Perestroika by Festival and Film: Soviet national opera on stage and screen

Philip Robinson
(philip.robinson-2@manchester.ac.uk)

2nd Transnational Opera Studies Conference | University of Bern

5 July 2017

This paper is concerned with the phenomenon of Soviet operas in the peripheral republics, and how film

adaptations and festival making served as agents of canon formation. The term I evoke to describe the

changing policies of cultural production is most familiar in the West vis-à-vis Gorbachev’s political

reforms of the 1980s. But perestroika—a nuanced term meaning restructuring, reorientation, or

reformation—was also pertinent to cultural policies of the 1930s. Richard Taruskin, for instance, has

used the term to describe both the shifting aesthetic of Shostakovich’s music after his public lambasting

in 1936, and the general restructuring of the institutions and infrastructure that mediated cultural life.1

Pauline Fairclough, too, has argued that there was a perestroika in Soviet symphonism in the mid 1930s,

as composers sought to redirect the practices of symphonic writing to conform to the edicts of socialist

realism.2 There was also a seismic shift in attitudes towards opera. In the 1920s, opera had been widely

dismissed as an elitist form that was antithetical to the socialist aims of populist appeal. But from the

1930s a ‘Soviet opera project’ was initiated to co-opt opera for its propagandistic potential, and operas

began to serve the myth-making of Soviet identity.3

1
‘Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting the Fifth Symphony’, in Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia
Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 511-44.
2
Pauline Fairclough, ‘The “Perestroyka” of Soviet Symphonism’, Music & Letters 83/2 (2002), 259-73.
3
Marina Frolova-Walker, ‘The Soviet Opera Project: Ivan Dzerzhinsky vs. Ivan Susanin’, Cambridge Opera Journal 18/1
(2006), 181-216. For other notable studies of opera in this period, see Philip Ross Bullock, ‘Staging Stalinism: The Search for
Soviet Opera in the 1930s’, Cambridge Opera Journal 18/1 (2006), 83-108; Meri Heralla, The Struggle for Control of Soviet
Music from 1932 to 1948: Socialist Realism vs. Western Formalism (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2012).
Perestroika by Festival and Film toca@bern.2017 Philip Robinson

I will argue that, concomitant to the opera project amongst Russian composers that has already

been explained by Marina Frolova-Walker, there was a transnational Soviet opera project that also began

in the 1930s.4 Unlike the former project presided over by Russian composers, which never succeeded in

producing a canon of Soviet operas, the transnational opera project, owing to a very different ideological

and critical climate, succeeding in building a canon of operas still performed today. The success of this

project owed much to the fact that these operas had a broader resonance with the ambitions of Soviet

ideology. The project engendered an attempt to enact Soviet nationalities policy in the cultural sphere,

constructing art that conformed to Stalin’s aphorism that art should be ‘national in form, socialist in

content’, the theory that socialism could be the means by which a collective ‘Soviet’ identity could be

forged across the disparate national identities of the Soviet Union, and the Stalinist qualifier that rescued

the nation state from classical Marxist critique.

Operas from the ethnic minorities began to enter the Russian repertoire in the early 1930s. For

example, in a prominent 1934 Soviet opera competition Aleksandr Spendiaryan’s Armenian opera

Almast, while failing to win, made enough of an impression to reach Western reports of the

competition.5 Further incentive to produce ethnic operas was also established by the construction of

opera houses throughout the republics in the 1930s.6 But the most effective vehicle for ethnic opera

4
Marina Frolova-Walker has already written about some of this repertoire, though her study does not account so well for the
broader legacy the operas from the republics forged. See ‘Musical Nationalism in Stalin’s Soviet Union’ in Frolova-Walker,
Russian Music and Nationalism from Glinka to Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). This is a reworking of her
earlier article ‘“National in Form and Socialist in Content”: Musical Nation-Building in the Soviet Republics’, Journal of the
American Musicological Society 51/2 (1998), 331-71.
5
‘Soviet Opera Contest: Search for New Ideas’, New York Times, 7 January 1934, 8. The article notes that Spendiaryan’s
opera ‘was interesting in that it gave the music of one of the national minorities.’ Ultimately, no first prize was awarded at the
competition. Joint second prizes were awarded to Valery Zhebolinsky’s Imeninï (Name Day), which offered a critique of
Russian aristocratic society, and Aleksandr Gedike’s U Perevoza (At the Turning Point), which focused on an eighteenth-
century peasant revolution. See Meri Heralla, The Struggle for Control of Soviet Music, 71-74.
6
These new theatres were grand edifices to rival European opera houses. Among them were the Yerevan Opera Theatre
(opened 1933), the Navoi Opera Theatre in Tashkent (1929), the Abay Opera House in Alma-Ata, now Almaty (1934), the
2
Perestroika by Festival and Film toca@bern.2017 Philip Robinson

came in 1936 with the establishment of the Dekadas of National Art (Dekadï natsional’nogo iskusstva).

These ten-day festivals, presided over by the newly-established Committee on Arts Affairs, obtained

enormous investment and boasted high propaganda value.7 Reports of the festivals were splashed across

the front pages of Pravda and Izvestiya, and detailed commentary also appeared in Moscow’s arts and

literary journals.8 Each festival included a delegation of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of artists and

musicians. The visitors would showcase the best examples of their culture, but the most high-profile

contributions were the national operas performed at the Bolshoi Theatre.

A number of features point to the high cultural and political significance of the dekadas. The

operas attracted attention from the politburo itself. Stalin attended most of them, usually accompanied

by high-ranking officials.9 Each festival ended with a grand reception in the Kremlin, at which the most

illustrious of the dekadniki, high-ranking politicians, and important figures in the art world would gather.

At one such reception, at the close of the Tajik dekada in 1941, Stalin’s speech spelled out the affirmative

action, post-imperial empire that the Soviet Union was now supposed to embody,10 of which the dekadas

were the principal physical expression:

We are enjoying with you today the fruits of the Friendship of the Peoples. [...] We old
Bolsheviks remember how we used to call Tsarist Russia the prison-house of peoples. Now we

Ayni Opera Theatre, Dushanbe, Tajikistan (1939), and the National Opera Theatre of Belarus, Minsk (1938).
7
The Committee on Arts Affairs (Komitet po delam iskusstv) replaced the defunct arts faction of the People’s Commissariat
for Enlightenment, and was ultimately superseded by the Ministry of Culture in 1953. One Soviet historian has argued that
the dekadas constituted the Committee’s greatest success story. See Ė. Shulepova, ‘Sozdaniye i nachalo deyatel’nosti komiteta
po delam iskusstv (1936-1941)’ [The Formation and Initial Activities of the Committee on Arts Affairs (1936-1941)],
Voprosï istorii 1977/1 (January), 47-58.
8
There is no exhaustive account of the national dekadas, but they are touched on in, for instance, Frolova-Walker, ‘Musical
Nationalism’; idem., ‘Checks and Balances’, Stalin’s Music Prize (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); and Richard
Taruskin, ‘The Ghetto and the Imperium’, Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2016).
9
Whenever Stalin attended a dekada opera or ballet, this was usually reported in the press. Press clippings from Stalin’s
dekada attendances were carefully collected in his personal archive. See RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, ed. khr. 1479-1480, also
available at www.stalindigitalarchive.com.
10
See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001).
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Perestroika by Festival and Film toca@bern.2017 Philip Robinson

have the Soviet Union, with its open cornfields in which workers are free and equal. Such are the
results of the Friendship of the Peoples policy. [...] The old ideology is dead, it has no future, it is
anathema to the new ideology, the ideology of the Friendship of the Peoples, which holds that
all people are equal.11

The dekadas were construed not only as an expression of transnational kinship, but also as a

manifestation of the improving quality of life following the first Five-Year Plan, reinforced by the

‘celebration discourse’ which came to the fore in the late 1930s.12 The linkage made between celebration

and the Soviet Union’s improving economic and cultural status may be seen from the 1938 official

history of the Communist Party, a sanctioned document of study for millions of Soviet citizens, in which

the festivals were discussed in a section on the ‘Growth in the welfare of the workers’, amidst an analysis

of economic improvements in the 1930s. It stated: ‘There has been unprecedented growth in the art of

the peoples of the USSR. Ukrainian, Georgian, Uzbek, and Azeri national dekadas in Moscow showed

the increasing cultural profile of the peoples of the USSR, national in form, socialist in content’.13

In light of such discourse, the dekadas provided a forum for new operas to be presented with

minimal ideological scrutiny. Whilst new Russian operas were hindered by a stuffy bureaucratic machine

that fostered a climate of constant criticism and self-criticism, the ideological protectionism afforded to

ethnic opera meant that composers representing the republics could do little wrong. As I shall discuss in

the following section, the strong position afforded to national opera allowed these works to flourish in a

variety of other cultural contexts.

11
‘Rech’ tovarishcha Stalina pri priyome uchastnikov dekadï tadzhikskogo iskusstva, rukovoditelyami partii i pravitelstva v
1941 g.’ [Speech by comrade Stalin at the reception for participants of the Tajik dekada, Party leaders, and government in
1941], RGASPI f. 558, op. 11, d. 1125, ll. 13-14.
12
For an in-depth study of this celebration discourse, see Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous Comrades:
Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).
13
Ye. Yaroslavsky and P. Pospelov (eds), Istoriya VKP(b): Kratkiy kurs [History of the Bolshevik Party: A Short Course]
(Moscow: State Publisher of Political Literature, 1938), 300.
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Perestroika by Festival and Film toca@bern.2017 Philip Robinson

Film-Operas

In 1922, Lenin remarked to Anatoly Lunacharsky that, for its propaganda value, cinema was ‘the most

important of all the arts’.14 Lunacharsky, who oversaw Soviet culture and the arts from his position as

Commissar for Enlightenment in the 1920s, had championed opera as a wholesome form of mass

entertainment at a time when mainstream discourse accused the genre of elitism.15 Whilst film

adaptations of operas were relatively prolific in the West even in the silent era,16 it was not until the

advent of sound and the increased ideological sanctioning of opera in the 1930s that Soviet filmmakers

began seriously to discuss the possibilities of bringing opera to the screen. Lev Kulakovsky considered

the prospect of a film-opera (kinoopera) a natural evolution of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.

Emphasizing Wagner’s revolutionary qualities, the all-encompassing film-opera was couched in

dialectical Marxist-Hegelian terms. Following Wagner’s synthesized conception of the arts, Kulakovsky

considered the film-opera to signify a telos of cultural-historical progress, characteristic of ‘the final stage

of capitalism’.17

Another article published in Iskusstvo kino (Cinematography) proposed a sketch for a film

adaptation of Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s opera The Quiet Don, including a series of foreseeable problems in

translating opera to screen. The Quiet Don had been publicly hailed by Stalin as the socialist realist

opera par excellence at the same time as Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth was mauled by the press. One of

the authors of the article, Mikhail Shapiro, would go on to direct a prominent film adaptation of the

revised version of Lady Macbeth, Katerina Izmaylova in 1967, with substantial input from Shostakovich

14
Lenin, ‘Directives on the Film Business’, Lenin: Collected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1971),
XLII: 388-89.
15
See Frolova-Walker, ‘The Soviet Opera Project’, 188.
16
For an account of film-operas in the West, see Mervyn Cook, A History of Film Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 132ff.
17
Lev Kulakovsky, ‘Opera i zvukovoye kino’ [Opera and Sound Film], Sovetskaya muzïka 1933/4 (Jul-Aug), see esp. 13-14.
5
Perestroika by Festival and Film toca@bern.2017 Philip Robinson

himself.18 The Quiet Don is based on Mikhail Sholokhov’s epic novel, and focuses on a struggling

community of Cossacks in the First World War, who ultimately join the 1917 revolution. Shapiro and

Yegorov’s article noted that whilst elements such as crowd scenes could be made more effective on film,

the weak acting of opera singers might become more apparent on camera. They were also concerned

that rewriting the story to better serve the cinematic medium would undermine the musical logic.19 In

some ways such reservations mirrored similar concerns in the West. For instance, in the 1930s one

commentator declared that the ‘unreal world of opera and the naturalistic film have nothing whatever in

common’, whilst for Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler the medium transfer from opera to film

demonstrated a populist shift that constituted nothing less than the ‘selling out’ of culture.20

Yet film adaptations of operas from the republics were not merely an obscure sub-genre of film-

opera, but rather became its most prolific commodity. The first film-operas to be produced in the Soviet

Union were, in fact, dekada operas, namely Mykola Lysenko’s Natalka-Poltavka and Semyon Hulak-

Artemovsky’s comic singspiel, Cossack Beyond the Danube. Both films were the work of Ukrainian

director Ivan Kavaleridze who, like Shostakovich, had recently been the victim of a public denunciation.

On 28 January 1936, the infamous article ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ appeared in Pravda. The article

condemned Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and instigating the campaign against its

composer, constituting the first move in a broader smear campaign against ‘formalism’ in art.21 Just two

weeks later a similar article appeared criticizing Kavaleridze’s recent film Prometheus. The main

18
See John Riley, Dmitry Shostakovich: A Life in Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 98-100; Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 238-39.
19
M. Yegorov and M. Shapiro, ‘Problema kinooperï’ [The Problem of Film-Opera], Iskusstvo kino 1937/11 (Nov), 22-23.
Ultimately, the film version of The Quiet Don was never produced.
20
Kurt London, Music for the Films: A Handbook for Composers and Conductors, S.W. Pring (trans.) (London: Pitman,
1935), 139-40; Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Athlone Press, 1994 [1947]), 57.
21
See ‘Sumbur vmesto muzïki’ [Muddle Instead of Music], Pravda, 28 January 1936, 4. This seismic article was followed soon
after by a similarly critical article of Shostakovich’s ballet The Limpid Stream: ‘Baletnaya fal’sh’ [Balletic Falsity], Pravda, 6
February 1936, 3.
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Perestroika by Festival and Film toca@bern.2017 Philip Robinson

objection of this editorial was that the film contravened ‘historical truth’, particularly in terms of its

representation of events in the North Caucasus. Like the attack on Shostakovich, the review also took

issue with the film’s ‘formalist’ aesthetic: the review described the film as ‘over-thematized’

(mnogoteme) whilst the wooden characters were ‘bereft of life, like yellowed pictures in an old photo

album.’22

Just as Shostakovich in 1937 posited his Fifth Symphony as a ‘creative response to just criticism’,

referring to the condemnation targeted against Lady Macbeth,23 Kavaleridze’s turn to ideologically

temperate film-operas was a kind of personal perestroika. In his memoirs, published over fifty years later,

after reflecting bitterly on the injustice of his Pravda attack, Kavaleridze stated that ‘after the setbacks of

Prometheus, I stood at a crossroads.’ Dismissing the idea of creating film documentaries or film

adaptations on various sanctioned Ukrainian themes, he had resolved to make films of the two principal

operas performed at the 1936 dekada.24 The first film, Natalka-Poltavka, was released in 1936, and

constitutes a love story between Natalka and Petro, interrupted by the elderly landowner Vozniy who

tries to claim Natalka for his own.25 Lecherous landowners became common features of Soviet operas of

this period, bearing obvious propagandistic parallels with the Dekulakization campaign, and even

Shostakovich went to great pains to liken Sergey in Lady Macbeth as a Kulak.26 Kavaleridze’s second

film-opera, the comical Cossack Beyond the Danube, was released in 1937. It focuses on the Ukrainian

22
‘Grubaya skhema vmesto istoricheskiy pravdï: O kartine Ukrainfil’ma Prometey’ [A Rough Scheme Instead of Historical
Truth: On Ukrainfilm’s Prometheus], Pravda, 13 February 1936, 4.
23
See Dmitry Shostakovich, ‘Moy tvorchestviy otvet’ [My Creative Response], Vechernyaya Moskva, 25 January 1938, 8.
24
Ivan Kavaleridze, Sbornik statey i vospominaniya [Selected Articles and Reminiscences] (Kiev, Mistetstvo, 1988), 108.
The Ukrainian dekada took place in March 1936, and was the first of the festivals.
25
Ivan Kavaleridze (dir.), Natalka-Poltavka (Gosfil’mofond, 1936).
26
In an explanatory essay, Shostakovich noted that ‘Sergey’s lyricism is insincere, bookish, and theatrical, his suffering is
disingenuous, and behind the kind and gallant appearance lies a future kulak.’ Shostakovich, ‘Moye ponimaniye Ledi Makbet’
[My Realization of Lady Macbeth], quoted in Yury Keldïsh, Istoriya muzïki narodov SSSR [History of the Music of the
Peoples of the USSR] (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1970), II: 48.
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Perestroika by Festival and Film toca@bern.2017 Philip Robinson

Zaporozhians, who are banished in Turkey. The bumbling drunkard, Ivan Karas, becomes the unlikely

hero after a chance encounter with the Sultan, who is traveling incognito around his country. Bargaining

with the Sultan, Karas manages to secure the Zaporozhians’ repatriation, and the estranged community

crosses the Danube back into Ukraine.27

Marina Frolova-Walker has convincingly shown the failure of the Soviet opera project.28 Operas

produced by Russian composers failed to gain canonicity, mostly as a result of the inhibiting effect of the

bureaucratic machine that mediated musical life, and through the constant processes of criticism and

self-criticism to which composers were subjected.29 Operas from the republics, however, enjoyed a more

favourable ideological status. As a result, they were not subject to the same strictures, and received

sufficiently universal publicity to allow a canon to flourish. For example, after the 1936 Ukrainian

dekada, the Kiev Opera Theatre went on tour around the Soviet Union, which allowed the dekada’s

operas to achieve a wider audience,30 and the resident cast of the Bolshoy Theatre proudly furthered the

cause of Ukrainian opera by mounting Lїsenko’s Taras Bulba in the season following the successful

Ukrainian dekada.31 Amateur performances of these works were also encouraged. For example, on 30

October 1937 Cossack Beyond the Danube was given an amateur staging in Belorussia, at an ‘All-

Belorussian Olympiad for amateur artistic performances’.32

Table 1 lists film adaptations of operas staged at the pre-war dekadas. The efficiency with which

27
Ivan Kavaleridze (dir.), Zaporozhets za Dunayem (Gosfil’mofond, 1937).
28
Frolova-Walker, ‘The Soviet Opera Project’.
29
This has been more fully demonstrated by Heralla, The Struggle for Control of Soviet Music.
30
‘Gastroli Kiyevskogo ordenonosnogo opernogo teatra v Leningrade’ [Tour of the Award-Winning Kiev Opera Theatre in
Leningrad], Sovetskoye iskusstvo, 17 May 1937.
31
Platon Kerzhentsev, the head of the Committee on Arts Affairs, proudly noted this in his report to Stalin and Molotov. See,
‘O meropriyatiyakh po bol’shomu teatru’ [On the Arrangements of the Bolshoy Theatre], 3 April 1936. RGASPI, f. 17, op.
163, d. 1103, ll. 144-46.
32
‘Vsebelorusskaya olimpiada khudozhestvennoy samodeyatel’nosti’, Pravda, 31 October 1937, 6. The Olympiads were
amateur music festivals which often featured tens of thousands of participants. See Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in
Soviet Russia, 1917-1981, enl. ed. (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1983 [1972]), 133-34.
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these operas were canonized may be seen from the wide range of production dates. Although these films

emerged in the 1930s, national film studios continued to produce lavish portrayals of operas into the

1980s. The 1950s saw a sharp rise in the output of Soviet film-operas,33 and critics were excited by the

opportunity to use the ever-advancing technology to bring opera to the masses. One such critic noted

that ‘film versions of Russian classical operas, with the help of the best opera artists in the land, will

undoubtedly be greeted with joy by the people.’34 Another, in a review of Vasili Latopknïsh’s 1954

remake of Cossack Beyond the Danube, concluded that ‘the use of cinematic laws [zakonov kino] in

committing operas, ballets and concerts to screen is not an end in itself, but rather a means of conveying

great musical works to the widest possible audience in all their unfading beauty’.35

Table 1 - Soviet-era film adaptations of operas staged at the pre-War national dekadas

Composer Opera Film adaptations (director/year)36

Ukraine (Dekada: March 1936)

Semyon Hulak-Artemovsky A Cossack Beyond the Danube Kavaleridze 1937; Ulmer 1939; Latopknïsh
1953

Mykola Lysenko Natalka Poltavka Kavaleridze 1936; Avramenko 1936;

Kolesnik 1978

Georgia (Dekada: January 1937)

Zakharia Paliashvili Abselom i Etari Esakiya 1966

Zakharia Paliashvili Twilight (Daisi) Sanishvili 1971

Viktor Dolidze Keto i Kotė Tabliashvili 1948

33
As well as opera of the republics, there was also a substantial market for the adaption of Russian classical operas. See
Mervyn Cooke, ‘Opera and Film’, in Mervyn Cooke (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 273-74.
34
Yu. Khokhlov, ‘Klassicheskuyu operu – na ėkran’ [Classical Opera on Screen], Sovetskaya muzïka 1952/4 (April), 74.
35
G. Troitskaya, ‘Muzïkal’no-stsenicheskiy obraz na ėkrane’ [Musical-Theatrical Imagery on Screen], Sovetskaya muzïka
1954/11 (November), 89.
36
See filmography below for full bibliographic details.
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Azerbaijan (Dekada: April 1938)

Uzeir Hajibeyov Koroghlu Frid 1954 [excerpts]

Uzeir Hajibeyov Arshin mal alan Vartian 1937; Leshchenko 1945; Tagizade
1965

Muslim Mahomayev Nargïz Frid 1954 [excerpts]

Armenia (Dekada: October 1939)

Aleksandr Spendiaryan Almast Barkhudaryan 1941 [excerpts], Isahakyan

1954 [excerpts], Levonyan 1985 [complete]

Armen Tigranyan Anush Barkhudaryan 1941 [excerpts], Isahakyan

1954 [excerpts], Varzha-Petyan 1983
[complete]

Aram Khachaturian Happiness37 Barkhudaryan 1941 [excerpts]

Belorussia (Dekada: June 1940)

Anatol’ Bogatïryov In the Forests of Polesia Nikolayev 1982

In a similar vein to Kavaleridze’s films, the first Soviet film-operas were musical comedies. The

1945 film of Hajibeyov’s comic opera Arshin mal alan (The Cloth Peddler) was personally

commissioned by Stalin. It earned Hajibeyov his second Stalin Prize in 1946, the first having been

awarded belatedly in 1944 for the opera Koroghlu (The Blind Man’s Son), which had been positively

received alongside Arshin at the 1938 Azeri dekada.38 The film became the most famous to be produced

in Azerbaijan, and inspired Georgian filmmakers to respond with their own comic opera, Keto and Kotė,

though this work never fully match the success of its Azeri predecessor.39 As the production of film-

37
Khachaturian went on to revise this ballet into the more enduring Gayane in 1942, revised again in 1957. For a comparison
between the versions, see Harlow Robinson, ‘The Caucasian Connection: National Identity in the Ballets of Aram
Khachaturian’, Nationalities Papers 35/3 (2007), 429-38.
38
See, Matthew O’Brien, ‘Uzeyir Hajibeyov and music in Azerbaidzhan’, in Soviet Music and Society Under Lenin and Stalin,
Neil Edmunds (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2004), 221; Marina Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and
Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 162-63, 312, 317.
39
Tatiana Egorova, Soviet Film Music: An Historical Survey, Tatiana Ganf and Natalia Egunova (trans.) (Amsterdam:
Harwood, 1997), 89-90.
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operas accelerated in the 1950s, film-makers turned to operas beyond the genre of comic operetta. The

Georgian State Film Studio produced films of Zakharia Paliashvili’s Abesalom and Etari (1966) and

Twilight (1971), and Belorussia followed with a film of Anatol’ Bogatïryov’s In the Forests of Polesia

(1982). In the 1980s the Armenia produced extravagant films of Aleksandr Spendiaryan’s Almast and

Armen Tigranyan’s Anush, both operas having been popularized at the 1939 Armenian dekada. They

both remain in the regular repertory of Armenia’s Yerevan Opera Theatre,40 like many other of the

republics’ opera houses who still perform their own dekada operas and ballets.

Ethnic film-operas trod the fine line between representing the authenticity of national identity,

whilst simultaneously constructing a unified Soviet identity. This mission was widely adopted by those

who made films about or in the republics. Oksana Sarkisova has demonstrated that documentaries made

about the peripheral republics ‘juxtaposed pre-Revolutionary “backwardness” with Soviet

“modernization”, whether by visualizing ethnic differences or depicting the “merging” of nations.’41

Whilst each opera was an artefact of its home culture, these works were frequently marketed as the

‘common property’ of the whole Soviet Union.42 This is exemplified by the fact that many such films

were sung in Russian, or released in two versions, dubbed both in Russian and the original language.

These films ensured that the spirit of the transnational opera project was kept alive for many years to

come. Whilst a canon of operas had been established at the dekadas, film-opera was one of the ways in

which the canon was immortalized.

40
See http://opera.am/en/english-opera/. Accessed 11 May 2017.
41
Sarkisova, Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017), 205.
42
The term was frequently employed by Soviet writers. One historian noted: ‘It has to be admitted that under the conditions
of Stalin’s Cult of Personality, several of the dekadas were ostentatiously garbed and did not give a true representation of the
condition of the opera theatre of each republic. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to belittle the importance of the dekadas of
national art, thanks to which the operas of Paliashvili, Hajibeyov, Lysenko, and other composers became the common
property of the whole Soviet Union.’ Abram Gozenpud, Russkiy sovetskiy opernïy teatr [Russian-Soviet Opera Theatre]
(Leningrad: Muzgiz, 1963), 367, emphasis added.
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Conclusion

Benjamin Curtis has argued that nationalist composers in the nineteenth century such as Wagner,

Smetana, and Grieg acted as ‘national intellectuals’. Rather than merely expressing national values, he

argues, composers were actively engaged in constructing cultural and national identity.43 The case of

ethnic opera production and dissemination in the Soviet Union exemplifies the extent to which such

practices continued to prevail in the twentieth century. The long-term cultural influence of national

opera repertoire established at the dekadas in the late 1930s demonstrates that composers did not just

express pre-existing national topics in a performative paradigm, but were actually engaged in the

perestroika of national identity and transnational cultural discourse. As this repertoire continued to

proliferate both in each opera’s own republic and elsewhere around the Soviet Union, the phenomenon

went some way to demonstrating that the multinational Union could cohere within a unified Soviet

identity: in one happy ‘communal apartment’, as Yuri Slezkine has put it.44

In the latter half of the twentieth century the production of film-operas was relatively sparse in

the West.45 Yet the ideological support that film-opera enjoyed in the Soviet Union goes some way to

explaining why it continued to prevail, as ideologues fostered the utopian dream of co-opting

technological advances to bring grand artefacts of cultural achievement to the ever-idolized masses. The

continued production of ethnic film-operas well into the 1980s exemplifies how the effects of the

43
Benjamin Curtis, Music Makes the Nation: Nationalist Composers and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe
(Amherst: Cambria Press, 2008).
44
Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How the Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic
Review 53/2 (1994), 414-52.
45
A few landmark examples include Michael Powell’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal
(1982) and Francesco Rosi’s Carmen (1983). See Marcia J. Citron, ‘Opera and Film’, in The Oxford Handbook of Film
Studies, David Neumeyer (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 46-52.
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Perestroika by Festival and Film toca@bern.2017 Philip Robinson

transnational opera project extended well beyond the ten-day duration of the festivals at which it was

conceived. The significant cultural influence that this repertoire exerted, and continues to exert, is surely

reason enough to devote more scholarly attention to this repertory than has yet been granted.

Filmography (by composer)

Armyanskiy kontsert [An Armenian Concert], Levon Isahakyan (dir.) (Ministerstvo kinematografii, 1954).

Haykakan kinohamerg [Armenian Film-Concert], Patvakan Bakhudaryan (dir.) (Yerevan Film Studio, 1941).

Rodnomu narodu [To the Native People], Yan Frid (dir.) (AzerbaijanFilm, 1954).

Bogatïryov, Anatol’, V pushchakh Poles’ya [In the Forests of Polesia], Gennadiy Nikolayev (dir.) (studio unknown, 1982).

Dolidze, Viktor, Keto i Kotė, Vakhtang Tabliashvili (dir.) (Tbilisis Kinostudia, 1948).

Hajibeyov, Uzeir, Arshin mal alan, silent film, Boris Svetlov (dir.) (Filma Sahmdar Camiyyati, 1917).

——, Arshin mal alan, produced in the US, Setrag Vartian (dir.) (Marana Films, 1937).

——, Arshin mal alan, Nikolay Leshchenko (dir.) (Baku Film Studio, 1945).

——, Arshin mal alan, Tofig Taghizade (dir.) (Azerbaijanfilm, 1965).

Hulak-Artemovsky, Semyon, Zaporozhets za Dunayem, Ivan Kavaleridze (dir.) (Ukrainfilm, 1937).

——, Zaporozhets za Dunayem, produced in the USA [official English title: Cossacks in Exile], Edgar G. Ulmer (dir.)
(Avramenko Film, 1939).

——, Semyon, Zaporozhets za Dunayem, Vasili Lapoknysh (dir.) (Kiev Film Studio, 1953).

Lysenko, Mykola, Natalka Poltavka, Ivan Kavaleridze (dir.) (Ukrainfilm, 1936).

——, Natalka Poltavka, Vasyl Avramenko (dir.), produced in the USA (Avramenko Film, 1936).

——, Natalka Poltavka, Rodion Yefimenko (dir.) (Ukrtelefil’m, 1978).

Paliashvili, Zakharia, Abselom i Etari, Leonard Esakiyan (dir.) (Georgiya-fil’m, 1966).

——, Daisi [Twilight], Nikolay Sanishvili (dir.) (Georgiya-fil’m, 1971).

Spendiaryan, Aleksandr, Almast, T. Levonyan (dir.) (Armenfil’m, 1985).

Tigranyan, Armen, Anush, M. Marzha-Petyan (dir.) (Armenfil’m, 1983).

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