The cult musical-comedy film “Stilyagi,” from 2008, follows the lives of a young group of Muscovites and their love for Western culture. One of the main characters, Polly, gives birth to a mixed-race baby boy. Actual statistics on mixed race births after the festival, however, are difficult to find. A handful of studies all proved futile. “Clearly there were some children who emerged from that, but nothing like what the popular sensibility suggests,” Roth-Ey said.
A multicultural union
For many Russians looking back on the 1957 festival today, deti festivalya are evidence of Soviet internationalism and racial tolerance. “My Russian friends and colleagues point to those liaisons as proof that the Soviet Union was a racially tolerant country,” Raquel Greene, assistant professor of Russian at Grinnell College, told The Moscow Times.
The early Soviet Union presented itself as a champion of multiculturalism, in opposition to the racism and nationalism that Soviet authorities said was rampant in the capitalist United States.
Experts who spoke to The Moscow Times pointed to the 1936 film “Tsirk” as one of the strongest illustrations of this. In the film, a white American woman named Marion Dixon comes to Moscow with her black baby. Having fled bigotry in the United States, Dixon decides to stay in the Soviet Union with her child.
After Stalin came to power, however, things changed. In 1947, the Soviet authorities passed a decree banning marriages between Soviet citizens and foreigners. Upon Stalin’s death in 1953 the law was reversed, but the prejudices that informed it remained, targeting women in particular. “Women are seen — cross-culturally — as the embodiment or repository of the nation’s honor,” Roth-Ey explained. “It’s not unique to the Soviet Union and it’s not unique to Russian culture.”