THE SOVIET CINEMA
49
educational, artistic and ideological value." Even if one assumes there
was no basis for the rumors-which would be rash-it .is hard to
know which is the more shocking-the rumor or the argument against
its validity. Eisenstein was also attacked. In a lengthy essay, the
RAPPist Ivan Anisimov exposed the bourgeois nature of
his
work.
And the 1932 edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia stated: "In his
works,
October
and
The General Line,
Eisenstein despite his great
ability,
yet gave no deep analysis of the d<:cisive stages of the Socialist
Revolution and made a diversion to formal experiments.
Eisenst~in
is
a representative of the ideology of the revolutionary section of the
petty bourgeois intelligentsia which is following in the path of the
proletariat....
"27
Just why a movie director should be expected to
give a "deep analysis" of the 1917 revolution is not clear-unless
because the Stalinist historians couldn't produce one themselves.
But the
cause dlebre
was the attack on Dovzhenko's
Soil.
Iz–
vestia
began it ·with a three-column article denouncing the film as
"counter-revolutionary," "defeatist," and "too realistic" in its por–
trayal of the peasantry. The article was all the more'"damaging because
it was written by Demyan Byedny,
*
a writer of journalistic doggerel
who lived in the Kremlin and was known to be close to Stalin.
28
Other journalists took up the cry, workers' clubs passed the usual
'spontaneous' resolutions, and
Soil
was withdrawn for heavy censoring.
The "realism" was deleted, as was the "counter-revolutionary scene,"
in
which a collectivised tractor breaks down amid jeering kulaks.
There were also cuts with a Will Haysian flavor: the removal of a
scene in which a peasant girl tears off her clothes in despair after the
death of her lover, and of a shot in which peasants, in an emergency,
t
The Stalin system can always be depended on to produce a sort of perverted
poetic justice. When Tairov a year or two ago produced Byedny's adaptation of
the Borodip opera,
Bogatyrs,
the Central Art Commission closed down the show.
Byedny had made three serious mistakes: (1) he had shown the Kiev robber
bands as revolutionary elements, (2) he had represented the bogatyrs as ruling
class tyrants, (3) he had satirized the
co~version
of Russia to Christianity. This
approach would have been .good doctrine under the first Five Year Plan, but
Byedny had underestimated the rightward swing of the second Plan. The correct
line as of 1936 was that (1) the Kiev robbers were robbers and nothing but
robbers, (2) the bogatyrs were legendary Russian heroes and hence to be for–
given their class origin, (3) the Christian Church had brought Western civiliza–
tion to heathen Russia.
29
Byedny was one of the founders of
Pravda;
he had
been writing political doggerel for Bolshevik papers since long before the revo–
lution; his verses had been flung broadcast from airplanes over the White lines
during the civil war, and were said to have caused many desertions; he was
the most popular poet in the Union; he had received both the Order of Lenin
and the Order of the Red Banner.3 o But all this availed him not--any more
than Tairov's international fame in the theatre availed
him.
Both were dis–
graced. Byedny overnight lost his position of power, and perhaps
~veu
his
suite
in
the Kremlin!
