Soviet films of the Cold War reveal a strange paradox, projecting the traumas and fears Soviet citizens faced in their own lives onto America. Poverty, repression, and eavesdropping are depicted as paradigms of American life. America becomes a kind of reverse mirror of unpronounceable constraints in the Soviet system. When millions of prisoners of war were deported from German to Soviet concentration camps, Mosfilm, Russia’s leading film studio, produced a movie entitled U nikh yest rodina (They Have a Homeland, 1950), wherein American operatives torture Russian soldiers in a deportation camp.

Meeting on the Elbe evokes the historic moment when US and Russian forces met on 27 April 1945 at Torgau on the river Elbe.

Alexandrov re-enacted this event in 1948 in the destroyed city of Königsberg (called Altenburg in the film). German prisoners of war built the film sets and played American GIs. The title is contradictory, since it is not about the allies’ meeting, but their split. Alexandrov uses a divided Germany as a symbol for the post-war world; Altenburg becomes a practice ground for the power play of the Americans and Soviets. In an impressive scene at the beginning, American soldiers swim across the river to join hands with their Russian allies because the bridge has been destroyed. At the end of the film the bridge is rebuilt, but only to separate the former allies, as we watch two officers who have become friends bid farewell. The film’s opening swimming race recalls a scene from Alexandrov’s 1938 comedy Volga Volga. The last image immediately brings to mind the famous open bridge from Eisenstein’s October, upon which of course Alexandrov and cameraman Eduard Tisse also worked.

The film’s images of Americans recall the representation of Nazis in Soviet war films as robbers, drinkers, and racists (although here their targets are not Jews but African-Americans). The film’s Americans appear as Hitler’s heirs, working hand-in-hand with German war criminals on the black market. Major Hill discovers that in the American Zone the ideals of freedom, democracy, and justice are nothing but a phantom. The viewer discovers that the only rational alternative available to a German citizen is to flee to the Soviet Zone, as the German scientist character Otto Dietrich does.

In Meeting on the Elbe he uses some elements of a spy thriller, but destroys the suspense by means of caricatures. The film starts with American body language, full of exaggerated motions and loose, nearly indecent gestures. Boogie-woogie dance movements are interpreted as convulsions and physiological perversions. Erast Garin, formerly a leading actor of Meyerhold’s theatre, and Faina Ranevskaya had been trained in a grotesque performing style, and frequently played larger- than-life monstrous caricatures. Lyubov Orlova, Alexandrov’s wife and singing and dancing star, here plays a cold-hearted spy à la Marlene Dietrich who cannot seduce the Russian Com- mander Kuzmin. In the West German press the film was labelled a “Russian revenge for Ninotchka” (Badische Zeitung, 11 August 1949).

Oksana Bulgakowa