in 1939, as the clouds of war gathered in Europe, two contrasting movie heroines were ripped away from small family farms by impressively staged windstorms and transported to fantastic foreign lands filled with magic and peril, from which, after many trials, each was glad to return to her cherished homeland. The American-made The Wizard of Oz (dir. Victor Fleming, 1939) and the Soviet-made Vasilisa prekrasnaia (Vasilisa the Beautiful, dir. Aleksandr Rou, 1939) both adapted fairy-tale characters and storylines that were already, in one way or another, deeply embedded within their national cultures, with each further inflecting its source material in response to current events unfolding upon the world stage.These big-budget, technically ambitious fantasies, produced concurrently in two of the world's largest and most populous nations, offered their viewers some dramatically opposed perspectives on ideas relating to home and abroad, ambition and duty, and the legitimacy of personal goals within wider society. In each film, the allegorical narrative reflects key tenets of its national ideology, while ratifying the pursuit of locally championed modes of behavior—reassuring their respective domestic audiences through this process that there really is “no place like home[land].”Most Western viewers will already be familiar with The Wizard of Oz, in which Kansas farm girl Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) is whisked away to the Land of Oz, where she teams up with the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), the Tin Man (Jack Haley), and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) on her journey to the Emerald City, where she hopes the Wizard (Frank Morgan) will grant her wish to return home. Vasilisa the Beautiful, by contrast, is little-known in the West, having never received a theatrical release in either Britain or America (although a subtitled DVD import is available). Before I begin my analysis, a short synopsis therefore seems appropriate.Vasilisa the Beautiful unfolds in an unspecified “once upon a time” in rural Russia, where three brothers live with their father (Georgii Milliar) on a small family farm. Each shoots his bow into the air, to find his bride where the arrow lands. The eldest (Nikita Kondrat'ev) secures a nobleman's daughter (Lidiia Sukharevskaia), and the middle brother (Lev Potemkin) a merchant's daughter (Irina Zarubina), but the arrow of Ivan (Sergei Stoliarov), the youngest, smartest, and most handsome of the three, falls into a lily pond, garnering him a frog fiancée. Of course, there is more to this frog than meets the eye; it soon transpires that the frog actually is the hardworking and beautiful peasant maiden Vasilisa (Valentina Sorogozhskaia), bewitched by the malevolent three-headed dragon Gorynych after she refused his amorous advances. After Vasilisa is betrayed by the treachery of the socially worthless other brides, Gorynych steals her away in a fantastical storm, transporting her to his dolorous castle beyond the Thrice-Nine Lands. To reclaim his bride, Ivan embarks on an epic journey in search of the wisdom and magical weapons needed to defeat this powerful foe. While the captive Vasilisa resists the bribes and threats of Gorynych's co-conspirator, the loathsome witch Baba Yaga (Milliar in a dual role), Ivan's kindness to a trio of bears in the dragon's sinister and enchanted realm secures him their help in obtaining the magical slaying sword he needs to destroy Gorynych. In a rousing finale, while Ivan sets himself to head-lopping, Vasilisa makes her own courageous stand against the abhorrent Baba Yaga. With good's triumph over evil secured, Ivan and Vasilisa begin their journey home.The objective of this article is to show how The Wizard of Oz and Vasilisa the Beautiful serviced their respective nations’ ideological priorities at a specific historical moment. To this end, I preface my analysis of their representations of home and abroad, and of desirable models of personal ambition and patriotic duty, with short accounts of two intersecting contextual frameworks. In the first, I explore the national and historical dimensions of their source material, as well as the purposes it was designed to serve, as a background to my subsequent discussion of key ideological changes wrought during the process of screen adaptation. In the second, I locate the films within the wider remit and functioning of the national industries that produced them, paying particular attention to those industries’ self-stated ideological aspirations and associated regulatory mechanisms. These perspectives help us to see how the design of each film reflected and reinforced the dominant national cinema, culture, and philosophy of its day, even as the filmmakers sought to shape audience attitudes in morally and politically desirable ways through a mixture of explicit and tacit messaging.No story exists in a cultural vacuum. Consequently, considering the questions of who is telling the story, whom they are telling, and for what purpose is always a good starting point when seeking to understand the cultural and/or political intent of any tale, irrespective of its medium, and the potential ways in which it might work upon the audiences most likely to experience it. This may seldom be truer than in those cases where the creator(s) felt the need to stress that they designed their narrative solely for entertainment purposes and without any underlying agenda. We should also remember that as stories are retold, they undergo a continual process of metamorphosis, with elements added, removed, or inflected to reshape them for new audiences of other ages or nations.The 1939 feature-film versions of The Wizard of Oz and Vasilisa the Beautiful both adapted tales initially written for other media—the authors of which had, in their turn, absorbed and responded to long-standing fairy-tale traditions, which they sought to reinvent for the consumption of modern children. Both screen adaptations show traces of the historical heritage of their source material, even as their makers carefully selected and molded the particular elements that best served the purposes of the stories’ latest contexts of production and distribution.L. Frank Baum's American fantasy novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (as it was initially known) first appeared in 1900. Written at a time of great change in American social and economic organization, as the nation emerged from a deep depression into an era of growing industrialization that wrought widespread changes in livelihoods and lifestyles, as well as in the publishing and entertainment industries, this cheery and imaginative frolic rapidly captured the public imagination. The book was widely reviewed, receiving largely positive notices, and its first edition sold quickly (Rogers 88–89). Baum swiftly capitalized on the novel's success by adapting it into a lavish musical stage show, which premiered in Chicago in 1902 before transferring to Broadway (Fricke 22). He further exploited his unexpectedly lucrative property by penning thirteen (originally unplanned) sequels and founding the Oz Film Manufacturing Company, which produced several short adaptations of the book series before, in 1925, Chadwick Pictures released a somewhat lackluster feature version of that famous first entry (“Other Movie Adaptations”). By the time of MGM's celebrated 1939 extravaganza, Oz was already an American cultural phenomenon, although even in its own country, it had not entirely escaped either censure or censorship.The 1930s saw the Oz series stripped from many library shelves for rather opaque reasons that appear to center on an ostensible lack of literary merit combined with the taint of crass commercialism (Grunzke 5–7). This was neither the first nor the last time that the wholesomeness of its messages drew suspicion; concerns that the books might harbor covert communist sympathies welled up in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution before ebbing and then resurfacing during the anti-Soviet Cold War paranoia of the 1950s (Grunzke 3, 18). Indeed, latent themes discoverable in Baum's original novel proved sufficiently versatile for the story to achieve enormous success with Soviet readers when, after some expeditious ideological tweaking, it was published under the name of its translator-adapter Aleksandr Volkov as Volshebnik izumrudnogo goroda (The Wizard of the Emerald City, 1939).1 Later, Baum's series attracted opprobrium for its intermittent inclusion of outmoded and unsavory racial representations, and more recently, its inclusion of “good” witches saw its presence on school reading lists subject to legal action by fundamentalist Christians (Grunzke 30–31).Within academic circles, a scholarly debate persists as to whether Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a topical political satire, in favor of the Populist Party and incorporating an allegory of the switch to a new monetary system. Many advocates of this theory, first advanced by Henry M. Littlefield in a 1964 article titled “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism,” still postulate the alleged intentionality of such metaphors within the novel's characters and iconography. Others, such as Bradley A. Hansen, are happy to credit the ingeniousness and usefulness of Littlefield's interpretation as a tool for teaching economics students about the history of American monetary policy but refute the idea that Baum had any such metaphor in mind (254–55). As the dispute rages on, myriad proponents of each view have sought to locate evidence for their preferred position in Baum's statements regarding his political sympathies, which are anything but clear-cut (Ritter 192).So what, if anything, did Baum have to say about all this? Well, frankly, not much. Early editions of his book opened with a short introduction, in which he disclaimed any intention other than that of providing amusement for the modern child. He began by praising the happiness that “folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales” have brought to “childish hearts” throughout the ages (Baum 5), before stating his belief that the time had come to dispense, in one fell swoop, with the stereotypical magical beings of olden-day tales and with the moral lessons traditionally inscribed within their more fearsome incidents. “Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales,” he opined (5).Given Baum's categorical refusal of moral intent or instruction (or, indeed, any substance beyond simple diversion), it is perhaps unsurprising that the book met with resistance from some more conservatively minded librarians. Nor is it surprising that—nature abhorring a vacuum—many commentators have sought to imbue it with a wide range of contradictory metaphors and meanings, producing a veritable mountain of scholarly and popular literature in the process. Yet despite the plethora of conflicting readings, two points remain on which critics widely agree. One is that despite Baum's protestations to the contrary, the book does indeed endorse certain moral values and behavioral codes. The other is that there is something innately American about it. The MGM adaptation dispensed with many of the original narrative and iconographic elements that had generated the more disputed interpretations, such as economic allegory, but as I will discuss, it preserved and augmented some of the moral messages along with the Americanism.Russia has a long and rich folkloric tradition, but after the Revolution of 1917, its fairy-tale narratives attracted deep domestic political suspicion. In the 1920s, a drive to increase literacy was accompanied by recognition of the need to provide children with “ideologically correct” reading material in order for them to develop a sound socialist consciousness, and many prominent educators argued that folklore and fairy tales were fatally tainted by such undesirable qualities as outmoded class structures and religious themes. By the mid-1920s, new, contemporary stories designed to encourage active engagement with the struggle toward a fully communist state had largely ousted them from official circulation—an effective prohibition that also debarred their use in film and theater (Balina 354–62; Rosenfeld). This situation changed in 1934, when writer Maxim Gorky delivered an influential speech to the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, which was instrumental in persuading authorities that, with appropriate readjustments, it was possible to rehabilitate Russian folklore as an efficacious vehicle for propagandist messaging (Oinas 46–47).In the 1930s, Soviet children's theater enjoyed a well-funded and prominent position in the drive to imbue young people with the desired political consciousness (Water). Around seventy venues were in operation at this time (Hellman 483). Such was the quality of productions on offer that a joke circulated in London that while British cinemas were beset by queues of children waiting hopefully for an accompanying adult, Russian youth theaters were surrounded by adults seeking child escorts (unattributed clipping). One such production was Skazka ob Ivanushke i Vasilisa prekrasnaia (The Tale of Ivanushka and Vasilisa the Beautiful) by Galina Vladychina and Ol'ga Nechayeva, which debuted at the Leningrad State Young Spectators’ Theatre on 28 February 1939 and would be adapted for cinema later that year (Zel'tser 287). It provides a textbook example of the appropriation and adaptation of traditional Russian folklore for propagandist purpose.Whereas Baum had pointedly dispensed with “the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy” (Baum 5) for his new wonder tale, Vladychina and Nechayeva assembled their narrative from an established set of time-honored fairy-tale building blocks. Their script drew in greatest measure from the well-known story “The Frog Princess” (Afanas'ev 119–23), but it also incorporated other iconic characters from Russian and Slavic folklore, linked together by some completely new material. Thus, Ivan becomes the heroic bogatyr of epic tradition in order to battle Gorynych the Dragon, a notorious adversary, and there is a prominent role for Slavic folklore's premier forest witch, Baba Yaga—albeit with her traditionally enigmatic and capricious character recast as unequivocally evil. “Our goal was not to use any particular tales,” Vladychina explained, “but to create on the basis of Russian folklore a new tale, which would embody certain ideas closer to our time” (Shneyder, Telling 18).The playwrights’ preservation and emphasis of the national identity of the tales from which they drew was intimately connected with the concept of narodnostʹ—often translated as “folk-mindedness” or “popular spirit.” Narodnostʹ, alongside ideological correctness (ideinostʹ) and party-mindedness (partiinostʹ), formed one of the three cardinal tenets of socialist realism—a representational paradigm that had, since 1932, been mandatory across all forms of Soviet art and entertainment.2 The national identity of their folkloric source material was therefore crucial to their project of fostering patriotism and popular spirit in their play's young audiences, as they sought to educate them about Russian heroism in a time of deepening international tensions (Dmitrievskii 90–91; Zel'tser 195–97).The play's swift conversion to the cinema screen meant that it required less updating for modern audiences than had Baum's thirty-nine-year-old novel. Moreover, whereas Baum had no direct hand in the Wizard of Oz screenplay, having died in 1919, Vladychina and Nechayeva worked closely with Soiuzdetfilm's chief script editor, Vladimir Shveitser, to adapt Vasilisa. The ideological goals remained unchanged, as did the main narrative structure and some key elements of iconography, although the film dispensed with the theatrical production's song and dance elements, assuming a weightier tone as Ivan and Vasilisa battled against evil in distant lands whose foreignness stood in sharp contrast to their treasured homeland.In some important respects, the American and Soviet film industries of the late 1930s hardly could have been more different. Hollywood operated on free-market private enterprise, whereas Soviet cinema had operated under centralized state control since the formation of Soiuzkino (All-Union Combine of the Movie-Photo Industry) in 1930 (Kepley, “Federal” 353). Nevertheless, under the leadership of Soiuzkino's chief policy officer, Boris Shumiatskii, the Soviet cinema of this era took significant learnings from its American counterpart. In East, as in West, a handful of studios dominated production, each with particular specialties. Moreover, eschewing the principles of montage cinema that had brought the Soviet industry international acclaim during the previous decade, production now followed a Hollywood model of easy-to-follow linear narratives and continuity editing (Kepley, “Russia” 15). The aim, in each country's case, was to focus primarily on creating films that would reach the widest audience possible and that viewers young and old, sophisticated and unsophisticated, could understand and enjoy.3In America, the primary goal was financial profit; in Russia and the Soviet Union, the primary goal was the dissemination of apposite political messaging. Yet in America as in Russia, key industry figures recognized the power of cinema for influencing public opinion, and each industry implemented some form of centralized control in order to channel such influence in desirable directions. In the Soviet Union, this took the form of stringent censorship at every level of production, with Communist Party leader Josef Stalin ultimately serving as chief censor (Miller 63–66). The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), by contrast, sought to stave off external censorship, whether at the national or local level, by implementing a system of self-regulation (Balio 268). The association's self-imposed Production Code, drawn up by Jesuit priest Daniel A. Lord and first implemented in 1930—and, in capitulation to pressure from Christian activists, more rigorously enforced from 1934—remained operative at the time of The Wizard of Oz's production (Balio 268–69). Widespread monitoring by government agencies would not emerge in America until 1942; from 1942 through the remainder of World War II, the Office of War Information ensured the channeling of American film production in a patriotically propagandist direction (Westwell 31–32).In each nation, filmmakers collaborated with regulatory authorities throughout different stages of planning and production to ensure the suitability of the final product for release.4 The Americans certainly underwent no pressure equivalent to the Soviet purges, including the so-called Great Terror of 1936–38 that saw many filmmakers arrested and, in some cases, executed—Shumiatskii among them—for the faintest suspicion of failure to toe the party line (Miller 82– 84). It was simply bad business to produce a film that, according to the terms of the MPPDA agreement, they could not release into any major theater. For different reasons, production workers in each national industry ensured their films promoted prescribed moral ideals—in letter, if not always entirely in spirit.5 These ideals, which emerged from contrasting bases, had points of both similarity and difference, as did their relation to the cultural norms operative at the time of the regulatory systems’ instigation.The American Production Code rested on a system of Christian ethics and upheld the teachings of the church. Its preamble asserted, “[T]hough regarding motion pictures primarily as entertainment without any explicit purpose of teaching or propaganda, [producers] know that the motion picture . . . may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking” (MPPDA, “Code” 547–48). Such phrases as “correct entertainment,” “correct principles,” and “correct standards of life” litter the document throughout. The concept of “correctness” was clearly deemed an absolute that brooked no further interpretation than that assigned to the comparable concept of “natural law,” defined within the document as “the law which is written in the hearts of all mankind, the great underlying principles of right and justice dictated by conscience” (MPPDA, “Code” 556).Soviet censorship, by contrast, emerged from a categorically secular base, and whereas the Production Code sought to protect and strengthen adherence to moral and religious principles long peddled by apparatuses of the nation's dominant religion, the Soviet system sought to channel public thought in a new direction. The American Code was conservative and reactionary, whereas Soviet filmmaking, now following the codes of the newly instituted socialist realism, aspired to bring audience attitudes into line with new social and political structures. In both cases, a paternalistic attitude to audiences, especially young people and rural residents, was evident. In the Soviet Union, Alexander Prokhorov has argued, “infantilization of the masses was part and parcel of the regime's myth of the future utopia” (129). In America, the MPPDA expressed its particular “moral obligations” to offer appropriate guidance to such groups as “small communities, remote from sophistication” (MPPDA, “Code” 553, 555). The tone of its self-justifying explanations falls only slightly short of the Code's 1927 predecessor (“The Don'ts and Be Carefuls”), which urged cautious handling of representations of criminal activity, “having in mind the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron” (MPPDA, “Don'ts” 547).The Wizard of Oz and Vasilisa the Beautiful both sit comfortably within the broader ideological frameworks of filmmaking in their particular period and country of production. As I will illustrate, the first inscribes traditional values into recently invented characters and spaces while the other inscribes new values and significance into the characters and spaces of traditional folklore—both articulating, in the process, a buoyant patriotic confidence in the superiority of the national culture they promote.In each film, there is a clear demarcation between the domestic and the foreign. Aside from the strangeness of the characters and situations the protagonists encounter on their travels, in both cases, the filmmakers signal the difference through visual elements, such as color, lighting, set design, and frame composition. Thus, in The Wizard of Oz, the Kansas sequences appear in sepia, whereas the strange and wonderful Land of Oz assaults the eyeballs with gaudy Technicolor, and the flat, open, and spartan rural landscape gives way to a jumble of cluttered detail. Similarly, in Vasilisa, whereas Ivan's farm is located in an open landscape, with dominantly horizontal compositions emphasizing the wide expanse, the set design and camerawork of the dragon's realm emphasize the vertical, the twisted, and the claustrophobic. The farm set is relatively naturalistic, albeit exaggeratedly picturesque, but away from home, the artifice is more brazen, with little apparent effort made to conceal the incorporation of matte paintings. Moreover, whereas the lighting of the Russian segment is dominantly bright and low-contrast even in night scenes, that of Gorynych's imposing castle and the forest over which it towers is a brassy chiaroscuro.In neither film are the protagonists keen to remain away from home for any longer than necessary, although in The Wizard of Oz, the reasons underlying Dorothy's strength of feeling for her homeland are not entirely cogent. This is particularly the case in Baum's novel, in which he describes Kansas as a forbidding wilderness, hostile to human survival, where the harsh elements have sucked the life and joy from Dorothy's aunt and uncle. “They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober grey; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were grey also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now . . . Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was” (12–13).In Baum's original story, Dorothy's main loyalty seems to be to her Aunt Em (played in the film by Clara Blandick), rather than to her homeland per se. A sense of familial duty culminates in her explanation to Glinda (a good witch, played in the film by Billie Burke) that “Aunt Em will surely think something dreadful has happened to me, and that will make her put on mourning; and unless the crops are better this year than they were last I am sure Uncle Henry cannot afford it” (254). Their existence is bleak, but even so, Dorothy retains an umbilical attachment to her homeland that defies any rational explanation. “No matter how grey and dreary our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, if ever so beautiful. There is no place like home,” Baum's Dorothy tells the Scarecrow (44–45). Such loyalty runs hand in hand with a xenophobia that becomes more explicit in an exchange with the Wizard, whom she bluntly informs, “I don't like your country, although it is so beautiful” (128).The MGM film frames Kansas rather differently. Its prologue depicts an apparently more thriving farm and a more comfortably appointed house than we find in the book, in addition to introducing five new characters—Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan), and three farmhands, all of whom appear in different guises during Dorothy's fever dream of Oz. The bullying behavior of the powerful landowner, Miss Gulch, becomes Dorothy's reason for wishing to leave home, and the friendly community of family and farmworkers becomes her reason to celebrate her return. People and their values are paramount; here, the shortcomings of her home life are the product of legal and economic, rather than meteorological, menace—although issues relating to class oppression are quietly forgotten at the end of the film, which provides no resolution to Miss Gulch's legal threat to confiscate Dorothy's little dog, Toto. Instead, a brand-new coda represents love, friendship, and comfortable domesticity as the keys to any heart's desire.This adaptation also introduces another significant inflection to the source material. In the song “Over the Rainbow,” which Dorothy performs during the Kansas prologue, she articulates her yearning for a land where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” Framing her adventures in Oz as a dream sequence—which Baum had not done—repositions this fantasyland of opportunity as being, as Dorothy finally realizes, her homeland all along: a place where her newfound confidence and awareness of the possibility of self-determination ratify the promise of the American dream.In Vasilisa, home life also has its challenges—goats wreak havoc in the cabbage patch, and chickens eat the crop seeds—but overall, it is a genial representation of Russian peasant existence. Class conflict plays a larger role here, as the vanity and laziness of the “bad brides,” the daughters of the merchant and the nobleman, are the objects of scathing ridicule, whereas Vasilisa's true nobility resides in her peasant status, her affinity with the rural world, and her hard work on the land. Within the rhetoric of this film, Vasilisa stands as an allegory of all that is best about the Soviet Union and its people.The importance of homeland is a more central motif here than in The Wizard of Oz, with reasons to love and honor it explicitly stated in a way they are not in the film's American counterpart. The landscape is beautiful, and the harvest is sufficient. As the menfolk wend their way homeward from the fields, a non-diegetic a cappella song of the “wide blue sea,” a “clear green field,” and “our dear native land” underscores the connection between agrarian labor, landscape, and nation. In Vasilisa, there is no hint that utopia might be located “over the rainbow”; following the relentlessly rose-tinted dictates of socialist realism, it is firmly aligned with the Soviet here and now.6 As Ivan prepares to embark on his journey to recover Vasilisa, he embraces his father and brothers, and each reaches down to touch his native soil—a talisman of fortune and success. The hero's quest is, in truth, a transparent metaphor for his real mission, one that it is implicitly the responsibility of every citizen to share—namely, the safeguarding of the Soviet nation and the Soviet way of life.At a time when America and the Soviet Union considered their respective positions as events in Europe threatened to spiral into another world war, contemporary international relations played a significant role in shaping both films’ depictions of foreigners and foreign lands. The original intention of Vasilisa's makers had been to provide viewers with a clear allegory of the Nazi threat—partly by means of a prologue in which Gorynych's evil army invades and burns a Russian village. They filmed this sequence but in August 1939 were forced to discard the footage after the Soviet Union entered into a pact with Germany midway through the shoot (Sputnitskaia 182). A few years later, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact long in shreds, Rou and Shveitser reprised the abandoned scene in their fairy-tale war propaganda film Kashchei bessmertnyi (Kashchei the Immortal, dir. Aleksandr Rou, 1945). What Vasilisa retained, in its representation of the dragon's distant realm, was a highly expressionist style of lighting and mise-en-scène. Two years before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the distinctive Germanic style already served as a convenient index of an untrustworthy otherness, antithetical to Soviet values. Fritz Lang's two-part epic Die Nibelungen (1924) was a specific influence (Sirivlia).In Vasilisa, we can observe a sharp contrast between the denizens of