Elizabeth A Papazian. The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. Editor: Jonathan Auerbach & Russ Castronovo. December 2013.
Propaganda and “Soviet Subjectivity”
The term “propaganda” has long been a contentious term in Soviet studies. For the conservative anti-communists of the “totalitarian school” who viewed the Soviet project as a whole as illegitimate, all cultural production in the Soviet Union could be labeled “propaganda,” thereby denying it any potential legitimacy as art. The analysis of Soviet cultural production as propaganda was wrapped up in the mythmaking project of the Cold War, with the United States proclaiming itself the antithesis of the Soviet Union, and its various methods of shaping public opinion (information, public relations, education) defined as the antithesis of propaganda. For this reason, many literary and cultural critics avoided the term altogether, instead focusing their analyses on the cultural concept that circulated in the Soviet context: socialist realism. Boris Groys defined socialist realism as the “total art of Stalinism,” an art that enabled an “automatization of perception,” in contrast to the avant-garde notion of “defamiliarization” or “making strange”: socialist realism makes abnormal, even monstrous phenomena seem normal (Groys 1992, 36). Czeslaw Milosz described a similar paralysis of the critical faculty in The Captive Mind with his “Murti-Bing pill,” a pill that made anyone who took it “serene and happy … impervious to any metaphysical concerns” (Milosz 1990, 4–5). Such a view of Soviet culture imputes to it the potential to render the Soviet subject unable to think independently or critically: an automaton.
If we attempt to reclaim the term “propaganda,” to define it and analyze it within the Soviet context, we find ourselves confronting the question of Soviet subjectivity. Propaganda was part of the Soviet transformative project: it aspired to construct the Soviet subject. In its goal of transforming individuals, Soviet propaganda thus overlaps in its mission with education (which is usually associated with an opening up of possibilities of thought instead of a limitation on thought). The fraught overlap between propaganda and education can be sensed in the Soviet use of the term “enlightenment” (prosveshchenie). In the early Soviet period, the Ministry of Education was called the Commissariat of Enlightenment. In general, “enlightenment” meant “coming to consciousness”—becoming a conscious member of the working class: becoming proletarian. There is a suggestion in this usage of an “aha” moment that leads the individual down the correct path; at the same time, the term “enlightenment” carries the weight of the historical Enlightenment, with its connotation of free will and agency for the individual. Herein lies the paradox of the transformative impulse underlying Soviet propaganda: it aims to enlighten at the same time that it aims to control.
The historian Choi Chatterjee has defined propaganda simply as the “actual articulation of ideology,” a definition that affirms the relationship between propaganda and ideology and avoids the connotation of manipulation (Chatterjee 1999, 22). In his classic study of Soviet Russian and Nazi German film propaganda, Richard Taylor has stated that “if ‘propaganda’ is to be a useful concept, if it is to be distinguished from ‘information’ and ‘publicity,’ it must first of all be divested” of its “pejorative connotations” (1998, 7). He offers the following very wide definition: “Propaganda is the attempt to influence the public opinions of an audience through the transmission of ideas and values” (1998, 15).
Taylor’s definition may seem unacceptably broad, particularly if we consider the term’s pejorative connotations of manipulation as inherent to its meaning. But the wider definition allows for the word’s completely different valence in its Russian usage during the Soviet period. “Propaganda” (propaganda) was not a bad word; rather, it was the higher, more abstract form of the political activity known as “agitation” (agitatsiia). Agitation aimed to mobilize audience members to act—whether to join the collective farm, sign up to help out with the harvest, volunteer to help clean the local school, take a night course to learn to read, vote in upcoming elections, or sign a protest against some international political event or an article demanding the highest penalty for an “enemy of the people.” As Lenin wrote in 1903, expanding the distinction made by the Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov in the 1890s, agitation presented “a single idea to the masses” and strived “to rouse” emotions. Propaganda, on the other hand, presented “many ideas … so many, indeed, that they will be widely understood as an integral whole only by a (comparatively) few persons.” A political agitation campaign could consist of slogans, posters, speeches on factory floors, the declaration of a “holiday” (subbotnik) dedicated to labor on a specific politically expedient task (e.g., to cleaning up a school), the announcement of a “socialist competition” between teams of workers to complete a particular task fastest, or other forms of what we might consider overt persuasion, with a definite emphasis on the immediate and the oral or pictorial. One example of agitation would be the campaign to “liquidate illiteracy,” which featured many famous posters exhorting people to learn to read, and the establishment of reading circles and “red corners” in factories, villages, and workers’ clubs. “Propaganda,” in contrast, was more complex and oriented more toward the written word (Taylor 1998, 29, citing Lenin, 410); propaganda aimed “to cultivate … a whole new worldview” ( Lenoe 2004 , 28). As the historian Matthew Lenoe explains, propaganda was “linked with the long-term project of educating the downtrodden Russian masses to be worthy citizens of the socialist utopia that the Bolsheviks were constructing.”4 In the Soviet context, neither propaganda nor agitation was considered negative or subversive; both terms were used openly in Soviet public speech. Like “advertising” and “public relations” in the United States today, “agitation” and “propaganda” were forms of persuasion intended to influence a mass audience.
We might also consider the Leninist conception of a more complex propaganda as reaching beyond immediate goals of persuasion through image and word, toward the creation of a complex web of cultural associations that would reflect, reinforce, and in turn shape the political, social, and economic system. Large-scale revolutionary projects like the construction of the industrial city of Magnitogorsk (Kotkin 1995), the creation of the myth of the October Revolution (Corney 2004), or the establishment of yearly celebrations such as International Women’s Day (Chatterjee 2002) aimed not at short-term goals, but at radical political, social, and cultural transformation. While it may seem simplistic to describe projects that had such enormous, nondiscursive results as “propaganda,” they did simultaneously function on a discursive level. Such projects “inculcated new values and beliefs among the populace” and drew participants “into the network of Soviet existence” (Chatterjee 2002, 3–4), reordering what Katherine Verdery calls the “worlds of meaning” of Soviet citizens, that is, “people’s sense of a meaningful universe in which they also act” (Verdery 2000, 34–35).
One undeniable particularity of the Soviet case is the fact of state control of the means of production, including cultural production, from approximately 1932. Any cultural artifact legally published, produced, or circulated in the Soviet Union was potentially subject to state surveillance and control. (“Unofficial” forms of circulation, such as samizdat, may lie outside direct state control, but the background of surveillance and control surely affects even works distributed outside it.) The system educated, supported, and surveilled all of its artists, resulting in a peculiarly hermetic ecosystem in which censorship intersected with self-censorship.
But to assert a complete identity of art and propaganda (even if claiming this identity only under conditions of the state’s constraint of discourse and bodies) is to risk losing the meaning of both terms. In the Soviet case “the attempt to influence public opinions through the transmission of ideas and values” (Taylor 1998) overflows the boundaries of art and letters, pervading the organization of social life. Hannah Arendt refuses to call this “propaganda”: totalitarian movements “do not actually propagate but indoctrinate,” an activity that is “inevitably coupled with terror” (Arendt 1973, 344). For Arendt, the totalitarian regime uses propaganda only to address “the nontotalitarian world” that lies outside its direct control. Arendt instead refers to “totalitarian organization,” which is designed “to translate the propaganda lies of the movement … into a functioning reality, to build up … a society whose members act and react according to the rules of a fictitious world” (364).
Arendt’s distinction between “totalitarian organization” and “propaganda lies” foregrounds the coexistence of discursive and nondiscursive aspects of Soviet “cultural construction” (of discourse and practice). The establishment of worlds of meaning, of “beliefs and ideas materialized in action” (Verdery 2000), cannot be equated with “propaganda” in a one-to-one correlation because the former’s aims are not merely persuasive, but transformative. Here Arendt’s definition of totalitarian organization can help us redefine the infiltration of ideology throughout culture as the creation of a web of meanings—of cultural associations—that shapes (organizes) political, social, and economic systems. In both cases, the organization of life relies on discourse—or, in Arendt’s terms, “the rules of a fictitious world.”
The term most often used to describe this discursive web is socialist realism, the policy adopted at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in August 1934 as the “method” for Soviet literature and eventually, for every other art form. Socialist realism, or the “total art of Stalinism” (Groys 1992), might be seen as a kind of aestheticization of politics (to borrow Walter Benjamin’s phrase), or, in Evgeny Dobrenko’s analysis, as an aestheticization of reality itself. Dobrenko argues: “Socialist Realism was a highly aestheticized culture, a radically transformed world. […] Aesthetics did not beautify reality; it was reality. By contrast, all reality outside of Socialist Realism was but the wilderness of everyday life, waiting to be rendered fit to be read and interpreted.” To understand socialist realism as “purely propagandistic” and “in no way aesthetic” misses its essential role in the Soviet project as a “crucial part of the social machine”: “Socialist realism’s basic function was not propaganda … but rather to produce reality by aestheticizing it” (Dobrenko 2004, 699–700, his italics). In this sense, Vacláv Havel’s greengrocer, who displays a placard with the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” in his shop window— thereby both contributing to the “huge backdrop to daily life” of such ritualized slogans and connecting himself to the automatic and anonymous system “as a component of the system”—might be understood as part of that aestheticized reality, as part of the gigantic “machine for transforming [Soviet] reality into socialism.”
The scholar Petre Petrov has recently objected to the analysis of socialist realism as a deformation, mythologization, or “rape” of reality, an interpretation that assumes some “unmediated notion of reality” that is “available in the manner of wax or any other workable material, so that something can be ‘done to it.’” (Arendt’s description of “totalitarian organization” as the translation of “propaganda lies” into a “functioning reality” according to the “rules of a fictitious world” similarly fits into this paradigm.) For Petrov, even Dobrenko’s radical analysis of socialist realism as a machine for transforming Soviet reality into socialism separates the aestheticized reality or hyperreality of socialist realism from an assumed prior, more authentic, empirical reality (“Soviet reality” or “Soviet historical experience”). Rather, the displacement of “authentic reality” by means of the “Soviet propaganda machine” (socialist realism) is “a movement internal to the very concept of ‘reality’”; socialist realism’s dream factory was an integral part of Soviet empirical reality (Petrov 2011, 876–878). With Petrov’s critique in mind, is an analysis of socialist realism in relation to the always mediated reality of the Soviet experience possible?
Once we reconsider propaganda as one aspect of a discursive web that enmeshed every aspect of Soviet life, that—as Petrov writes—“itself refashioned the notion of truth and the real” (879), we turn to the subjects entangled in it: were Soviet citizens conformists “sedated” beyond all criticism, or were they “dissidents,” resisting the state monolith while conforming outwardly? Or perhaps they were true believers, victims of the deception of what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called “the big lie” who in turn became victimizers, imposing the deception on others? In the past twenty years, many scholars of the Soviet Union have focused on the transformative nature of the Soviet project, revealing the instability of previously accepted dichotomies between complicity/resistance, official/unofficial, public/private—and calling into question the very “possibility of a stable and coherent Stalinist subject.” Scholars have asked “To what extent did coercive Soviet state institutions and discourses limit the agency of individuals in constructing their identities, and how, precisely, did Soviet citizens exercise agency in creating their identities from and against prescriptive state discourses?” (Chatterjee and Petrone 2008, 968).
The model of “Soviet subjectivity” or more generally, “illiberal subjectivity,” has provided one answer to the question of agency in a system of constraint. The historian Igal Halfin has written, in a Foucauldian vein: “Neither only active nor only passive, the self creates itself while being created. […] there is no authentic, true subject out there that we have somehow to unearth. Rather, the subject is produced through power” (Halfin 2003, 34). In his study of Stalin-era diaries, the historian Jochen Hellbeck has revealed what he calls an “illiberal, socialist subjectivity” that shared with the standards of the capitalist industrial modernity of the West “a dedication to technology, rationality, and science,” but believed that “socialism would win out, economically, morally, and historically, because of its reliance on conscious planning and the power of the organized collective” (Hellbeck 2006, 9). Hellbeck argues that Soviet individuals sought to “claim for themselves the roles of active participants on a world historical stage” by “inscribing themselves into the Communist drama of human struggle and salvation” (Hellbeck 2009, 623). The belief in or internalization of ideology (via propaganda) is not as important as the fact that Soviet citizens “articulated, repeated, and perpetuated the categories of a Soviet weltanschauung” (Chatterjee 1999, 23). The illiberal subject is produced by discursive practices (Gerasimov 2002, 214). At the same time, the individual (discursive) project in subject formation lies at the very core of Soviet large-scale transformation.
But is this “subjectivity”? According to the cultural historian Alexander Etkind, the “Soviet subjectivity” model replaces “Soviet terms such as ‘remaking’ (peredelka), ‘reforging’ (perekovka), and ‘remolding’ (pereplavka), which are quite horrible in their application to humanity, with a universal idea of ‘subjectivity,’” which leads to a misperception of “Soviet subjectivity” as a “positive appreciation of the Soviet past”— even as “applauding the regime” (Etkind 2005, 176). But Etkind also points toward a larger problem of conflating rhetoric with practice, aesthetics with ethics, the “aesthetic authenticity” of texts with their authors’ “ethical autonomy,” or freedom of moral choice. “Those early Soviets with whom Hellbeck and Halfin are fascinated were free (at least in their diaries) to express their subjective authenticity. They were not autonomous (even in their diaries) in their choice between possible ideas of the good life. They were sincere, but they were not free. Does this qualify as subjectivity?” (177, my italics) In Etkind’s analysis, the Soviet privileging of authenticity as a “primary force of subjectivity,” an authenticity that could be “extorted” in “specifically Soviet personnel procedures from party purges to investigative torture to the oral exams in universities,” is anti-modern; “Soviet subjectivity” is “a failed project.”10 In other words, for Etkind, “subjectivity” seems to be equivalent to “freedom,” and is by necessity “modern,” “Western,” and “liberal”; Soviet or illiberal subjectivity is a mere illusion of subjectivity.
The distinction between rhetoric and practice—that is, between a rhetoric that promises self-realization through transformation and the practice it justifies—is precisely what becomes blurred in the socialist realist totalwork. Let’s assume that “subjectivity” includes both interiority (a capacity for thought, criticism, judgment, and imagination) and agency (the potential for action, for being an historical actor). How does the seeping of propaganda into culture affect subject formation? In an essay linking Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism with the documentary short stories of the gulag survivor Varlam Shalamov, the literary critic Svetlana Boym shows how interiority becomes a kind of agency in the give-and-take between imagination and judgment.
Boym argues that judging requires the subject to defamiliarize both experience (through the practice of thought) and “habits of thought” (through the challenging experience) (Boym 2008, 352). Imagination, like judgment, relies on “cultural commonplaces” of the surrounding culture, but also “involves a capacity for self-distancing, for moving beyond individual psychology into the experience of the common world” (352). In this sense, judgment and imagination counter the power of the “hypnotic simulacrum of the ideal Soviet territory” reproduced in Soviet socialist realism, which “helped to distract from and domesticate the powerful teleology of revolutionary violence that justified sacrifice for the sake of paradise on earth” (343). Instead of “domesticating and naturalizing” the everyday mythologies of the authoritarian state (including terror), judgment and imagination defamiliarize them (350). Elsewhere Boym has analyzed Victor Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie) or “making strange,” the artist’s attempt to “ ‘return sensation’ to life itself, to reinvent the world, to experience it anew,” an “exercise of wonder, of thinking of the world as a question, not as a staging of a grand answer” and has connected it to Arendt’s “conception of distance that is opposed to both Marxist world alienation and romantic introspection” (Boym 2005, 587–588, 600). Thus judging and imagination are the kind of aesthetic practice (including thinking) that “work in counterpoint to the state’s aesthetic totalwork” (Boym 2008, 350).
The trace of interiority, then, serves as evidence that individual subjectivity does remain, despite its entangling in a sticky web of state-sponsored discourses and practices. The trace of interiority is not restricted to artistic texts, even if critical thinking (judgment and imagination, in Boym’s terms) operates as aesthetic practice (defamiliarization).
Yet Etkind’s concern about agency persists. The literary scholar Irina Paperno’s work on dreams may provide an answer to this concern. Paperno reads politicized dreams about the Stalin terror recorded in diaries, letters, and dream journals “as texts—stories about historically specific experiences” (Paperno 2006, 794). Politicized dreams “signify the irresistible penetration of the terror into the inner and most intimate domains of people’s lives,” but not only as an instrument of terror (the terrorizing of the self in dreams); dreams of Stalin also afforded a way for “Soviet subjects to see themselves as actors on the social and historical scene; even to confront Stalin personally.” Dream experience enacted a subjectivity based on “uncertainty about agency” and on “a modality that fused possibility, impossibility, and necessity” (824). In a sense, then, the trace of individual agency (potential for action) exists both as an experience of the self as part of a collective historical (and historically necessary) action, and as an anxiety about whether individual actions distinct from that collective action are possible.
In her analysis of Shalamov’s story “Dry Rations,” set in the camps of Kolyma, Svetlana Boym evaluates the possibility of agency outside of the collective trajectory of the Bolshevik historical narrative (the discursive web):
Each prisoner reacts to the gasp of freedom by choosing a different tactic: suicide, self-mutilation, the resilient survival of gulag veteran and writer-witness, and Fedia’s ambivalent lesson of pushing the boundaries of the zone. Each reaction is an unpredictable form of judging for oneself, a personal choice that does not agree with the official objectification and subjugation of the: “human material.” Thus “Dry Rations” concerns not a liberal subjectivity that some historians love to hate but a liminal subjectivity that bends the barbed wire ever so slightly and yet significantly. (Boym 2008, 357)
Liminal subjectivity, which Boym connects not only with “individual acts of judging,” but also with “minor courageous acts,” calls to mind Tzvetan Todorov’s concept of the “ordinary virtues” that become heroic under extreme conditions. Elsewhere Boym has written about the “poetics of blemish,” a form of aesthetic subversion that appears as “misprints” in the “official plot of history.” Shalamov himself “insisted on leaving misprints and repetitions in his texts,” which, Boym notes, irritated “his helpful editors”; such blemishes preserve “traces of the singularity of experience and witnessing” and echo a similar interest in blemish among other modernist writers “who also addressed issues of totalitarianism—in particular, Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera” (348).
Boym’s connection of the aesthetic with the ethical in a metaphor that emphasizes reading is significant. Recalling Dobrenko’s analysis of socialist realism cited above: “all reality outside of Socialist Realism was but the wilderness of everyday life, waiting to be rendered fit to be read and interpreted” (my italics). Socialist realism produces the “official plot of history” to be read and understood; any “misprint” in the legible text can only obscure the meaning of history. Moreover, the Bolsheviks’ simultaneous concern with literacy—both as a goal of their emancipatory ideology and as a measure of its success—and with the legibility that total surveillance provides raises the stakes for “misprints,” heightening the potential for misreading.
Literacy vs. Legibility
The opposition between literacy and legibility provides another way to examine the Soviet enlightenment paradox mentioned above—that is, the tension between impulses toward controlling discourses and bodies (which includes propaganda) and of liberating them (which includes education). As James Scott has shown in his 1998 book Seeing Like a State, modern states have sought to simplify the societies they govern, to make them more “legible,” in order to extract resources, revenue, and conscripts for the army. For Scott, “ultra-high modern” theories like those of Le Corbusier and Lenin seek to simplify on a massive scale for utopian reasons—in order to create a perfect society— without worrying about the consequences to the ecosystem. Such massive simplification or “legibility” projects also necessarily involve state control on a mass scale. The goal of total transparency that is so brilliantly satirized in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s vision of a city made entirely of glass (in his 1921 novel We) facilitates a system of total surveillance and control.
The obverse of the Soviet movement toward legibility is the campaign for literacy. Régis Debray has recently identified the period of the “graphosphere,” the age of the dominance of print media (starting with the Gutenberg Revolution and ending with the “rise of TV”), and has located the “life-cycle of socialism” within this period, noting the importance of typography, books, schools, and the workers’ press for socialist revolutionaries across time and space—including, of course, “emancipation through literacy”: socialism was all about reading and writing ( Debray 2007 , 12). In the Soviet context, the success of the literacy campaign was one of the proudest accomplishments of the Bolshevik Party, but at the same time, the leadership was clearly aware that empowering people in this way might entail risks.
The danger of “real” enlightenment, an enlightenment that might lead to criticism, was always fought through both censorship and surveillance, including surveillance of readers, who filled out questionnaires about what they read at the library or at their study groups. Librarians were very often responsible for watching readers, noting what people were reading, and asking readers to respond to questions about whether they enjoyed the book and why or why not. Reader surveillance was extremely important in the 1920s, when reader tastes were eagerly examined as part of the development of Soviet literary aesthetics; by the mid-1930s, when socialist realism became the “only method” for Soviet literature, those reader tastes had found their way into literary policy, and the socialist realist “method,” a fusion of “high,” “tendentious,” and “popular” literature, clearly reflected mass taste as it could be determined from the various questionnaires. With socialist realism, readers could be led to the correct ideological analysis not only by schools, newspapers, study groups, work supervisors, and the state, but also through their leisure activities—reading, art appreciation, theater, and music. The surveillance of readers culminated at the First Writers’ Congress in 1934, when the doctrine of “socialist realism” was adopted, and delegations of readers from all over the Soviet Union and from all different professions read official reports asking for the writers to give them literature that would be relevant to their lives as Soviet citizens.17 In fact, we might consider the socialist realist aesthetic developed in the 1930s an attempt to make reading itself completely transparent and legible.
We might then posit a governing tension between literacy and legibility, between reading and being read. It is this duality between the literacy/legibility of the enlightenment project, of the opacity of interiority and the transparency of a collective subjectivity or, more specifically, of freedom of thought (criticism) and discursive constraint that defines Soviet art.
While the issue of literacy and legibility would seem to point us toward literature, and much has been made of the “idolization of writers” in the Soviet Union and the “hypertrophy of the text, its aura enhanced by censorship” (Debray 2007, 12), cinema was always understood by the Bolsheviks as the best instrument for propaganda, for “organizing the masses”—as attested by repeated quotation of the adage attributed to Lenin that cinema was “the most important of the arts.” Cinema’s importance only grew in the Stalin era: as Evgeny Dobrenko has argued, “Cinema corresponded most fully with the very nature of Stalinist art; the Stalinist Gesamtkunstwerk required a synthesis of the arts, and precisely cinema turned out to be amenable to the synthesis of literature, the theatre, music and painting” (Dobrenko 2008, 4). Dobrenko points out that “the expansion of the screen coincided with the boom in totalitarian ideologies and manipulating political technologies”; quoting Susan Sontag, he argues that, as in the novel, “the cinema presents us with a view of an action which is under control of the director (writer) at every moment … The camera is an absolute dictator.” In the 1930s, “the cinematographic phase of cultural development gradually replaced the literary phase” as part of a general cultural shift “from an avant-garde elitist culture to a mass-appeal socialist realist culture.”18 Even so, within the cinema of the Stalin era, the “status of the word increased enormously” (Dobrenko 2008, 5). Although Stalin’s personal interest in and enjoyment of cinema and his role as “censor-in-chief” is well known, many scholars insist that Stalin focused his censorship on verbal text (in particular, in the form of scripts) over image, and on the repression of screenwriters. This suggestion of the greater potency of word over image would seem to indicate that, in Debray’s terms, the Soviet system under Stalin was still part of the “graphosphere.” This shift found its nodal point in the mid-1930s, the moment of ascendance not only for socialist realism, but for sound cinema, which fed into that development; the mid-1930s also saw the establishment of the Soviet film industry, of thematic planning, of the first cinema trade union, and the attempt to expand the network of film distribution.
The tension between literacy and legibility lies at the crux of Dziga Vertov’s 1934 film, Three Songs of Lenin (Tri pesni o Lenine), made to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death. Vertov’s 1934 film has often been seen as a turning point in his own development as a director, a move away from the avant-garde work of the 1920s and toward a more “Stalinist,” “‘religious’, or quasi ‘sacred’ cinematic discourse” in the 1930s (MacKay 2000, 378). Constructed of documentary footage—both historical footage of Lenin’s life and death, and new footage shot on location around the Soviet Union— the film is divided into three sections: three “songs” based on songs allegedly written by women from the newly invented Central Asian republics (formerly known collectively as Turkestan) and the Trans-Caucasian republic of Azerbaijan. Although it is a sound film, Three Songs has little spoken text; the words of the songs are given on the soundtrack in various (non-Russian) languages and on screen through Russian intertitles. The soundtrack includes a mix of local music of the “Soviet East” (the songs of the title), Western classical music, Soviet patriotic marches, and the Internationale, several examples of speech recorded on location (one short speech of Lenin reproduced without synchronized images in the second song, and four synchronized interviews with a shock-worker, an engineer, a collective farm worker, and a collective farm leader in the third song), the call of a mullah (in the first song), and, toward the end of the second song and in the third song, noises, including gunshots, cannons, sirens, and a variety of industrial noises. In other words, Three Songs of Lenin often seems like a silent film with an added soundtrack. As in Vertov’s earlier films, images are linked primarily through logical and/or formal connections and false eyeline matches; for example, when in the second song a recurring shot of women sitting in a darkened room as though in a cinema or theater, looking offscreen in the same direction, is succeeded by footage of Lenin’s corpse or Lenin’s funeral, we may assume that the women are looking at the same images as we are.
The reference to “songs” in the title extends Vertov’s play throughout his career with generic designations. His avant-garde masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera (1928) and first sound film Enthusiasm (Symphony of the Donbass) (1931) were referred to, grandly, as “symphonies,” while the later, more doctrinaire Stalinist film Lullaby (1937) bears a simpler, folksier designation. The title Three Songs of Lenin embodies a generic tension; while suggesting a turn from avant-garde and documentary toward epic and history (“pesni o” is a typical epic title), the word “song” simultaneously motivates the film’s structure, an arrangement of documentary material based on visual, literary, and poetic qualities.
The first song demonstrates how women’s lives have changed under Soviet power; the second, an expansion of the twenty-first issue of Vertov’s cinema journal Kino-pravda (1925), retells the history of the Russian Revolution through Lenin’s life and death, focusing in particular on his funeral; and the third song showcases the achievements of Bolshevik power since Lenin’s death, reiterating, “If only Lenin could see us now!” As an example of the Lenin cult initiated under Stalin, the film focuses on building up Lenin not only as an historical figure and founder of the Bolshevik Party, but as a folk hero and even a religious icon.21 The film’s advertising emphasized that it included newly discovered archival footage of “the living Lenin” (Vertov 1984, 115).
The first song of Three Songs of Lenin encodes the literacy/legibility dyad in the theme of unveiling, part of the Soviet modernization project in Central Asia. This segment of the film, titled “My Face Was in a Dark Prison,” aligns the unveiling of “the women of the East” with the urbanization of the countryside. One of James Scott’s main examples of a mass “ultra-high modern” simplification, Soviet collectivization, is glorified here, with “Lenin” becoming a metaphor for “springtime,” associated with water and light—which in turn is associated with “enlightenment.” Electrification was one of the key Soviet cultural metaphors for enlightenment; “unveiling” became a similar metaphor, particularly during the hujum or “attack” of the late 1920s on Central Asian traditions and customs, which included a campaign for forced unveiling of women.
In the first song, the desert is irrigated; electricity is brought to the villages; crops grow—but most importantly, women unveil themselves and are enlightened. One woman is singled out in recurring images and used as a visual narrative device, linking together the varied documentary material. We see her at her window, then coming out into the street, walking to the women’s club. This “enlightened” woman is first pictured at the window of her house in a typical visual rhetorical move for Soviet cinema, looking offscreen ostensibly toward the bright future that beckons; but she is also holding a book. Enlightenment (“a ray of truth … the dawn of Lenin’s truth,” as the intertitle informs us) comes not only from unveiling and from the “electrification of the whole country,” but through literacy. The women at the women’s club are learning how to read—not just anything, but the works of Lenin that we see, later in the film, carried across the screen on conveyer belts, the product of the Taylorist, rationalized, mechanized labor that the film promotes.
Three Songs of Lenin epitomizes the early Soviet nationalities’ policy of “state-sponsored evolutionism,” in which the Russian “vanguard” would “push forward” the various “backwards” peoples of the Soviet Union along the “Marxist timeline of historical development,” toward a common international—or post-national—future.23 Vertov combines footage from several different parts of the Soviet Union, with completely disparate local customs—including varying traditions of women’s seclusion and veiling—into a single image of backwardness and oppression of women that can then be “electrified” by Lenin and his (vanguard) agents: electricity and the tractor. Vertov’s film imagines this process as a massive web of electrification/enlightenment, conducted through print media, radio, and cinema. (In the second song, footage from Lenin’s funeral is interspersed with shots of women in a darkened room looking offscreen, and shots of different women listening to a radio, apparently suggesting that the women of the Soviet periphery are watching and/or listening to some kind of Lenin commemoration occurring in Moscow.) “Enlightenment” radiates from the center—from the metropole, Moscow, and from the ultimate vanguard of the proletariat, Lenin, or at least his corpse, which “lights” the “Lenin’s little lamps” and communicates via radio.
In Three Songs of Lenin, the theme of legibility intersects with the theme of enlightenment/literacy: we see images of a child being weighed and measured; women unveiling themselves, learning to read, driving a tractor, fixing a tractor; a light being turned on in a yurt as a woman tunes in by radio to a report from Red Square; and, later in the film, a new Central Asian Agricultural-Pedagogical Institute; and a young Central Asian woman looking through a microscope. Nature can be surveyed, measured, and controlled; people can be surveyed, measured, and controlled. The illegible becomes legible; dark becomes light; the hidden becomes visible; the blind become sighted; the oppressed become enlightened and learn to read the world around them as it becomes progressively more transparent. The hujum is about making the illegible local cultures of Central Asia legible to the Russian metropole. Unveiling is the ultimate expression of the ambivalent coexistence of enlightenment and legibility.
Throughout the film, the image of Lenin’s corpse serves as an icon that illuminates the Bolshevik truth: of individual liberation (unveiling, literacy) that has meaning only as part of a mass modernization project. In the first song, we learn that Lenin “made light of darkness, a garden of the desert, and life of death”; he “convinced the weak and the poor that a million specks of sand make a dune, that a million grains make a sack, that a million of the weak are a mighty force.” Light and eternal life are inextricably linked with collectivization—with the irrigation and cultivation of the Central Asian steppe— and industrialization. The third song sings of Soviet industrialization, showcasing the projects of the Five-Year Plans. Most of these projects—Magnitogorsk, the White Sea-Baltic Canal, the Moscow-Volga Canal—were built using forced labor, in part or in full: thus the film concludes with a model of total control. But more important for our purposes is the emphasis on transparency. This third segment of the film features documentary-style interviews with individual Soviet citizens (all apparently European) who attest to their participation in the course of history. One woman, the shockworker Maria Belik, modestly tells the story of how she was awarded the Order of Lenin for her work at the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam construction site after she fell into a vat of concrete, climbed out, dried off, and finished her shift, overfulfilling the plan. Vertov’s use of synchronized sound at this point, after an asynchronous montage of sound and image throughout the rest of the film, creates the impression of a total laying bare of the people being interviewed. These ordinary “working-class heroes” become transparent.
But the enlightenment achieved by the Central Asian women in the first and second songs of Three Songs of Lenin differs from the transparency achieved by the Europeans in the third song. The women of the “Soviet East” go to the women’s club to read, to play musical instruments, to have their children weighed and measured, to study, to watch movies about Lenin (the second song is framed as some kind of Lenin commemoration attended by women at the women’s club); they learn to drive and repair tractors; they listen to radio reports from Red Square; they attend the Agricultural-Pedagogical Institute; they learn to use a microscope. In particular, the “enlightened woman” of the first song who holds a book and looks out the window offscreen, apparently toward the future—linked by false eyeline matches with shots of young Pioneers marching, apparently also into the bright future—presents us with an image of enlightenment as thought. As the film scholar John MacKay has noted, this woman is not simply reading, but writing: the previous shots of the old, prerevolutionary, “blind” way of life and the vision of marching Pioneers seem to be “flashbacks or meditations, ‘interior’ to [her] consciousness”; her subjectivity structures the material. Using a “subjective, psychological pivot” to link “the passage from the Old to the New” is a new rhetorical move for Vertov (MacKay 2000, 382). Such offscreen glances in Stalin-era film are generally associated with (reverse-shot) fantasies of the Great Leader ( Shcherbenok 2009 ), but Three Songs does not provide this kind of suture.28 While MacKay has laid to rest the hypothesis that Three Songs did not contain images of Stalin and formed a kind of “structuring absence,” the presence of Stalin in the film did not structure the film in the expected manner: Stalin, like all the other ordinary citizens shown in the film, simply fulfills Lenin’s testament ( MacKay 2000 , 386). One of these ordinary people in fact attains something more: subjectivity in the sense of interiority.
The enlightened woman’s thoughtful, intense offscreen gaze signals the dangers of enlightenment: the unveiled “women of the East” can now not only read, but write; they can think, criticize, and challenge authority. Instead of following what James Scott calls the “one-way transmission of information and ideas” of propaganda, revolution becomes “a complex social event involving the wills and knowledge of many human agents, of which the vanguard party [is] only one element” (Scott 1998, 155, 170). By “one-way transmission,” Scott means Lenin’s conception of agitation and propaganda; whereas the “complex social event” refers to Rosa Luxemburg’s vision of revolution as a “living process.” Scott contrasts Luxemburg’s model of a vanguard party that produces a “creative, conscious, competent, and empowered working class” to Lenin’s view of the vanguard party as “a machine for making a revolution and then for building socialism,” a means and not an end. It is interesting in this regard that the “enlightened woman” seen at the window in Vertov’s film has been identified as Aishat Gasanova, a Party activist (MacKay 2000, 382). Despite its inexorable orientalist linking of periphery (Central Asia) to metropole (Moscow) not only in spatial terms, but in a Marxian historical trajectory that the East must inevitably follow, Three Songs of Lenin presents Bolshevism as having real potential for empowerment: the “women of the East” are not just part of the mass of newly legible and literate workers and peasants but have the potential to become part of the vanguard, as in Luxemburg’s model of “living process.”
Three Songs of Lenin received wide distribution and positive reviews from around the Soviet Union and recognition for Vertov; it was even cited by Boris Shumyatsky, the head of the centralized Soviet film industry, in his 1935 book on socialist realism in cinema. According to Shumyatsky, Three Songs “bears witness to the transition by even the ideologists of the factographic documentary film to the positions of socialist realism”; the film was “organized, connected, and ideologically moulded fictional material” (Shumyatsky 1994, 365–366). But Three Songs is constructed out of fragments of historical “fact,” or documents, which have been strung like beads into a loose rhetorical structure; it is a sound film that eschews dialogue, instead using poetic intertitles (the texts of the songs) and a challenging soundtrack that mixes Western classical music, Soviet patriotic marches, the Internationale, and the local music of the “Soviet East” with a few “unstaged” recordings of sound and speech. Its fragmentary nature both on the visual and sound tracks renders gaps in the rhetorical structure that must be filled in by the viewer. Despite its clear propaganda function as a Lenin cult film, Three Songs has more in common structurally with the art of the avant-garde faktoviki (factographers) than with the hero-centered formulae of socialist realism.
Unlike the major film hit of 1934, the Vasiliev “brothers’” Chapaev, an adaptation of Dmitry Furmanov’s documentary prose work of the same name, Vertov’s film retains a documentary aesthetic. Although like Chapaev, Three Songs is loosely structured around a biography—no less than the biography of Lenin—it never becomes a biographical film with a clear unifying narrative. Its dazzling array of footage from around the Soviet Union and its newly discovered footage of Lenin do not quite become a “museum of the revolution” in Dobrenko’s terms; rather, the incompletely assimilated footage recalls Vertov’s commitment to the fantasy of a universal archive of “unplayed” (unstaged, nonfiction) cinema. Dobrenko notes the “complex link” between the archive and the museum: “If the archive is the basis of the historian’s work in the restoration of the past, then the museum is the basis for official myth and the institution for the installation of the artificial past” (Dobrenko 2008, 5). The historical museum of Stalinist cinema, in Dobrenko’s analysis, functions to legitimize and control the institutionalized past and, through historical narrative, to legitimize the Stalinist present (Dobrenko 2008, 12–13, 18–19). In this sense Dobrenko’s museum bears comparison with Hayden White’s (1978) model of historical narrative as a fiction-like familiarization of otherwise incomprehensible, often traumatic events: and we return full circle to the dialectical relationship between “familiarization,” “automatism,” “sedation,” “normalization,” “legitimatization”—or whatever we chose to call the “something” that socialist realism “does” to reality—and the famous Russian avant-garde function of defamiliarization.
Here again we might note Petrov’s caution: both the “reality” and the “distortion” are part and parcel of the same historical phenomenon; we can extrapolate from this to suggest that the apparent authenticity of documentary footage is in fact as illusory as that of the most extravagant Stalinist musicals. For socialist realism, however, there was a difference between the loosely strung beads from Vertov’s archive and the tightly scripted historical narratives of mythological heroes: despite the advent of sound cinema, Vertov chose to continue putting his films together in a “poetic” or “musical” structure. As Ian Christie has shown, sound cinema posed a serious challenge to 1920s Soviet avant-garde film aesthetics. Christie emphasizes the importance to the montage school of Boris Eikhenbaum’s concept of “inner speech,” that is, the viewer’s “constant subjective ‘accompaniment’ to the experience of film viewing,” making “the connection between separate shots.” According to Christie, “if ‘inner speech’ provides the guarantee of film intelligibility, it is also the basis on which filmic metaphor and other rhetorical structures depend.” The danger to “inner speech” presented by the “outer speech” of sound cinema (in particular, dialogue) was of transforming the spectator from an active participant in making meaning in a “poetic interplay of inner speech and montage figures” into a “passive eavesdropper” (Christie 1982, 38). Although Vertov’s 1934 film provides far more narrative signposts, and is far more “accessible” (in Shumyatsky’s terms) to the viewer than any of his previous work, nonetheless it avoids dialogue altogether, and includes only a few monologues, such as a recording of a Lenin speech and three interviews with workers. The bulk of the film’s literary text consists of the “songs” conveyed on the soundtrack in languages other than Russian, and in Russian through intertitles. To assimilate these texts with the often metaphorical images requires the activation of inner speech.
If propaganda represents the limitation (or domestication) of thought, art—at least as an ideal—represents the liberation of thought. The gap between what is said and what is meant, between the representation and the actual object, between the signifier and the signified: this is the gap (of a “misprint”) that allows misunderstanding, interpretation, and, most importantly, criticism. In the case of Three Songs of Lenin, the elisions in the soundtrack—which provides speech only to Lenin and the evidently European Soviet worker, engineer, collective farm worker, and collective farm leader, but not to the “women of the East,” whose devotion to Lenin is conveyed only in song—function to defamiliarize the “official plot of history” (Boym) that the film presents, to activate the gap, and thereby the viewer’s active participation in the production of meaning. In this sense, subjectivity resides not in the “simulacrum of the ideal Soviet territory” (Boym 2008) constructed in Three Songs, but rather in the viewer’s participation in that construction.
In the Stalin era, even the most committed author was vulnerable to having his or her works misinterpreted by the implied reader that hovered over everything: not only the censors, but the secret police (and in the Stalin era, Stalin).30 We might simply chalk up the potential for misreading to the nature of certain literary tropes—most obviously metaphor—in which what is said is different from what is meant. After all, when one uses indirect means of expression, there is always the possibility of being misunderstood. The genres that use more of the indirect modes of narrative discourse (such as free indirect speech31) are more vulnerable to multivalent readings. Such genres require the reader’s/viewer’s participation in the production of meaning through “inner speech,” the subjective connection of parts of the artistic work into a coherent whole— that is, through thought. As the standard bearer for the 1960s and 1970s Soviet school of “poetic cinema,” Dziga Vertov is a perfect example of the use of indirect modes that activate inner speech. The tension in Vertov’s work between the illusory objectivity of documentary modes and the opacity of poetry makes space for the subject.
The Soviet enlightenment paradox—the tension between literacy (opacity, emancipation, education, art) and legibility (transparency, control, indoctrination, propaganda)— mimics the gap between the object and its representation. The dream of total legibility attempts to overcome or abolish this gap, while the obverse goal of literacy instead relies on the gap, the same gap between signifier and signified on which art depends. The muddling of the categories of “art” and “propaganda” that results from the legibility/literacy dialectic is surely not unique to the Soviet 1930s, emerging in religious contexts as early as the Counter-Reformation. But such blurring manifests itself especially starkly in Soviet socialist realism—as exemplified in the visual rhetoric of Vertov’s film.