The Stalinist musical

The Stalinist musical was a popular Soviet film genre that offered an idyllic public image of collective life: society appeared fundamentally happy, misbehavior could be corrected, and even animals joined people in celebration. In Slavoj Žižek’s account, that harmonious screen world is inseparable from the genre’s historical setting. Set beside the grotesque political spectacle of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, it forms the cheerful public face of a culture whose other cinematic register exposed the obscene underside of Stalinist power.

Genre and Screened Social Harmony

The genre flourished from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. Žižek distinguishes it from the heroic wartime, historical, and revolutionary epics that might seem the obvious candidates for a defining Stalinist cinema. Instead, he calls the musical the genre par excellence of the period, especially the so-called kolkhoz musicals. Liubov Orlova, described as their greatest star, occupied a place comparable to Ginger Rogers in Hollywood.

The representative films named are The Merry Children, also known as The Shepherd Kostja; Volga, Volga, identified as Stalin’s favorite film; and The Cossacks of the Kuban District, which marked the genre’s swan song. Their social world has no traitors. The characters who cause trouble are instead opportunists, lazy figures, or frivolous seducers, and the endings restore them to society through reeducation and willing reintegration. The conflict is therefore contained: disorder does not disclose an irreconcilable opposition but becomes a temporary deviation that the community can absorb.

That resolution shapes the films’ picture of ordinary life. They represent it as fundamentally happy, with the social whole able to reclaim even those who have behaved badly. The images extend this harmony across the boundary between human and animal life: pigs, cows, and chickens dance alongside people. The effect is not merely a pleasant setting but a vision of collective order in which every kind of creature appears to find its place. That consoling picture becomes more pointed when contrasted with Eisenstein’s staging of power and political violence.

Eisenstein’s Counter-image of Power

In Ivan the Terrible, Eisenstein depicts what Žižek calls the libidinal economy of the Stalinist Thermidor. The second part of the film reserves its only color reel for a hall in which a carnivalesque orgy takes place. There, ordinary relations of authority are turned upside down: Ivan makes the idiot Vladimir a new Tsar, gives him the imperial insignia, then prostrates himself before him and kisses his hand. The ruler’s performance of submission makes the reversal visible, while the scene’s setting places political power inside an unreal and deliberately theatrical spectacle.

The hall scene is led by the Oprichniki, Ivan’s private army, in a chorus and dance staged as an unusual blend of Hollywood and Japanese theater. Its musical number joins pleasurable entertainment to the imagined destruction of the ruler’s enemies. A wealthy meal is described before the chorus presses for what comes next and a solo Oprichnik supplies the answer: the song turns expectation into a celebration of political liquidation. The point is not that the scene resembles the harmonious social world of the kolkhoz musicals. It is that musical pleasure can also provide a vehicle for the obscenity concealed beneath the law and its public authority.

The contrast gives the genre its wider significance in Žižek’s argument. The musicals present a reassuring public world in which social problems end in reintegration; Eisenstein’s film makes another register of Stalinist culture visible, where political violence acquires a disturbing theatrical and pleasurable form. Žižek places this difference in a historical shift: destructive energy that had been associated with a liberating Leninist outburst has become, in the Stalinist order, the obscene underside of the law. The musicals do not depict that underside in the scenes described, but their picture of unbroken happiness acquires meaning beside Eisenstein’s counter-image.

The Unfilmed Continuation

Eisenstein’s account of the carnivalesque did not stop with the second part of Ivan the Terrible. A similar nocturnal orgy appears in the scenario for the film’s third part, which was not shot. In this planned scene, Ivan and the Oprichniki hold a drinking feast staged as a black Mass, wearing black monastic robes over their ordinary clothing. The sacrilegious framing would have made the underside of political power explicit. Because the third part survives in scenario rather than as a filmed sequence, it is evidence of a proposed continuation, not a scene audiences saw in the completed film.

Exchange with Hollywood

The relationship between the Soviet musicals and Hollywood runs in both directions in Žižek’s account. Soviet filmmakers sought to build a Soviet version of the Hollywood production system, but influence also traveled from Soviet cinema to Hollywood. He points to the familiar image of King Kong atop the Empire State Building as an echo of a constructivist project for the Palace of Soviets, crowned by a gigantic statue of Lenin.

A more direct exchange came in 1942, when Hollywood produced its own version of the kolkhoz musical: The North Star. The film was one of three explicitly pro-Stalinist movies made as wartime propaganda. Its creative credits joined Lillian Hellman as screenwriter, Ira Gershwin as lyricist, and Aaron Copland as composer. Žižek argues that its image of kolkhoz life was no less idealized than its Soviet model. The example complicates any simple division between Soviet propaganda and Hollywood entertainment: the forms and images circulated across that divide, even as they served wartime purposes.

An Earlier Musical Show-Trial

Žižek sets the musical staging of political judgment beside an earlier example from Disney’s 1935 cartoon Pluto’s Judgment Day. After falling asleep near a fire, Pluto dreams that cats put him on trial, label him a public enemy, and sentence him to be burned. He awakens as the imagined fire is connected to the real danger of the nearby fire reaching his tail. The cartoon’s trial unfolds as a musical number, with ironic references to popular songs, including a number from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.

The comparison is chronological as well as formal: 1935, the year of the cartoon, was also the first major year of the Moscow Trials, while the United States was conducting a public campaign against gangster public enemies through the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Žižek does not treat the cartoon as a Soviet film or as part of the kolkhoz genre. Rather, it supplies an earlier parallel for the conjunction of musical entertainment and political show-trial. Read alongside Eisenstein and the Stalinist musical, it shows how a light, popular form can stage judgment and punishment while making that political structure part of a performance.