitative, citational as Evdokim’s assumption of masculinity had been earlier in the film. Because the gender performances and transformations in Livnev’s film carry the aura of the Frankensteinian and the horrific, because they are staged as a totalitarian culture’s attempts at controlling its subjects,

168   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

Fig. 6.6. The final shot. Private collection.

the final message delivered by the ending of Hammer and Sickle reinvents a belief in “classic” masculinity with its conflations of penis and phallus, of biology with structures of power. The film suggests that there is, finally, a core and authentic self, with a gender that maps directly onto sex. When Dolores asks permission to borrow Evdokim’s gun, he knows very well that there is one poison bullet left in its barrel. He also knows that Dolores will aim and pull the trigger. As a result, Evdokim’s death is a suicide, as the final close-up of his smiling face reveals. The suicide, the act through which Evdokim finally becomes the master of his life, redeems his masculinity, as it might be imagined in post-Soviet fantasy. No longer a pawn of the Stalinist state, Evdokim finally regains the control over his life that he lost when his body was subjected to the medical experiments of the state. Indeed, the film wants to argue, anyone who succumbs to the myths and fantasies of Stalinism is a kind of “tovarishch Dusia”—a feminized subject, used and abused by the Stalinist state. Evdokim’s final moment of triumph is what Lacan and Slavoj Žižek have called the “true ethical act” of “symbolic suicide,” the moment of the subject’s erasure from the symbolic network by which he or she had been produced and sustained.23 The last sequence of Hammer and Sickle allows Evdokim finally to ascend to

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   169

this status of true subjectivity. Through his suicide Evdokim severs the ties to Stalinist culture and acts “decisively” and as a “man”; in other words, he appears finally to be the master of his life.24

The Future of an Illusion In Enjoy Your Symptom! (1992) Slavoj Žižek suggested not only that socialism was founded on collective belief, but also that its demise coincided with a profound dis- or uninvestment of collective belief in the structures of Soviet power. The subjects of “real socialism” never really believed in the party, in Communism, et cetera, but they acted “as if” they believed, because what they wanted to preserve above all was the “essential appearance of the big Other,” the agency invested with power and meaning whose place as the master signifier of culture must be preserved at all costs.25 Like the big Other of any ideological belief, Soviet power and the myth of socialism existed in two mutually exclusive modes. On the one hand, the big Other appears as a hidden agency pulling the strings, running the show behind the scenes. The big Other is the proverbial “man behind the curtain” whose omnipotence and omniscience gives meaning to the symbolic structures in which we live our daily lives. Not simply Stalin, but Stalin buttressed by Lenin and empowered by the forces of history comes to occupy the place of the big Other in Soviet culture. It is for history in its Marxist-Leninist development that rallies are staged, films are made, and show trials put on. At the same time, the big Other is an agency of pure seeming, a nonexistent being for whose gaze the fictions of belief are maintained: The agency of “pure semblance,” the logic of essential appearance was carried to an extreme in “real socialism,” in which the whole system aimed at maintaining the appearance of the people united in their support of the Party and in the enthusiastic construction of Socialism—ritualized spectacles followed one after another in which nobody “really believed” and everybody knew that nobody believed, but that the Party bureaucrats were nonetheless uncommonly frightened by the possibility that the appearance of belief would disintegrate. They perceived this disintegration as a total catastrophe, as the dissolution of the entire social order. The question to be asked here is simply: if nobody “really believed,” if everybody knew that nobody believed,

170   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

what was then the agency, the gaze for whom the spectacle of belief was staged?26 The 1937 diary of Galina Vladimirovna Shtange provides an excellent example of this “spectacle of belief,” in a text filled with unfinished and frequently contradictory statements about everyday life in Stalin’s Russia.27 Shtange describes in detail the great changes that have taken place in the Soviet Union and the “wide assortment of high-quality goods” that were now available in the “magnificent stores,” and, at the same time, bemoans the lines that start forming outside the department stores at two o’clock in the morning and how after four days she “finally managed to get two saucepans” for her son and his wife. She describes the joyful celebrations in the streets commemorating the new Stalin constitution, but at the same time, withholds her actual opinion by referring to the sentiment of the masses: “December 6, 1936. Last night Stalin’s new Constitution was adopted. I won’t say anything about it; I feel the same way as the rest of the country, i.e., absolute, infinite delight,” and notes that she did not go to the demonstration because “all kinds of things have been piling up that need to be taken care of.” And she leaves without comment the statement, “My children are dreaming about Stalin.”28 We might note here that Shtange’s diary appears on the surface to be written precisely for the “gaze of the big Other” as the subject supposed to know—for the hidden agencies who might come knocking in the middle of the night and use the selfsame diary for the purposes of Shtange’s exposure as a “class alien element” and “enemy of the people.” And yet, the contradictions of the text are not erased by this knowledge. The diary does not simply confirm the belief in the “subject supposed to know,” it also suggests the presence of its opposite, the “subject supposed not to know.” How else to explain the desire to remind the big Other that celebrations are taking place in his name? How else to interpret the “dreams of Stalin”—“Boria dreamed that he came to visit us and had a friendly, intimate conversation with us. And the same day, Zhenia dreamed that he was defending Stalin from an attack by a bandit”29—except as a desire at all costs to maintain belief in the big Other? Because if the big Other did not exist, then nothing about Shtange’s life, not the commitment to “personal life,” nor the ten square meters of space in which her son lives with his family, nor the lack of goods and services, nor the mass celebrations of a

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   171

fraudulent constitution would make any sense; and Shtange’s life would be revealed as the distance between the dream of collective utopia and the reality of Soviet socialism. The persistent myth that Stalin could never really distinguish between the fictions of socialist realism and Soviet reality is another example of the staging of the belief for the gaze of the big Other. Many critics, starting with André Bazin and Nikita Khrushchev, followed by Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, and ending with recent scholars such as Peter Kenez and Ian Christie, have suggested that Stalin “believed” in the reality of what he saw on the screen. “Stalin,” wrote Khrushchev, “knew the countryside and agriculture only from films. And these films had dressed up and beautified the existing situation in agriculture. . . . Evidently, Stalin thought that it was actually so.” Christie quotes director Grigorii Kozintsev’s account of the first Kremlin screening of Iunost’ Maksima (The Youth of Maxim, 1935): “We heard the voice several times during the screening. I listened hard to the words, trying hard to understand their meaning. It wasn’t easy: sharp, at times even indignant exclamations were followed by approving interjections. But neither the anger nor the praise had any relation to the quality of the film. Gradually I realized that Stalin didn’t watch movies as works of art. He watched them as real events taking place before his eyes.” Kenez makes a similar point when he writes, “As Stalin withdrew from the real world, in the sense of seeing actual factories, collective farms, villages and even the streets of Moscow, his view of the world came to be more and more determined by what he saw on the screen. . . . Stalin, ironically, allowed himself to be deceived by the lies of his own Party activists, lies that he himself has generated.” And Mandel’stam, in Hope Abandoned (Vtoraia kniga, 1972), tells the following story: watching the Ukrainian actor A. M. Buchma play the role of traitor: “Stalin commented that a traitor could be played so well only by someone who actually was a traitor, and he demanded that the appropriate measures be taken. He gave this order to both Khrushchev and Malenkov, and quite independently of each other—it was always dangerous to concert one’s actions—they managed to fool Stalin by saying they were having Bukhma followed with a view to capturing all the other traitors connected with him. They did not have to keep this up for very long, because Bukhma was saved either by his own death or by Stalin’s.” Though Mandel’stam admits a sentence earlier that the story of

172   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

Bukhma is “a story of Khrushchev’s” told to her by Il’ia Ehrenburg, and she is not sure she remembers it correctly, nevertheless this image of Stalin as a dictator fooled by his own propaganda is suggestive. To maintain Soviet power, everyone but especially Stalin had to act “as if” they believed—and Stalin’s reported conflations of fiction with reality merely showed the way he too staged his belief for the gaze of the big Other, here embodied in the audience of the Kremlin film screening room.30 Žižek’s account of socialism’s collapse teaches us something about the workings of Soviet power and the nature of the collective belief with which that power was invested. Not merely a tool of propaganda (though certainly it was that), socialist realism was a way of maintaining collective belief, the ability to act “as if” Stalinism and Soviet rule truly embodied the inevitable and inexorable march of history toward the bright future. The nuances of this belief were worked out on the level of texts, where fictional heroes in fictional scenarios were able to play out the crisis of faith and overcome its life-threatening consequences. Even better if these texts could be close to but not exactly the “truth,” if the fictions themselves were based on real events, if the authors themselves could be said, in the words of Fedor Gladkov, to have taken a part in the events, “as a Communist . . . from the beginning to the end.”31 A given symbolic order, as Kaja Silverman notes, “will remain in place only so long as it has subjects, but it cannot by itself produce them. It relies for this purpose upon the dominant fiction, which works to bring the subject into conformity with the symbolic order by fostering normative desires and identifications.” Here again, we might say, using Žižek’s notion of the “as if,” that a given symbolic order will remain in place only as long as its subjects continue to act as if they believed. Radical loss of belief in the conventional premises of masculinity brings the male subject in confrontation with those “defining conditions of all subjectivity” that masculinity generally projects onto the female subject: lack, specularity, and alterity.32 The fictions of Stalinism come back again and again to the figure of the mutilated body as a site for producing the “projection, disavowal, and fetishism” of exemplary male subjectivity. Katerina Clark in The Soviet Novel suggests that bodily mutilation is one of several ritualistic components of the socialist realist novel’s master plot, part of the ethos of “ritual sacrifice.” In the Stalinist novel, she argues, “death and token mutilation have a predominantly mythic function.

EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”   ★   173

When the hero sheds his individualistic self at the moment of passage, he dies as an individual and is reborn as a function of the collective.”33 The undercurrent of Christian martyrdom is unmistakable here, as is the memory of such radical rituals as the castration practiced by the castrates, or skoptsy, whose rituals of bodily mutilation aimed at creating the collective body: “employing surgical rather than ritual means, [skoptsy] realized their communal ideal by removing the most enduring obstacle to collective subjectivity”—the sex organs.34 In this context, we might recall Andrei Platonov’s short story “Ivan Zhokh” (1927), in which Zhokh’s inability to properly handle Arishka undermines his godlike status and eventually leads to his expulsion from the all-male utopia. The men feel that they could have forgiven Zhokh had he been a castrate (skopets), but he turned out to be a man with a full sack (“Kaby b on oskoplennyi byl, a to muzhik s polnoi grozd’iu”).35 The possibility of creating a “collective body” is here directly linked both to the threat of sexual difference and to the ritualized bodily mutilation of its members. Castration becomes a necessary precondition for the formation of a collective identity and for securing citizenship in the future utopia, the body marked by a sign so that it can take its rightful place among the chosen people.36 As the readings throughout How the Soviet Man Was Unmade have suggested, however, the rhetoric of bodily sacrifice aimed at creating a collective body lead to a literature populated by injured, mutilated, and otherwise scarred bodies, itself a direct contradiction of policy and ideology. Stalinist ideology was never able to tolerate for very long the presence of actual invalids on the streets of its major cities,37 and this intolerance echoed the larger crisis of national identity that confronted Europe, Russia, Japan, and the United States when soldiers damaged by war (both physically and psychologically) tried to take their proper place in postwar society. As Roxanne Panchasi suggests, “The scarred and mutilated body of the disabled soldier became the privileged site in the fantasy of national recuperation.”38 To reconstruct the mutilated male body, to return it to the workforce, to rid it of “phantom limbs” by replacing missing body parts with prosthetic extensions, meant to heal the wounded, mutilated, and scarred nation and return to it its rightful place in national and world economy. The male body’s productivity equaled the productivity of the nation, and the fantasy of male rehabilitation mapped onto the fantasy of national recuperation.

174   ★   EPILOGUE: “FEMALE MASCULINITY”

It is precisely at this intersection of wounding and productivity that we encounter the last set of constraints for situating the figure of the mutilated male body in Stalinist texts. In Soviet rhetoric, usefulness and productivity are key terms for marking citizens and their “alien” others, defined as “nonlaboring, privileged exploiters.”39 Those unwilling or unable to support themselves through legal state employment faced disenfranchisement, deportation, and arrest. Disability from war or labor and invalid status did not secure state benefits but undermined them, leaving the wounded and maimed vulnerable to charges of tuneiadstvo—parasitic or idle behavior.40 The challenge of the maimed or “non-able-bodied” individuals in Soviet society was to prove their ongoing usefulness to the Soviet state, while the consequences of disenfranchisement ranged from the everyday—restriction or denial of housing, taking away of ration cards, loss of medical care and access to education—to the severe: deportation, arrest, and forced labor. One can sense this threat of parasitism in both Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered and Boris Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man, as both novels compulsively imagine the trauma of returning home as unproductive and useless members of society. On the one hand, the men are heroes of war; on the other, they are broken, parasitic, alien others.41 The texts examined in How the Soviet Man Was Unmade do not simply provide fictional models for good Soviet citizenship; they also manifest the extremes to which citizens have to go to remain “in the ranks and in life”; and they give voice to the underlying anxiety over the consequences of failing to live up to the demands of Soviet enfranchisement. The fantasy of the mutilated male body marks the site where national identity, citizenship, constructions of gender, and historical contingency all intersect. The wounded or maimed socialist realist hero makes legible the stakes of the collective belief in the dominant fictions of Stalinism.

Notes

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

I have followed the Library of Congress system for transliteration throughout. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 1. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 58–63; also referred to in John Haynes, New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). This study is influenced by Clark’s work on socialist realism and by the work of Svetlana Boym, Boris Groys, and Hans Günther. 2. Boris Polevoi, Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke (Moskva: Goslitizdat, 1955); A Story About a Real Man, trans. J. Fineber (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952). All citations to this text use these editions. Translations are modified. 3. Fedor Gladkov, Tsement (Leningrad: Zemlia i fabrika, 1926); Cement, trans. A. S. Arthur and C. Ashleigh (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1980). All citations to this text use these editions. 4. I translate chelovek as man advisedly, though the Soviet term certainly referred to both the New Soviet Man and the New Soviet Woman. My analysis, however, does not concern the “universal” but strictly the male subject, or, as Lacan put it: “It is the man—by which I mean he who finds himself male without knowing what to do about it.” Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of The Woman,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), 143. 5. As Victoria E. Bonnell shows, although the image of the conventional workericon, the blacksmith, may have been replaced in the thirties by the images of the shock-worker (some even taken from real life) and the great leaders of the party, the model of “unimpaired” masculinity continued to dominate the visual arts (Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], esp. 20–63). For the “fantasy of extravagant virility,” see Toby Clark, “The ‘New Man’s’ Body: A Motif in Early Soviet Cul175

176   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 5–6

ture,” in Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917–1992, ed. Matthew Cullerne Brown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 48. 6. On masculinity and the body in Soviet texts, see Eliot Borenstein, Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Haynes, New Soviet Man; Rolf Hellebust, Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Keith A. Livers, Constructing the Stalinist Body: Fictional Representations of Corporeality in the Stalinist 1930s (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). 7. Aleksei Zamkov claimed that his injections of sterilized urine taken from pregnant women would cure a variety of conditions in both human beings and animals and, more broadly, raise the “general tone” of the organism. He was responsible “for the production from the inside of the Stalinist body, a body capable of working tremendously long shifts, a body in a nearly perpetual state of élan, a body that would not be weakened by infection, stress, or even fear” (Eric Naiman, “Discourse Made Flesh: Healing and Terror in the Construction of Soviet Subjectivity,” in Language and Revolution: Making of Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin [Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002], 295; 288, emphasis in original). 8. This description of the worker comes from the journal On Literary Guard around 1925, quoted in Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 135; and in Hellebust, Flesh to Metal, 74. 9. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 38–39. 10. Haynes, New Soviet Man, 1. 11. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 42–43. 12. The Blokh statue, originally presented in the nude, to the “shock and dismay of local officials,” was first given a fig leaf, and later, a blacksmith’s apron, “but only after some modifications to the original sculpture” (Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 26). The height of Mukhina’s Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer, from the base to the tip of the sickle, is 23.5 meters. The figure’s height: 17.25 meters; the length of his arm: 8.5 meters; the height of the head: 2 meters. The weight of the stainless steel scarf: 5.5 tons; length: 30 meters. The statue’s total weight is 75 tons, including steel sheet coating, 9 tons. It was initially mounted 35 meters off the ground at the Soviet Pavilion in Paris, but later on a low 10-meter platform in front of the northern gate of the Exhibition of National Economic Achievements in Moscow. Mukhina was upset that the “sculpture was given no room for movement, and was therefore distorted” (Lyudmila Butuzova, “Factory Worker and Collective Farmer: Past and Present,” Moscow News, N. 12 [31.03.05], accessed: http://english .mn.ru/.) 13. Stalinskoe plemia (fil’m o fizkul’turnom parade XX goda oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii, Moskva, 12 iulia 1937 g.), directed by I. Posel’skii, V. Erofeev, I. Setkina (Soiuzkinokhroniki, 1937); Pesnia molodosti (The Song of Youth), directed by S. Gurov, F. Kiselev, M. Slutskii (Moskovskaia studiia kinokhroniki, 1938).

NOTES TO PAGES 6–8   ★   177

Footage from these films used in Kolybel’naia (Lullaby), directed by Dziga Vertov (Mosfil’m, 1937). 14. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 41. 15. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 187. 16. Defined as “an imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfillment of a wish in a manner distorted to a greater or lesser degree by defense processes,” an illusory production that cannot be “sustained when it is confronted with a correct apprehension of reality,” the term phantasy (imagination, visionary notion) is generally preferred by psychoanalysis to the more usual fantasy (caprice, whim, fanciful invention) to mark it as a “technical psychological phenomenon.” See J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1977): 314; and James Strachey, “Notes on Some Technical Terms Whose Translation Calls for Comment,” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 1:xxiv. Slavoj Žižek uses the more common fantasy to describe the psychoanalytic phenomenon (The Plague of Fantasies [New York: Verso, 1997]). 17. The psychoanalytic term captation borrows from the French juridical sense of captation, meaning “illegal securement” (from the Latin root meaning capture or seizure). For Jacques Lacan, it describes how particular images, as well as elements of external reality, can “catch hold” of the psyche and become important formative agents for the subject. For example, he refers to “the spatial capture manifested by the mirror stage” (“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink [New York: Norton, 2002], 77). 18. See Kaja Silverman, “The Dominant Fiction,” in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15–51. 19. Sigmund Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” in The Complete Psychological Works, 19:248–58; “Fetishism,” ibid., 21:152–57. 20. Freud, “Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” ibid., 19:252. 21. Freud refers to the mother’s penis (“Fetishism,” ibid., 21:152). 22. David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 2. 23. “Dans les analyses, ils se présentent sous une forme typique, presque stéréotypée, quand le patient, quelquefois dans l’embarras, quelquefois très à l’aise, emploie la formule: ‘Je sais bien que . . . mais quand même. . . . Une telle formule, bien entendu, le fétichiste ne l’emploie pas en ce qui concerne sa perversion: il sait bien que les femmes n’ont pas de phallus, mais il ne peut y ajouter aucun ‘mais quand même,’ parce que, pour lui, le ‘mais quand même ‘c’est le fétiche.’” (“During analysis, they typically [almost stereotypically] manifest themselves when the patient, sometimes in a quandary, sometimes very much at ease, employs the formula: ‘I know very well . . . but all the same . . .’ The fetishist, of course, does not

178   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 9–16

use this formula in relationship to his perversion: he knows very well that women do not have the phallus, but he can’t add any ‘but all the same,’ because for him the ‘but all the same’ is the fetish.”) (Octave Mannoni, “Je sais bien, . . . mais quand même . . .” Clefs pour l’imaginaire; ou, l’autre scène [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969], 11–12, emphasis in original). 24. Lacan, Le Séminaire, vol. 4, La relation d’objet, 1956–57, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 219. 25. Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” Écrits, 576. 26. Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” The Complete Psychological Works, 19:34. 27. Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 44, 47. 28. As Žižek defines it, the big Other is the agency invested with power and meaning whose place as the master signifier of culture must be preserved at all costs. It appears, on the one hand, as a hidden agency “pulling the strings,” running the show behind the scenes. Its omnipotence and omniscience gives meaning to the symbolic structures in which we live. On the other hand, the big Other is an agency of “pure semblance,” its inexistence is “ultimately equivalent to its being the symbolic order, the order of symbolic fictions which operate at a level different from direct material causality” (Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out [New York: Routledge, 1992]; and Žižek, “The Big Other Doesn’t Exist,” Journal of European Psychoanalysis [1997], accessed online at: http://www .lacan.com/zizekother.htm, 4 April 2007). 29. That is to say, symptoms not caused by injury or disease. 30. In these films, the big Other is represented by a series of absent men of unquestionable patriarchal authority: Marshall Kliment Voroshilov in By the Blue Sea, the commander of the Soviet air force (and Valia’s father) in The Sky Barge, by Stalin himself in Valerii Chkalov. 31. I borrow the term m(a)us(ol)eum from Alexander Prokhorov, “‘I Need Some Life-Assertive Character” or How to Die in the Most Inspiring Pose: Bodies in the Stalinist Museum of Hammer and Sickle,” Studies in Slavic Cultures 1 (2000): 28–46. 32. Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), xi. 33. Ibid., xii. 34. A 2006 query on SEELANGS entitled “Is Psychoanalysis a Heresy?” (SEELANGS, 17 March 2006), produced a long debate on the applicability of psychoanalysis to Slavic studies. 35. In Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks, 160. Aron Belkin, then director of the National Psychoendocrinology Center at the Ministry of Public Health in Moscow and now president of the Moscow Psychoanalytical Society, began publishing on Freud and psychoanalysis in the late 1980s, including an essay in one of the first Soviet publications to break with the anti-Freud critique, Literaturnaia gazeta’s tribute to Freud in June 1988. (See ibid., 156–57.) 36. Tolkovanie snovidenii (Interpretation of Dreams), directed by Andrei Zagdanskii, 1989; Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks, 156.

NOTES TO PAGES 16–24   ★   179

37. In Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks, 144–46. 38. Ibid., xii–xiii; 163. 39. As Freud described his progress on the Dora case in a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss, 14 October 1900. See Philip Rieff’s “Introduction” to Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Collier Books, 1963), vii. 40. Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 74. Quoted in Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 27. CHAPTER 2: HOW THE SOVIET MAN WAS (UN)MADE

1. I. Grinberg, “Geroi sovetskogo romana” in Obraz bol’shevika. Sbornik kriticheskikh statei (Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1938). 2. Ibid., 14–24. 3. Volume 2 of The Last of the Udegs was published in 1932; the novel remained unfinished. 4. Grinberg, “Geroi sovetskogo romana,” 61. 5. Ibid., 67–74. 6. See Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934). 7. Nikolai Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’ (Moscow, 1982); Nikolai Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tempered, trans. R. Prokofieva (Moscow, 1959). Page numbers are given for both versions. Translations are modified. 8. Quoted in M. F. Getmanets, Makarenko i kontseptsiia novogo cheloveka v sovetskoi literature 20kh–30kh godov (Khar’kov, 1978), 29. 9. A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–39 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 252. 10. “Likhtenberg calmly understood his pain, he had long ago accepted that the time of the warm, dear, whole human body had passed and that each person was obliged to be a crippled invalid.” Andrei Platonov, “Musornyi veter’,” Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1983), 87. On the image of the invalid in the socialist realist novel, see Jörg Lehmann, “Die Figur des Invaliden in der Sowjetprosa,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 51 (2003): 227–88; and Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 53 (2004): 131–97. 11. See Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 15–51. 12. Octave Mannoni, “Je sais bien . . . mais quand même . . . ,” 11–12; Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 30–33. 13. See Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Borenstein, Men Without Women. 14. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 15. 15. The writing process itself was a “heroic act.” Ostrovskii was said to have written the novel himself, using a transparency (transparant)—a regular paper folder with sections, about eight millimeters in width cut out of the top to match

180   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 25–30

the lines on a page. Numbering the pages and never lifting his hand off the folder so as not to lose his place, Ostrovskii was able to stay within the lines of the page as he was writing. The following day, his family and friends would transcribe the text in notebooks. When this effort became too much and the work progressed too slowly, Ostrovskii engaged his neighbor, eighteen-year-old Galina Alekseeva, to take dictation. 16. Boris Polevoi’s hero Aleksei Meres’ev certainly comes close to the model of bodily sacrifice that Pavka Korchagin represents: with his legs amputated at the shins, he is nevertheless determined to return to the front as a fighter pilot. The four times wounded, tubercular, and one-legged Aleksei Voropaev from Petr Pavlenko’s novel Schast’e (Happiness, 1947) is another example of a character zealously fighting to remain in the ranks despite a long string of injuries. 17. “The exercise of discipline,” writes Foucault, “presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible. . . . In the perfect camp, all power would be exercised solely through exact observation; each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power. . . . The camp is the diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1979), 170–71. 18. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 136–37; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tem­pered, 1:307–08. 19. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 137; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tempered, 1:308–09. 20. Aron Zalkind, “Polovaia zhizn’ i sovremennaia molodezh’,” Molodaia gvardiia 6 (1923): 247; Zalkind, Polovoi vopros v usloviiakh sovetskoi obshchestvennosti (Leningrad: Gos. Izd., 1926), 24. Both quoted in Naiman, Sex in Public, 127–28. 21. See Slavoj Žižek’s response to my article on How the Steel Was Tempered in The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 119–20. 22. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 138; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tempered, 1:311. Interestingly, the next series of diary entries come from Rita Ustinovich, Pavka’s comrade, love interest, and boss, who ends her diary after she is told (incorrectly) of Pavka’s death from typhoid. “Pavel’s death has opened my eyes to the truth,” she writes, “he was far dearer to me than I had thought. And now I shall close this diary. I doubt whether I shall ever return to it” (ibid., 191; 2:106). 23. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 182; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tempered, 2:83–84. 24. This threat is repeated a few pages later when the men load Pavka’s unconscious and feverish body onto a train. A fellow comrade, acting as a bodyguard, is told to use Pavka’s gun against anyone who tries to move him. 25. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 187; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tempered, 2:95.

NOTES TO PAGES 30–36   ★   181

26. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 188; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tempered, 2:96. 27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170. 28. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 287; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tem­ pered, 2:345. 29. “The super-ego owes its special position in the ego, or in relation to the ego, to a factor which must be considered from two sides: on the one hand it was still feeble, and on the other hand it is the heir to the Oedipus complex and has thus introduced the most momentous objects into the ego. . . . Although it is accessible to all late influences, it nevertheless preserves throughout life the character given to it by its derivation from the father-complex—namely, the capacity to stand apart from the ego and to master it. It is a memorial of the former weakness and dependence of the ego, and the mature ego remains subject to its domination. . . . Thus, the super-ego is always close to the id and can act as its representative vis-à-vis the ego. It reaches deep down into the id and for that reason is farther from consciousness than the ego is.” Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” The Complete Psychological Works, 19:48–49. 30. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 289; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tem­ pered, 2:349. Raia Ostrovskaia puts this even more clearly: Nikolai said to have conducted “a meeting of the Politburo with his ‘I’ about the treacherous behavior of his body” (zasedanie Politbiuro so svoim ‘ia’ o predatel’skom povedenii svoego tela) (Nikolai Ostrovskii [Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1988], 28). 31. The first Political Bureau of the Communist Party, which lasted for only about two weeks from 10 (23) October to 24 October (6 November) 1917, was elected “to provide political leadership” during the revolution and was composed of seven members—Vladimir Lenin, Grigorii Zinov’ev, Lev Kamenev, Lev Trotskii, Iosif Stalin, G. Ia. Sokol’nikov, and Andrei Bubnov. The second incarnation of the Politburo was elected on 25 March 1919, by the plenum of the Central Committee. Lenin, Kamenev, Nikolai Krestinskii, Stalin, and Trotskii became full members, Nikolai Bukharin, Zinov’ev and Mikhail Kalinin candidate members. This version lasted until 1952, when Stalin replaced it with the Presidium. Ostrovskii’s choice of organizations, therefore, is hardly incidental—Lenin and Stalin are his “superego.” 32. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 288; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tem­ pered, 2:345–47. 33. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201. 34. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel, 178. 35. Ibid. 36. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 141; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tem­ pered, 1:316. 37. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 201; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tempered, 2:130–31. 38. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 199; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tempered, 2:127.

182   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 36–41

39. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 292; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tem­ pered, 2:357. 40. “In the film The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a cyborg who returns to contemporary Los Angeles from the future, with the intention of killing the mother of a future leader. The horror of this figure consists precisely in the fact that it functions as a programmed automaton who, even though all that remains of him is a metallic, legless skeleton, persists in his demand and pursues his victim with no trace of compromise or hesitation. The terminator is the embodiment of the drive, devoid of desire” (Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991], 22). 41. Quoted in Lev Anninskii, “Kak zakalialas’ stal’” Nikolaia Ostrovskogo (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1971), 10. 42. Semen Tregub, O Nikolae Ostrovskom (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1938), 160. 43. A foreign journalist for Pravda and Stalin’s personal emissary to the Spanish Republic, Mikhail Kol’tsov was the author of Spanish [Civil War] Diaries (1938). Arrested on 12 December 1938, he was shot as a spy on 1 February 1940. 44. Kol’tsov, “Muzhestvo,” Pravda, 17 March 1937, 4. 45. Quoted in Semen Tregub, Nikolai Alekseevich Ostrovskii (1904–1936) (Moscow: Molodaia guardiia, 1950), 154. 46. Anninskii, “Kak zakalialas’ stal’,” 17. 47. L. N. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Sobranie sochinenii v dvadtsati tomakh (Moscow: Gosud. izd-vo khudozh.lit-ru, 1963), 9:70; Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (New York, 1970), 446, translation modified. 48. On the museum/mausoleum, see Prokhorov, “‘I Need Some LifeAssertive Character,’” 28–46. 49. Andrei Platonov, Razmyshleniia chitatelia (Moscow: Sov. pisatel’, 1970), 97. 50. Ibid. 51. Evgenii Dobrenko, “Korchagin’s Happiness” in The Making of the State Reader, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 289. On Ostrovskii, see also Dobrenko, The Making of the State Writer, trans. Jesse M. Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 401–02, on Ostrovskii’s “Stakhanovite” preparation (eight months to read world-famous literature, including Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina) for writing his novel. 52. Viktor Pelevin, Zhizn’ nasekomykh (Moscow: Vagrius, 1998), 48–49; Viktor Pelevin, Omon Ra (Moscow: Tekst, 1993), 32–33. 53. Pelevin, Omon Ra, 40. 54. Ostrovskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’, 303; Ostrovskii, How the Steel Was Tem­ pered, 2:383. 55. Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977), 299.

NOTES TO PAGES 42–45   ★   183

CHAPTER 3: VISUAL PLEASURE IN STALINIST CINEMA

1. “Ponimaesh’, posmotrel etot fil’m i teper’ bol’she vsego boius’ za svoi bilet, ne ukrali li. Poverish’ li, noch’iu zagliadyvaiu pod podushku zheny, ne tam li on.” Leonid Trauberg, “Kakim on byl . . .” in Grigorii Mar’iamov, Ivan Pyr’ev v zhizni i na ekrane (Moscow: Kinotsentr, 1994), 117. 2. Trauberg writes that in Odessa everyone knew Sokolovskaia as “Comrade Elena” and that the main character of Ilia Slavin’s short story “Intervention” (Interventsiia) was modeled on her (ibid., 117). 3. See “Results of the Review of Party Documents, 25 December 1935,” in Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, ed. Robert H. McNeal (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). 3:160–67, for language about the value of party documents. As Julie Cassiday notes, “Pyr’ev’s film taught that the ordinary paper cards issued to party members were no less sacred than membership itself” (Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000], 182). 4. On the “discourse of the purge,” see Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia. 5. One film reviewer literally incorporated Stalin’s famous phrase into his review of The Party Card: “The years go by, ‘life has become better, life has become happier.’ The Kulikov family lives a happy and prosperous life.” Vyshka, Baku Zakavkaz’e, 21/IV/1936. 6. As O. Litovskii notes in “Fil’m o bditel’nosti” Kinogazeta 17 (30/III/1936): 729, the film’s other task is to show “the new joyous life, the touching monolith and Bolshevik fusion (spaika) of the Kulikov family, and the new socialist Moscow.” Stalin’s “New Moscow” is the topic of Aleksandr Medvedkin’s 1938 film Novaia Moskva (New Moscow) and Iu. Pimenov’s 1937 painting of the same name. The rhetoric of “fusion” and “merging” (sliianie), as Kharkhordin points out, went along with the discourse of the purges, which were necessary so that “The party would be cast as a monolith” (vylita iz odnogo kuska). Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual, 136, quoting the 1921 resolution on the first general purge of the party, K proverke, peresmotru i ochistke partii (Irbit, 1921), 7. Here the “monolith” is Anna’s family, and the purge is conducted at the level of this family. 7. RGALI, f. 3058 (Pyr’ev, Ivan Aleksandrovich), op. 1, ed. kh. 481. Articles on and screenplays for The Party Card, 1936–1950. 8. According to Pyr’ev’s own account of the events, this collaboration ended when Pravda published its attack on Dmitrii Shostakovich for musical formalism (“Sumbur vmesto muziki,” Pravda, 28 January 1936). Kinematograficheskoe nasledie. I. A. Pyr’ev. Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978), 1:59–75. 9. RGALI, f. 631 (Pravlenie Soiuza sovremennykh pisatelei SSSR), op. 3, ed. kh. 159, ll. 1–72 (Anka, first screenplay) and ed. kh. 371, ll. 1–72 (Anna, second screenplay). 10. Maia Turovskaia, “Fil’my i liudi,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 57: 251–59. Turovskaia suggests that The Party Card is not a film about “Bolshevik vigilance,” but a

184   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 45–47

film about “survival.” Pavel is a brave worker and Communist whose only fault lies in his past—he is the son of a kulak—a crime for which there is no amnesty. She argues that our sympathies very much lie with him—as clearly, did Pyr’ev’s—and that this unorthodox message comes through the film. Turovskaia quotes from Vinogradskaia’s private comments on the film’s negative reception at Mosfil’m: “I think I know what the problem is,” writes Vinogradskaia, “Pavel is the only true Bolshevik in the movie. The rest are mediocrities, fools. . . . The enemy is smarter than they are. This is the love of the director for the prominent individual, this is autobiography. . . . But I can’t say anything to them. I, who know everything about the director’s intentions.” 11. I. Vaisfeld, “Chto my gotovim na 1935 g.,” Vecherniaia Moskva, 15/III/1936. RGALI, f. 3058 (Pyr’ev). 12. Kinematograficheskoe nasledie. I. A. Pyr’ev. 1:69. 13. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. kh. 159, l. 72. 14. Vinogradskaia had originally won recognition for her screenplay Oblomok imperii (Fragment of an Empire, 1929) directed by Ermler. 15. RGALI, f. 631 (Pravlenie soiuza sovremennykh pisatelei SSSR), op. 3, ed. kh. 159, l. 34. Quoted in Kinematograficheskoe nasledie. I. A. Pyr’ev, 1:69–70. 16. Kinematograficheskoe nasledie. I. A. Pyr’ev. 1:70. 17. It is not surprising, of course, that Pyr’ev picked Chapaev (Lenfil’m, 1934), directed by Sergei Vasil’ev and Georgii Vasil’ev, as his model, heeding Stalin’s call to make more films “like Chapaev”—more films about the party’s influence on the everyday lives of the Soviet people (Iosif Stalin, “Congratulations to Soviet Filmmakers on the Fifteenth Anniversary of Soviet Cinema,” January 1935), in Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (New York: Routledge, 1991), 334–35. Ironically, however, like The Party Card, Chapaev also owed its popularity and mass distribution to Stalin’s direct involvement. See RGASPI, f. 558 (I. V. Stalin), op. 11, ed. kh. 828 and 829. Boris Shumyatskii’s notes on Kremlin screenings, 1934–1937, appeared in print for the first time in Kinovedcheskie zapiski 61 (2002): 321. Discussion of The Party Card appears in Kinovedcheskie zapiski 62 (2003): 163. 18. According to Pyr’ev’s memoirs, he and Vinogradskaia rushed off to one of the Writers’ Union vacation homes in Abramtsevo to rewrite the screenplay. The portrait of the Communist family was based in part on Pyr’ev’s own experiences living with a working family in a workers’ town in the Simonov (Leningrad) region. Kinematograficheskoe nasledie. I. A. Pyr’ev, 1:70. Archival documentation and newspaper accounts at the time state that the revisions came from the GUKF. RGALI, f. 631 (Soiuz sovetskikh pisatelei), op. 9, ed kh. 371. Here the film’s title appears as Anna. 19. O. Litovskii, “Fil’m o bditel’nosti.” Ia. Aveshin writes, “The star of the film is the party card and all the action takes place around it and because of it.” Bakinskii rabochii, Baku, 21/IV/1936. 20. Sergei Eisenstein, “Speeches to the All-Union Creative Conference of Soviet

NOTES TO PAGES 47–49   ★   185

Filmworkers” in S. M. Eisenstein, Selected Works, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: British Film Institute, 1988), 3:16–46. For the Russian text see Eisenstein, Izbrannye stat’i (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1956). 21. In 1930, Sovkino was renamed Soiuzkino (the change was not mentioned in the press) and given greater authority over the studios of the national republics. See Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 95. After his return from the United States, Shumiatskii famously suggested, “There is an inescapable need to build a single cinema center in the southern and sunniest part of the Soviet Union, near the sea and the mountains.” This idea of a “Soviet Hollywood,” coupled with the failure to produce the requisite number of films per year, among other failures, led to Shumiatskii’s arrest on 8 January 1938 and his denunciation in Pravda the following day as a “captive of the saboteurs,” as “a Fascist cur” (Kino, 11 January 1938), and as “a member of the Trotskiite-Bukharinite-Rykovite Fascist band” (Iskusstvo kino, February 1938). Quoted in Richard Taylor, “Boris Shumyatsky and the Soviet Cinema in the 1930s: ideology as mass entertainment,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 6 (1986): 43–64. 22. Taylor, “Boris Shumyatsky and the Soviet Cinema,” 60. 23. For full account, see Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 129–30. 24. Kinematograficheskoe nasledie. I. A. Pyr’ev, 1:74. 25. Ibid., 1:75. 26. G. Mar’iamov, in his 1994 Ivan Pyr’ev, attributes both the approval and the change in title directly to Stalin: “The nighttime debates at the sanatorium became known in the TsK (Central Committee of the Communist Party). Stalin asked for the film. After seeing it, he acknowledged the picture as politically accurate and relevant (actual’nyi). Instead of the inert title ‘Anka,’ he gave it the title ‘The Party Card,’ clarifying that movies should be titled in relation to their content and that the main idea of this film was vigilance (bditel’nost’) and the safekeeping of party cards” (Mar’iamov, Ivan Pyr’ev, 28). In her personal notes from that period, Vinogradskaia writes, “A couple of days after (the film screening at Barvikha) we were called into Shumiatskii’s office. Sokolovskaia said to me, ‘Stalin has seen the movie. He said it was brave (smelaia kartina). He made a couple of changes and gave it a new name, The Party Card.’” This was a huge victory (Eto byla pobedishcha)!” RGALI, f. 2983, op. 1, ed. kh. 44, 5–14, quoted in Turovskaia, “Fil’my i liudi,” 258. 27. J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 48. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 33. 30. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 299n. On the purges and the screening of Pyr’ev’s The Party Card in Magnitogorsk, see “Dizzy with Success,” 280–354. 31. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 300. 32. Ibid., 303. In “Zakrytoe pis’mo TsK VKP(b): Uroki sobytii, sviazannykh so

186   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 49–51

zlodeiskim ubiistvom tov. Kirova,” addressed to all the organs of the party, Stalin wrote that members of the Zinoviev group had been hanging on to their party cards in order to appear faithful to the Bolshevik Party and to the Soviet Union. Kirov’s murderer, L. Nikolaev, was apprehended by the Cheka three weeks prior to the murder, but because he was carrying a party card he was not even searched. “Is it so hard for a Chekist to understand,” wrote Stalin, “that a party card could be counterfeited or stolen from its owner, that by itself, without a check of its authenticity or a check of the person carrying it, a party card cannot serve as a guarantee? Where has vigilance gone?” (18 January 1935), published in Izvestiia PK KPSS 8 (1989). In his address to the plenum of the TsK VKP(b) on 3 March 1937, titled, “O nedostatkakh partiinoi raboty i merakh likvidatsii trotskistskikh i inykh dvu­rushnikov,” Stalin quoted from the 1935 letter, suggesting that the measures taken in party card exchange and verification had failed to prevent Trotskiite elements from penetrating into the party. Pravda, 29 March 1937. 33. Getty writes that the decision to conduct a general verification of party records had been taken more than a year after the first revelations of disorder and several weeks before the assassination of Kirov (Origins of the Great Purges, 58). The Party Card, however, makes clear that the stakes of the verification were better articulated once the murder had taken place. 34. See Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 301–06; and Istoriia vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov) Kratkii kurs (1938) (OGIZ, 1945), 313. The 1938 Kratkii kurs reprints many of the statements and formulations originally published in Stalin’s Voprosy Leninisma (Moscow, 1935). 35. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 310. 36. Getty, Origins of the Great Purges, 88. 37. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 310. 38. Pravda, 29 September 1936, 270, cited in Stalin, Kratkii kurs, 314. 39. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). When speaking about the subject’s assumption of “sex,” Butler writes, “The forming of a subject requires an identification with the normative phantasm of ‘sex,’ and this identification takes place through a repudiation which produces a domain of abjection, a repudiation without which the subject cannot emerge. This is a repudiation which creates the valence of ‘abjection’ and its status for the subject as a threatening specter.” Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3. 40. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 37. 41. Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, calls the period 1933–1939 “the permanent purge” (Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956]). 42. Kharkhordin, Collective and the Individual, 136, citing K proverke, peresmotru i ochistke partii (Moscow: World Publishers, 1921), 7. 43. Kharkhordin, Collective and the Individual, 138–39. Kharkhordin also cites Aaron Solts, who lists the seven “party illnesses”—deadly threats to the collective

NOTES TO PAGES 51–54   ★   187

body (ibid.). In Sex in Public, Eric Naiman points to how the notion of a “collective body” was produced through the discourses of different groups and tendencies, but specifically how this metaphor pervaded Proletkul’t texts. He writes, “[the poetic images] of Proletkul’t were taken seriously in a way in which poetic images rarely are—they were hyperbolized and came to dominate other genres of social discourse. . . . Proletkul’t literary critics were also critics of culture, and they nurtured the language of the collective body because they saw its value when projected off the page into ‘real’ life” (Naiman, Sex in Public, 71). The image of this collective body remained in place after Proletkul’t’s demise and found its way into the discourse of purity and contamination that characterized the purges. 44. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 307. 45. Ibid., 298. 46. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 149. 47. “Our party organization is young and unquestionably more contaminated (zasorenno) than others,” quoted in Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 307n. Arguably, Pyr’ev and Vinogradskaia are reworking the “old” equation of sexual purity with ideological purity. The discourse of class enemies echoes Aron Zalkind’s claim in his 1926 Polovoi vopros v usloviiakh sovetskoi obshchestvennosti, that “sexual attraction is a class enemy” (Naiman, Sex in Public, 137). 48. Anna’s “trial” takes place during a meeting of the factory’s cell of the Communist Party, presided over by Fedor Ivanovich, the head of the local party cell. The interrogation is private—it takes place without an audience, a feature that Kotkin notes was typical of the “verification” as opposed to the “purge” (Magnetic Mountain, 307). I have followed Cassiday’s lead here in referring to the interrogation as Anna’s “trial,” which links The Party Card to other feature films of the thirties whose action culminated in trial sequences, as well as to the decade’s reworking of the agitsud into trial documentaries (Cassiday, Enemy on Trial, 182). 49. dat’; nesov. (sov. davat’): 2. komu. Ustupat’ muzhchine, soglashat’sia na seksual’nuiu sviaz’ (o zhenshchine) (to give: 2. to whom. To give way to a man, to agree to sexual relations [about a woman]). Slovar’ moskovskogo argo, ed. V. S. Eli­ stratov (Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet im. Lomonosova, 1994). 50. This is a reformulation of Zalkind’s observation that “sexuality is . . . an extremely subtle diplomat, who cleverly crawls through the narrowest of slits”; this reformulation ties the discourse on the loss of the party card directly to the earlier discourse on sexuality (Zalkind, Polovoi vopros, 47. quoted in Naiman, Sex in Public, 168). 51. Mulvey writes, “Voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989], 21–22). We see this in the case of Anna’s trial: part of the pleasure of this film comes from first punishing and then forgiving its heroine. 52. Ibid., 16.

188   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 54–64

53. Ibid., 19. Mulvey’s argument both stems from and gives rise to psychoanalytic film criticism’s concern with “difference.” Christian Metz, Jean-Pierre Oudart, Stephen Heath, Mary Ann Doane, and Kaja Silverman, among others, have written on the desire present in all cinema to show us a “hermetically sealed world,” with which we are nonetheless invited to identify fully. Suture, voice-over, eye-line matches, a darkened theater, actors who occupy the place of the “ jeidéal”—all of these are techniques aimed at the erasure of difference. “Plenitude,” therefore, is always at stake in cinema—as The Party Card and its fetish objects serve to show. 54. See Octave Mannoni, “Je sais bien que . . . mais quand-même,” 9–33. 55. Both Pavel’s sister-in-law and Pavel’s former fiancée, who reveals his real identity to Anna, make brief appearances in the film. The main narrative, however, focuses on the love triangle between Anna, Pavel, and Iasha, with Fedor Ivanovich playing the important role of supervisor/party head/mentor/chief prosecutor. 56. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. kh. 159, l. 24. 57. RGALI, f. 631, op. 3, ed. kh. 159, l. 25. 58. On “The Stalinist Myth of the ‘Great Family,’” see Clark, The Soviet Novel, 114–35. 59. I am indebted to Gregory Freidin for the suggestion that Anna’s marriage to Pavel is never consummated (screening of The Party Card, Slavic Film Group, University of California, Berkeley, April 2000). 60. imet’; nesov.: 1. kogo, chto. Vstupat’ s kem-to v polovuiu sviaz’ (to have: to enter into sexual relations). Slovar’ moskovskogo argo. Again, Vinogradskaia’s screenplay is explicit where the film is only implicit: “[Pavel is] wild. He is seized by a [feeling of] celebration, a reaction to fear, more powerful than before, in the nighttime garden. He is yelling something incomprehensible, holding Anka by the shoulders like something his own, completely his own. She has closed her eyes for a second feeling his arms around her. Pavel, laughing, happy, is not leading but practically carrying her down the hall, like a dead woman, lifting her up by her shoulders.” RGALI, f. 3058 (Pyr’ev), l. 52. 61. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 44, 46. 62. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” The Complete Psychological Works, 21:152–54. 63. Cassiday, Enemy on Trial, 183. 64. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 21–22. 65. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 310. 66. Once the film was approved by the Central Committee for mass distribution, it was shown widely and became one of the top films of 1936. Pravda (8 April 1936) notes that the opening of the film in Moscow the day before (7 April 1936) generated higher than usual matinee attendance and that the evening shows were completely sold out. Similarly, Rabochaia Moskva (9/IV/1936) notes that there was not a single theater with unsold tickets. More than 60,000 people watched the film during the first two days. RGALI f. 3058 (Pyr’ev). 67. Izhevskaia pravda, 22 April 1936, p. 53.

NOTES TO PAGES 64–73   ★   189

68. Sotsialisticheskii Donbass, Ukraine, 14 April 1936. 69. Kommunar, Tula, 18 April 1936. 70. Krest’anskaia gazeta, 8 April 1936, p. 37. 71. Leningradskaia pravda, 14 April 1936. 72. Nasha pravda, Moscow, 19 April 1936. 73. Elektrozavod, 22 April 1936, p. 53. All quotes from RGALI, f. 3058 (Pyr’ev). 74. Ermler’s fears of his wife are, of course, the reverse of the movie’s literal message. Besides Anna’s seemingly irredeemable guilt, the “protest” suicide of Stalin’s wife Nadezhda on the night of 8–9 November 1932 may offer another possibility for interpretation. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 299n. As Edvard Radzinskii, among others, has pointed out, following Nadezhda Allilueva’s suicide the Kremlin became more and more “homosocial,” while Stalin took to regularly arresting and executing the wives of Central Committee members. Edvard Radzinskii, Stalin (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Vagrius,” 1997). Wives, therefore, were particularly subject to suspicion—as Ermler’s confession suggests. CHAPTER 4: HETEROSEXUAL PANIC

1. Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of The Woman,” 141. 2. See Clark, The Soviet Novel, 177–88; Irina Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 131–49. 3. See Eric Naiman, “The Creation of the Collective Body,” in Sex in Public, 27–78; and Borenstein, Men Without Women, 1–41. 4. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 182–83. 5. Quoted in Mikhail Heller (Geller), Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 180. 6. Heller, Cogs in the Wheel, 180–81. 7. The socialist realist text, of course, is not free of sexual innuendo or eroticism, though its writers and censors are at great pains to remove any openly sexual content. Vladimir Nabokov famously pointed out some examples of “Soviet erotica,” one of which came from Fedor Gladkov’s novel Energy: “The young worker Ivan grasped the drill. As soon as he felt the metal surface he became excited and his whole body started trembling. The deafening roar of the drill hurled Sonya away from him. Then she placed her hand on his shoulder and tickled the hair behind his ear. . . . It was as though an electric discharge had pierced the two young people at the same moment. He gave a deep sigh and clutched the apparatus more firmly” (Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature [New York, 1981], 10). 8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 9. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 184. 10. Ibid., 186. 11. Borenstein, Men Without Women, 2.

190   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 73–77

12. Noting the critical tendency not to see homoeroticism in Babel and Olesha’s works, Borenstein writes: “No doubt envy is inextricably linked to the attraction Babel’s Cossacks hold for his narrator. In this respect Liutov resembles Olesha’s Kavalerov, whose envy of Andrei and Volodia is mixed with undeniable eroticism. . . . In both Liutov’s and Kavalerov’s cases, the critic becomes complicit in the same sublimation process used by the narrators themselves. Kavalerov ascribes his fascination to envy, and thus the critics do the same. Liutov describes the erotic appeal of the Cossacks but does not dwell on it, and the critics do the same. But if we turn our attention to the eroticism of ‘My First Goose,’ the story begins to resemble less a rite of passage than the beginning of a long and difficult courtship” (ibid., 93). 13. Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 143–46. 14. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 183. 15. Gutkin writes about the Stalinist cult of maternity and the creation of the Order of the Mother-Heroine to honor women raising ten or more children (The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 141). See specifically the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 8 July 1944 on the “Increase in State Aid for Pregnant Women, Mothers with Many Children and Single Mothers, the Strengthening of Maternal and Child Welfare, the Establishment of the Honorary Title of ‘Mother-Heroine’ and the Founding of the Orders of ‘Maternal Glory’ and the ‘Medals of Maternity.’” 16. Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 116. 17. Fedor Panferov, Bruski (1928–1937), quoted in Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 141–42. 18. Heller, Cogs in the Wheel, 168. Also quoted in Borenstein, Men Without Women, 12. 19. Heller, Cogs in the Wheel, 182. 20. See the decree of 17 December 1933 and law of 7 March 1934 on the recriminalization of sodomy (muzhelozhstvo), under Article 121 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code; and “Discussion of the Law on Legal Abortion,” Pravda, 28 May 1936, and “Decree Prohibiting Abortions,” Pravda, 28 June 1936. 21. Heller, Cogs in the Wheel, 183. 22. Cynthia Hooper, “Terror of Intimacy: Family Politics in the 1930s Soviet Union,” in Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, ed. Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 83. 23. Sigmund Freud, “The Ego and the Id,” The Complete Psychological Works, 19:3–68. 24. U samogo sinego moria (By the Blue Sea), directed by Boris Barnet (Mezhrabpomfil’m and Azerfil’m, 1935). 25. Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 147–48. 26. According to Ronald Grigor Suny, Lenin became the first head of state to address a woman’s congress at which the delegates cheered the suggestion that the

NOTES TO PAGES 77–90   ★   191

derogatory Russian word for woman, baba, be outlawed (Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 186). 27. See René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966). 28. Eisenschitz suggests that Barnet’s characteristic shot structure (découpage) and his organization of space are based on symmetry rather than on directional or temporal continuity, as well as on a careful attention to the subdivision of space (Bernard Eisenschitz, “A Fickle Man or Portrait of Boris Barnet as a Soviet Director,” in Inside the Film Factory, ed. Richard Taylor and Ian Christie [New York: Routledge, 1991]), 159. 29. Writing about stereotypes of the Azerbaijani in Stalinist films, Michael Smith notes, “Boris Barnet’s At the Deepest Blue Sea [By the Blue Sea], a comedy about the antics of a Caspian fishing collective, proved this point [about excessive stereotyping] all too well. Both Russian and Azerbaijani reviewers criticized Iusuf, the movie’s main Azerbaijani character, as being too simple and cheerful, ‘too detailed a national character,’ especially when he sang and played the mandolin. Here was proof that what they called the ‘banalities’ of ‘eastern exoticism’ were not yet dead in Soviet film. But Barnet, a veteran director from the experimental Russian studios of the early 1920s, was simply toeing the general line, outfitting the movie with the stock figures of every class and nationality who filled the entertaining ‘mass’ comedies of the day” (Michael G. Smith, “Cinema for the ‘Soviet East’: National Fact and Revolutionary Fiction in Early Azerbaijani Film,” Slavic Review 56 [1997]:645–78). 30. “What did By the Blue Sea amount to? In our epoch of construction, with all its serious and weighty problems, what’s all this about a wave which sweeps a woman into the cabin of a boat? This really has nothing to do with reality!” Interview with Otar Ioseliani, Paris, August 1983, in Eisenschitz, “A Fickle Man or Portrait of Boris Barnet.” 31. Dva boitsa (Two Soldiers), directed by Leonid Lukov (Tashkentskaia kinostrudiia, 1943). 32. Synopsis from: Dva Koitsa (Two Soldiers), Kino-nasledie DVD, Retro-klub, 2005. 33. The choice of “countryman” reinforces the notion that Arkadii and Sasha cannot live together after the war because they come from different places. The play with linguistic gender suggests that even though geography takes precedence over sexual difference (Sasha and Tasia come from the same place, therefore are better suited to each other than Sasha and Arkadii), sexual difference nevertheless threatens the potential union and is best left as transvestitism: a fellow countryman, just in a skirt. 34. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, 235–36. 35. Freud, “Observations of a Severe Case of Hemi-Anaesthesia in a Hysterical Male (1886),” The Complete Psychological Works, 1:23–31.

192   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 91–94

36. Eng, Racial Castration, 174. Centered on rereadings of Joseph Breuer’s case history of Anna O. (published with Freud’s cases in Studies on Hysteria, 1893–1895) and Freud’s case history of Dora (“Dora: Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” 1905), feminist critics have noted that hysteria can be read as a mode of political resistance, the refusal of the (female) subject to occupy her proper place in patriarchal society. On the case of Anna O., see The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); on Dora, see In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 37. Indeed, Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria do not provide further examples of male hysterics, nor is the case described above analyzed by Freud at a later date with his standard set of psychoanalytical tools. Nevertheless, male hysteria lurks in the background of psychoanalysis, sometimes marking a class difference, sometimes a racial one. See Sander Gilman, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Eng, Racial Castration. I am indebted to Irina Paperno for suggesting “male hysteria” as a category of analysis for impaired Stalinist masculinity. 38. See Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land. 39. Letchiki (The Pilots), directed by Iulii Raizman (Mosfil’m, 1935). 40. Boris Shchukin was the leading actor of Moscow’s Vakhtangov Theater and went on to play Lenin both on stage (jubilee performances to mark the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution and in Mikhail Romm’s Lenin v oktiabre (Lenin in October 1937) and Lenin v 1918 godu (Lenin in 1918, 1939). In other words, Ivan Koval-Samborskii may have had the dashing good looks symbolic of Soviet heroism, but Shchukin from the beginning reminded the audience of the “living Lenin.” 41. On Soviet aviation, see K. E. Bailes, “Technology and Legitimacy: Soviet Aviation and Stalinism in the 1930s,” Technology and Culture 17 (1976): 59. See also Scott Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On the pervasive rhetoric of the Soviet pilot as a New Soviet Man, see Clark, The Soviet Novel, esp. “The Aviation Hero as the Paradigmatic New Man,” 124–29; and Jay Bergman, “Valerii Chkalov: Soviet Pilot as New Soviet Man,” Journal of Contemporary History 33 (1998): 135–52. On Chkalov and masculinity, see John Haynes, New Soviet Man, esp. 53–62. 42. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 126–27. 43. Valerii Chkalov, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov (Lenfil’m, 1941); G. F. Baidukov, Chkalov (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1975). 44. I rely on Katerina Clark’s definition of the “spontaneity-consciousness” paradigm as integral for the master plot. Generally, I have relied on Michel

NOTES TO PAGES 97–108   ★   193

Foucault’s notions of discipline, power, and pleasure in order to think about the place of the Stalinist subject in Stalinist texts. See Anna Krylova, “Beyond the Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm: ‘Class Instinct’ as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis”; Reginald E. Zelnik, “A Paradigm Lost? Response to Anna Krylova”; and Igal Halfin, “Between Instinct and Mind: The Bolshevik View of the Proletarian Self,” all in Slavic Review 62 (2003). See also Eric Laursen, “‘A New Enigmatic Language’: The Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm and the Case of Gladkov’s Cement,” Slavic Review 65 (2006), 66–89. 45. The year 1935 marked the first Moscow-Sakhalin flight of the famous Soviet pilot I. P. Mazuruk, thus making Galia’s eventual visit possible, though quite difficult. I am grateful to Sharyl Corrado for her knowledge of the history of Sakhalin. 46. Istrebiteli (The Fighter Pilots), directed by Eduard Pentslin (Kievskaia kinostudia, 1939). Birgit Beumers notes that the film attracted 27 million viewers (“Soviet and Russian Blockbusters: A Question of Genre?” Slavic Review 62 [2003]: 449n.). 47. “Liubimyi gorod,” lyrics by Evgenii Dolmatovskii, music by Nikita Bogoslovskii. 48. 28 December 1932 saw the reintroduction of the registration of citizens in a single place of residence (propiska) that served, as Widdis puts it, as a “symbolic attempt to limit mobility” (Visions of a New Land, 144). And in 1934 internal passports were introduced for people living in towns, substantially reducing the possibilities of movement and travel for all citizens, in particular those living in the countryside (see Heller, Cogs in the Wheel, 182). 49. See Eric Naiman, “Introduction,” The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), xii. 50. Nebesnyi tikhokhod (The Sky-Barge), directed by Semen Timoshenko (Lenfil’m, 1945), released in theaters 1 April 1946. Under a directive from Moscow the original screenplay was rewritten as a comedy, with all references to battle or to suffering excised. The film, however, was released in 1946 when the political atmosphere had once more shifted toward the heroic representation of war, Stalin, and the victory of the Soviet army. Thus the film was found to be plotless, empty, and apolitical. For archival sources, see “Iz istorii ‘Lenfil’ma’. Pamiatnik neizdannomu sborniku,” ed. Vera Kuznetsova and Petr Bagrov, Kinovedcheskie zapiski 72 (2005): 178–99. 51. “Pervym delom—samolety!,” lyrics by Aleksei Fat´ianov, music by Vasilii Solov´ev-Sedoi. 52. “The woman can only be written with The crossed through. There is no such thing as The woman, where the definite article stands for the universal. There is no such thing as The woman since of her essence—having already risked the term, why think twice about it?—of her essence, she is not all” (Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of The Woman,” Feminine Sexuality, 144). 53. Mary Ann Doane, “Film and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator”

194   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 108–114

in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 24–25. 54. As my then four-year-old son never failed to point out, the women in the film wear their caps slightly tilted to one side, thereby marking their difference from men. 55. In this text concerned with enemies and foreign substances, the actual foreign enemy is depicted as homosexual—the German ace determined to shoot down Bulochkin’s U-2 has extremely thin lips, wears a tight flyer cap, and holds his dainty coffee cup with his pinkie finger out—suggesting that homosexual panic is never far removed from any patriarchal unconscious. 56. The ending continued to be a point of discussion at Lenfil’m after the film was completed. At a 30 December 1945 meeting it was decided that the final scene would be reshot to include either of the two songs written for the film. 57. “Pora v put’-dorogu,” lyrics by Aleksei Fat´ianov, music by Vasilii Solov´ev-Sedoi. 58. Or again, in the final verse of “The March of the Aviators”: “Our keen look pierces every atom, / Every nerve is full of determination / Please believe us that for every ultimatum / The Air Fleet has an answer” (“Nash ostryi vzgliad pronzaet kazhdyi atom, / Nash kazhdyi nerv reshimost’iu odet; I, ver’te nam, na kazhdyi ul’timatum / Vozdushnyi flot sumeet dat’ otvet”). 59. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 129. 60. Ibid., 130. 61. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 42. 62. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 135, 131. See also Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in Dobrenko and Naiman, Landscape of Stalinism, 3–18. 63. Russian psychoanalytic critic Igor’ Smirnov suggests the fear unmasked by physical constraint is the fear of an immobile or fixed corporeality. When the masochist needs to describe suffering in its purest form, “he points to that which he fears most—to bodily immobility or, at the very least, to difficulties of movement” (Smirnov, Psikhodiakhronologika [Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1994], 255). Naiman terms this condition “ontological impotence”—an inability of Soviet citizens to see their way clearly through Stalinist ideology (Landscape of Stalinism, xi). 64. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 133. 65. Widdis makes an explicit point that her readings of Soviet film do not subscribe to apparatus theory or psychoanalysis, but I want to suggest that the formal technique of the aerial shot has implications for the ideological construction of the viewing subject, and it is these implications that I will be pursuing here. 66. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28 (1974–1975): 39–47. 67. Widdis, Visions of a New Land, 135.

NOTES TO PAGES 116–123   ★   195

68. Oksana Bulgakowa, “Spatial Figures in Soviet Cinema in the 1930s,” in Dobrenko and Naiman, Landscape of Stalinism, 51. 69. Ibid., 53. 70. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” and “The Myth of Total Cinema” in What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 1:9–22. 71. Bulgakowa, “Spatial Figures in Soviet Cinema,” 68. 72. Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” 39–47. 73. Jan Plamper, “The Spatial Poetics of the Personality Cult: Circles around Stalin” in Dobrenko and Naiman, Landscape of Stalinism, 24–25. 74. Quoted in Bailes, “Technology and Legitimacy: Soviet Aviation and Stalinism in the 1930s,” 61. CHAPTER 5: WHAT DOES WOMAN WANT?

1. All citations are from Boris Polevoi, Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1955); A Story About a Real Man, trans. J. Fineberg (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952). Translations are modified. 2. This honorary title was established 16 April 1934 with the Gold Star medal instituted 1 August 1939, by Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Recipients received the Order of Lenin, and a Diploma of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Special privileges included a pension with survivor benefits, first priority on the housing list, 50 percent rent reduction, reduced taxation rates (in 1985 this was changed to tax-exempt status), up to 15 square meters additional living space, a yearly round-trip first-class ticket, bus transportation, a yearly visit to a sanitarium or rest home, and entertainment and medical benefits. (The Soviet Military Awards, accessed: http://www.soviet-awards.com, 22 March 2005). 3. Polevoi, Story, 221. 4. Polevoi, Story, 228; Povest’, 127. 5. Polevoi, Story, 186; Povest’, 105. 6. Ibid. 7. Polevoi, Story, 209; Povest’, 117. 8. The film, Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke, was directed by Aleksandr Stolper (Mosfil’m, 1948); the opera was Sergei Prokofiev, “Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke,” op. 117 (1947–1948). 9. Octave Mannoni, “Je sais bien que . . . mais quand-même,” 11. 10. Polevoi, Story, 501; Povest’, 281. “Polnotsennyi” is literally “of full value,” suggesting that in his disabled state Meres’ev can be only of partial use. My argument is that Stalinist culture redefines usefulness as sacrifice—thus Meres’ev is actually more “fully useful” (polnotsennyi) with his feet amputated. 11. Polevoi, Story, 12–13; Povest’, 8–9. 12. Polevoi, Story, 12–17; Povest’, 8–11. 13. Polevoi, Story, 16; Povest’, 10.

196   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 123–136

14. Polevoi, Story, 18–19; Povest’, 11–12. 15. Polevoi, Story, 21–22; Povest’, 13–14. Compare this to Polia’s rape by Bad’in in Fedor Gladkov’s Cement (1925): “She had no time to drop her hands: he fell on the bed with terrifying weight and pressed her to the pillow. . . . She was choked by his stale heavy body, from his sweat and from the intoxicating smell of alcohol. She did not resist; crushed by the darkness she was not able to resist. Why, when it was all inevitable and irreversible?” 16. Polevoi, Story, 185, 12; Povest’, 104–05, 108. 17. Polevoi, Story, 20; Povest’, 13–14. 18. Polevoi, Story, 24; Povest’, 14–15. 19. Polevoi, Story, 26; Povest’, 16. 20. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 116. 21. Ibid., 116–18. 22. Polevoi, Story, 30, 76; Povest’, 18, 44. 23. Polevoi, Story, 65, 70; Povest’, 38, 40. 24. Polevoi, Story, 58, 69; Povest’, 33, 40, emphasis added. The choice of “instinctual” here underscores my argument that Meres’ev is not acting out a wish or desire but a compulsion—what Freud termed “instinct” or “drive” that operates beyond the subject’s agency. See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The Complete Psychological Works, 18:3–64. 25. There are numerous references to Meres’ev as infant: once rescued, he is given “semolina for babies” and chicken broth; lying under the sheepskin coat he feels “as though his body had had the bones removed and had been filled with warm cotton wool, through which the blood pulsated and throbbed”; swathed in bandages, he looks like “a bundled up newborn infant”; and, learning to walk on his artificial feet, Meres’ev is compared to a “little toddler” (Story, 94, 114, 107, 157, 280). 26. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 36. 27. Polevoi, Story, 28; Povest’, 17. 28. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits, 75–81. 29. Ibid., 76–78. 30. Polevoi, Story, 70, 71; Povest’, 40–41. 31. Polevoi, Story, 81, 83; Povest’, 46–48. 32. Polevoi, Story, 185; Povest’, 104–05. 33. Polevoi, Story, 209–12; Povest’, 117–19. 34. Polevoi, Story, 210; Povest’, 116–17. 35. Polevoi, Story, 212–13; Povest’, 119. 36. Polevoi, Story, 214–15; Povest’, 119–20. 37. “A nursling in front of the mirror,” writes Lacan, “who has not yet mastered walking, or even standing up, but who—though held tightly as he is by some prop, human or artificial . . . overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the constraints of

NOTES TO PAGES 136–144   ★   197

his prop in order to adopt a slightly leaning-forward position and take an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind” (Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” 76). 38. Polevoi, Story, 215; Povest’, 120. 39. Ibid. 40. Polevoi, Story, 71, 232, 239; Povest’, 41, 129, 133. 41. Roxanne Panchasi, “Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Rehabilitation of the Male Body in World War I France” (Differences 7 [1995]: 111–12). On male subjectivity and World War I, see Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Nicoletta F. Gullace, “White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War,” Journal of British Studies 36 (April 1997): 200. See also Nicoletta F. Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegoti­ ation of British Citizenship during the Great War (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002). On the “return of the dead,” see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 42. Polevoi, Story, 284, 553; Povest’, 158, 312. 43. Polevoi, Story, 507; Povest’, 284. 44. Polevoi, Story, 102; Povest’, 58–59. 45. Polevoi, Story, 166; Povest’, 94. 46. Polevoi, Story, 164, 170; Povest’, 93, 96. 47. Polevoi, Story, 283; Povest’, 157. 48. Polevoi, Story, 263; Povest’, 144–45. 49. We see this discourse acted out again and again in World War II texts. In Zhdi menia (Wait for Me, 1943), the heroine who waits for a year for her husband to return without losing hope is contrasted with her best friend who goes out every night to “dance” with other men—and the accidental death of her betrayed husband is laid squarely at her feet. In Raduga (The Rainbow, 1944) Pusia, despite being the wife of a partisan leader, is not only unfaithful but also a collaborator—sexual betrayal and political betrayal are marked as one and the same. 50. Polevoi, Story, 257, 231, 264; Povest’, 142, 128, 146, 150. The discourse about impregnable fortresses is a play on Stalin’s famous formulation that “there are no fortresses Bolsheviks can’t take.” 51. Polevoi, Story, 103, 318–19, 377, 424; Povest’, 58, 176, 209, 235. In her work on the poetics of mourning, Harriet Murav argues that “central to the idea of the prosthetic is the interrelation of absence and presence: what is present, the artificial limb, indicates the absence of the amputated limb.” It therefore acts as a “supplement” in the Derridean sense, because it undermines the difference between an original and a copy (Murav, “Music from a Speeding Train,” unpublished MS). 52. Polevoi, Story, 457, 363, emphasis in original; Povest’, 255, 201–02. 53. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 69, 74. 54. Pelevin, Zhizn’nasekomykh, 47; Pelevin, Omon Ra, 31.

198   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 144–151

55. Polevoi, Story, 228; Povest’, 126–27. 56. Ardan Markizov was the people’s commissar of agriculture for the BuriatMongol Autonomous Republic, shot not long after the picture was taken. The girl’s mother served a term in the Gulag, then committed suicide. 57. For the Stalin period, the law of kinship could be seen in the repeal of the law permitting abortion (“Decree Prohibiting Abortions,” Pravda [28 June 1936]); the formulation of the new law against homosexuality (Decree of 17 December 1933 and law of 7 March 1934 recriminalizing sodomy [muzhelozhstvo] under Article 121 of the Russian Federal Criminal Code); adoption of the “Stalin” Constitution (5 December 1936); strengthening of laws regarding residency and movement within the country (28 December 1932); and reintroduction of registration of all citizens in a single place of residence (propiska). 58. Padenie Berlina (The Fall of Berlin), directed by Mikhail Chiaureli (Mosfil’m, 1949). 59. Nikita Khrushchev, The “Secret” Speech. Delivered to the Closed Session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976), 19. 60. Ibid., 56. 61. This is another clear example of Lacan’s “there is no sexual relation” (“l’absence du rapport sexuel”). This type of missed or misdirected desire can be found in many socialist realist texts. Vladimir Nabokov points to a passage from Sergei Antonov’s The Big Heart (1957): “Ol’ga remained silent. ‘Oh,’ exclaimed Vladimir, ‘why can’t you love me as I love you?’ ‘I love my country,’ she said. ‘So do I,’ he exclaimed. ‘But I also love,’ Ol’ga began, releasing herself from the young man’s embrace. ‘What?’ he asked. Ol’ga raised her limpid blue eyes to look at him and answered quickly: ‘the Party’” (Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, 10). 62. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 254. 63. Ibid., 255. 64. André Bazin notes a similar sequence in Chiaureli’s The Vow in which the voice of the dead Lenin speaks to Stalin at the site of their last meeting. “Just in case the metaphor of a mythic anointment and the hearing of the Ten Commandments were not enough, Stalin looks to the sky.” Bazin, “The Stalin Myth in Soviet Cinema,” trans. Georgia Gurrieri, Film Criticism 3 (1978):24, emphasis in original. Originally published as “Le mythe de Staline dans le cinéma soviétique,” Le cinéma français de la libération à la Nouvelle Vague (1945–1958) (Paris: Éditions de L’Etoile/ Cahiers, 1983). 65. As Žižek points out (For They Know Not What They Do, 257), quoting Stalin’s “Vow of the Bolshevik Party to Its Leader Lenin”: “We, Communists, are people of a special mold. We are made of special stuff,” it is quite easy to recognize the Lacanian name for this “special stuff”: “objet petit a, the sublime object, the Thing within a body.” 66. Bazin, “The Stalin Myth in Soviet Cinema.”

NOTES TO PAGES 152–153   ★   199

67. Nikita Khrushchev, The “Secret” Speech, 19. In his annotated notes to The “Secret” Speech, Jon Bone comments that: “according to Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 409–10, the lack of official documents bearing Stalin’s name shows that he fell to pieces some six days after the initial German attack and was hors de combat from 28 to 30 June 1941. Roy Medvedev, in Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), is equally adamant that Stalin was absent from duty June 23–30. Whatever length of time was involved, Medvedev hints (and Volkogonov explicitly claims) that this paralysis reflected deep psychological shock once the full impact of the German invasion became apparent. . . . Khrushchev almost certainly based his description of the Politbiuro delegation’s visit to Stalin on the recollections of Anastas Mikoian, according to whom Mikoian, Molotov, Beria, and others decided that postinvasion paralysis could be solved by vesting total authority for the war effort in a new Committee of State Defense headed by Stalin. When the group went to Stalin’s dacha to ask him about it, Stalin may have thought the petitioners had come to arrest him. This is speculated in the Russian edition of Dmitrii Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediia: I. V. Stalin, politicheskii portret, bk, 2, pt. 1 (Moscow, 1989), 168–69.” Special Report to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (closed session, February 24–25, 1956) by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, First Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Full (annotated) text cited from: http://www.uwm.edu/Course/448–343/index12. html. Accessed 13 October 2005. 68. This describes the situation three days after Stalin’s death, when the nation was finally told that the great leader was dead. The fear of Stalin, or the hope of his death that supposedly kept the Central Committee members from opening his bedroom door, can be read a different way: as the fear of facing precisely that structural void, the lack of a successor, the failure of belief in Communism, in the bright path toward utopia. As long as Stalin was “alive,” fetishistic disavowal could continue uninterrupted. Thus Krushchev’s famous reformulation that the Soviet Union would continue on the path of Leninism: covering over the void with a fantasy of plenitude. Both Karen Shakhnazarov’s film Gorod zero (City Zero, 1988) and Vasilii Pichul’s Malen’kaia Vera (Little Vera, 1988) depict this void. In City Zero, Soviet history is “turned off” and the protagonist sails oarless into an unknown and unknowable future. In Little Vera the father’s death marks the passing of all previous and patriarchal authority, and the last shot mirrors the opening shot of the smog-filled sky over industrial blight, again suggesting that there is nowhere left to go. 69. As the archival materials on Semen Timoshenko’s Nebesnyi tikhokhod (The Sky-Barge, 1945) suggest, the brief respite from war (1945, the year during which comedies about war were allowed to be made) was immediately followed by a new directive to portray the war as sacrifice and victory. See “Iz istorii ‘Lenfil’ma’. Pamiatnik neizdannomu sborniku,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 72 (2005): 178–99.

200   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 155–160

CHAPTER 6: EPILOGUE

1. Iurii Olesha, Kniga proshchaniia (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999). 2. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 1–2. 3. Smirnov, Psikhodiakhronologika, 253. 4. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 1. 5. Olesha may have been a “fellow traveler,” but his 1927 novel Envy and his screenplay for Strogii iunosha (A Strict Youth), directed by Abram Room, 1934, each reflects an obsessive concern with “new” and “old” masculinity and the Olympian body of the New Soviet Man. 6. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 47. Late and post-Soviet films dealing with Stalinism include: Aleksei German’s Moi drug Ivan Lapshin (My Friend Ivan Lapshin, 1984), Tengiz Abuladze’s Monanieba (Repentance, 1987), Karen Shakhnazarov’s Gorod zero (City Zero, 1988), Petr Todorovskii’s Ankor, eshche ankor! (Encore, Once More, Encore!, 1992), Ivan Dykhovichnyi’s Prorva (Moscow Parade, 1992), Sergei Mikhalkov’s Utomlennye solntsem (Burnt by the Sun, 1994), Pavel Chukhrai’s Vor (The Thief, 1997), German’s Khrustalev, mashinu! (Khrustalev, My Car!, 1998), among others. 7. As Birgit Beumers notes, contemporary filmmakers (Abuladze, German, Mikhalkov, and others) have gone out of their way to demythologize the Stalinist heritage. Only Livnev, however, has “re-created myth in a postmodernist tradition to highlight the false nature of the myth in the first place.” Birgit Beumers, “MythMaking and Myth-Taking: Lost Ideals and the War in Contemporary Russian Cinema,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 42 (2000): 188. 8. Sergei Livnev directed one earlier film, Kiks (1991), whose plot focused on a substitution of a pop star by her look-alike. In early interviews about Hammer and Sickle, Livnev claimed to be making a “remake” of Kiks—another film about doubles, substitution, and replacement. See interviews and articles in Sovetskii ekran, Iskusstvo kino, and Seans (1994–1995). Hammer and Sickle was barely screened in Russia: because of a lawsuit, it was not released in theaters and appeared only at film festivals, and on video and DVD. 9. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13–31. 10. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 1–2. 11. What Butler has called the “performativity” of gender: that is, “not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (Bodies That Matter, 2). 12. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits, 78. 13. Attempting to mark the initial distinction between sex as “given” and gender as “constructed,” Butler writes, “If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way.

NOTES TO PAGES 160–170   ★   201

Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. . . . But “the body” is itself a construction, as are the myriad “bodies” that constitute the domain of gendered subjects. Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender.” Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 10, 13. 14. “We were born to make fairy tales come true, to conquer expanse and space, our reason gave us arms and wings of steel, and a fiery engine for a heart.” (My rozhdeny, chtob skazku sdelat’ byl’iu, / preodolet’ prostranstvo i prostor, / nam razum dal stal’nye ruki-kryl’ia, / a vmesto serdtsa—plamennyi motor.) “The March of the Aviators” (Marsh aviatorov, 1921–1922, lyrics by P. German); later known as “The March of Stalin’s Aviation” (Marsh stalinskoi aviatsii). 15. Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” 13. 16. Beumers, “Myth-Making and Myth-Taking,” 174. 17. Prokhorov, “I Need Some Life-Assertive Character,” 32. 18. In his essay on Hammer and Sickle, Prokhorov makes the opposite point, understanding Evdokim’s confrontation with Stalin as the moment when the disembodied “master voice” of Stalinist discourse is temporarily embodied in the aged and weak body of Stalin (ibid., 37–38). 19. Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 51. 20. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 7–8. 21. Sergei Livnev, International Film Festival, Rotterdam, 1995, http://www .filmfestivalrotterdam.com. 22. I am borrowing here Lev Anninskii’s description of Nikolai Ostrovskii, who, blind and paralyzed, spent the last fourteen months of his life in a house the government built for him in Sochi, on the Black Sea coast (Anninskii, Kak zakalialas’ stal’ Nikolaia Ostrovskogo, 17). 23. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 46. 24. This concluding fantasy, however, is a compensatory fantasy that tries to undo the models of exemplary masculinity produced by Stalinist culture and imitated through the remaining years of Soviet rule. It says that a true man, no matter how manipulated and limited by his circumstances, will be able to find his way out of the “alienating armor of identity” that Stalinism imposes. 25. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, 40–41. 26. Ibid., 40. 27. In Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, Intimacy and Terror, trans. Carol A. Flath (New York: New Press, 1995). 28. Ibid., 209, 215, 181. 29. Ibid., 209.

202   ★   NOTES TO PAGES 172–174

30. See Nikita Khrushchev, The “Secret” Speech, 72; Ian Christie, “Canons and Careers: The Director in Soviet Cinema,” in Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor and Derek Spring (London: Routledge, 1993), 166; Peter Kenez, “Soviet Cinema in the Age of Stalin” in Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, 66; and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 324, emphasis in original. 31. Gladkov, “Autobiographical note,” Cement, vi. 32. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 50–51. 33. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 177–78. 34. Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998), 95. 35. Andrei Platonov, “Ivan Zhokh,” Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow: Informpechat’, 1998), 372. 36. As Murav suggests about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, “testimony,” the act of bearing witness, becomes “testament, in the biblical sense of covenant or binding agreement. The scar on the heart contains an allusion to the biblical covenant between God and humankind” (Murav, Russia’s Legal Fictions, 183–84). 37. In 1947 war invalids, permanent reminders of the horrors of that war, were removed from Moscow and other major cities. See Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); on the changing status of Soviet veterans see also Mark Edele, “Soviet Veterans as an Entitlement Group, 1945–1955,” Slavic Review 65 (2006): 111–37. 38. Roxanne Panchasi, “Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Rehabilitation of the Male Body in World War I France,” 110. 39. Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 5. 40. See ibid., 97–127. On the connection between “invalidnost’ ” and the mutilated male body in socialist realist novels, see Lehmann, “Die Figur des Invaliden in der Sowjetprosa.” 41. As Alexopoulos argues, the fact that Stalin’s constitution extended citizenship to everyone living in the Soviet Union did not remove the threat of political disenfranchisement, but simply altered the punishments for tuneiadstvo. “Social marginals” were now denied passports and expelled from cities. Moreover, after the reinstatement of rights, deportees and resettled aliens were denied freedom to leave their settlements and encountered distrust, suspicion, and severe sanctions from the secret police. “An earlier policy of social engineering that involved the dual practices of purging alien elements and evaluating worthy citizens was replaced by a campaign of expulsion with almost no possibility of redemption” (Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts, 184).

Bibliography

PRIMARY SOURCES

Archival Material Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov (GAKFD) Letchiki (kinoocherk o letnom uchilishche voenno-vozdushnykh sil RKKA). Directed by A. Varlamov. Moskovskaia studiia kinokhroniki, 1938. Pesnia molodosti. Directed by S. Gurov, F. Kiselev, M. Slutskii. Moskovskaia studiia kinokhroniki, 1938. Stalinskoe plemia (fil’m o fizkul’turnom parade XX goda oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii, Moscow, 12 iulia 1937 g.). Directed by I. Posel’skii, V. Erofeev, I. Setkina. Soiuzkinokhroniki, 1937. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) Fond 631 op. 3 (Pravlenie Soiuza sovremennykh pisatelei SSSR) Fond 631 op. 9 (Soiuz sovetskikh pisatelei) Fond 634 (Redaktsiia “Literaturnoi gazety”) Fond 966 (Goskinoizdat) Fond 1847 (Aduev) Fond 1966 Fond 1976 (Kurikhin) Fond 2091 (Vertov) Fond 2124 (Platonov) Fond 2252 (Lezhnev) Fond 2450 (Glavnoe upravlenie khudozhesvennykh fil’mov) Fond 2453 (Mosfil’m) Fond 2496 (Sovkino) Fond 2639 (Ginzburg, S. S.) Fond 2653 (Ianushkevich) Fond 2734 (Aleinikov) 203

204   ★   BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fond 2753 (Vasil’evy) Fond 2794 (Ekk) Fond 2953 (Sverdlin) Fond 3043 (Bernes) Fond 3058 (Pyr’ev) Fond 3070 (Iutkevich) “A driani podobno ‘Garmon’’ bol’she ne stavite?” Zapisi besed B. Z. Shumiatskogo s I.V. Stalinym posle kinoprosmotrov. 1934 g. (Publikatsiia i kommentarii A. S. Troshina). In Kinovedcheskie zapiski 61:281–346. “Iz istorii ‘Lenfil’ma’. Pamiatnik neizdannomu sborniku.” Edited by Vera Kuznetsova and Petr Bagrov. Kinovedcheskie zapiski 72:178–99. “Kartina sil’naia, khoroshaia, no ne ‘Chapaev’ . . .” Zapisi besed B. Z. Shumiatskogo s I.V. Stalinym posle kinoprosmotrov. 1935–1937 gg. (Publikatsiia i kommentarii A. S. Troshina). In Kinovedcheskie zapiski 62:115–88. Films Bezhin lug. Directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Mosfil’m (unfinished), 1937. Chapaev. Directed by Sergei and Georgii Vasil’ev. Lenfil’m, 1934. Chelovek s ruzh’em. Directed by Sergei Iutkevich. Lenfil’m, 1934. Chlen pravitel’stva. Directed by Aleksandr Zarkhi and Iosif Kheifits. Lenfil’m, 1940. Dva boitsa. Directed by Lenonid Lukov. Tashkentskaia kinostudiia, 1943. Istrebiteli. Directed by Eduard Pentslin. Kievskaia kinostudiia, 1939. Iunost’ Maksima. Directed by Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. Mosfil’m, 1935. Kliatva. Directed by Mikhail Chiaureli. Tbilisskaia kinostudiia, 1946. Kolybel’naia. Directed by Dziga Vertov. Soiuzkinokhronika, 1937. Kubanskie kazaki. Directed by Ivan Pyr’ev. Mosfi’lm, 1950. Letchiki. Directed by Iulii Raizman. Mosfil’m, 1935. Lenin v oktiabre. Directed by Mikhail Romm. Mosfil’m, 1937. Lenin v 18 godu. Directed by Mikhail Romm. Mosfil’m, 1939. Malakhov Kurgan. Directed by Aleksandr Zarkhi and Iosif Kheifits. Tbilisskaia kinostudiia, 1944. Nebesnyi tikhokhod. Directed by Semen Timoshenko. Lenfil’m, 1945. Novaia Moskva. Directed by Aleksandr Medvedkin. Mosfil’m (never released), 1938. Odna. Directed by Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. Soiuzkino. 1931. Odnazhdy noch’iu. Directed by Boris Barnet. Erevanskaia kinostudiia, 1944. Okraina. Directed by Boris Barnet. Mezhrabpomfil’m, 1933. Oktiabr’. Directed by Sergei Eisensten. Sovkino, 1927. Padenie Berlina. Directed by Mikhail Chiaureli. Mosfil’m, 1949. Paren’ iz nashego goroda. Directed by Aleksandr Stolper and Boris Ivanov. TsOKS (Alma-Ata), 1942. Partiinyi bilet. Directed by Ivan Pyr’ev. Mosfil’m, 1936. Podvig razvedchika. Directed by Boris Barnet. Kievskaia kinostudiia, 1947.

BIBLIOGRAPHY   ★   205

Povest’ o nastoiashchem cheloveke. Directed by Aleksandr Stolper. Mosfil’m, 1948. Putevka v zhizn’. Directed by Nikolai Ekk. Mezhrabpomfil’m, 1931. Raduga. Directed by Mark Donskoi. Kievskaia kinostudiia, 1944. Stalin: Eine Mosfilm Produktion. Directed by Oksana Bulgakowa, WDR, 1993. Stalingradskaia bitva. Directed by Vladimir Petrov. Mosfil’m, 1949. Strogii iunosha. Abram Room. Ukrainfil’m (never released), 1936. Svetlyi put’. Directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Mosfil’m, 1940. Svinarka i pastukh. Directed by Ivan Pyr’ev. Mosfil’m, 1942. Tan’ka-traktirshchitsa. Directed by Boris Svetozarov. 1929. Traktoristy. Directed by Ivan Pyr’ev. Mosfil’m, 1939. Tret’ia meshchanskaia. Directed by Abram Room. Sovkino, 1927. Tri pesni o Lenine. Directed by Dziga Vertov. Mezhrabpomfil’m, 1934. Tsirk. Directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Mosfil’m, 1936. U samogo sinego moria. Directed by Boris Barnet. Mezhrabpomfil’m and Azerfil’m, 1935. Valerii Chkalov. Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. Lenfil’m, 1941. Velikii grazhdanin. Directed by Friedrich Ermler. Lenfil’m, 1937-39. Velikii perelom. Directed by Friedrich Ermler. Lenfil’m, 1945. Vesna. Directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Mosfil’m, 1947. Volga-Volga. Directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Mosfil’m, 1938. Vozvrashchenie Maksima. Directed by Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. Lenfil’m, 1937. Vratar’. Directed by Semen Timoshenko. Lenfil’m, 1936. Vstrecha na El’be. Directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Mosfil’m, 1949. Vyborgskaia storona. Directed by Grigorii Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. Lenfil’m, 1939. Zhdi menia. Directed by Aleksandr Stolper and Boris Ivanov. TsOKS (Alma-Ata), 1943. SECONDARY SOURCES

Alexopoulos, Golfo. Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Andreev, Iurii. Revoliutsiia i literatura: Oktiabr’ i grazhdanskaia voina v russkoi sovetskoi literature i stanovlenie sotsialisticheskogo realizma (20–30-e gody). Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1987. Anninskii, Lev. “Kak zakalialas’ stal’” Nikolaia Ostrovskogo. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1971. Antonowa, Irina, and Jörn Merkert. Berlin-Moscau/Moskva-Berlin, 1900–1950. Munich: Prestel, 1995. Apter, Emily, and William Pietz, eds. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

206   ★   BIBLIOGRAPHY

Attwood, Lynne. The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex Role Socialization in the USSR. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Attwood, Lynne, and Maya Turovskaya, with Oksana Bulgakowa. Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era. HarperCollins, 1993. Babitsky, Paul, and John Rimberg. “Heroes and Villains in Soviet Films, 1923–1950: A Quantitative Content Analysis.” In The Soviet Film Industry, ed. Paul Babitsky and John Rimberg. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1955. Baidukov, G. F. Chkalov. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1975. Bailes, K. E. “Technology and Legitimacy: Soviet Aviation and Stalinism in the 1930s.” Technology and Culture 17 (1976): 55–81. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly 28 (1974–75): 39–47. Baudry, Jean-Louis, ed. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Bazin, André. “Le mythe de Staline dans le cinéma soviétique.” Le cinéma français de la libération à la Nouvelle Vague (1945–1958), Paris: Éditions de L’Etoile/ Cahiers, 1983. Translated by Georgia Gurrieri under the title “The Stalin Myth in Soviet Cinema,” Film Criticism 3 (1978): 17–26. . What Is Cinema? Vols. 1–2. Translated by Hugo Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. . Moscow Diary. Translated by Richard Sieburth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Bergman, Jay. “Valerii Chkalov: Soviet Pilot as New Soviet Man.” Journal of Contemporary History 33 (1998): 135–52. Bernheimer, Charles, and Claire Kahane, eds. In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria— Feminism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Beumers, Birgit. “Myth-Making and Myth-Taking: Lost Ideals and the War in Contemporary Russian Cinema.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 42 (2000): 172–89. . “Soviet and Russian Blockbusters: A Question of Genre?” Slavic Review 62 (2003). Bocharov, S. G. “‘Veshchestvo sushchestvovaniia.’ Vyrazhenie v proze.” In Problemy khudozhestvennoi formy sotsialisticheskogo realizma, 310–50. Moscow: Nauka, 1971. Bonnell, Victoria E. Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

BIBLIOGRAPHY   ★   207

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. The Freudian Subject. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Borenstein, Eliot. Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Boym, Svetlana. Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. . The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Breuer, Joseph, and Sigmund Freud. “Studies on Hysteria.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, 1986. Brooks, Peter. “Freud’s Masterplot.” Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 280–300. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Permanent Purge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2000. Bulgakowa, Okasana. Fabrika zhestov. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005. Bullitt, M. “Towards a Marxist Theory of Aesthetics: The Development of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union.” Russian Review 35 (1976): 53–76. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993. . Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. . “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. New York, 2000. Bynum, Caroline W. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Carmichael, Joel. Stalin’s Masterpiece: The Show Trials and Purges of the Thirties: The Consolidation of the Bolshevik Dictatorship. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. Cassiday, Julie A. The Enemy on Trial: Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. Christie, Ian. “Canons and Careers: The Director in Soviet Cinema.” In Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, edited by Richard Taylor and Derek Spring. New York: Routledge, 1993. Clark, Katerina. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981. Clark, Toby. “The ‘New Man’s’ Body: A Motif in Early Soviet Culture.” In Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917–1992,

208   ★   BIBLIOGRAPHY

edited by Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 33–50. Condee, Nancy, ed. Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Davies, Sarah. Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” In Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1991. Dobrenko, Evgenii. The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of the State Reader. Translated by Jesse M. Savage. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. . The Making of the State Writer. Translated by Jesse M. Savage. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. . Metafora vlasti: literatura stalinskoi epokhi v istoricheskom osveshchenii. Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1993. Dobrenko, Evgenii, ed. Izbavlenie ot mirazhei: Sotsrealizm segodnia. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990. Dobrenko, Evgenii, and Eric Naiman, eds. The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. Dunham, Vera. In Stalin’s Time: Middle Class Values in Soviet Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Edele, Mark. “Soviet Veterans as an Entitlement Group, 1945–1955.” Slavic Review 65 (2006): 111–37. Emerson, Caryl. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Engelstein, Laura. Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. . “Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia.” American Historical Review vol. 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 338–53. . The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Eng-Liedmeier, Jeanne van der. Soviet Literary Characters: An Investigation into the Portrayal of Soviet Men in Russian Prose 1917–1953. The Hague: Mouton, 1959. Ermolaev, H. Soviet Literary Theories, 1917–34: The Genesis of Socialist Realism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Etkind, Aleksandr. Khlyst: Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998.

BIBLIOGRAPHY   ★   209

Felman, Shoshana, ed. Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. . Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. . Tear Off the Masks!: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. , ed. Stalinism: New Directions. New York: Routledge, 2000. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage–Random House, 1979. . The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. . “Questions of Method.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1986. Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Garros, Véronique; Natalia Korenevskaya; and Thomas Lahusen. Intimacy and Terror. Translated by Carol A. Flath. New York: New Press, 1995. Getmanets, M. F. Makarenko i kontseptsiia novogo cheloveka v sovetskoi literature 20kh-30kh godov. Khar’kov, 1978. Getty, J. Arch. Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. Gor’kii, Maksim. Gor’kii i sovetskie pisatel ne izdannaia perepiska. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1963. Goscilo, Helena, and Andrea Lanoux. Gender and National Identity in TwentiethCentury Russian Culture. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Gray, Camilla. The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Grinberg, I. “Geroi sovetskogo romana.” In Obraz bol’shevika. Sbornik kriti­ cheskikh statei. Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1938. Groys, Boris. “Stalinism kak esteticheskii fenomen.” Sintaksis 17 (1987): 98–110. . The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Translated by Charles Rougle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Gullace, Nicoletta F. The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002. . “White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War.” Journal of British Studies 36 (April 1997): 178–206.

210   ★   BIBLIOGRAPHY

Günther, Hans, ed. The Culture of the Stalin Period. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Gutkin, Irina. The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Halfin, Igal. Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. , ed. Language and Revolution: Making of Modern Political Identities. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002. Hansen, Sabina. “Fantasmagorii sotsrealisticheskogo kanona.” In Sovetskoe bogatstvo: Stat’i o kul’ture, literature i kino, edited by Marina Balina, Evgenii Dobrenko, and Iurii Murashov, 427–39. St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2002. Haynes, John. New Soviet Man: Gender and Masculinity in Stalinist Soviet Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Hayward, Max. “The Decline of Socialist Realism.” In Writers in Russia 1917–1978, edited by P. Blake, 149–83. London: Harvill Press, 1983. Healey, Dan. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Hellbeck, Jochen. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Hellebust, Rolf. Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Heller (Geller), Mikhail. Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. Hooper, Cynthia. “Terror of Intimacy: Family Politics in the 1930s Soviet Union.” In Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, edited by Christina Kiaer and Eric Naiman, 61–91. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Hunter, Dianne. “Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna O.” In The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Istoriia otechestvennogo kino. Dokumenty. Memuary. Pis’ma. Edited by V. S. Listor and E. S. Khokhlova. Moscow: Materik, 1996. Istoriia sovetskogo kinoiskusstva zvukovogo perioda. Edited by I. V. Sokolov. Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1946. Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov) Kratkii kurs (1938). Moscow: Gos izd-vo polit. lit-vy. 1945. James, C. V. Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory. London: Macmillan, 1973. Kemp-Welch, A. Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–39. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

BIBLIOGRAPHY   ★   211

Kenez, Peter. Cinema and Soviet Society 1917–1953. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. . “Soviet Cinema in the Age of Stalin.” In Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, edited by Richard Taylor and Derek Spring. New York: Routledge, 1993. Kershaw, Ian, and Moshe Lewin, eds. Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kharkhordin, Oleg. The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Khrushchev, N. S. The “Secret” Speech. Delivered to the Closed Session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Nottingham: Spokesman Books, 1976. Kiaer, Christina. Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Kiaer, Christina, and Eric Naiman, eds. Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Kinematograficheskoe nasledie. I. A. Pyr’ev. Izbrannye proizvedeniia. Vols. 1–2. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1978. Kino: politika i liudi (30-e gody). Moscow: Materik, 1995. Kolesnikoff, Nina, and Walter Smyrniw, eds. Socialist Realism Revisited: Selected Papers from the McMaster Conference. Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University Press, 1994. Kol’tsov, Mikhail. “Muzhestvo.” Pravda, 17 March 1935, 4. Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Lacan, Jacques. “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” In Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading, Otherwise, edited by Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. . Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. . Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. Edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. London: Macmillan, 1982. . The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. . On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973. Bk. 10, Encore, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. . The Psychoses. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. . Le Séminaire. Vol. 4, La relation d’objet, 1956–57, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. Lahusen, Thomas. How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Lahusen, Thomas, and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds. Socialist Realism without Shores. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

212   ★   BIBLIOGRAPHY

Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1977. Larsen, Susan. “Melodramatic Masculinity, National Identity, and the Stalinist Past in Postsoviet Cinema.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 24 (2000): 85–120. Lehmann, Jörg. “Die Figur des Invaliden in der Sowjetprosa. Teil 1.” In Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 51 (2003): 227–88. . “Die Figur des Invaliden in der Sowjetprosa. Teil 2.” In Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 53 (2004): 131–97. Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Liderman, Yulia. Motivy “proverki” i “ispytaniia” v postsovetskoi kul’ture: Sovetskoe proshloe v rossiiskom kinematografe 1990-kh godov. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2005. Listov, Viktor S. Rossiia. Revoliutsiia. Kinematograf. K 100-letiiu mirovogo kino. Moscow: Materik, 1995. Livers, Keith A. Constructing the Stalinist Body: Fictional Representations of Corporeality in the Stalinist 1930s. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. Livnev, Sergej. Interview. The International Film Festival in Rotterdam, 1995. Internet site. http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com. Accessed 29 August 2007. Lukács, Georg. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Translated by J. and N. Mander. London: Merlin, 1963. . The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Lunacharskii, Anatolii. Lunacharskii and the Cinema. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1965. Maguire, Robert A. Red Virgin Soil. Soviet Literature in the 1920’s. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Abandoned. Translated by M. Hayward. New York: Atheneum, 1981. Mannoni, Octave. Clefs pour l’imaginaire; ou, l’autre scène. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969. Marsh, Rosalind. Images of Dictatorship: Portraits of Stalin in Literature. London: Routledge, 1989. Mathewson, Rufus W., Jr. The Positive Hero in Russian Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975. McReynolds, Louise, and Joan Neuberger. Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Michelson, Annette, ed. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Translated by Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Miller, Martin. Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

BIBLIOGRAPHY   ★   213

Morozov, A. I. Konets utopii. Iz istorii iskusstva v SSSR 1930-kh godov. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Galart,” 1995. Morson, Gary. “Socialist Realism and Literary Theory.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38 (1979): 121–33. Muller, John P., and William J. Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Murav, Harriet. Russia’s Legal Fictions. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Russian Literature. New York: Harcourt, 1981. Nadtochii, Eduard. “Druk, tovarishch, i Bart: Neskol’ko predvaritel’nykh zamechanii k voprosheniiu o meste sotsialisticheskogo realizma v iskusstve XX veka.” Daugava: Literaturnyi zhurnal 8 (1989): 114–20. Naiman, Eric. “Discourse Made Flesh: Healing and Terror in the Construction of Soviet Subjectivity.” In Language and Revolution: Making of Modern Political Identities, ed. Igal Halfin, 287–316. Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002. . Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology. Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1997. Olesha, Iurii. Kniga proshchaniia. Moscow: Vagrius, 1999. O muzhe(n)stvennosti: Sbornik statei. Ed. Sergei Ushakin. Moscow: Novoe litera­ turnoe obozrenie, 2002. Ostrovskaia, R. Nikolai Ostrovskii. Moscow: Molodaia gvardia, 1988. Palmer, Scott W. Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Panchasi, Roxanne. “Reconstructions: Prosthetics and the Rehabilitation of the Male Body in World War I France.” Differences 7 (1995): 109–40. Paperno, Irina, et al. “Symposium.” Slavic Review 53 (1994): 193–224. Paperno, Irina, and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds. Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Papernyi, Vladimir. Kul’tura dva. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1996. Passek, Jean-Loup, ed. Le Cinéma russe et sovietique. Paris: Centre George Pompidou/ l’Equerre, 1981. Pervyi Vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei: Stenograficheskii otchet. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1934. Petrone, Karen. Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Platonov, Andrei. Razmyshleniia chitatelia. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1970. Prokhorov, Alexander. “‘I Need Some Life-Assertive Character’ or How to Die in the Most Inspiring Pose: Bodies in the Stalinist Museum of Hammer and Sickle.” Studies in Slavic Cultures 1 (2000): 28–46. Radzinskii, Edvard. Stalin. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Vagrius,” 1997.

214   ★   BIBLIOGRAPHY

Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Edited by Robert H. McNeal. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Rice, James L. Freud’s Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993. Robin, Régine. Socialist Realism: An Impossible Aesthetic. Translated by Catherine Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. , comp. “Soviet Literature of the Thirties: A Reappraisal.” Sociocriticism, October 1986. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schmulévitch, Eric. Réalisme socialiste et cinéma: Le cinéma stalinien (1928–1941). Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1996. Scott, H. G., ed. Problems of Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress. Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1935. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. . Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Serinskii, S. Istoriia strany–istoriia kino. Moscow: Znak, 2004. Sesonske, Alexander. “Re-editing History: Lenin in October.” Sight and Sound 53 (1983–1984): 56–58. Shentalinsky, Vitaly. Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared Writers of the Soviet Regime. Translated by John Crowfoot. New York: Free Press, 1993. Shklovskii, Viktor. Za 60 let: raboty o kino. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1985. Shlapentokh, Dmitry, and Vladimir Shlapentokh. Soviet Cinematography, 1918–1991. New York: A. de Gruyte, 1993. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. . Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. . The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996. Siniavskii, Andrei [Abram Terts]. “Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm?” In Fantasticheskii mir Abrama Tertza, 401–46. Paris: YMCA Press, 1967. Smirnov, Igor. Psikhodiakhronologika: Psikhoistoriia russkoi literatury ot romantizma do nashikh dnei. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1994. Smith, Michael G. “Cinema for the ‘Soviet East’: National Fact and Revolutionary Fiction in Early Azerbaijani Film.” Slavic Review 56 (1997): 645–78. Spackman, Barbara. Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Special Report to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (closed session, February 24–25, 1956) by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, First Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Full (annotated) text. Internet site. http://www.uwm.edu/Course/448–343/index12.html. Accessed 13 October 2005.

BIBLIOGRAPHY   ★   215

Stalin, I. Sochineniia. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi litera­ tury, 1949. Struve, Gleb. Russian Literature under Lenin and Stalin, 1917–1953. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Suny, Ronald Grigor, ed. The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Taylor, Richard. “Boris Shumyatsky and the Soviet Cinema in the 1930s: Ideology as Mass Entertainment.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 6 (1986): 43–64. . “‘A Cinema for the Millions’: Soviet Socialist Realism and the Problem of Film Comedy.” Journal of Contemporary History 18 (July 1983): 439–61. . Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. London: Harper and Row, 1979. Taylor, Richard, and Ian Christie, eds. The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939. New York: Routledge, 1988. . Inside the Film Factory: New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1991. Taylor, Richard, and Derek Spring, eds. Stalinism and Soviet Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. Thompson, Boris. The Premature Revolution: Russian Literature and Society, 1917–1946. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972. Trauberg, Leonid. “Kakim on byl . . .” In Grigorii Mar’iamov, Ivan Pyr’ev v zhizni i na ekrane. Moscow: Kinotsentr, 1994. Tregub, Semen. Nikolai Alekseevich Ostrovskii (1904–1936). Moscow, 1950. Trotskii, Leon. Literature and Revolution. New York: International Publishers, 1925. Tsivian, Yuri. Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception. Translated by Alan Bodger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Turovskaya, Maya. “Fil’my i liudi.” Kinovedcheskie zapiski 57:251–59. . “The 1930s and 1940s: Cinema in Context.” In Stalinism and Soviet Cinema, edited by Richard Taylor and Derek Spring. New York: Routledge, 1993. Tynianov, Iu. N. Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” 1977. Verdery, Katherine. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Widdis, Emma. Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Woll, Josephine. Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000.

216   ★   BIBLIOGRAPHY

Youngblood, Denise. Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. . Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005. Lawrence: City University Press of Kansas, 2006. Yurchak, Aleksei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Zalkind, Aron. Polovoi vopros v usloviiakh sovetskoi obshchestvennosti. Leningrad: Gos. Izd., 1926. Zalygin, Sergei. “Skazki realista: realism skazochnika.” Voprosy literatury 7 (1971): 120–42. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Big Other Doesn’t Exist.” Journal of European Psychoanalysis 5 (1997). Internet site. http://www.lacan.com/zizekother.htm. Accessed 4 April 2007. . Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? New York: Verso, 2001. . Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992. . For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991. . Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. . The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. . The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997. . The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. Zubkova, Elena. Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957. Translated and edited by Hugh Ragsdale. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. abject, 13, 31, 50, 60–61, 120 Abrikosov, Andrei, 43 air shows, 114–15 Aleksandrov, Grigorii, 44 Alexopoulos, Golfo, 202n41 Allilueva, Nadezhda (Stalin’s wife), 189n74 Althusser, Louis, 13, 17, 126 amputation, 13, 120, 136, 140–41 Andreev, Boris, 6, 83, 147 Anninskii, Lev, 38, 39 avant-garde cinema, 116 Avdenko, Aleksandr, 70 aviation films. See pilot films aviation hero. See pilot Avtonomova, N. S., 16 Azhaev, Vasilii, Far from Moscow, 86 Babel, Isaac, 71, 87; “My First Goose,” 15, 73; Red Calvary, 72–73 Barnet, Boris, By the Blue Sea, 68, 76–82, 78, 80, 85, 88, 118 Batalov, Sergei, 6 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 114, 117 Bazin, André, 151, 171 Belkin, Aron, 16, 17, 178n35 Bentham, Jeremy, 33

Bernes, Mark, 6, 83, 88, 98 Beumers, Birgit, 162 Bezymenskii, A., 42 big Other: in Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin, 10, 147, 152–53; defined, 178n28; in Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, 29; in Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man, 125; in Soviet culture, 169–72; Stalin as, 14, 118, 163–64, 169; symbolic order as, 130, 152; in Timoshenko’s The Sky-Barge, 104 blacksmith image, 4, 6, 156 Blokh, Mikhail, 6, 176n12 body: in Communist Party rhetoric, 51, 186n43; fragmented, in mirror stage, 131; king’s two bodies, 150–52; male subjectivity and, 91, 120; of New Soviet Man, 22–23; of Ostrovskii, 37–39; in Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, 25–27, 36; overcoming of, 22, 25; in Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, 52–53; Soviet/Stalinist preoccupation with, 5. See also wounded bodies Bolsheviks: anxiety of, 43, 62–65; as ideal citizens, 4, 6, 19, 36, 144, 156; 217

218   ★   INDEX

vigilance required of, 43–44, 46, 49, 51, 53–54 Bonnell, Victoria, 10, 74, 113 Borenstein, Eliot, 71, 73 Brooks, Peter, 41 Buchma, A. M., 171 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 45 Bulgakowa, Oksana, 115–16 Butler, Judith, 3, 17, 50, 76, 88, 164, 201n11, 201n13 camouflage, 106–8 captation, 7, 157, 164, 177n17 Cassiday, Julie, 62 castration: amputation as, 13, 120, 136, 140–41; Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin and, 153; and collective subjectivity, 173; film and, 54; language and, 8–9; Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man and, 120–21, 123–24, 140–41; Pyr’ev’s The Party Card and, 43, 58, 62–63, 65–66; Stalinist culture and, 146 Central Committee, 47–50, 146 Chapaev (Vasil’ev and Vasil’ev), 11, 46, 184n17 Chiaureli, Mikhail: The Fall of Berlin, 3, 10–11, 118, 146–53, 148, 152; The Vow, 146–47 Chirkov, Boris, 6 Chistiakov, Aleksandr, 91 Chkalov, Valerii, 6, 94–95, 117 Christie, Ian, 171 cinema. See film Clark, Katerina, 56, 69, 73–74, 94; The Soviet Novel, 34, 172 Clark, Toby, 4 collective belief, 9, 14, 146, 154, 169–72 Communist Party: and cult of personality, 146–47; membership in, 48–52; purity of, 43, 48–52 Congress on Human Behavior (Moscow, 1930), 15

constitution, Stalin’s, 170–71, 202n41 cult of personality, 146–47 Dashenko, Vladimir, 98 Derrida, Jacques, 17 desire: drive versus, 36, 41; homosociality and, 71 difference: film and, 188n53; in Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, 99–100. See also sexual difference dirt, 50 discipline, of Stalinist culture, 31–34, 61, 92–95, 102, 106, 127 Doane, Mary Ann, 3, 108–9 Dobrenko, Evgenii, 39 documents, official, 132. See also party membership cards Dollar, Mladen, 17 dominant fiction, 7–11, 21–22, 139, 144, 146, 147, 172 Douglas, Mary, 50 Dovzhenko, Aleksandr, Aerograd, 52, 112 drive, 36, 41, 71, 128–29 Ehrenburg, Il’ia, 172 Eisenstein, Sergei, 116; Bezhin Meadow, 47, 52 Eng, David, 8, 91 Ermler, Fridrikh, 42–43, 65 exemplary masculinity: contradictory image of, 22; in Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, 22; in Stalinist culture, 11, 22, 155. See also New Soviet Man extravagant virility. See virility, fantasy of extravagant Fadeev, Aleksandr, The Last of the Udegs, 20 family, 12, 74–75, 84 family laws, 12, 74–75, 76

INDEX   ★   219

fantasy. See ideological fantasy; phantasy Fedorov, Nikolai, 15 female subjectivity: ideal of, 7; and lack, 8; mobility of, 107–9; in Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, 12, 43–44, 53, 55, 61; in Stalinist culture, 43. See also New Soviet Woman; women feminist theory, 17 fetishism, 8, 54, 60, 146 film: apparatus of, production of subjectivity through, 114–17; and censorship, 47; and difference, 188n53; ideal citizens in, 6; industry politics, 47; male subjectivity in, 10, 12–13, 76–118; power relations in, 117; socialist realist theory of, 116. See also socialist realism film theory, 3, 17, 114 First Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), 19, 20, 37 Foucault, Michel, 3, 17, 33, 93; Discipline and Punish, 31 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 103; on fetishism, 8–9, 60; influence of, in Russia, 15–17; on male hysteria, 90; on sexual difference, 8; on superego, 32 Fromm, Erich, 16 front. See war, front/rear as gendered spaces in Furmanov, Dmitrii, Chapaev, 24 Gelovani, Mikhail, 147 gender: in Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle, 156–69; neutrality/mobility of, 73, 75, 80, 87, 107–9, 139–40, 158–59, 167; as performative, 158–60, 167, 200n11; sex and, 168, 200n13; war and the confusion of, 138–39; war’s front/rear and, 86, 120, 141–42 gender studies, 3 Getty, J. Arch, 48 Girard, René, 77

Gladkov, Fedor, 172; Cement, 1–2, 3, 25, 73, 74; Energy, 73, 189n7 Golynchik, Evgeniia, 98 Goriunov, Anatolii, 43 Gor’kii, Maksim: The Birth of a Man, 19; Mother, 24 Grinberg, I., “The Hero of the Soviet Novel,” 19–20 guilt: cinematic, 54, 62; in Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, 12, 43–44, 54, 62–64 Gutkin, Irina, 69, 74, 190n15 hail, the, 126–27, 129, 161, 161. See also interpellation Halberstam, Judith, 3, 158 Hegel, G. W. F., 17 Hellebust, Rolf, 10 Heller, Mikhail, 70–71, 74–75 heterosexual melancholia, 76, 86, 88 heterosexual panic: in Barnet’s By the Blue Sea, 76–82; hysteria and, 90; in Lukov’s Two Soldiers, 82–87; patriarchal demands as cause of, 75–76; in Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, 98–103; in socialist realism, 71, 86; in Timoshenko’s The Sky-Barge, 104 heterosexuality/heteronormativity: all-male utopia versus, 68–69, 73, 81, 87; anxiety about, 12–13, 67–69, 81, 87 (see also heterosexual panic); political attachment versus, 71, 76; in socialist realism, 4, 12–13, 68–69, 71, 75–89, 98–111; theme of, 4; in Timoshenko’s The Sky-Barge, 104–11 Hitler, Adolf, 16, 49, 151 holy male union. See utopias, all-male homosexual panic, 12, 72–73, 86, 194n55 homosexuality: anxiety about, 12, 72–73; recriminalization of, 12, 74–75, 76 homosociality: and all-male utopias, 69, 71, 73, 81, 86, 87, 89, 99; in Barnet’s By the Blue Sea, 76–82; in Lukov’s

220   ★   INDEX

Two Soldiers, 82–87; in Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, 98–103; Sedgwick on, 72; in socialist realism, 4, 12–13, 68–69, 71–73, 75–89, 98–111; in Timoshenko’s The Sky-Barge, 104–5 Hooper, Cynthia, 75 How the Steel Was Tempered (Ostrovskii), 3, 20–41; body in, 25–27, 36; composition and publication of, 24, 37, 179n15; critical praise for, 20; critical reception of, 37; discipline in, 31–34; exemplary masculinity in, 22; male subjectivity in, 10–12, 20–22; near-death experiences in, 34–36; Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man and, 119; popular reception of, 24–25, 38, 39; as socialist realist model, 11, 20–22, 25, 39; subjectivity in, 25–36; surveillance in, 22, 25–26, 28–29, 31–34; on usefulness of the wounded, 174; vision as theme in, 25–34 hysteria: female, 90–91; male, 68, 76, 89–91, 96–97, 103–4; meaning of, 90–91 identity: in Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle, 163–64; otherness and, 163–64; in Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, 99–100. See also subjectivity ideological fantasy, 21 ideology, and subjectivity, 126–27, 129–30, 134–38 Il’enkov, Vasilii, The Driving Axle, 73 Il’in, Iakov, The Large Conveyer, 20 interpellation, 126–27, 130, 134–38. See also hail, the invalid, as exemplary Stalinist male, 3, 21–22, 40, 97, 120–22, 139, 143, 145–46, 156, 165–66, 172–74. See also wounded bodies Ivanov, Boris, Wait for Me, 86

Kalatozov, Mikhail, 10 Kassil, Lev, The Goalie, 6–7 Kenez, Peter, 52, 171; Cinema and Soviet Society, 47 Kharkhordin, Oleg, 51, 186n43 Khrushchev, Nikita, 16, 146–47, 152, 171, 199n67 king’s two bodies, 150–52 Kirov, Sergei, 49, 58, 60 Kolosov, M. B., 37 Kolotozov, Mikhail, The Cranes Are Flying, 87 Kol’tsov, Mikhail, 37, 38 Komsomol’skaia pravda (newspaper), 37 Kotkin, Stephen, 51–52, 64 Kotovskii, G. I., 23 Kovaleva, Marina, 148 Koval-Samborskii, Ivan, 91, 192n40 Kozintsev, Grigorii, The Youth of Maxim, 171 Krafft-Ebing, Richard Freiherr von, 15 Kriuchkov, Nikolai, 76, 103–4 Kuz’mina, Elena, 88 Lacan, Jacques, 3, 8–9, 159; influence of, 17; “deadlock” of sexuality, 67, 79; on king’s two bodies, 150–52; on l’absence du rapport sexuel (there is no sexual relation), 67, 198n61; on Other, 163; on sexuality, 67; on subjectivity, 130–31, 135–36; on symbolic death/suicide, 130, 168; and “woman as such,” 107 lack: Freud on, 8; Lacan on, 8–9; male response to, 8, 54, 62, 68; male subjectivity and, 89, 140–45; in Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, 100–101; in Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, 58, 60–61, 65; in Raizman’s The Pilots, 95–97; in Timoshenko’s The Sky-Barge, 104. See also castration Ladynina, Marina, 44

INDEX   ★   221

language: and castration, 8–9; gender as, 160; hysteria and, 90–91, 103 Large Soviet Encyclopedia, 16 law of kinship, 8, 145 law of language, 8, 145 Leibin, V. I., Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Neo-Freudianism, 16 Lenin, Vladimir, 6, 39, 169, 192n40 Leonov, Leonid, The Road to the Ocean, 19–20, 21 Leven, F., 21 Lissitzky, El, 116 Livnev, Sergei, 165; Hammer and Sickle, 3, 13–14, 39–41, 156–69, 157, 161, 166, 167, 168, 200n8 Ljubljana School of Theoretical Psychoanalysis, 17 love: in Barnet’s By the Blue Sea, 76–77; in Lukov’s Two Soldiers, 82–85; patriotism as, 70–71; in Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, 99; socialist realist treatment of, 69–71, 74, 76, 89; in Timoshenko’s The Sky-Barge, 105, 107–10. See also sexuality love plot. 68–71, 76, 85, 86; auxilliary, 82, 84, 86; missing or underdeveloped, 69, 76 Lukov, Leonid, Two Soldiers, 68, 82–89 male subjectivity: and all-male utopias, 105–6, 109; anxiety of, 75; in Barnet’s By the Blue Sea, 77–78; and body, 91; castration and, 9–10; in Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin, 147–50, 152–53; contradictory image of, 97, 103, 154–55; dismemberment/mutilation/ elimination of, in Stalinist fantasy, 3, 22, 40–41, 103, 137, 144–46, 156, 158, 166, 172–74; dominant fiction of West concerning, 7–11, 21–22, 139, 144; emasculation of, 3, 106, 109–11, 120; and fear of the feminine, 125; and feminine position, 109–10, 124;

in films, 10, 12–13, 76–118; and hysteria, 68, 76, 89–91, 96–97, 103–4; and lack, 89, 140–45; limitations of, 102, 104, 106, 121; in Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle, 156–69; and masculinity as construction, 156–69; in novels, 10–11, 19–20; in Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, 10–12, 20–21; in Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man, 10–11, 13, 119–45; in Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, 58, 61–62; in Raizman’s The Pilots, 95–97; response of, to lack/castration anxiety, 8, 54, 62, 68; response of, to women, 86–87; in Stalinist culture, 1–7, 68, 102–3; women’s desires and, 97, 139–40, 143–44. See also exemplary masculinity; New Soviet Man; subjectivity; virility, fantasy of extravagant Maleev, Igor’, 43 Mandel’shtam, Nadezhda, 171 Mannoni, Octave, 8 Mares’ev, Alexei (historical figure), 40, 119, 121, 144 Mar’iamov, G., 185n26 Markizov, Ardan, 145, 198n56 marriage. See heterosexuality/ heteronormativity masculinity, in Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle, 156–69. See also exemplary masculinity; male subjectivity masquerade, 108 maternity. See motherhood Medvedev, Roy, 199n67 Mel’nikova, Evgeniia, 92 Merkur’ev, Vasilii, 105 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 5 Michelangelo, David, 6 Mikoian, Anastas, 199n67 Miller, Martin, 15, 16 mirror stage, 130–31, 135–36 misogyny, 105

222   ★   INDEX

Molodaia gvardia (journal), 11, 20, 24, 37 Molotov, Viacheslav, 16 monumental art, ideal males in, 3, 5–6, 156 Morozov, Pavlik, 74 Mosfil’m, 45, 47, 183n10 motherhood, 74, 76, 84, 190n16 movement: in Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, 100–101; in Raizman’s The Pilots, 91–92; as response to anxiety/fear, 89–91; Soviet heroes and, 6, 11, 20, 21, 25, 97–98, 126, 128–29; in Stalinist culture, restriction of, 101–2, 113 Mukhina, Vera, 5; Industrial Worker and Collective Farmer, ix, 3, 6, 157, 162, 165–66, 176n12 Mulvey, Laura, 3, 54, 62, 68 mutilated bodies. See wounded bodies Nabokov, Vladimir, 189n7; 198n61 Naiman, Eric, 176n7, 186–87n43, 187n47, 194n63 Name-of-the-Father, 8 naturalism, 74 Neshchiplenko, Vasilii, 105 New Soviet Man: body of, 22–23; contemporary assessment of, 19–20; contradictory image of, 1–4, 7, 22, 154–55; ideal of, 4, 5–7; post-Soviet reflection on, 165–66; as socialist realism goal, 21–22; Soviet term for, 175n3. See also exemplary masculinity; male subjectivity New Soviet Woman, 45, 73, 74, 102. See also women News Chronicle (newspaper), 23 Nicholas II, 16 Nikolaev, Leonid, 49 novels, male subjectivity in, 10–11, 19–20. See also socialist realism Nuremburg trials, 121

Olesha, Iurii, 71, 87, 154–55; Envy, 15, 73; A Severe Young Man, 73 Ostrovskaia, Raia, 39 Ostrovskii, Nikolai: body of, 37–39; Born of the Storm, 38; death of, 24, 41; life of, 21, 23–24, 37–39, 119, 166. See also How the Steel Was Tempered (Ostrovskii) Panchasi, Roxanne, 138–39, 173 Panferov, Fedor, Bruski, 73, 74, 75 Panopticon, 33 The Party Card (Pyr’ev), 3, 42–66; body in, 52–53; and castration, 43, 58, 62–63, 65–66; discipline in, 61; female subjectivity in, 12, 43–44, 53, 55, 61; heterosexuality/heteronormativity in, 71; lack in, 58, 60–61, 65; male subjectivity in, 58, 61–62; production and release of, 47–50, 184n18, 185n26, 188n66; reception of, 42–47, 64–65, 183n10, 188n66; sexuality in, 52–53, 55–58; Stalin and, 48, 184n17, 185n26; stills from, 57, 59, 63; timeliness of, 46–52, 60; visual pleasure in, 54–55, 61–62 party membership cards, 48–51, 53–54, 60–61, 64–65, 185n32 patriarchy: classic masculinity and, 8; male hysteria as reaction to, 91; male relations in, 72–73, 105; male subjectivity in, 75; Stalinist, 75, 89; in Timoshenko’s The Sky-Barge, 110–11; women’s place in, 72–73, 105 patriotism, 70 Pelevin, Viktor, 3, 13; Omon Ra, 39–41, 144 penis: fetishism and, 8, 60; (in)commensurability of phallus and, 9, 22, 97, 139, 146, 148, 153, 158, 168; and sexual difference, 8–9, 54 Pentslin, Eduard, The Fighter Pilots, 3, 68, 82, 98–103, 113–15, 118

INDEX   ★   223

performance of gender, 158–60, 167, 200n11 perspective, visual, 117 phallus, 9, 22, 97, 146, 148, 153, 158, 168 phantasy, 7, 177n16. See also ideological fantasy physical culture parades, 6 Pichul, Vasilii, Little Vera, 199n68 pilot: as heterosexual masculine hero, 7, 12, 75, 89, 96, 101, 104, 112–15, 138, 155; female, 92, 93; with limitations or disabilities: 13, 97, 100, 102-4, 108, 114, 118, 127, 130 pilot films: 89–94, 100, 103–8, 11–18, 121, 127. See also Pentslin, Eduard, The Fighter Pilots; Raizman, Iulii, The Pilots; A Story About a Real Man (Polevoi); Timoshenko, Semen, The Sky-Barge. Plamper, Jan, 117 Platonov, Andrei, 21, 39, 71, 87; “Fro,” 70; “Ivan Zhokh,” 15, 173 Pluzhnik, Grigorii, 6 point-of-view shots, 115–16 Polevoi, Boris, 1, 2, 121, 144. See also A Story About a Real Man (Polevoi) Politburo, 32, 181n31 posters, 113, 155 post-Soviet film, 3, 13–14, 39–41, 166–68, 200n6. See also Pelevin, Viktor, Omon Ra; Livnev, Sergei, Hammer and Sickle poststructuralism, 3 power: film viewing and, 62; in Stalinist culture, 25–26, 63 Pravda (newspaper), 37, 48–50, 70, 121 Prokhorov, Alexander, 39 Proletkul’t, 186n43 psychoanalysis, 3, 14–18 psychohistory, 17 purges, 48–49, 51, 138 Pushkin, Aleksandr, Eugene Onegin, 92, 107

Pyr’ev, Ivan: The Brothers Karamazov, 44; career of, 44–45; The Cossacks of Kuban, 44; The Country Bride, 44; The Foreign Woman, 44; musical comedies of, 44; The Pig Farmer and the Shepherd, 44; reminiscences of The Party Card, 45–48, 54, 184n18; The Tractor Drivers, 44; Trauberg’s tribute to, 42. See also The Party Card (Pyr’ev) queer theory, 3, 17 Rabochaia Moskva (newspaper), 65 Raizman, Iulii, The Pilots, 68, 70, 91–98, 93, 96, 115, 118 rear. See war, front/rear as gendered spaces in recognition, 130–38, 163–64 Reich, Wilhelm, 70–71 return of the repressed, 22, 70, 79 Romm, Mikhail, 45 Room, Abram, 73 Rost (journal), 37 Rozanov, Vasilii, 15 Sakhalin, 97–98 Salecl, Renata, 17 screens, 117 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 3, 12, 71–72, 86 Serebriakov, Aleksei, 157 sexual difference: in Barnet’s By the Blue Sea, 77, 79–81; Freud on, 8; in Lukov’s Two Soldiers, 82; in socialist realism, denial of, 75 sexuality: in Barnet’s By the Blue Sea, 77–78; fear of, 27; film and, 54; Lacan on, 67; in Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, 52–53, 55–58; socialist realism and, 67–71, 74, 189n7; in Vinogradskaia’s Anka, 45–46; women and, 69. See also love

224   ★   INDEX

Shaginian, Marietta, The Hydrocentral, 19 Shakhnazarov, Karen, City Zero, 199n68 Shchukin, Boris, 92, 192n40 Sholokhov, Mikhail, And Quiet Flows the Don, 24 show trials, 51, 138 Shtange, Galina Vladimirovna, 170–71 Shumiatskii, Boris, 47, 185n21 Silverman, Kaja, 3, 7, 17, 58, 144, 172 skoptsy, 173 Slivkin, A. M., 47 Small Soviet Encyclopedia, 74 Smirnov, Igor’, 155 socialist realism: and collective belief, 172; construction as theme of, 69–70; and film, 116; goal of, 21; heterosexuality/heteronormativity in, 4, 68–69, 71, 75–89, 98–111; homosociality in, 4, 68–69, 71–73, 75–89, 98–111; love plots in, 69–71, 74, 76–77, 82–85, 89, 99, 105, 107–10; models of, 11, 20–22, 25, 39, 121; as official doctrine, 11, 20; and sexuality, 67–71, 74, 189n7; Stalin’s belief in representations of, 171–72; themes of, 4; war’s front/rear as gendered spaces in, 86; women in, 73–75, 86–87, 104 Soiuzkino, 47, 185n21 Sokolovskaia, Elena, 42–43 The Song of Youth (film), 6 Soviet subjectivity: in Barnet’s By the Blue Sea, 77–79; construction of, 162; invalid as exemplary masculine, 3, 21–22, 40, 97, 120–22, 139, 143, 145–46, 156, 165–66, 172–74; limitations as necessary to, 4, 97, 102–4, 106, 121, 127; masculinity and, 161–62, 164; in Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, 11, 22, 25, 35, 41; overcoming of body by, 22; in Pentslin’s The Fighter Pilots, 103; in Polevoi’s A Story About a Real Man,

125–27, 132–33; production of, 31; in Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, 58; and sexuality, 69. See also subjectivity: in Stalinist culture Soviet Union: bird’s-eye “mapped” perspective on, 101, 113, 115; collective belief in, 169–72; everyday life in, 170. See also Stalinist culture space, cinematic techniques and, 116 Stakhanovites, 4, 6 Stalin, Josef: as big Other, 14, 118, 163–64, 169; on Bolshevik strength, 144; Chkalov on, 118; Communist Party under, 50; constitution put forth by, 170–71, 202n41; cult of personality around, 146–47; death of, 199n68; as father/teacher/leader, 10, 24, 94, 118, 145–48; as ideal figure, 6, 10; images of, in films, 16, 102, 110, 113, 118, 145, 147–51, 153, 157, 163–65; Ostrovskii and, 24; on party cards, 185n32; and patriarchy, 89; portraits of, 117; and Pyr’ev’s The Party Card, 48, 184n17, 185n26; reality and fiction in mind of, 171–72; Voroshilov and, 82; wife’s suicide, 189n74; in World War II, 199n67 Stalinist culture: and castration, 146; Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin and, 146–53; dismemberment/mutilation/ elimination of men in, 3, 22, 40–41, 103, 137, 144–46, 156, 158, 166, 172–74; dominant fiction of, 7–11, 21, 144, 146, 147; family in, 12, 74–75; female subjectivity in, 43; ideal males in, 4, 5–7; and its “own,” 137–38; male subjectivity in, 1–7, 68, 102–3; patriarchy in, 75, 89; in post-Soviet films, 13–14; prosperous self-image promoted by, 44; subjectivity in, 25–36, 40–41, 66, 92–95, 101–2, 113–14, 125–27, 129–30, 132–33, 144–45, 157–58, 161–69 (see

INDEX   ★   225

also Soviet subjectivity); wounded bodies in, 1–4, 7, 10–11, 22, 97 Stalin’s Tribe (film), 6 State Directorate of the Film and Photo Industry (GUKF), 46 Stavskii, V., 37 Stolper, Aleksandr, Wait for Me, 86 A Story About a Real Man (Polevoi), 1, 2, 86–87, 119–45; basis of, 119, 121–22; and castration, 120–21, 123–24, 140–41; film and opera made from, 121; gender confusion in, 139–40; and lack, 140–45; male subjectivity in, 10–11, 13, 119–45; New Soviet Man in, 2, 3; New Soviet Woman in, 73; as socialist realist model, 121; still from, 137; subjectivity and desubjectification in, 126–38; on usefulness of the wounded, 174 Stuchka, P., 74 subjectivity: and desubjectification, 130; discipline and, 31–34; film apparatus and production of, 114–17; ideal Soviet, 31; ideology (interpellation) and, 126–27, 129–30, 134–38; and lack, 9; mirror stage and, 130–31, 135–36; in Ostrovskii’s How the Steel Was Tempered, 25–36; and recognition/misrecognition, 130–38, 163–64; in Stalinist culture, 25–36, 40–41, 66, 92–95, 101–2, 113–14, 125–27, 129–30, 132–33, 144–45, 157–58, 161–69. See also female subjectivity; identity; male subjectivity; Soviet subjectivity sublimation, and socialism, 69–70 suicide, 26, 32, 92, 95, 130, 168–69 superego, 32, 181n29, 181n31 Supreme Council of the USSR, 82 surveillance, 22, 25–26, 28–29, 31–34. See also vision Sverdlin, Lev, 76 symbolic order, 9, 130, 168, 172

Timoshenko, Semen, The Sky-Barge, 68, 82, 103–12, 117, 118, 193n50 Tolstoy, Aleksei, Bread, 20 Tolstoy, Lev, Anna Karenina, 38 total cinema, 116 tractor musicals, 44 transvestitism, 108 Trauberg, Leonid, 42–43 travel. See movement Tregub, Semen, 37 Trotskii, Leon, Literature and Revolution, 5 Turovskaia, Maia, 45, 183n10 Union of Soviet Writers, 41 utopias, all-male, 68–69, 71, 73, 81, 86, 87, 89, 99, 105–6, 109 Vasil’ev, Georgii and Sergei (the “Brothers Vasil’ev): Chapaev, 11, 46, 184n17 Vertov, Dziga, 116; Lullaby, 74, 145 Vinogradskaia, Katerina, 183n10, 184n18, 185n26; Anka, 45–46, 53, 55 virility, fantasy of extravagant, 4, 6–7, 75, 155, 161, 165 vision: film apparatus and, 114, 117; mastery through, 101, 112–18. See also surveillance visual pleasure, 12, 54, 61–62 Voitsik, Ada, 43, 44, 55 Volkogonov, Dmitrii, 199n67 Voloshinov, V. N., Freudianism, 15 Voroshilov, Kliment, 16, 81–82, 89, 118 war, front/rear as gendered spaces in, 86, 120, 141–42 war veterans, wounded, 138–39, 173 Weininger, Otto, 15 Widdis, Emma, 76, 112–14; Visions of a New Land, 101, 112 women: boyish, 73, 75, 87, 139–40, 167; male response to, 86–87; and male subjectivity, 97, 139–40, 143–44;

226   ★   INDEX

patriarchy’s denial of, 72–73; and sexuality, 69; socialist realism and, 73–75, 86–87, 104. See also female subjectivity; New Soviet Woman wounded bodies: and castration, 140–41; post-Soviet reflections on, 39–41; and productivity, 174; in Stalinist culture, 1–4, 7, 10–11, 22, 97, 122; of war veterans, 138–39, 173. See also invalid, as exemplary Stalinist male; male subjectivity: dismemberment/mutilation/elimination of, in Stalinist fantasy

Žižek, Slavoj, 3, 17, 21, 36, 130, 168, 172; Enjoy Your Symptom!, 169–70; For They Know Not What They Do, 150 Zagdanskii, Andrei, Interpretation of Dreams, 16 Zalkind, Aron, 27, 67, 70 Zamkov, Aleksei, 5, 176n7 zoologism, 74 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, Before the Sunrise, 15