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Chekov and Sustainability

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Sustainability in Chekov’s Cherry Orchard is represented by the relationship between Madame Ranevsky, Lopakhin, and the orchard itself. Madame Ranevsky is poor and cannot afford to pay her mortgage, while she is sitting on top of a very expensive estate. The cherry orchard itself, under Madame Ranevsky, is not being harvested or used, it is also not being sold. Although you cannot put a price on sentimental value, Ranevsky’s situation is desperate.

From Ranevsky’s point of view, the only way for her to sustain her family’s financial situation is through selling the cherry orchard. She also asks other for money to help her pay for her mortgage, which just further enables her to avoid the inevitability of having to sell her orchard.

Meanwhile, Lopakhin is a wealthy neighbor who can buy the land and make use of the property by capitalizing on the real estate. This would be sustainable for Lopakhin in the long run, because in time the orchard may pay for itself.

At the end of the play, Lopakhin purchases the orchard in an auction. From a sustainability standpoint, this is a good decision because the land can be utilized for means of productivity.

Mazower’s Dark Continent compared to Eisenstein’s October

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                                                               Martin Zahariev

Throughout the human history there were revolutions which affected the political climate, brought progress and changes- positive, and negative. One of the most important of them, which broke out in the 20th century was the October revolution. The movie October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) by Sergei Eisenstein, and the Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century present this event in two different ways.

                The first one is a Russian propaganda movie created by Eisenstein for a specific audience- the people from the Soviet Union. Its focus is narrow-the struggle of the poor, and the oppressed against the Provisional Government. In the beginning of the movie we see the destruction of the statue of Alexander III. It is clear that Russians want change, wish to be treated like people, to change their lifestyles, to get out of the misery. However are they really fighting for the creation of the Soviet Union? Eisenstein tries to convince his audience in that false direction. The movie is like a twisted reality of the events of 1917. It is obvious that the author omits certain events, and facts. His purpose is clear- to make people believe in the greatness of the newly established political regime.

                Mazower’s book Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century is not a propaganda work, but a detailed, objective and deep analysis of the events that led to the Bolsheviks coming to power. Unlike Eisenstein his focus is not narrowed, and his purpose is to depict the real events rather than manipulate his readers. He tells us how Lenin managed to gain his power, thanks to his political acuteness, and to the blunders his political rivals made. The author does not express any political preferences.

                Mazower’s book Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century and Eisenstein’s movie October,  created with different purposes, clearly look at the Russian Revolution under two different angles.

October and the Dark Continent

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Matthew Goldstein                                                   Inter War History

The film October: Ten Days that Shook the World by Sergei Eisenstein was another in the series of grand Soviet Propaganda films produced by the director Eisenstein. It’s highly dramatized portrayal of the November Revolution, is in stark contrast to the straight forward writings of Mazower in the Dark Continent.

The title to the film and its background were taken from Jack Reed’s highly popular novel Ten Days that Shook the World, which gives a first hand account to the happenings of the Russian Revolution in St. Petersburg during that faithful Revolutionary period. Reed’s sympathy with the Communist revolutionaries makes it impossible to call his book a straight forward honest portrayal of the events in St. Petersburg. Its a exciting work that makes you feel as if all of Russia was behind the communist pusch, with stories of soldiers revolts and the great bravery of common supporters of the Soviet against the bourgeois officers and aristocrats that supported the Provisional government. Eisenstein’s film fills you with this same emotion. His grand scenes of the supporters storming the Winter Place make you feel as if all of Russia was there on the faithful night. Eisenstein’s movie was created as a propaganda film, and it’s purpose was to prop up men like Stalin who was taking control of Russia at this time and ruin the reputation of men like Trotsky who had fallen out of favor with the leadership. As a result this film has little validity to a student of the actual occurrences of the Revolution.

Mazower’s passage on the Russian Revolution is in a totally different vein then the film. It isn’t slanted so heavily to the side of the Revolutionaries, like Ten Days that Shook the World and October are. Mazower looks back to the period before the Revolution and the politics involved in the entire arch of time. This examination puts a different spin on the Revolution. Instead of being strictly a spontaneous uprising of the people, we see that the actions of the Communists were planned much further in advance and that their success was a much more calculated move. The Communist party “gained under one forth of the total votes cast”. (Mazower p.10) The Communist party did not have the rousing support shown in the movie but it was smart enough to seize power when it could. That is abundantly clear in The Dark Continent. Although October and Ten Days that Shook the World vary greatly from The Dark Continent, both works are able to give you a perspective and insight into the Russian Revolution.

Comparison between Mazower’s Dark Continent and and Eisenstein’s Potemkin

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The 1925 film The Battleship Potemkin by Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein portrays a 1905 mutiny of the Russian naval ship Potemkin based on a true story. Set outside Odessa during the 1905 revolution Eisenstein shows the narrative of the social cultural history of time through a settled Soviet Russia viewpoint. Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent follows many of same issues of the Russian revolution and later political instabilities of Europe discussed through the film.
The causes of the mutiny portrayed in the film track the themes but not completely time specifics of Mazower’s history of the Russian revolution. The low quantity and low quality of food available on the ship created issues between the officers and the crew. This issue is similar to the food shortages seen by the peasants and proletariat in 1905. The film notes the failures of the Russo-Japanese war and the undesirable conditions leading to such poor moral. A picture of Tsar Nicolas in the officers’ cabin over top of the piano is subtly inserted with the goal of showing the overall enemy or “executioner” that is not truly labeled in the movie.
Mazower describes many of the overall sentiments and goals of the communist revolutionary movement primarily later in 1917. First you can see the same class structures social differences experienced on the battleship. The separation between classes discussed by Mazower is mirrored with the disgust for which the officers have for their soldiers, and how the people are angered at the wealthy man in Odessa (which is possibly religious based anti-Semitism). Second the common use of violence as a first mean of control is brought up in Mazower speaking to the Cheka and use of state terror. In 1905 the bloody Sunday event of state terror was a catalyst for the first revolution and the history of the Potemkin. In the film the command to kill the sailors came fairly easily and the Cossacks to put down a rebellion killed citizens indiscriminately, accurate to some Tsarist policy.
Some of the things I found difficult to understand were who, besides the officers that tried to execute the sailors, were the opposition that the public was upset with? While they blame the Jews and yell at what appears to be the bourgeoisies group, the people look to be an eclectic group of society including both spectrums of social classes. Obviously the Cossacks showed extreme violence as to show the Tsar again to be the enemy but as a film it was never said the antagonist outright. Also the religion aspect of the film seemed to the excess of Soviet propaganda. Mazower’s work does not describe that much hatred of clergy and Orthodox Church by 1905. I instead understood later anti religious politics to be the intellectuals’ policy for a more efficient communist system.

Two Portraits of Revolution (Re-post)

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Revolution has proven to be an incendiary topic throughout history, thus becoming the subject of countless different interpretations across various mediums.  Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent, a rigorous portrait of early twentieth-century European governments, and Battleship Potemkin, a Russian propaganda film relating the story of a Russian sailing crew’s mutiny against the ship’s oppressive officers, present two equally informative images of the Russian revolution that vary drastically in perspective.

Mazower’s text revisits the topic of interwar European government from a perspective that does not presuppose the primacy of democracy.  Consequently, he presents the Russian revolution as a quasi re-imagination of liberal democracy.  The author recounts the revolution’s optimistic origins as a move toward the unification of Russia behind the “‘universal democratic soul’” described by Prince Lvov (Mazower, 10).  However, Mazower acknowledges the divisions that arose due to the ambiguity of the revolution’s goal (i.e. “‘bourgeois democratic’” vs. “‘proletarian socialist’”) and how this ultimately led Russia to be “squeezed increasingly tightly between the twin extremes of communism and fascism” (Mazower, 10 & 13).

Conversely, in Battleship Potemkin, the sobering relative objectivity that pervades Mazower’s work vanishes into overt propaganda.  The plot is simple and quickly established by the on-screen dialogue, which is dominated by rallying cries for revolution such as “All for one and one for all!” and “Let nothing divide us!”  These lines originate in the mouths of the mutinous sailors and eventually find their way to the people of Odessa, who rally against the Tsarist regime upon hearing the story of the death of sailor Vakulinchuk (“Killed for a plate of soup”).  This text in conjunction with the insistently dramatic bombast of the score and several poignant images (the destruction of the Odessa Opera House, a baby carriage careening down a flight of steps in the midst of a riot) creates a poignant albeit transparent appeal to the pathos of the viewing audience in an attempt to glorify the concept of a Russian revolution.

Ultimately, Mazower’s view of the Russian revolution is one of factual pragmatism that benefits from several decades of hindsight and research, while Battleship Potemkin (much like Triumph of the Will) is equally useful as an image of one faction’s ambitions created in the climate of the revolution it advocated.

Battleship Potemkin and Mazower

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Watching Battleship Potemkin confronted me with the raw power of a political film with no three dimensional characters. Each individual possesses individuality only inasmuch as they represent a certain aspect of a cause or argument. The child shot by the czarist soldiers and crushed by the stampeding crowd careening down the steps facing the Odessa harbor matters because of the innocence he comes to embody in the face of czarist barbarity. The same goes for the film’s protagonist, the sailor and revolutionary Vakulinchuk, whose life, death, and words all act to symbolize the fundamental goodness of the communist cause, the heroism of its leaders, so unwilling to submit to fear in the face of their totalitarian enemy that their martyrdom suffices to drive crowds into a revolutionary frenzy.

The men and women move as crowds, but we do not for a second imagine that they lack individuality; it simply does not matter. Here I find myself reminded of Prince Lvov’s declaration of March 1917, on the subject of the Russian people’s role in the European democratic movement, cited by Mark Mazower in the first chapter of Dark Continent. “The soul of the Russian people,” he proclaims, “turned out by its very nature to be a universal democratic soul…prepared not only to merge with the democracy of the whole world, but to stand at the head of it and lead it along the path of human progress…” While the rebellious citizens and sailors of Battelship Potemkin do not stand for the Social Liberalism advocated by Levov, their bristling mass of clenched fists represents something similar: the helm of a movement in the name of human liberation.

The attack of the Cossacks left the strongest impression on me of all the scenes. It reminded me of Mazower’s section on the failure of Russian liberalism.  Unlike the liberals, Russia’s rural peasants and urban working class wanted peace and a higher standard of living, neither of which the liberals offered. “In the factories, in the countryside, social order was collapsing, and the middle ground in Russian politics disappeared”. Nothing indicates this state of affairs better than the facelessness of the Cossacks in Battleship Potemkin. As the shock troops of czarism, they stand for nothing, save the brutality of power. Nothing denotes impotence better than repression.

Comparing Mazower and Battleship Potemkin

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In the film Battleship Potemkin the sailors of the vessel revolt and over throw the command after being severely mistreated and abused. In the opening scene of the movie a caption appears saying “there’s a limit to what a man can take,” in reference to his constant struggle and pattern of harassment. The mutiny that takes place on the ship is representative of the same struggle that occurs on the soil of the Russian homeland. On the boat it is the common sailors vs. their oppressive officers, and on the mainland it is the workers vs. the Tsarist regime. This film could be considered a piece of revolutionary propaganda because it glamorized the working class by showing a banded, cohesive group of like minded people rising up and taking things into their own hands through power in numbers.

While Mazower’s Dark Continent does not go into much detail about Russia prior to WWI, there are a lot of recurring themes and similarities that exist, principally dealing with violent overthrows instigated by the middle and working classes. Although Battleship Potemkin is set in 1905, the Russian people are still dealing with very similar issues in both time periods. Some similarities that I noticed in the two works is how Mazower wrote, in reference to Tsarist times compared to communist rule, “but it differed too in its conception of revolutionary politics as civil war, wherein state terror had a special role as an instrument of class struggle” (p.12). The sailors on the Potemkin were victims of this when some of the sailors were designated for execution for refusing to eat the rotten meat. In response, the sailors dealt their superiors a crushing blow by rousing a mutiny and symbolically tossing them overboard, cleansing themselves of their oppressive regime.

 

FUN FACT: Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, proclaimed the film to be “A marvelous film without equal in the cinema … anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film,” even though there was a man in the film who made an anti semitic slur during the rally and was beaten in the street by the mob. This scene highlighted how the Russian cause did not discriminate in terms of race or ethnicity, it was solely about class struggle and united all workers.             … Quite ironic

How propaganda was used: Mazower’s “Dark Continent” and Eisenstein’s “October”

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October: Ten Days that Shook the World, directed by Sergei Eisenstein and Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century illustrate differing perspectives of Russia’s October Revolution–the film is clearly a work of propaganda. The film shows exclusively positive elements of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The film tries to express the ‘unilateral’ support of the Proletariat at a time when Stalin was fighting to gain complete and undeniable control over the country. For this reason, Trotsky has a minimal role at the beginning of the Revolution. The film uses words to update the audience on changes, but offers no further explanation of why Trotsky, for instance, wanted to postpone an armed uprising. Stalin’s government wants to stop Trotsky’s influence to help cement his own claim to the Soviet Union. The film, in condemning the opinions of Trotsky, places Lenin as the hero of the revolution. This idea was used to aid Stalin at the beginning of his reign so that he could gain more legitimacy–he was following in the footsteps of Lenin. Eventually, this type of propaganda will change as Stalin begins to distance himself from Lenin and Lenin’s plans for the USSR–namely, the New Economic Plan for Collectivization and Dekulakization.

The film clearly exaggerates certain events: the toppling of the czar’s statue in the first few moments of the film is a key example of this. This film celebrated the 10th Anniversary of the Revolution. To do this successfully, the film needed to show that the Revolution had broad and sweeping support. Each time opponents of the Revolution are shown, words such as “traitors” and “turncoats” are flashed across the screen to show that these men and women have betrayed their country. Moreover, the film shows violent confrontations unfolding as the Bolsheviks win control over St. Petersburg/Petrograd and the Winter Palace–an event that occurred without violence and bloodshed.

Furthermore, all representations of the Provisional Government show a lazy group that does not fight for all the people. Near the end of the film there are many words shown across the screen that show the Provisional Government as wanting to discuss the changes and negotiate, rather then implement changes. The strongest image is when the screen says the Provisional Government is trying to save itself, but flashes to an empty office.

The film ends with the win of the Bolsheviks. This win is displayed “across the world” with the use of clocks to show that this is a monumental step for the entire world. The other countries will soon follow the example of the USSR and communism will become the new world order. The film presents a romanticized perspective of the Revolution and one that is extraordinarily different from the history described by Mazower. In Dark Continent, the Revolution is placed within the context of the extreme political change and radical political sentiments that were shaking Europe as WWI unfolded and ended. None of this was explored within the film because it would have undermined the struggle of the people that the Soviet government wanted to propagate.

Drama on the Deck- How Battleship Potemkin is an analogy for Interwar Europe

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Mazower describes Europe in the years between the two world wars as a period of radical changes within the various countries due to social and economic disconnects between the ruling bodies and those governed by them. Eistenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin, specifically the 2nd scene, serves as an excellent analogy of revolutionary Europe.

If the battleship is viewed as Europe/anyone of the revolutionary countries, there is a connection between the sailors’ plight and that of the citizens of Europe. While Eistenstein deals with the oppression of civilians specifically in his movie, I feel as if the struggle the sailors undergo better represents Europe as a whole. Because they have the three basics tenets of life-Food, shelter and water- the sailors are in better living conditions than some following World War I. However, it is the quality of the trifecta that pushes them over the edge, much like the quality of life in Europe pushes many to revolt and change their system of government. The sailors deal not only with maggot-ridden meat, they have cramped living conditions and are forced to deal with an oppressive master, a master which represents the Tzar, the autocrats and the ineffective democracies of Europe.

The conflict that the sailors undergo against the officers is similar to that of the conflict Germans deal with in the 20’s and 30’s. While there is a governmental body, they have about as much influence and control over the German citizens as the officers have over the enlisted sailors. While they are able to attempt to control the sailors and even prepare to execute a few of them, it is a leader, selected from the mob of men that ends that crushing oppression, much like Hitler and the National Socialists emerged from Germany. The trends seen in Battleship Potemkin are those of a future war-torn Europe, one that was as “crippled” as Russia was at the end of the movie.

The Destruction of the Plate

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When studying historical events there are many ways to learn about a certain subject. A couple of ways one can study a historical event is through the use of literature and films. While learning about the Russian Revolution, I read the section on the Russian Revolution in the novel Dark Continent by Mark Mazower and watched the silent film Battleship Potemkin directed by Sergei Eisenstein. In their own ways, both of these works touch upon the division of social classes in Russia in 1905 and the tension that accompanies the division.

Battleship Potemkin depicts the Russian Revolution on a smaller scale, through the mutiny of soldiers aboard a ship. The scene that interests me the most from Battleship Potemkin is surprisingly not one of the many gory scenes depicted in this film. It is instead of the crew members doing the dishes. One crew member comes across a plate that puts a look of anger, betrayal, and disgust on his face. I was intrigued as to what could have possibly angered him so much. This plate turned out to say “give us this day our daily bread.” He takes this plate, shows it to his fellow crew members, and then violently throws it to the ground. Although there is an obvious religious affiliation with this plate, I believe it symbolizes something other than the destruction of religion. The tension in Russia before the revolution is depicted through this poor crew member looking at the aristocrat’s plate he is being forced to wash. This man that was provided rotten meat is now supposed to clean the very plate on which his overseers, the aristocrats, had eaten a perfectly good meal on. To me, this shattering plate symbolizes the anger of the common man towards the upper class, and the hope for destruction of democracy, aristocracy, and the division of the social classes. From this disdain for the division of social classes comes the desire for equality, and a desire for a government centered around the ideas of communism.

This scene from Battleship Potemkin relates the writing of Mazower about the Russian Revolution in his novel Dark Continent. Mazower writes about the fall of democracy, aristocracy, and the rise of communism due to the peasants (or crew members in Battleship Potemkins) desires. “In the factories, in the countryside and in the ranks, social order was collapsing, and the middle ground in Russian politics disappeared (Mazower 11). The lower class wanted their “daily bread” and felt that communism would be the solution to their “starvation.” They wanted a Russia where everyone was equal; where everyone could afford land, food, and water. Aristocracy needed to come to end, and the Russian Revolution began the process of attempting to close the gap within the social classes. Russia’s current government was not adequate in providing the people what they wanted, and thus they revolted.