The Limits of Expression

Texts | Forbidden Exhibits | Video

Subject essay: James von Geldern

The cultural landscape of 1968 was defined less by what artists made than by the limits of what they were permitted to show. The decade had opened with the 1964 trial of Joseph Brodsky for social parasitism, a proceeding that established how a writer could be removed from circulation without any of his writing being mentioned in court, and it continued through the 1966 prosecution of Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel for publishing fiction abroad under assumed names. Concessions arrived alongside the prosecutions, carefully measured. In 1966 and 1967 the journal Moskva printed a heavily cut version of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, giving Soviet readers Woland's visit to Moscow while withholding hundreds of passages that reached them within months in typescript and in émigré editions. Great work might come out of the drawer, though only in the condition and at the moment the state chose.

Painters learned the same lesson in a cruder form. Unofficial artists had no journals and no studios at their disposal, so their work reached the public through exhibitions mounted in institute lobbies, workers' clubs and private flats, and those exhibitions were opened and shut at the discretion of whoever held the keys. Shows were closed within hours of opening, canvases were removed before viewers arrived, and organizers found themselves answering to their employers rather than to any court. Nothing needed to be banned, since nothing had been formally permitted. The practice reached its notorious conclusion in 1974, when the authorities dispersed an open-air exhibition on a vacant lot in Beliaevo with bulldozers and water cannon, an episode that gave the whole phenomenon its name and secured for these painters the foreign attention that Soviet officials had been trying to avoid.

In cinema the machinery was fully documented, and no case shows it more plainly than that of Aleksandr Askoldov. His Commissar, completed in 1967 as his graduation film, took its story from Vasilii Grossman, a writer whose novel the security organs had confiscated six years earlier, and gave it to Nonna Mordiukova, who plays a Red Army commissar billeted on the family of a Jewish tinsmith to wait out the birth of her child. What forms in that crowded household over the following weeks is the film's true subject, and it ends in a choice between the child and the retreating army. Order No. 312, signed by Goskino chairman A. V. Romanov on 29 July 1968, disposed of it in three sentences: the film was not to be released, permission to rework it was revoked, the costs were written off as a loss to the Gorky studio, and every material, negative and positive and soundtrack and trim alike, was to be handed to Gosfilmofond.

The order also named those held responsible, and its effects on Askoldov exceeded anything written in it. He was forbidden to direct and refused the diploma certifying that he had completed the Higher Directors' Courses, so that in December 1968 he asked the Secretariat of the Filmmakers' Union to watch his film and determine his professional fate. Thirteen months later the Secretariat found that the film raised serious doubts while its best passages testified to his abilities, and proposed that he defend a diploma using an assembly of the better episodes. He was permitted neither to defend it nor to work. Commissar reached audiences in 1987, twenty years after it was made, and Askoldov, who was forty-nine when the ban was lifted, never directed another film.

Kira Muratova's Brief Encounters, finished at the Odessa studio in the same period, was withdrawn on objections described as moral and stayed out of sight for two decades, its offense apparently residing in a refusal to sort its characters into the deserving and the undeserving. The year's success ran in the opposite direction. Leonid Gaidai shot The Diamond Arm in 1968 and released it the following spring, and Iurii Nikulin's ordinary tourist, mistaken for a smuggler after criminals conceal diamonds in the cast on his arm, drew audiences on a scale no serious film approached. Filipp Ermash, then running the cinema sector of the Central Committee's culture department and from 1972 the chairman of Goskino, would build a policy on exactly this: pictures that entertained, earned and asked nothing. Directors drew the obvious conclusion, and the films placed on the shelf accumulated quietly at Belye Stolby, a hidden canon nobody could consult, until the lost movies came back under glasnost to show what had been withheld.

17 Moments in Soviet History - The Limits of Expression, by James von Geldern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.