Quiet Subversion, Overt Compliance: Critiquing Consumer Communism in Soviet Film

Abandoned GAZ M21 Volga. 2013. Wikimedia Commons.

By Stan Vassilenko

“The real background to the [dissident] movements that gradually assume political significance does not usually consist of overtly political events or confrontations between different forces . . . . These movements for the most part originate elsewhere, in the far broader area of the “pre-political.”

—Václav Havel

After Stalin’s final breath, Nikita Khrushchev’s Third Program immersed the uncertain Soviet landscape in a visionary “full-scale building of communism,” with a new twist: to improve consumer lives. Accompanying this shift toward client politics was a new public power to call out the regime on its consumer shortcomings, one that was increasingly developing in the liberalizing cinema industry.

Against this backdrop, Soviet film directors, disillusioned with their society’s increasingly acquisitive culture, were nevertheless compelled to follow official mandates to depict ‘consumer abundance’—the state’s attempt to divert public attention from the more lethargic reality of scarcities and shortages (Chernyshova 229). To maintain their cultural distaste for materialism, they blurred their  criticism by combining negative and favourable depictions of consumer culture that sidestepped official censors (Chernyshova 232). Through these efforts, film became an artistic medium for the intelligentsia to channel its moral concerns for Soviet society: its deviation from social egalitarianism and the emotional insufficiency of consumer-oriented life.

Car Ownership and its Discontents

Eldar Ryazanov’s highly popular satire Beware of the Car (1966) chronicles regular car thief Yury Detochkin’s effort to steal a Volga from consumer-profiteer Dima Semitsvetov. According to Culturist historian Natalya Chernyshova, the film treats private-car ownership by more well-to-do citizens as an injustice that questioned the leadership’s commitment to egalitarianism (Chernyshova 231). Indeed, Semitsvetov’s expansive purchasing power due to his profiteering—evidenced by his fashionable clothing and dacha (summer cottage)—casts him into sharp relief with Detochkin, whose altruism leads him to donate the money from his sold spoils to orphanages (Chernyshova 235-236). However, Ryazanov equally pays tribute to the state's pro-consumer agenda by embellishing Semitsvetov with positive qualities. He refuses to rigidly dichotomize the antagonist with the Marxist, car-thieving Detochkin by depicting the former as a “well educated, sophisticated and sociable, even charming” individual (Chernyshova 234-235). 

Moreover, the protagonist’s tragic heroism lies in the anachronistic nature of his socialist beliefs. Detochkin’s car-stealing enterprise is a “personal socialist revolution” against a perceived ‘bourgeois’, yet his theft ultimately amounts to imprisonment under Soviet law (Chernyshova 234). Furthermore, he conveys that acquisitive consumers outnumber, even endanger, Detochkin in his task: the arrival of Semitsvetov’s young, rowdy circle of friends to admire his car obstructs Detochkin’s theft, nearly blowing his cover (Chernyshova 235)(Ryazanov 33:24). In this way, Ryazanov projects his anxiety over a larger generational divide between orthodox communists and youthful consumers.

The film’s warm reception from contemporary film critics further demonstrates its external success in circumventing state mandates. Upon its release, film reviews focused overly on its ideological facets, such as Detochkin’s epitome socialist character and Semitsvetov’s under the counter selling of Western goods (Chernyshova 236). Indeed, one of the critic’s readings of the antagonist as representing a minority of Soviet consumers overlooked the picture’s suggestion that he, conversely, symbolized an emerging threat to social equality (Chernyshova 236). As such, the film effectively blurred its critical message by synthesizing pro- and anti-ideological elements, which enabled it to escape official backlash.

The Russian Soul

Consumer culture’s emotional insufficiency is a central critique in Vladimir Menshov’s Oscar-winning hit Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears (1979). The film documents the lives of three young female protagonists—Katya, Lyudmila, and Tonya—between their young adulthood to middle age. Set during the peak of Soviet consumption in 1958, the Moscow girls harbour similar ambitions for stability through marriage yet differ in their material outlooks. While Tonya resorts to life in the countryside with her boyfriend, Katya and Lyudmila attempt to merge into higher society by acquainting themselves with the city’s intelligentsia (Kolchevska 129).

Akin to Ryazanov’s film, Menshov offered conflicting depictions of consumer culture to conceal his fundamental distaste for material life. On one end, the state-endorsed rags-to-riches narrative is not entirely fulfilling for the Soviet subject. Consumer culture in the world of Moscow is a coterie of ill-intentioned, irresponsible men: Rodion, a television broadcaster, rapes and impregnates the former, while the latter’s marriage to an alcoholic hockey player ends in divorce (Kolchevska 129).  In addition, although Katya grows up to become her factory’s manager and a state consumer of her own—possessing a private apartment and a car—her perquisites fail to eliminate her melancholic solitude (toska) as an unwed mother. Spending her days in secret trysts and nights weeping in self-pity, the film ultimately seems to mythicize the material pursuit of happiness (Menshov 1:22:12-1:25:38, 1:27:58). Indeed, the midlives of each woman are telling: Tonya is a thriving married mother of three children, while Lyudmila and Katya are left as a divorcee and single mother, respectively.

However, the girls’ attempts to associate with Moscow’s ‘high culture’ equally appears as a driving point for female independence. In fact, Katya’s rape does not permanently harm her; rather, her rise to becoming a factory director equally aligns her with traditional Soviet rhetoric that women, too, can become hard-working and self-sufficient contributors to society.

The film further dilutes its critical commentary by providing socialist solutions to the women’s misfortunes. As a form of poetic justice, Katya’s encounter with Gosha—“an enlightened proletarian metalworker”—allows her to master the image of the ideal Soviet woman as conceived under the Khrushchev Thaw: a life of domesticity characterized by the balance of motherhood, wifehood and work (Kolchevska 129). Moreover, his nurturing character contrasts with Rodion’s cold philandry, which is exemplified when he wraps Katya in a blanket and urges her to rest while he cooks at a picnic (Menshov 1:46:24, 1:47:49). Combining these qualities, the film appears to suggest the immaterial, emotional sensibility of the industrial worker in juxtaposition with the deceptive and selfish urban consumer. Menshov lays out his fundamental opposition with consumer communism by suggesting heterosexual marriage as the solution for its emotional inadequacy, yet blurs this moralism with socialist ideology by pointing to the rural and industrial realms as nonpareil grounds for finding marriage partners. 

Conclusion

Under the Khrushchev regime’s rising material culture, Soviet filmmakers advanced their critical views of consumer communism by blurring them with socialist themes in their productions. Cineastes such as Eldar Ryazanov and Vladimir Menshov centred the plots of their pictures on issues they perceived to be moral threats to Soviet well-being—emerging wealth disparities and materialism’s emotional unfulfillment. However, to avoid state detection, their works also sought to gloss over these issues by incorporating more ideologically-friendly themes: social egalitarianism, female empowerment, and idealization of the industrial worker. 

Such thematic ambiguity within Soviet films enabled directors to release and screen their works nationwide under the guise of state compliance. Although these films advanced commentaries in lieu of suggesting practical solutions, they nevertheless were indicative of a broader artistic dissident movement that channelled the intelligentsia’s moral—hence political—dislikes for where their regime was headed. As such, Soviet movies demonstrate that tip-toeing around iron fist rule was more effective than directly confronting it; it was by beating around the bush that critical art developed and extended far beyond Khruschev’s reign.

Works Cited

Chernyshova, Natalya. “Philistines on the Big Screen: Consumerism in Soviet Cinema of the Brezhnev Era.” Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, pp. 227-254. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1386/srsc.5.2.227_1.

Kolchevska, Natasha. “Angels in the Home and at Work: Russian Women in the Khrushchev Years.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3/4, 2005, pp. 114-137. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40004421.

Menshov, Vladimir, director. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. Mosfilm, 1979. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTWA_7-ld_U.

Ryazanov, Eldar, director. Beware of the Car. Mosfilm, 1966. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flkjrJyBiSg.