Soviet Sixties" sounds like an oxymoron: Brezhnev in lovebeads. But Russia experienced a period of cultural ferment analogous in certain ways to the transformations that roiled America in the Age of Aquarius. The Soviet Sixties began earlier than the American version and ended sooner, though equally abruptly.

Change was set in motion by Stalin's death in 1953 and Khrushchev's famous denunciation of the "cult of personality" at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956. What followed was a period known as "the Thaw." While artists and thinkers were still subject to a grab bag of ideological constraints, there was an explosion of long-suppressed freedom in all of the arts. These were the years in which the charismatic poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko declaimed his verses to enormous audiences, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's landmark novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published.

The Soviet film industry was also revitalized during this period. While the works of Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn, and other leading writers of the Thaw were widely read in the United States, few Americans are acquainted with the films of that era. "Soviet Sixties," a traveling show that played recently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, has introduced some of the best of these movies to an American audience.

After Stalin's death in 1953, the first efforts to escape the constraints of socialist realism mimicked documentaries, seeking an authenticity that most Soviet-era films lacked. In these pseudo-documentaries, filmmakers rejected color—which had become synonymous with ideologically perfect socialist realism—and consciously chose black-and-white instead. By the Sixties, black-and-white had become a less politically laden choice. As Josephine Woll observes, "directors [in the 1960s] embraced black-and-white not in order to represent reality truthfully, as their predecessors had done ten years earlier, but to generate their own singular vision and version of it."1 This singular vision became the hallmark of the "Soviet Sixties."

During the Thaw, the themes that had been enshrined in Stalin-era cinema—the heroic Soviet citizen, "the dream of progress, the sanctity of labor, the wisdom of the people, and the strength of the collective will"—were undercut, satirized, and in many cases altogether ignored. This period saw filmmakers probe individuals' emotions and private lives without constantly relating the personal to the collective good. The new breed of humanist heroes inhabited their own moral universe, rather than the universe of the state.

Mikhail Romm's Nine Days of One Year (1961) is typical of this new style: a dark film dealing with a previously forbidden subject, atomic research. The two main characters are scientists. Gusev (Aleksei Batalov) is driven and idealistic. He dreams of creating energy from his atomic experiments and sacrifices himself to his work. In contrast, Kulikov (played by Innokentii Smoktunovski) is a jaded nihilist who ridicules the notion that mankind is advancing inexorably toward a more perfect existence. Throughout the film, he mocks science, society, and the rhetoric of progress; he refers to the diners at an elegant Moscow cafeteria as "Neanderthals."

Made without a musical score and filmed with foreshortened shots inside an anonymous science institute, Nine Days of One Year creates a disorienting atmosphere reminiscent of the 1919 silent classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In one shot, Gusev, returning to work though ill from excessive exposure to radiation, is shown as a tiny figure walking at the base of a huge cement wall, the outer wall of the institute. Beginning with the accident that exposes Gusev to the radiation, the film evokes a feeling of anxiety. Gusev is desperate to finish his experiment and prove that he has built a functioning thermonuclear reactor, but a new accident causes him to deteriorate even more. As the movie ends, he realizes that his discovery has nothing to do with thermonuclear reactions, and he will probably die. In the Soviet press the film was criticized for "objectivity" and pessimism (not appropriate for a movie that young Soviets would watch), for Kulikov's ironic view of the world, and for the abandonment of the genuine hero. Even so, it was a smash hit with Soviet audiences.

Another subversive film that resonated with audiences was Andrei Konchalovsky's The First Teacher (1964), about a young communist who travels to a distant Central Asian village to found the village's first school. The film opens in 1924, in the early years of the communist state, with Lenin still alive. The teacher, like many of the functionaries of the new state, is almost as uneducated as his students. He is driven by an enormous sense of duty and passion and at one point builds a stepping stone bridge across a frigid river (in his bare feet) so that his students can reach the school during the winter.

His good intentions, however, are overshadowed by his insensitivity, blindness, and absolute lack of understanding for those around him. When he receives the news that Lenin has died, he races into the village and creates a bonfire out of the villagers' precious brush and firewood in order to force the people to wake up to hear the news of the tragic event. Later, he rescues one of his students, Altynai, from the neighboring landowner to whom she has just been sold as a bride. Her husband, a man "whose time is past" now that communism will soon create equality for all, has raped her on her first night in his house. But when the teacher returns home with Altynai after he has brought soldiers to arrest the landowner, the people in the village spit on her and shun her: she must leave the village.

In a famous scene in the film, while the students are chanting "so-ci-a-lism, so-ci-a-lism, so-ci-a-lism," the camera shifts to look out the window of the school, panning across the barren, rocky steppe—a place seemingly alien to the promises of socialism, just as the people of the village are resistant to the new ideology.

A similar outlook informs Mikhail Kalatozov's The Unsent Letter (1959, with Sergei Urusevskii as cinematographer). During the 1930s and 1940s, geologists were the favorite socialist realist heroes. Under Stalin, nature was typically portrayed as a passive, malleable force that could be fashioned to suit the needs of progress, just as human society was to be rebuilt from the ground up under communism. But in The Unsent Letter, a prospecting team of geologists in Siberia comes up against the murderous indifference of the untamable wilderness.

Desperate to find diamonds, they have stayed later than they planned, until late in the fall, with winter threatening. In a trancelike sequence, the four prospectors flail at the earth with pickaxes while the fire of their campfire billows in and out of the frame. It is a drunken, enraged rape of the earth, an earth that is not allowed to keep its secrets any longer. Finally, the team finds diamonds. They radio home to report their success, and prepare for the return trip. But on the day they are set to leave, a forest fire breaks out. Their guide is crushed by a falling tree, and one of the geologists sprains his ankle. As they struggle through the forest, their battle for survival is mocked by the news on their portable radio, lauding their discovery of diamonds. One by one, they fall victim to fire, freezing cold, and starvation.

In 1964, Khrushchev resigned as First Secretary and the subsequent Brezhnev regime began to clamp down on artistic expression. By 1967, Brezhnev's ideological controls had, for all intents and purposes, forced the film industry back a decade or more. Interesting and provocative films were shelved or forced into oblivion.

But the films of the Thaw, in the late 1950s and 1960s, had given Soviet audiences and filmmakers a chance to see themselves as they were, to laugh and groan with fear and disgust at the anti-heroes of the day (themselves included), and to experiment with the creation of alternative realities. It is impossible to see these films from the "Soviet Sixties" without wondering what might have happened had the spirit of those years been allowed to flourish.

1. See Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000).

Bethany Davis Noll is a researcher at the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at Oxford University.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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