Popular films in the Soviet Union were the products of the implementation of propagandistic messages into storylines that were both ideologically and aesthetically consistent with of the interests of the State and Party apparatuses. Beginning in the 1930s, following declaration of the doctrine on socialist realism as the official form of cultural production, Soviet authorities and filmmakers tailored films to the circumstances in the USSR at that given moment in order to influence and shape popular opinion; however, this often resulted in inconsistent and outright contradictory messages. Given the transformation that gender relations were undergoing in the early stages of development, one area that was particularly problematic in Soviet cinema was the portrayals of women. Focusing primarily on the Stalinist period of the Soviet History (1934-1953), I plan to look at the ways in which women were portrayed in popular Soviet cinema and specifically the ways in which these presentations shifted before, during, and after World War II.

The present thesis analyzes the cultural image of the Russian neo-Romantic writer Alexander Grin (1880-1932) as it has been constructed by Soviet ideology and received in Soviet popular culture since the late 1950s. The topic of the thesis is unique, and it has not yet been investigated before. The thesis explores three major aspects of Grin's representation in Soviet culture: critical, fictional and cinematic. The first part "Critical representation of Grin's works in the USSR" focuses upon the process of construction and development of ideological "myths about Grin" in the system of Soviet culture. It demonstrates and analyzes the transformation of the official and public attitude to Grin's works from the 1920s to the 1980s. The second part is entitled "Representation of Grin's image in Soviet fiction: Grin as a fictional character". Through the coherent analysis of three Soviet novels (introducing Alexander Grin as a protagonist), it explores the phenomenon of the transformation of both the personal and socio-cultural attitudes to Grin. The fictional works are viewed in chronological order: The Black Sea by Konstantin Paustovsky (Chernoe more, 1935), The Wizard from Gel'-Giu by Leonid Borisov (Volshebnik iz Gel'-Giu, 1944) and The Lord of Chances by Valentin Zorin (Povelitel' sluchaynostey, 1977-79). The third part concentrates entirely on the Cinematic representation of Grin's works on the Soviet screen, analyzing five major film-versions of Grin's works: Scarlet Sails (Alye parusa, dir. Ptushko, 1961), She Who Runs the Waves (Begushchaya po volnam, dir. Lubimov, 1967), Shining World (Blistayushchiy mir, dir. Mansurov, 1984), The Golden Chain (Zolotaya Tsep , dir. Muratov, 1986), Mister Designer (Gospodin oformitel', dir. Teptsov, 1986). The study of Grin's case offers a unique opportunity to investigate how the old ideological myths are occupying the minds of younger generations nowadays. Grin is still a "cult figure" for Russian society, but it remains to be investigated to what extent his contemporary image (and the image of his fiction) is influenced by the old models of the Soviet era.

My thesis examines visual and written culture of the interwar Soviet Union dealing with the body as an object of public observation, appreciation, and critique. It explores how the need to construct new Soviet subjectivities was realised through the figure of the body. I explore the representation of ‘physical culture’ (fizkul’tura), with reference to newspapers, specialist fizkul’tura and medical journals, and Party debates. This textual discourse is considered alongside visual primary sources – documentary and non-fiction film and photography, painting and sculpture, and feature films. In my analysis of these visual primary sources I identify three ‘categories of looking’ – surveillance, aesthetics, and spectatorship – that I claim structure representations of the embodied Soviet subject. My introduction incorporates a brief history of early Soviet social psychological conceptualisations of the body, outlining the coercive renovative project of Soviet subjectification and introducing the notion of surveillance. My first and second chapters explore bodily aesthetics. The first focuses on non-fiction media from the mid- to late-1920s that capture the sporting body in action; this chapter introduces the notion of spectatorship and begins to unpack the ideological function of how bodies are observed. The second further explores questions of bodily aesthetics, now in relation to fizkul’tura painting and Abram Room’s 1936 film, Strogii iunosha. My third chapter looks at fizkul’tura feature films from the mid- 1930s to explore how bodies were related to social questions of gender and sexuality, including marriage and pregnancy. My final chapter focuses on cinematic representations of football from the late 1930s and the relationship between bodies on display and onlooking crowds. These two chapters together indicate how the dynamic between the body and its spectator (whether individual or in a group) was reimagined in the late interwar years; the body’s aesthetic appeal is now of little importance compared to its ability to constitute a public subjectivity through the manipulation of emotion, trauma, and pathos.

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