THE SOVIET CINEMA
45
wardly they voiced complete agreement, even enthusiasm. At this conference,
the same phenomenon could be observed which later was to mystify the
world in the Moscow trials. The victims compete with the prosecutor in
denouncing themselves, in repudiating the ideas and actions of their entire
careers, and in paying servile homage to the very forces which are destroy–
ing them. The litany is by now all too familiar:
Dinamov:
"The theory of a film without a plot is a very dangerous
thing."
Eisenstein:
"The intellectual cinema ... is too vulgar to consider.
The
General Line
was an intellectual film."
Dinamov:
"The film without a hero was only an experiment."
Pudovkin:
"In
Chapayev
we see how a real class character is made."
Dovzhenko:"Chapayev
is tied up with the future of the cinema."
Eisenstein: "Chapayev
is the answer to the very deep solving of Party
problems in art."
\
Di1Jamov:
"The voice of the hero must be the voice of the epoch, and
the voice of the epoch must be the voice of the hero."
58
The Cultural T hermidor
Three months before the 1935 cinema conference, on December 1,
1934, a young Communist named Nikolaiev assassinated Sergei Kirov, one
of Stalin's chief lieutenants. "Nikolaiev's shot," we read In
The Letter of
an Old Bolshevik,
"proved to be fatal not only to Kirov but also to the
country as a whole and to the Communist Party."
59
In the three and a half
years since Kirov's assassination, the Stalin regime has carried its Thermi–
dorean reaction to almost incredible extremes. The recent laws making
divorce and abortion difficult for the common people, the establishing of
the death
p~nalty
for theft of State property, the restoration of uniforms
for schoolboys and of Czarist military discipline and rankings in the army,
the speed-up and enormous wage differentials of Stakhanovism, the an–
nihilation, political or physical, of almost all the Old Bolshevik leaders–
such symptoms of Thermidor have appeared throughout Soviet society.
In the cultural field, the screws were first applied with vigor on January
28, 1936, when
Pravda
launched its celebrated attack on the composer
Shostakovitch. Since the liquidation of RAPP in 1932, Soviet arts and letters
had enjoyed a period of comparative calm, freedom and tolerance-"a .gen–
eral critical amnesty," in the words of Joshua Kunitz.60 Webster defines
'amnesty' as "the act of a sovereign power, granting oblivion, or a general
pardon, for a past offense"-and, indeed, oblivion is the most welcome gift
the bureaucracy could make to any Soviet artist. Now this 'general pardon'
to artists for being artists was withdrawn, and they were all once more forced
