Exploring Soviet Identity as Represented in Chapaev (film, 1934)

(The film being discussed today is available for free and can be accessed here)

By viewing media of the past, we can not only form a parasocial relationship with the setting and actors depicted in a given work, but we can form our own lived experience in interacting with its ideas and applying them to ourselves and our surroundings. This fact is especially true when historical and political circumstances are ripening in a pattern that forces us to recall our understanding of the past and the way in which previous generations overcame struggles such as racial and economic inequality on a mass scale. Expressed in the dominant form of media in the early 20th century, Chapev has been one of the most well recognized and frequently referenced films to be produced in the tradition of Socialist Realism. Coming from a well-established tradition of war films in the post-revolutionary state, the Lenfilm production draws off of the novel of the same name by Dmitri Furmanov, a fictionalized account of the war hero Vasily Ivanovich Chapaev. The story follows the happenings of the Russian Civil War and Chapaev’s victories, relationships with his fellow soldiers, and eventual martyrdom.  Among the themes explored and ideas reflected in the work, we see allusions to a rising idea of the new Soviet man, the ideal of comradery in human struggle, and the strength in a collective.

Much of the imagery in Chapaev has stood the test of time and many of the thematic concepts resonate so well today that they could be described as forward thinking; it should be considered that these images though, should be viewed from the standpoint of their socio-historical setting and be responsibly consumed as a product that reflects the standpoint of its producer. This is an especially relevant point when discussing media that recreates a setting the audience may be temporally or physically alienated from. The producer is building the aforementioned setting in their art and the audience exerts as little effort as they can into critically deconstructing the world as possible in order to consciously enjoy it, thus we must approach historical media with a critical frame of mind. As the film Chapaev so aptly puts, “you look back for fear of not getting a bullet from behind” (TS 15:40) and it is our responsibility as consumers of media to practice caution.

 One of the aims of the artist during this period was to take on a realistic didactic narrative in which the artist hopes that life will, in a sense, imitate the art [1]. This ideological concept shows itself in Chapaev at various points. A woman within the first few scenes, for example, throws a flirtatious soldier off of her back and demands that he show her how to fire a machine gun, modeling the expected defiant behaviour of the Soviet woman who would be less objectified after the revolution; she goes on to say that Chapaev’s soldiers are “only heroes with women” (TS: 12:50).  This same woman ends up becoming a major player in the film when she operates a machine gun and forces the White Army to retreat in a later battle. The film goes out of its way to develop this subplot to portray scenes and interactions that show gender equity and provide a role model of both men and women beside each other rather than in a hierarchical or overly romantic arrangement. 

(TR: We fight well - followers of Suvorov and Chapaev)

The relationship between Chapaev and his fellow soldiers is forever evolving as the narrative progresses, from hostile to familiar, illustrating the eventual harmony and equity that would erase class friction. There is a clear divide between the proletarian mass and the educated military intelligentsia as their interest in the civil war seem to differ. Chapaev becomes a relatable character not only due to his passion and military knowledge, but because he is the archetypal uneducated laborer that defies preconceived notions of his class and his ability to collaborate with members of other classes. He demonstrates this most apparently when he reveals that he has no idea who Peter the Great was (TS 20:00) and the collaboration between him and an educated military officer results in them both taking a new perspective of each other. Conversely, in a scene just preceding this, we see that the interactions of the White Army are sanitized, refined, and even foreign, as one officer even recounts fighting under a German officer in the First World War.

In addition to the development of Chapaev’s relationships, he gains a higher level of class consciousness, embodying the reverence Soviet culture placed on knowledge. At the time following the Civil War, literacy among peasants was approximately 65.4%, largely due to the imperial regime’s reliance on serf labor [2, 3, 4]; at the time Chapaev was released, literacy was still on the rise, primarily thanks to Vladimir Lenin’s 1919 decree “On eradication of illiteracy among the population of [the] RSFSR” which facilitated the creation of ‘likbez’ or reading schools with the expressed purpose of teaching adults how to read and write [6, 7]. Chapaev reveals himself that he had only learned to read two years prior. The Soviet government would eventually achieve a literacy rate higher than the United States with nearly the entire population being able to read by 1959 [3]. (Watch an interesting video about the likbez and the role of women in society here). 

Chapaev first begins achieving his higher state of class consciousness when he is enraged about his fellow commander being arrested for allowing the men under him to steal from a local village, but seeing how much the village people have suffered in the war, he confronts objective morality (32:00). For the most part, the intelligentsia of the post-revolutionary period felt that the common people were “the bearer[s] of truly essential ideas about reality [that] can give the most correct evaluation of phenomena” and thus interaction between the proletariat and intelligentsia was often depicted in the arts [4, p. 42].

The film Chapaev takes on a multiplicity of cultural, societal, and political topics of the time within the frame of a historical retelling of the Russian Civil War. As leadership was attempting to model their emerging culture after Marxism-Leninist values [5], the character of Chapaev is portrayed as both a proletarian turned military hero and friend of the working in order to model the behaviour of the ideal Soviet leader. Chapaev states that he is a commander of his men “only in action” and their comrade “when at ease” (TS 34:20), demonstrating the perceived breakdown of class distinction between leadership and the working people. Looking back, we can not only observe the struggle that necessarily took place to uproot tsarist oppression, but sympathize with the optimistic and idealized notion of a state still forming it’s identity, soon to face the largest calamity of contemporary history.

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References

[1] - Teikmanis, A. (2013). Toward Models of Socialist Realism. Baltic Journal of Art History, 6, 99. doi:10.12697/bjah.2013.6.04

[2] - The Soviet Union: Facts, descriptions, statistics. (1929). Washington, D.C.: Soviet Union Information Bureau.

[3] - Liebowitz, R. D. (2017). Education and Literacy Data in Russian and Soviet Censuses. Research Guide to the Russian and Soviet Censuses, 155-170. doi:10.7591/9781501707087-011

[4] - Spivak, D. L. (2005). Serfdom in Russia and its abolition: History and present-day issues. St. Petersburg: EIDOS.

[5] - Fitzpatrick, S. (1974). Cultural Revolution in Russia 1928-32. Journal of Contemporary History, 9(1), 33-52. doi:10.1177/002200947400900103

[6] - Clark, C. E. (2000). Uprooting otherness: The literacy campaign in NEP-Era Russia. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press.

[7] - Soviet of People's Commissars decree "On eradication of illiteracy of population in RSFSR". (1919, December 26). Retrieved June 24, 2020, from https://www.prlib.ru/en/history/619846