An Erotic Film Stalin Liked

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 13 -- An inevitable consequence of a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic that so dominates the news media in Russia and elsewhere is that some journalists will seek out stories about topics as far removed from what people are living through and suffering with as possible. Some of these are amusing and some even revelatory.

            One such is offered by Yaroslav Solonin on the Life.ru portal entitled “Stalin’s favorite erotic film and toplessness in Soviet films” (life.ru/p/1313976 reposted at newvz.ru/info/182190.html), something unexpected given Stalin’s puritanical reputation and the meme from the times of the USSR that “there is no sex in the Soviet Union.”

            In spite of that opinion, the journalist says, “the first undressed woman appeared already under Stalin. This year is the 90^th anniversary of the appearance of Dovzhenko’s The Land, where the first open scene was shown. And in each of the succeeding decades, several films with piquant subjects came out.” 

            Some criticized the partial nude scenes in the movie as “paganism,” Solonin reports, but “Stalin highly rated the work of the actress.” He even recommended that she be given more roles. Dovzhenko’s film was banned until 1960, however, and thus “unfortunately,” the journalist says, Soviet viewers associate Elena Maksimova “more with roles of old women.”

            In 1956, another Soviet film, Grigory Chukhay’s “41” also featured an erotic scene between a Bolshevik woman and a white guard. And in 1966, Andrey Tarkovsky’s “Andrey Rublyov,” now considered “a model of Orthodox creativity,” appeared with a nude scene.  The director himself said he was more inspired by paganism than by Christianity.

            More sex scenes began to appear in the 1970s and in perestroika times.  Indeed, Solonin says, at that time, “erotic scenes were filmed at the brink of pornography,” opening the way to the anything goes films of the post-Soviet period.

            Sergey Kudryavtsev, a film critic, tells Solonin that in Soviet times, “erotic elements were most often allowed in military dramas and in pictures about villages, in the military ones in order to counterpose love and war and to show that life goes on and in films about the village to stress the natural, spontaneous and popular nature of life there.”