Authors

Susan Ikonen¹;  ¹ University of Helsinki, Finland

Discussion

Fridrikh Ermler (1898-1967), the director of Stalin era political and propagandistic films, surprised Soviet audiences with his 1955 melodrama Unfinished Story (Neokonchennaia povest’). The Leningrad-based film recounts a story of Elizaveta Maksimovna, a district doctor who supports her forward-looking patient against her conservative and stagnated boss, and a love triangle ensues. The film has been analysed in the contexts of the early thaw, the interim period between Stalinism and yet-unknown future, and of Soviet women’s emancipation. Without contesting either of these paradigmatic viewpoints, this paper adds a new context for analysis, one stemming from political history of late Stalinism: the Leningrad affair and especially the so-called Doctors’ Plot.
The paper suggests that the film served as a rehabilitation of Jewish (and Ukrainian) doctors and of the city of Leningrad in the wake of the most notorious late Stalinist political campaigns: the Leningrad Affair (1949-1952), which saw several hundred local party leaders accused and either executed or deported, and the so-called Doctors’ Plot, through which Stalin planned a new wave of terror.
In January 1953, Pravda reported a conspiracy of Jewish doctors, claiming they were plotting to poison high-ranking political leaders (cf. the 1952 Slansky trials in Czechoslovakia). With its outright antisemitism, the Doctors Plot was a direct continuation of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign that had reigned since 1949. This plot involved the worry of Lidiia Timashuk (a Ukrainian doctor) from 1948, who claimed that Zhdanov had been mistreated before his untimely death. These old accusations were used when Pravda wrote about killer-doctors (vrach-vrediteli), and only Stalin’s death prevented a full-scale antisemitic campaign from taking place. In April 1953 Pravda declared the Plot a fabrication, and Timashuk lost her recent Order of Lenin decoration (she got another decoration in 1954).
The paper suggests that this conglomeration of political affairs might explain why the master of Soviet political film embarked on such a melodrama. Ermler’s Unfinished Story came out two years after the end of the Doctors Plot. Its heroine is a genuinely respected, sweet and sympathetic doctor, whom everyone knows and trusts – an antithesis of a treacherous poisoner and a rootless cosmopolitan Jew. Yet, the role of Elizaveta Maksimovna was played by actress Elina Avraamovna Bystritskaia, Ukrainian Jew.
The paper analyses Ermler’s film as an attempt to normalize Soviet society after the terrorizing affairs of late Stalinism. Leningrad was rehabilitated as a cultured city, and Jewish doctors were to be seen as constituent members of their respective communities. If this really was the intent, Ermler probably achieved this end. The film was a success, almost 30 million Soviet viewers saw it, and Elina Bystritskaia was awarded with the title of the best Soviet actress in 1955.