5th Congress of the USSR Union of Cinematographers

Background

After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, glasnost was in the air, but the film industry remained under party censorship and the nomenklatura system of the Cinematographers' Union. The chain reaction began on 8 April 1986 at a meeting of the Moscow critics' section. There the party curator read a recommended delegate list exactly matching the quota, and the film scholar Viktor Bozhovich proposed adding candidates to it. Secret-ballot elections followed across the professional sections, and much of the old guard, including Sergei Bondarchuk, Stanislav Rostotsky and Union head Lev Kulidzhanov, failed to be elected as delegates. The secret ballot also kept four members of the official nomenklatura off the delegate list.

The Congress

The congress opened with the traditional report by First Secretary Lev Kulidzhanov but sharply changed its usual course. Debate was frank and critical: the union's 'unsatisfactory work' was acknowledged and the administrative-command method of film production was condemned. Rolan Bykov, Vladimir Menshov, Andrei Plakhov and others excoriated censorship, while the film director Nikita Mikhalkov called the failure at the elections of Sergei Bondarchuk 'childishness.' All delegates were shown the banned film Repentance by Tengiz Abuladze, and it was declared that 'problem' cinema had replaced entertainment cinema.

Aftermath

The vote lasted almost the whole night. When the new board list proposed by the party group was opened, virtually no one from the old membership was elected; the counting commission tried to hide the result, and information reached the CPSU Central Committee. Instead of the failed 'Plan A,' the Center launched a 'Plan B,' betting on Elem Klimov, which Plakhov calls a mistake. Klimov was elected First Secretary of the board and went on to bring Repentance, an allegorical indictment of Stalin-era terror, to the public.

The congress dealt a powerful blow to censorship and set an example of genuinely democratic elections, on which scenario changes later took place in other creative unions of the USSR. By Plakhov's account, over about two years after the congress roughly 250 films, including documentary, television and animation, were taken off the shelf, which effectively meant the end of Soviet censorship; he attributes this above all to the congress, through a commission on creative conflicts he headed.

Assessments and Disputes

The congress is regarded as a decisive turning point in Soviet cultural history, and is documented as later receiving the name 'revolutionary.' Politburo member Vitaly Vorotnikov, a guest, called what happened a 'calamity,' writing that representatives of the 'democratic intelligentsia' sharply spoke out against the ideology and practice of socialism and the CPSU's leading role. That retrospective also framed the congress as a 'subversion of national security' that 'repressed great directors,' though in fact the officials concerned lost only their posts. Accounts also differ on Alexander Yakovlev's role: Russian sources record him as authorizing and backing the release of Repentance, while some critics and filmmakers hold that he 'conducted' the congress as an unofficial 'grey cardinal' of perestroika.