Despite failure with the public, Shostakovich’s talent was appreciated and recognized immediately at the Leningrad film studio. He was hired for all the major productions. One such project, commissioned by the state to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover, was Counterplan, which hailed the efforts of a Leningrad plant to build a powerful turbine before the deadline. The production was personally supervised by Kirov, who compared making Counterplan with “crucial economic and political work.”16 Stalin himself impatiently awaited completion of the film, which had an enormous budget (including construction of a set to represent a huge turbine-building plant). Counterplan was intended to praise the achievements of the Soviet five-year plans for developing industry. It was also the first Soviet film to depict the saboteur engineer as a fullblown villain; this was the start of a theme soon to dominate Soviet culture—“the hidden enemies.”
Unlike The Overcoat and New Babylon, with their themes of defeat and impotent protest, their ghostly characters, and their over-complicated style and technique, all of which made them unacceptable to the authorities, Counterplan was out-and-out agitprop, albeit masterfully done; it therefore received unqualified approval from the Soviet state. The film was shown everywhere, and the song Shostakovich wrote for it quickly became a hit; it even became fashionable in leftist intellectual circles in the West. After World War II it was designated as the anthem of the United Nations. (Most people were unaware that the author of the lyrics, the Leningrad poet Boris Kornilov, had died in one of Stalin’s purges.)
Counterplan made celebrities of its two young directors, Sergei Yutkevich, a founding member of FEKS, and Fridrikh Ermler, who came to the film studio straight from the Soviet secret police. Yutkevich, an aesthete, and Ermler, an autodidact, were united by opportunism: both were ready to tailor the form and ideology of Counterplan to the Party’s wishes. Once they moved to the front ranks, these directors began to set the tone at Lenfilm, which was beginning to change from a refuge for eccentrics to a state factory of ideologically correct dreams.
The leaders of FEKS, Kozintsev and Trauberg, sensed the changes in the rules of the game. FEKS ceased to exist as a part of the Leningrad film studio after completion of New Babylon in the late twenties. It became clear that its avant-garde aesthetics did not suit the state’s purposes. The directors’ attempts to find a new path led in the midthirties to their film Maxim’s Youth, a fictional story of a simple fellow from a working-class suburb of Petrograd who is transformed into a professional Bolshevik revolutionary.
Kozintsev and Trauberg, having lost their ideological virginity by then, wanted to create a work accessible to a mass audience. Maxim’s Youth, Kozintsev explained, was an attempt at a Soviet biographical novel in film. “The audience had to fall in love with Maxim not for his incredible looks or for his general ‘good qualities,’ but because Maxim had to represent the best qualities of his class. The strength of his class. The humor of his class.”17 In other words, the film had to be ideologically instructive as well as entertaining.
Kozintsev and Trauberg made Maxim’s Youth entertaining; it had good actors (but, tellingly, not former FEKS members), and the musical score was again by Shostakovich. Against a backdrop of mediocre Soviet films and an almost total absence of movies from the West, Maxim’s Youth caught on with Russian viewers. But more important for the former FEKS leaders was Stalin’s approval.18 The Soviet leader was preparing his major political purges, in which almost all the leading Bolsheviks who had seized power in 1917 with Lenin were to disappear from the stage and people’s memories. Therefore, Stalin hailed the creation of new heroes to replace old ones: the mythical Maxim would supplant the real Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others doomed to destruction and oblivion.
Stalin likewise gave broad support for Chapayev, the 1934 film produced in Leningrad about a minor commander in the Red Army who drowned in action in the civil war. The film’s directors, Georgy and Sergei Vasilyev (not related, even though people referred to them as the Vasilyev brothers) single-handedly made Chapayev a national hero. This suited Stalin, who planned to (and soon did) liquidate the real revolutionary military leaders.
Chapayev was the most popular Soviet film of the prewar period. Legend has it that many teenagers saw Chapayev dozens of times, hoping against hope that this time their beloved hero, played by Boris Babochkin, would be saved. Other Lenfilm productions were extremely popular with audiences, too.
