Redressing the Commissar: Thaw Cinema Revises Soviet Structuring Myths

ELENA MONASTIREVA-ANSDELL

leksandr Askoldovs 1967 film The Commissar opens with a soft female voice singing a lullaby as the camera lingers on a pale morning sky before descending to a misty country landscape with a statue of the Madonna by the road. Valerii Ginzburgs camera continues its fluid pan across the steppe until it meets a long procession of Red Army troops, whereupon it accompanies them as it draws back to the holy figure. While clanking metal weaponry temporarily drowns out the lullaby, and the dust raised by the soldiers feet obscures the peaceful view as the regiment mindlessly bypasses the Madonna, the song soon resumes its affectionate flow over the tired procession. In this unconventional introduction to a Civil War film that was supposed to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Askoldov (b. 1932), Ginzburg (b. 1925), and the composer Alfred Shnitke (193498) captured the moral and philosophical tension defining their subversive reassessment of Soviet legitimating narratives.1 Rather than celebrating the power of Soviet ideology to shape a better world, the filmin the words of a Soviet censordepicts the revolution as a force that opposes the very essence of human existence, a phenomenon that destroys personal ties by causing alienation, despair, and uncertainty about the future.2 The cinema officials who banned
Research for this article was assisted by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Oberlin College. I am greatly indebted to Andrew R. Durkin, Arlene Forman, Dodona Kiziria, and Nina Perlina who read various drafts and made valuable suggestions. I would also like to thank Vida T. Johnson, Jane Knox-Voina, and the third reader of the manuscript for The Russian Review for their encouragement and insightful comments. Finally, I am grateful to The Russian Cinema Council for their permission to use the stills reprinted in this article. 1 Konstantin Shcherbakov Shag navstrechu, Iskusstvo kino, 1987, no. 1:58. The Commissar, made fifty years after the October Revolution, belongs to the category of anniversary films, works meant to commemorateand glorifyimportant Bolshevik victories and to reaffirm the legitimacy of the Soviet system. Askoldov studied direction at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in the 1960s and made The Commissar as his diploma certification feature. After the banning of The Commissar in December of 1967 and revocation of his diploma he never made films again (in the USSR film directors were required to hold a diploma from VGIK). Only with the onset of glasnost did he eventually see the release of The Commissar in 1987 and witness its international triumph. See Elena Stishovas article for an in-depth account of the films troubled history (Passions Over Commissar, Wide Angle 12 [October 1990]). 2 O nedostatkakh stsenariia Komissar, August 2, 1966, quoted from Valerii Fomin Na bratskikh mogilakh ne staviat krestov, Iskusstvo kino, 1991, no. 8:22. The Russian Review 65 (April 2006): 23049 Copyright 2006 The Russian Review

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the film in 1967 censured The Commissar for distort[ing] the humanist essence of the proletarian revolution.3 Not surprisingly, they ignored the affirmative stance the movie takes toward a Thaw-inspired, heterodox understanding of the Revolution as a kind International, in which free individuals could celebrate their philosophical, ethnic, and gender differences, thereby shattering the crust of an homogenizing ideological dogma. At the time of films making, the authorities had begun to reimpose this dogma quite openly, leaving no illusions as to the possibility of resolving the conflict between the individual and the authoritarian state within the existing system. Absent from Soviet screens since 1957, the Revolution and the Civil War reemerged almost a decade later as the setting for a series of films authorized in preparation for the impending half-century anniversary. Younger filmmakers chosen to participate in the series, however, were motivated not by a desire to pay homage to the regime born of the Revolution, but rather to question and test its ideological soundness. When in the mid1960s the Thaw generations cherished ideal of humane socialism based on Leninist norms started showing features of the old authoritarian system, filmmakers felt a need to revisit the societal myth of creation, taking a journey back to the source as a means of recovering the original truth first hand.4 Evgenii Margolit notes that these late-Thaw inquiries into the revolutionary past are very reflective and analytical, featuring intellectual protagonists, rather than the ordinary idealistic revolutionaries of such 1950s films as Grigorii Chukhrais The Forty-First, Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumovs Pavel Korchagin (both 1956), or Iulii Raizmans The Communist (1957). In these films, the artists personal contemplation of the myth reverberates with the protagonists probing assessment of the very essence of their faith over which they debate with the antagonist.5 With the exception of a few filmsmost of them about Lenin (the late Thaws ultimate intellectual protagonist)these introspective inquiries into the countrys founding years proved too subversive to the existing system to be allowed to reach wider audiences. Some of them, such as Aleksandr Ivanovs The First Russians (1967), received limited distribution, while others, including Askoldovs The Commissar, the cine-almanac The Beginning of an Unknown Age (1967), and Gennadii Polokas Intervention (1968), were summarily shelved.6 While each of the above-mentioned films examines Soviet national identity from previously unexplored and probing angles, The Commissar synthesizes the five-decadelong cinematic tradition of modeling Soviet society on a military unit, a model that ultimately proved impervious to Thaw-era efforts at dismantling sociopolitical and ethnic hierarchies. The film tells the story of a Russian female commissar who resigns from her position at the top of her regiments chain of command in order to give birth. Bivouacked
3 E. Surkov (associate chairman of the State Cinema Committee, chief editor of the Scenario Board), On the Shortcomings of the Scenario Commissar, August 2, 1966, quoted from Elena Stishova, Passions Over Commissar, 67. 4 Evgenii Margolit, Otblesk kostra, ili nastoiashchii konets bol'shoi voiny, in Kinematograf ottepeli: Kniga vtoraia, ed. Vitalii Troianovskii (Moscow, 2002), 1056. 5 Ibid., 106. 6 Featuring Larisa Shepit'kos The Homeland of Electricity, Andrei Smirnovs Angel, and Genrikh Gabais Motria (all 1967). Motria was shown on television two years later. See Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London, 2000), 202.

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in a crowded Jewish household, she learns a whole new way of relating to people. When the war raging outside threatens to obliterate this peaceful community, she feels compelled to take a final stand for all those similarly oppressed, leaving her newborn and her host family behind. Rearticulating the basic components of the familiar model, Askoldov draws upon the Thaws reconceptualization of Soviet structuring mythologies to redefine and ultimately invert the established framework of the historical-revolutionary genre in his search for ways to ameliorate the rapidly widening gap between the states gradual reassertion of authoritarianism and the societys ever-increasing expectations of personal freedom and social equality. REVISIONS OF SOVIET STRUCTURING MYTHS IN THAW CINEMA Since the early 1930s, the Civil War had become the symbol of the countrys founding period, its initial point of reference. It replaced the focus favored in Soviet avant-garde films of the 1920s on the more spontaneous and ideologically less-controlled stage of social upheaval with the revolutionary masses as the chief protagonist. The Bolshevik partys organizational and mobilizing role in the Civil Warno matter how exaggerated in later propagandawas recruited to legitimize the Stalinist regime that was rapidly consolidating its political and economic powers. In 1934, Georgii and Sergei Vasiliev cinematically embodied the myth of the nations origin in their historical-revolutionary production Chapaev. In it, the new societys founding fathers, the popular commander and the political commissar, work together to organize and direct the initially spontaneous but malleable and loyal masses, endowing them with the Marxist consciousness necessary to defeat counterrevolutionaries.7 The film established a pattern for a new cinematic genre (in many ways comparable to the American Western) in which the historical timeframe during the new societys turbulent years of birth served as a metaphor for contemporary political and social tensions. Along with Chapaev, films like Aleksandr Dovzhenkos Shchors (the Ukrainian Chapaev, 1939) and Leonid Lukovs Aleksandr Parkhomenko (1942) helped justify Stalins authoritarian policies of the thirties and legitimize his leadership in World War II by adjusting Civil War events to reflect the contemporary situation and by crafting an image of an omnipotent Leader capable of guiding the Soviet people out of civic strife, foreign occupation, and economic hardship.8
7 At this early stage in the development of the genre, the relationship between the spontaneous commander and the rational commissar involves a certain degree of interdependence: if Furmanov teaches Chapaev discipline and the party line, Chapaev excels in military strategy and leadership skills. This allows us to view their partnership as joint leadership of the masses who are inferior in all the above-mentioned respects. In later films, the figures of the commander and the commissar merge into one, thus omitting or marginalizing the intermediate figure of the spontaneous commanderwho is of the people, but at the same time more talented and ideologically receptive than themand overcoming the ambiguous duality inconceivable in the image of the omnipotent Leader in the second half of the 1930s. 8 Slavic (Russian and Ukrainian) Civil War Leaders dominated the Stalinist screen. Some of the other national republics within the Soviet Union made historical epics about their token national heroes who were so chosen from prerevolutionary past as to highlight those republics long-standing loyalty to Russia. See, for example, Mikhail Chiaurelis Georgii Saakadze (Tbilisi Studio, 1942) or Bek-Nazarovs David Bek (Erevan Studio, 1944).

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As Katerina Clark has shown in her influential volume on the Soviet novel, in this mythological framework, the Civil War furnished a metaphor for the Stalinist sense of reality as an unceasing struggle between the revolutionary us and the counterrevolutionary them (the Whites, the imperialists, the kulaks, the saboteurs, and later the Nazis, all of them commonly represented as hostile natural elements requiring subordination or defeat). The hierarchical structure of a military regiment in which ideological allegiances outweigh personal ties provided a blueprint for the organization of Soviet society as a harmonious big family consisting of model sons and wise fathers with Stalin as the patriarch.9 Although in this imagined society fathers acted as mentors directing their sons toward greater political maturity, even the most model sons never became fathers themselves. In this essentially patriarchal order women generally represented the ordinary people, who, under the influence of the party (in the form, of course, of a man), will embrace the new ways and accept the wisdom of the revolution.10 Following Nikita Khrushchevs proclaimed return to Leninist ideals at the Twentieth Party Congress (March 1956), Soviet filmmakers in the early years of the Thaw utilized the dramatic possibilities of the Civil War setting to cleanse the Revolutions utopian ideals of Stalinist distortions. Such 1956 films as Iurii Egorovs They Were the First, Alov and Naumovs Pavel Korchagin, Chukhrais The Forty-first, as well as Vladimir Skuibins Cruelty (1958) departed from the long-established tradition that exalted the heroic leadership of the fathers, focusing instead on the exploits of the big familys model sons and daughters, the ordinary and youthful participants of the revolutionary events. Despite their earnest desire to recover the egalitarian and liberating aspects of the Revolution, these early Thaw films revealed a hitherto unthinkable tension between the protagonists ideological loyalty to their big family and their private commitments. Vitalii Troianovskii notes that these characters sincere faith in the collective coexisted with and at the same time denied their equally profound thirst for personal freedom, while Josephine Woll points out that this central paradox of the Thaw is best exemplified in The Fortyfirst.11 The film depicts a passionate love affair between a Red Army sharpshooter Mariutka and a White Army officer. Stranded on an isolated island, these ideological enemies have plenty of time for both affectionate moments and heated philosophical debates. Even though Mariutka eventually fulfills her revolutionary duty by shooting her officer-lover
9 See Clarks discussion of the Socialist Realist master plot and the official Soviet myth of the great family, in which she distinguishes between the little, nuclear family and the symbolic family of the state, a political community with the higher-order bonds (The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual [Chicago, 1981], 11415). 10 Lynne Attwood, Rodina-Mat and the Soviet Cinema, in Gender Restructuring in Russian Studies, ed. Marianne Liljestrom (Tampere, Finland: 1993), 17. In her study of female roles in Russian art and literature Attwood argues that cinema reflects the more general tendency to represent women as a range of abstract ideas, particularly those connected with nationhood, the land and the people (ibid., 15). She further observes that the age-old Russian tradition of associating women with the land, the nation, and the state of its moral health gained particular prominence in the World War II movie, the updated reincarnation of the Civil War film. In such films as Fridrikh Ermlers She Defends Her Motherland (1943) and Lev Arnshtams Zoya (1944), the older women represent the motherland and younger female partisans its people. When Pasha, the protagonist of She Defends Her Motherland, (who had mobilized fellow villagers into a partisan unit to avenge the invaders) mercilessly executes a partisan deserter, she upholds the moral as well as ideological standards among her symbolic children (ibid., 20). 11 Vitalii Troianovskii, Chelovek ottepeli, in Kinematograf ottepeli: Kniga pervaia, ed. V. Troianovskii (Moscow, 1996), 31; Woll, Real Images, 41.

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(and her forty-first target), the final close-up is of her anguished face as she weeps over the body clasped in her arms, the rifle forgotten on the sanda collision of despairing faith and doomed love.12 The protagonists femininity has a primarily symbolic function, contrasted as it is to the predominant masculinity of Stalinist authoritarian culture. The narrative progression in which the initially man-like heroine casts off her restrictive military uniform and reveals her capacity for love and nurture symbolizes the Thaws recovery of the kernel of Leninist ideals from the hard shell of Stalinist dogmatic encrustations. In the guise of Mariutkas initially aberrant femininity, the film repudiates the previously celebrated hypermasculinity compromised under Stalin and proclaims emotional openness and compassion as the Thaws new ideal. While the narratives focus on the female protagonist and her emotional awakening anticipates The Commissar, The Forty-first reserves the more solemn position of official authority for a male character. In its portrayal of the Red Army detachment that makes its way through the desert to the Aral Sea, the film readjusts the big familys hierarchy by humanizing its commanding commissar and bringing him closer in scale to his ideological charges. The narrators voiceover establishes the thirty-four surviving fighters as most ordinary people, who prove their revolutionary loyalty through their perseverance and triumph over the harsh elements. Commissar Evsiukov leads his soldiers (whom he addresses as brothers) not so much by virtue of his superior political awarenesshis political education is rudimentary at bestbut by the power of his intuitive faith and physical endurance. The commissar takes responsibility for the lives of his charges and personally attends to every one of those who die in the course of the long journey. In the mandatory scene of bidding farewell to a murdered fightera revolutionary martyr whose ultimate sacrifice traditionally allowed a commissar the opportunity for a tendentious speech justifying revolutionary violenceEvsiukov simply asks his deceased brother for forgiveness (Prosti, brat). The commissar respects the limits of his authority when he subsequently refuses to execute the sentry responsible for the unnecessary death, leaving judgment to the revolutionary tribunal. Evsiukovs allegiances, however, lie first and foremost with the Revolution and the revolutionary collective and he expects no less from his troops, branding any physical or ideological wavering as desertion, with all attendant implications. This masculine philosophy of unconditional loyalty to the revolutionary cause resounds in Mariutkas final shot, even though her recovered femininity rebels against this violent act. Mikhail Kalatozovs The Cranes Are Flying (1957) transplants the discussion of the relationship between the public and the private that has traditionally structured Soviet national identity to a World War II setting. In the second half of the 1940s this setting superseded the Civil War as a historic framework for Stalinist national mythmaking. Like Chukhrai before him, Kalatozov casts the ideological crisis threatening the integrity of the big family in explicitly gendered terms. The heroines inner split in The Forty-first here resurfaces as a confrontation between an introspective and emotionally vulnerable individual and the collectivist society mobilized for war. While those around her, including
12

Ibid., 41.

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her fianc Boris, his sister, and his best friend, join in a communal war effort, suspending their private concerns and commitments as they don military uniforms, Veronika experiences the war as an ultimately personal tragedy. The film documents the heroines traumatic psychological journey through a number of life-changing events. She first loses her parents in a bombing raid, then Boris who disappears at the front; his cousin Mark rapes her while she is still mourning her loved ones, then in an act of desperation and self-punishment she marries Mark. Contributing to the common cause by working as a volunteer in a military hospital, Veronika fights her own war, seeking the moral strength to come to terms with her betrayal of Boris and accept the news of his death when it eventually reaches her. The heroines emotional solitude in the midst of her symbolic community (which also condemns her as a faithless fiance and a self-absorbed individual) highlights the big familys indifference to the individuals personal traumas and needs. Even the loving and sensitive Boris callously disregards Veronikas feelings when he forfeits his draft exemption and joins up without conferring with her first. His loyalty to the collective thus comes before his commitment to his fiance and his nuclear family. When Boris leaves her to face the trials of war alone he, in a way, betrays Veronika before she betrays him. In his discussion of Cranes as a home-front family melodrama Aleksandr Prokhorov argues that the film, in fact, identifies the big family of us with the war forces that brutalize the individual.13 In Cranes Kalatozov more specifically than Chukhrai in The Forty-first connects societys internal conflict to the crisis of the big familys paternal authority. Rather than merely toning down the importance of leadership and foregrounding communal efforts, the film cleaves the previously monolithic power of the one and only father of the nation in two, into the competing notions of national and familial authority. The former, official discourse, appears in the film as the disembodied voice of state radio, whose dispassionate, standardized announcement that there were no significant developments at the front follows the emotionally moving scene of Boriss tragic demise, thereby conveying an epic vision of history that denies the value of individual life. If state paternity appears in the film as largely incorporeal and static, familial paternity becomes embodied in Boriss flesh-and-blood father, Fedor, who overcomes his occasional internal contradictions to emerge as an authentic parental figure. Physically imposing and gentle at the same time, Fedor provides the homeless and orphaned Veronika with shelter and familial support when the war shatters her peacetime security. On a number of occasions, he rebels against the insincerity implicit in official discourse, but falls back on it when he impulsively denounces unfaithful fiances in order to comfort a despairing patient. He grasps the true meaning of this potentially murderous generalization as soon as he sees Veronikas distressed face. In order to win back the heroines filial trust, this Thaw father must abandon ideological clichs, reverting instead to his genuine fairness
13 Aleksandr Prokhorov, Soviet Family Melodrama of the 1940s and 1950s: From Wait for Me to The Cranes Are Flying, in Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, ed. Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (Durham, NC, 2002), 225. In the following discussion of Cranes, I draw upon Prokhorovs detailed analysis of the state versus small family paternity in the film.

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and kindness. The film juxtaposes the apparent brutality of the compromised state logos to Veronika and Fedors inherent emotional sincerity, conveyed through such nonverbal means as emotional gesture, facial close-ups, and expressive movement. In Cranes, the small family with a melodramatic emotional father emerges as an alternative to the totalitarian national family of the Stalinist era.14 While the film envisions the small family as a patriarchal institution, it celebrates the qualities traditionally associated with femininity as the Thaws ideal for both genders. Cranes opens a succession of Thaw films in which the good mother is a male figure who displaces a biological mother.15 Besides acting as a sensitive parent for the orphaned heroine, Fedor, in his capacity as a doctor, nurtures and comforts wounded soldiers, his symbolic children. His daughter Irina, on the other hand, lacks the emotional sensitivity and nurturing qualities of her father. The film presents her choice of a traditionally masculine occupation (like her father, she is a surgeon), total dedication to the communal cause, emotional severity, and visual austerity (she pulls her hair back and wears a military uniform) in a direct contrast to Veronikas unrestrained femininity. The bold reaffirmation of the individuals right to a private world notwithstanding, Cranes falls short of an unconditional endorsement of the personal over the public. If Fedors emotional sincerity and nurturing form a necessary counterbalance to his authority as the nuclear and symbolic family patriarch, Veronikas fulfillment in the film is contingent upon her acceptance of a certain degree of social responsibility, be it through mothering the war orphan Boriska or joining in the life of the community in the final victorycelebration scene. Further readjustment of paternal roles took place in World War II films set in a military milieu. Revaz Chkheidze subverted the traditional chain of command in A Soldiers Father (1964). The films eponymous protagonist, the ageing Georgian peasant Georgii Makharashvili, joins the army as a private in order to find his son, a senior lieutenant in a tank division. Instead of leading, this father follows his courageous son all the way to Berlin. In a reversal of the popular Thaw scenario of orphan adoption, a group of younger soldiers adopt the initially disoriented Georgii and help him to join their battalion, a significantly smaller, and therefore much more intimate unit than the conventional army regiment. The fathers authority within this small family comes as much from his perseverance and courage, as from his emotional authenticity, nurturing warmth, and unimposing morality. Like Veronikas ineptitude with words, Georgiis limited command of Russian emphasizes the value of ineffable inner sincerity over a verbal discourse compromised by official rhetoric. This emotional melodramatic father of a simple soldier supersedes the epic father of all times and nations at the top of the armys ethical chain of command.
Ibid., 225. Woll, Real Images, 11416. Woll cites Georgii Danelia and Igor Talankins Serezha and Andrei Tarkovskiis The Steamroller and the Violin (both 1960). This list should be augmented by a number of films that deal with the issue of orphan adoption, such as Marlen Khutsievs Two Fedors (1958) and Sergei Bondarchuks The Fate of a Man (1959). Andrei Tarkovskii reworked the motif in his Ivans Childhood (1962).
14 15

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The centrality of a Georgian in the film subverts yet another well-known Stalinist hierarchythe great family of Soviet peoples.16 Mikhail Chiaurelis The Fall of Berlin (1949) depicted Soviet victory in World War II as a heroic feat of a stalwart Russian soldier directed by Stalins strategic wisdom and assisted by a handful of Russian-speaking non-Russian nationals. The film epitomized the 1930s cinematic convention in which the slightly distorted official Soviet word replaces the word spoken in different languages. Non-Russians appear as younger brothers-in-class who are only approaching the logos of the first land of victorious socialism, and these minors are allowed to exhibit some natural, spontaneous, and naive traits, which in the course of the characters growing social consciousness will be overcome.17 In a celebration of Thaw-era egalitarianism, the protagonist of A Soldiers Father travels from the margins of the Soviet empire to play as crucial a role as any Russian soldier in defending his country. Georgii is the first in his battalion to find a USSR border marker buried in the snow, which he then props up with the help of his fellow soldiers. His sons tank brigade is the first to cross a strategic bridge in Berlin, clearing the path for the rest of the army. These individual achievements represent more ordinary, although by no means less important, contributions by non-Russian ethnicities to the joint war effort, as opposed to the singular monumental and unnecessarily risky feats glorified in Stalinist war productions (for example, the raising of a Soviet flag over the Reichstag in The Fall of Berlin). The opening portion of the film set in Georgiis home village is shot entirely in Georgian, and the protagonist never achieves fluency in Russian, resorting instead to more universal means of human communication and bonding. The interethnic rapprochement between Georgii and his fellow soldiers is a two-way process, in the course of which both parties come to appreciate not only their common humanity but also each others language and culture. In addition to assimilating a few Georgian words (for example, genatsvale, or dear), Russian-speaking soldiers request a Georgian melody (lezginka) from a touring band and intuitively understand the meaning of Georgii and his sons Georgian song and conversation. In the films melodramatic finale Georgii mourns the death of his son in a deeply moving pieta-like scene that acknowledges his republics and, by extension, other national minorities sacrifices during the war. Sergo Zakariadzes inspired performance infuses the previously schematic stereotypes that circumscribed Georgian characters in Stalinist films with humanity, candor, and humor. Like its
16 In the first half of the 1930s, Stalin promoted Russia to big-brother status among other Soviet republics proclaiming its cultural, economic and ideological superiority over its younger brothers. In the years to follow, non-Russian ethnicities were subjected to intense Russification as a means of establishing political conformity under the administrative-command rule. In keeping with this revived colonial Russocentrism, Stalin singled out the Russian people as the major contributors to the victory over Nazi Germany, while at the same time meting out severe punishment to ethnicities that in any way disrupted the alleged harmony of the great family. Instances of governmental repressions and state-sponsored injustices against entire ethnic groups include the 193233 terrorfamine in the Ukraine, the official silence about the Holocaust, political deportation of multiple ethnic minorities during World War II, and the postwar anti-Semitic campaign. 17 Evgenii Margolit, Landscape, With Hero, in Springtime for Soviet Cinema: Re/Viewing the 1960s, ed. Alexander Prokhorov, trans. Dawn Seckler (Pittsburgh, 2001), 31.

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protagonist, Chkheidzes movie shot at Gruziiafilmone of a number of national republic studios that flourished in the 1960smade a cultural journey from a geographically peripheral republic in the Caucasus to the hearts of many Soviet viewers.18 While Woll has demonstrated that cultural Thaw was, from its inception, an uneven process, the last years of Khrushchevs rule certainly marked the beginning of the end. Many party functionaries resisted Khrushchevs policy of de-Stalinization, because it undermined party authority and threatened to transcend the critique of the personality cult, thereby exposing the corruption deeper within the power apparatus. Even before the Central Committees call upon artists in the late summer of 1964 to plan appropriately triumphant movies for the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution and hundredth anniversary of Lenins birth and prior to Khrushchevs ouster from his post in October 1964, filmmakers felt the tightening of ideological controls.19 Changing gender dynamics reflect the increasing emphasis on state authority and ideological orthodoxy. Samson Samsonovs Optimistic Tragedy (1963), set on board a ship in 1917, resurrects the image of an impregnable fair maiden as a symbolic embodiment of the Revolution. Based on Vsevolod Vishnevskiis 1934 play of the same name, the film documents an ideological confrontation between an anarchist and a female Red Commissar who are fighting for authority over the ships all-male crew. At the climactic moment in an ideologically charged scene, the commissar shoots down an anarchist sailor who had earlier attempted to violate her. She fires the shot in order to protect not her person as such, but the dignity and authority of the party she represents.20 The heroines ostensible vulnerability as a woman surrounded by aggressive male adversaries validates her use of physical violence. Several years earlier, in The Forty-first, Chukhrai had reconceptualized the image of the revolutionary woman warrior, problematizing the Stalinist ideal of femininity it represented. In Cranes, Kalatozov further distinguished between the individuals private world and the realm of social obligations by embodying them in two distinct characters: Veronika and Irina. The commissar of Optimistic Tragedy shows no internal contradiction between her private and public persona. She is authoritative, articulate, resolute, and committed to the revolutionary cause. Her ideological triumph over the anarchists reaffirms the partys unrivaled authority in the past, as well as in the present.21 Samsonov retained a female leader at a time when others were already reverting to more traditional depictions. Aleksei Saltykovs The Chairman (1964) reestablished masculine authority at the top of the Soviet social hierarchy and once again relegated women to the symbolic role of the Russian people to be shaped and directed by a strong
18 Woll notes that Georgii Makharashvili was voted the second most popular film hero in 1964 (Real Images, 182). 19 Ibid., 164. 20 In Vsevolod Vishnevskiis play this action is accompanied by the following authorial remark: The one who will attempt to oppose such a party, oppose our country, will be crushed and ground to dust (slomlen i rastert). See his Optimisticheskaia tragediia, Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh (Moscow, 1954), 1:224. 21 Woll notes the reemergence of highfaluting rhetoric in the critical response to the film: words that had receded from the active vocabulary of film criticism years before, such as revolutionary pathos and scope [masshtabnost'], reemerged in [Afanasii Salynskiis essay Printsipial'naia udacha iskusstva (Iskusstvo kino, 1963, no. 7:2526)] on Optimistic Tragedy (Real Images, 111).

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male hand. The film focuses on Egor Trubnikov, who returns to his devastated village after the war and sets about mobilizing his demoralized compatriots to revitalize their collective farm and improve their living standards. While Egor makes personal sacrifices for the people he loves, the methods he uses to lift them out of their misery are ruthless and authoritarian. Egors despotic leadership over the predominantly female collective is quasi-Stalinist at best;22 his semimilitaristic tactics assure the farmers total commitment to the collective cause. In the big familys epic struggle for the bright future complete with a communal club and a sanatorium, any individual claims or nuclear family allegiances are mercilessly suppressed. Egor severely reprimands his own brother Semen, who collects grass for his familys cow at a kolkhoz-owned field. In the larger scheme of events, feeding the cow that provides vitally needed milk to Semens children turns into an act of treason. SOVIET STRUCTURING MYTHS IN THE COMMISSAR The Commissar revisits the basic myths structuring Soviet national identity as it tackles the philosophical, societal, and ethnic tensions that tear at the Soviet social fabric in the mid-1960s. Askoldov diagnoses the fatal split in Soviet identity as an enduring fissure between the state conditioned model of society as a semimilitarized big family responsive to the administrative-command rule on the one hand, and the Thaw-era community modeled on a small family, an egalitarian institution that collapses social, political, and ethnic hierarchies on the other. In order to explore the conflict which the Thaw failed to resolve, the film adopts an analytical strategy whereby it amplifies the existential polarities of the Thaw-era value system before colliding them in a final debate. The Commissar embodies the societal tensions in the multivoiced nature of its discourse, as well as in the fractured and disconnected structure of its imagined universe. In addition to responding to a wide variety of cinematic texts that were strongly imprinted on the films audiences, Askoldov uses less familiar heterodox treatments of the revolutionary theme and its reverberations in early Soviet literature.23 Two works republished during that period, Vasilii Grossmans 1934 short story In the Town of Berdichev and Isaak Babels 1920s short prose cycle Red Cavalry, both set in the Red Armys 1920 Polish campaign, inspired Askoldovs cinematic revision of the revolutionary myth.24 The plot of Grossmans short story provided the core structure for The Commissar, while the inquiries of Babels philosophers into the nature of revolutionary justice and his potent visual imagery helped flesh out Grossmans somewhat schematic psychological and spatial landscapes. The ethical dialogue with Babel as a participant of the Revolution and Grossman as a contemporary of Stalinist reforms strengthens the films intellectual, questioning stance.
Ibid., 179. Trained as a literary and theatrical critic prior to becoming a film director, Askoldov was quite attuned to the Thaws rediscovery and rehabilitation of authors banned or silenced under Stalinism. 24 Vasilii Grossman (190564) first published In the Town of Berdichev in Literaturnaia gazeta, April 2, 1934. The story was not republished until 1958 in Povesti, rasskazy, ocherki (Moscow).
22 23

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The Commissar shifts its focus away from the military campaign to a highly personal moment: Red Army commissar Klavdia Vavilova faces a pregnancy, which she sees as a grave obstacle in her revolutionary struggle and therefore makes every effort to terminate. When various attempts prove unsuccessful, the pregnant commissar moves into the lively Jewish household of Maria and Efim Magazanik for her imminent delivery. After she gives birth to a son, Klavdia must choose between staying with her adopted small family or rejoining the big family of the revolutionary fighters. Even though she has grown attached to her newborn and her loving hosts, she eventually follows her urge to fight for the better future, leaving the infant with the Jewish family. Klavdias flash-forward to the Holocaust notwithstanding, the story seemingly concludes where it began. In the final scene, the commissar again leads the Red soldiers in battle but the film places its major focus upon the profound change that takes place within the protagonist in the course of her home stay. The commissar enters the narrative as an authoritarian leader in command of a powerful and ruthless military force complete with cannons and armored vehicles. When she suddenly finds herself outside the familiar militaristic setting, she simply does not know how to function. The commissars situation in the film resembles the position of Soviet society, which entered the liberal atmosphere of a cultural and political Thaw after decades of semimilitaristic existence under authoritarian rule. Faced with a new political freeze, Askoldov tries to comprehend the reasons for the Thaws failure to resolve the tension between the individual and the state and thus regenerate Soviet society on humane premises. Expanding the spatio-temporal boundaries of Grossmans short story, Askoldov symbolically depicts the Thaws search in his heroines journey of physical and psychological liberation facilitated by her new, small-family environment. The stages of Klavdias emotional and spiritual maturation in the film reverse the symbolic progress toward consciousness and the ritual initiation into the big family that shaped Stalin-era Civil War discourse, reappearing in the late Thaw quasi-Stalinist narratives. Askoldovs inverted enactment of a conventional Stalinist rite of passage shows Klavdia undergo its three main phases: separation from previous environment, transition to a new system of values and incorporation into the new community. 25 THE PREVIOUS ENVIRONMENT The Commissar evokes and simultaneously recasts the image of a manly woman used to denote the unnaturally exaggerated masculinity of Stalinist authoritarian culture, juxtaposing it with the Thaw cultures feminine system of values. At the beginning of the film, Klavdia comes forth as an agent and a product of the militarized world governed by martial law and militant ideology. Dressed in a heavy military uniform and speaking in rough military jargon mixed with ideological clichs, the heroine strikes the viewer as more masculine than the men in her all-male army. When the commissar tells the regiment commander about her pregnancy in the scene directly following her cold-blooded order to shoot a deserter, the news comes as a joke both to him and to the audience. What The
25

For Clarks discussion of the Socialist Realist plot as a rite of passage see Soviet Novel, 16776.

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Forty-first presented as the heroines painless and natural awakening to femininity, here looks highly improbable and contradictory, preparing the viewer for a more profound exploration of the underlying antinomies. Askoldovs oxymoron of a pregnant commissar works further to challenge the renewed attempts by films like Optimistic Tragedy to hijack the Thaws feminine ideal for rehabilitating ideological orthodoxy and authoritarianism. In view of the films heightened ideological polarities, the commissars pregnancy becomes an ultimate test for the Revolutions ability to bring forth new life. The film places little trust in the reason-driven verbal discourse discredited earlier in the Thaw, shaping its argument via almost exclusively visual and nonverbal auditory imagery. Within the movies extensive metaphoric network, Klavdias changing body becomes a symbolic battleground in the ensuing encounter between the two opposing sets of ideals and worldviews. In the war-consumed world of the big family, Klavdias pregnancy is interpreted as a desertion from the communal cause. When she discloses her state to the regiment commander, she needs to justify her ideological treason by describing her assiduous, albeit fruitless, attempts at aborting the fetus. In order to stay loyal to the Revolution, Klavdia has to purge her body and her mind of any individualistic impulses. Prior to learning of her pregnancy, the viewer sees Klavdia wash in the towns deserted Family Baths. Building up the steam to enhance the baths cleansing effect (and most likely in hopes of inducing a miscarriage), the heroine violently beats her naked body with birch switches. The camera reinforces the punitive intent of a bathing ritual traditionally associated with healing when it cuts to the flogging that takes place outside, where a mounted orderly whips a helpless deserter, Emelin. Events that follow uncover a deeper correspondence between the expecting commissar and the deserter. Emelin absconded from the regiment to care for his sick wife and children, and a jug of milk that this parent-nurturer clutches to his chest confirms his infidelity to the communal ideal. The ensuing execution, which Klavdia orders in the name of the bright future, lacks the romantic pathos of the shooting in Optimistic Tragedy. Before the executioners bullets pierce Emelins chest, they puncture the jug, spilling the milk in it before spilling blood. This symbolic attack on the small family (the shootings off-screen victims) undermines the Revolutions promise of the bright future, whose traditional beneficiaries are precisely children.26 Klavdias relationships within the regiment lack the close familial nature traditionally attributed to the symbolic community that safeguards its members social and personal welfare. The ties connecting fathers and sons are presented as sterile and impersonal; the big family cannot accommodate the richness of life that it aspires to transform. Equating Klavdias pregnancy with desertion, the commander threatens her with court-martial, thus expressing his regret over the loss of a valuable combatant unit (boevaia edinitsa), instead of rejoicing over the emergence of a new life. In the course of this conversation the camera slowly moves down from the commanders face to the table where he is lining up a row of bullets. It then follows the row across the table and slowly rises to connect in
26 The scene further reverberates with the episode in The Chairman, in which the eponymous protagonist banishes his brothers personal cow from the collectively owned field, knowing full well that the cows milk feeds the familys malnourished children.

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an uninterrupted movement the commander and the commissar, now a man and a woman, through potentially deadly ammunition (Fig. 1). Equally disturbing weaponry resurfaces in a retrospective episode which depicts Klavdias romantic interlude with her lover next to a cannon hopelessly stuck in a barren desert. In Civil War films, military weaponry traditionally served as a prop that empowered characters or brought romantic lovers together; here it turns into an ominous phallic symbol of the official patriarchy. The film completes a progression toward larger and more destructive firearms (with a Thaw-era humane interlude of a rifle in The Forty-first)from Chapaevs machine gun and Shchorss howitzer to a cannonthus bringing it to the point of the surreal.

FIG. 1

Klavdias regiment makes no effort to protect her or her newborn and surely has no inclination to bond with the child. When the regiment commander and his orderly pay a visit to inform her about their retreat from the town and discuss her situation, they far too willingly accept Klavdias decision to stay, especially given that a White occupation would most surely be fatal for a Red Army commissar, not to mention those harboring her. Although the sequence has humor, the camera portrays the two men as menacing intruders into the peaceful family abode. They track in dirt with their boots, the commanders cigarette smoke is harmful for the child, and the orderlys gold watch not only clashes with the poor simplicity of the household but also suggests plundering and possibly a pogrom. Ginzburgs camerawork emphasizes the lack of any deeper connection between the regiments traditionally close-knit leadership: avoiding group shots, the camera films most of the conversation in a shot/reversed shot sequence, isolating the commander and the orderly from Klavdia and her child. The orderlys ironic farewell comment, Lets hear from you, Vavilova (Pishi, Vavilova), accentuates an essential disconnection between the worlds inhabited by the big and the small families. The film, in fact, presents the protagonists big family as her and the civilian characters chief victimizer; its brutalityepitomized in a massive cannon that threatens to crush Maria and her vulnerably naked children upon the armys arrival in town becomes associated with the forces of the Revolution and war itself. Klavdia finds herself in Emelins shoes when on a walk around town her former soldiers start shooting at her,

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with complete disregard for the child she is holding. The internecine nature of this conflict is most vividly conveyed through the Magazanik childrens war games in which siblings attack and torture each other. TRANSITION TO A NEW SYSTEM OF VALUES The process of Klavdias inner renewal starts on the day she leaves the oppressive environment of her military regiment and moves in with her Jewish host-family. The Magazaniks inner courtyard presents a stark contrast to the deserted stone-paved streets of the war-ravaged town: it is filled with freshly washed linen, the sounds of cooking dinner, childrens voices, and noises coming from Efims workshop. Here strong family bonds and respect for elders attempt to keep at bay the martial law of the outside military world. If Klavdia employed a firing squad to protect her regiments ideological unity in the deserter-execution scene, Efim summons his mother, wife, and six children, his weapon with which he intends to defend his household from an intrusion when the uniformed stranger appears at their door. Askoldovs choice of actors for the roles of Klavdia, Maria, and Efim is in line with the films overall analytical strategy to amplify the existential polarities of the Thaw-era value scale before colliding them. If Nonna Mordiukovas tall, thick-set, resolute, sexually repressed, and uniformed Klavdia epitomizes big family paternity, Rolan Bykovs small, poorly dressed, slightly comical, sentimental, and ironic Efim, whose name appropriately means fruitful, incarnates the Thaw-era ideal of parenthood. Raisa Nedashkovskaias delicately built, compassionate, and family-oriented Maria embodies the ideal of holy motherhood. Marias and Efims roles within their small family can be compared to those of the commander and the commissar of the military regiment: Maria takes care of the household everyday strategy and logistics, while Efim is in charge of their childrens intellectual and ethical guidance and discipline. Initially resisting the invasion, the family soon warms up to Klavdia, starting the process of her initiation into the small family and biological parenthood, the strongholds of Thaw-era values. The process begins on a purely surface level, when Efim sews her a loose light dress to replace her constrictive uniform and heavy overcoat. In place of Klavdias military boots, Maria offers her Efims house slippers. The old cradle which Klavdia inherits from Maria and Efims six children performs the function, while it subverts the meaning, of the baton, a symbolic object, gesture, or speech, the passing of which traditionally acted as an ideological blessing that assured the continuity of revolutionary teaching.27 The explicit familial nature of Maria and Efims baton reaffirms the need for the continuity of humane values disregarded in revolutionary lore. The prolonged sequence of Klavdias labor constitutes the next, mostly physical, stage of her transformation, in the course of which the heroines feverish visions of her regiments futile campaign in a barren desert eventually subside, giving way to a heavy rain that welcomes the appearance of new life. When Klavdia sets out on a walk around town with her newborn, she finally looks comfortable with her new identity. The heroines
27

Clark, Soviet Novel, 173.

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visual resemblance to the Madonna with Child signals her inner change, while at the same time symbolizing the Thaws hopeful vision of the Revolution as a cradle of a humane teaching launching a new era of internationalism and social equality. The image of the childs father, a bespectacled commissar-intelligent who momentarily appears in Klavdias desert visions before perishing in battle, reinforces the hopes associated with the child: Askoldov names the father Kirill, thus comparing St. Cyrills deed of bringing the humanistic ideals of Christianity to the Slavs to that of enlightening humanity with revolutionary ideals.28 Klavdias walk around Berdicheva town situated at the Russian Empires ethnically, socially, and culturally mixed peripheryallows the protagonist to experience lifes infinite variety. In his comprehensive exploration of Soviet national identity, Askoldov subverts both political and ethnic hierarchies. His idealand largely utopiancommunity takes shape in opposition to both the big family of the state and the big family of Soviet peoples.29 Along with exposing the ingrained authoritarian nature of the Soviet political system, the film reveals the hypocrisy of the official concept of internationalism as the central structuring principle of the nationalistic and anti-Semitic Soviet Empire. In contrast to the official view of internationalism as a homogenizing notion, Askoldov proposes his ideal of ethnic and cultural diversity. The emotional uplift and spiritual enlightenment the heroine experiences as a result of her initiation into this multiethnic community is conveyed through the formal structure of the mothers walk sequence in which Klavdias ascending motion to the top of the hill symbolizes her search for a unifying moral vision. The sequence starts with a rapid upward movement of the camera and a dynamic low angle shot of the Orthodox Church cupolas accompanied by tolling bells on the soundtrack. As the ringing gains volume, it is joined by an off-screen polyphony of human voices in the market square. The previously desolate market now bustles with music and dance and its stands abound with farmers produce and artisans wares. People interact peacefully in a community comprised of Gypsies, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians, peasants, intelligentsia, craftsmen, and artists. Klavdia continues her walk up to the Catholic Church, eventually proceeding to the very top of the hill, the location of the towns destroyed but not abandoned synagogue. An old rabbi looks out one of the synagogues east-facing windows. When he turns around to greet Klavdia their eyes meet in symbolic communion.30 Shnitkes nondiegetic music accompanying the heroine on
28 Prior to Askoldov, Babel utilized the names symbolic connotation in his own pseudonym, and that of his narrator in Red Cavalry: the name Kirill Liutov (liutyi means ferocious) combined the symbolism of spiritual enlightenment and humanism with the recognition of violence as an inseparable part of revolutionary reality. Askoldovs allusion, through the name of his doomed character, to Babels hero and Babel himself questions the possibility of reconciling humane ideals with the violence performed in their name. 29 The utopian nature of this vision becomes evident when juxtaposed to the gradual waning of ethnic culture and traditions from the grandmother to Efim and Maria and then to the youngest generation. 30 The symbolism connected with the synagogues adds another dimension to this scene. The rabbi stands across from the synagogues entrance, thus looking out through an opening in the eastern wall. The rabbis orientation toward the east signifies his openness to a dialogue with God, since the east wall of the synagogue traditionally contained the aron-kodesh niche, crowned with the inscription: The Almighty Father opened the gate for prayer. When Klavdia enters the synagogue from the gate of the people and the rabbi greets her from the gate of God, he acts as an intermediary between the heroine and the source of the higher wisdom.

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her walk introduces special leitmotifs for each of the religions, and they all intertwine harmoniously with the central musical theme of motherhood. Amidst the overall fragmentation of the films warring universe, the unity facilitated by the lyrical motherhood theme highlights the ecumenical nature of the scene on the top of the hill. As she descends, Klavdia leaves the peaceful domain of tolerance and spirituality, to reenter the realm of warring ideologies: at the bottom of the hill her former soldiers accuse her of desertion and shoot at her and her child. Running away from the attack, Klavdia crosses a bridge, at the end of which she hits the stones at the base of the cliff and slides all the way to the ground. Her consequent return home is filmed in a long shot, with the small and vulnerable figures of the mother and child viewed against a background of overpowering cliffs. The road is a flat path at the very bottom of the screen. The sequence that started with the cameras inspiring flight to the cupolas in the clear sky finishes with the heroine falling against the stones and walking a depressing flat path against the rocky backdrop. Askoldov here and elsewhere cinematically renders both the Thaws attempt to achieve a nonauthoritarian community and subsequently visualizes its failure in his heroines journey through a warring world. INCORPORATION INTO A NEW COMMUNITY Klavdias metaphorical baptism during her visit to the towns three temples prepares her complete integration into her adopted small family. When the regiment retreats from the town, Maria and Efim come to Klavdias room to offer her the protection of their humble home. All three protagonists are grouped around the cradle, conveying a sense of mutual support and close-knit community (Fig. 2). The composition of the shot and the postures

FIG. 2

of the characters evoke those of Andrei Rublevs venerated Trinity, the fourteenth-century icon that appeared on screen in Andrei Tarkovskys Andrei Rublev (1966). In Tarkovskys own words, his film intended to show how the national yearning for brotherhood at a time of vicious internecine fighting and the Tatar yoke gave birth to Rublevs inspired

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Trinityepitomizing the ideal of brotherhood, love and quiet sanctity.31 Both in the original masterpiece and its cinematic reminiscence, the compositional center holds an object that draws the three participants together and emerges as a symbol of hopes for a better future and reconciliation. In Rublevs Trinity, it is the chalice that is peacefully shared by the three angels; in Askoldovs tableau, it is the newborn child that brings out commonality in people with different ethnic and ideological backgrounds. As Klavdia sings to her son, a fluid panning shot of the house celebrates the deeply personal ties connecting Klavdia and her new family. Without a single visible cut, the camera moves through the dark house to the accompaniment of a song, hovering over the familys three living generations and incorporating the ancestors portraits hanging on the walls. Klavdias song is not a conventional lullaby, but a series of short rhymed couplets of urban folklore, known as chastushki. It tells the protagonists deeply personal story which she could not share with her commander when he asked her crudely about the father of her child: the loss of the loved one and a deeply felt compassion for him, a mothers sacrifice of her favorite dress for swaddling cloths for her children, and a couples night walks under blooming locust trees. The secular words of Klavdias song merge with the grandmothers Yiddish prayer, her appeal for God to spare the innocent children from murder. Fascinated by the emotion reflected in the commissars song, Maria joins in with a Jewish tune and the two melodies complement each other. Despite the difference in languages, form, and content, the artistic means of three different genres (prayer, chastushka, and lullaby) merge to express the same feeling of compassion for the three womens loved ones. THE FINAL DEBATE Klavdias incorporation into her adopted family does not erase their respective identities and beliefs; it helps instead reappraise their philosophies in view of alternative discourses. Ginzburgs lighting choices in the lullaby scene suggest that Klavdias emerging selfidentification as a mother exists next to her changing identity as a commissar: as the singing protagonist paces about the candlelit room, her silhouette doubles as her body, casting a prominent shadow on the back wall and reflecting the new complexity that has replaced her previously orthodox worldview. The protagonists ideological convictions, suspended throughout her home stay, eventually become tested in light of her recent experiences and in a direct debate with the small-family ideologue Efim. Efims subversive irony works to challenge rigid ideological orthodoxies throughout the movie. As opposed to Klavdias unwavering endorsement of official discourse as a sort of a divine revelation at the beginning of the film, Efim questions even the most sacred texts and authorities if they fail to take individual people into account. He doubts the wisdom of Gods creation when he semi-jokingly complains about his familys meager rations consisting of nothing but potatoes: if God spent the first five days creating potatoes,
31

Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (London, c1986), 34.

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then why on the sixth day did He create man? Efim uses the newspaper Speech, a mouthpiece of official propaganda, to make cutouts for Klavdias maternity dress. When Efim sadly states that there will be no trams in his town because there will be no people to ride them, he questions the sacrosanct promise of the bright future and denies legitimacy to a state power which asserts itself at the expense of enormous human sacrifice. Efims words evoke a famous pronouncement by Mikhail Kalinin, who in 1923 stated that if a city has a functioning tram service, then Soviet power functions in that city. Efim defies the homogenizing effect of restrictions that any one ideology imposes upon human diversity and individuality when he comments that a woman who puts on a military uniform does not become a man. His yearning for peace and freedom from authoritarian powers of all shapes comes true only during brief periods between military occupations, when one power has left the town and another has not yet arrived. The films key philosophical debate takes place closer to the end of the film, when the family, including Klavdia and her infant, hide in the basement during enemy artillery bombardment. The doom hanging over this underground sequence contrasts with the hopeful spirituality of the scene on the top of the hill: oppressive reality once again reasserts its power over the characters idealistic aspirations. While traditionally the commissar acted as an ideological elder to less politically conscious characters, affording them a glimpse of the glorious future, in this conversation Efim challenges Klavdia to consider the ethical dimension of her sweeping ideological assumptions. His philosophy echoes that of Babels wise shopkeeper Gedali, who supports a kind International that ascribes equally high value to each individual, regardless of ethnicity or philosophical conviction. Efims evocation of the Jewish nation as a symbol of suffering humanity oppressed by ideological systems, and the films subsequent flash-forward to the Holocaust, make a powerful argument in favor of his philosophy. The film draws parallels between three major autocratic/totalitarian empirestsarist, Nazi, and Sovietthat used anti-Semitism and nationalism as a means of impressing ideological conformity and unifying the communal us against the deviating/deviant them. Sympathizing with Efims kind International, Klavdia nonetheless insists on the use of activeand violentmeans in the struggle for a better future for humanity. Her pronouncement about a free brotherhood of workers, while invoking the utopian idealism of the early Thaw years, strikes the post-Thaw Soviet viewer as ironically naive and clichd. Klavdias subsequent admission to Efim of her emotional fatigue reveals her deep-seated frustration with her inability to reconcile the Revolutions proclaimed ideals with the need for their violent enforcement. In the aftermath of the debate, Klavdia begins to question her views on revolutionary ends and means and experiences a clairvoyant flash-forward to humanitys real future. The heroines verbal defense of a militant official ideology clothed in abstract terms and unsubstantiated utopian promises collapses before the vividly concrete depiction of the Holocaust, which provides a dramatic climax to Klavdias moral rite of passage. Deeply moved by the tragic revelation about the destinies of her small family, Klavdia feels compelled to prevent the future from happening by changing the troubled present. In a gesture that is doomed to failure from the outset, the

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transformed commissar emerges from the basement to confront the forces of aggression that consume the outside world.32 If at the films outset Klavdia embodied official discourse, at the end she opposes the forces of war associated with the authoritarian state in order to shield her small family, a cradle of interethnic and social communality. Preparing for combat, the heroine puts on her commissars overcoat and heavy boots, but military garb is now no more than an outer shell for her maternal core, as she runs off to battle in her simple dark dress and headscarf. Her overcoat, blown back in the wind in the manner of the Mother of Gods mantle (pokrov), becomes symbolic of the motherly protection Klavdia aspires to extend over her loved ones.33 If at the films opening the heroine headed a powerful military force, in the end she leads a small group of young idealistic graduates of the revolutionary Petrograd Courses for Red Commanders who oppose heavy bombardment with nothing but side-arms and rifles. Klavdia and a few other survivors of the barrage start their final advance toward the Thaw audience to the plaintive, off-key tune of a lonely trumpet playing the Internationale, but the screen freezes in a static view of the snow-covered town, thus precluding the longed-for meeting between the two epochs. Along with chronicling the end of the Thaws dialogue with its philosophical source, the finale mourns the demise of the Revolutions internationalist and humanist mythology in its ultimate (poslednii i reshitel'nyi) confrontation with the overpowering ideological monologism of war as an enduring sense of reality in the authoritarian state. The closing shots of the film present a stark contrast to numerous hopeful portrayals of regenerated humanity in Thaw cinematography, often accomplished via nature symbolism (for example, the onset of spring and natural revival following a totalitarian freeze). In Ginzburgs cut to a birds-eye view of the Magazaniks empty yard, snow is falling upon the cold stones, obliterating any trace of the life that flourished there in the course of the film. The actual fate of Klavdias son Kirill remains disturbingly silenced. The snow, the solemn tolling of the church bells, and the wailing wind on the soundtrack become symbolic of the new political freeze of the late 1960s, with its regression to authoritarianism symbolized in the final freeze-frame (stop-kadr). The Commissar was among a series of late Thaw films that marked a transition from the romantic utopianism of the hopeful mid-1950s and early 1960s, with their search for the individuals place within a regenerating Soviet society, to the ideological skepticism of the authoritarian 1970s characterized by alienation between the individual and the state. When, by the mid-1960s, Thaw filmmakers moved from the initially idealistic to a more critical exploration of Soviet structuring mythologies, they threatened the very state apparatus that these myths were called to legitimize. The system cut short any further
The issue of revolutionary violence was widely debated in the mid-1960s. While disapproving the Civil Wars bloodshed, many Thaw artists believed in its unavoidability. Such Leniniana films as Lenin in Poland (1965), On One Planet (1965), and The Sixth of July (1968) show the revolutionary leader as first and foremost striving for a peaceful resolution with minimum casualties, an insurmountable task in a hopelessly divided and warring world. These films represent Lenin as a tragic thinker, who unlike those around him knows full well what will happen in the future. He also knows, that it is not within his power to prevent these future events from happening [including] Stalins reign and World War II (Margolit, Landscape, With Hero, 111). 33 Here Askoldov references the Mother of Gods role as a divine intercessor (zastupnitsa) in Russian Orthodoxy.
32

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forays into the forbidden field, formally ending the Thaw in August 1968 when Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Even though basic Soviet mythologies continued to inform post-Thaw cinema, they became schematic, imitative, and empty when no longer infused with the faith in their ability to shape a communist utopia. When The Commissar was finally released in the Soviet Union under Gorbachevs policy of glasnost, some Soviet critics and perestroika officials read it in the context of the leaderships renewed efforts at reconnecting the crumbling Soviet system with the ideals of compassion and justice at its revolutionary source.34 At the films end the transformed Klavdia Vavilova embodied for themas for the filmmaker himselfthe high moral integrity of the commissars who fought in the Revolution and the Civil War for human dignity, against spiritual darkness.35 In light of this interpretation, the films nomination for the Lenin Prize in 1990 seemed particularly appropriate. The critics who denied the Revolution the pathos attributed to it in glasnost discourse associated the ideals endorsed in The Commissar with the individual characters personal ethics rather than self-assertive political ideologies.36 In the post-Soviet era the film continues to appeal to art cinema audiences worldwide thanks to its universal humanistic message, which transcends national, ethnic, and social boundaries, not merely political mythologies.

34 Shcherbakov, Shag navstrechu, 64. See also Aleksandr Borshchagovskii Na toi dalekoi, na grazhdanskoi, Moskovskie novosti, March 15, 1987. 35 Aleksandr Askoldov (interviewed by Vladimir Garov) Sud'ba Komissara, Sovetskii fil'm, 1989, no. 2:12. 36 Leonid Zorin Komissar: Spektr mnenii, Sovetskaia kul'tura, August 13, 1988; Aleksandr Timofeevskii Svet i pokoi, Ekran i stsena, January 11, 1990.

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