The Soviet Reality in the 1930–1940s Feature Films: the Ideology of Everyday Life and the Everyday Life of Ideology

The Soviet everyday life has already become an object of scientific interest in philosophy, cultural studies, and history. The films on the Soviet reality of 1930–1940s evidently show one of the main epoch contradictions – the one between ideological image of the “new soviet man” and the ideological cliché of “caring about working people’s needs”. The contradiction follows the tradition of contrasting everyday life (“byt”) and the philosophical concept of being (“bytie”). The contrast between ideal and reality, obvious in Stalin era films, can also be regarded in this field. The author investigates not only the displaying of the soviet reality in the soviet feature films of 1930–1940s, but also the influence of these films on everyday life. As far as the films are the documents of their time, they transmit both ideology and the information on spectators’ tastes and preferences. The feature films can be considered the persuasive representations of norms and ideals of the epoch. A number of ways to show everyday life existed – from reduced to stylized. Despite the dominance of the conventional and functional representations, in some cases the real everyday life of Stalin era is “coming out” of the visual narrative.