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

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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”.

This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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