An Inexpiable Debt: Stalinist Cinema, Biopolitics, and the Discourse of Happiness

Abstract

This article excavates the coentanglement of happiness and duty in Stalinist discourse by examining Soviet films of the 1930s and 1940s, including Dziga Vertov's Three Songs of Lenin (1934) and Mikhail Kalatozov's Valerii Chkalov (1941). As happiness was brought firmly into the political domain in the 1930s, cinema celebrated Stalin's dictum that “life has become more joyful” at the same time it espoused dutiful service to the state. The merging of self‐realization and self‐sacrifice at the heart of this on‐screen conception of “happiness,” I argue, bore witness to a new biopolitical modality of power which legitimized citizens’ right to a happy and prosperous life at the same time as it produced a “being‐in‐debt.” With recourse to Jacques Lacan's theories on the synergy of discourse and jouissance, this article explores how the emergence of a new form of governmentality in the Stalin era was rooted in the configuration of a new libidinal economy.