osprey_archer | Soviet Movies

For a variety of reasons my progress in Karl Schlogel’s The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World has been slow, and one of them is that I keep pausing to watch the movies he mentions. A surprising number of Soviet movies are available on Youtube with English subtitles! (And a few, tantalizingly, are available only without subtitles, like Three Plus Two. Someday maybe a subtitled version will appear…)

Tractor Drivers is a 1939 musical extravaganza, the classic “a boy, a girl, and a tractor” Soviet film. It features Marina Ladynina as Maryana, a tractor driver who swaggers around in overalls, driving her motorcycle at top speed down the darkened roads. She’s a new Soviet Woman, ready, willing, and able to work alongside the men, but still one of the girls even though all the other girls on the kolkhoz still wear their traditional kerchiefs and skirts. You might imagine there would be a little tension, but no! Everyone loves and admires Maryana, the wave of the future, their very own Stakhanovite tractor driver.

(Schlogel thinks Maryana is not attractive enough, but he is objectively wrong. Her soft butch aesthetic is adorable, and she also shows a softer appeal when she takes off her motorcycle cap to reveal the soft waves of her cute golden bob.)

The only drawback of Maryana’s fame as a Stakhanovite is that she keeps getting unwanted marriage proposals. Therefore, she creates a fake engagement with a fellow worker, who is not in fact her love interest: instead, the fake engagement is an impediment to the true love interest, a tank driver whom she meets after she crashes her motorcycle and injures her ankle… a gender-swapped Jane Eyre moment!

The tank drive has recently demobbed from uhhhhh I don’t actually remember, but the important thing is not where he comes from but what he brings with him: the doctrine of military preparedness! Soon all the lads in the kolkhoz are learning about tanks, and Maryana leads a delegation of girls who want to learn tank tactics too.

Ten years later, Marina Ladynina reappears in Cossacks of the Kuban, in which she plays a collective farm manager who is secretly in love with the Cossack who runs the next collective farm over, although she keeps refusing his entreaties to wed. The film gives her a much more feminine look, all skirts and soft hair. It’s not only in America that the post-war years featured a feverish return to traditional values.

However, the main theses of this film is “Cossacks are hot” - an abrupt swerve from my previous experience with film Cossacks, who are usually setting villages on fire! - and “There is plenty of food in the Soviet Union!” Stalin, infamously, referred to this film when his advisors tried to explain that famine was threatening yet again: what food shortages?, he demanded. Look at the mountains of melons in Cossacks on the Kuban!

Schlogel notes the almost fairy-tale plenty of the agricultural fair where most of the film takes place. The characters ride in carts on massive piles of food; the stalls overflow; and not just with food, but with cloth, books, records, guitars, horse collars - shoddy horse collars, though! And the horse collar dealer gets called out for his poor wares in the fair entertainment later that night.

Said entertainment also features a song in which Marina Ladynina and her Cossack are singled out by name and basically informed “Everyone ships you! Get on with it!” Oh my God. Marina has refused her Cossack for all these years because he keeps doing un-Soviet things like “attempt to form a cabal with the other growers to charge high prices for his produce”; he is forced to drop prices when Marina drops prices on her farm’s produce, but he never actually seems to grow or change, so it’s a little weird that they get together.

But then we have a heroic montage of tractors plowing the black Ukrainian earth as the characters sing, reminding us that the true hero of any Soviet film is the collective might of the laborers. Happy end!