Scant Sign of Thaw: Fear and Anxiety in the Representation of Foreigners in the Soviet Films of the Khrushchev Years

Abstract

Nations and communities are broadly acknowledged to define them­selves by contrast with a rejected Other, and the history of Russian film provides ample evidence of the use of foreign characters to help define and proclaim what it is to be Russian or Soviet. Since the first Russian film was released 100 years ago, in 1908, Russian cinema has examined the attitudes and behaviour of hundreds of foreign characters, and it has always been illuminating to interpret the way these foreign­ers are represented in the context of political and social developments. With the coming of the Cold War, the former allies were explicitly the object of suspicion. On 9 August 1946, five months after Churchill’s‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, during a meeting of the Organiza­tional Bureau of the Communist Party Central Committee to discuss the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, Stalin spoke the following words: ‘You walk on tiptoe before foreign writers. Is it worthy of the Soviet citizen to walk on tiptoe before foreigners? By doing this you encourage feel­ings of bowing down (nizkopoklonnye chuvstva), which is a big sin.’¹ It is unsurprising in this context that the Soviet films of the late Stalin years, whether set in the present or the past, consistently offered negative por­traits of their foreign characters, be they military men or politicians, businessmen or scientists .²