Soviet Hollywood

Origins

The Soviet Hollywood project was the plan Boris Shumyatsky put forward after touring American film studios in 1934. As the official in charge of Soviet cinema from 1930, he wanted to transplant Hollywood's technical sophistication and its division-of-labour, mass-production system into the USSR, and he concluded that the existing Moscow- and Leningrad-centred production base could not deliver that. Heading the Chief Administration of the Cinema and Photo Industry (GUKF), he made a southern studio base capable of shooting year-round a central task of his tenure.

Site and scale

The favoured site was the area around Laspi Bay on Crimea's southern coast, between Sevastopol and Yalta. Its year-round climate and geography resembled California's, which was the stated reason for the choice. The plan was not a few sound stages but an entire film city, Kinograd, with housing, production and service functions built from scratch.

The figures for planned annual output differ between sources. Russian Wikipedia gives 200 films a year, while the film historian Oksana Bulgakova writes that Shumyatsky dreamed of raising production to 800 films a year. Both are planning-stage ambitions, not achieved results.

Accounts of the site also differ. English Wikipedia describes a centre near Odessa, where the climate and geography resembled Hollywood's and thus favoured year-round film-making, and calls the whole film community Kinograd. Interviewed by Ogonyok, Shumyatsky's great-grandson recalls that his great-grandfather dreamed of a single film centre in Crimea, that the Soviet Hollywood was never built, and that only a makeshift ersatz film town arose around the Odessa studio. Bulgakova likewise locates the projected kino-city in Crimea. The two locations are not reconciled by the available sources.

Collapse

The plan failed on money. According to Russian Wikipedia, the expensive project was rejected at the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR in 1937. Bulgakova writes that the programme for expanding production was rejected outright. The film city was never built; only a makeshift ersatz complex grew up around the Odessa studio.

Meanwhile Soviet film output was falling sharply. English Wikipedia's figures show 148 features completed in 1928 against 35 in 1933, then 45 of a planned 130 in 1935, 46 of 165 in 1936 and 24 of 62 in 1937. Bulgakova gives different figures, 124 features released in 1928 and 29 in 1933, and attributes the fall to technical and economic difficulties, including the incomplete conversion to sound, the building of equipment factories, the refitting of old studios and the construction of new studios in the Central Asian republics, as well as to Stalin's censorship and his doctrine of producing a few masterpieces rather than many mediocre pictures.

Political consequences

The project's failure merged with Shumyatsky's own political fate. According to Bulgakova, once the expansion programme was rejected he was exposed as a saboteur and an enemy of the people who had failed to understand the real problems facing cinema, and the press damned him as a fascist swine and a propagator of conveyer-belt cinema and of kino-americanism. The kino-city project itself was singled out as oriented toward international cinematic standards rather than an authentic Soviet path. In the same period Shumyatsky took part in the suppression of Bezhin Meadow and in the persecution of the director Sergei Eisenstein, which became another axis of the case against him.

On 7 January 1938 he was dismissed as head of GUKF and in the night of 17-18 January he was arrested on charges of participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organisation and espionage; he was shot at Kommunarka on 29 July of that year and rehabilitated on 22 February 1956. The Soviet Hollywood episode therefore stands as a case that shows both the ambition of Stalin-era cultural administration and how that ambition was recast in the language of the Great Purge.