Scenes of Belonging: Cinema and the Nationality Question in Soviet Ukraine during the Long 1960s.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the aesthetics of Soviet cinema and the politics of filmmaking in Soviet Ukraine during the 1960s as a lens through which to view the mechanisms of defining and representing national difference. This work argues that the post-Stalin period requires an investigation of Soviet visual culture in order to understand the particular dimensions of the nationality question. Prior scholarship on relations between Moscow and the Union Republics has focused on the political and social dimensions of Soviet policies toward non-Russians. Instead of a discourse based on national rights, I see the post-Stalin period as one in which notions of the national self are encoded within modes and styles of cultural expression. This dissertation argues that Soviet nationalities policy stretched far beyond the question of political rights to embrace both highly essentialist and highly ambiguous claims about the very meanings of particular nationalities and national identities. In this respect, the nationality question referred to the project of defining self and other within the context of a multinational socialist state. Soviet cinema participated in a cultural project, which invested motion picture studios with the purpose to create and reproduce meaning out of categories of national difference within the USSR, while also attempting to reconcile these conceptions of difference. For Ukrainian filmmakers in the 1960s, nationality was a question of self-discovery, an experiential rather than rights-based discourse that resembled what American commentators would call “identity politics.” Against conformist notions of “contemporaneity” and the “Soviet image of life,” nationality was posed as a question of cultural diversity. In working squarely within the field of Soviet cultural bureaucracies, and subject to economic plans and the desires of film audiences, Ukrainian filmmakers attempted to establish a popular imagery and narrative of what it meant to be Ukrainian, both in the past and within the contemporary Soviet Union.