Claire Knight is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Bristol, where she is also the Academic Director for the Centre for Study Abroad. Her work has appeared in the journals Kritika, Slavonic and East European Review, and KinoKultura.
This post is excerpted from the introduction of Stalin's Final Films: Cinema, Socialist Realism, and Soviet Postwar Reality, 1945-1953, a Northern Illinois University Press book published by Cornell University Press. Copyright (c) 2025 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher. Visit claire-knight.com for visual material complementing the book.
Mine is the first book-length study of late Stalin-era cinema, 1945-53, a period that is often skipped over in surveys of Soviet and Stalinist film. These years are known as a time of malokartin’e or film famine, when films were censored so heavily and production was scaled back to such an extent that the film industry nearly ground to halt, reaching its nadir in 1951 with only 9 domestic feature film releases.
At the same time, this is also the period when the Stalin cult on screen reached its apogee, inspiring scholarly ruminations on the “death of Soviet cinema.” In my book, I take a fresh look at these films—concentrating on those that topped the box office—with the aim of breathing new life into them, and through them, into our understanding of late Stalin-era Soviet culture.
Late Stalin-era cinema has a reputation for retreating into the past. To avoid the difficulties of navigating censorship and risking the regime’s approbation, it is said, filmmakers turned to the relative safety of the prerevolutionary period and to biographies of choice historical figures in particular. But this is a misconception. While it is true that there were more historical biographies produced after the war than ever before, they nevertheless accounted for only 17 of the 135 feature films released during Stalin’s final years, or less than 13 percent of cinema production. Even including the handful of theatrical and literary adaptions, folktales, and fairy tales that were set outside of the Soviet period, it remains that the majority of postwar films were concerned with the contemporary world: they were set in the 1940s and 1950s.
As such, late Stalin-era films were fundamentally postwar in nature. They were in constant dialogue with the legacies of the war and how it was won, with the practical and ideological crises and opportunities that it presented for both the regime and Soviet society. Rather than simply returning to the same priorities, themes, and aesthetic strategies as prewar cinema, Soviet films after the war were distinctive, being firmly rooted in their historical moment.
They responded to the same kinds of issues that dominated other national postwar cinemas: social dislocation and alienation, physical destruction, economic breakdown, demographic crisis, and the loss of an ideological center. Yet while other, better-known postwar cinemas—German Trümmerfilm, Italian neorealism, Japanese cinema under American censorship—express the zeitgeist of a defeated nation, Soviet postwar cinema responded to the destruction of war from the perspective of a victorious regime. Despite this distinction, the cinema of the victors was faced with the same practical challenges and ideological crises that confronted defeated nations.
As the cinema of victors, Soviet postwar films extended the wartime triumphs to the demobilized home front, resolving all war-related problems. Frequently, films accomplished this objective by modeling the state-determined process of recovery. This is true of the rural films, for instance, which exemplify economic and agricultural recovery through protagonists who put the regime’s resolutions into practice. They amalgamate collective farms, construct hydroelectric power stations, and adopt cutting-edge technology and animal husbandry techniques to lead Soviet agriculture into a new era of abundance.
Even more often, though, films solved the complex issues of demography, demobilization, and physical destruction by presenting an alternate reality: love triangles with one woman and two men in a context where women outnumbered men by more than two to one in the countryside; veterans integrating seamlessly into the villages that most never returned to, even when they did survive the front; abundant produce amid rationing and shortages; intergenerational harmony at a time when youth crime and disengagement were on the rise.
Meanwhile, the complications of assimilating new lands and peoples into the USSR and neighboring states into the socialist sphere are smoothed over by an emphasis on brotherhood and shared political values. In other words, Soviet postwar cinema engages with the legacies of the war—the social, economic, and political consequences of occupation, destruction, death, and trauma—by depicting their resolution. This is the varnished reality that Nikita Khrushchev so criticized when condemning the cinema of late Stalinism. It is also not in the least surprising.
What is surprising, however, is that this varnished reality was more nuanced than might be expected. The lacquer applied by postwar cinema was pervasive but also pointed and precise. It was layered neither indiscriminately nor evenly across the canvas of postwar reality. Instead, films targeted specific issues, either resolving them implicitly or acknowledging problems more directly by having them serve as the challenges that are overcome by the protagonist. My book pays particular attention to what was varnished and in what ways and, in light of historical context, posits to what ends the lacquer was applied. It argues that, rather than being disconnected from history or wildly utopian, the cinema of Stalin’s final years was future-oriented, postulating a perfected scenario that was nevertheless grounded in reality, however tenuously. The abundant harvests of cinematic farms were always the fruit of next year’s planting, not this year’s, and the advanced technology on screen really did exist, albeit only in prototype.
The varnishing or perfecting of reality in postwar films was rooted in the theme of recovery—from the war itself, but more so from the way in which it was won. During the conflict, the regime granted a number of concessions to liberal reform in order to facilitate the war effort, including measures like decentralization, devolution of authority to regional and industry heads, loosening censorship, and permitting traditional and nationalist values and symbols to displace Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, and socialist realist discourse. Once victory was assured, the state began signaling to the public that, contrary to popular expectations, the reformist trend would not continue and liberal allowances would be rescinded.
As a form of official communication, cinema was both a target and a tool of this reimposition of Stalinist strictures. That is to say, cinema was subjected to proscription, while also serving as a prescriptive voice directed toward Soviet society. This was a knife’s edge on which filmmakers and industry personnel were accustomed to balancing, but one that attained a new degree of keenness in the context of postwar recovery. Thanks to rising ticket sales and expanded distribution after the war, cinema served as a pivotal means by which the official vision of postwar Soviet culture was promoted to the public. As a result, Soviet postwar film can be defined as a cinema of recovery.
The regime’s bid to recover lost ground in political, ideological, and cultural terms hinged on addressing three urgent questions, each of which implicated a significant number of films and in fact preoccupied the majority of the films that topped the box office. The first of these questions concerned the definition of the war narrative itself and whom to credit for victory. This was complicated by the need to encourage continued mobilization—at least in a cultural, if not a military, sense—in light of the burgeoning Cold War. From the regime’s perspective, the war narrative was ongoing and victory incomplete, making its representation on screen all the more challenging, particularly since popular perceptions did not necessarily align with the official view. The war films and spy thrillers dealt directly with this set of quandaries.
Equally pressing was the question of how to represent Stalin in the new era and reestablish his central position in Soviet ideology following his rather muted media presence during the war. Crucial to this project was the task of defining the leader’s relationship with the Soviet people—they were, after all, the “other” in contrast to whom his image was delineated. Had the struggle for victory and its attainment affected the dynamic between the Wise Father Stalin and his Soviet children in any way? The films that address this question most pointedly are the Stalin epics, that is, films in which Stalin himself was written into the script, and, more implicitly, the rural dramas and comedies that showcase the Stalin cult of the 1940s and early 1950s.
The final challenge to preoccupy Soviet cinema was the representation of everyday life after the war and recovery from the devastating conflict. Films explored postwar reality almost exclusively through narratives set in the countryside. This trend contrasted starkly with earlier cinema, which practically fetishized the journey from rural periphery to urban center as the path from ignorance to enlightenment and therefore the crux of the New Soviet Person’s developmental arc. Postwar rural films reverse this journey, redefining typical Soviet life along the way and ensuring that rural films became a dominant genre in Soviet cinema. The collectivized countryside became the image of triumphant Soviet life in the era of victory.
The tightest, most rigorous system of censorship and centralization in the history of cinema to that point developed in part to facilitate the Soviet regime’s response to these three vital issues: establishing the war narrative, defining the leadership of Stalin, and depicting postwar reality. Yet, the results were not the consistent, let alone cohesive, cinematic oeuvre that we might expect. This was particularly the case for war films, which spawned not one but two new genres in the quest to define the war narrative and its hero. Variety persisted in the Stalin cult and rural films as well, at times leading to incongruous and even conflicting imagery. In fact, the films usually considered most representative of the era, The Fall of Berlin and Cossacks of the Kuban, were far more the exception than the rule when it comes to postwar cinema. Postwar cinema remained dialogic, retaining a modicum of diversity and artistry amid the ideological artifice in its representation of the contemporary Soviet Union.
