Moscow believes in the Soviet ideal, as proven time and again in Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. Throughout Vladimir Menshov’s award-winning 1980 film, subtle returns to the ideal citizens depicted in early Socialist Realism are interspersed with more modern ideas of gender roles. Without knowledge of Menshov’s politics, it seems as if the movie serves two purposes: grounding the viewer within their preordained role in society, and serving as a vehicle for the Soviet woman to re-affirm her stake, aided by the introduction of a more “modern” (1970s/80s) role for women. This may have been a vitally important task: citizens of the USSR were restless, just 11 years before the fall of the Soviet Union, and any chance to modernize and re-evaluate staid traditional policies might have pacified the people for some much-needed time. With this admission though, and even with the strong female presence found in the film, state ideology is never questioned or contorted beyond recognition. Moscow is a Soviet film at heart, with the intent of bringing culture back into a semi (and modernized) Soviet Realist style.

Moscow Does Not Believe in Tear is a story of three women at its core, and their experiences and trials throughout the film highlight the main themes applied by the writer and director. All migrants from the countryside, or “boonies” as is stated in the film, the women have extremely different mindsets and philosophies. I found region and education to be closely linked, heavily weighted factors throughout the film. Although studying to further their education, the women are all markedly different from the majority of true “Muscovites” that feature in the film. This may be purely a result of class (The Worker’s Dormitory they reside in versus the luxurious apartments of the elites), but I believe education is also a vital piece. The men that Liudmila, and to a lesser extent Katya, are interested in wooing are all have a distinctly academic and educated flavor, with a few notable exceptions. The opening scene is particularly indicative of the role Liudmila will play in the movie: she disparages the country boy, and worker, Nikolai. This will come back to haunt her, as her own husband (Sergei), a Muscovite hockey player, will descend into alcoholism, and the marriage will end tragically. Katya also suffers for adopting a toxic mindset. In her focus on education, she too bears a faint trace of the bourgeois, as does Liudmila’s taste in men. Her seeming acceptance of education and the Muscovite high life reaches its climax at her willingness to go along with Liudmila’s dinner party, which proves to be a vessel to meet eligible bachelors of a higher class. Katya pays for this violation by ending up a single mother. The good-for-nothing TV host father of her child and his clearly bourgeois family elites wants nothing to do with her or her daughter as soon as her ruse has been revealed. When shown that Katya is a member of the true favored Soviet Class (she is of rural origins, and a factory worker) they immediately treat her with disdain. In this way Katya plays a typical Soviet Worker Woman, and pays for her infidelity to the ideology dearly. She only reaches peace and happiness with the vaguely impoverished Gosha, himself a worker.

Unlike her roommates, Tonya has the “right” idea about men from the beginning of the movie. She is engaged in a constant, unending relationship with a fellow rural worker, which ends in as blissfully as it began. She makes no attempt to join in dinner-party like shenanigans, content to hold-true to a Soviet Realist ideal by marrying her fellow worker, and a typical Soviet man. With this, we can see the two distinct pathways taken by the women of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. In the eyes of the regime, the two women that ultimately pay during the movie chose the wrong path: pursuit of men of a higher, merit-less class, driven in part by slightly frivolous education. We see the opposite as well: ultimate obedience, in love and in life, to the collective national experiment of a working man’s state. The movie’s forward-thinking idea of gender dynamics can be encapsulated with one idea. The three women’s ability to choose between different classes and types of men, and to take the paths described above, creates a compelling film that counts a female audience as perhaps its largest stakeholder. With any luck, this was not simply a byproduct of a political agenda. We can only hope it was a sincere leap in the right direction, and a positive influence for Soviet and global cinema in the years to come.