Despite initial criticism of their first film, the musical comedies made during the 1930s by director Grigory Aleksandrov and composer Isaak Dunayevsky – Jolly Fellows (1934), Circus (1936), Volga-Volga (1938), and The Radiant Path (1940) – became highly-acclaimed examples of Soviet cinema (Volga-Volga was a personal favorite of Stalin’s). Aleksandrov and Dunayevsky were highly honored for their work, receiving the Stalin Prize in 1941 for Circus and Volga-Volga. Dunayevsky’s music, in particular, was continually cited for its “life-affirming robustness,” with the theme song from Circus eventually serving as both the call sign for Moscow radio and the unofficial Soviet national anthem until 1943. At the same time, these films were wildly and genuinely popular with Soviet audiences, also due in large part to Dunayevsky’s music, which benefited from the new technology of sound cinema to become some of the earliest and most widely disseminated Soviet popular music. What formula had Aleksandrov and Dunayevsky hit upon in their films and music that made them so successful in the eyes and ears of both the authorities and the masses? How could entertainment cinema and popular music be reconciled with Soviet ideology and its official artistic doctrine of socialist realism?

I suggest in this dissertation that it was a turn to the American-style film musical that enabled Aleksandrov and Dunayevsky to achieve this balance. One of the film musical’s defining characteristics is the ability of music to temporarily take over the image track, causing a reversal of the traditional audio-visual hierarchy and the creation of utopian spaces in which the deepest personal aspirations of the characters can be expressed most clearly. Such continual collapsing of the real and the ideal allows the film musical, in turn, to do some sort of ideological work. Using the four films mentioned above as case studies, I argue that this process can be seen as a particularly powerful metaphor for socialist realism, which aimed to aestheticize life by conflating the Soviet present with the utopian “coming attractions of socialism.” Additionally, in proposing that each film attempted to work out some fundamental dichotomy associated with Soviet ideology via the adaptation of American popular film and musical styles, my analysis offers a nuanced understanding of how this genre presented Soviet audiences of the 1930s with a reflexive lens through which to comprehend the modernizing goals of their society. In this way, the dissertation opens up new perspectives on the intersections between music, cinema, society, ideology, and modernity.