Lost Soviet classic: Klimov's "Agony'

Every society— "open" no less than closed— has its own instruments of censorship. The late German scholar Herbert Marcuse made the point that free speech was one such device, since the ostensible right to speak was constrained by mechanisms of reception that certified the acceptable range of opinion and excluded everything outside it.

Official licensing systems are in some sense easier to work with (or evade). A public censor must permit something to pass, for the sake of propaganda if nothing else. This circumstance gives the artist in an authoritarian state a certain amount of leverage, even as it exposes him to an undeniable level of risk.

The history of Soviet censorship is thus at the same time a history of Russian art in the 20th Century. Under Stalin, it took the crudest of forms: simply eliminating the artist. In the long, gray years that succeeded him, works deemed unacceptable were simply shelved. This was the case with Elem Klimov's Agony, one of the most ambitious works of late Soviet cinema.

Even today, it's not quite clear what Klimov intended in this film, whose original cut doesn't survive. The "agony" of the title refers to Russia in 1916, the last year prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. The country was convulsed by the Great War, a struggle that had gone badly from the beginning and now presented Russia with a political as well as a military crisis.

Neither martyr not hero

Of course, from the Soviet perspective what was darkest preceded the dawn, and the last pre-revolutionary year offered no acceptable story line unless it segued into 1917, especially since the political principals of 1916— Tsar Nicholas II and his court confidant, the Siberian monk and faith healer Grigori Rasputin— were unmentionable except as objects of excoriation.

About Nicholas II nothing much can be said except that he was a tragically inadequate figure, caught in the toils of history. Nicholas receives a better press in post-Soviet Russia as a martyr, but no one will ever make him a hero.

As for Rasputin, he remains a byword for villainy. Dramatically speaking, of course, he is also fascinating: a combination of holy fool, shameless lecher, ruthless operator, and hypnotic charmer that not even a Dostoevsky could have dreamed up.

Rasputin's particular influence on the royal family lay in his uncanny ability— medically inexplicable even today— to stem bleeding in Nicholas's hemophiliac son. This talent bound the Tsarina Alexandra to him, and made his word, many feared, law in the household.

Since Nicholas was in fact the final authority in Russia, Rasputin's sway left the country in effect at the mercy of a man regarded by half the country as debauched and the other half as mad. This scandal undermined the monarchy more even than military defeat and mass hunger.

The Bolsheviks' crime

To make a film whose central characters were Nicholas and Rasputin, therefore, involved turning the spotlight on an officially discredited past. Nicholas couldn't have been portrayed sympathetically in the Soviet Union of the 1970s— Klimov made Agony between 1973 and 1975— without upending the narrative of the Bolshevik Revolution as the salvation of Russia from a decadent tyranny, and that narrative was necessary lest discussion revive about the original Bolshevik crime, the murder of the entire royal family in 1918.

Rasputin's story, similarly, raised issues about the persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church in an officially atheist state. A film like Agony, were it to have been made today, would have been viewed as straightforwardly anti-Bolshevik.

Sympathy for the Church

Agony in fact views the monarchy as Russia's core political institution, whose collapse portends the most devastating consequences. The Church, too, is presented sympathetically; in a critical scene, scandalized church elders entrap Rasputin and ritually beat and anathematize him. As for the Bolsheviks, they are simply absent from Agony, and in the one scene that alludes to them, their expulsion from the Duma is noted with wild applause.

To be sure, Agony provides an agitprop scene at the very end that references the revolution to come, but when that scene was added to the film is unclear. The real ending shows the royal family returning from Rasputin's funeral, and the Danish-born Alexandra, now deprived of her son's only protector, saying to Nicholas, "I hate this country."

That this film was banned in Brezhnev's Russia is wholly unsurprising; that it was made at all, and on an epic scale that clearly required substantial state resources, is the real mystery.

Debt to Eisenstein

What are we to make of Agony as a film? It owes a great deal to the Russian epic tradition of Eisenstein in particular, although some scenes convey a dreamy inwardness that appears to reflect the contemporary influence of the great Andrei Tarkovsky. The film intercuts stock period footage in black and white, some of it apparently reshot, with color scenes reminiscent of Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace.

The connection between scenes is often loose indeed, and Klimov indulges himself with apparent relish in Rasputin's debauches— as does his star, Alexei Petrenko, whose astonishing performance as Rasputin wholly dominates the film. There isn't really a relationship between Nicholas and Rasputin so much as a contrast, with Anatoly Romashin's tsar a decent family man completely overwhelmed by the circumstances closing in on him.

Klimov concentrates on close-up shots focused on the eyes: those of Rasputin mesmerizing, indomitable and more than a little mad, and Nicholas's reflecting, most often, bewilderment and blank fear. In one scene, Nicholas stops before a soldier on guard duty, who stares fixedly ahead— the tsar's gaze, of course, cannot be met. Only his wife and daughter return it, both with an icy contempt.

Prophetic cry

If there is a point in Klimov's pairing of these two men, it lies in what they apparently represent: in Rasputin, the anarchic impulses of Russia itself, and in Nicholas, the frailty of order. In Agony, the latter is clearly no match for the former, and if the film makes any political judgment it appears to be unspoken: that a Rasputin could be tamed only by a worse monster— namely, Stalin.

Klimov's film was finally cleared for general release in Russia by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Nicholas II of the Soviet Union. Klimov himself became first secretary of the Filmmakers' Union, a position he resigned in 1988 when the failure of perestroika became evident. The next year, the Berlin Wall fell. Klimov himself, who died in 2003, never made a film after the mid-1980s.

Agony, for all its flaws, remains his prophetic cry. Like Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, it portrays a time of troubles as emblematic of the national experience.

Will someone finally be able to make a film about Stalin's Great Terror of the '30s? Not, I suspect, on the watch of Vladimir Putin, the little tsar in half-boots. But Russians have long memories, and they are accustomed to nursing them.