Authors

Stefan Lacny¹;  ¹ UCL SSEES, UK

Discussion

This paper examines the cinematic contributions of Polish socialist-turned-communist Wanda Wasilewska (1905-1964) through the prism of the Second Polish Republic’s ethnic minorities. Having worked as a writer, journalist and socialist activist during the interwar decades, Wasilewska enthusiastically embraced the Soviet takeover of Poland’s eastern regions in 1939, established a close working relationship with Stalin and swiftly rose to become the most important Pole in the Soviet Union, shaping key decisions affecting the annexed territories from 1939-1941 and later influencing the drawing of the Polish-Soviet border in 1944-1945, which ceded the Polish east to the USSR. In Polish and, to a much lesser extent, English scholarship, Wasilewska has been assessed in terms of her literary output and political activities in interwar Poland and the USSR, but not with reference to her work in cinema. I argue that Wasilewska’s cinematic collaborations are vital to understanding her conversion from reformist socialism to Soviet communism. An exploration of three notable films she worked on (Mir Kumen On (Aleksander Ford, 1936), Veter s vostoka (Abram Room, 1940) and Raduga (Mark Donskoi, 1943)), which variously focus on the oppression of Jews and Ukrainians under Polish and Nazi rule, reveals how Wasilewska’s post-1939 activism was significantly shaped by her concern for interwar Poland’s minority groups. Wasilewska’s belief in the liberationist promise of Stalinist rule for minority groups, which ultimately led her to reside in Kyiv from 1945 and represent Ukraine in the USSR’s Supreme Soviet, highlights the attractiveness of Soviet nationalities policies to leftist intellectuals raised in capitalist nation states. Viewed in a wider context, however, this case study also demonstrates the willingness of the Stalinist state to instrumentalise minority nationalism for its own purposes, including its efforts to justify its territorial expansionism in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.