58
PARTISAN REVIEW
Shumiatsky replied
(1)
that he would make
800
films m
1940,
and
(2)
that the original
1937
Plan of
123
films was "unrealistic" and must be cut
to
60.
In the first six months of
1937
just four pictures were produced, and
on June
1, 1937,
only thirteen scenarios were in production. 92 The Plan
called for
70,000
movie theatres by the end of
1937,
but less than half
that many existed by then.
It
was becoming clear even to the Kremlin that
Shumiatsky would have to go. In less complicated societies, he would have
been dismissed for inefficiency. But in the Russia of Stalin such directness
would be out of question. The frame-up system has reached the point of
being automatic, so that guilty and innocent alike must be framed . In Shu–
miatsky's case, it is true, a frame-up was perhaps an administrative necessity.
To have simply fired him as a bungler would have reflected on the regime
which had kept him in office eight years.
The Shumiatsky frame-up showed imagination and humor. The basic
charge was the usual banality to the effect that he had "permitted savage
veteran spies, Trotskyist and Bukharinist agents, and hirelings of Japanese
and German fascism to perform their wrecking deeds in the Soviet cinema."
But the specific incident which the stage managers chose to bring about
Shumiatsky downfall was something quite original. The Children's Film
Trust had produced a version of Stevenson's
Treasure Island.
Early in
1938,
Soviet Art,
organ of the Central Art Committee denounced this film as
bourgeois (to get love interest, Jim Hawkins had been changed into Jenny
Hawkins, with whom Dr. Livesey falls in love), and also as leftist (to get
a class angle, the Irish revolutionary movement had been dragged in).
If
the
producers had to do this, asked
Soviet Art,
why had they not at least read
Karl Marx's
1869
letter on the Irish situation? This Irish rebellion idea
had been approved of by Shumiatsky and three other high executives, "who
were later exposed as enemies of the people." A reference in the review to
Shumiatsky as "the former chief" of the cinema industry was the first
public intimation of his fall. He himself was not accused of wrecking but
merely of "falling into the hands of wreckers who wormed their way into
the administration of cinematography." He is today among the 'missing.'93
The Shumiatsky debacle stimulated much comment in the Soviet press
as to what was wrong with the cinema. Four major weaknesses seemed to exist:
1.
The incompetence of the Shumiatsky administration, which oscillated
between visions of the future and complete paralysis of decision in the present.
This is the reaction one might expect from executives who are called on to
carry out impossibly ambitious plans and at the same time apply a political
control which alienates the directors and scenarist they must depend on for
production. The official excuse for the collapse is that Shumiatsky was given
too much power. As an Amkino official put it, "Naturally, with only one
~an looki~g ~fter
things,
th~re
wa.s bound to be relaxation of vigilance
III
some dIrections and resultmg mlsmanagement."9oj Without asking who
