Sergei Prokofyev’s Little Peter and the Wolf, commissioned by the Central Children’s Theater run by Natalya Sats, had premiered at the Moscow Philharmonic on May 2, 1936, before moving to the children’s venue.334 Although Soviet functionaries had failed to cajole the self-exiles Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninov to return, they had succeeded in retrieving Prokofyev, who lived among the constellation of émigré luminaries in Paris with his Spanish wife, Lina Codina, and their Paris-born children. He would receive a four-room apartment in an elite neo-constructivist building (Zemlyanoy Val, 14) and immediately set to work on a plethora of commissions. He had never gravitated to vaudeville or the Hollywood musical, and he took Shostakovich’s public humiliation as promising that there would be ample space for his own diatonic melodies, determined, as he was, to become a central player in what was a serious musical culture. Prokofyev underestimated the bureaucratic deadweight (approval committees made up of third- and fourth-rate musical talent would rewrite his works), but in the meantime the orchestral storytelling of his Little Peter and the Wolf enchanted young audiences.335
Alexandrov, Eisenstein’s former assistant, had done it again: his film Circus premiered on May 23, 1936. Alexandrov, who had once been a circus performer himself, based the film on the Ilf and Petrov play Under the Big Top, from the Moscow Music Hall. Circus lacked the disorganized zaniness of Jolly Fellows: the cameraman had been to Hollywood with Shumyatsky and introduced American storyboarding and Disney’s matching of sound and image. Circus followed the winning Hollywood formula of the transformation of a spunky underdog into a smash success. The female lead, Marion Dixon (played by Lyubov Orlova), a name evocative of Marlene Dietrich, is a performer in an American circus that comes to the USSR on tour. She had given birth to a son with a black lover and suffered racism in the United States; in the USSR, she falls for a Russian performer named Ivan and defects, which spurs the circus director to threaten to expose her illegitimate black child, but the Moscow audience embraces him, and Marion remains in Moscow with her Ivan. The film climaxes with a lullaby sung, in turn, by representatives of the various Soviet nationalities. (The final kiss cliché, characteristic of American comedies, between the little black boy, Jimmy, and a little white girl was cut.) Dunayevsky supplied six catchy songs, performed by Yakov Skomorovsky’s jazz band, including the colossally popular, easily memorized “Song of the Motherland,” with lyrics by Lebedev-Kumach (“I know of no other country where a person breathes this freely!”). The film’s final production number has Orlova dancing at the pinnacle of a multilayered cake structure. One million people saw Circus during just its first two weeks in Moscow. Orlova crisscrossed the country. In Chelyabinsk, she was awarded a piston ring from the factory foundry engraved with lyrics from the Jolly Fellows march: “Song helps us build and live.”336
Party Card, directed by Ivan Pyryev, had premiered in Moscow on April 7, 1936. In the film, the year is 1932 and Pavel Kurganov, from Siberia, the son of a kulak, signs on at a Moscow factory. Becoming a shock worker there, he seduces and marries a young woman, Anna Kulikova, an outstanding assembly-line worker and loyal party member. Unbeknownst to Anna (played brilliantly by Ada Voitsik), Pavel (Andrei Abrikosov) has murdered a Communist Youth League activist, to take over his identity, while secretly working for foreign intelligence, which assigned him the task of obtaining a party member’s card to commit sabotage. Despite her initial lack of vigilance, which Anna’s party colleagues at work denounce, she teams up with her former sweetheart to expose her husband as an embittered kulak enemy. The lesson: Pavel, a peasant lad, had looked trustworthy, but no one can be trusted. The most dangerous enemy is the one with a party card.337 In the initial draft of the screenplay (by Yekaterina Vinogradskaya), titled Little Anna, Pavel had not been a spy. Stalin helped recast it.338 Party cards, long a sign of status in the Soviet Union, allowing holders to attend secret meetings, receive secret information, and shoulder extra responsibilities, now endangered those who held them.
