The Russian Intelligentsia: Taming Nihilism in the Stalin Period

This essay represents a fragment of a text devoted to issues of figurative representation in Soviet and Russian cinema. It briefly analyzes the evolution of the image of the scientist during the period of Stalinist cinema. The author’s theoretical reasoning is based on the definition of nihilism given by Nikolai Berdyaev in his essay “Russian Socialism and Nihilism”.

In their policy towards the intelligentsia, including the policy in the sphere of cinema, the Soviet authorities used those attributes of nihilism which constituted the main essence of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia. The author discusses four periods in the history of Soviet cinema: the 1920s, the 1930s, the World War II period and the consequent period of “malokartinye” (film scarcity). Beginning with the film Congestion (1919), an attempt had been made to convince representatives of the intelligentsia that the Soviet form of government carried the ideas of freedom, equality and fraternity, so there was no more reason for nihilistic attitudes towards reality as to a world ruled by evil. In the 1930s, the Soviet culture formed a full-fledged positive image of a scientist who accepted Soviet power. A most important domestic political task was outlined: the state was to carry out a tremendous job of bringing up its own Soviet intelligentsia and scientists who would not be tainted by the “wrong” nihilism of their pre-revolutionary predecessors. If it ever arose, nihilism was to be tightly controlled and transformed into the search for scientific truth and intransigence towards the enemies of the Soviet regime. During the World War II (the Great Patriotic War), intellectuals became the highest embodiment of spiritual aspirations and the denial of everything hostile to the nation; it may be said that their faith was deemed as an achievement comparable to the faith of Christian martyrs. And in the post-war period and the period film scarcity, cinema renewed the demonstration of the possibility of an ideal relationship between the scientists, the intelligentsia and the Soviet government. Film representation system included images of what the Soviet government gave to the scientists (and, more broadly, to the intelligentsia) and of their debt of gratitude for everything given to them.