The Hypocrisy behind Early Soviet Cinema

Leon Trotsky phenomenally described the noticeable flaws in popular cinema in his editorial from Pravda titled “Vodka, the Church, and Cinema”. This article initially describes changes in early Soviet life such as vodka prohibition and the eight hour cap on working days, but then expands on the potentially devastating, but useful role of cinema during the free hours of citizens. Trotsky almost sounds vitriolic when he states, “In the daily life of capitalist towns, the cinema has become just such an integral part of life as the bath, the beer-hall, the church, and other indispensable institutions, commendable and otherwise.” Trotsky was the king of anti-capitalism, and a statement about cinema in capitalist areas must have irked him beyond belief. He later states this disdain by saying, “The fact that we have so far, i.e., in nearly six years, not taken possession of the cinema shows how slow and uneducated we are, not to say, frankly, stupid.” Trotsky believed from the beginning that cinema could be used as an instrument of propaganda both for communism and against it. It is somewhat surprising to see that it took the amount of time it did to finally regulate the film industry in the Soviet Union, given the government’s constant paranoia about citizen uprising. The history of soviet cinema is quite interesting and included multiple phases.

The film industry in Soviet days started slowly because of filmmaker antipathy towards the Bolsheviks. This decreased funding and left the medium financially insolvent, thus crippling growth. However, schools began to fill with aspiring directors in varying genres, and the film movement began to expand quite rapidly after the Civil War. Lenin and the Bolsheviks embraced the industry, believing that film was the art of the future for the Soviets. Filmmakers created movies portraying anything because the public was entranced by the moving images. Many younger artists surely thought they were showing off their creative, independent ideals, however, a different story took place in their studies. Teachers indirectly urged students to bring a Bolshevik narrative to their films through filming techniques and images. The portrayal of such socialist narratives became engrained in the minds of those enjoying the films, and was a great means of subliminal propaganda. For the first time, many Russian peasants had the capability to see their new leaders. Adele Barker notes in the Russia Reader, “…more peasants knew what Lenin and Trotsky looked like than they did Tsar Nicholas II, whose portrait many had never seen.” This brought the peasants together with the city people in knowing their leaders and seeing the similarities among all classes. This was just another indirect method of propaganda for the Bolshevik leaders. Battleship Potemkin is lauded for its filming methods and amazing technological achievements for early 20th century film, but was also a pride piece for the Bolsheviks in that it portrayed the 1905 Revolution from a Bolshevik viewpoint.

Freedom in film lasted a short period from 1917 until after the Civil War’s end in 1922. After the Bolshevik victory, censorship began in full effect, thus isolating the Soviet film industry from outside influences, and focusing on socialist ideals. The Soviet Union ironically prided itself on individualistic film achievements, while actually forcing filmmakers to show certain things. Socialist ideals were present in every film, regardless of target age, demographic, or film genre. This arguably diminished the idea of film as a type of art, and turned it into a Soviet propaganda machine. The hypocrisy often ran deep throughout Soviet Russia, but the hypocrisy behind early Soviet cinema, leading to its later stages, was one of the worst offenses by the communist government.

-Alex

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https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/women/life/23_07_12.htm

http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1924-2/socialist-cinema/

http://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/russia-and-its-empires/laurel-tisserand/

The Russia Reader. Barker, Adele and Grant, Bruce. 365-369.

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Pinkertonovshchina in Soviet Russia

The Pinkerton detective agency has been in existence since the mid 1800s. Allan Pinkerton started the agency after moving to the United States from Scotland in 1842. His goal was to create the largest detective agency in the world, and his wild success reached a paradigm in the early 1890s, when the agency employed a higher number detectives than soldiers in the US Army. Pinkerton became more prominent in American culture in the early 1900s due to their involvement in many labor issues. This prominence led to a pop-culture standing in the United States, which surprisingly caught on in Soviet Russia.

The Nat Pinkerton craze in early 20th century Russia is well documented in many books and scholarly articles. The reasons for such idolization of an American detective series are widely debated, but the most realistic cause is also the reason for the success of Sherlock Holmes in Russia: Western ideologies permeating into Eastern culture.

Western products and ideas have entered the Eastern European and Russian markets through various mediums, and the commercial craze of multiple detective series from 1907 through the 1920s was a major presence in Soviet culture. The Nat Pinkerton magazines were the most endearing for citizens of all ages because of their “cross-cultural link” to Soviet Realism. The ideologies present in the short reads often paralleled Soviet culture at the time, and allowed people to bask in the ongoing revolutionary culture that was a staple of early Soviet years. The magazines were even loved so much by early Soviet leaders, that a series known as the “red” Pinkerton was considered.

In the Soviet Union, it was a well-known fact that Lenin was a voracious reader in the crime/ detective genre. One of the major Soviet debaters, Nikolai Bukharin, thought the Pinkerton craze was interesting, but could be put to better use. This would have involved a somewhat communist Pinkerton propaganda figure, who would have stoked up young communists in all parts of the country. Because of Stalin’s reluctance to accept any type of art in the country, such a character was never created. However, the Nat Pinkerton craze did change young Soviet life through the short, but to-the-point dialogues between characters, along with the engrossing plot developments that symbolized many prominent Soviet ideals.

The Nat Pinkerton series was not be as well received in modern day Russia, but it spiked a long-standing interest in detective novels and shows, epitomized today by the recent high-budget Sherlock Holmes series on Russian television.

-Alex

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http://www.crimeculture.com/?page_id=4215

http://languagehat.com/dralyuk-on-pinkerton/

http://www.pinkerton.com/history