The struggle for the Far East in the interpretation of the Vasilyev brothers

The article analyzes the film “The Defense of Volotchayevsk” (1937) by the Vasilyev brothers as an example of totalitarian cinema. The Vasilievs wrote about their method as an approach to socialist realism and characterized their style as “maximum expressiveness with maximum simplicity”. The appeal to the struggle for the Far East was dictated by ideological goals: to form the identity of Soviet people and prepare them for a future war. The growth of socio-political tension in the Far East in the late 1930s made the Vasilievs create such a film which according to their own statements, was supposed to evoke “hatred for the enemy”, call upon “all Soviet people to rally even more closely around their government, the Communist party, and its leader, Comrade Joseph Stalin”. The masses were actively involved in the creation of the movie.

Reserving “the right to interpret these events from the viewpoint that seems to us the most correct”, the directors, while indicating the historical fact in the title, distorted the facts. Although the filmmakers proclaimed that they had used the evidence of the participants of the events in the script, they deliberately made the characters abstract representatives of social groups. The main efforts were aimed at creating the image of the enemy, the Japanese colonel Ushijima (L. Sverdlin). All the storylines and actions of the characters were determined by the party policy of the late 1930s and had a didactic meaning. Creating an ideological product for the masses, the authors focused on folklore aesthetics.