This struggle for Ukraine’s wheat ended in mass murder
On black ground: Scene from “Earth”
Quelle: imago/United Archives International
Wheat and the land on which it grows is once again being fought over in Ukraine. Such a struggle took place once before during and after the revolution. The silent film classic “Earth” told about it in 1930. He is silent about the mass murder that went with it.
Dhe beginning of this classic silent film seems like one of those abstract film images that avant-garde cinematographers experimented with in the 1920s: black-and-white undulating movements fill almost the entire screen. But the sea, whose waves director Oleksandr Dovschenko shows in “Earth”, is a sea of wheat that grows from the famous black earth.
When sunflowers, the national flowers of Ukraine, and men and women with slightly folkloric clothing enter the picture, it becomes clear that a story is being told from the country that, in 1930, when the film was made, was considered the breadbasket of the Soviet Union and on its Wheat shipments today are awaiting countries around the world with increasing desperation.
This is not the first time there has been a fight over Ukrainian wheat. After the revolution, civil war raged in Ukraine, after which the expropriation of economically successful peasants, who were demonized as “kulaks”, began.
Dovschenko’s film tells about this time, the hero of which is a young communist who brings the first tractor into the village and is shot by the class enemy. The film is considered by cinema historians to be a seminal masterpiece. Time and again it is placed at the top of polls of critics and directors for the best films of all time.
Right at the beginning, when a dying man asks for an apple, enjoys it and then says “Now I’m dying”, is considered the quintessence of Dowschenko’s almost natural-magical evocation of country life. But the film has a somber background, like the works of Leni Riefenstahl: the demonization of the kulaks, who were portrayed as exploiters, was the preparation for thousands of murders and for the Holodomor, the hunger holocaust of millions of Ukrainians.
Dovzhenko himself had a checkered history: he fought with the peasant national revolutionary Petlyura before joining the Bolsheviks. In the USSR he represented a left-wing Ukrainian nationalism, which he also represented in autobiographical books such as the autobiographical novel The Enchanted River.
Again and again he was censored. His film Ivan was accused of pantheism and fascism. Sometimes he was able to ask Stalin directly for help, sometimes the dictator made direct (and life-threatening) criticism of Dovzhenko’s works, for example the epic Burning Ukraine, which was written directly during the war. Stalin once invited Dovzhenko to a reading in the Kremlin to read the screenplay for his film Aerograd to the four most powerful men in the country (Molotov, Kirov and Voroshilov were also present). It has been approved. But Stalin also forced Dovzhenko to move to Moscow from his beloved Odessa. This dangerously vacillating relationship with Stalin is similar to that of composer Dmitri Shostakovich and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov.
The criticism of “Earth” was harmless. There, the censors didn’t like some of the nude scenes, and even the part where the farmers cool down the overheated radiator of the tractor by peeing in it wasn’t heroic and hygienic enough.
However, Dovschenko often received Stalin awards for his films that were censored or completely re-edited according to party directives. In the Soviet Union, he was considered – along with Pudovkin and Eisenstein (who also had problems with Stalin) – as the founder of domestic socialist cinema art.
Today, the National Film Institute of Ukraine in Kyiv is named after Dovschenko. His films and his life are windows on the history of a country that we still know too little about in this country.