And so, draped in red, the pendulum swings back again. We have often discussed the semi-cyclical (ovulalular? Parabolic? Any shape that implies recurrence will do) nature of cultural change (and, hence, its representation in cultural production) in Russia and the Soviet Union. We read Gladkov’s Cement, in which Gleb arrives home from the front to find everything (especially relations with his wife) radically altered. Gleb struggles to comprehend the new, radical gender relations of the (albeit heavily idealized) Soviet world- his wife operates outside the home, holds responsibilities. He is not the center of her world, and he bristles at his loss of authority.

Then comes Stalin, and the dynamism of the early Soviet gender ideal is locked behind the iron facade of towering, epistemologically stable gender monoliths. Enter ‘red traditionalism’- man as warrior, man as worker, woman as mother. Mother calling for revenge, raising pioneers, etc.

So what to make of the gender roles portrayed in Moscow Does Not Believe in
Tears? This is a big topic, so I will say just a few words here. Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears appears to be a sort of synthesis of the two previous models for gender relations (and their portrayal) in Soviet works. Ekaterina is the director of her factory. This is portrayed as an achievement (she is complimented, remarked upon), but essentially normalized: her life story remains within the realm of the possible. It is just unusual enough to be a source of dramatic tension with Gosha-this dramatic tension is not employed in the movie to ‘prove’ Gosha ‘wrong’, or to ‘prove’ his patriarchal views ‘right’ (at least explicitly.) Rather, it lets these views be showcased, and also normalized. ‘Red traditionalism’ is given a platform, and is left unquestioned. When Gosha is a ‘strong father,’ the results are shown as positive, and when he asserts patriarchal control, Ekaterina acquiesces. He leaves, upset, when he finds out about her position, but returns with the ‘problem’ left unresolved: drunken comradeship and zakuski, deus ex machina that they are, do not change that Ekaterina is still the director of her factory. The ending is touching, but has a note of ambiguity-Soviet gender relations continue to toe the line between progressivism and traditionalism.

But everyone seems happy. And it really is a beautiful movie.

Brodsky’s attitude towards language throughout “Less than One” conveys the powerful sentiments of the dehumanization and lack of individuality that many Russians fell victim to. First, he describes his attitude towards his Judaism: “I remember that I always felt a lot easier with a Russian equivalent of “kike”: it was clearly offensive and thereby meaningless, not loaded with allusions. A one-syllable word can’t do much in Russian” (8). He is frustrated with the less offensive word for Jew because it is “loaded with allusions”, while he embraces the far more offensive word because of its clarity. The word “kike” does offer a role for a Jew in society, though it is not a particularly flattering role whereas the more benign word for Jew is so complicated and multifaceted that it fails to offer any clarity. He describes the Russian language as inadequate when it comes to offering language that enables humanity and individualism. He continues to describe a lack of power: “verbs and nouns change places as freely as one dares to have them do so” (9). He recognizes words as a form of censorship—it seems as if the words drive the content of the conversation, rather than the content determining the words used.

He offers another example of this notion at the end of the piece, “I merely regret the fact that such an advanced notion of Evil as happens to be in the possession of Russians has been denied entry into consciousness on the grounds have having convoluted syntax” (31). He argues that the sentiment behind the word “Evil” is not one that is properly expressed in the Russian language; while Russians, of course, have the capacity for evil, they don’t have the language necessary to talk about it. Brodsky laments the intricacies of the Russian language for indirectly contributing to the battle against freedom of speech.

A sweeping sense of despair and hopelessness over the unjustifiable and heinous actions committed against the people and the intelligentsia of the times pervades the works of Akhmatova and the Mandelstams. The hopelessness comes from the systematic breaking down of the individual and their sanity, so that the persecuted are waiting for death to be granted to them as a kind of mercy and relief from their present reality.

In Akhmatova’s poems, as we have seen before, uses herself as her own muse and writes of herself in the third person, although to produce a different effect: here this intentional distancing and separation from herself allows for her to write about herself in more general terms, making her character able to encapsulate the plight of other individuals, artists or not. However on a deeper and physiological level, it is in itself a manifestation of trauma. Separating yourself from a traumatic incident is one coping mechanism, in which you are able to deny that it happened to you, imagining another separate entity to be victim of your history. This is exemplified in part III: “No this is not me – someone else suffers. / I couldn’t stand this: let black drapes / cover what happened…” However even this is confused throughout her writings, where her own identity bleeds through, making the identity of the victim unclear, proving that Akhmatova herself is the true inspiration for her works, in part II she writes:  “This woman is sick, / This woman is alone, / husband in the grave, son in prison, / pray for me.” The “me” at the very end betrays the woman’s identity.

A striking component of these writings was the separation of the individual from the outside world, and more specifically the separation from the family. As we see with Akhmatova, what haunts her throughout her imprisonment was the despair of knowing that the regime had killed her husband and had also imprisoned her son. The uncertainty of whether her son would live or die weighed greatly on her and brought her to the point of welcoming death. In Mandelstam’s writing, she wrote about the imprisonment of her husband and how the regime attempted to systematically break him down, by hindering his sleep patters, as well as potentially making him listen to the far off voice of a woman that in his delusional state thought was the voice of his wife. She writes this: “Methods like these are only possible when if a prisoner’s links to the world are broken from the moment of his arrest.” It was also shocking to witness the acceptance of their reality to the point where exiles were longer something to be afraid of since they were subject to them so frequently, and more surprising the attempt at committing suicide by slashing one’s wrist as “being the most natural thing in the world.” This, then is only one of the many effects of trauma produced by Stalin’s harsh regime.

Early on in “Hope against Hope”, Nadezhda describes her early relationship with M., “Whenever they met they were cheerful and carefree like children, as in the old days at the Poets’ Guild. ‘Stop it,’ I used to shout, ‘I can’t live with such chatterboxes!’”(4). Returning to this sentence after having read the whole piece, the notion of any of these characters as “chatterboxes” seems utterly out of place. This stark contrast is clear at the end, when she writes, “An existence like this leaves its mark. We all became slightly unbalanced mentally—not exactly ill, but not normal either: suspicious, mendacious, confused and inhibited in our speech, at the same time putting on a show of adolescent optimism” (88). “Adolescent optimism” replaces their previous “cheerful and carefree like children” behavior. Similarly, instead of being “chatterboxes” they have become “inhibited in our speech”.

The effect of terror and its influence on speech really struck me in this piece. The fact that writers and poets, those who clung to words and speech for their livelihood, were most targeted and silenced was particularly striking when Nadezhda writes, “But a poet, after all, is just a human being like any other, and he is bound to end up in the most ordinary way, in the way most typical for his age and his times, meeting the fate that lies in wait for everyone else. None of the glamour and thrill of special destiny, but the simple path along which all were ‘herded in a herd’” (10). The realization of these dejected poets that they will likely die without “glamour and thrill” goes hand in hand with the realization that poets, too, are vulnerable and can be silenced by the government. The pain of a deflated artist is particularly poignant and representative of the pervasiveness of the terror.

Looking at the Stalin-era propaganda posters, the personified, female Motherland (Rodina-Mat’) appears again and again. She is portrayed in a more or less uniform manner-she is swathed in a red approximation of village female dress, and she occupies the center of the poster, either calling upon the viewer directly, or looking up and leftwards towards a hostile ‘other’ (it is up for debate whether the figure in the V.S. Ivanov poster is the Rodina-Mat’ ‘simplified,’ or a different figure, an archetypal Soviet all-mother.

The personified Motherland demands two things: action from the viewer, or damnation upon the other-enemy. This action is tied with issues of war, betrayal, revenge- this action requires either violence or self-discipline as ‘verbal violence’ (nye boltai!). The viewer is expected to do something, to placate this figure, to prove themselves a real Soviet citizen (though, keeping Freud in mind, this mother-invocation to go fight and save the motherland might have slightly different implications for young Soviet men…). The Rodina-Mat’ is the ‘mother’ to all citizens, the home front conscience who spurs them on. She will harvest the grain, clutch the child, but none of this will be possible if the viewer does not act.

So, where’s dad? The figure that is missing from these posters is, of course, Stalin himself. This does not mean that he is absent from Soviet propaganda posters- the difference, rather, seems to be in his role. A cursory search reveals that, in Stalin-era propaganda posters, the role of Stalin himself is, compared to the Rodina-Mat’, markedly less aggressive and action based: he is an object of adulation, a benevolent guarantor of the future. When he is ‘doing’ something, he is portrayed as insulated from the viewer’s gaze: they will see how he acts, but he does not explicitly call upon them to act.

Why is this? I posit that, in the Stalinist symbolic universe, Stalin-as-image and the Rodina-Mat’ are two components of a symbolic ‘pair,’ a semi-parental function with a dialectic relationship both to each other and to the viewer. As an image that represents, to a certain degree, a ‘real’ figure, Stalin-as-image cannot be too intimately tied to the world of direct action: as people disappear in black cars at night, and gossip from the front varies in its positivity, this image might not be as convincing. The Rodina-Mat’, however, is doubly useful: she simultaneously does not ‘exist,’ yet, as a reimagining of the ‘eternal mother/feminine’ figure, exists everywhere, and retains real power to motivate. These two figures, hers and that of Stalin, need each other to comprise a full symbolic universe: she to demand love in the form of action, he to receive love as the result of implied action.

While reading the excerpts from Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, I was constantly confused as to how to read it; I could not rightly discern the stance it was taking in regards to the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing Soviet regime, until at last the very end. I believe that my confusion exemplifies the different views as stated in the history textbook about the drastic and arduous changes occurring in Russia. The text is following the return of Gleb from the front lines as a Red soldier to his home in a factory town. The text sets up the stage that everything has changed by providing the reader with the smokescreen that everything appears to look the same to Gleb. Slowly, however, we begin to realize to what extent things have actually changed beneath the surface: his wife is not the same woman he left three years ago and the factory is devoid of workers. In short, everything this Bolshevik soldier thought he was fighting for is left unrealized or has abandoned him. This first led me to believe that Soviet Revolution, as depicted in the text, failed to deliver what it was seeking to accomplish; this is clearly the thought process of the ex-factory workers. The text however resolves that problem by the end with the simple fact that they needed someone from the party, Gleb, to organize them. It is an interesting move to make, to have the local Soviet soldier be the one to revitalize the community and its workers, when there is a clear disconnect between him and his fellow ex-factory workers and their experiences for the last three years, as well as the entire ideology of the Soviet Party. It is clear from his relationship with his wife that he in himself and on the domestic front is not entirely the embodiment of all the new Soviet ideals. Gleb is very much a character that is ruled by his almost primitive passions, his love for the factory and labor is described as one would describe something innate, primitive, and instinctual. His love for Dasha can be qualified in the same way, it is a love that manifests itself in the dominance of man and the subservience of woman. He does not love Dasha for Dasha, but loves her as a “traditional woman.” This view on woman is an obsolete view in this new Soviet order, but he is not able to come to terms with it, although by the end he knows everything has changed, and that women no longer like they did before the revolution, and are not to be treated in the same manner.

Considering the time this text was written, the positive effects of the Revolution had yet to fully make themselves known. The transition to a new regime after a revolution is without fail always turbulent, and this is what the text manages to portray. Although it is a propaganda text in favor of the Soviet Party, it is still grounded in fact and makes no delusion with itself on the realities and consequences of war. Everything has changed but the work is still not done or complete, not even the Soviet soldier is the perfect example of the ideals of this new world order, but there is still hope and potential, and the firm belief that Soviet Party will lead Russia to better days.