Page 213 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

194 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
the importance of Soviet actors like the comedian Igor Ilyinsky or the more serious
Nikolai Cherkasov or massively popular stars like Lyubov Orlova or Tamara
Makarova. And we ignore the significance in Soviet cinema of genres like musical
comedy (The Happy Guys [Veselye rebyata, 1934], The Circus [1936], Volga-
Volga [1938] or The Tractor Drivers [Traktoristy, 1939]), Civil War films
(Chapayev [1934], We from Kronstadt [1936], Shchors [1939]), or ‘historical-
revolutionary’ films (the Maxim trilogy [1934—8], A Great Citizen [Velikii
grazhdanin, 1937—9], Lenin in October, 1937] etc.). As a result our view of Soviet
cinema has been both distorted and impoverished.
But perhaps the most surprising omission of all is our constant underestimation
of the importance of those who actually ran the film industry at the highest political
level, those who took the major policy decisions and who held the ultimate
responsibility. This underestimation is a limitation we share with Soviet cinema
historians, although the ideological origin of their blind spot is rather different from
that of ours. In this chapter I want to look at the role of the man who dominated
Soviet cinema for seven years from 1930 until the end of 1937: he was neither a
film director nor a scriptwriter, neither an actor nor a cameraman, but a Party
activist and an administrator and his influence on Soviet cinema can still be felt
today. His name was Boris Shumyatsky.
Boris Zakharovich Shumyatsky was born on 4 November 1886 (old style) to an
artisan family near Lake Baikal, joined the Party in 1903, played a leading part in
the disturbances in Krasnoyarsk and Vladivostok in 1905—7 and, after 1917, held a
number of important position in the Soviet governmental and Party apparatus in
Siberia. From 1923 to 1925 he was Soviet plenipotentiary in Iran and on his return
he became rector of the Communist University of Workers of the East and a
member of the Central Asian Bureau of the Party Central Committee. This might
seem an unlikely background for his next appointment, which is the one that
concerns us here: in December 1930 he was made the chairman of the new
centralised Soviet film organisation, Soyuzkino. But it was precisely this
background as Old Bolshevik, Party activist and administrator that did qualify him,
in the authorities’ eyes, for the task in hand. 2
There had been two previous attempts to organise Soviet cinema along
centralised lines since the film industry had been nationalised in August 1919. In
December 1922 Goskino had been established to put Soviet cinema on a secure
footing: it had failed, partly because it was underfunded and partly because it had to
compete with numerous other organisations, some of which were privately funded.
Learning from these mistakes, Narkompros established Sovkino in December
1924 to perform a fundamentally similar task. But even Sovkino did not have the
resources to compete adequately with the private sector and Soviet cinema
audiences still flocked to see either imported films like Broken Blossoms [USA,
1919], The Mark of Zorro [USA, 1920], Robin Hood [USA, 1922] or Soviet films
that imitated imported models. An excellent example of this last category is the
3
film The Bear’s Wedding [1926], made by Konstantin Eggert in 1925 for
Mezhrabpom-Rus, the joint-stock company in which he had a large shareholding,