“Center” and “Periphery”: Shaping the Cinematic New Soviet Woman

Women’s emancipation was a pivotal component of the Bolshevik agenda. However, constructing a New Soviet Woman was a laborious task, because traditional feminine traits and beauty standards were at odds with the Party’s requirement towards the citizens to build the socialist state. As the Bolsheviks used cinema to enlighten the illiterate masses, cinema, ideology and politics were closely intertwined. Films of this period hold a key to the following questions: what were the defining traits of a New Soviet woman? How was she required to act in critical situations? How she was supposed to do dress and look? This article will address the aforementioned questions through an analysis of three Russian films and one Georgian depicting an urban working class. The imbalance originates from the fact that, while Moscow generated films portraying contemporary life during the 1920s, the Georgian studio started production of films from the modern era only near the end of that decade. The films were chosen based on their exploration of women’s challenging issues concerning sexual freedom, marriage, motherhood, and abortion. These films are Katka the Apple-seller, directed by Fridrich Ermler’s Katka the Reinette Apple Seller (1926), Bed and Sofa directed by Abram Room (1926), House on Trubnaya street by Boris Barnet (1928) and Saba directed by Mikheil Chiaureli (1929). Analysis also incorporates the center-periphery dichotomy, framing the center as more modernized and the periphery as less developed. Situating the findings in a wider framework, the paper challenges the division into “center” and “periphery” in the context of women’s emancipation.