The Lives and Deaths of Animals in Soviet Cinema

Abstract

This dissertation argues that Soviet ideologues turned to animals as allies of the working class after the October Revolution of 1917. Whereas the contributions of animals to human society under capitalism had been marginalized, Soviet culture sought to reincorporate animals into material history alongside the proletariat as partners in the building of communism. I examine how filmmakers elaborated, modified, and challenged these reoriented ideas about animals from the Soviet Union’s founding through its collapse in 1991. I focus on cinematic depictions of animals because film’s live-action dimension lets us encounter animals as singular, autonomous beings as their lives unfold in front of the camera. Beginning with Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain (1926), a documentary about Ivan Pavlov, I argue that revolutionary culture erased distinctions between humans and animals: all beings were specimens to be retooled in service of the state. In Old and New (1929), Sergei Eisenstein worried that Pudovkin’s machinelike view of the organism curtailed opportunities for play, which he counteracted through his anarchic portrayal of animals as a source of renewed revolutionary verve. Later, Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Jolly Fellows (1934) depicted animals as childlike and capable of speech. The spectacle of talking animals infantilized viewers by inducing a state of impressionability that paved the way for propaganda. Then in the post-Stalin era, animal representation vied to recoup life’s dignity after years of turmoil, as also indicated by the rise of Soviet pet-keeping. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966) accords with this spirit of animal stewardship, yet it is also replete with cruelty, turning the film into a meditation on animal death that obligates viewers to confront their precarious position in Soviet society. Inspired by Tarkovsky, Aleksandr Sokurov compares images of humans and animals in states of decay in Days of Eclipse (1986), revealing how all beings are reduced by the torpor of late Soviet life. Finally, I turn to Kira Muratova’s Asthenic Syndrome (1990), which, in step with the USSR’s collapse, obliterates the lines between humans and animals, advocating for new forms of interspecies community. My dissertation reveals how the turbulence of the Soviet experience is reflected in human-animal relations.