Sergei Eisenstein

Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible is presented as a striking account of Stalinist power: beneath its official order lies a carnivalesque world where authority is inverted and political violence becomes a source of collective enjoyment. The book locates Eisenstein’s achievement in making that underside visible, and sets his film against the cheerful public face of Stalinist cinema.

Ivan the Terrible and the Carnival of Power

In the second part of Ivan the Terrible, the film’s only color reel—the penultimate reel—takes place in a hall where an orgy turns ordinary relations of power upside down. Ivan gives the imperial insignia to Vladimir, the imbecile he proclaims Tsar, then humbly prostrates himself before him and kisses his hand. The reversal is at once theatrical and politically charged: the ruler stages his own submission, making the hierarchy appear both unstable and deliberately performed.

The hall sequence begins with the Oprichniki, Ivan’s private army, performing a chorus and dance in an avowedly unrealistic mixture of Hollywood spectacle and Japanese theater. Their song turns from the image of boyars passing golden goblets at a lavish meal to a gleefully anticipated command to strike with axes. The passage joins musical pleasure to political liquidation: violence is not concealed behind the celebration but made part of its entertainment. The film was shot in 1944, a circumstance the book treats as sharpening the scene’s carnivalesque relation to Stalinist purges.

From Revolutionary Violence to the Obscene Law

The book reads Eisenstein’s scene as more than a depiction of brutality. Its central historical distinction is between the destructive energy of a Leninist liberating outburst and the Stalinist form of violence, which appears as the obscene underside of the Law. By staging political power as a celebration that can turn submission into domination and killing into song, Eisenstein makes that shift perceptible rather than presenting violence as a simple instrument of rule.

A further nocturnal feast, described in the scenario for a third part of Ivan that was never filmed, would have made the sacrilegious dimension explicit: Ivan and the Oprichniki drink in black monastic robes worn over their ordinary clothes, in a scene framed as a black Mass. Because the sequence survives only as a scenario, it belongs to the unrealized extension of the film, not to its completed screen action. The book nevertheless uses it to show how far Eisenstein’s conception of the Stalinist world reached into the profane and ritualized underside of political authority.

The Public Face of Stalinist Cinema

The discussion contrasts Eisenstein’s exposure of this underside with the Stalinist genre it identifies as cinema’s exemplary public face: the kolkhoz musical, popular from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. Liubov Orlova was its leading star. Films such as The Merry Children, also known as The Shepherd Kostja, Volga, Volga, and The Cossacks of the Kuban District present a fundamentally happy social world without traitors. Their disruptive figures are opportunists, lazy people, or frivolous seducers who are eventually reeducated and welcomed back into society; even pigs, cows, and chickens dance alongside people.

That idealized harmony also links Soviet cinema to Hollywood in both directions. The Soviet musical system sought a local counterpart to Hollywood production, while Hollywood’s 1942 film The North Star offered its own pro-Stalinist version of the kolkhoz musical, with a screenplay by Lillian Hellman, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and music by Aaron Copland. This contrast clarifies Eisenstein’s place in the account: his Ivan the Terrible does not reproduce the genre’s reassuring social surface, but reveals the political violence that such a surface could leave out.