Khutsiev in Transition: Postmemory and Fragmentation from the Soviet Thaw to Stagnation

By Micah Slater, Edited by Sophia Fijman

The work of Soviet-Georgian director Marlen Khutsiev does not often appear in texts on the Soviet sixties. On the rare occasions it does, his name is usually relegated to lists for further viewing. Alongside the likes of Larisa Shepit’ko, Gennady Shpalikov, Kira Murakova and others, Khutsiev’s work has received comparatively little attention from academics. Despite this, Khutsiev’s filmography is populated by sophisticated, compelling, and complex films. Their international and domestic reception have varied widely, as have their content. However, due in no small part to Khutsiev’s interest in the everyday and its imbrication in contemporary politics, they emerge as particularly potent inscriptions of their times. 

Spring on Zarechnaya Street (Весна на Заречной улице, translit. Vesna Na Zarechnoy Ulitse, 1956), Khutsiev’s first film following his graduation from VGIK (the Moscow state film school), is a compelling exhibition of the beginning of the Thaw, a period generally defined as occurring between Stalin’s death in 1954 and Nikita Khruschev’s removal from office in 1964—or the Eastern Bloc invasion of Prague in 1968. His subsequent film, I Am Twenty (1965), subject to severe censors, re-edits, and an erratic and limited release schedule, situates itself firmly within the Soviet anxieties of the 60s Thaw. Finally, July Rain (Июльский Дождь, translit. Yulieski Dozht’, 1967), in its position at the very end of the Thaw, betrays the inherent unmooring that had occurred in the 60s Soviet protagonist, as well as the middle-class depression and disillusionment that precipitated and continued into the subsequent Stagnation period under Leonid Brezhnev. Across these three films, depictions and discussions of gender, urban space, and the social conditions of the Soviet sixties construct a striking portrait of the Thaw, simultaneously conscious of and born from the positioning and perspective of the first postwar Soviet generation. This paper will trace Khutsiev’s portrayal of the times through three of the dominant films of his oeuvre, exploring the fundamental anxieties of the Soviet people during the long sixties and their multiplicitous expressions. 

Since the founding of the USSR, the institutional and cultural positioning of film art was globally distinct, even from countries where the cinema was immediately an object of governmental interest. Author Marko Dumanċić notes, “Films [were] considered more than idle escapism” (Dumanċić 254). Beginning with Lenin’s famous 1922 (published 1925) declaration of cinema as the art most crucial to the Communist Party, the state’s involvement in filmmaking across the Eastern Bloc quickly took shape in two major forms. The first, the founding of dozens of film schools across the USSR, nearly fifty at their height. The second, a much more complex and contradictory state censorship system, which touted involvement at every stage from scriptwriting to post-production. Between the two, Socialist Realism emerged as the dominant style of the Union. Despite sustained interrogation and subtle subversion, the style was largely upheld for decades. Beginning with the death of Chairman Joseph Stalin in 1954, the Khrushchev Thaw—defined by loosening censorship, repression, and relative peace with neighboring nations, and named for Stalin’s succeeding Chairman—had significant impacts on the national cinema. Dumanċić describes the predominant emotions in the filmmaking and -going public as “hopes and anxieties” in tandem (Dumanċić 254). The style of Socialist Realism began to fall away, allowing for narrative and formal experimentations to spread through the work of established and emerging filmmakers alike. Khutsiev, as a member of the generation emerging into this context, was particularly subject to these changes. 

However, the cinema of the Soviet sixties is not unilaterally defined by the Thaw. Lilya Kaganovsky writes, “the Soviet 1960s actually covers two historical periods—the end of the Thaw and the beginning of Stagnation—and the films of the decade articulate the transition from one to the other” (Kaganovsky 237). The same can be said of the previous decade—Stalin’s death occurred not halfway through the fifties. Considering this, Khutsiev’s 1956 release of his first feature, Spring on Zarechnaya Street, is among the first to experience all stages of production under Khrushchev, not Stalin. Therefore, the film serves as a particularly potent epigraph of the early Thaw. It follows a young female teacher of Russian literature, Tatyana Sergeevna (Nina Ivanovna) on assignment to a night school for working adults in a small countryside village. One of her students, Sasha Savchenko (Nikolai Rybnikov), develops romantic feelings for her and begins a largely unsuccessful pursuit for her affections. The meeting tides of the coming Thaw style and the preceding eminence of Socialist Realism dominate the interrogations of Spring, notable in the collision of rural context and gendered conflict. The setting of a small village underpinned by an ambiguous industrial factory is a familiar one in Socialist Realism, as well as themes of edifying the adult working class. Working women, specifically in fields considered gendered or carework (such as Tatyana’s schoolteacher role) also feature heavily. Khutsiev’s education at VGIK during the Stalin years is clear in these his underpinnings, but that is where his glorification of the worker ends. Her students are largely prompt and invested, but do not exist as endlessly energetic, motivated, Socialist heroes. They write dirty messages on her chalkboard [00:44:12]. They fall asleep in class [00:26:13]. Sasha, the other principal character, is sent out of the classroom on the first day [00:21:58]. While other characters’ arcs through the film exhibit symptoms of these societal changes, his is the most apparent.

Sasha Savchenko is, fundamentally, a protagonist of the Thaw. He is a factory worker in a small village, but his existence is not one of the assured Soviet laborer. As scholarship has identified, the Soviet man of the Thaw is fundamentally destabilized: they “seemed unable to assert themselves in [the] world… perpetually in search of a compass” (Dumanċić 255). As early as two years into the Thaw period, social anxieties have taken an explicitly gendered form. Savchenko, unusually sensitive, unstable, insecure, and riddled with desire, centers the imagined panacea of his unmooring on his romantic interests in Tatyana, but she is far from his only source of anxiety. Helping his son with his homework, serving to emasculate adult education in parallel, he explains to the boy that their last name, Savchenko, doesn’t “sound” (звучить, translit. zvuchit’), but he wants it to [00:43:41]. Alternative translations of his word choice include the synonyms ‘ring’ and ‘resound.’ While Khutsiev—and other Thaw directors—would later go on to more prominently center masculine anxieties around the absent patriarchy, echoes of this sentiment are obvious here. Sasha’s confidence in his own masculinity is shaken—both down to and by—an absence of pride in his name, the one he has passed to his son. Later, he confides in a friend over his interest in Tatyana, and inability to express it to her in a way she seems receptive. The man throws his hands in the air and declares “Can’t you ask straight? Where’s your working pride?” (А спросить-то так, прямо не можешь, да, где твой рабочие гордость? Translit: A sprosit-to tak, pryamo ne moshesh’, da, gde tvoi rabochie gordost’?) [00:57:00]. Sasha’s unmooring as an individual man is implicated in larger crises here: because he is impotent in his personal life, he is no longer the proud worker of the Stalinist era. He has failed the tenets of his labor and employment through his uncertainty in himself. 

Such anxieties are not unique to Sasha, or men, however: Tatyana Sergeevna illustrates the tensions and anxieties present between the urban USSR and its rural counterparts in ways far beyond the treatises of Socialist Realism. Of the characters in Spring, Tatyana at first appears the most conventional. She is a firm, stern, educated working woman, primarily appearing in crisp but plain skirt suits. She has no qualms with punishing her students, but is motivated by a genuine pride in her specialty. She has taken her post in the countryside in stride, determined to educate whoever the state has assigned her to the best of her ability. However, the resemblance stops there. The first scene of the film, and the first in which we see her, she is caught in the pouring rain and fails to catch a bus, instead paying for a ride into the town on a dump truck with a local man [00:01:43]. She admits to concerns about teaching adults, and is only further alarmed when the man tells her that the students “ran” the last Russian literature teacher out of town after only two weeks. “I carried her there, and I carried her back,” (И туда, и обратно; Translit. I tuda, i obratna) he says [00:04:12]. While this highlights the unconventional portrayal of Soviet laborers in Spring in the abstract, it serves to betray both Tatyana’s youth and anxiety. A recent graduate of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, the premier school for teaching in the Soviet Union, she does not feel in any way girded by her experience and education with the state. Later, she is kicked out of her housing by one of the women she is staying with, who? is infuriated by her stealing Sasha’s affections. While moving to a new apartment, she breaks down crying. The friend who delivered her there, Nikolai Krushenkov (Gennadi Yukhtin), inquires what’s wrong, and she declares “What teacher? I’m just a girl to them. I never expected my students to give birth, drink vodka, grow a mustache” (Педагог, какой там педагог, когда это не просто девчонка? Разве я думала, что мы ученики будут варить стали рожать пить водку, отращивать усы? Translit. Pedagog, kakoi tam pedagog, kogda eta ne prosto devchonka? Rasvye ya dumala, chto mii’ uchenilo budut varit stali rozhat, pit’ vodky, otrashivat’ usii’?) [01:11:46]. Her anxieties, like Sasha’s, embroil her gender in her perceived failures as a teacher. Sasha’s repeated advances also fundamentally destabilize both her and the audience’s expectations for a Soviet man. He’s intelligent, but brash, popular with local women, and unwilling to behave at the night school. She has no idea what to do with him. Here, masculine anxieties permeate the lives of Khutsiev’s women as early as his first film, forecasting the coming storm of listlessness, insecurity, paralysis, and immaturity of the Soviet sixties protagonist.

Compared to the warm reception of Spring on Zarechnaya Street, which drew over 30 million Soviets to theaters upon its release uncut by the censors, Khutsiev’s next film was highly controversial. First cut in 1962, the film was titled Застава Иличка (Translit. Zastava Ilich’ka), of which competing translations abound. The most common, Ilich’s Gate and Lenin’s Guard, should make immediately apparent one layer of the film’s controversy. Film depictions of and references to Vladimir Lenin (middle name Ilich) were at the center of many Thaw and early Stagnation discussions of film, including the suppression of director/filmmaker Mikhail Romm’s humanist documentary on Lenin because the “leader of the October Revolution came off as insufficiently stern” (Dumanċić 259). As such, the controversy over the titling of Khutsiev’s three-hour piece becomes clear: the film directly implicates the founder of the Union in the lives of, as we will later discuss, superfluous, directionless, anxious young men. Even under the loosened restrictions of the Thaw, Premier Khruschev polemically decried the film and it was shelved. In 1965, after extensive recuts and a change of the title to I Am Twenty ( Translit. Мне Двадцать Лет), the film was allowed a limited re-release.

I Am Twenty follows three friends on their return to Moscow from a tour of duty with the Soviet army. As Kaganovsky points out, it is crucial to acknowledge that they are returning “not from the war but from mandatory military service” (Kaganovsky 240). This is the generation that has never experienced war, but the inscription of wartime trauma in the film is still extremely prominent. Kaganovsky brings in Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to decode this inclusion. She writes: “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Kaganovsky 236). This trauma is most apparent in I Am Twenty’s principal protagonist Sergei Zhuravlyov (Valentin Popov), whose father died in “the war” (undefined, but nonetheless immediately understood to be the Eastern Front of World War II). In his absence, and in their social context, Sergei and his friends have become stunted, perpetually childlike, directionless men. As with other contemporary films, “the first thing you notice when you look at the screen heroes of the 1960s is their youth” (Kaganovsky 239). Intentionally reifying this is the three friends’ recurring meetup spot, a children’s playground outside of Sergei’s apartment block [01:08:53]. His companions, Slava Kostikov (Stanislav Lyubshin) and Nikolai Fokin (Nikolai Gubenko), experience their own anxieties and aberrations. Slava, now with a wife and child, neglects his family to wander Moscow and engage in idle pursuits with his friends, far and away from the responsible, mature, working man that the Soviet father and husband was depicted to be in the Stalin years. Nikolai refuses to be recruited as an informant at his job, and spends most of his time expressing baseless optimism and chasing women. As a supporting cast, they are ironically unable to support themselves or each other in becoming proper, well-adjusted Soviet men, as implied to be their fathers. 

Sergei’s own father appears to him in a striking, distinctly unreal scene at the very end of the film. This “dream of paternal authority” is welcomed and unquestioned by Sergei, whose filmic goal of a relationship with a woman has recently failed (Kaganovsky 238). He asks his father “And what must I do?” (А что надо; translit. a chto nada) seeking the paternal guidance of the conspicuously absent wartime generation [02:37:00]. However, his father has nothing to offer him—he died two years younger than Sergei is now, at 21. “Live,” (жить; translit. zhit’) is all he says [02:37:14]. It’s a woefully inadequate piece of advice, as Sergei has just been living. He asks his father how, and the man only answers by looking at two other of his hallucinated comrades, as if to illustrate that his life has been the front, and between his youth and conditions, he has no advice to offer his son. It is in this transmission from the Eastern Front of over two decades prior to the simplicity of postwar life and the liberalization of the Thaw that the descent into masculine uncertainty and anxiety becomes clear. For Sergei’s father, “just living” is a rote impossibility, and for his son, it is the source of his malaise. Further, his youth compared to Sergei’s emphasizes the necessity of maturation in the wartime generation, as well as the (primarily military) structures that would engender it—both of which have been lifted from the shoulders of his son and his peers. 

Without this purpose, and burdened by the postmemory of a war they will never see, the Soviet man of the 1960s has been set adrift. Masculinity in this context is imagined as a “series of traces,” in photographs of dead fathers and husbands, hung on walls in ways that evoke Russian Orthodox icons, in voice-overs, in old letters (Kaganovsky 244). The traces are framed as woefully inadequate, as throughout their conversation, Sergei repeatedly enforces that all he has wanted in his crisis is to talk to his father, to lean on him, to receive his input. However, the hallucination makes abundantly clear that there is no input to receive—the perceived eminence, maturity, and stability of the wartime Soviet man is only that, a perception. As he leaves, Sergei’s father says, “I envy you. More than anything else I would like now to walk through Moscow streets” (Я тебе завидую. Больше всего сейчас мне хотелось бы пройти по московским улицам; Translit: Ya tebya zaviduyu. Bolshe vsevo seichas mne holtelos’ bui’ proiti po moskovskim ulitsam) [02:38:10]. And, as the film ends, Sergei’s contemplative gaze out of his window transitions to the silhouettes of three Great Patriotic War-era soldiers, out of both time and place, walking a main thoroughfare of urbanized Moscow, fulfilling both Sergei’s dream of living with purpose and his father’s of walking Moscow’s streets again [2:40:22]. 

Moscow in particular became a centerpiece of Khutsiev’s late-Thaw filmography. As an urban space that underwent rapid postwar industrialization and growth, it is an “emphatic present that has not come to terms with either the past or the future,” reifying its young inhabitants’ lack of intergenerational connection, as well as their absent hopes (and even concepts) for the future (Coxe 31). Kaganovsky notes the “fragmentation” with which Khutsiev films the city, how his rapid cutting, extremely long takes, and lack of visual focus on his protagonists reinforce an “urban landscape that disappears (and is disappearing) as suddenly as it appears” (Kaganovsky 236, Coxe 31). As the capital of Russia and the political seat of the Soviet Union, the fundamental instability diagnosed by Kaganovsky and present in I Am Twenty here betrays a drastically deepened anxiety as compared to his work in Spring on Zarechnaya Street. Moscow is a source of comfort and stability for Tatyana, whose anxieties about her performance and gender are induced by interactions in the countryside. Her premier education in the intellectual and political capital of the Union fell short in preparing her to teach adult education to the working class, but the city itself is not the source of her conflict. In the years between Spring and I Am Twenty, Khutsiev’s reordering of the locus of youthful anxieties lands squarely in the city. All his remaining films made during the 1960s take it as their setting. July Rain, his last during the official years of the Thaw, is his most comprehensive picture of the era, using Moscow to highlight the depression and disillusionment of the Soviet youth and their bleak outlook as the Union descended into Brezhnev’s Stagnation.

July Rain follows another female protagonist, Lena (Evgeniya Uralova), through a largely (intentionally) directionless plot centered around the young Soviet intelligentsia in Moscow. She jockeys between her boyfriend Volodya (Aleksandr Belyavsky), their social circle, and telephone conversations with a stranger, Zhenya (Ilya Bylinkin), whose jacket she borrows during the titular rain and repeatedly fails to return through a series of missed connections. Over the course of the film she gradually begins to realize the vapidity of her sphere, becoming increasingly disillusioned with Volodya and their friends, until she ends the relationship and meets an uncertain future on the streets of Moscow. Coxe writes, “I see in July Rain the creeping fear of the end of the 1960s, a moment that has “somehow lost its dynamic momentum and simply awaits stasis” (Coxe 44). And, indeed, of the anxieties and depressions of Khutsiev’s Thaw protagonists, Lena’s is the most fundamental. Her job as a translator in a printing house highlights the emptiness of her life and work. She prints reproductions of Renaissance-era paintings, something that has evoked Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in multiple scholarships [00:26:01]. 

These images flash over the film’s opening montage of a downpour on a Moscow street, furthering Khutsiev’s filmic fragmentation of the city [00:04:17]. The intercut of the Renaissance paintings Lena is presumably copying “[destabilizes] any notion of fixed time and space or perspective: we have to ask ourselves where these portraits have come from” (Coxe 34). Other fragmentations occur in the soundtrack: the sound of a radio dialing to different stations heightens the anxiety of the opening montage, and music from Western Europe dominates the score. The film is oft-compared to the French Nouvelle Vague, and the inspirations are clear, but the sonic jumble of the film’s aural atmosphere exposes something deeper. The national identity, and even metropolitan identity of Muscovites specifically, has experienced a fundamental un-anchoring over the course of the 1960s, leading them to drift into adoption of other cultures. Coxe notes that Lena and her friends “dress like Westerners and listen to Western music” (Coxe 37). Kaganovsky writes of a deeper affective shift: The “new young actors copied the relaxed bodily gestures of Hollywood and European stars [...] In Soviet sixties cinema, tense back muscles are relaxed to show the body as liberated; slouched postures become a sign of antiauthority and nonconformity” (Kaganovsky 236). However, counterculture is not the focus of July Rain. Instead, it takes up the listless young intelligentsia, “the privileged on the potential verge of self-induced collapse,” and watches them slouch aimlessly towards absolutely nothing at all (Coxe 30).

Anxieties in Lena’s life are not based entirely around the men she spends it with, but they certainly do not help. Lena’s friend Zhenya seems to be just a “voice on the telephone, and her fiancé Volodya can be described only in the negative: Doesn’t drink, doesn’t lie, doesn’t chase after women” (Kaganovsky 244). Kaganovsky, on the films of the Thaw that centered female protagonists, cites them as “full of [...] languor and agitation. [Their] capricious, high-strung emotions came not from loneliness, from the absence of a concrete man, but from the suspicion that ‘man’ in general no longer exists in the world, that he has become a myth” (Kaganovsky 245). Lena certainly exhibits this: As the film progresses and she becomes increasingly disillusioned with Volodya, she turns to her phone conversations with Zhenya for comfort—and still finds none. “You know, you need to talk to a living being,”  (Бывает такая полоса в жизни, когда очень нужна. Очень нужна живая душа; Translit: Bivayet takaya poloca v zhizni, kogda ochen nuzhna. Ochen nuzhna zhivaya dusha) he tells her, betraying the anomie and isolation broiling within the Soviet man of the sixties [01:25:42]. Later, her depression and detachment culminates during a picnic outside of the city (preceded by three uninterrupted minutes of Moscow city streets, with no reference to or focus on Lena at all) [00:56:56]. At the picnic, she “witnesses the hypocrisy of her boyfriend, Volodya, the hypocrisy of her generation and its loss of ideals” (Coxe 43). The moment culminates in Lena disappearing from the picnic into the birch trees of the forest, later drawing a comparison between the undeveloped physical landscape of Russia and the foreign, unstable cityscape of Moscow. 

For Kaganovsky, July Rain marks the “end of the Thaw, with its hopes and utopian illusions of a new community that could be reforged after the crimes of Stalinism and the trauma of World War II” (Kaganovsky 243). There is no outpouring of grief, however; only a muted acceptance and quiet mourning at the concept of entering yet another unknowable time, one that promised even less than the Thaw had in the mid-1950s. Lena’s own identity disappears as she comes to that realization. She retreats into herself at social gatherings, expresses more and more limited emotions to Volodya. She has become lost, another wandering Soviet depressed under the deluge of social anxiety and uncertainty. During a montage of her phone calls with Zhenya, she says to him “Maybe you don’t exist. Well, not all of you. Just a voice” (Может быть, тебя не существует. Ну нет вас всё. Просто голос. Translit: Mozhet buit’, tebya ne sushestvuet. Nu net vas vsyo. Prosto golos) [00:53:46]. Lena’s relationship to the absent, non-existent man is heightened by the anticipated return of her father to Moscow, which sets her mother about renovating their entire apartment [00:28:57]. However, their celebratory anticipation is immediately destroyed when they learn of his sudden death [00:41:41]. The traces of masculinity as discussed earlier are still only that, traces. Lena has no paternal figure in her life, and her friends and partner offer similarly empty portrayals of manhood. Even her father, who would have survived at least World War II and likely some childhood experience of World War I in order to be alive at the start of the film, cannot return home. He is lost, gone, no longer able to foster stability and motivation in the younger generation. Like Sergei’s father in I Am Twenty, he is relegated to a photograph, an icon on the wall, an image that further evokes Lena’s endless reproduction in her job. At the very end of the film, after ending her relationship with Volodya, Lena wanders the streets of Moscow during preparations for the Victory Day parade [01:47:41]. Among the unearned swells of big band music, she disappears into a crowd of young men. Their faces close out the film; the lost postwar generation, the youth of the Soviet sixties, the aimless, superfluous men burdened with the postmemory of wars they will never fight.

The long Soviet sixties and the Khrushchev Thaw were a particularly singular time. The temporary liberalization of Khruschev’s censors allowed for filmmakers to interrogate the conditions of the postwar USSR in ways that would have been unthinkable during the Stalin years; and yet, the overwhelming social malaise of the generation led to those portrayals taking on a distinct tone of anxiety, fragmentation, and purposelessness. However, these protagonists did manage to prove that “even the most carefully maintained hypermasculine myths” cannot be maintained forever (Dumanċić 265). Despite their listlessness, the protagonistic men in these films are sensitive, contemplative, empathetic people, whose relationships to the women in their lives make them endure real, tumultuous emotions, establishing one of the main connections usually drawn between this era and other New Wave movements across Europe. Underpinning those emotions, however, are the social conditions of the Thaw, which engendered a collective and individual paralysis simply far too strong to endure. As the Stagnation approached, the fundamental psychological fracture of a generation with no past, no future, and a present that seemed to constantly reinvent itself into increasingly pedantic and abstracted versions of itself would only atrophy. Though Khutsiev would continue to release films until his death in 2019, he would never again produce a triptych of such an incisive nature. Between Spring on Zarechnaya Street, I Am Twenty, and July Rain, Marlen Khutsiev’s inscription of the Thaw remains one of the most dynamic and thoroughly humanist portrayals of the period, illustrating the depth of inherited traumas, lack of direction, and overall malaise of the first postwar Soviet generation, forecasting the conditions of the Stagnation with a prescience still remarkable today.

Works Cited

Coxe, Brinton T. "An Imprint of the Times: Marlen Khutsiev's "July Rain" and the End of the Thaw." Ulbandus Review, vol. 9, 2005, pp. 30–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/25748152.

Dumanċić, Marko. "Epilogue:; The End of the Long Sixties and the Fate of the Superfluous Man." Men Out of Focus. University of Toronto Press, 2021. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/10.3138/j.ctv1c9hmxv.12.

Kaganovsky, Lilya. "Postmemory, Countermemory:; Soviet Cinema of the 1960s." The Socialist Sixties. Edited by Anne E. Gorsuch, and Diane P. Koenker. Indiana University Press, 2013. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org.libproxy2.usc.edu/stable/j.ctt16gz7q4.13.

Directed by Khutsiev, Marlen. I Am Twenty, Mosfilm, 1965.

Directed by Khutsiev, Marlen. July Rain, Mosfilm, 1967.

Directed by Khutsiev, Marlen. Spring on Zarechnaya Street, Odessa Film Studio, 1956.