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Redressing the Commissar:Thaw Cinema RevisesSoviet Structuring Myths

ELENA MONASTIREVA-ANSDELL

Aleksandr Askoldovs 1967 film The Commissaropens 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 legitimatingnarratives.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 forThe 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.1Konstantin 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 commemorateandglorifyimportant 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 Commissaras his diploma

certification feature. After the banning ofThe Commissarin 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 ofThe Commissarin 1987 and witness its international triumph.

See Elena Stishovas article for an in-depth account of the films troubled history (Passions OverCommissar,

Wide Angle 12 [October 1990]).2O 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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Redressing the Commissar 231

the film in 1967 censured TheCommissar for distort[ing] the humanist essence of the

proletarian revolution.3 Not surprisingly, they ignored the affirmative stance the movietakes 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 mid-1960s 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 ultimateintellectual 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 Commissarsynthesizes the five-decade-

long 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 herposition at the top of her regiments chain of command in order to give birth. Bivouacked

3E. 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, 67.4Evgenii Margolit, Otblesk kostra, ili nastoiashchii konets bol'shoi voiny, inKinematograf ottepeli: Kniga

vtoraia, ed. Vitalii Troianovskii (Moscow, 2002), 1056.5Ibid., 106.6Featuring Larisa Shepit'kos The Homeland of Electricity, Andrei SmirnovsAngel, and Genrikh GabaisMotria

(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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232 Elena Monastireva-Ansdell

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 compelledto 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 time-

frame 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

7At 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.8Slavic (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-NazarovsDavid 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 ofreality 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 patr iarchal 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 anddaughters, 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. VitaliiTroianovskii 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 Forty-

first.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

9See 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).10Lynne 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 ArnshtamsZoya (1944), the older women represent

the motherland and younger female partisans its people. When Pasha, the protagonist ofShe 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).11Vitalii 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 despairingfaith 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-firstreserves the more solemn position of officialauthority 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 whoseultimate 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 therelationship 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

12Ibid., 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, Veronikaexperiences 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 lovingand 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 ofCranes 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 nationin 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 backon 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

13Aleksandr 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 ofCranes, 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 nonverbalmeans 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 communalcause, 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 victory-

celebration 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 ASoldiers 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 fatherof a simple soldier supersedes the epic father of all times and nations at the top of the

armys ethical chain of command.

14Ibid., 225.15Woll,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 hisIvans Childhood(1962).

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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 ofA 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 USSRborder 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 courseof 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

16In 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 terror-

famine 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.17Evgenii 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 geographicallyperipheral 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 andideological 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 offemininity 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 ofOptimistic 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

18Woll notes that Georgii Makharashvili was voted the second most popular film hero in 1964 (Real

Images, 182).19Ibid., 164.20In 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), 1:224.21Woll 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 theircollective 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 Commissarrevisits 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 forThe 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.

22Ibid., 179.23Trained 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.24Vasilii Grossman (190564) first published In the Town of Berdichev in Literaturnaia gazeta, April 2,

1934. The story was not republished until 1958 inPovesti, rasskazy, ocherki (Moscow).

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The Commissarshifts its focus away from the military campaign to a highly personal

moment: Red Army commissar Klavdia Vavilova faces a pregnancy, which she sees as agrave 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 narrativeas 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 inthe 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 Commissarevokes 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

25For Clarks discussion of the Socialist Realist plot as a rite of passage see Soviet Novel, 16776.

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Forty-firstpresented as the heroines painless and natural awakening to femininity, here

looks highly improbable and contradictory, preparing the viewer for a more profoundexploration 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 disclosesher 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 ofmilk 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. EquatingKlavdias 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

26The 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 resurfacesin 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 filmsmost 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 whichsiblings attack and torture each other.

TRANSITIONTOA NEW SYSTEMOF 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 inthe 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 thecommissar 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 revolutionaryteaching.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

27Clark, 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 humaneteaching launching a new era of internationalism and social equality. The image of the

childs father, a bespectacled commissar-intelligentwho 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 ofhuman 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

28Prior to Askoldov, Babel utilized the names symbolic connotation in his own pseudonym, and that of his

narrator inRed Cavalry: the name Kirill Liutov (liutyi means ferocious) combined the symbolism of spiritualenlightenment 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.29The 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.30The 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 overallfragmentation 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 pathagainst 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.

INCORPORATIONINTOA 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 TarkovskysAndrei 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 anobject 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 thefather 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 self-

identification 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,

31Sculpting 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. WhenEfim 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, whenthe 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 apowerful 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, Klavdiabegins to question her views on revolutionary ends and means and experiences a clairvoyant

flash-forward to humanitys realfuture. 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 finaladvance 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 Commissarwas 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 stateapparatus that these myths were called to legitimize. The system cut short any further

32The 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 asLenin 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).33Here Askoldov references the Mother of Gods role as a divine intercessor (zastupnitsa) in Russian Orthodoxy.

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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 toinform 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 Commissarwith 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.

34Shcherbakov, Shag navstrechu, 64. See also Aleksandr Borshchagovskii Na toi dalekoi, na grazhdanskoi,

Moskovskie novosti, March 15, 1987.35Aleksandr Askoldov (interviewed by Vladimir Garov) Sud'ba Komissara, Sovetskii fil'm, 1989, no. 2:12.36Leonid 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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