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298 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 discussing 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 society 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, disclosing that even a local pastor had harassed her. American Women as Enemies While picturing American women as victims of the capitalist system, the propaganda 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, narrowmindedness, 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
