Maria Belodubrovskaya offers her readers the first institutional history of Stalin-era cinema. She focuses on its four major institutions: thematic planning, director-authors, independent scriptwriting, and postproduction censorship (216). Belodubrovskaya contends that Stalin's cultural administrators dreamed of building “Soviet Hollywood,” a propaganda film industry based on studio system methods, but ended up operating “under an artisanal mode of filmmaking” (6). On the basis of new archival materials and the film press of the era, the author comes to the conclusion that Soviet cinema was not a smoothly functioning ideological machine as it is often represented. Instead, the author suggests that Soviet cinema existed in a condition of disorganization when multiple cultural authorities changed ideological policies every year and failed to lead the industry ideologically. As a result, film directors ended up in control of film production and often bypassed misleading ideological directives.
Chapter 1 examines Soviet film policy: the short-term goal of producing exemplary masterpieces and the long-term goal of creating mass industrial cinema. Eventually, Belodubrovskaya contends, the objective to produce only masterpieces “precluded industrial reform and development” (51) and led to the contraction of film production, the so called “film famine” of the late Stalinist era.
In Chapter 2, the author examines the formation and evolution of thematic planning as a tool of Soviet film production. Belodubrovskaya questions the common assumption that thematic planning served primarily as a tool of Communist Party's control over the filmmakers’ creativity (89). Instead, the author tracks Soviet cultural producers’ attempts to implement top-down content development in the late 1920s and early 1930s, their failure to do so, and Boris Shumiatskii's alternative model—that of, “counterplanning based on specific directors” (89). Shumiatskii's model was based on taking into account directors’ strengths and ideas and planning production via reviewing directors’ proposals. In other words, under Shumiatskii, the director emerged as the central figure of the industry, who negotiated and defined production. Belodubrovskaya argues that party bureaucrats rarely ran the industry via direct orders from above. Instead, “ultimately everything depended on directors” (82). When the head of the film industry disregarded the leading directors, his position was by no means secure. Instead of the ideological commissar-producer, the auteur-director emerged as the ultimate producer of Soviet films.
Chapter 3 focuses on the role of filmmakers in Stalin era film production. Belodubrovskaya contends that Stalinist cinema never developed producer-centered industry and retained a director-centered artisanal mode of production inherited from the late imperial era (92). Stalinist cinema developed a peer-criticism institution of Artistic Councils to control the quality of the new films. Dominated by directors, this institution promoted the artistic preferences of the filmmakers and enhanced their power in the industry. However, the Artistic Councils rarely met the ideological goals of the state governed by the Communist Party. Eventually, Belodubrovskaya argues, the conflict between the propaganda goals imposed on the industry by the state and directors’ self-governance of the production process based primarily on their artistic tastes led to a serious drop in film output during the last year of Stalin's rule.
Chapter 4 explores the institution of Soviet scriptwriting. Most Soviet screen writers worked outside the industry and often enjoyed elite status as powerful members of the Union of Soviet Writers. Soviet cultural authorities encouraged them to “create without pressures from producers or profit” (164). Such a privileged position as screenwriters made it often impossible for producers to “tame” them as workers within the film industry. The ideological censors, in turn, failed to fix the screenplays and create ideologically perfect “iron scenarios.”
Chapter 5 focuses on censorship. On the basis of three case studies, Aleksandr Medvedkin's The Miracle Worker, Leonid Lukov's A Great Life (Part 2), and Konstantin Iudin's Brave Men, Belodubrovskaya demonstrates how the film industry carried out its own self-censorship and what role external ideological bodies played in the films’ production and release. Belodubrovskaya concludes that Stalin-era film censorship combined uncertain industry prescription with reactive party proscription, which resulted in a weak institution of censorship. The lack of clear guidelines led to uncertainty about the fate of the film after its completion and even release, to filmmakers’ aversion to risk taking, and ultimately failure to build a propaganda film industry.
Maria Belodubrovskaya has written a thoroughly-researched and analytically deep monograph that will impact film and Slavic studies for years to come. Trained as a scholar of both classic Hollywood and Soviet cinema, Belodubrovskaya compares Soviet cinema with the studio system and explains why Soviet industry failed to meet its ideological goals and production target numbers while Hollywood was so successful in delivering its ideologies globally. Belodubrovskaya lays a foundation for a new understanding of Soviet film institutions, as well as Soviet and post-Soviet Russian cultural institutions at large. Arguably, those institutions have persisted after Stalin's death and are alive in post-Soviet Russian cinema. Thus, Belodubrovskaya's findings present an innovative conceptual map not only for the students of Soviet cinema and culture, but also for scholars of contemporary Russian culture. Petr Viazemskii once wrote in his notebooks: “In Russia, the salvation from poor policies adopted by the government is in their poor implementation.” His words can serve as an epigraph to Belodubrovskaya's lucid analysis of how Russian filmmakers managed to produce high quality cinema under totalitarian political system: “Not According to Plan.”
