Oldal 300 [300]
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Oleg Riabov
society woman is a slave” (Grachiov 1950: 11). This displayed itself in attitudes
towards woman as a sexual object, which led to the devaluation of her humanity,
reflected particularly in her working conditions: her boss was in command not only
of her working time, but also of her body.
Let us examine how cinema elaborated on this tenet. For instance, The Russian
Question begins with a scene in which the journalists Parker and Hardy are discuss¬
ing Jessie’s return to the post of MacPherson’s secretary. Commenting on Parker’s
characterisation of MacPherson as a “dirty old man... he is sixty-two years old,
and so tactless”, Hardy says: “If I had his money I'd be tactless too”. In response
to Jessie’s words that her relationship with her the boss is strictly business, Gould
makes a cynical comment: “And is it strictly business? Then the boss has grown old
indeed”. As a Soviet film stressed, “it’s impossible to be employed by MacPherson
and not be his girlfriend” (Abramov 1948: 16).
“Why do Russians have common wives?”, a barber in New York asks Harry
Smith, “I can understand anything. But how people live in a country where they
cant have their own bicycle or a wife—this I cannot understand”. Apart from
ridiculing the ignorance of American philistines, who blindly believed the myths
of anti-Soviet propaganda, this scene from The Russian Question also aimed to
demonstrate that women in capitalist societies were perceived as a commodity.
As, in 1946, the Secretary of the Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov said, “In
America one can buy everything. One can buy women, the title of mayor, honour,
and respect” (Zhdanov 2005: 725).
This tendency of American society to turn women into commodities showed
itself in prostitution, which had been represented as an inherent vice of Western so¬
ciety since the beginning of Soviet gender discourse, with significant support from
cinema (Kenez 2008: 105). The prostitute Flossie Bate in The Silver Dust exposed
the amorality of ‘respectable Americans’, their dissoluteness and dissimulation, dis¬
closing that even a local pastor had harassed her.
American Women as Enemies
While picturing American women as victims of the capitalist system, the propa¬
ganda simultaneously portrayed some of them as a component of the enemy world
that possessed all its vices. This was important in order to convince the audience
that the vices of American femininity (heartlessness, mercenary spirit, narrow¬
mindedness, profligacy, racist and anti-communist prejudices) were not accidental:
they were engendered by the very essence of bourgeois society.
The capitalist system deprived women of qualities that should be inalienable
to female nature, including compassion. The audience of Meeting on the Elbe was
able to judge the heartlessness of women of the enemy through a scene where white
American soldiers beat up a black compatriot: whereas the German women’s faces
express horror and compassion, the American women watched proceedings with
an almost sport-like passion. Doris Steal in The Silver Dust had no compassion for