Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Russian and East European Studies
Reader 1
Larissa Rudova
Reader 2
Andrew Aisenberg
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
The Stalinist Musical Comedies of the 1930s answered the call for a “cinema for the
millions”, seeking to offer an accessible and entertaining vision of a utopian Socialist society. They are also markedly different from other official culture of the time as they feature exclusively women heroines. This paper embarks on a closer examination of two films Volga-Volga (1938) and Circus (1936), directed by Grigori Aleksandrov, who pioneered the genre. I will discuss how, within the larger ideological tensions between the Bolsheviks’ idea of women’s emancipation against the push towards nuclear domesticity in the 1930s, the heroines’ changing gender presentation throughout the film purports to reconcile the heroines’ own professional life with the personal and romantic. This supposedly liberatory gender transmigration is repeatedly undermined by Aleksandrov in the service of comedy and spectacle. In addition, these films all adapt the Socialist Realist proto-plot to their feminine protagonists, giving them a larger symbolic role of mother and educator in the “Great Soviet Family”.
Recommended Citation
Woodworth, Marissa, "Costuming the Collective: Constructing Gender and National Identity in Stalinist Musical Comedies" (2025). Scripps Senior Theses. 2685.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2685
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.