‘Here will be a Garden-City’: Soviet Man on an Arctic Construction Site

• Main Author: Bugaeva, Lyubov
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 2015
• Subjects: Arctic; Bugaeva
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694174.003.0025

The trope of Arctic exploration has been used for political purposes all over the world, and the Soviet Union was no exception. In this chapter Lyubov Bugaeva examines the construction of the ‘Soviet man’ in Soviet Arctic filmmaking in the Stalinist era. Moreover, she examines how Stalinist doctrines in Soviet cinema of the 1930s was reconfigured in films about Arctic expeditions by later generations of filmmakers in the 1970s. Bugaeva offers detailed accounts of how this process of construction played itself out in a range of Stalinist and post-Stalinist films, including Sergei Gersimov’s The Seven Bold Ones (1937), City of Youth (1938), and The Love of Mankind (1972). By way of contrast, Bugaeva also considers the work of including Alexei Simonov’s The Ordinary Arctic (1974).