For a while, Stalin signed on to Boris Shumyatsky's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Shumyatsky idea of a "Soviet Hollywood" (Советский голливуд)--a massive industrial city in the sunny Crimea (located to permit film making in any season) that would rival Hollywood in the number of films produced. By 1937, though, Stalin had abandoned the idea. Here are accounts of the idea and its fate from two authors: Maria Belodubrovskaya and Stephen Kotkin:
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(1) "Soviet Hollywood: The Culture Industry That Wasn’t
Maria Belodubrovskaya
From: Cinema Journal
Volume 53, Number 3, Spring 2014
pp. 100-122
University of Texas Press colophon
Abstract
This article details the history of a project to reform the Soviet film industry based on the Hollywood model and to construct a “cine-city,” a Soviet Hollywood, in Soviet Russia in the mid-1930s. It argues that with the project’s abandonment, the Soviets missed an opportunity to create a culture industry. Instead of a Hollywood-style production machine, they ended up with an exclusive, event-based cinema in which every film was distributed in hundreds of prints, but in which filmmaking was never routine enough to effect a subjectifying mass culture.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/543846
"In the summer of 1935 the Soviet government sponsored a trip by the head of the Soviet film infustry, Boris Shumiatskii, and a group of Soviet film professionals to Europe and America to study film production. A major part of the trip was a visit to Hollywood. The tour resulted in a project to reform the Soviet film industry in accordance with the Hollywood film model. Soviet film executives proposed building in the south of Russia a 'cine-city'--a 'Soviet Hollywood'--incorporating a dozen studios. The construction of the cine-city was to start in 1936 and finish by 1945, by which time Soviet Hollywood was to produce six hundred feature films a year, rivaling Hollywood's output. The concurrent introduction of Hollywood-style producers and departments at existing studios was to double their production programs to an additional two hundred films. Yet by 1937, both the cine-city and the industry reform were abandoned..."
Only the first page of this article is available online to non-subscribers. However, part of Belodubrovskaya's book *Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin* is available online and contains some details on the failure of the "Soviet Hollywood" idea:
"Soviet Hollywood went as far as selecting in July 1936 with Stalin's blessing, the site for the city-—the Lapsi area near Foros on the southwestern tip of the Crimean Peninsula. First foundations were laid in November 1936. Soon, however, the project was closed. It appears that Shumiatskii lost Stalin's support in the course of 1936 when Stalin started to receive signals that conflicted with Shumiatskii's rosy picture of Soviet cinema. Stalin learned, for instance, that the film industry was operating at half capacity. Yet instead of focusing on the tasks at hand, Shumiatskii, as the Propaganda Department's Shcherbakov put it, was preoccupied with "sunny cine-cities.". It did not help that in October 1936 Shumiatskii's administration underwent an investigation and subsequent closure of one of its subsidiaries, Vostokfilm, whose leadership was accused of squandering state funds. Tellingly, the US press described the Vostokfilm chiefs as executives who "went Hollywood.".
"It is possible that after all this negative feedback, Stalin decided that the Soviet Hollywood project, as well as the 'Hollywood-type' industrialization implemented by Shumiatskii, might produce poor results and withdrew his support. Yet why did Stalin abandon the project itself? After all, no Soviet Hollywood meant no mass production and no competition with Hollywood. The answer is that Stalin's change of heart was part of a new shift in his thinking, which occurred in 1936 and which set the Soviet Union, once again, on a course toward isolationism, Soviet superiority, and internal security. This course was incompatible with Soviet Hollywood.
"In August 1936 two prominent party leaders, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, as well as several others, were accused of anti-Soviet activity, including a plot against Stalin. Their show trial unleashed what became known as Stalin's Great Terror, a witch-hunt for "enemies" among Soviet elites. Shumiatskii experienced the effects of this hunt simultaneously with the Kamenev-Zinoviev trial. Some of his associates and subordinates were purged in 1936 and he fell under suspicion for harboring "enemies of the people" in his administration. Because of spy mania, foreign sympathies and ties were no longer considered welcome. Suddenly, Shumiatskii, before then a Stalin insider and a powerful executive, became the target of ruthless public criticism.
"The Soviet Hollywood project was closed sometime in 1937, likely following the arrests of executives associated with it. When Frank Capra and Robert Riskin visited Moscow in May 1937, they discussed the matter with its key proponents, the director Grigorii Aleksandrov and the cinematographer Vladimir Nil'sen. Yet days later Pravda wrote that the idea of Soviet Hollywood was "foreign to the spirit of Soviet culture." Pravda's particular contention was that two-thirds of Soviet screens continued to be silent, making Shumiatskii's project—-to produce sound films exclusively-—utterly divorced from reality. The "foreignness" of Soviet Hollywood was voiced again in August 1937, at which time the newspaper Izvestiia referred to Soviet Hollywood in the past tense. Nil'sen, Eisenstein's student and an accomplished cinematographer, who accompanied Shumiatskii to Hollywood and was his collaborator on the industry Americanization project, was arrested in October 1937 and executed in January 1938. Shumiatskii, who had lived under a constant threat of arrest for many months, was apprehended in January 1938. After repeated brutal interrogations, where he refused to name his "associates" in an alleged plot to assassinate Stalin at a Kremlin screening, Shumiatskii was executed in July 1938..." https://books.google.com/books?id=K0o4DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT43
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(2) Stephen Kotkin also discusses the idea in *Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941*:
"Being a great power meant looking into the American mirror. Shumyatsky had launched the idea of a Soviet Hollywood. A severe lack of factory capacity meant that Soviet film prints were in short supply—usually fewer than forty copies per film for the entire country—and he wanted a film industry capable of producing its own quality film stock, cameras, projectors, sound-recording machines, and lighting, all of which were expensive to import.284 He had headed an eight-person commission to Paris, London, Rochester (Eastman Kodak), and Los Angeles, whence he published stories about his film viewings and meetings, returning determined to found a Soviet Cinema City in the mild, sunlit climate on the Black Sea, permitting year-round work.285 At a Kremlin screening, he had gotten Stalin to approve the Hollywood idea. “Opponents cannot see farther than their own noses,” the dictator had intoned. “We need not only good pictures but also more of them, in quantity and in distribution. It becomes obnoxious when the same films remain in all the theaters for months on end.”286 At a follow-up screening, when Stalin saw *Chapayev* for the thirty-eighth time, the dictator said he had heard that Mussolini would build his Cinecittà outside Rome in just two years. But despite Stalin’s verbal support, the expensive Hollywood on the Black Sea never materialized.
"Opposition came not just from industrial and budget officials. Yechi’el-Leyb Faynzilberg, known as Ilya Ilf, and Yevgeny Katayev, known as Petrov, wrote a letter to Stalin opposing the Soviet Hollywood idea (February 26, 1936)..." https://nemaloknig.com/read-361790/?page=51
***
So suppose Stalin never abandoned the "Soviet Hollywood" idea--insisting that the USSR must overtake non-Soviet film production in quantity as well as quality. Yes, it would be expensive, but Stalin could approve some very expensive ideas--even though the Great Patriotic War and the German occupation of Crimea would no doubt slow down work on this project. And even the disgrace and subsequent "liqudation" of Shumyatsky did not necessarily have to kill the idea. After all, Stalin could follow through on ideas originally proposed by people he was to exile, imprison, or shoot. (E.g., his outdoing the Left Opposition on de-kulakization and mass collectivization.)
***
(1) "Soviet Hollywood: The Culture Industry That Wasn’t
Maria Belodubrovskaya
From: Cinema Journal
Volume 53, Number 3, Spring 2014
pp. 100-122
University of Texas Press colophon
Abstract
This article details the history of a project to reform the Soviet film industry based on the Hollywood model and to construct a “cine-city,” a Soviet Hollywood, in Soviet Russia in the mid-1930s. It argues that with the project’s abandonment, the Soviets missed an opportunity to create a culture industry. Instead of a Hollywood-style production machine, they ended up with an exclusive, event-based cinema in which every film was distributed in hundreds of prints, but in which filmmaking was never routine enough to effect a subjectifying mass culture.
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/543846
"In the summer of 1935 the Soviet government sponsored a trip by the head of the Soviet film infustry, Boris Shumiatskii, and a group of Soviet film professionals to Europe and America to study film production. A major part of the trip was a visit to Hollywood. The tour resulted in a project to reform the Soviet film industry in accordance with the Hollywood film model. Soviet film executives proposed building in the south of Russia a 'cine-city'--a 'Soviet Hollywood'--incorporating a dozen studios. The construction of the cine-city was to start in 1936 and finish by 1945, by which time Soviet Hollywood was to produce six hundred feature films a year, rivaling Hollywood's output. The concurrent introduction of Hollywood-style producers and departments at existing studios was to double their production programs to an additional two hundred films. Yet by 1937, both the cine-city and the industry reform were abandoned..."
Only the first page of this article is available online to non-subscribers. However, part of Belodubrovskaya's book *Not According to Plan: Filmmaking under Stalin* is available online and contains some details on the failure of the "Soviet Hollywood" idea:
"Soviet Hollywood went as far as selecting in July 1936 with Stalin's blessing, the site for the city-—the Lapsi area near Foros on the southwestern tip of the Crimean Peninsula. First foundations were laid in November 1936. Soon, however, the project was closed. It appears that Shumiatskii lost Stalin's support in the course of 1936 when Stalin started to receive signals that conflicted with Shumiatskii's rosy picture of Soviet cinema. Stalin learned, for instance, that the film industry was operating at half capacity. Yet instead of focusing on the tasks at hand, Shumiatskii, as the Propaganda Department's Shcherbakov put it, was preoccupied with "sunny cine-cities.". It did not help that in October 1936 Shumiatskii's administration underwent an investigation and subsequent closure of one of its subsidiaries, Vostokfilm, whose leadership was accused of squandering state funds. Tellingly, the US press described the Vostokfilm chiefs as executives who "went Hollywood.".
"It is possible that after all this negative feedback, Stalin decided that the Soviet Hollywood project, as well as the 'Hollywood-type' industrialization implemented by Shumiatskii, might produce poor results and withdrew his support. Yet why did Stalin abandon the project itself? After all, no Soviet Hollywood meant no mass production and no competition with Hollywood. The answer is that Stalin's change of heart was part of a new shift in his thinking, which occurred in 1936 and which set the Soviet Union, once again, on a course toward isolationism, Soviet superiority, and internal security. This course was incompatible with Soviet Hollywood.
"In August 1936 two prominent party leaders, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, as well as several others, were accused of anti-Soviet activity, including a plot against Stalin. Their show trial unleashed what became known as Stalin's Great Terror, a witch-hunt for "enemies" among Soviet elites. Shumiatskii experienced the effects of this hunt simultaneously with the Kamenev-Zinoviev trial. Some of his associates and subordinates were purged in 1936 and he fell under suspicion for harboring "enemies of the people" in his administration. Because of spy mania, foreign sympathies and ties were no longer considered welcome. Suddenly, Shumiatskii, before then a Stalin insider and a powerful executive, became the target of ruthless public criticism.
"The Soviet Hollywood project was closed sometime in 1937, likely following the arrests of executives associated with it. When Frank Capra and Robert Riskin visited Moscow in May 1937, they discussed the matter with its key proponents, the director Grigorii Aleksandrov and the cinematographer Vladimir Nil'sen. Yet days later Pravda wrote that the idea of Soviet Hollywood was "foreign to the spirit of Soviet culture." Pravda's particular contention was that two-thirds of Soviet screens continued to be silent, making Shumiatskii's project—-to produce sound films exclusively-—utterly divorced from reality. The "foreignness" of Soviet Hollywood was voiced again in August 1937, at which time the newspaper Izvestiia referred to Soviet Hollywood in the past tense. Nil'sen, Eisenstein's student and an accomplished cinematographer, who accompanied Shumiatskii to Hollywood and was his collaborator on the industry Americanization project, was arrested in October 1937 and executed in January 1938. Shumiatskii, who had lived under a constant threat of arrest for many months, was apprehended in January 1938. After repeated brutal interrogations, where he refused to name his "associates" in an alleged plot to assassinate Stalin at a Kremlin screening, Shumiatskii was executed in July 1938..." https://books.google.com/books?id=K0o4DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT43
*****
(2) Stephen Kotkin also discusses the idea in *Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941*:
"Being a great power meant looking into the American mirror. Shumyatsky had launched the idea of a Soviet Hollywood. A severe lack of factory capacity meant that Soviet film prints were in short supply—usually fewer than forty copies per film for the entire country—and he wanted a film industry capable of producing its own quality film stock, cameras, projectors, sound-recording machines, and lighting, all of which were expensive to import.284 He had headed an eight-person commission to Paris, London, Rochester (Eastman Kodak), and Los Angeles, whence he published stories about his film viewings and meetings, returning determined to found a Soviet Cinema City in the mild, sunlit climate on the Black Sea, permitting year-round work.285 At a Kremlin screening, he had gotten Stalin to approve the Hollywood idea. “Opponents cannot see farther than their own noses,” the dictator had intoned. “We need not only good pictures but also more of them, in quantity and in distribution. It becomes obnoxious when the same films remain in all the theaters for months on end.”286 At a follow-up screening, when Stalin saw *Chapayev* for the thirty-eighth time, the dictator said he had heard that Mussolini would build his Cinecittà outside Rome in just two years. But despite Stalin’s verbal support, the expensive Hollywood on the Black Sea never materialized.
"Opposition came not just from industrial and budget officials. Yechi’el-Leyb Faynzilberg, known as Ilya Ilf, and Yevgeny Katayev, known as Petrov, wrote a letter to Stalin opposing the Soviet Hollywood idea (February 26, 1936)..." https://nemaloknig.com/read-361790/?page=51
***
So suppose Stalin never abandoned the "Soviet Hollywood" idea--insisting that the USSR must overtake non-Soviet film production in quantity as well as quality. Yes, it would be expensive, but Stalin could approve some very expensive ideas--even though the Great Patriotic War and the German occupation of Crimea would no doubt slow down work on this project. And even the disgrace and subsequent "liqudation" of Shumyatsky did not necessarily have to kill the idea. After all, Stalin could follow through on ideas originally proposed by people he was to exile, imprison, or shoot. (E.g., his outdoing the Left Opposition on de-kulakization and mass collectivization.)
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