Children of the Thaw
At the breakfast table in Soviet film of the thaw period, the father is often a shadowy figure. A fashionably dressed mother sets forth a bowl of porridge, a boy turns it pensively with a giant spoon, unwieldy in his small hand. If a father is there, his head is often behind a newspaper. More likely his chair is empty, and the child negotiates his bad grades with his mother. This is not to suggest that male authority is absent from Soviet films of this period. On the contrary, this heroic male continues to appear within the expected Socialist framework; he does so, however, more often in a peer, rather than paternal, relationship: the military commander leading his soldiers to victory, a factory director guiding the achievement of a five-year plan, or party organizer educating a political ingénue. The heroic father, fighting to shape the personality of his children, guiding them through the perils of adolescence, is comparatively rare.
Khrushchev’s thaw, at this point in its last, but most developed stages, is a significant context for this work in that it was based in the renunciation of a generation of fathers. While it could be argued that films featuring missing fathers are simply reflective of the demographic realities of the day--many fathers had not, in fact, returned from the war or from Stalin’s camps--it is clear that many of them approach this absence on a more symbolic level. It is not a single father who has been lost, but a larger patrimony. These films explore ways in which this space might be filled. A number of them present the solution as a fraternal, rather than paternal relationship; an elder, or “big brother” emerges. This conforms to the larger pattern we encounter here, in which the generation of the parents is mistrusted, discounted and ultimately eliminated, despite the fact that they had made so many sacrifices for their children during the war and the purges.
A number of scholars have discussed the predilection for films of this time to feature children—most notably Josephine Woll and Aleksander Prokhorov. They have pointed out that the child provided filmmakers the opportunity to present a fresh perspective on the world and to explore the realm of the imagination more freely. Prokhorov has also noted the absence of the father in many of these films, and related this to a shift from a vertical model of authority to one that is more horizontal, based on peer relations. I would like to add to their work by looking at children’s films of the period that seem to use the missing father to place the child in some sort of unfinished moral structure, one free of ideological baggage. Where a father playing the role of moral pedagogue might pit one generation against another, bringing the sins of the Stalin generation into focus, here this conflict is avoided. The child is at large in the moral universe, making mistakes and transgressions that are committed not against the patriarchal authority represented by the father, but against the limits of his or her own experience.
Lenin is supposed to have said "Give us the child for eight years and he will be a Bolshevik forever," but these children seem to operate in the world described by Piaget in The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932): "the child is someone who constructs his own moral world view, who forms ideas about right and wrong, and fair and unfair, that are not the product of adult teaching and that are often maintained in the face of adult wishes to the contrary.” In the films in this series, made between 1962 and 1964, it seems that it is Piaget’s world, and not Lenin’s, that is at work.