Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Soviet-class films a thing of the past

One of the undoubted glories and enduring successes of the 
socialist system is the high standard of universal education it 
attains. Today, of course, the inhabitants of former socialist 
countries are beginning to realise that while capitalism enables 
a minority of the population to own more than one car, it has no 
use for a high-quality universal education system.

In March, the British Communist newspaper Morning Star ran 
an interview with the Russian film director Karen Shakhnazarov, a 
former Soviet director nowadays the President of Mosfilm Studios 
in Moscow, Europe's largest film studios. The interview had first 
appeared in RIA-Novosti.

Discussing the quality of the films produced today in Russia, 
Shakhnazarov observed: "The quality of the film industry is 
determined by the cultural level of its audience, which was 
undoubtedly higher in Soviet times".

In Shakhnazarov's opinion, the decline in the country's cultural 
level is "directly linked" to education, "which was much better 
12 to 15 years ago" (i.e. before the overthrow of socialism in 
the USSR).

"I used to be a teacher", Shakhnazarov told the interviewer, "and 
can say that some entrants of the director faculty [of the 
national film school] have never read Mikhail Bulgakov's works.

"A director should be well educated. Today's youth read very 
little.

"People are brought up on advertising and film cliches. They have 
forgotten how to think and cannot create anything serious.

"In Soviet times, there was not such an information flood from 
the West as we have now.

"However, we saw all the best films of the world film industry. 
Now some people do not even know who Fellini is."

Shakhnazarov could have added that there is already a rather 
clandestine movement among young people who are now reading and 
discussing among themselves classical Russian literature.

Unfortunately, Shakhnazarov identifies no political or economic 
forces behind his comments of the present situation. He gives no 
indication of being aware that they are part of a deliberate 
process designed to reduce the territory of the former Soviet 
Union to cultural, educational, economic and political 
backwardness.

The best he can do is glib generalisations ("globalisation is a 
steamroller that is crushing and eliminating individuality") or 
to throw his hands up in despair: "I think that Russia now is 
rated far behind the West and seems to borrow its worst 
features".

Or else he lapses into the kind of mystic nonsense that we 
thought had gone out forever with the Revolution: "The Russian 
soul is sleeping, but will hopefully wake up some day". But will 
it be a right-wing nationalist or a socialist awakening?

Karen Shakhnazarov does not seem to recognise that capitalism is 
engaged in a very serious economic war against Russia, a war of 
conquest and colonisation. The low cultural level that 
Shakhnazarov bemoans is a by-product of that economic, cultural 
and political war.

As we have discussed before in this column, the ruling class does 
not want ordinary people to become adept at analysing current 
events and the nature of the world they live in. Such knowledge 
could be dangerous, causing people in capitalist countries to 
feel that they were not getting their just share of the riches 
produced by their own labour.

This in turn could lead to social disturbances and even, heaven 
forefend, demands for changes in the social and economic system!

In countries that were formerly socialist, it could lead to 
serious questioning of the wisdom and desirability of abandoning 
socialism, of abandoning public ownership for minority private 
ownership, of relinquishing full employment, free health care, 
free universal education and guaranteed housing at extremely low 
rents.

No, the capitalist class is not going to facilitate that sort of 
thing. They much prefer the people to be kept distracted, to be 
flooded with superficiality and immersed in trivia.

This is what comes with the "flood of information from the West" 
which Shakhnazarov notes, for all its quantity, does not enhance 
the Russian people's cultural level at all.

Capitalism's propaganda line is to denigrate the achievements of 
socialism, or at least to depoliticise them.

Shakhnazarov does add a grudging acknowledgement of the 
achievements of socialism without mentioning it as such: "Soviet 
times saw some colossal achievements..."

Such "colossal" achievements that capitalism cannot simply 
discard them as worthless. Instead, it cleverly allows them to be 
absorbed as "nostalgia", shorn of their political significance.

Thus the Russian army retains its Soviet emblems and banners, and 
Shakhnazarov's studio, Mosfilm, still uses as its trademark and 
logo, seen at the beginning of all its films, a rotating model of 
Vera Mukhina's famous sculpture of the Worker and Collective Farm 
Woman. The tune of the Soviet national anthem is still retained 
as the present anthem.

Holding aloft a hammer and a sickle respectively, these two 
monumental figures still stand at the entrance to the permanent 
Exhibition of Economic Achievement in Moscow which is now a 
business centre.

The West's continuing cultural war on the former Soviet Union has 
been quite successful, as Shakhnazarov's assorted complaints 
indicate. As he himself, says: "in creative terms, Soviet-class 
feature films are not produced in Russia today". But will he 
become a campaigner to restore the former glory of the Soviet 
film industry? That is the question.