Marko Dumančić's monograph arrives at a most timely moment, given the almost exclusive attention in recent decades afforded to femininity and the portrayal of women in Soviet culture, as well as Vladmir Putin's machismo on show for the world to view in Ukraine in 2022. The book's range is indeed impressive, with investigations of Soviet visual culture that include film, TV, and the popular press. Pride of place (for this reviewer) goes to the many reproductions of satirical cartoons from the USSR's most prominent and popular humorous magazine, Krokodil. The author is to be congratulated also for the sheer range of his sources, from literary texts to the cultural media, from discussions of films to their reception by the Party ideologues and the public, and from academic studies to archival and documentary materials. The book also contains almost eighty illustrations, either stills from films or reproductions of Krokodil cartoons, some of them very funny indeed.
Men out of Focus is structured around six chapters: Stalinist masculinity (the “positive hero”), two chapters that explore presentations of fatherhood, “the trouble with women,” and the portrayal of scientists, all of them male, of course. The final chapter provides an intriguing and innovative juxtaposition and comparative analysis of four Soviet films from the 1950s and 1960s, and films investigating similar themes and motifs from Poland, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Czechoslovakia, all of whom had their own “New Waves” in these years.
It is also to Professor Dumančić's great credit that he has unearthed a raft of documents reflecting the official Soviet and public perception of the “masculinity crisis” in these years, and he engages in extended and focused analysis of some little-known films, such as Grigorii Chukhrai's Clear Skies of 1961, Genrikh Oganesian's Three Plus Two of 1963, and Sergei Mikaelian's Into the Storm of 1965. The juxtaposition of films and their reception, against the background of public discussion of the issues involved (for instance, weak husbands and their grasping materialistic wives) is both fascinating and incisively analyzed.
The ultimate value of the book's thesis, often argued and demonstrated with painstaking attention to the myriad of sources, is its coupling of the public debate on masculinity with the Party's shifting ideological priorities, as the “soft” masculinity reflected in Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw is replaced by the return to the “hard” man under Leonid Brezhnev and the partial rehabilitation of Iosif Stalin. The detailed discussion of the resourceful Soviet spy Shtirlits (Stierlitz), who infiltrates the Nazi high command in the 1973 TV blockbuster The Seventeen Moments of Spring, is germane to this narrative, and analyzed in detail here.
On the negative side (and these are more quibbles than serious reservations), the book would have benefited from closer editing, with many misprints and some problems with English syntax and grammar, and the argument does tend to be repetitive in some places. The Index is just about adequate but not very helpful. Also, the “long sixties” is itself a problematic formulation, as the author concentrates his argument on the years 1953–1968 (the discussion of The Seventeen Moments of Spring notwithstanding), so the “extended Thaw” may have been more appropriate.
The book closes with a brief statement on Vladimir Putin's “remasculization of the post-Soviet cultural space” that refers back to the super-hero of Stalinist ideology, with the speculation that in the 1960s the “hypermasculine myths eventually give way to alternative models of masculinity” (263). The 2022 war in Ukraine should provide us with these alternatives, or show that these myths are doomed to self-destruct.
