Krushtalyov, my car! (film essay)

　

1. A Winter’s Tale

Once in the winter of 1953, Alexei German’s father, a prominent Moscow novelist, greeted a man in the stairway of the Kommunalka (communal apartment) where the extended family lived. The man said that he had come from abroad and was carrying a letter for German’s father, Yuri German. Alexei German recalled that he father was appalled. Immediately, he kicked the man so hard that he plunged down the flight of steps leading to the Kommunalka. The visitor from abroad vanished into the snowy night. "Why did you do that?" Alexei asked his father. "He was an agent provocateur," Yuri German told his son. "To receive a letter from abroad now would be to sign my death sentence." "But how do you know he was an agent provocateur?" the 12 year-old Alexei asked his father. "I don’t know, but I can’t take the chance," his father told him.

This anecdote forms the core for German’s Krushtalyov, my car! The film is about the hysterical paranoia at the heart of Soviet Stalinism. It is one of the most uncompromising pictures ever made and considered by Russians to be the most penetrating account of the psychology of totalitarianism ever presented.

2.

German began production of Krushtalyov in 1992. Work on the film continued sporadically, when money was available, through 1998. The movie is ostensibly based on a short story ("In a Room and a Half") by the Nobel laureate writer, Joseph Brodsky, an expatriate who died in New York City in 1996. (Like Nabokov, Brodsky, a famous Russian poet became an equally well-known and highly regarded American poet; after coming to the United States, he wrote his poetry in English.) The script is credited to German’s wife and collaborator, Svetlana Carmelita.

Alexei German demanded that all props and vehicles be authentic. He told Jim Hoberman in 1999, shortly after the film’s disastrous international premiere at Cannes, that it "took me a year of my life to find the 12 black ZIS -110 automobiles." In the film, as in real life, each of those cars carries one member of the 12-person Politburo. In Russian slang, these vehicles were called "Voronek" cars, harbingers of catastrophe just like the black ravens and crows that preside over the climax of Krushtalyov.

　

3. Alexei German

"I regard myself as an unrealized and, on the whole, an unhappy, failed man."

Alexei German

Soviet Russia was an experiment that lasted three generations. Yuri German, Alexei German’s father came of age in the first generation; he was born in 1910. Alexei (1938 - 2013) lived for more than fifty years as a citizen of the Soviet empire. His son, Alexei Alexeivich German was born in 1976 – he was 15 when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. All three men are notable Russian artists.

Yuri German was a very brave man. When he was 18 he accompanied his father, an artillery officer, to the Front in the Civil War. Much of life was spent reporting combat. German wrote his first novel at age 17, although he disavowed the book later. With his Maxim Gorky as his mentor, German published a number of novels during the decade of the thirties, including most famously Ivan Lapshin, my Friend, a novel about petty criminals and their punishment. Throughout World War II, Yuri German reported on various fronts from his headquarters in Arkhangelsk. (Arkhangelsk is the capitol of Oblast Province in the sub-Arctic and Arctic north of European Russia.) During the war, Yuri German wrote many short novels and stories. He also reported for TASS news agency, authoring many articles and essays.

Yuri German became a member of the Communist party in 1958. He died in Leningrad in 1967. German’s war novels are said to be beautifully written, but, essentially, adventure stories with compelling plots. He was never considered to be a "great writer" by his peers, but was said to be a "man of great moral courage and infinite kindness."

German was one of Stalin’s favorite novelists. Yuri German met Stalin on a number of occasions and participated in banquets held in the dictator’s honor. German wrote a number of screenplays for films produced in the forties and fifties. Although German was periodically honored by the regime, he also led a politically precarious existence. On several occasions, German was questioned by authorities with respect to so-called subversive elements in his writings. German’s household was a gathering place for the Leningrad intelligentsia and, on occasion, people who had visited the writer’s home simply vanished, arrested in the dark of night and either secretly executed or sent to Siberia.

Yuri German married a woman who was a prominent physician. Their child, Alexei was born in in Leningrad in 1938. However, for much of his childhood, Alexei lived with his parents in the far north either at Arkhangelsk or Poliarnoe, the Northern Fleet’s base near Murmansk. (One of his father’s assignments was covering the exploits of the Northern Fleet’s submarines.)

Alexei was 15 when Stalin died in 1953. After 1953, Alexei met many prisoners from the Gulag who were released after the dictator’s death. These men and women were guests in his father’s home in Leningrad and vividly described their experiences in the camps to Yuri and his son. Alexei described his father as a loyal Communist and a true believer – "he was more naive that I am and he had a harder time seeing bad things." Initially, Alexei planned to become a medical doctor like his mother. However, his father urged him to become involved in theater and consider directing films. Curiously, Alexei didn’t like working in the film industry: "I never wanted to be a cinema director...I wanted to be a doctor. I experience terror in the face of this profession. I’m always unhappy when I have to shoot...It’s as if every day – you had to drill teeth." Although the family lived in fear during the purges, as did everyone else in the Soviet Union, Alexei’s parents were well-to-do – his family had a chauffeur, nanny, and a maid.

Alexei studied with Gregorei Kozintzev, an important Soviet-era film maker. (Kozintzev made noteworthy films of Shakepeare’s King Lear and Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment.) Alexei German was trained on the job, as a kind of apprentice, and did not have the typical film school experience of most Soviet directors – that is, education at VGIK (Moscow’s All Union State Institute for Cinematography). Instead, he worked throughout his entire career at Lenfilm in Leningrad, the place where he learned the trade from Kozintzev and other directors affiliated with that studio – many of his father’s film scripts were prepared to Kozintzev films made at Lenfilm and, it seems, that Yuri’s prestige resulted in Alexei finding employment at that studio. (Alexei says that his father’s influence was unavailing to win him good jobs in the movie industry; he claims to have worked as a "mouse wrangler" on one movie made in 1958 – "I had," German says "a stigma of talentlessness.")

Alexei German worked on a number of films directed by other men, as well as theatrical productions, until 1965. At that time, he worked with his father to adapt one of Yuri German’s short war novels, a story called Operation "Happy New Year". At this time, Yuri German was suffering from the cancer that would kill him in 1967. (During this period, German co-directed his first film, The Seventh Satellite with Gregorii Aronov, released in 1967). The script for his war film, ultimately called either The Road Block or Trial on the Road was finally completed in 1969. By that time, Alexei had married Svetlana Karmalita – she was a researcher for documentary films and has co-written the screenplays for all of German’s movies.

Trial on the Road, finally completed in 1971, was immediately censored and not released. The film concerns a Soviet POW who returns from German captivity during World War Two to join the partisans. At first, the partisans don’t trust the POW, but he proves his valor and, finally, dies heroically in brutal fire-fight at a railroad switching station. The problem with this scenario was that "officially" there were not Soviet POWs fighting with the Russian partisans. Stalin’s General Order 270 provided that any Red Army soldier captured by the Germans was to be deemed a traitor and executed immediately upon repatriation to the Russian army – Soviet soldiers were ordered to fight to the death and not allow themselves to be captured. Therefore, any film focusing on the experiences of a Soviet prisoner of war was thought to be deeply offensive. Even worse, Trial on the Road suggests that the POW had actually aided the Germans in the fighting and may have participated in attacks on the Red Army. Of course, this subject was highly controversial and "touched a nerve" – in fact, many anti-Communist members of the Russian military had joined the Germans and fought against the Red Army in the Ukraine, Estonia, and other areas at the fringe of the Russian empire. In the Soviet Union, films were subject the censorship of Goskino. The head of Goskino in 1971 vowed that the film would never be shown during his lifetime –"We have to congratulate LenFilm on a movie about the people who lost the Great Fatherland War" (the official name for W. W. II in the Soviet era). True to his oath, the film was suppressed – it was not shown until 1986, that is, fifteen years after its completion. Later Soviet films were allowed to express some ambiguity about the Great Fatherland War – a conflict, after all, in which hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens fought for the Germans. But Trial on the Road was about five years too early and, so, despite many revisions and resubmissions to Goskino, the picture was shelved. (I have seen the picture, regrettably in a DVD without English subtitles – it is a raw, visually effective, and exciting war movie made with a huge budget. One scene, famous in Russian cinema, shows thousands of prisoners of war on a barge slowly passing under bridges that the partisans have mined with explosives – the suspense is whether an approaching train will have to be blown-up when it is over the barges, thereby raining fire and death on the prisoners of war below. The ending of the film seems very conventional, the hero Lazarev, proving his mettle by mowing down dozens of Germans before expiring in a hail of gunfire in the midst of immense armored trains moving back and forth in a gloomy iron wasteland.) When Goskino finally authorized the movie’s release, it turned out to be very successful at the box office and was awarded a USSR State Prize in 1988.

(When Trial on the Road was finally released and after Perestroika, German says that he received many job offers from Hollywood. Hollywood executives contacted him and asked him to work in Los Angeles, reportedly on the basis of a single shot in the film. Lazarev has been killing Germans with a submachine gun; when he is shot, his weapon falls in the snow, its barrel so hot that it makes a hissing sound. German says that the Hollywood executives showed their fundamental immorality and superficial understanding of film by repeatedly praising that single shot while, apparently, understanding nothing of the film itself.)

For a couple years, German was unable to get anything produced. However, a writer-friend of his father, Konstantin Simonov, offered German a newly written novella, Twenty Days without War. German was attracted to the story, a rather conventional narrative about a journalist’s romance during his 20 days of leave during World War Two. The story is set in Tashkent, a city to which the traumatized journalist travels after reporting on combat at Stalingrad. The journalist goes to a movie set where Soviet authorities are producing a propaganda film about the war. Of course, the depiction of combat in the propaganda film, on which the journalist is asked to lend technical expertise, is ludicrously inaccurate. The journalist falls in love with a woman employed as a seamstress in the wardrobe department of the film’s production company.

German’s wife customarily researched historical details shown in her husband’s films and he was fanatical about literal accuracy. For Twenty Days without War, German delayed production until he could find a tram identical to those used in 1942 to transport troops from the front to Tashkent. Shooting was on-location using buildings still showing marks of war damage in the early ‘seventies. German’s attention to detail had always been obsessive – for instance, all firearms used in Trial on the Road were real Red Army weapons that could be used to fire real bullets – but he carried these techniques to an extreme in Twenty Days without War. Combat sequences were shot with Soviet naval assistance using live ammunition in many cases and at enormous cost. (Twenty Days without War is the only one of German’s films to use color – however, the film was processed in such way as to mute its colors so as to produce a monochrome effect. I’ve seen the film and it uses film stock so weathered and ancient-looking that it seems to have been disinterred from a mass grave on the Eastern front – the movie has an extraordinary distinctively crepuscular appearance, a kind of twilight murk envelopes everything. If I had not read reviews indicating that the film was shot in color, I likely would not have thought that the film contained any color footage at all).

And, once again, German’s film was banned by Goskino. The censors felt that German’s depiction of World War Two was too pessimistic, too unheroic, and too anti-war. In addition, German remained under a cloud due to the scandal enveloping Trial on the Road. Ultimately, the film was withheld from theatrical presentation until 1981, when Konstantin Simonov’s efforts finally resulted in the movie’s clearance for screening. The pattern existing with respect to Trial on the Road was repeated – the film was very successful at the box-office, universally acclaimed, and German received another Soviet film making prize for a film that the authorities had banned for five years.

Next, German adapted one of his father’s novels, Head of Operations, for the screen. The novel is set in Astrakhan in 1937 during the Purges. Yuri German’s book is based on recollections of a family friend, Ivan Bodunov,a retired police commissar. Bodunov was the sole survivor of a police team that had battled a criminal gang, in the mid-thirties in Leningrad – all of the other members of team were shot in 1937-1938 in the Purge. (Bodunov’s friend, a translator, important in the story and film was also executed at the same time.) The movie version of this novel was named My Friend, Ivan Lapshin – Ivan Lapshin is the name of the police commissar in the movie.

German changed the film’s time-frame, setting the movie in 1935 – that is, before the Great Purge. In this way, German sought to avoid conflict with Goskino censors. Further, German even described the film as about "simple people working to build socialism" in a remote provincial city. But German was too honest to avoid foreshadowing the Stalinist terror and he suggests the comical, Chekhovian idyll is trembling on the verge of calamity. When the movie was completed in 1981, Goskino authorities summoned German to their offices. The officials explained that:

A myth exists about the 1930's. In Lapshin, you have chosen the happiest time period – 1935! And you try to dissect it. We won’t give up this period to you.

So, once again, German’s film was suppressed. Other Soviet film makers expressed horror at the movie – Elem Klimov is said to have screamed at German that he didn’t know how to set up a shot and that his mise-en-scene was indecipherable. My Friend Ivan Lapshin was not theatrically released until three years later – this was in 1984. As always, the movie was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece, enormously successful at the box office, and, again, German received many prizes for his work on the movie. My Friend Ivan Lapshin is the Vertigo or Citizen Kane of Soviet films – it has repeatedly been acclaimed as the greatest film ever made in the Soviet Union. In fact, the film is also immensely popular with the Russian public. Last year, My Friend Ivan Lapshin was voted the most beloved and popular film ever produced during the Soviet era – the movie was also German’s personal favorite.

Krushtalyov, my Car! was made during a fantastically difficult time in Russian history. The movie was produced at LenFilm between 1991 and 1998 – repeatedly, work on the movie had to be halted because devaluation or inflation of the ruble made it impossible to pay the actors and crew for their services. The Russian economy staggered and almost fell in this period, the decade of the dissolution of the old Soviet empire. Regime changes imperiled German’s funding and his French backers repeatedly withdrew their funding when it seemed that the ambitious film would never be completed. The movie was premiered in Cannes in 1998 where it was detested, most of the audience walked out of the picture. At the time, the movie was made, Russian films had no international audience – there was no mechanism for distributing a film made in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Until the last five or six years, the movie was unavailable to study. It is now regarded as among the greatest of all Russian films and has been called a "grandiose close to Soviet cinema."

In 1966, German wrote a script based on a novel, Hard to be a God, by the science fiction writers, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, the authors of the book on which Andrei Tarkovsky based Stalker. The script was ambitious and German was not able to begin work on the film until 2001. The picture was shot in the Czech republic over a period of six years – photography lasted so long that several of the older characters died during the production. Hard to be a God is a big-budget production, filmed on huge sets with armies of extras. The movie involves exploration of a planet that is 800 years behind Earth, a place trapped in a perpetual Dark Ages – "here," a voice-over says in an early scene, "there was no renaissance." Hard to be a God languished in post-production for another six years – it took 12 years all told for the film to be finished. German died of a heart attack in St. Petersburg in 2013. His son, and wife, Svetlana Karmelita, finished the movie and it was first shown in 2014. The American premiere of Hard to be a God at the New York Film Festival induced a world-wide revival of German’s films – he only made six pictures during his long career (he worked in the film industry for 53 years) and, soon, I hope it will be possible to study all of his work on DVD.

　

4. A Russian Greatcoat

When Alexei German was asked why he made his movies in black and white, he replied: "I am a realist. I want things to look real. It is almost impossible to shoot a Russian great-coat in color."

　

5. Cannes 1998

In 1998, the two most famous Russian directors had films in competition for the NIKA, the Russian equivalent of the Oscar. Nikita Mikhalkov’s Barber of Russia was nominated for a Best Feature Film award. Alexander Sokurov’s Moloch had been nominated for a Best Director award. When Mikhalkov and Sokurov saw Krushtalyov, My Car!, they silently withdrew their pictures from the competition, chastened by the daunting brilliance and ambition of German’s film.

At Cannes, more than half of the audience walked out on the movie. One critic said: "They couldn’t hear the soundtrack, but nobody had any difficulty hearing the seats snapping back up as people fled the auditorium." Stephen Holdin reviewing the film for the New York Times wrote: "(the film) is virtually impossible to decipher. It’s characters aren’t properly delineated, its politics not elucidated, its geography unclear — everything that isn’t white...is inky black." Even today, the film is daunting; a Russian critic wrote: "Krushtalyov is a film threatened neither by oblivion nor by understanding."

Although ordinarily uncompromising, the debacle at Cannes resulted in German redubbing the film, improving the audio mix on the soundtrack, and, even, adding a voice-over – the voice of the 12 year-old narrator. Since the voice-over is not consistently used, and since the boy’s point-of-view is only periodically applicable, I doubt that this revision enhanced the film’s coherence, more likely just adding another level of difficulty to the movie. If the person who is narrating the film is central to what we are seeing, then, why does most of the film show us things that the child couldn’t have seen, or known, or, indeed, even imagined?

Ultimately, Krushtalyov was awarded the Nika for best picture in 1998. This award was granted on the basis of Sokurov and Mikhalkov’s endorsement of the film. However, one anonymous critic spoke for many when wrote:


To the respected academy members I have accumulated a sum-total of one single question: How could you choose as Best Feature Film something that almost no one has seen; almost no one has understood; from which the audience walked out; and which was not even widely printed due to its utter lack of commercial viability.

　

6. Discomfort

Audiences watching German’s mature films almost uniformly report severe discomfort. The experience is disorienting and, to some people, almost physically repellent. It is worthwhile to analyze how German’s films offend their viewers. (By "mature films," I identify German’s last three pictures: My Friend Ivan Lapshin, Krushtalyov, My Car!, and Hard to be a God.)

First, audiences complain about his soundtrack. German’s last three films have extraordinarily dense and cacophonous soundtracks. We hear an intricate aural tapestry of background noises – in Krushtalyov, for instance, calliope music, traffic noise, and a lion roaring in a nearby park. Typically, it is difficult to know what sounds are primary and what are merely noise in the background – in fact, German destabilizes that hierarchy: sometimes, the background noise is obscures the dialogue in the foreground. Furthermore, German records his soundtrack with complex overlapping dialogue – everyone is talking at the same time, coughing, or hacking up phlegm (in Krushtalyov everyone seems to have an awful head or sinus cold.) As in Robert Altman’s films, we are disoriented by the chorus of competing voices – Krushtalyov is polyphonic, many voices all sounding at the same time. In some respects, viewing the film with subtitles falsifies the experience – the subtitles pick out layers of sound from the complicated mix and prioritize them for us. A Russian audience will, undoubtedly, experience Krushtalyov as more difficult to understand than an audience reading subtitles.

Similarly, German’s photography doesn’t clearly differentiate between what is foreground and background. The plethora of background detail often overwhelms what is occurring in the foreground. Our eye is confounded like our ears. We don’t know where to look. Furthermore, we can’t tell what characters are important and what characters are purely peripheral – it takes the audience fifteen minutes to figure out that Yuri Kliensky is the film’s protagonist. Initially, we think that the boy who is perceiving events in his household will provide the primary perspective on the chaos that the movie shows. But, very quickly, we see that young Alexei’s perspective is not privileged – German shows us scenes that Alexei could not have witnessed. The movie either has no consistent point-of-view or multiple, unpredictable mutating points of view.

Goskino objected to German’s films for their "superfluity of background." German responded: "I always liked making the background...Goskino even wrote about me that I present the background as if it were the real cinema. But that background is indeed the most important: it is life itself. I do indeed film a ‘cinema of background’."

In addition, German doesn’t provide narrative clues as to the relationship of the characters to one another or to the story that the film presents. Who is Fedya the Stoker who is arrested in the first few minutes of the movie? What is his relationship, if any, to Yuri Kliensky? Who are the crowds of people jammed into frame when the camera tracks through the chaotic Kliensky household? German allows for no exposition and doesn’t clarify any of the action. We have no idea where the General is taken when he is arrested or why the people in the country instinctively attack him. In German’s later films, nothing makes sense.

But, of course, this confusion, the audience’s disorientation, is intentional. German is presenting a world in which there is nothing stable and in which decisive events simply can not be understood. This is a milieu in which people suddenly and mysteriously vanish forever, a society in which you can be arrested at any time – it is a world menaced by an immensely powerful, pervasive force that can’t exactly be seen or understood. The Stalinist threat comes from everywhere and nowhere in particular. The person with the "cosmopolitan" self-inflating umbrella at our door may be a remote relative or an agent of the KGB. It is impossible to know which is true. The menacing, indescribably antic atmosphere in a film like Krushtalyov apparently reproduces to some degree the experience of people living under Stalin’s terror. People seem trapped in a mode of carnival-like celebration – because, it seems, that human life is unpredictable and, at any moment, we might be inexplicably swept away. In Bulgakov’s comic masterpiece The Master and the Margarita, Satan stalks the streets of Moscow – people attend gluttonous feasts, drink to excess, and indulge in promiscuous sex, always expecting that each moment might be their last. Characters inform on one another inadvertently, everyone is a spy, and, sometimes, people just vanish – one moment they are with us, and the next moment they are gone. German’s carnival confusion reflects a world seething with inexplicable threats.

Like Fellini, a film maker German admired beyond all others, the director casts according to appearance – as a result German’s later films are crowded with grotesque-looking people, strange physiognomies, and downright ugly actors. Hollywood movies make everyone look more attractive, desirable and fit than real life. German’s later films depict an equally unrealistic world in which most are unattractive and some positively hideous. Of course, the effect is that of a prolonged nightmare – German’s vision of Soviet life during the Purges. Russian literature flirts often with the grotesque – there are nightmare passages of grotesque comedy in Gogol and Dostoevsky. The Soviet critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, identified this kind of corporeal grotesque with the carnival and with Rabelais – the "carnival" is the festival of the flesh and it is Bakhtin’s belief that the human body, together with its effluents, is the ultimate agent of revolution, the rebellion against the merely polite and the "civilized" veneer by which oppression masks its barbarity. Depicting bodily functions is revolutionary in that establishes a stratum of existence over which the oppressor has not power: even the mightiest King and Captain of Industry defecates. And, as Montaigne reminds us, all men are, more or less equal, when sitting on a toilet. In this light, German’s relish in depicting things that are disgusting, physically repellent, and, even, nauseating accords with subversive tendencies in Soviet literary criticism and film making – although Bakhtin’s criticism was thought to be Marxist in that it imputed a revolutionary sensibility to the profoundly conservative Dostoevski and unclassifiable figures like Rabelais and Gogol, no doubt exists that his radical critique is also equally applicable to Stalinism and the Soviet Polit-Buro. The fundamental gesture in Krushtalyov is to spit – just before the film’s title is announced, the 12-year old Alexei approaches a mirror and spits on his own image. In effect, German’s film spits in the eye of its audience.

Ultimately, audiences are baffled and disconcerted by the mercurial alternation between horror and comedy fundamental to German’s final movies. Sequences in these films are extremely funny – for instance, the "cosmopolitan" umbrella that keeps opening during the various calamities befalling the visitor to Moscow. But this gag leads to an image of the man who owns the umbrella being beaten to death. The giant and towering General, Yuri Klensky, a figure who is like Rabelais’ Pantagruel, a colossus of unbridled appetite and energy is reduced to a quivering, abject shadow of himself when he is raped in the champagne truck. For a moment, it seems that we are spectators on a particularly hectic domestic comedy, too many ill-matched people living in too small of an apartment, but before we can laugh something sinister or horrible occurs. The nightmare world of Soviet totalitarianism oscillates between the ridiculous and the horrible.

An excellent account of the cinematic technique in German’s mature work is this description, although written about My Friend Ivan Lapshin, equally relevant to Krushtalyov:


Loosely episodic, the film is remarkable in its resistance to linear narrative: dialogue is often drowned out by senseless chatter or the clanging of buckets; our view of important characters is frequently blocked by figures crossing the screen. In its cinematography, (German’s films) consistently refuse to accept established priorities, as though every element of each shot must be allowed its meaning. The camera often enters a room behind characters’ backs, like a guest, or at elbow level, like a curious child. There is no sense that the scenes are choreographed or pre-arranged, but, rather, a feeling that the camera wide-eyed is capturing what it can of a bewildering world.
Tony Wood, "Time Unfrozen – the Films of Alexei German" published in New Left Review, 2001.

　

7. Who is Krushtalyov?

Ivan Krushtalyov was one of Stalin’s bodyguards. He was appointed to this position a few weeks before Stalin suffered the series of cerebral hemorrhages that caused his death. Beria had selected Krushtalyov for the position and it has been alleged that this guard may, in fact, have administered poison to Stalin. Accounts of Stalin’s death vary, but several suggest that Krushtalyov gave the order to dismiss staff, including medical doctors and nurses attending on the dictator on the night that Stalin died – thereby, it seems, depriving Stalin of access to medical treatment that might have saved his life.

In Russian, the word "car" is "machina" – this word suggests in Russian, as in English, "machinations." When Stalin died, Beria is said to have shouted in a "loud, undisguisedly triumphant voice," the words "Krushtalyov, bring my car – or bring on the machine." In the words of one critic, Beria’s command signifies that the machinery of history has progressed beyond Stalin to a new phase.

　

　

8. Historical background

In the lexicon of Stalin’s tyranny, "rootless cosmopolitan" means "Jew." Throughout, Stalin’s reign, periodic anti-Semitic purges were instituted. The so-called "Doctors’ Plot," the subject of Krushtalyov was one of these episodes.

In 1942, the Jewish Bund or Anti-Fascist League was formed to oppose Hitler’s invasion of Russia. A number of prominent Jews, including many Yiddish poets and writers, joined this organization. After World War Two, the Jewish Anti-Fascist League took measures to publicize Hitler’s genocidal assaults on the Jews. This publicity ran contrary to Stalin’s propaganda that emphasized German atrocities against the Russian people as a whole and did not single out the Nazi war against the Jews for attention. The Bund was banned in the Soviet Union after the War and a number of its members were arrested, tortured, and shot.

In 1951, members of the MGB (the Ministry for General Security) alleged that several Jewish doctors previously connected with the Jewish Anti-Fascist League had committed medical malpractice on members of the Politburo, specifically Zhdanov (Stalin’s successor-in-waiting) and Shcherbakov (the head of the Soviet Writers Union). A couple of doctors were arrested and tortured. However, the leader of the MGB, Abakumov, disbelieved the allegations and suggested that there was no basis to proceed with further investigation. Abakumov’s subordinate accused him of "covering up" the conspiracy and, indeed, went so far as to claim that Abakumov had ordered that one of the prime suspects, a doctor named Etinger had been intentionally tortured to death to keep him from identifying other conspirators. (In fact, the subordinate had botched Etinger’s interrogation and accidentally killed him.) Abakumov was arrested and shot himself. Beria, then, appointed a commission to investigate the plot. The allegations were that nine Kremliln doctors had conspired to kill Zhdanov and Shcherbakov, both of whom had died as a result of their alcoholism. Of the nine doctors arrested, six were "rootless cosmopolitans" suspected of "bourgeois nationalism" – jargon for "Jewish."

Under Beria’s ruthless leadership, the purge expanded. Another 37 doctors were arrested. Ultimately hundreds of people, almost all of them Jewish, were implicated. Beria pursued the investigations zealously – at that time, he was attempting to deflect attention away from a scandal that affected him, the so-called Mingrelian affair. Under torture, more names were named. Several nurses provided evidence about the so-called "Doctor-Killers" including one who was awarded the Lenin Star in January 1953. Stalin’s instructions to his interrogators were to "beat, beat, and beat again." Soviet news agencies whipped the public into a state of hysteria claiming that Zionist "terrorists" had subverted the medical system, intentionally misdiagnosing patients and, then, murdering them with incompetent treatment. It seems that the Politburo was considering deporting Russian Jews at this time. The Jewish community was said to have been "bought by the Americans."

Stalin fell ill in late February 1953 when the purge of so-called "doctor-saboteurs" was at its height. (This posed a number of problems for his treatment – as shown in the film, imprisoned and half-dead doctors were hauled out of jail and brought to Stalin’s bedside to consult with his treating physicians; most of these doctors were cardiology specialists.) Stalin died on March 5, 1953. With his death, the purge ended. Later, Krushchev declared that he entire affair had been a hoax – there had never been any evidence of a conspiracy among Soviet doctors, either Jewish or not.

　

9. Doubles

The Moscow Show Trials occurred between 1936 and 1938. An embarrassing episode occurred during the so-called "Trial of the 21." A man named Krestinsky was accused of supporting Trotsky and working for the German secret service. Prosecutors claimed that Krestinsky had confessed and called him to testify as to his guilt. To everyone’s surprise, Krestinsky said that he was not guilty, that he had never support Trotsky, and that he was not in the pay of the German Secrete Service. The Judge gavelled the proceedings closed and adjourned. The next day, Krestinsky appeared again and acknowledged that "poor health" had misled him during the previous session and that he had accidentally uttered the words "I am not guilty." He acknowledged that he was guilty as charged and said that he hoped that his example would serve as a warning to other conspirators against the Soviets.

After Krestinsky’s execution, Soviet secret service personnel located "doubles" – that is, people who could credibly appear as men and women arrested by the State. The purpose of these doubles was to provide testimony at "Show Trials" – the doubles were not weakened by torture and not inclined to deviate from the script that they had been given acknowledging their guilt. General Kliensky knows that he is doomed in Krushtalyov when he encounters his double, a man who looks just like him who has been recruited presumably to read his confession at the trial on accusations pending against him.

In the film, Yuri Kliensky is composite figure – he has some characteristics of Alexei German’s father and other features associated with a family friend, a military doctor who spent time in Gulag. The role of the General is played by Yuri Tsurilo, a small-town blacksmith who also appeared, from time to time, in regional theater – local shows produced in small provincial towns. (German often casts against type – in Twenty Days without War, a bitter and morose anti-war film, German had the role of the cynical journalist and central character, Lopatin, played by a famous Moscow comedian who was also the director of the Moscow circus.)

　

10. Kommunalka

Krushtalyov shows life in a Kommunalka – that is, communal apartment. By the early fifties, private property and private ownership of real estate had been effectively abolished. Even professional people and elites were forced to live in crowded communal apartments. This living arrangement is shown in the chaotic domestic scenes in Krushtalyov. Although the General is an important man, he, nonetheless, has to live with a crowd of other people, some of them apparently informants for the KGB. One of the ways that Stalin’s secret police kept track of subversives and potential threats to the regime was by planting spies in the Kommunalka – that is, the communal apartments where urban elites lived.

　

11. Rape

German has said: "Krushtalyov is a metaphor for the terrible psychological trauma of national anal rape by the state, by tsars, and by the Bolsheviks."

　

12. Favorite films

What kind of cinema did Alexei German admire? In an interview, German said that, at his dacha, he and his wife and son endlessly watched and re-watched the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Federico Fellini. German said that Federico Fellini was his favorite director and that the movies that he most admired by Fellini were Roma and Amarcord.

12.

What Happens in Krushtalyov, My Car!

The action of Krushtalyov, My Car! occurs between about 10:00 pm on the night of February 28, 1953 to mid-morning March 2, 1953 – that is, a period of three days. Although official histories give Stalin’s death as March 5, 1953, some sources say March 2 – and, of course, German firmly believed, on the basis of his research, that Stalin died at his dacha on March 2. A coda in Siberia takes place ten years later – that is in 1963.

　


Part One
A voice-over announces that it is February 1953. (The voice is the adult Alexei recalling events from the 1953).

Fedya, the Condom, a stoker, gets arrested, possibly because he discovers a car full of secret police watching over the neighborhood where Yuri Kliensky, the famous general and military surgeon, lives. He is put in some kind of a small hut and simply abandoned there. (At the end of the film, we learn that he has been sent to Siberia and imprisoned there for ten years.)

A man with a beret happens on the place where Fedya is confined. With his umbrella, he pushes a dropped cigarette under Fedya’s door.

The 12 year old Alexei is messing with fire and causes a small explosion. He spits on a mirror. The title of the film is announced.

The man with the beret is knocked down by a vehicle on the snowy street. He gets a bloody nose. A big, aggressive woman, possibly his wife, intervenes. The man’s umbrella inflates – a sign that he is from abroad. (Umbrellas of that kind didn’t exist in Moscow in 1953).

At the Kommunalka, chaos reigns. Grandma wants to be sent to a poor-house. There is discussion about being Jewish. Cousins to the family are Jews, but family members regard themselves as Russian. A maid, or servant, announces to the lady of the house that something is an affront to "female dignity," earning a slap from her mistress. (She may be referring to Yuri Kliensky’s compulsive philandering.)

Alexei sits under the dining room table as the family bickers and eats, playing with a match. His father, Yuri does a headstand with two hanging gymnastic rings.

An insert shows black cars moving through the night, probably the black limousines of KGB officers.

In a snowy schoolyard, probably the next morning, children are fighting. They talk about the Jews and the Russians. Alexei gets beat up and, when his father comes along, slapped by Yuri as well, probably for losing the fight. (We will return to this school yard in the final part of the film where the kids continue, like the adults, to bully and beat one another).

At the hospital, there is a crisis. Someone has locked himself in the enema room. An axe is delivered to Yuri and he breaks down the door. (Yuri also encounters one of his girlfriends, a comically tiny, if belligerent, woman.) The morgue attendant seems to be called "Death." In the enema room, he sees his double. This leads him to conclude that he will likely be arrested by the KGB, tortured, and his double used to appear in public and confess to his crimes. However, Yuri doesn’t give any sign that he is afraid.

It is night once more – the camera pans through a public garden with a small zoo. From time to time, people say that they can hear the lion roaring – a sign, perhaps, for Stalin’s commands that govern everyone’s life.

The man with the beret is in a crowded place that looks like a restaurant. He is offered a ram but rejects the animal. There is discussion about ethnic identity in the Soviet Union. The man wearing the beret departs the restaurant in a bus or some kind of public conveyance. The bus crashes into the street car. Sonya, the beret-man’s wife apparently, appears and berates him – she is the large aggressive woman that we earlier saw at the first accident. Sonya takes the beret-man on a tour of a bathhouse and says that she is the "doctor of the bathhouse".

After leaving the bath-house, the man with the beret goes to Yuri Kliensky’s apartment. He claims to be an emissary from a Swedish relative of Kliensky. Yuri throws him out of the apartment.

Alexei is tormented by his sadistic sisters.

Out on the street, the man with the beret gets into a fight, possibly with KGB men, who seem to kill him. He is dragged away. This time his umbrella fails to inflate.

On the snowy street, a street car runs parallel to a vehicle taking Yuri Kliensky to a party of the doctors and other staff at his hospital. He sees a man in a street car balancing a glass of vodka on his head. A woman beckons to Yuri from a passing car.

Kliensky, who will be referred to as "the General," seems to know that he will be arrested. He goes "on the lam". We see him scaling a wall, sitting on its top, and, then, letting himself fall backward into the snow on the other side. (Earlier we saw someone fleeing over this wall with exactly the same gesture – the image seems to signify both desperation as well as a sense of being freed: the worst has now happened.)

The General throws the ring of one of his girlfriend’s into the air, saying that if finds it again, everything will be okay. We aren’t shown whether he finds the ring – presumably he does not.

Someone is let out of a shed in which he has been locked. Is the stoker, Fedya, the condom?

A battered bus pulls up and a comically large number of Soviet apparatchiks come forth, scurrying through the snowy streets and pouring into the General’s house. These are the secret police searching for the General.

The General goes to the flat of an ex-girlfriend, Varvara. Varvara has become fat but she still loves the General. "I’m an old maid and I’ve got sinusitis," Varvara tells the General. He drinks cognac or vodka and spits it into flame, causing a fireball. (The General like his son Alexei seems to enjoy causing small fires and explosions.) A cat tries to steal a big carp that is store in Varvara’s bathtub and she punishes the cat by half-drowning it. Then, Varvara implores the General to have sex with her so that she can bear his child. The General can’t manage the act.

Back the General’s apartment, all is chaos. The place has been searched and half-looted. Alexei is told by secret policeman to call a certain number to inform on his father if, and when, the General returns. Certain rooms in the house are officially sealed – including a room containing a family pet. One of the women contemptuously breaks the seal. The people in the house fight with one another over the government seal.



This is the end of the Part One of the Film

Part Two

The furrier is told that the stoker has been arrested.

Fleets of sinister-looking black sedans roll through the Moscow streets. The Voronek cars show that the Politburo is on the move – something is afoot. There are road-blocks.

The General has hitched a ride in an open truck with some agricultural produce and several roosters. The truck stops in a little village. A mob of boys attacks the general with sticks – they seem to sense that he is on the run. The secret police arrive and apprehend the General. In the fight, the General has lost a boot, and has one foot bare, but it is restored to him.

The General is locked in the back of champagne truck and hauled away.

Back in Moscow, the General’s family has moved into a ramshackle hovel of an apartment in which someone has stolen the toilet seats and door knobs. Alexei’s mother acts erratically and has, perhaps, gone insane.

At a crossroads, the champagne truck stops and a bunch of convicts from another lorry and put in the back with the General. The convicts rape the General and sodomize him with some sort of metal bar. Then, the champagne truck stops in dense fog. The guards say that the fearsome "boss" is coming. Another vehicle arrives full of secret police. The General’s double is also among these people. The Boss beats one of the convicts to death with metal pole used to sodomize the General. The General tries so drown himself in a hole in the ice and, then, cools his buttocks and rectum in a piel of snow. When the General is told to go with the Boss, there is a fight over shoes, the General clinging to a shoe that turns out to be "a kid’s shoe."

The caravan continues. They stop at an inn where there is a picture of Pushkin on the wall and the "doctor’s plot" against Stalin is mentioned. The General is cleaned-up and told that he can be a general again – he has somehow been briefly rehabilitated. Looking out a window, the General sees an ill-favored bird, a sinister omen.

The General watches a train crossing a river and bound for Astrakhan. There is another road block and the General is transferred into another one of the black Sedans. A bird of ill omen is seen in a tree.

The General has been brought to Stalin’s deathbed at the dictator’s dacha. Beria and Krushchev are present. Stalin is lying in his own excrement. A nurse is beaten for allowing this to happen. The General rubs Stalin’s belly and succeeds in eliciting a fart from the dying man. Stalin dies at 3:53 pm. Throughout these scenes, the General is dowsed in some kind of cologne or perfume.

The General is back in Moscow. Alexei, his son prays because he feels he must betray his father by placing a phone call to inform on him. The General collapses with nervous exhaustion. A boy in the household sings a Jewish song. Then, Alexei tells us in a voice-over that he never saw the General again.

A motorcycle with side-car vanishes in the distance of Moscow’s streets. Apparently, the motorcycle crashes. The mise-en-scene has led us to believe that the General is on the motorcycle but he is not. Alexei’s narrative says that his father’s name doesn’t appear on the list of those executed.

Ten years pass.

Prisoners are released from a camp to return to Moscow. A band plays

Fedya, the Stoker, is one of the prisoners to be released. He has spent his time learning English in the prison. But he hasn’t been taught to curse in English. Another prisoner says if you can’t curse in a language that language is useless to you.

The prisoners board a train. A whore is turning tricks in berth next to where the General is sleeping.

The General gets up. There is a contretemps with Fedya. Fedya is beat up. He cries out: "What did I do? All my life they beat me." In frustration, he slaps his own face.

On an open rail car, the General wagers that he can hold a glass of vodka on his bald head despite the shocks of the road. He balances the glass on his head. The car departs into the distance of the Siberian wilderness.

Someone gurgles phlegm and cries out "Fuckall!"

　

13. German: A final word

Do not consider my cinema gloomy, frightening, anti-Russian...(Krushtalyov) is simply a humorous film. Sometime in the future it will indeed be humorous, although very frightening. But it is cinema made with love. Once such a thing was called the Russia- Troika. We attempted to approach the genius fo Gogol.

　

　


QUIZ


The ‘little sparrow’ as she was called by her father, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva died at 85 in 2011 in the town where she had lived for many years: ________________________. To the people in that town, she was known as Lana Peters.

Stalin’s granddaughter, Chrese Evans, runs a boutique in _____________________ and is a practicing _______________.