Creating the Polish enemy on the Soviet screen, 1925-1939

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the presentation of Polish characters in Soviet cinema from 1925 to 1939. It argues that the many films made on the so-called ‘Polish theme’ in these years reveal a persistent Soviet anxiety towards Poland, which appears as a potential aggressor representing a military and ideological threat to the USSR in its western borderlands. Through close analysis of selected films from the corpus, the article demonstrates how Soviet cinema processed the perceived threat from Poland by means of gendered characterisations of Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians. Most commonly, these characterisations take the form of depictions of sexual violence committed by male Poles against female Ukrainians and Belarusians, a repeated narrative feature designed to convey to Soviet audiences the danger posed by Poland to Eastern Slavs on either side of the Polish-Soviet border. Likewise, though, the films seek to alleviate spectatorial concerns by portraying a corrupted patriarchal hierarchy among Polish protagonists that represents a parodied inversion of heteronormative gender standards. By conveying the Polish danger to Soviet nationalities and simultaneously disavowing it through insinuations of Polish societal weakness, Soviet filmmakers aimed to strike a balance between communicating and assuaging spectatorial anxieties towards their western neighbour.