A Glasnost Litmus Test for Filming

So much has changed in the Soviet Union since Mikhail S. Gorbachev electrified his country’s creative and intellectual elite three years ago with his policy of glasnost .

At first the shift was startling: Characteristic Soviet defensiveness and secrecy were abandoned as article after article in newspapers and magazines exposed the shortcomings of Soviet society--past and present. Formerly taboo authors were told their books could be taken out of drawers and the long-suppressed works became best sellers. Newspaper circulation soared. Audiences flocked to such plays as the anti-Stalinist “Speak Out” by Alexander Buravsky.

In the midst of this ferment, Gorbachev singled out the movie world for special approval.

He attended the 1986 meeting where director Elem Klimov, an outcast under Leonid I. Brezhnev’s stultifying regime, took leadership of the Union of Film Makers. And lest anyone miss the importance, Gorbachev told members of the more conservative writers union that they should emulate the movie people. Films “on the shelf” were exhumed and released. Klimov and other Soviet film artists traveled the world, bearing the heady message that things were changing for the better--even inviting co-productions with Western film makers. The mood in cinema circles was ebullient.

With all the hurrahs about the new openness, less attention was focused on the political rational behind encouraging the country’s creative elite. The hope--expressed at the Politburo level--was that the excitement of artists and intellectuals would be contagious, that it would translate into the popular support needed to make perestroika work, that enthusiasm would break through the apathy and cynicism afflicting masses of rank-and-file Soviets.

That has not happened.

In a remarkable January speech to intellectuals, the media and party leaders, Gorbachev himself was forced to acknowledge that the country is increasingly dissatisfied with consumer and housing shortages; many are blaming his policies of perestroika for those shortages .

Now Gorbachev and others are trying to rein in glasnost in ways to make the program serve political aims rather than serve as a Soviet bill of rights.

Nowhere is the contrast more evident than among the film makers.

New economic laws have tied the hands of those who had hoped to create independent studios and production units modeled on the Hollywood system. Some film makers fear that a pending reorganization of the cinematographers’ union may dilute its influence.

And the overall enthusiasm for social criticism in cinema has diminished to the point where some Soviet movie industry insiders fear that films like “Little Vera,” a recently released feature that unflatteringly depicts Soviet city life, will soon be unwelcome. In the film, the working class heroine is forced to lie to save her alcoholic truck-driver father after he stabbed her student boyfriend. Her mother bluntly explains that the father supports the family by thievery and they will not have enough to live on if he goes to prison.

To be sure, much anxiety in the film industry can be traced to a general shift in public focus that has little to do with movies: The delicious thrill of the formerly forbidden has worn thin as sour dissatisfaction with the quality of life after three years of perestroika has grown. Gorbachev also declared that nationalist aspirations from the Balkans to the Baltics aired under the flag of glasnost might force changes in the policy “if this were to succeed in spreading.”

In the speech, Gorbachev insisted that the media shift from criticism of Soviet society’s failings to cheerleading for his economic program. In place of his former encouragement of criticism, he chastised some members of the media for using the new atmosphere to settle personal scores.

Echoing themes that Soviet conservatives have been sounding with increasing frequency--and oddly echoing U.S. conservatives who blast “liberal media”--the Soviet leader went on to say:

“Unfortunately in our mass media, one can observe a desire to disseminate hasty and unfounded conclusions and opinions, and one or two people have started to gamble on sensationalism. And I must say frankly that a lot of lies have appeared. There have been very many instances of people being undeservedly humiliated and insulted. And most important, they do not all always have the chance to defend their name.”

Those remarks were made, pointedly, in a passage of the speech dealing with a law being drafted to regulate glasnost in the media. Gorbachev said the law would deal with “responsibility for the well-foundedness of our speeches and writings.”

In short, the media attacks had served their purpose of discrediting the Brezhnevites. Continuing to point out deficiencies would foster distrust in the leadership’s ability to carry out its program.

A few days after the speech, divisions within the cultural elite surfaced dramatically when a letter in Pravda attacked as “scum” one of the leading supporters of Gorbachev’s program, the magazine Ogonyok, and claimed the weekly’s articles are often intended to slander and discredit.

An influential film maker, Sergei Bondarchuk, was one of letter’s seven signers. Bondarchuk, the conservative director of “War and Peace,” was humiliated in 1986 when he failed to be elected as a delegate to the film makers’ union meeting where the old guard was overthrown.

Adding to this tempering of enthusiasm for glasnost , a new economic law that requires enterprises to generate profits is producing fear of unemployment throughout the economy, while a companion decree bars the movie industry and other media from achieving independence.

Under the old system of quotas, Soviet film studios were required to produce large numbers of pictures to fulfill the state plan. But if studios only produce films they hope will be money-making, insiders suspect that layoffs will follow.

As a hedge against unemployment, a number in the film industry have been sinking life-savings into film cooperatives to produce films for industry, public service films--even features.

Any dream that this would lead to Hollywood on the Moskva was rudely interrupted on Dec. 29, when the Council of Ministers decreed that independent film cooperatives, as well as unofficial printing organizations, would be prohibited.

Whatever the economic impact on movie workers, the unmistakable political fallout is that film makers, once the darlings of glasnost , had fallen from grace. The decree also dispels any hopes that publishing houses, even newspapers, might function independently. The mass media will remain state media.

The third point about the state of the movie industry comes back to the influence of the Union of Film Makers, which has a wide-ranging but select membership of directors, screenwriters, performers, cameramen, set designers, composers, technical staff, editors and critics.

Yuri Neyman, a critically acclaimed emigre cameraman whose United States credits include “Liquid Sky” and “DOA,” was in Moscow during late December, filming a PBS documentary on the exiled poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky.

Top Soviet film officials explained to Neyman that a pending reorganization is not intended to dilute the union’s power, but to streamline a setup that has become too cumbersome; the union is to remain as an “umbrella” organization. But if the practical effect of the move is the splintering of the organization, the creative end of the industry could lose its powerful voice.

Despite these concerns, no one is suggesting that the situation is as bad as it was under Brezhnev. Indeed, in his speech, Gorbachev insisted glasnost would continue.

Thanks to a litmus test of sorts from the film industry--the documentary “Solovetski Power”--it will soon be possible to gauge Gorbachev’s intent.

In the film, six survivors of the concentration camps on the Solovetski Islands just south of the Arctic Circle tell their harrowing stories--and a former camp official attempts to justify his actions. At the USA Film Festival in Park City, Utah, a screening of the film on Jan. 27 left many in the audience in tears.

In the Soviet Union, the documentary--the first to present the camps with such candor--has so far been shown only to selected audiences. The film’s director, Marina Goldovskaya, who attended the festival, said high-level political authorities are weighing just how broad an audience they want for it.