Soviet culture and foreign policy from the Cambridge history of Russia, volume 3

Culture, 1900-1945

JAMES VON GELDERN

Russian culture in the first two decades of the twentieth century came under influences that could be found in most European cultures. New audiences transformed taste cultures. The decline ofmonarchies and ascent ofindustrial capitalism made art patrons of the bourgeoisie.[1] Modern technology turned the lower classes into a mass audience. Aristocratic arts institutions faced competition from new organisations, many of them private and open to the general public. Cultural life reached social groups once excluded on the basis of class or nationality. The fast-paced, fragmented life of the modern city insinuated itself into all art forms, from the cinema to painting and poetry, and artists struggled to create satisfying art forms from the chaos of modern life.[2]

Russian culture was also influenced by circumstances distinct from other cultures. The first was the intelligentsia, a self-defined class of educated people who sustained social and cultural life under the profoundly undemocratic conditions of tsarism.[3] The second was the October Revolution, which sepa­rated Russia from European cultures after 1917, and fundamentally reconfig­ured the cultural life of the country The Bolsheviks considered themselves heirs to the great tradition of the intelligentsia when they seized power on 25 October 1917. As an underground party before the revolution, they had organised the working masses by propaganda and education. After the revolu­tion, they used the resources ofthe state to foster an entirely new consciousness in Soviet citizens, particularly those who came of age after they took power.

Few would argue the reach of this cultural programme, though many would dispute the quality of the transformation and the benefits gained by the Soviet people.

If the Bolsheviks felt themselves heirs to the great tradition, others consid­ered them betrayers of the tradition. A deep split had begun to appear within the intelligentsia around the dawn ofthe twentieth century, as materialists and idealists forwarded alternative versions of the intelligentsia mission. Radical materialists devoted their attention to the sciences or politics as most promis­ing for the betterment of humanity. Some of the most undeviating adherents of materialism could be found in the revolutionary underground, including Vladimir Ul'ianov (Lenin). Other members of the artistic intelligentsia found this unswerving commitment to social change commendable but sterile. They sought a better life in the refined beauty of artistic creation, and their search to recover the unique power of art constitutes the opening chapter of twentieth- century Russian culture.

Modernism had many manifestations and inspirations in Russia and cannot be traced to a single source or moment.[4] A figure who inspired the respect of many, who stood as a symbol of integrity and transcendent talent and whose birth as an artist coincided with the birth of the century was the poet Aleksandr Blok.[5] His first published collection, Verses on a Beautiful Lady (Stikhi o prekrasnoi dame) (1904), was greeted by older Symbolist poets as an embodiment of their movement, yet Blok stood beyond any specific movement, and spoke to many different readers. His was a poetic world beyond material reality, of ideals that could never be fully expressed and would be destroyed by engagement with everyday life. Though his ethereal early verses were distant from social issues, Blok never turned his back on the world around him. He responded to the social upheavals of his day with poems of urgent foreboding, most remarkably The Twelve (Dvenadtsat') (1918), one of the first artistic responses to the October Revolution. Taken by Bolsheviks to be a paean to the revolution, Blok's poem was, much like Andrei Belyi's modernist novel Petersburg (1916), an ambivalent recognition of social turmoil, and an attempt to find value in it. The unmatchable lyric power of Blok's verse and his faithfulness to his vision served as inspiration to later generations who suffered under the Soviet regime. He insisted that artistic vision gave the clearest view of the future and stayed faithful to his singular genius by avoiding political allegiance.

Organised cultural life in Imperial Russia was dominated by the autocracy until late in the nineteenth century. The Romanov dynasty lavishly supported the performing arts, as with the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow or the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, and it sponsored the Academy of Art and schools that discovered and trained Russia's immense artistic talent. The theatre monopoly guaranteed that Russia's finest talents performed on the imperial stages, and produced a performing tradition in drama, opera and ballet that achieved first- rank status in Europe. The imperial grip on the arts world loosened early in the twentieth century When the theatre monopoly was lifted in 1882, private theatres appeared, such as the Korsh Theatre, Aleksandr Tairov's Chamber Theatre, and the Moscow Art Theatre, home to Konstantin Stanislavsky and his productions of Chekhov's plays.[6] In the visual arts, private art schools, such as the Moscow Art School, introduced young artists to the modernist trends sweeping Europe, and patrons from merchant families, such as the Mamon- tovs, Morozovs, Shchukins and Tret'iakovs encouraged new directions. These factors and relaxed censorship allowed for a nascent public sphere that freed aesthetic achievement from the narrow tastes of the ruling class. Art could operate according to its own rules, without support from the autocracy or permission from the censor.

The pre-revolutionary capitals of St Petersburg and Moscow offered artists, writers and performers a community in which they mingled intimately and stayed abreast of new developments around the world. They mixed in the same cafes, theatres and private salons, and drew inspiration from each other's work. Poets discovered new techniques in painting; theatre directors looked to poets for new language; painters sought inspiration in the theatre. Infor­mal venues accommodated a greater range of tastes than imperial institutions had. These included nightclubs such as the St Petersburg Stray Dog, the kapust- nik improvisational evenings at the Moscow Art Theatre, or the Wednesday evening literary salons in the 'Tower' apartment of poet Viacheslav Ivanov. The Symbolists organised journals such as The Golden Fleece, Scales or Apollo.[7]

Aleksandr Benois of the World of Art organised yearly art exhibits starting in 1899, which evolved into international exhibitions promoted by Sergei Diag- ilev. Diagilev's creation of the Ballets Russes in 1909 exported the choreography of Mikhail Fokin, the dancing of Vaslav Nijinsky, and later the music of Igor Stravinsky to Paris and beyond, in such productions as Firebird and Petrushka (see Plate 2).[8]

The visual arts were perhaps most fractured by competing artistic pro­grammes. Pre-war years saw the Academy and the now influential World of Art challenged by a dizzying array of groups, including Rayonists led by Mikhail Larionov and Suprematists led by Kazimir Malevich. Other artists, including Vasilii Kandinsky, Pavel Filonov, Nataliia Goncharova and Vladimir Tatlin, seemed to defy group definition. The ultimate impact of Russian mod­ernism was not in its organisations, but in the achievements of its brilliant artists, and their legacy to the next generation of artists, whose fate was to encounter the October Revolution at the moment of their maturity.[9]

Many modernists thought of their art as addressing social concerns. Yet it was apparent that the audience for modernist art did not go far beyond the edu­cated classes, and that the lower classes, who did not possess much leisure time or spare income, were largely indifferent to their work. These lower classes were not, as many supposed, lacking in cultural stimulation. The invention of new technologies, such as the gramophone, cinema and mass typogra­phy exposed more consumers to cultural expression than ever before. Cheap printing spurred a boom market in paperback detective stories, robber tales, romantic love stories, sometimes even light pornography.[10] The gramophone, which could be purchased for the home or listened to in a public parlour, brought music to listeners who could not afford imperial theatres, music halls or beer gardens. Such luminaries of the imperial stage as opera singer Fedor Chaliapin became popular recording stars, as did cafes chantants and vari­ety singers, such as Nadezhda Plevitskaia, Varia Panina, Anastasia Vial'tseva. The Russian film industry, dominated by foreign companies before the First

World War, boomed when the war isolated the country and created domestic opportunities for Russian studios. By 1917, directors such as Petr Chardynin, Vladimir Gardin, Iakov Protazanov and Evgenii Bauer were presenting view­ers with distinctive Russian views of life and history, played by recognisable stars such as Ivan Mozzhukhin and Vera Kholodnaia.[11]

Popular culture was produced by profit-making enterprises, which varied from small family-owned printing presses to the large movie studios. All were subject to the marketplace and responsive to the changing tastes of the popular audience. Disdained by the arbiters of elite culture, popular culture encour­aged literacy, exposed audiences to a variety of music, and in the cinema, exposed them to unknown worlds. Lower-class consumers did not seem to share the intelligentsia's assumption that culture need be edifying to be worth­while. In its sensationalism, popular culture often exposed audiences to social trends ignored by other art forms. Sensational crime stories often revealed the social tensions underlying violence. Sexual innuendo and scandal-mongering encouraged the creation of independent female characters, who in their search for passion transgressed once impenetrable social barriers. Anastasia Verbit- skaia, writer of the best-selling novel Keys to Happiness (Kliuchi shchastiia), and Count Amori (Ippolit Rapgof), wildly successful writer of film scenarios, were two of the many signs that women and non-Russian nationalities were becom­ing part of Russian culture.[12]

The Bolsheviks showed a great capacity to exploit cultural change when they seized power. The years following the war probably would have seen tremendous cultural innovations even without the Bolsheviks, as was the case in Europe and the United States. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks made the lower classes the ultimate client of culture. Their long-term policy was to turn cultural institutions to the advantage of the new ruling classes.

Soon after taking power, the Bolsheviks launched an ambitious cultural pro­gramme that ran counter to the extremely limited means at their disposal. The policy, executed by the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) and its leader, Anatolii Lunacharskii, relied on the extensive seizure and nationalisa­tion of existing cultural institutions, and on a much smaller and unco-ordinated effort to create new institutions.¹³ The first enterprises to fall under Bolshe­vik power were printing presses.¹⁴ The monopoly on the press, a policy that history has come to associate with the Bolsheviks, came about haphazardly, without a programmatic decision from the party. The two revolutions of 1917 had given birth to a vigorous and diverse press. By early 1918 few non-Bolshevik newspapers were open, and they were subject to strict censorship and closed when their criticisms became too acute. One newspaper to be closed was New Life (Novaia zhizn), edited by Lenin's friend and political sympathiser Maxim Gorky, perhaps the most popular living writer in Russia.¹⁵ Similar actions took place in other institutions inherited from the Old Regime, including imperial theatres, universities, art and music academies. Employees of these institutions had once been members of the privileged elite, and resented their new masters bitterly. It would take several years to bring the institutions under control, a decade in the case of some universities.

Chaos often overwhelmed signs of health and vigour. The economic catas­trophes that accompanied the civil war destroyed much of the productive capacity of cultural institutions. Popular education was in disarray, leaving a generation for whom culture, even literacy, was an unattainable luxury. Deep divisions appeared among artists and institutions about the fundamental pur­pose of art. Before the revolution most artists could, despite their differences, agree that artistic expression had some purposes entirely apart from social progress. The Bolsheviks did not agree. They came to power convinced that culture, politics and society are part of a great whole, infused with the same spirit. It was unimaginable to them that the political and cultural life of a country could function on opposing principles, that the state could pursue a socialist agenda while cultural life was determined by the dictates of the market.¹⁶

The hope that revolution would liberate the working class to create its own culture had been cherished before the revolution. Some counted on the

13 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of the Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts Under Lunacharsky, October 1917-1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

14 Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917­1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

15 Maxim Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917­1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

16 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

so-called 'worker-intellectuals' (samouchki, or self-taught intellectuals), uncom­mon men from the working and lower-middle classes who by force of will found time in their hard lives to read and write. The first worker-intellectuals had become visible in the 1870s, and by the turn of the century, there was a significant body of literature by these men.[13] Aleksandr Bogdanov, a doc­tor, philosopher, economist and leading Bolshevik thinker, proposed another model of working-class culture. As described in the science fiction classic Red- Star (Krasnaia zvezda) (1908), Bogdanov's vision was one in which work and leisure merged into one, and art reflected the deep-seated principles of free­dom and equality. Bogdanov believed that the proletariat could not properly exploit political power before it possessed socialist consciousness, disagreeing with Lenin, who believed that socialist culture could not be created before political power was in proletarian hands. While the Bolsheviks were planning insurrection in the autumn of 1917, Bogdanov and colleagues were creating a cultural network that came to be called Proletkul't.[14] At its peak, the network encompassed over a thousand clubs throughout Russia with a hundred thou­sand members, most devoted to basic instruction in writing, theatre and the arts. The central leadership of the movement followed an ambitious agenda that claimed to be the sole arm ofproletarian cultural management, supersed­ing the state. When the Bolsheviks consolidated their power at the conclusion of the civil war, Proletkul't became an impediment to unified state manage­ment. Lenin himselfdevoted considerable energy to reining in the movement, so that by 1921 its influence was greatly diminished. No fully autonomous pro­letarian cultural organisation ever again arose in the Soviet Union.

A more immediate need in the years of revolution was to mobilise pop­ular support, by means of agitation, propaganda and education. The classic distinction of agitation and propaganda belongs to Lenin. According to him, agitation was a short-term activity that informed the masses of tasks for the immediate future and enlisted them on the side of progress. Propaganda was instructive and enlightening, aimed at establishing deeper understanding of the goals of the revolution.[15] Agitation was essential during the revolution, for it allowed the Bolsheviks to recruit the worker masses into the Red Guard and Red Army, and to defeat better-situated opponents. Many Bolshevik lead­ers had been underground journalists and were masterful communicators.

When the newsprint shortage and a transport crisis made communication difficult, they devised ingenious new methods. ROSTA (Russian Telegraph Agency), the first Soviet press agency, hired artists in a number of large cities to produce posters on current events in a popular cartoon style presenting the Bolshevik point of view. The army and Narkompros organised so-called agit-trains. Staffed by journalists, actors, orators and leading members of the government, agit-trains would typically arrive in a town or village, interview local Bolsheviks (if there were any) and residents, write up their findings into a newspaper that was printed aboard the train and then show a movie in the evening. A visible presence could be decisive in bringing locals over to the Bolshevik cause.

Though instrumental in the civil war effort, agitation could not serve the Bolsheviks' long-term needs. Strapped for funds upon conclusion of the war and with an economy in ruins, the government undertook to create a new Soviet consciousness. Schools were rebuilt in villages and towns, and new teachers hired to teach children who, in many cases, had not seen school for five years. The Commissariat of Enlightenment issued new curricula based on the progressive education theories of John Dewey, embodied by the ele­mentary school curriculum borrowed from Dalton, Massachusetts. A reality of under-educated and overworked teachers with poor facilities meant that many reforms were never realised. In higher education, curricular reform was complicated by ambitious programmes to recruit working-class students, who never before had access to higher learning. Rabfaks (worker faculties) were cre­ated to prepare these students for the rigours of study, laying the ground for years of conflict between students and their professors, most of whom still hailed from the privileged classes. Tensions grew throughout the 1920s until finally a new generation of younger 'Red' professors replaced older faculty

members. [16]

The belief that Soviet Russia would breed new forms of culture based on new forms of social life was borne out only partially. The cultural life of most Russians was vastly different by the mid-i920s from what it had been in the final years of the Romanov dynasty. The face of art had changed as well. Artists spoke with a voice unimaginable before the revolution, and in the voices of people - above all the urban working class - silent under the Old Regime. New, revolutionary art forms represented the fragmented consciousness of modern urban life and its hostility to traditional ruling norms. The need to respond to new realities, to find new purposes for art, to appeal to a new audience and even to find a new language or mode of expression caused an unrivalled outburst of creative activity.

Writers discovered that the revolution had remade the very stuff of their work, the Russian language. The coherent social structures that had been the foundation of the Russian novel had disappeared, and prose writers retreated to shorter fragmentary forms. Although writers produced very little of lasting value during the revolution, they responded with a burst of innovative prose in the early 1920s. Readers who preferred a traditional narrative found the civil war experience related in Chapaev (1923), a novel by Dmitrii Furmanov, who had himself served the real Chapaev as commissar. In Cement (1925), Fedor Gladkov gave readers a working-class hero who fought in the civil war and returned to civilian life to reconstruct a local cement factory. These two novels, whose heroes and narratives conformed in many ways to the classic literary canon, were later declared forerunners of the official Soviet literary style, socialist realism.[17] Aleksei Tolstoy published the first two volumes of his trilogy Road to Calvary (Khozhdeniepo mukam), which chronicled the tortured path of a well-born intellectual through the revolution.

The realistic narratives of these and other writers were challenged by a strong element ofmodernism in Soviet literature. Fragmented narrative styles were well suited for a time when prevailing social structures had broken down. Isaak Babel' 's compact tales of the civil war, published under the title of Red Cavalry (Konarmiia), provided classic heroes of bravery and natural grace, but disconcerted readers by describing unjustifiable acts of brutality. Boris Pil'niak's Naked Year (Golyi god) (1921) reflected the era through a town seemingly unaware of the revolution, whose residents slowly succumb to its dislocations. His prose seems plotless and fragmentary, and his language heterogeneous, as if overwhelmed by new words and ideas. A more comic approach to social change was found in the feuilletons of Mikhail Zoshchenko, an enormously popular writer of the NEP era. Set loose in booming urban centres, his narrators and characters absorbed the new language of Soviet Russia without fully understanding it, producing comic malapropisms that cut to the heart of the new Soviet consciousness.

The poetic heirs of Aleksandr Blok and the Symbolists were many and diverse, and they met the revolution with responses ranging from hostility to welcome. Though he had sought to uncover ineffable truths with his verse, Blok's legacy lay equally in changes he brought to Russian poetic language and form. Blok was able to weave ideal beauty and the coarseness of mod­ern urban life into a single poetic form. He perceived and responded to the storm gathering over Russian society in such poems as The Field ofKulikovo (Na pole Kulikovom) (1908) and Retribution (Vozmezdie) (1910-21). Poets responded to his challenge either by seeking a new balance for modern verse, as classi­cal verse had once possessed, or by created a fragmented, unbalanced poetic form appropriate to modern life. The poetic ideal once created by Pushkin featured a harmonic expressive control; modern poets no longer had such a world to describe. Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky sought inspiration in a non-standard sources, including popu­lar urban ditties called chastushki, and introduced new and sometimes vul­gar words into the poetic lexicon, to yield a new range of expressive abil­ities. They grabbed readers' attention with public scandals and manifestos that included A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu), published by David Burliuk, Aleksandr Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov in 1913.[18] The Futurist taste for urban modernism contrasted with the classical balance sought by Acmeists, a group organised by Nikolai Gumilev, whose most elegant voices would be Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandel'shtam.

The October Revolution saw young poets respond in a number of ways. Mayakovsky declared the revolution to be his own and dedicated his work to its cause. The younger Boris Pasternak was far more ambivalent towards the revo­lution. Marina Tsvetaeva rejected the revolution and wrote from the Paris emi­gration. Each found in modernism a fragmentation of metre, rhyme and the poetic line that corresponded to their emotional needs and social experience. Each developed an intensely personal style and lyrical voice. Mayakovsky's claim that poetry was obliged to participate in social change proved fertile in his case, but did not hold true for all. The revolution demanded that literature change with the times. Yet time has proven the value of poetry that culti­vated its own values, arranging words in musical patterns and bringing out the distinct and fundamental meaning of language. Poets who gathered under the banner of Acmeism, most prominently Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam, answered to these tasks. Refusing to march with the times, never ignoring the world around them, both Akhmatova and Mandel'shtam wrote verse of tremendous gravity and integrity.[19]

Their fates would be tragic, depriving Russia of one of its greatest poetic generations. Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921 for alleged con­spiratorial activities. Lyrical poet Sergei Esenin committed suicide in 1925. Mayakovsky killed himself in 1929. Mandel'shtam would be swallowed by the prison camps in the 1930s, and is believed to have died in 1938. Tsvetaeva even­tually returned to an alien Soviet Russia in 1939 and would commit suicide in 1941. Pasternak, whose intense lyricism had little place in Soviet literature after 1934, found refuge in secondary work such as translations. Only after the Second World War did he begin work on his novel Doctor Zhivago, which eventually brought him the Nobel Prize. Akhmatova's personal, salon poetry proved the most capable of bearing witness to the times. Akhmatova suffered tragedy when ex-husband Gumilev was shot in 1921, and their son Lev was imprisoned twice in the 1930s. Her Requiem and Poem without a Hero (Poema bezgeroia), written in these years and not published till many years later, are in their gravity and control of language the most eloquent testaments to the years of purge and war.

Organisational questions loomed large for other art forms. Music and the­atre involve complex issues of financing and distribution; cinema requires a vast investment in technology. Artists cannot work alone in these art forms, and during the revolution they needed to establish a positive relationship with the state to continue work. State-financed theatres found relations with the new rulers problematic from the start. The Bolsheviks and former imperial theatres both entered the relationship with the assumption that ballet, opera and other performing arts were inherently elitist. Opera and ballet, which required a sophisticated audience, years of intense training and the budget for several lavish productions a year, seemed unsustainable in a proletarian state. Only the foresight and tremendous patience of Lunacharskii saved the enterprises, and allowed for the eventual incorporation of the imperial arts into the Soviet pantheon. In the first years of Soviet rule, the imperial theatres seemed bent on defying Soviet power. Beginning with strikes in 1917, and then refusing to adjust the repertory to the tastes of the new audiences, the theatres could find no viable artistic path in Soviet society. Narkompros found itself responsible not only for former imperial theatres, but for theatres that had been privately run under the old regime, most prominently the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT).[20] The repertory of MKhAT changed little after 1917, featur­ing the same plays by Chekhov, Gorky, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which seemed somewhat irrelevant after 1917. Bewildered by the new realities of the theatre world, Stanislavsky took his troupe into a long period of touring abroad that ended only in 1922. Meanwhile, the banner of change in revolutionary Russia had to be carried by his former student, and later director of the imperial Alek- sandrinsky Theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had the audacity to proclaim an 'October in the Theatre' in 1918.[21]

Independent of the avant-garde, and sometimes independent of the prole­tarian state, popular culture underwent fundamental change in the years of the New Economic Policy.[22] Members of the working classes who had seen military action or had served in emergency economic conditions during the war now had more leisure time to devote to culture, and possessed a small por­tion of disposable income. There was a vigorous working press in the capitals and provincial cities. Inexpensive editions of Russian classics were available, and competed for audiences with contemporary literary works. Trade unions, factories and military units gained cheap access to tickets for state-financed theatres, including the once-exclusive imperial theatres. Technologies such as the gramophone, cinema and radio brought culture to the darkest corners of the country.

Despite the wealth of native cultural sources for Soviet Russians, the decade saw a flood of foreign cultural imports, including the same American jazz and movies that were flooding Europe. Jazz music found native adherents such as Leonid Utesov and Aleksandr Tsfasman, whose bands remained popular for decades. Utesov went on to stardom in movie musicals. For all the suc­cess of imports, the borrowings were not suited to the ideological purposes of Soviet culture. In fact, jazz would come under heavy restrictions in the 1930s.[23] A more amenable tactic was to graft socialist content onto native cul­tural tradition. Examples could be found in music, where the so-called 'cruel romance' was recycled, as in Pavel German's 'Brick Factory' (1922), a story of working-class woe and redemption.[24] In literature, writers adapted popular genres such as the detective story, known as the 'Pinkerton tale' in Russian. Marietta Shaginian's Mess-Mend (Mess-Mend, ili Ianki v Petrograde) (1924) fea­tured proletarian detectives who foil a plot by world capitalists to depose the Soviet government. Such work was often successful with audiences, yet crit­ics from the proletarian Left claimed that any work adopted from capitalist cultures could never reflect proletarian consciousness.

No cultural form presented greater competition from the capitalist world, or more opportunity to create distinctly Soviet forms, than the cinema. The movie business requires tremendous investment and organisational support for training, production and distribution. The greater part of the movie indus­try fled Russia after the October Revolution, taking with it equipment, film stock and a generation of actors, scriptwriters and directors. Faced with rebuild- ingthe movie industry from scratch, and a recognition that cinema would allow the party to spread its message across the country, Lunacharskii established a film school in 1921 that, starting with almost nothing, would soon train a generation of masterful cinematographers and directors. Soviet cinema in the early 1920s faced overwhelming competition from Western imports, particu­larly American films. Stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were proving irresistible to Russian audiences. In response, the young Soviet film industry experimented with the action format. Lev Kuleshov's The Extraordi­nary Adventures of Mr West in the Land ofthe Bolsheviks (Neobychainyeprikliucheniia Mistera Vesta v strane bol'shevikov) (1924) told the story of an American visitor to Moscow swindled by a gang of thieves and rescued by honest Soviet police. The message of proletarian virtue and capitalist trickery was relieved by stunts and chases worthy of an American movie.[25]

Soviet film avoided the Hollywood star system by developing a corpo­rate or collective production system. Film studios commissioned work from scriptwriters and directors, and supervised production to ensure ideological responsibility. Actors worked at the behest of the director, who became the focal point of the cinematic creative process. A generation of young directors came of age in the 1920s, producing films of aesthetic daring that they believed embodied the Soviet point of view. The Kinoglaz (Film-Eye) series of newsreel director Dziga Vertov coupled the non-fiction format with aggressive editing techniques to present viewers with a world of socialist values. Directors of the fictional or artistic film followed Kuleshov's lead, coupling action techniques with revolutionary values. Working on state commissions, Sergei Eisenstein created Strike (Stachka) (1924) and Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin) (1925), which attracted the attention of critics around the world. Dedicated to events from the tsarist past, the films used action techniques to create vivid images of class struggle. Expressive camera angles and visual metaphors, and editing techniques based on a grammar of conflicting images forced view­ers to become active interpreters of events. The films of Vsevolod Pudovkin often concerned the same eras and events, and boasted the same power of persuasion. His Mother (Mat') (1926) and The End of St Petersburg (Konets Sankt- Peterburga) (1927) offered scenes of great violence and revolutionary passion. Pudovkin's editing aimed not at disquieting audiences, as Eisenstein's did, but at providing viewers with a coherent vision of the past.

The moderate policies nurtured by Lunacharskii ensured that Soviet cul­ture under NEP was rich and layered, offering something to many tastes.[26]Adherents could point with pride to advances in the cinema, to the verses of Mayakovsky or plays of Meyerhold, to the vigorous worker club movement. Perhaps their greatest triumph was unprecedented access ofthe proletariat to culture. Critics who rejected the revolution or felt that art must follow its own path could find solace in the splendid outburst of poetry, in the riches of the art world, in the splendid new theatre productions by directors such as Tairov and Evgenii Vakhtangov, by the reinvigorated opera and ballet companies of the former imperial theatres.[27] They could even read the rich flow of novels and poetry being produced by Russian emigres in Paris and Berlin.[28] Social ferment ensured a lively and sometime ferocious debate on cultural issues.

Moderate policies ensured that many modes of cultural expression received state support. In practice the Bolsheviks accepted the same cultural hierarchies that radical Leftists would make the primary target of revolution. Despite the obvious disloyalty of their staffs during the revolution, the former imperial the­atres received lavish funding. The theatres responded by bringing their work to working-class audiences and creating a new repertory that tried to respond to revolutionary thematics. Still, much in the ballet and opera harked back to an aesthetic identified with imperial society.[29] Other innately conservative organisations, such as the musical conservatories and arts academies, contin­ued to receive generous support, undergoing periodic outbursts of internal reform in which the state was as likely as not to support the forces of continuity. Institutions of higher education were still dominated by faculties trained long before the revolution, a situation that grew tense as the worker faculties brought more and more students radicalised by the revolution into univer­sities. Younger people who felt that the revolution had been accomplished in their name found themselves marginalised within many Soviet institutions. Many devoted their energies to building secondary cultural organisations that seemed insignificant within the diversity of the 1920s, but would later mount a powerful assault against prevailing orthodoxies. Institutions that provided refuge for cultural radicals included local branches of the Komsomol, worker clubs and newspapers that gave space to worker correspondents (rabkors), who reported on local working-class affairs and whose exposes of local corruption were so trenchant that several were murdered.

The fate of two independent proletarian organisations that came to dom­inate cultural life in the late 1920s illustrates the dynamics of the 'Cultural Revolution', the radicalisation and subordination of culture to the party that was initiated in the late 1920s.[30] Artists and critics claimingto speakforthe work­ing class created the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) and Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). They insisted on pursuing a narrowly proletarian agenda in the arts, and succeeded for several years dur­ing the First Five-Year Plan when the state gave members control of institutions of training, publication and production. The proletarians demanded that art present party agendas and proclaim the slogans of the day. They insisted that only workers could create a proletarian art (this despite the non-proletarian background of many RAPP and RAPM members). Above all they worked to excise certain forms of culture that betrayed bourgeois or aristocratic origins. Noble-born literary classics such as Pushkin and Tolstoy were declared out of date. Lyric poetry and the realist novel were to be replaced by so-called 'pro­duction' novels, which describe the industrial process as experienced by the working class.[31] Folk music, popular urban songs, jazz and most forms of clas­sical music were no longer supported, and some were actively attacked. The tumult that accompanied the rise to power of RAPP and RAPM was replicated in theatres, editorial offices and educational institutions across the country. There was a dismal fall-off of artistic production in all branches of culture, and a wrenching turnover of personnel. Experienced creators and administrators were silenced or removed from office, and classics disappeared from stages and library shelves. Much of this activity took place in the years 1928-33, which coincided with radicalisation of Soviet social life. These were the years of the First Five-Year Plan, and of the collectivisation of agriculture.[32]

Just as it grew wary of policies that alienated common citizens from Soviet power, the party cooled towards proletarian arts organisations. Soviet lead­ers sought to stabilise cultural life in ways that would allow them to work productively with the 'creative intelligentsia' (as the artistic world came to be known in Soviet parlance) and to win back audiences alienated by radical art forms. Two new policies became the foundation of the state arts administra­tion. The first was the creation of trade unions for creative artists, initially in literature, then in music and the visual arts. The unions allowed party and non-party artists to normalise their professional lives, including the commis­sion and payment for their work. The second was the enunciation of an official Soviet aesthetic, called socialist realism, which rapidly became obligatory for all artistic expression.[33]

Socialist realism was declared the reigning method of Soviet literature at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Defined by Maxim Gorky as a continuation ofthe Russian realist tradition, the doctrine was infused with the ideology and optimism of socialism. Socialist realism was best characterised by the watchwords accessibility (dostupnost'), the spirit ofthe people (narodnost'), and the spirit of the party (partiinost'). Joseph Stalin provided an authoritative if vague formulation when he stated that socialist realism was 'socialist in content, national in form'. Writers were wise not to use fancy language, artists and composers not to be too refined in their techniques. The subjects and heroes of these works were usually uncomplicated, reliable and their politics predictable (if not always the core of the tale). Such works could be entertaining, as was Iurii Krymov's Tanker Derbent (1938), an adventure tale that hinged on an undisciplined crew brought together by their Communist captain. Socialist realism was unique only in that it was the sole method endorsed by the state. Soviet critics would have denied that this was new. Other ruling classes - the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie - had enforced establishment aesthetics through sponsorship and taste. Of course the proletariat would do the same.

Proclaimed as a unitary method, socialist realism tookmany different forms depending on the time, the artistic medium and the national culture in which it was created.[34] A form of socialist realism fashionable at the time of its establishment was the so-called production novel. An example of the genre was Valentin Katayev's Time Forward! (Vremia vpered) (1932), in which young workers attempt to build a gigantic steel plant in record time. Painters pro­duced monumental canvases celebrating the First and Second Five-Year Plans. Music was a more difficult medium, since there is nothing inherently realistic in musical composition. Prescribed methods of socialist realism in all media underwent frequent changes as party factions shifted. At all times the going description was proclaimed to be permanent, rooted in Marxism-Leninism and official. Writers, even loyal and servile writers, found it challenging to follow the line. Soviet culture was riddled with examples of canonic writers being forced to rewrite their work to conform to changing standards. Fedor Gladkov, author of Cement, and Aleksandr Fadeev, chairman of the Writers' Union and author ofthe classic Rout (Razgrom)(1927) and Young Guard (Molodaia gvardia) (1945) were forced into rewrites that changed the style of their works entirely.

The Writers' Union regularised the business of literature, providing its mem­bers with a dependable living.[35] A writer who submitted to its authority would enjoy a variety ofperquisites. The Union distributed assignments to journalists, controlled which house published which books and doled out foreign delica­cies, designer clothing and even the highly sought country homes (dachas). To be a non-member meant not to be published. By the time of the First Congress, control of printing, distribution, publishing, radio, film and theatre had been firmly centralised, giving the party Central Committee absolute power of veto. The Writers' Union served as model for the other creative unions (Cinematographic Workers, Actors, Artists) that were soon established.

While it is apparent in retrospect that these policies were the tools with which the government regimented the arts, it is important to understand why artists in the years 1932-4 might have greeted them with relief. When journals, museums and theatres, arts academies and other cultural institutions fell under the control of the self-proclaimed proletarians, artists found that to sell their work, they must submit to humiliating review by critics with low aesthetic but high political standards. Often these standards were arbitrary and depended on which administrator was in charge. Many artists eventually found it impossible to make a living. The unions and socialist realism regularised commissions and standards of review, and guaranteed payment for artistic work. While the life of a creative artist was very tenuous at the outset of the 1930s, life for a successful artist was extremely profitable by the end of the decade, placing artists among the wealthiest citizens in the land of socialism. Few seemed bothered by the silencing, imprisonment or even death of artists. For the consumers of culture, who had suffered through a long period in which few new movies or books emerged, the policies boded an outburst of culture for popular tastes. Though a good deal of the work labelled socialist realism was mediocre, the decade witnessed a steady stream of literature, movies and popular songs that are read, viewed and sung with great pleasure even today. And since a watchword of the aesthetic was accessibility, all of it was perfectly understandable and enjoyable for the mass consumer.

Socialist realism, first formulated by writers and promulgated by the Writ­ers' Union, was very much a literary principle. It called for clarity of language and narrative, simplicity and steadfastness of character, and a forthright polit­ical stance. For a brief few years in the middle of the 1930s, the seeming impracticality of the method gave artists great latitude, particularly in popular music and the cinema. The film industry, restructured into a new organisation called Soiuzkino and headed by Boris Shumiatskii, took as its goal the creation of a popular, self-financing film industry. Shumiatskii felt that the aesthetically ambitious films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kuleshov, as well as the younger Aleksandr Dovzhenko, had alienated the common Soviet spectator. The box office bore him out to a degree. Shumiatskii demanded films that were 'acces­sible', enjoyable and entertaining. Although political fidelity was still a must, it soon became clear that politics would yield to fun as the primary mission.[36]

Two films of 1934 carried the banner of the new cinema. The first bore the name of Furmanov's 1923 novel Chapaev. The novel depicted Chapaev as a simple soldier, brave and charismatic but politically untutored. Under the guidance ofhis commissar, he gradually understands the cause he instinctively supports, and teaches his undisciplined troops the primacy of the cause over the individual. On the silver screen, Chapaev's rough-cut personality, full of grand gestures and petty foibles, became the main draw. The second hit of 1934 was Happy-Go-Lucky Fellows (Veselye rebiata), directed by Grigorii Aleksandrov. Travelling to Hollywood in 1930-2 as Eisenstein's assistant director, Aleksan­drov had seen how the musical film could exploit the new talking medium and win a mass audience. He set about creating the Soviet musical, and selected Leonid Utesov as his lead man. Renowned for his performance of the slangy songs of his native Odessa, with a strong admixture of jazz, Utesov played a simple shepherd in the movie. Living in the Crimean village of Abrau, his singing talent is discovered by vacationing Muscovites. He is whisked away to the capital, and soon finds himself leading a jazz band. Anybody, it seemed, could be a star in Soviet Russia.

Music for the film was written by Isaak Dunaevskii, a mainstay of the Soviet song-writing industry. Soviet popular music betrayed the significant influence of jazz, an influence that had not been fully digested when the Cultural Revolution rendered it politically suspect. Soviet audiences lovedjazz, both the foreign jazz they heard on records and the native jazz played by Russian bands. From the late 1920s to the early 1930s jazz was rarely heard in officially recognised musical forums, but Utesov's performance in Fellows relegitimised jazz in its heavily Russified form. Soviet-Russian jazz was more melodic than rhythmic and it abstained from the improvisation that is problematic in a heavily censored culture. Soviet jazz borrowed its melodic influences from sources ranging from American jazz to Russian folk music. What made it 'jazz' to its Soviet audiences was the use of unfamiliar instruments such as the saxophone and trombone, the unfamiliar rhythms, and the exuberant performance style alien to classical music. Dunaevskii was the composer who most successfully combined these influences; and because of his willingness to write his music for the heavily politicised lyrics of Mikhail Isakovskii and Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, among other lyricists, he fared well with cultural watchdogs. Other composers, such as the Pokrass Brothers, Matvei Blanter, or A. V Aleksandrov (founder of the Red Army Chorus) created a more distinctly Soviet style ofmusic in which the march was the favoured genre. The presence of ideological music did not eclipse more traditional musical concerns, and the love song was still the most popular genre of the decade, with the young lyricist Evgenii Dolmatovskii scoring his first successes. As for performers, the Red Army Chorus made its first tours at this time, yet the overwhelming audience favourites remained jazz players like Utesov and Aleksandr Tsfasman, or vocalists such as Izabella Iur' eva, Konstantin Sokol ' skii, and Vadim Kozin, who ignored politics and who harkened back to the great torch singers of pre-revolutionary years.

Soviet arts organisations had gained complete control over cultural life by the mid-i930s. In retrospect, these were golden years for average Soviet audiences. Hugely popular songs, novels and movies were easily available, and came out in a fairly steady stream. Audiences had more free time and disposable income than they ever had before. That these resources were paltry in comparison to Western societies seemed to matter little. Yet much of the same witch-hunting that struck the political world during the purge trials of 1936 took place as well in the arts, invisible to the public eye. By the end of the decade, artists as diverse as Mandel' shtam and Kozin were either dead or lost in the prison camps, as were many, many others, including Babel , Meyerhold and Pil niak. Mikhail Bulgakov s great novel Master and Margarita, a decade in the making, was completed and lost deep in a desk drawer, not to emerge until 1966, after which it became perhaps the most beloved Russian novel of the century. Cruel fate struck artists from the most popular to the most elusive, from wholehearted Bolshevik to apolitical elitist, from Russian to Jew.

Emblematic of the unpredictability was the fate of two operas, Lady Macbeth ofMtsensk, composed by Dmitrii Shostakovich, and Ancient Heroes (Bogatyri), a libretto written by Demian Bednyi to an old comic opera by Borodin. The young Shostakovich was a rising star in Soviet music, and Lady Macbeth one of his first resounding successes. Based on a story by Nikolai Leskov, the opera tells of a strong-willed woman trapped in a loveless marriage in the Russian provinces, ruined finally when her passionate affair leads to the murder of her husband and his father. First performed in 1934, it won instant acclaim for the daring use of instruments such as the trombone and saxophone, and its bold dissonance and discordant rhythms. Yet when Stalin attended a 1936 per­formance and walked out in evident disgust, Shostakovich was dangerously exposed. Within two days Pravda featured an editorial entitled 'Chaos instead of Music', castigating Shostakovich, and performance of the opera ceased.[37]More surprising was the fate of Bednyi. A poet and staunch comrade of Lenin, Bednyi had once defined Soviet political correctness. During the civil war his caustic verse scored points against priests, capitalists and monarchists, and afterwards he remained an effective political versifier. His libretto for Heroes was in the same spirit of mockery, yet much to his shock, Pravda denounced its debut performance for disparaging the role of Christianity in Russian history.[38]

Though the final third of the 1930s was a period of profound repression in the arts, to many Soviet citizens it was a time when their tastes were served. Audiences continued to find new movies to suittheirtastes, many oftheminthe musical genre they had come to love. Aleksandrov scored new hits with Volga- Volga (1938) and Radiant Path (Svetlyi put') (1940), both starring Liubov' Orlova, and he soon found a rival in the young Ivan Pyr'ev, who directed the popular musicals Rich Bride (Bogataia nevesta) (1938), Tractor Drivers (Traktoristy) (1939) and Swineherd and the Shepherd (Svinarka i pastukh) (1940). These films seem today to be cliches of socialist realism, in which kolkhozniks and shock workers find true love and happiness, but they resonated deeply with their intended audiences. Music of all kinds continued to be performed, recorded and played on the radio, and if the socialist marches of Aleksandrov and Dunaevskii received the lion's share of official attention, crooners and jazz singers were still commonly available. In fact, one ofthe most popular entertainments ofthe era were vast outdoor masquerades and dance parties, such as those arranged in Moscow's Gorky Park, where carefree thousands danced the night away. Here, as well as in dance halls throughout the land, jazz and the cruel romance held sway. The music played on, as long as nobody uttered the word 'jazz'.

Perhaps the most democratic shift in cultural organisation was the state's willingness to sponsor amateur arts to a degree that rivalled the profes­sional. Falling under the broad rubric of samodeiatel'nost', roughly translated as amateur, but meaning 'self-actuating', amateur arts organisations bloomed throughout the Soviet Union. Devoted to all forms of activities and hob­bies, clubs provided space, equipment and instruction to the working masses. Although 'Organise Cultured Leisure' was the pervasive if unappealing slo­gan of cultural authorities, the slogan should not obscure the fact that the movement allowed simple Soviet citizens tremendous opportunity to enjoy themselves, to socialise and to share their accomplishments with friends. Most commonly, amateur arts groups were devoted to singing and dancing, with a repertory that included dollops of officially approved Soviet marches and large shares of the folk music that only a few years before had been the target of prole­tarian critics. In the Slavic, Transcaucasian and Central Asian ethnic republics, the revival (often artificial) of folkmusic and dance was used to demonstrate the deep roots of Soviet nationalities policy. The amateur arts movement allowed common citizens to participate in Soviet cultural life. Oddly the movement, whose folk aesthetics were in utter contradiction to socialist realism, thrived most during the years when the state promoted socialist realism most avidly.[39]

The repressions of the immediate pre-war years undermined the world of culture. Popular song and amateur arts seemed to thrive, but the movie busi­ness was producing fewer and fewer films every year, artists were confined to narrow ranges of expression and the literary world lost many of the great writers who had made the first decade of Soviet literature so rich. Arts admin­istrators maintained their jobs by parroting the most recent party line, and in doing so destroyed the careers of talented peers. Artistic unions formed to defend the interests of artists now existed to control them. Soviet culture suffered from a deep split between artists, administrators and audiences.

Similar rifts within Soviet society left the country unprepared for the war that began in June 1941. The army, whose command structure had been destroyed in the purges of 1938, could not resist German attacks; the state found it impossible to organise retreat or resistance in the early months ofthe war. The party central leadership seemed incapable of response. Yet Soviet artists responded immediately and powerfully to the German invasion, creat­ing songs, posters, newspaper and radio reports and later stories and movies that gave Soviet citizens an outlet for their fury and despair. The ability to adapt to war footing far faster than the army, party or state suggests that Soviet cultural organisations were much stronger than would have seemed

possible.[40]

The most difficult years for many Soviet artists were the two between the signing of the Soviet-German Non-aggression Pact in August 1939 and the German invasion. The tremendous pressure on cultural organs to provide ideological support for the never-ending purges, for the growing cult of Stalin and for the forced incorporation of territories into the Soviet Union challenged even loyal minions. Three years of bloody purges left them unsure of whom to praise and wary of paying tribute to any policy line that could, within the space of several days, be declared anathema. The sudden flip-flop into friendship with Hitler's Germany was even more traumatic. Many younger journalists, songwriters and artists had learned their craft by castigating the Nazi scourge.

Some fell silent, others turned their attention elsewhere. Still others ignored the situation, The most popular singers of that era were Kozin (soon to be arrested) and Iur'eva, honey-voiced crooners of love songs. In the cinema the most popular offerings were Pyr'ev's sweet musical comedies. Movies such as Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Liberation (Osvobozhdenie) (1940), which chronicled the 'reunification' of Western Ukraine (otherwise known as eastern Poland) under the terms of the Soviet-German Treaty, or Vasilii Belaev's Mannerheim Line (1940), about the Soviet-Finnish war, quickly passed as embarrassingbows to government campaigns.

Sergei Eisenstein provides an illustration ofan artist who continued to iden­tify with the state, yet wished to maintain artistic integrity. When anti-German feeling was at its height, he directed his classic Aleksandr Nevskii (1938), which chronicled how in 1242 that Novgorodian prince unified the Russians and repulsed the invasion of the Teutonic Knights. The climactic battle on the ice of Lake Peipus is one of cinema's great action scenes, and the film score com­posed by Sergei Prokofiev offers one of film's greatest collaborations between composer and director. Unmistakable analogies between the Teutonic Knights and modern Germans, Nevskii's Novgorod and Stalin's Soviet Russia made the film an effective piece of propaganda. The unfortunate shift in foreign pol­icy that followed within a year made the film politically obsolete, and it was removed from circulation. Soon after the signing of the pact, Eisenstein was commissioned to direct Richard Wagner's Die Walkiire, the apotheosis of the German spirit, at the Bol'shoi Theatre. Meant as a gesture of cultural friend­ship, the production left German representatives at the 1940 premiere offended by its aesthetic innovations, 'deliberate Jewish tricks' as they called them. The German invasion soon erased the controversy. Wagner was removed from the repertory, and Nevskii was once against released to Soviet screens.[41]

Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War came from an ability of society to rally around the war effort, to tap into deep wells of patriotic faith, to unify itself behind the state and its leader Joseph Stalin. Soviet culture played an integral part in this enterprise. The first rallying cries issued from the pens of the young journalists, artists and songwriters who had made their careers during the purge era. The venom that they so deplorably unleashed against their compatriots seemed entirely appropriate when directed against Fascist invaders. The war seemed to liberate writers and artists who had previously operated inside Soviet cultural rules, to give them a subject matter appropriate to their style, allowing them to access once unacceptable cultural idioms. Most remarkable in this regard was the widespread use of Christian symbols as a source of Russian national identity. Only one day after the German attack, Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, erstwhile lyricist of orthodox Soviet songs ('Life's Getting Better and Happier Too', 1936; 'The Common Soviet Man', 1938), and General Aleksandr Aleksandrov, director ofthe Red Army Chorus, wrote and recorded 'Holy War', a stirring march that served as anthem for the war. Political cartoonists such as Boris Efimov, who had cut his teeth on anti-Trotskyite caricatures for Pravda, and Kukryniksy, a trio of cartoonists who had begun publishing cartoons in i933, immediately drew anti-German posters that were distributed throughout the country. They continued to do so throughout the war, and remained the most effective graphic propagandists in the country. A similar development took place in journalism, where older political journalists such as Boris Gorbatov, Ilya Ehrenburg and Aleksandr Korneichuk were joined by recent graduates such as Konstantin Simonov in creating an effective brand of wartime journalism. In the earliest months of the war, when the mass media at their worst were pretending that the war effort was going well, these journalists made the perilous journey to the front, addressed the obvious catastrophe and yet offered their readers hope and courage. Ehrenburg proclaimed German barbarity to be the sign of a cultural rot that could not defeat Soviet civilisation. Simonov travelled to western Russia, witnessed the caravans of soldiers and common people streaming east before the German tanks and wrote poems of heartfelt grief. His 'Wait for Me' (Zhdi menia) and 'Smolensk Roads' (Ty, pomnish', Alesha, dorogi Smolenshchiny) were recited as prayers throughout the war and after.

Newspapers, posters and popular songs, which could be generated quickly and distributed throughout the vast country, were the most effective means to rally the people in the first year of the war. Most of the Soviet Union was accessible by radio and print. Radio proved a particularly effective medium. Soviet broadcasting switched from the wire-fed system that had allowed the state to control content and cut off outside broadcasts, to shortwave broadcasts that could reach over enemy lines to the occupied territories. Journalists could report developments on the front immediately, allowing breathless listeners to follow the heroic defences of Stalingrad and Leningrad. Soldiers could hear the latest recordings of their favourite singers singing 1930s classics or new hits. Mark Bernes sang his beloved 'Dark Night' (i942), Klavdiia Shulzhenko her romantic 'Blue Scarf' (1941) and Leonid Utesov recorded his satiric 'Baron von der Pschick' (1942). For all the popularity of Soviet-produced culture, however, listeners on the front and at home most avidly followed readings of Lev Tolstoy's War and Peace (Voina i mir). The Russian defeat of a foreign invader through persistence and endurance offered a comforting analogy to the present.

The desperation and raw emotion of the first year, which gave birth to short genres with an immediate response to the surrounding world, and a direct route to the emotions of readers and listeners, gave way to more sub­stantial artistic forms later in the war. This was due to the fact partly that artists and writers had more time to work and plan, and partly that cultural insti­tutions that had ceased to function recovered their footing. Censors that had ceded their functions to editors and administrators in the early months of war once again became an effective barrier to unorthodox expression. Arts-funding organisations once again received the political guidance they needed to oper­ate. The Bol'shoi Theatre in Moscow, and the large theatres in Leningrad could again offer the classics of drama, opera and ballet. Productions boosted morale in the big cities where they were performed, and throughout Russia where they were broadcast. They infused Soviet citizens, foremost Soviet Russians, with a pride in their culture at a time when national pride constituted the core of public morale; and they offered proof that civilisation could survive in the face of Fascist barbarity.

The confidence in final victory gained by the summer of 1943 gave Soviet life an unprecedented legitimacy. Soviet culture, commissioned by party and state, accomplished its design. Inspired by Marxism-Leninism, devoted to the cause ofthe working people, obedient to their representative, the Communist Party; committed to a single message, and receptive to artists of all circumstances of birth: such were the ideals it embodied. Soviet artists and writers had an immediate relationship with their audience that might have been the envy of artists throughout the world. Oddly enough, it was only the German invasion that made the vision of a cultural monolith come true.

Conclusion

Russian-Soviet culture was fundamentally different after fifty years of social and institutional change. An institutional framework based on the autocracy had given way to private and informal institutions, which were then swept away by the October Revolution. Soviet cultural institutions came into being only slowly, hindered first by financial constraints, then by a shortage of knowl­edgeable cadres and later by unpredictable ideological shifts. The centrality of social mission to art, an article of faith to the intelligentsia that had been tested by modernism and market-based popular culture, was institutionalised in Soviet times and made obligatory. The modernist impulse so strong in the early years ofthe century, which had enriched Russian artistic culture and had responded to the revolutionary spirit, was ultimately rejected for the aesthetic of socialist realism. It is important to understand that Soviet popular culture was often genuinely popular, and that the political orthodoxy unpalatable to other cultures and other times did not always bother the intended audience. Many products of Stalinist popular culture were beloved by Soviet audiences long after their political context had faded. Soviet classics enjoy great popular support even today, now that the Soviet Union is a distant memory.

One must not forget, however, that Soviet culture was founded on coercion. The state and party controlled all the institutions of arts education, creation, production and distribution. Artists had no choice but to conform to artistic controls, and audiences knew little but what the state provided them. The audience's apparent enjoyment of Soviet cultural products in pre-war years, and the deep response during the war, took place in the absence of compe­tition. No less a legacy of Soviet culture is the wretched treatment of gifted artists, writers, composers. Those who died, and those who were hounded into silence, were also beloved by Soviet readers, and their legacy lives on.

The politics of culture, 1945-2000

JOSEPHINE WOLL

During the more than half a century covered in this chapter, the Soviet Union experienced a bewildering array of changes, up to and including its own demise. The final years of Stalin's life and rule, when the country had to regenerate itself after the devastation of the Second World War, involved major cultural repressions amid a climate of isolationism and xenophobia. Between Stalin's death in 1953 and the mid-1960s, Soviet officialdom shed its most tyranni­cal aspects, and despite frequent reimposition of cultural controls, artistic creativity flourished. Brezhnev's reign curtailed much of the dynamism char­acteristic of the Thaw, whose suppressed energies re-emerged during Gor­bachev's five years of perestroika and glasnost'. Finally, after the upheavals that ended Gorbachev's rule, Russia now vies for attention and profit in a world market. In slightly more than half a century, then, the society has gone from absolute political centralisation to substantial if jagged decentralisation, from state-planned mega-economic structures to market-dependent enter­prises, from power- and prestige-based hierarchies to money-based class struc­tures. Its creative artists, once tacit partners with the state in a contract based on mutual support, must fend for themselves in a difficult and competitive environment.

Paralysis, 1945-53

Although Soviet culture was never entirely monolithic and univocal, it prob­ably came closest to that condition between Victory Day (8 May 1945) and Stalin's death nearly eight years later. Broadly speaking, the arts in those years had nothing whatever to do with an artist's unique and untrammelled creative energies, and little to do with the art prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s, born

My thanks to Caryl Emerson, Julian Graffy, Joan Neuberger, Robert Sharlet and Ron Suny for their extremely helpful comments and corrections on earlier drafts of this essay

of the marriage between state ideology and individual imagination. Rather, artistic products served 'to make conscious that which was made known in the language of decrees'.[42]

Within a year of the war's end, the nation's wartime unanimity of patriotic purpose disappeared, replaced by a reshuffled deck of social sectors with new allocations of privileges, rewards and penalties, and a welter of new domestic enemies. A miasma of belligerent isolation and xenophobia stifled wartime exposure to the outside world, and controls over culture tightened with dra­matic harshness. Party leaders, often Stalin himself, 'selected the main themes and topics of literature and carefully supervised its ideological content', plac­ing particular emphasis on both Russian and Soviet chauvinism, hatred of everything foreign and glorification of the Communist Party and of the coun­try's ruler,[43] and favouring the epic genres - long novels, marathon narrative poems, historical films, operas - that most readily accommodated themselves to expressing these themes. During the Zhdanovsh.ch.ina, the crudest expression of the regime's general approach to the arts in the post-war years, every news­paper and journal joined the offensive against individual works and artists, excoriating the least suspicion of veracity, artistic independence ('formalism') and apoliticism ('ideological emptiness') and demanding militant, ideologi­cally pure and edifying art. If artists wanted to address the real moral and social dilemmas of their world, they could do so only in the most oblique fashion; lakirovka, or make-believe, reigned supreme.

Andrei Zhdanov and his epigones vilified great artists, such as poet Anna Akhmatova, satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, film director Sergei Eisenstein, com­posers Dmitrii Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. But they scrutinised with equal vigilance individuals of considerably less talent and reputation: Ukrainian Petro Panch, for the brazen notion that the writer had the 'right' to make mistakes; playwright Aleksandr Gladkov, for his 'complete ignorance of Soviet man and an irresponsible attitude toward his own literature'; scriptwriter Pavel Nilin, whose play provided the basis for Leonid Lukov's film A Great Life (Bol'shaia zhizn'): 'In the imaginary people portrayed by Nilin there is no power of enthusiasm, no knowledge, no culture, which the Soviet man in the ranks, who matured during the years of the mighty growth of our state, bears within himself.'[44] The film itself, an attempt to portray with some degree of verisimilitude the life of miners in the Donbass, elicited a Central Committee ban (4 September 1946) as an 'ideologically and politically vicious' film, and artistically weak to boot.[45]

The rhetoric of assault, the shortcomings singled out for attack and the sanc­tions imposed recurred throughout the years 1945-53, with different segments of the creative intelligentsia targeted at different times. Music, for instance, tookits turn on the choppingblockin 1948, when the Central Committee made an example of composer Vano Muradeli and his 'vicious and inartistic' opera The Great Friendship (Velikaia druzhba). The State Museum of Modern West­ern Art was closed down in 1948, the same year that libraries were instructed to 'process' their holdings of foreign literature captured abroad during the war, and to eliminate once-acceptable domestic works that had slipped into disfavour through political vicissitudes, such as a novel expressing 'friendly feelings' for Communist Yugoslavia, now turned enemy under renegade Tito.

Chauvinist xenophobia rehabilitated the Russian past and hailed all aspects of Soviet life while denigrating everything Western. Seductively attractive foreign art masked a 'putrid, baneful bourgeois culture'. Soviet productions of foreign plays disseminated 'the propaganda of reactionary bourgeois ide­ology and morals'. Revised editions of books excised favourable references to foreign nations and negative details about Russia. A 1948 edition of Stepan Razin, a historical novel set in the seventeenth century, for instance, eliminated obscenities, gory descriptions of torture and details about body odour, bed­bugs, flatulence and sex that suggested an 'uncivilized' Russia. New editions ofVsevolod Ivanov's 1922 novel and play, Armoured Train No. 14-69 (Bronepoezd No. 14-69), inserted tributes to the Russian people and interpolations about America's hostile role in the Far East during the civil war, including American plans 'to annex Siberia and China'.[46]

For a few years after the war audiences hungry for entertainment had the chance to see German and American 'trophy' films captured by the Red Army: the regime authorised their distribution partly for revenues, partly to compensate for the absence of new domestic films. Introductory texts and revised titles provided requisite ideological adjustments: Stagecoach became

The Journey will be Dangerous, 'an epic about the struggle of Indians against White imperialists on the frontier', and Frank Capra's Mr Deeds Goes to Town became The Dollar Rules.[47] Though rarely reviewed, these films were popular enough to annoy the authorities: a central newspaper censured Dom Kino, the film industry's Moscow clubhouse, for screening too many foreign films, including films 'with jazz and fox-trot', to mark the fifth anniversary of the Nazi invasion.[48]

In post-war culture, one blueprint served for all cultural products. Russian chauvinism dictated Russifying the ethnic designations of Greek and Tatar settlements in the Crimea to obliterate their pasts. Eisenstein had repeatedly to answer for the 'lack of Russian spirit' in Part II of Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Groznyi); composers, a couple of years later, were anathematised for violating the 'system of music and singing native to our people'. Soviet chauvinism dic­tated rewriting recent history: new editions of Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don (Tikhii Don) (1928), for instance, added quotations from Lenin and Stalin, and cleansed individual Bolsheviks 'of a wide array of personal vices pertaining, among other things, to sex, marriage, foul language, drinking and brutality'. Aleksandr Fadeev cut or altered descriptions of the Red Army's hasty retreat during the war in his novel The Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia) (1945) after a critical Pravda editorial, and Valentin Katayev increased the 'operational capa­bilities of [an underground] group' by adding several local Communists to For the Power of the Soviets (Za vlast' Sovetov) (1949-51) after Pravda had a go at him.[49]

The trophy films disappeared from Soviet screens in the late 1940s. Instead audiences could choose from a thin stream of anti-Western films (Aleksan- drov's Meeting on the Elbe (Vstrecha na Elbe), Romm's Secret Mission (Sekretnaia missiia), Room's Court of Honour (Sudchesti), historical spectacles explicitly glo­rifying Stalin (The Vow (Kliatva), The Battle ofStalingrad (Stalingradskaia bitva), The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina)), and biographies of scientists and musicians implicitly doing the same thing.[50] From its outset the anti-cosmopolitan cam­paign had vilified the intelligentsia, many of whom were Jews, but after 1948 the campaign turned categorically anti-Semitic, first in print - the leading seri­ous film journal, Iskusstvo kino, published a list of 'aesthete-cosmopolitans in cinema', nearly all Jews - and then in action, with the NKVD execution of

Solomon Mikhoels, the Soviet Union's leading Yiddish actor, in January 1948 and the execution of thirteen prominent Jews in August 1952, four of them

writers. [51]

With very few exceptions, the arts between 1945 and 1953 operated in the realm of fantasy. 'Even the recently ended war,' Dobrenko comments, 'a horri­ble wound that continued to bleed, was immediately externalized and became yet another thematic.'[52] As Boris Slutskii, a poet who fought in the war, wrote, And gradually the cracks were painted over, / The strong wrinkles smoothed out, / And gradually the women grew prettier / Andsullenmengrewmerry.'[53]Painters produced 'meaningless mass scenes', canvases filled with cheerful civilians and clean, well-rested soldiers.[54] Playwrights struggled with the absurd and inherently anti-dramatic theory of'no conflict drama', premised on 'the alleged impossibility of conflict in a "classless society"',[55] which dominated discourse in the early 1950s. 'Hortatory' writing on rural themes, 'designed to promote discipline and enthusiasm for the painful sacrifices involved in restoring agriculture after the war's devastation', presented the depopulated, devastated countryside as a thriving hive of enthusiasm and productivity.[56] The collision of'the good and the better' (in one famous formulation), whether on stages or cinema screens, left little space for ambivalence, weakness and death, except for heroic death on the battlefield; it left no room at all for tragedy. As environment - factory, shop, school, field, farm - supplanted human beings and roles replaced character, protagonists became virtually interchangeable, clones identifiable only by their jobs.[57] Thus art shrivelled to function as defined by the Communist Party.

Between 1945 and 1953, nearly every genuine artist fell silent. Authentic popular culture was restricted to the labour camps of the Gulag, and reached a wider public only after Stalin's death. Ersatz, officially sponsored popular culture reflected the regime's conservatism, its determination to preserve the status quo, its insistence on stability and normalisation. The rising middle class shared many of those values. At a time when Soviet citizens had little opportunity to amuse themselves in cafes or dance halls and no opportunity to travel, and movie houses recycled hits from a decade before, the bulk of middle-brow reading material - mainly novels - provided diversion, escapist happy endings and 'one of the few ways of meeting the people's need to understand their society's major workaday problems ... a chance [for the reader] to check his own questions about postwar adjustments against the paradigms of current social issues'.[58] The discrepancy between reality and the 'utterly profane' version[59] advanced in fiction like Babaevskii's Cavalier of the Golden Star (Kavaler zolotoi zvezdy) (and Raizman's 1950 screen version) and films like Pyr'ev's Cossacks of the Kuban' (Kuban'skie kazaki) troubled the regime not at all. As for the Soviet public, or a large part of it, they suspended belief - willingly or reluctantly - in the pursuit of enjoyment and whatever scraps and tatters of meaning they could relate to their own lives.

The Thaw, 1953-67^)

Although the beginning of the Thaw is far easier to date than its terminus, even the death of Stalin did not mark an absolute turning point. After all, indi­viduals and institutions involved in the creation, regulation, dissemination and reception of cultural products did not simply vanish the day Stalin died, nor did their modus operandi. At the same time, signs of renewal pre-dated March 1953, in the arts and in society at large. Valentin Ovechkin's 'District Routine' (Raionnye budni), a fictional sketch that began 'the process of returning rural literature to real life',[60] appeared in Novyi mir in September 1952. Vsevolod Pudovkin's last film, The Return ofVasilii Bortnikov (Vozvrashchenie Vasiliia Bort- nikova), marked by psychological credibility and imaginative camerawork, was shot in 1952. Young people rebelled against grey Soviet monotony by wear­ing imitations of Western styles, tight trousers and short skirts. Still, Stalin's death unquestionably liberated the psychocultural shifts characteristic of the Thaw years. Belles-lettres responded the most quickly. The fine lyric poet Ol'ga Berggol'ts insisted on the poet's right to express personal emotions in her own voice; the established novelist Ilya Ehrenburg and the novice literary critic

Vladimir Pomerantsev both demanded more spontaneity and 'sincerity', less official interference in literature.

The termination of the Thaw cannot so readily be pinpointed, in part because it did not skid to a dead halt in one violent action like the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Indeed, many of the ideas discussed and trends inaugurated during the Thaw years outlasted the political career of the man most clearly associated with it, Nikita Khrushchev, who fell from power in 1964. They endured and evolved over the next two decades, albeit forced into alternative channels as official ones constricted. Most individuals who identified themselves with the goals of the Thaw continued to work within the Soviet cultural sphere, although some emigrated and others confined their audiences to friends or to anonymous purveyors of samizdat.

Nonetheless, the term 'Thaw' legitimately denotes a dozen years during which Soviet society moved out from under the worst shadows ofthe late Stalin years. Artists and audiences alike pressed for greater candour in the arts, an end to mendacious representations of Soviet life, a recognition of the puissance of private concerns, more latitude in subject and style and a 'less paternalis­tic concern' over what the Soviet reader/film-goer/museum visitor 'should and should not be permitted to know'.[61] Khrushchev's major de-Stalinisation speeches spurred a passion for truth-telling, expressed in a variety of artistic forms that shared a common concern with the moral compromises endemic to Soviet society. And although the party attempted to maintain hegemony over cultural matters, the thawing process persisted despite, beneath and around the ice floes of official reversals, skittish compromises and dogmatic retrench­ments.

Already in 1955, before Khrushchev's 1956 'Secret Speech', access to foreign culture increased, with events like the week of French cinema held in October 1955. After Khrushchev's speech the pace accelerated dramatically. Personnel shake-ups replaced bureaucrats with active artists and balanced conservatives with progressives (such as the new, liberal Moscowbranch ofthe national Writ­ers' Union, an organisation Mikhail Sholokhov mordantly dubbed the 'Union of Dead Souls'[62]). The party allocated funds to build or refurbish theatres and movie houses, to buy better equipment, to pay higher authors' fees, to revi­talise languishing republican film studios, to rejoin the world's cultural com­munity. (The First Moscow International Film Festival took place in August 1959.) Khrushchev's attempts to decentralise decision-making and encourage individual initiative, though formulated to achieve economic goals, had cul­tural repercussions. The Ministry of Culture, the party's umbrella organisation for all broadcasting, educational and cultural institutions, remained in charge, but official censors relinquished some of their authority to editorial boards of journals and film studio artistic councils; senior literary editors and theatre directors had more access to the ideological watchdogs.

In order to secure the trust of a nation profoundly wary of the repercus­sions of autonomy, Khrushchev enjoined writers to tell the truth (up to a point) without fear of lethal consequences. As Shimon Markish, a writer and son of one of the Yiddish poets murdered in 1952, wryly - but accurately - observed, while both Stalin and Khrushchev were whimsical and capricious, with Khrushchev 'we knew that whatever happened, it would not be arrest and death'.[63] Artists who felt both anger and guilt at their own acquiescence in falsehood proffered mea culpas: in Evgenii Evtushenko's dramatic poem 'Zima Station' (1956), for instance, he reproaches himself for saying 'what I should not have said' and failing to say 'what I should have said'. Censors excised many of the once-obligatory disparaging references to the West and to non-Russian nationalities in new editions of previously published works, and scrapped equally obligatory laudatory references to Stalin: his very name was cropped from phrases like 'Stalin's army' and 'Stalin's generation'. While censors continued to discourage bleak descriptions of the purges, they - emu­lating Khrushchev - partially rehabilitated the victims of Stalinist repression. 'The censorship did not cease to operate,' Geoffrey Hosking notes, 'but its implementation became less predictable.'[64]

The early years of the Thaw gave artists the chance to scrape the excres­cences of Stalinism off what they perceived as the authentic revolutionary idealism of the 1920s. They could retain the possibility of utopian socialism, sans Stalin's crippling despotism and Stalinism's lies. Even the relatively ortho­dox writer Konstantin Simonov, editor of Novyi mir in 1956, urged acceptance of any literature imbued with 'socialist spirit', and a large part of Soviet society embraced the opportunity to examine the actual circumstances and dilemmas of Soviet life. For a time, at least, party directives, creative impulses and popular desires galloped along as a troika.

The same desiderata-less embellishment, greater truthfulness, more atten­tion to individuals and their private dramas, the muffling of authorial judge­ment, multiple perspectives - characterise nearly all fiction and film in the early

Thaw years, whether historical or contemporary. As early as 1954, the novelist Fedor Abramov published a damning survey of post-war rural prose, which centred on the collective farm and frequently came from the pens of urban writers ignorant of country life. He and other derevenshchiki - writers of'village' (rather than kolkhoz) prose - began to correct the spurious approach to rural themes characteristic of post-war fiction in favour of sympathetic yet unsen­timental portraits of everyday rural reality, including the religious faith that sustained the peasantry. Themselves usually scions of village life, they avoided the (falsely) picturesque, folksy and romantic, and, over the next decade or so, elaborated a set of values virtually opposite to those that dominated kolkhoz literature.

Film had less room to manoeuvre, since the party's demand for more and better films 'about agriculture' pointedly implied kolkhoz achievements, not retrograde village traditions, and film-makers were understandably reluctant to tackle such a fraught subject. When they did turn to the countryside, however, they starkly contradicted the florid and grotesquely synthetic images of peasant life on display in musicals like Cossacks of the Kuban'. Camerawork favoured medium and long shots and pans of the entire environment, as if to offer trustworthy images saturated with reality; the happy ending that reassuringly concluded most kolkhoz movies yielded to ambiguity. A wedding opens -ratherthan closes - Mikhail Shveitser's Alien Kin (Chuzhaia rodnia, 1955): trouble starts afterwards. Stanislav Rostotskii's It Happened in Penkovo (Delo bylo v Penkove, 1957) pays lip-service to official rhetoric, encasing a flashback within a narrative framework that shows a poor collective farm becoming prosperous, but for most of the film only drinking, romance and fighting alleviate the tedium of village life.[65] In Vasilii Shukshin's first two films, A Boy Like That (Zhivet takoi paren , 1964), and Your Son and Brother (Vash syn i brat, 1965), exterior shots convey the omnipresence of Siberia's natural environment while interiors are panned matter of factly, their furnishings (wood-burning stoves, vodka decanters, framed photographs) neither quaint, ethnographic objects nor fetishes to be venerated but the stuff of people's lives.

History - the Decembrist uprising of 1825, the populist movement of the 1880s, Bolshevism, the Second World War-served as a template through which to examine the present, both because the past gave writers and film-makers more freedom, and because it had directly engendered the present with which they were primarily concerned. With Khrushchev himself calling for a return to Leninist norms, the years during which the Soviet state took shape offered a dramatic framework in which to investigate contemporary hopes and ideals. Thus the Thaw's first historical films - Iurii Egorov's They Were the First (Oni byli pervymi, 1956), Alov and Naumov's PavelKorchagin (1956), based on Ostrovskii's novel How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalialas' stal'), Grigorii Chukhrai's The Forty-first (Sorokpervyi, 1956), Iulii Raizman's The Communist (Kommunist, 1958)- re-create the civil-war years and the i920s, not as they had actually been, certainly, but as they were viewed through the lens of the 1950s: as a relatively noble, inspiring and passionate period. Alov and Naumov replaced Ostrovskii's robotic Pavel Korchagin with a hero who renounces personal happiness ('this isn't the time for love') at the cost of horrific, graphically delineated suffering. Chukhrai's protagonists, White Army officer and Red Army sniper, fall so deeply in love, and Chukhrai's cameraman Sergei Urusevskii filmed their idyll with such lyricism and beauty that the lovers' passion and tenderness enjoy parity with - if not primacy over - revolutionary duty.

Throughout the Thaw, and well into the Brezhnev years, the Second World War became a touchstone of Soviet culture, in part because it represented the single unifying experience of a history otherwise bloody with political and ide­ological divisions. At the Twenty-Second Congress Khrushchev extended his earlier criticism of Stalin to include the army purges of 1937 and the treatment of returning Soviet POWs, unleashing a wave ofmemoirs, lyrics, autobiographi­cal fiction and movies that reflected the knowledge and experience of the vast majority of Soviet citizens. Finally, civilian dedication to the war effort ranked as no less heroic than combat bravery, and civilian losses as no less painful than death on the battlefield. In fiction by Vasilii Grossman, Boris Balter and Bulat Okudzhava, the private dramas (and melodramas) contingent upon the war took precedence over military strategy, to the point that movies began routinely to avoid battle-scene heroics, instead locating their heroes in the interstices between battles (Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo)), in the undramatic hell of the Nazi prison camp, where heroism equalled dogged determination to survive (Bondarchuk's Fate of a Man (Sud'ba cheloveka, 1959)), or away from the front altogether, as in Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate, 1959) (see Plate 22), where the only 'battle scene' mocks conventional heroics by showing the hero running away from a tank.

The idealism and/or naivety of the early Thaw years disappeared by the end of the decade, its demise hastened by the establishment's loathsome attacks on Boris Pasternak when he won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the Thaw lurched into the early i960s, the 'real, struggling, ascetic' hero morphed into many kinds of hero operating in every sort of context (war, village, kolkhoz, fac­tory, scientific institute, rapidly growing city) and genre. Consistently, however, characters were 'no longer apprehended primarily in terms of their attitudes toward the work they perform, their degree of social dedication or the extent to which they have absorbed official dogma and patterns of conduct'.[66] We encounter many vulnerable and/or innocent protagonists: children, whose age protects them from the corruption of adults and whose lack of subterfuge authenticates their vision of the world; teenagers, honest about their fears and tentative about their hopes; young women who fail to live up to their own ideals or who succumb to intolerable pressures. These heroines, not coinci- dentally, animated the many melodramas that appeared during the Thaw; the genre's 'revival of private life as a legitimate subject for the arts' made it 'an especially apt tool for exploring the individual within the collective, the pri­vate morality underneath the strictures on public performances, the tensions resulting from political manipulations of both public and private morality. [It offered] escape . . . from a social and moral certainty imposed from above.'[67]

So did the poetry recited at open-air readings, a public event revived in the late 1950s that attracted thousands of listeners and turned younger poets - Robert Rozhdestvenskii, Evtushenko and Voznesenskii, Iunna Morits, Bulat Okudzhava, Bella Akhmadulina - into cult figures; so did the concurrent wave of'youth prose' and its attendant cinematic movement. Although many cliches lurkbeneath the colloquialisms, sly humour and taste for rock' n' roll that char­acterise Vasilii Aksenov and Andrei Bitov's heroes, these authors confronted the painful fissures of Soviet society without proposing easy or dogmatic solutions. Their characters, tired of 'kvass patriotism, official bombast, and village-style surveillance by the neighbours of their clothing, their morals, and their leisure habits',[68] did not obediently turn to their elders for paradigms. 'Puzzled and concerned about the future, socially disoriented and, in some degree, psychologically bemused',[69] they tried to devise 'ethical standards to replace outworn or suspect ones'.²⁹

Khrushchev's speech at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961 invigorated the liberals and stimulated a year of exciting cultural develop­ments. Stravinsky made his first visit to his homeland in half a century, as did George Balanchine (after forty years away), who brought the New York City

Ballet. Yehudi and Hepzibah Menuhin toured the Soviet Union; Shostakovich's 'Babii Iar' Symphony, incorporating the text of Evtushenko's poetic memo­rial to Jewish victims of Nazi slaughter outside Kiev, premiered in December 1962. Moscow museums dusted off and displayed canvases by modernists like Bakst and Larionov. Evtushenko's 'Heirs of Stalin', a passionate and forceful assault on neo-Stalinism, appeared in the autumn, as did the first half of Viktor Nekrasov's account of trips to Italy and the USA, Both Sides of the Ocean (Po obe storony okeana), in which he criticised isolationist Soviet cultural policies. Most shocking, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in November's Novyi mir, principally thanks to editor Aleksandr Tvardovskii and his shrewd campaign for Khrushchev's personal intervention. The top box-office success of 1962, The Amphibious Man (Chelovek-amfibiia), responded to Khrushchev's revelations by presenting a political allegory about a brilliant scientist's under­water utopia whose only inhabitant - his amphibious son Ikhtiandr - pays for the dreams and desires of his father. 'I wanted to make you the happiest of men,' Dr Salvator apologises to his son, 'and instead I made you unhappy. Forgive me.'

Conservatives fought back, especially after the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Khrushchev retreated: he 'had to give his conservative oppo­nents something', and culture 'was the most disposable part of his reforms'.[70]Throughout 1963, at a series of meetings between party leaders and artists, Khrushchev and his ideological overseer Leonid Ilichev delivered speeches (immediately printed in major newspapers) insisting on party control of the arts, rejecting Western and modernist influences, and shrilly denying any­thing resembling a generation gap in Soviet society. Khrushchev personally denounced Nekrasov, for Both Sides ofthe Ocean and for the writer's praise of Marlen Khutsiev's Ilich's Gate (Zastava Il'icha), a particularly provoking film.

The three young heroes of Ilich's Gate come of age in the Moscow of 1961­2, and Khutsiev chose as his co-author Gennadii Shpalikov, roughly the age of the film's protagonists, so as to ensure up-to-date language and mood. Characters work on actual construction and demolition sites, enhancing visual/atmospheric veracity; students from the State Institute of Cinematog­raphy - future stars of Soviet cinema - play many roles; a poetry reading organised for the film looks as real as the documentary footage of a May Day parade. (In fact, the actors had to elbow their way through the throng crowding in to hear such superstars as Rozhdestvenskii and Akhmadulina.) Much about Ilich's Gate's depiction of the relationship between generations exasperated

Khrushchev, but one scene enraged him. When the twenty-three-year-old hero Sergei asks the ghost of his father, killed during the war, for guidance on how to live, his father replies 'I am twenty-one', and vanishes. 'There's more to this than meets the eye,' fulminated Khrushchev. 'The idea is to impress upon the children that their fathers cannot be their teachers in life, and that there is no point in turning to them for advice. The filmmakers think that young people ought to decide for themselves how to live, without asking their elders for counsel and help.'[71]

Before Khutsiev succeeded in revising and abridging Ilich's Gate into a ver­sion finally approved for release in 1965, under the title I Am Twenty (Mne dvadtsat' let), well over a year had passed, and Khrushchev himself had been replaced by the team of Brezhnev and Kosygin (in October 1964). The film's sad fate reflects the Soviet Union's general retreat from Thaw liberalism and the onset of a process of calcification that later earned the sobriquet zastoi, 'era of stagnation'. Like the Thaw before it, stagnation proceeded unevenly, often imposing itselfruthlessly in the cultural sphere but occasionally permit­ting new voices to join the cultural chorus. Its crudest and most notoriously repressive manifestations - the trials of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniel', the arrest of Ukrainian dissidents, the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Writers' Union and then from the country - conceal a more complex and less uniformly bleakpicture. Ideas, instincts and individuals nurtured by the Thaw survived into zastoi - indeed, most of them survived into Gorbachev's era of perestroika and glasnost', if not beyond. However, in the gen­erally inhospitable cultural atmosphere that prevailed between Khrushchev's fall and Gorbachev's ascension, they faced constricting official possibilities and found themselves compelled to explore alternative channels and outlets.

Stagnation, 1967-85

Official attempts to suppress debate and to reverse the relative openness ofthe Thaw dominated cultural life from about 1966 until the early 1970s, with 1967 - the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution - proving particularly stultifying. In 1965 Mikhail Romm's Ordinary Fascism (Obyknovennyifashizm), a documentary probing the psychology underlying and engendering Nazism, with tacit par­allels to Stalinism, attracted 20 million viewers during its first year and won a prize at the Leipzig festival.[72] By the end of i965 censors routinely cut 'any parallels, direct or implied, between communism and nazism', any reference to the penal units during the war, to Red Army atrocities, to the official policy that branded as traitors Soviet soldiers imprisoned by the Nazis as prisoners of war (which among other consequences precluded Red Cross assistance), even to venereal disease among combatants.[73] Estonian film-maker Kaljo Kiisk made Madness (Bezumie)in 1968, setting its action in Nazi-occupied Estonia and suggesting parallels between Nazism and the Soviet domination of his country: the film was banned until 1986. These proscriptions remained broadly in force until the early i980s.

The same strictures applied to de-Stalinisation, the purges and the cult of personality. In early i965, lacking explicit guidelines from the new Cen­tral Committee, the script and editorial committee (GSRK) overseeing film production reacted warily to scripts on these subjects. Gradually committee members gained confidence, vetoing one script based on the wartime diary of a girl whose father spent seventeen years in the Gulag, another whose pro­tagonist investigates the rehabilitation cases of those unjustly accused. 'The theme ofthe cult ofpersonality', they explained, 'is unacceptable at the present time.' By late July, GSRK reacted to a proposal from Armenia's studio with a flat assertion: 'This film should not be about the era of the cult of personality, for there was no such era.'[74]

In May 1967, with domestic publication of Cancer Ward (Rakovyi korpus) bogged down indefinitely, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mailed 250 signed copies of a thunderous denunciation of censorship and of the literary establishment whose members were about to gather at the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writ­ers. He sent them to 'all the people whom Solzhenitsyn regarded as honest and genuine writers', and to prominent members of the Writers' Union (the two categories rarely overlapped).[75] 'Literature', he wrote, 'cannot develop in between the categories of "permitted" and "not permitted," "about this you may write" and "about this you may not".'[76] Eighty-three members of the Union signed a collective letter to the congress requesting open debate on the subject, but the congress resolutely ignored the letter, the author and the issue.

Nevertheless, people like Solzhenitsyn - members of the 'disaffected intel­ligentsia' - constituted an 'extremely powerful intellectual subculture that challenged the official culture through the power of moral persuasion it exer­cised . . . through nonofficial channels'.³⁷ By 1967, official control over culture had substantially shifted from doctrine to praxis, from the once-powerful, now attenuated dogma ofsocialist realism into the bureaucratic structures that reg­ulated distribution of the arts as a means of regulating what actually reached the consumer. Those structures proved both effective and durable, particularly when manned by orthodox bureaucrats. The unions exercised control over pensions, housing, lecture tours, travel funds: infringement of unwritten rules - whether signing a petition in defence of an arrested human rights activist or writing about a proscribed subject - could entail serious financial hardship. The State Committee for the Press, parallel and complementary to the Writ­ers' Union, expanded its powers, devising a production plan to fulfil economic goals and a thematic plan to fulfil ideological ones.

The system encouraged both conformity and hypertrophy, meeting its goals by producing a certain number of books (movies ... paintings... plays) rather than by satisfying readers or audiences. Production figures, not sales figures, measured success, although studios and publishing houses faced close ques­tioning when ticket sales fell or books gathered dust on shelves. (Since the number of copies printed determined royalties, rather than the number of copies sold, publishers authorised large print runs of 'safe' books - includ­ing Brezhnev's ghost-written war memoir My Little Homeland (Malaia rodina).) Censorship processes - as opposed to self-censorship - began within the intri­cate hierarchies ofjournal, publishing house, theatre or film studio, longbefore a work ever reached official censors.

Vladimir Makanin came of age professionally during the Brezhnev years. He described the unwritten pact:

As a member ofthe Writers' Union you got all sorts of advantages: they looked after you if you were ill or disabled . . . they might appeal on your behalf to the Moscow City Council to get you an apartment or a kindergarten place for your child; they guaranteed a good rate of pay for your writing, provided

Documentary Materials, 2nd edn (New York and London: Collier, 1975), p. 544; I have modified the translation. 37 Adele Marie Barker, 'The Culture Factory: Theorizing the Popular in the Old and New Russia', in Adele Marie Barker (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 20-1.

writers' retreats and so forth.... But of course the Union of Writers, like any other trade union, had a political edge to it: it guaranteed all these material advantages, but in exchange you had to write as they wanted you to ... Under such circumstances it's an enormous labour to go your own way and remain an individual.[77]

Nevertheless, even the most repressive years -1968,1970,1972,1979 - reveal inconsistency and a growing multivocality. Non-conformists willing to remove themselves from the central Moscow-Leningrad axis sometimes found havens inprovincial cities. A workproscribed in one city might be published in another. Plays occasionally sneaked onto theatre stages without official permission. Films (like Irakli Kvirikadze's The Swimmer (Plovets), made and shelved in 1981) might be shown in clubs if not in commercial theatres. Texts by safely dead, once-proscribed writers - Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Bunin, Mikhail Bulgakov - reached Soviet readers for the first time, in part to compensate for the dis­appearance of living writers who, forced into emigration, lost their status as authors along with their citizenship: their books vanished from library shelves, their names from literary history. (Dancers who defected and musicians who transgressed - as Rostropovich did by helping Solzhenitsyn - were similarly erased from officially recorded Russian culture.) When publication was fore­closed, writers often chose to circulate their work unofficially, via samizdat, underground distribution of typed or occasionally mimeographed copies of manuscripts, orto send it abroad (tamizdat).[78] Liudmila Petrushevskaia, whose unpublished plays were performed in private apartments during the early and mid-1970s, recalled the cachet of illicit art: 'If a play was widely advertised it meant it wasn't worth seeing, no one went. Whereas crowds and crowds would turn up for something that hadn't been advertised at all; everyone would hear about it by word of mouth... It would be announced as a "creative evening" or "a meeting with young actors", without mentioning the author or the name of the work.'[79]

Individuals in positions of responsibility often consciously (and occasionally inadvertently) shielded artists. A publishing house held on to Fazil Iskander's story 'Tree of Childhood' (Derevo detstva) for years rather than rejecting it out­right, simply because the director wanted to avoid controversy, and eventually the story appeared.⁴¹ The editors of Novyi mir, although unable to publish

Petrushevskaia for many years, 'fed me, gave me work, all through the most difficult and hungry times they gave me reviews and book reports to do. They . . . read me and gave me their opinion - always . . . And when the time came [under Gorbachev], they did publish me.' Similarly, her play Three Girls in Blue (Tri devushki vgolubom) appeared in the journal Contemporary Drama in 1983 'thanks to the courage of a few people who'd simply taken the responsibility on themselves': specifically, the chief editor of the journal and an apparatchik in the Ministry of Culture who said, 'This play is about me!'⁴²

In what amounted to an ongoing tug-of-war between two unequal forces, state and artist, the artist had surprising if insecure resources. The state expelled beyond its borders incorrigible cases, but it did so reluctantly, fully aware of the negative publicity resulting from the departure of some of its most creative individuals. (When authorities bulldozed an outdoor exhibit of paintings by non-conformist artists in 1974, the ensuing negative publicity won a degree of freedom for the artists involved.⁴³) Andrei Siniavskii, himself one of those miscreants compelled to emigrate, described the resultant situation:

With the appearance of ventures which the state interprets as hostile to itself- samizdat, the activities of the dissidents and so on - the censorship has tended to be more lenient with certain official writers, who are therefore permitted to deal quite boldly with subjects which, although not the most burning in social and political terms, are nonetheless ofconsiderable peripheral interest, like the subject of the Soviet past and individual destinies . . . The state is obliged to tolerate them, because if they banned them completely they would all go straight into samizdat or emigrate to the West.⁴⁴

Artists who chose to remain within the system during zastoi adroitly cap­italised on their knowledge of its personalities and institutions to evade its constraints. Anatolii Rybakov had never sent his manuscripts abroad for pub­lication, thereby sustaining a reputation for 'loyalty'. Nonetheless, several journals rejected his 1978 novel Heavy Sand (Tiazhelyi pesok) depicting a Jewish family's life in the Ukraine from about 1900 until 1942, primarily because of its depiction of Belorussian complicity with the Nazis in the destruction of the local Jewish ghetto. He then submitted it to Oktiabr, a journal known for its conservatism, in the hopes that the new editors might want to 'raise the journal's respectability by publishing a daring, sensational work'. Moreover, he knew the censors were less likely to read ahead of time an entire work

42 Ibid., pp. 32-3.

43 Alison Hilton and Norton Dodge, 'Introduction', in New Art from the Soviet Union (Wash­ington and Ithaca, N.Y.: Acropolis Books, 1977), p. 10.

44 Andrei Siniavskii, 'Samizdat and the Rebirth of Literature', Index on Censorship 9, 4 (Aug. 1980): 9.

scheduled for serial publication in Oktiabr' than one scheduled for a known liberal monthly like Novyi mir. 'Thus the first, relatively harmless portion of Heavy Sand passed through censorship. But the next installment described Soviet repressions of the 1930s and the Nazi's [sic] "final solution" . . . The censors were dumbfounded, but deemed it too awkward to interrupt the novel's serialization.'[80] The same tactic enabled Iurii Trifonov to publish House on the Embankment (Dom na naberezhnoi) in another 'conservative' journal, Druzhba narodov.

Writers frequently relied on Aesopian language, embedding sensitive ideas in a code of allusions, manipulating rigidly defined and instantly recognisable images and topoi in order to suggest parallels to current moral dilemmas and to alert readers to a very different set of values from those officially authorised. 'Since Stalinist socialist realism offered writers a ready-made system of signs with fixed political meanings, it had the potential to be used as . . . a medium for [post-Stalin] writers to express themselves - even if only in a very tentative way - on politically delicate subjects.'[81] Such codes, requiring 'respondents' who share information, point of view or values with the artist,[82] need not be exclusively verbal. In theatre, for instance, an actor's inflected delivery of'inno- cent' lines might cue the audience to a coded meaning; in film, juxtaposition of image and sound can signal satiric intent.

The past continued to serve as a template for the present, regardless of the artist's particular politics, but emphasis increasingly shifted to contemporary life. Conservative Iurii Bondarev and liberal Vasil Bykov both chose to link the Second World War with contemporary Soviet life by following 'the behaviour and actions of former soldiers and officers . . . through several decades after the end of the war, and [juxtaposing] the reactions to past events by represen­tatives of different generations'.[83] The revolutionary and Stalinist past 'enters into every facet' of Trifonov's characters and informs - indeed, determines - the moral universe they occupy in the present.[84] In the late 1960s and 1970s, Tri­fonov, Georgii Baklanov and a handful of others succeeded inpublishing fiction about the cynicism and consumerism ofthe urban intelligentsia, the degraded state of'that handful of ideals in which scions of the intelligentsia still believed but were unable to act on', and to link the moral expediency of the nation's past with the spiritual degeneration of subsequent generations. Others - Shukshin, Valentin Rasputin - wrote about the 'victims of the transforma­tion of Soviet society, people who had little understanding of and less control over their own lives'. Trifonov wrote from inside the transformation process itself, from 'the point of view of those members of the urban intelligentsia who had "made" the Soviet Union and must live with the results'.[85]

With the present pushing out the past as art's primary focus, village prose diminished in importance, although it remained popular among readers. The phenomenon of literatura byta, the literature of everyday reality, expanded, despite consistent official denigration of bytopisanie as trivial. (Attacks on byt included film: Marlen Khutsiev fielded similar charges against Two Fyodors (Dva Fedora, 1958), as did Tengiz Abuladze the same year for Someone Else's Children (Chuzhie deti).) Over time, 'this generally small-scale literature, with its focus on the everyday and the mundane (especially the domestic), carved out a niche for itself within the mainstream of Soviet literature while declining to link the individual with the universal, to resolve personal as well as more general problems, or to comment on ideological or philosophical matters'.[86]

While by no means gender-specific, the literature, drama and cinema of byt came to be identified with 'women's themes' and with women artists, espe­cially writers, whose numbers increased dramatically in the Brezhnev years. In films like A Sweet Woman (Sladkaia zhenshchina, i976), A Strange Woman (Strannaia zhenshchina, 1977) and A Wife Has Left (Zhena ushla, 1979), and in the fiction of many women writers, a throng of lonely women work and raise their children in a feminised world in which men play little part, and that part seldom constructive. The characters live in ugly apartment blocks in neighbourhoods devoid of shops and greenery, miles from the nearest metro stop. They spend inordinate amounts of time acquiring basic foodstuffs and traversing mud- and rubble-filled streets to get to work. 'It is precisely the domestic aspect of life, with its inequitable distribution of labor, its family pressures, the inadequate social and economic services, and above all the necessity of living with alcoholism, that immediately and on a very basic level distinguishes women's lives from those of men.'[87] (That distinction is eroded in later fiction by younger women.) Often enough, these writers treated themes - such as the impact of drunken husbands on family life - that coin­cided with official concerns (the economic cost of ubiquitous alcoholism). As a result, 'they were able to graft themselves onto a mandate that was actively being promoted' by the authorities.[88]

Given the cost and logistical complexity of film-making, making films required working within the system. Rewards included access to scarce resources like imported film stock, larger shooting budgets, more leisurely schedules, opportunities to shoot co-productions abroad and well-paid man­agerial positions within the Union of Cinematographers, the studios and the Soviet Union's premier cinema training centre, the State Institute of Cine­matography (VGIK). The state stringently controlled distribution: reluctant to ban products that represented substantial financial outlays, the system pre­ferred to limit their impact. With movies, that meant controlling the number of prints made and the venues in which they were shown (in, for instance, central versus outlying locations).

In the 1970s, as cinema attendance sagged in inverse proportion to the rise in TV ownership, the regime tried to encourage the release of entertaining films. (Central TV went over fully to colour programming in 1978.) To that end Filip Ermash, an admirer of Hollywood, replaced the ideological and anti- commercial Aleksei Romanov as head of Goskino, the State Department of Cinema. Ermash ran Goskino from 1972 to 1986, and encouraged a tilt towards 'mass, lightweight film aimed at everyone',[89] like the extraordinarily popular slapstick (and skilful) comedies directed by Leonid Gaidai.

Films became more homogeneous, though generically more diverse, and decidedly less individualistic, especially towards the end of Ermash's tenure. However, not all successful Brezhnev-era film-makers were opportunists, ready to conform to the party's priorities. Eldar Riazanov and Vasilii Shukshin, two significant exceptions, believed no less strongly than Andrei Tarkovsky that film-making should be free of control and dedicated to improvement of society, but they 'rejected formal experimentation in favour of an aesthetic of maximum (or at any rate, widespread) popular accessibility'.[90] Each had occasional difficulties: for years Shukshin fought (unsuccessfully) to make a film on the seventeenth-century Cossack rebel Stenka Razin, and local party chiefs banned Riazanov's bleak 1980 satire Garage (Garazh), even though it had been approved for general release. Still, most of their films played in first-run theatres to huge audiences. Fifty million viewers saw Shukshin's Snowball Berry Red (Kalina krasnaia, 1974) in its first year; seventy million saw Riazanov's Irony of Fate, or Have a Good Sauna! (Ironiia sud'by, ili s legkim parom!) a year later. Lenfilm's exceptionally gifted Dinara Asanova made eight films in ten years as well as a series on juvenile delinquency for TV While party leaders censored Asanova's 'portrait of a generation, puzzling in its taste for Western music and punk attire and its search for a new identity',[91] and relegated her films to second-run or run-down theatres, they held none back, and Kids (Patsany, 1983) won prizes at several Soviet festivals.

After 1967-8 film-makers faced increasing resistance to experimental, folk- loric and stylistically inflected films, with structures based on 'analogical images rather than narrative logic'.[92] Nevertheless, both central and repub­lican studios managed to produce such films until roughly 1975, when local and national pressures combined to promote pedestrian and derivative cin­ema. Ukraine's studio tried to perpetuate the legacy of Dovzhenko and the beleaguered Sergei Paradzhanov, at least until the latter's arrest in 1974 on fabricated charges. Iurii Ilenko's highly stylised Spring for the Thirsty (Rodnik dlia zhazhdushchikh, 1965) was shelved for twenty years, but two later films, On St John's Eve (Vecher nakanune Ivana Kupala, 1969) and the award-winning White Bird with a Black Mark (Belaia ptitsa s chernoi otmetinoi, 1971), ran in theatres, if only briefly. The explosion of cinematic energy that distinguished the studios of Central Asia in the late 1960s continued for several years, with Ishmukhame- dov's Sweethearts (Vliublennye; Uzbekistan, 1970), Mansurov's She was a Slave (Rabynia; Kazakhstan, 1970), Narliev's The Daughter-in-Law (Nevestka; Turk- menia, 1972), Okeev's The Fierce One (Liutyi; Kirgizia, 1974), and two films by Kirghiz director Shamshiev, Red Poppies ofIssyk-Kul (Alye maki Issyk-Kulia, 1971) and White Steamship (Belyi parokhod, 1976), both award-winning, though the latter minimally distributed.

Of the republics, only Georgia managed to produce a consistently interest­ing body of work throughout zastoi: poetic and visually stunning explorations of Georgia's national past; 'philosophical comedies' that examine 'the incon­gruity between dream and reality, between the desires of the natural man and the structure of a society founded on mechanics and regulations';[93] subtle psychological dramas exploring the tensions of modern Soviet life. (Distri­bution was frequently restricted to Georgia.) Otar Ioseliani, who began his career in i966 with Leaf fall (Listopad), a feature film of near-documentary verisimilitude, experienced so many problems with later films that he eventu­ally left for France, where he continues to work. Lana Gogoberidze, originally a documentarist, won fame with Some Interviews on Personal Matters (Neskol'ko interv'iu po lichnym voprosam, 1979), whose forty-something heroine finds she can no longer juggle the complicated balls of her life and whose past - like Gogoberidze's - includes a reunion with a mother released from the Gulag after Stalin's death.

By the last years of zastoi, 'the state's intrusion in private life considerably diminished, while the arena for public expression and the possibilities for pri­vate pleasure both expanded. Culture and everyday life were, of course, still constricted by political surveillance and economic controls, and censorship still operated ... But conformity in modes of behavior, public expression, and individual identity became far less coercive, and the politicization of everyday life, the expectation that communal or political goals shaped individual desires, was muted and even ridiculed.'[94] Counter-systems - the cultural equivalents of the black and grey markets that supplemented the stagnant economy - defied, paralleled and in a sense complemented the 'public gloss, monumen- talism, desiccated oratory, and relentless ritualism' of state systems.[95] The urban, topical irreverence of estrada (revue) comedy, acute commentaries on the shortcomings of Soviet life performed most adroitly by Arkadii Raikin and Mikhail Zhvanetskii, appealed to live audiences. And a plethora of voices - from women, from provincial Russia, from non-Russian republics - leaked into and thickened the official chorus.

New technology permitted the spread of culture - primarily, but not exclu­sively popular culture - with a speed and on a scale previously unimaginable. The advent of cheap audio cassettes allowed everyone from long-distance truckers to high-school students to hear gypsy songs previously banned from the airwaves, the immensely popular songs of Zhanna Bichevskaia, Alla Pugacheva and Valerii Leont'ev, and the far more abrasive ones of bards like Aleksandr Galich and Vladimir Vysotskii. (The Composers' Union fought back, mandating 'that 80% of all songs performed had to be those of Soviet com­posers' and establishing 'review commissions to vet all rock groups'.⁶¹) A few years later video technology, though accessible only to a tiny elite, permitted the beginnings of an underground cinema movement, mainly in Leningrad. What began as 'an underground band of young layabouts and drunken "week­end warriors" who started to film their own debauched and violent free-for- alls in the woods in the early 1980s' went on to make the Soviet Union's first horror movies, where 'crazed "zombies" or necro-denizens wander apoca­lyptic landscapes and commit acts of wanton cruelty, homosexual violence, and murder'.[96] With the increase in the availability of VCRs, pirated foreign films eventually entered Soviet homes without even a token nod to official channels.

Popular fiction during zastoi superseded in popularity if not in critical esteem the new generation of 'serious' writers known variously as 'urban', 'the Moscow school', and 'the forty-year-olds'.[97] It satisfied a reading public that had grown substantially thanks to urbanisation, better education and liv­ing conditions and increased leisure time. The makulatura scheme, introduced in i974 to solve the Soviet Union's perpetual paper shortage, enabled read­ers to trade in newspapers and magazines for books. 'Large segments of the population which had previously been uninterested in the printed word out­side newspapers were now introduced to the idea of the book as something valuable to be acquired; they were also encouraged to build a library of ide­ologically neutral and highly readable literature.'[98] Crime fiction burgeoned, both the home-made versions produced by novelists like Arkadii Adamov, Lev Ovalov and Arkadii and Grigorii Vainer, and the imports: fifteen works by Agatha Christie alone appeared in Soviet journals between 1966 and 1970.[99]Iulian Semenov's thrillers fed the hunger for escapist popular fiction, as did Valentin Pikul' 's piquant novels of the diplomatic, aristocratic and dynastic life of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. The state, eager for its share of the profits, authorised print runs in the millions (that sold out immediately) and screen adaptations. The prestigious Moscow-based journals like Novyi mir and Znamia did not need such material to keep their circulation high, but provincial journals like Volga, Sel'skaia molodezh (Rural youth) and Ural'skii sledopyt (Urals pathfinder) relied on detective novels and/or science fiction to attract subscribers, and the legal journal Chelovek i zakon (Man and the law) came out in enormous print runs because it published Georges Simenon's Maigret novels and Semenov's 6 Ogareva Street.[100]

The Brezhnev regime's final spasm of cultural repression occurred in 1979, with its refusal to publish a 'literary almanac', Metropolis (Metropol'). Metropo­lis contained poetry, essays, drama and short fiction by twenty-six writers, famous and obscure. Its editors - Vasilii Aksenov, Viktor Erofeev, Andrei Bitov, Fazil Iskander and Evgenii Popov - justified Metropolis as an effort to combat 'the dreary inertia which exists in journals and publishing houses . . . the con­dition of stagnant, quiet fright'.[101] Deliberately fostering a pluralist approach by including aesthetically diverse material, the editors tried - and failed - to publish via legal channels. The authorities blocked the intended 'book launch' at a downtown cafe (literally: they sealed off the block and closed the cafe for 'sanitary' reasons). The Writers' Union expelled five contributors, including Erofeev and Popov, slandered Aksenov and Akhmadulina, intimidated others; several, including Aksenov, emigrated. In the paralysis that ensued, and that persisted until 1986, Soviet culture bifurcated into its official sphere, 'total marasmus, total decay, supercretinism', in Popov's words, and an active, even 'tumultuous' literary underground whose members - mainly born between 1945 and 1955 - had virtually no hope of publication.

The fact that our generation was immediately confronted with a kind of con­crete wall meant that we were forced to go in another direction... [We] never identified with Sovietpower, absolutely never... Whereas that generation, the 'sixtiers', had identified with it, they'd gone through the romance ofjoining the YCL [Komsomol, Young Communists' League] and hearing all these myths and stories about good communists. They'd been seduced by this subtle lie ... We never felt that. Our only hope was that we might get away with it just a bit, cheat the system a bit, maybe publish a few things. That was our rather mini­mal ambition .. . None of this was unbearable, unbearable isn't the word .. . but it was simply melancholy, very melancholy, watching what was happening around us, communism and more communism, and wondering when on earth it would end. In fact mostly it seemed it would never come to an end . . . We felt that for evermore and eternity there'd be a portrait of Brezhnev hanging there on the wall and someone singing some communist rubbish on the radio. So however much we laughed at Gorbachev, we should all remember very clearly that he played an absolutely enormous role.[102]

Glasnost' and the post-Soviet decade, 1985-2000

When Gorbachev came to power he hardly intended the end of the Soviet state, with its concomitant dismantling of political, economic and cultural institutions, the resulting need to adapt to altered economic circumstances, cycles of inflation and devaluation that impoverished significant portions of the population, the success of an emergent entrepreneurial class and a myriad of other changes. Initially, glasnost', coupled with perestroika, promised hope, and for some time it delivered on the promise that many men and women, themselves products of Khrushchev's Thaw (the 'sixtiers' to whom Popov refers), felt had been deferred for twenty-five years or more. Throughout 1986, 1987 and 1988, excited, amazed gasps greeted every manifestation of freedom: historical-political rehabilitations, literary and cinematic discoveries and redis­coveries, artistic revelations. Although wary about the durability of those gains without fundamental institutional reform, artists and cultural consumers alike fervently welcomed the recovery of their national pasts, the removal of polit­ical boundaries that had banished into oblivion emigre culture, the exposure of lies that had shaped Soviet life for so long and the opportunity to write and read, produce and watch, compose and listen without supervision. For more than sixty years the Soviet state had controlled the creation and distribution of cultural products; beginning in 1986, that domination disappeared.

Theatre and film unions supported Gorbachev rapidly and energetically, partly because they hoped that the absence of censorship would stimu­late a revamped repertoire with which to lure dwindling audiences. They blamed political and bureaucratic interference for the system's inefficiency, and believed that independence would resolve many of their problems. They swiftly divested themselves of old-style political appointees in favour of those who had accumulated 'moral capital' by suffering from state repression.[103] A new Union of Theatre Workers replaced the All-Russian Theatrical Society, with the aim of 'freeing theatres from the close, pettifogging tutelage of the

Ministry . . . enabling theatre companies themselves to take all the essential decisions and manage their own affairs'.[104] Between January 1986 and 1988, the number of theatres in Moscow increased by 50 per cent, and amateur and semi-professional groups multiplied, including fringe companies offering more experimental productions.

In a parallel process, members of the Cinematographers' Union voted out two-thirds of the board in May 1986, electing in their stead 'uncompromised' directors (most of whom had entered the industry in the 1960s) like Elem Klimov, Eldar Shengelaia and Andrei Smirnov. Cinema studios converted to a financially self-supporting system (khozraschet) that permitted virtual auton­omy over script selection, budgeting, casting and hiring, though it offered no solutions to the obstructions posed by entrenched interests, the lack of hard currency and the difficulty of gauging popular taste. In 1988 film studios gained the right to distribute their libraries of films directly, bypassing the official government export agency.

Almost immediately the Cinematographers' Union undertook a review of films suppressed during the Brezhnev years, mainly for political transgres­sions, and authorised their release: Aleksei German's Roadcheck (Proverka na dorogakh, 1971), its hero a POW suspected of collaboration with the Nazis; Gleb Panfilov's The Theme (Tema, 1979), with allusions to Jewish emigration; Aleksandr Askoldov's first and last film The Commissar (Komissar, 1968), with an ambiguous Red Army heroine, montage reminiscent of the 1920s, and a flash forward to the Holocaust. Audiences watched these 'recovered' films with interest, but reserved their passion for the new movies portraying the Soviet Union's painful past and its tumultuous present, just as they devoured inves­tigative journalism in print and on TV All-Union television, reaching virtually every household in the nation, broadcast a startling number of documentary films.

A few directors (Kira Muratova, Aleksandr Sokurov, Lana Gogoberidze) wel­comed glasnost' as the chance 'to make films that resist the overpoliticization of culture', rather than as an opportunity to make more openly political films.[105]But the majority of film-makers, freed from the demand to 'construct the future', portrayed the reality that surrounded them, and 'what they saw was a bleak picture: beggars on the streets, impoverished pensioners, economic chaos, street crime, Mafia shootings, pornographic magazines and videos, decaying houses and ramshackle communal apartments, and the emergence of a new class, the New Russians.. .'.[106] Feature films like Vasilii Pichul's hyper- realistic melodrama Little Vera (Malen'kaia Vera) and Iurii Mamin's satiric The Fountain (Fontan), both released in 1988 when ticket prices were still affordable, drew huge audiences (50 million for Little Vera) and international prizes.

Within a few years, however, audiences had had enough, preferring to watch Brazilian soap operas and optimistic fortune-tellers on TV in their relatively clean, safe and comfortable living rooms rather than the all-too- familiar grim reality (or Hollywood trash) on offer in decaying dirty theatres. Film production dropped as fast as it had risen: 300 films were released in 1990, 213 in 1991, 68 in 1994, 28 in 1996.[107] More recently annual production has stabilised at about 75, produced by small, privatised companies instead of the unprofitably large studios of yore. Russia's Ministry of Culture currently finances fewer than two dozen films annually, and studios in many ofthe former Soviet republics struggle to survive, relying on help from organisations like France's Centre National de Cinematographie.

The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the 'wholesale social displacement of the cult of high culture'.[108] Entrenched attitudes compounded enormous practical difficulties. During the Brezhnev years, the polarisation between those artists whom the state favoured and those whom it marginalised strengthened the 'perceived connectionbetween the moral integrity ofthe film "artist" and the social pessimism and aesthetic difficulty of his or her films'. In other words, inaccessibility denoted honesty, and entertainment meant com­promise.[109] That attitude persisted well beyond the system's demise: 'Many people go to movie houses just to relax and enjoy themselves - to stop think­ing,' commented a leading film-maker. 'We have to enlighten them and make them want to think.'[110] Yet 'auteur' films, however gratifying the international laurels they may accrue at Cannes, do not fill seats.

After more than a decade of negotiating between creative autonomy and public taste, Russian film-makers have found no magic formula. Still, a sizeable handful of recent films have succeeded in drawing domestic audiences into theatres. (The construction of modern multiplex cinemas with stadium seating and reliable heating helps as well.) Successful post-Soviet films manipulate generic formulae to probe contemporary concerns. Thrillers like Balabanov's Brother (Brat, 1997) offer amoral killer-heroes who may promise safety in a lawless society. Comedies like Dmitrii Astrakhan's Everything Will Be OK (Vse budet khorosho, 1995) provide 'escape into another world, imagined or real'. And war films like Prisoner of the Mountain (Kavkazskii plennik, 1997) and The Cuckoo (Kukushka, 2001) feature attractive soldier-heroes who are abandoned by their army and their community.[111] If the film-maker 'with a pragmatic frame of mind and a calculating self-interest has succeeded the figure of the director who was ostentatiously distant from material problems and fully engaged in the problems of art',[112] director Valerii Todorovskii welcomes the shift: 'I think it's a feature of the new generation of Russian filmmakers that they don't try to educate anyone. They understand that cinema should entertain people and give them pleasure, and, if it can, create some original, new world.'[113]

Literature benefited immediately from the steady expansion of opportu­nity and erosion of prohibitions ushered in by glasnost', despite a tug-of-war between liberals and conservatives that lasted for several years.[114] Censorship was formally abolished on 1 August 1990, but long before that Glavlit had lost most of its teeth. Editors, once the first-line censors, made decisions with little regard for political or ideological criteria, except as they might affect circula­tion figures. As a result of the 1990 law, formerly underground and unofficial journals gained legal status: more than 400 registered within a few months. Most printing facilities and access to paper supplies remained in the hands of the Communist Party, so the newly independent journals faced an abundance of practical handicaps. For a few years, however, until financial exigencies forced many journals to close down, editors reintegrated into Russian culture an extraordinary range of once-banned material, from poetry and fiction writ­ten in the 1920s (Evgenii Zamiatin's 1920 dystopian novel We (My), for one) to novels written thirty or forty years later (Vasilii Grossman's Forever Flowing (Vse techet), Nabokov's novels), from samizdat texts by authors living abroad to texts written 'for the drawer' by Soviet authors who had simply waited until circumstances changed. Contemporary authors who had published through­out the years of zastoi now took up crusading pens (Rasputin's Fire (Pozhar, 1985); Astaf'ev's SadDetective (Pechal'nyi detektiv, 1986); Aitmatov's Executioner's Block (Plakha, 1986)), and works appeared by Tatyana Tolstaya, Viktor Erofeev, Mikhail Kuraev - writers whose 'vision of the world evolved prior to glasnost, even if the publication of their works did not'.[115] In addition, readers had access to a bewildering array of pulp fiction - thrillers, romances, pornography - lying cheek by jowl with political pamphlets and 'serious' literature on the stalls outside metro stations.

As the period of Gorbachev's rule drew to an end, writers and critics grad­ually abandoned the time-honoured civic and social role of literature, its func­tional utility. Viktor Erofeev, speaking for many, rejected the demand that writers be 'priest, and prosecutor, and sociologist, and expert on questions of love and marriage, and economist, and mystic'.[116] Readers adapted more slowly, rebuffing writers for 'offering no deep thoughts, no beautiful feelings, no attractive characters, not the least ray of hope'.[117] Accustomed to publicistic, polemical and pedagogic prose that sought to expose or ridicule the system, they spurned much of the 'alternative' literature on offer, mainly fiction 'osten­sibly divorced from any specific social and historical context... sometimes real, sometimes fantastic', and often outrageously explicit in its sexual references and obscenities.[118]

Dubbed by one Russian critic 'post-socialist realist baroque',⁸⁵ the fiction of writers like Valeriia Narbikova and Valentin Sorokin is bleak and often shock­ing, written in response to 'an all-pervasive mass culture [originating] in ideol­ogy, deeply permeating the language as well as the visual landscape ... [Their work] can be read as a passionate response to a society that lived on hypocrisy and shame, combining grandiose pretensions to moral righteousness with an almost unparalleled capacity for violence.' Sorokin, in particular, depicts 'a schizophrenic world in which the stock characters of Soviet literature - solid officials, eager young men, wry old codgers who have seen a thing or two - turn out on inspection to be monsters and perverts, and where everyday

Soviet language - the language of apparent sense and morality - is seen as no more meaningful than the raving of lunatics'.[119]

Post-Soviet chernukha (black fiction), published in serious periodicals, appealed to readers because it 'legitimized their own knowledge that such things [homelessness, prostitution, army hazing, etc.] existed', and its authors spurned any and every kind of ideology in favour of'corporeal truth'.[120] In time chernukha became 'the chief medium for chronicling everyday life', with 'new Russians' (that is, newly and ostentatiously wealthy) replacing the heroes and heroines drawn from the dregs of society, and material abundance - banquets, orgies - replacing suffering and physical humiliation. For the new hero, power alone retains meaning, and 'all other norms that traditionally relate to morality become absolutely arbitrary and are defined by almost insignificant factors'.[121]In Vladimir Tuchkov's 'Master of the Steppes' (Novyimir no. 5,1998), for exam­ple, the protagonist, a successful businessman, values Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for precisely those episodes where evil triumphs. He constructs his own 'ham­let', hires 'serfs' for $2,000/year, abuses them in the manner of Dostoevskian sadists - and his employees eagerly extend their contracts, regarding their master 'not as an eccentric man of means but as their very own father - strict but fair and incessantly concerned for their welfare'.[122] Thus the 'morality' of boundless power prevails over any spiritual value system that condemns such power.

Intriguing, but dispiriting - and hardly enticing to citizens who no longer equate literature with culture, who rarely opt for the self-reflexivity and self- parody of much current 'high' literature, and who much prefer books they enjoy, like the twelve-volume series called 'The Romanovs: A Dynasty in Novels', police procedurals by Aleksandra Marinina, and the escapades of Viktor Dotsenko's hero, an Afghan veteran known as the 'Russian Rambo'.[123]The Russian Centre for Public Opinion Research concluded in 1998 that one- third of Russians do not read at all; 95 per cent of those who do read exclu­sively choose 'light reading',[124] mostly homegrown products. Various kinds of detective stories - domestic and historical crime novels, female detective novels, 'techno-thrillers' - attract the most readers, principally because they depict 'genuine nobility, people of duty and honor', and because, whatever their time frame, they deal with contemporary concerns: 'how to live in a period of property redistribution, bureaucratic and criminal lawlessness, ter­rorism, the spread of drug addiction, unsavory public relations campaigns, corruption, loss of social status, and the destruction of public morals'.[125] In Western societies 'high' literature became estranged from popular culture half a century ago. The exigencies of politics and history artificially postponed that rift in the Soviet Union. It is now a reality.

In lieu of a conclusion

This chapter tells a convoluted story, or rather stories, spanning five decades and a spectrum of leadership ranging from Stalin's absolute dictatorship to Putin's technocracy. It depicts a society where politics and culture have until quite recently been intimately, indeed inextricably, intertwined, and where the imperatives of one frequently conflicted with the essence of the other. Even in today's post-Soviet Russia, where artists grope to find a secure footing in the rubble of the old cultural landscape, the nexus of politics and culture has not entirely disappeared. For better and for worse, each illuminates the other, deepening our understanding of both. The story, then, is as complex as the society - and like the society, with all its metamorphoses and transformations, the story continues, its future unknown.

Comintern and Soviet foreign policy, 1919-1941

JONATHAN HASLAM

The October Revolution

The October Revolution was intended as a prelude to world revolution. Ini­tial disappointment at the failure of other countries to follow suit led to an abrupt change of policy at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, when Lenin settled for a compromise peace with the Kaiser in order to give time for the creation of a military base for the revolution until Germany was ripe for revolt. The invasion of Russia by the armies of Japan and the Entente Powers, in May and August 1918 respectively, temporarily destroyed the tactic of accommo­dation with the capitalist world. The option of revolutionary war in the style of Napoleon was thus forced upon the Bolsheviks as a matter of survival. A war of offence against the West therefore became inseparable from the needs for defence. The question hidden behind the ensuing turmoil was the direc­tion of foreign policy once military hostilities ceased. Would Soviet Russia revert to the 'Brest viewpoint' of accommodation? Or, having tasted the excitement, would Moscow once again exercise the option of revolutionary war?

The Bolsheviks had been conducting a fierce campaign to spread the rev­olution among invading Allied troops since the autumn of 1918 under the Central Executive Committee's Department of Propaganda, which was then moved over into the Communist International (Comintern) on 25 March 1919. The Comintern was thus always conceived and created for more than just furthering the worldwide proletarian revolution: protecting and enhancing the security of Soviet Russia (from 1923 the USSR) was no less a priority. Not everyone immediately understood this ambiguous role. It was reported that at the focal point of its intended activities - Germany - the question of creating the Comintern was viewed 'with great scepticism' because it was not thought that 'anything organisationally could be achieved in the near future'.[126]

In theory no conceptual difference was allowed to exist between these entirely distinct purposes. But the conflict between theory and practice very soon became too blatant to remain unremarked, and as early as 1924 and as late as 1935 even official utterance acknowledged that, at any given moment, these purposes could collide. A further complication also arose from the fact that the Comintern was born out of the October Revolution of 1917, which was Russian in inspiration and implementation. It meant that this global apparatus of power attached to the Soviet Communist Party became embroiled in the struggle for power that divided the party after the death of Lenin. Thus, even as it increasingly became an adjunct to Soviet state power abroad, the Comintern also became an adjunct to one faction within the party that sought to control all Soviet power. Thus the process of Bolshevising the Comintern that took place under Lenin - ostensibly to prepare fraternal parties for revolution - inevitably became a process of Stalinising the Comintern once Stalin crushed all vestiges of formal opposition in 1929.[127]

Therefore, even ifwe treat the Comintern as the instrument of Soviet foreign policy that it undoubtedly was, the relationship between Soviet state interests and the interests of worldwide revolution was not always entirely clear. Second, even where one can in retrospect see a line dividing the two, the thorny issue remains of a distinction between the interests of the ruling faction in Russia and the interests of the Soviet system as a whole. The Comintern was thus not a marginal and extraneous extension of Soviet power but integral to its very core and purpose, whether original or bastardised by Stalin's autocracy. The legitimacy of the October Revolution in Russia never depended exclusively on what it could do for Russia. Primarily it lay in what Russia could do for the world. Once the German revolution triumphed, Lenin intended to move to Berlin. Thus internal and international purpose could never be separated by a Chinese Wall of indifference without breaching the Leninist legacy in its entirety. Even at the height of his powers and at the peak of his contempt for foreign Communists, Stalin could never fully forswear that legacy, for to do so would have undermined an essential element in the domestic structure of power he was so anxious to dominate completely. Trotsky wrote that Stalin would not dare desert the Comintern except at risk of appearing 'in the char­acter of a consistent Bonaparte, i.e. break openly with the tradition of October and place some kind of crown on his head'.[128]

Standing alone

The failure of the Allied war of intervention, signalled by the British decision to pull out by the end of 1919, effectively ensured the survival of Bolshevik rule in Russia and the greater part of its former empire. The Janus faces of Soviet foreign policy thereby emerged: on the one side the face of appeasement and statecraft, the policy of accommodation to the capitalist world (the 'Brest viewpoint'); on the other the contrasting face of violence and revolution to uproot and supplant capitalism in its entirety.

Not least because of the Royal Navy offshore, the Baltic states - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - were where Lenin cut his losses. He granted diplo­matic recognition to these bourgeois nationalist regimes and sought to make virtue of necessity by dramatically demonstrating Soviet support for the hal­lowed liberal principle of national self-determination. Similarly in the East, the Bolsheviks projected their solidarity with 'national liberation movements' against Western imperialism even if, in one instance, national liberation was led by a brutal feudal despot (King Amanullah of Afghanistan). This funda­mental breach of Marxist principle - to back the bourgeoisie instead of the toiling masses - was dictated by the demands of the Soviet state in a friendless world where revolution was slow to emerge. In the eyes of the Bolsheviks these were merely temporary remedies to a problem for the short term. A breach of principle in the longer term was not expected and would certainly not have been accepted if proposed.

At the same time that Lenin reassured the Baltic that they might stand free of Bolshevik expansionism, other countries were targeted for Sovietisation. The high point of this misplaced euphoria occurred when Poland was seemingly within grasp in late July 1920. Lenin declared 'the situation in the Comintern' to be 'superb'. Zinoviev, Bukharin and Lenin thought it the time to encourage the Italian revolution (this was the time of the factory occupations in Turin). 'My personal opinion', Lenin wrote, 'is that for this we need to Sovietise Hungary, and perhaps also Czechoslovakia and Romania . . .'[129] This bafflingly misplaced optimism was connected to the drive on Warsaw in a desperate attempt to create a bridge to the land of revolution, Germany. Even with the dramatic failure of the Polish offensive, Lenin continued to boast. 'The defensive period of the war with global imperialism has ended,' he told the Nineteenth Conference of the Russian Communist Party, 'and we can and must use the military situation for the start of an offensive war.'[130]

The voice of sanity was that of the brilliant Polish Jew, Karl Radek, who was consistently better informed about the state of the world because he moved beyond Soviet borders, and with his eyes wide open. Radek ridiculed the optimism prevalent in the Kremlin. He had no problem with the notion of offensive war; only with the assessment of the international situation. 'Now comrade Lenin is demonstrating a new method of information gathering: not knowing what is going on in a given country, he sends an army there,' he parried. It was, he agreed, entirely possible that a revolution in Italy would transform the scene. 'But in any case we must refrain from the method of sounding out the international situation with the aid of bayonets. The bayonet would be good if it were necessary to aid a particular revolution, but for seeing how the land lies in this or that country we have another weapon - Marxism, and for this we do not need to call upon Red Army soldiers.'⁶

The complete and humiliating collapse of the last all-out attempt at revo­lution made by German Communists in March 1921 overturned Comintern policy. It underlined the sorry fact that - for all the recrimination heaped upon the KPD leadership for incompetence and lack of conviction - a structural shift was under way outside Russia, reversing the tide accelerated by war from revolution to the 'stabilisation of capitalism' and, though they had yet to recognise it, counter-revolution. And if the Soviet regime was to survive, it had to take careful note and adjust tactics accordingly. Institutionally, the shift was paralleled by the transfer of talent from the Comintern and other party bodies to the diplomatic apparatus, in the form of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel), whose hitherto precarious existence now became solidified as Soviet Russia established itself as a state in its own right.

It would, however, be wrong to see this shift of emphasis as in any sense final. The two institutions, embodying the Janus faces of the Soviet regime, fought for dominance as an extension of the fact that Comintern sponsorship of revolution inevitably created problems for the Narkomindel. Matters came to a head in mid-August 1921. The issue was to ensure 'that the international position of the RSFSR and the Comintern were not in a condition of antago­nism between one another'. The institutional stance of Soviet diplomats was, of course, the 'Brest viewpoint': the Peace of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918, where fledgling Soviet Russia traded its principles, indemnities and territory for precious time against the invading Germans. Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgii Chicherin wrote to party secretary Molotov:

I do not understand why, thanks to the Comintern, we have to fall out with Afghanistan, Persia and China.

.. .The harm is done in the inadequacy of contacts between the Narkomindel and the Comintern. The line of the Narkomindel consists in enabling the Soviet Republic, the citadel of world revolution, to overcome millions of difficulties. Only from an anti-Brest viewpoint of indifference to the existence of the Soviet Republic can this line be rejected. These difficulties can be counted in the millions; our position is extremely complex. Everyone everywhere mixes up the RSFSR with the Comintern, and an untimely step on its [the Comintern's] part could create a catastrophe for us. We have little in the way of military power. An attack on us from Afghanistan could lead to catastrophe in Turkestan. This is not a game [etim nel'zia igrat']. To consider shameful, vigilance in the face of these dangers - that is truly shameful. [131]

The clash between state interests and revolutionary interests was not so easily resolved in the East, as the revolutionary movement began to swell. In Europe, however, where revolution was effectively in retreat and where the stakes were higher for Soviet security, Comintern tactics had already moved in the direction of the 'united front'. Communist parties formed by splitting Social Democracy were now told to ally with those they believed traitors to the revolution. The parliamentary road to power, anathema months before, was now not just acceptable but also the preferred route to government. The tactical retreat from outright insurrectionism served Soviet state interests because Lenin had by then reached a point of no return in the decision to align Moscow with the pariah of Europe, Weimar Germany. And this alignment rested uneasily upon a common interest between the Right within Germany - extreme nationalists hostile to the Versailles Treaty system, heavy industry in need of markets and the military looking for allies against the Franco- Polish axis - and the Bolsheviks, whose urgent priority was to keep the rest of Europe at loggerheads to forestall any renewed attempt by a common coalition to overturn Soviet power. This alignment was prefigured by secret and unwritten understandings on military co-operation secured before the end of 1921, symbolised in the Treaty of Rapallo in April 1922.[132]

Having failed to overthrow the Bolsheviks - though with no idea just how close they had come - the British, led by Lloyd George, decided to rationalise retreat by attempting to prove a fundamental tenet of liberal doctrine: that by trading with Russia, which was now embarking on a market-based New Economic Policy, Britain could undermine its revolutionary essence as individ­ual economic self-interest overwhelmed the spirit of collectivism. The market would thus ultimately triumph. Such a policy might have worked at that time had Lenin - well versed in liberal fundamentals and a keen reader of Maynard Keynes - not immediately blocked off that promising but elusive avenue with institution of a state monopoly of foreign trade. The Anglo-Soviet trade agree­ment of March 1921 was effectively used by the Bolsheviks to establish Russia as a presence on the international stage, while failing to secure for Britain a ready and peaceful means of ridding the world of Bolshevism. It fast became apparent to all that, with little if any negotiating power at his disposal and with a readiness to make tactical sacrifices as the moment demanded, Lenin had turned the balance of Europe to Russia's advantage, and not through the expected means of revolutionary expansionism but by the time-honoured practices of realpolitik and in a manner worthy of Talleyrand. In this game of deadly chess, under Lenin's skilful direction Moscow always seemed a few steps ahead, leaving the capitalist world insecure, angry and resentful, but with no means yet available of turning that into effective policy to neutralise or destroy the bases of Soviet power.

The real problem for Soviet Russia was, however, that this proved Lenin's last triumph. The assassin's bullet increasingly rendered him senseless, and there existed no one of comparable ability to succeed him. Thus Lenin's tactical moves of the moment - such as Rapallo - were, for want of greater foreign political intuition and ingenuity, fixed in concrete. Where experimentation beyond Lenin's strategy did occur, it not infrequently took place long after it could be truly effective (notably the Popular Front against Fascism) having been blocked by dogma; or it emerged as a desperate scramble to appease a foreign threat, during which every trace of principle was ditched in indecent haste (the Nazi-Soviet pact) and at considerable cost.

The awakening of the East

The one great asset that emerged after Lenin's demise in January 1924 was what he had predicted two decades before: namely, the 'awakening of the East' - in this instance the Far East. Strategically the prospect of stripping the imperialist powers, above all Britain, ofthe assets that underwrote empire, was beguiling indeed. India took the greatest share of British export, China stood a close second. The consequences of losing both or even one of these crucial markets, that were also the recipients of billions in capital investment, were both incalculable and uplifting. India, however, trod its own path. The passive resistance movement established by Gandhi differed from the Bolsheviks (and Indian Communists) crucially not only as to ends but also as to means. That left China.

Lenin had been to the fore in establishing Soviet credentials with China's bourgeois nationalist movement under Sun Yat-sen. In 1918 a message had been sent declaring all unequal treaties null and void. Yet nothing was heard in reply. Finally, at the end of 1920, Russian emissaries reported back favourably on Sun as 'violently anglophobe'.[133] But he led no party as such and Moscow saw its job as not merely to found a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but also build the nationalist movement against the West and Japan. In the summer of 1922 emissary A. A. Ioffe reported to Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs (for the East) Lev Karakhan that Beijing was

for us extremely favourable. The struggle with world capitalism has vast res­onance and massive possibilities for success. The spirit of world politics is felt here extremely strongly, much greater than, for instance, in Central Asia, where Lenin attributed it. China is without doubt the focal point of interna­tional conflicts and the most vulnerable place in international imperialism, and I think that precisely now, when imperialism is undergoing a crisis in Europe, and when revolution is imminent, it would be very important to deliver imperialism a blow at its weakest point.[134]

Accusations of 'revolutionary opportunism' were met with the rebuttal that 'revolutionary nationalism' was a force to be reckoned with in its own right. 'We have no alternative.'[135]

With Sun's death early in 1925 the Chinese nationalist movement passed into the hands of a less principled successor, Chiang Kai-shek, who formed it into a party: the Guomindang. Even under Sun, however, the interests of the nationalists intersected with those of Russia only at certain key points, not all along the line. Rather like Germany under Stresemann from 1926, the Guomindang saw its close relations with Moscow as a major bargaining counter to be cashed in when others offered more; an exercise engaged in with the British in the late 1920s and the Japanese from the early 1930s.[136]

By 1925 minimal Soviet investment had paid off handsomely. And when on 30 May the British foolishly fired on unarmed protestors in the Shanghai International Settlement, the entire nationalist movement rose in protest, the fledgling and hitherto insignificant CCP in the vanguard of direct action. The Soviet, and therefore Comintern, commitment to revolutionary nationalism in China was only conditional; yet that very condition - driving the British out - was sufficient to send Anglo-Soviet relations into a tailspin from which it never entirely recovered, and with damaging consequences in the longer term after Hitler came to power in Germany when Moscow needed London as an ally against Berlin.

Thus Comintern aspirations were displaced fortuitously from West to East. Comprehension of the East was, however, not a great deal better than of the West. And the Russians soon got carried away in expectation of cutting the British Empire down to size. They were therefore entirely unprepared when London laid its trap: negotiating a secret compromise with Chiang that not only encouraged but also facilitated the massacre of Communist cadres within his ranks and a breach in diplomatic relations with Moscow that finally foreclosed on the Leninist investment in revolutionary nationalism. London also cut relations with Moscow in the spring of 1927. The Russians therefore had every cause to regret having vested so much in what turned out to be a futile and costly venture. Only the CCP had more reason for regret. Its last outpost of strength was washed away in a tide of blood by Chiang at Canton that December. All that remained were peasants deep in the vast interior, much vaunted by the unknown Mao Zedung but a cause of deep scepticism in Moscow, where decisions were in the making to break the back of recalcitrant peasants resisting the forced collectivisation of agriculture.

Revolutionary phrase versus cautious pragmatism

Had decisions on Comintern strategy hinged entirely on principles of revolu­tionary solidarity, the Soviet state would have faced the prospect of extinction, since objective reality did not match up to exaggerated expectations. Rapallo realpolitik would, for instance, never have come about, thus leaving Russia dan­gerously isolated in a hostile world. Had decisions hinged entirely on reasons of state, however, the Comintern would have lost its membership abroad; and although Moscow not infrequently undercut fraternal parties, this was usually only in extremis. In the late 1920s, however, neither factor was criti­cal to Comintern strategy. What was critical was the advancement of Stalin within Russia. He had always been deeply sceptical of the Comintern's value - lavochka (corner shop) was the dismissive term he used to describe it. None the less the prevailing view was that the Comintern was the sacred repository for the ultimate objective - world revolution - and its membership was inex­tricably tied into the Soviet party; indeed the Polish party was so difficult to differentiate-it also sprang from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party- that later Stalin wiped it out.

What made necessary the complete subordination of the Comintern to Stalin was that it was effectively a continuum with the Soviet party - so dom­ination of the latter also necessitated domination of the former. What made possible that subordination were practices begun by Lenin for completely different purposes. Strict discipline was governed by the notorious twenty- first condition of Comintern membership, which originated not from Russian hands but at the enthusiastic suggestion of the founder of the Italian Commu­nist Party, Amadeo Bordiga. This greatly facilitated the process begun by Lenin known as Bolshevisation, which was to ensure that the sections were fine-tuned to (successful) Russian revolutionary standards. The core assumption behind the purge was the fixed and unalterable belief that failure to accomplish revo­lutionary goals was not the result of the absence of revolutionary conditions but the absence of revolutionary aptitude.

Ifthis were not distortion enough, it rapidly became an instrument to bolster the power and influence of those Russians at the head of the Comintern - initially Zinoviev-to advance their own proteges at the expense of meritocracy. Thus it was that initially the Left (including Bordiga) captured the Comintern, was soon forced to give way to the Right, and both were then obliged to cede to Stalin; precisely parallel to the shift of power within the Soviet Communist Party. Bolshevisation therefore reached its apogee as Stalinisation. And by then whatever virtue there had originally been had long surrendered to bureaucracy. It is no accident that later the indigenous revolutions were accomplished only by those who, one way or another, evaded Moscow discipline (Tito, Hoxha, Mao and Castro).

Stalin notoriously stole the policies of his enemies once he had done with them. Thus it was that, having rid Russia of Trotsky (though not his followers, who were still sulking in their tents), Stalin immediately embarked on policies hitherto heralded by the Left as the domestic solution to Moscow's dilemma: rapid state industrialisation and the forcible collectivisation of agriculture. This was prefaced by turning the Comintern sharp left against all contacts with Social Democracy and bourgeois nationalism worldwide, proclaimed at the sixth Congress in 1928, ironically under the now helpless leader of the Right, Bukharin. The entire reorientation, domestic and foreign, was effec­tively harnessed to winning over the Left, even if one allows that events were anyway pressing in this direction. Whether Stalin would have forced the pace without such incentives is open to doubt, for he had hitherto been identified as a Rightist both internationally (by the British Foreign Office no less) and at home (not least by Trotsky). The acute tension within him between innate caution and burgeoning intemperance during moments of gloomy introspec­tion was apt to break dramatically when events allowed, and drive him to lash out in unexpected directions and at unsuspecting victims.

Although the Comintern no longer remained the centre of Soviet foreign policy-making, neither did it become completely irrelevant - not least because the rest of the world saw international revolution as Russia's objective. Thus the shift to the left did have undesirable consequences for the effectiveness of Soviet diplomacy. A near rupture with France at the end of 1927 was followed by a near rupture with Germany early in 1928 and a crisis in China in 1929.[137]That same year ill-considered and overt attempts to recruit the rank and file of the French Communist Party (PCF), the second largest in Europe, for the purpose ofspying on military and logistical capabilities resulted in the prompt arrest and imprisonment of the PCF leadership, followed by further tension with Moscow. The atmosphere of fear was such as one might have expected on the eve of war and matched the bellicose rhetoric on the domestic front. The one inevitably spilled easily over into the other.

There was one notable success, however. Patching up relations with the minority Labour administration in Britain provided some compensation, but increasingly France took the lead against international Communism. An unusually enfeebled British Empire - already undermined by the Treasury's short-sighted financial policies - fell easy victim to the Wall Street Crash in October 1929; and by the end of September 1931 Britain was not only forced into devaluation but even the navy had mutinied.

To a Marxist all this should have come as no surprise. The Russians, of course, had long predicted a crash followed by acute social unrest, if not rev­olution. But as far as Stalin was concerned rhetoric was just rhetoric. Policy was a different matter. With the countryside in revolt, the industrial economy overheated and unrest manifest within the ranks ofthe Red Army, itselfback- ward technologically compared to the Great Powers, the last thing Stalin wanted was a Communist attempt to seize power and, in so doing, unite the wrath of the capitalist world in a furious, further and possibly final assault on the debilitated Soviet Union.[138]

Thus an extraordinary credibility gap emerged by the spring of 1930 between bellicose Comintern propaganda about the imminence of war and revolution and the flagrant timidity and conservatism of Stalin's instructions to foreign Communist parties. In both Germany and China word went out to desist from grandiose and risky revolutionary adventures.[139] On the diplomatic front this cautious approach was matched by Commissar Maksim Litvinov, who had de facto control over the Narkomindel since 1928 before supplanting his ailing and querulous boss, Georgii Chicherin, in the summer of 1930. The Litvinov line met Stalin's needs to a tee. It meant following the line Lenin had chosen in the spring of 1922 for the Soviet delegation to the Genoa conference, designed to win over the pacifist bourgeoisie of the West with high-flown talk of increased trade, world peace and general and complete disarmament; a charade, perhaps, but a proven and effective smokescreen which required a continued Soviet presence at international conferences - mostly boring Geneva, where Litvinov indulged himself spinning out the empty hours in the evenings watching Westerns at the cinema.[140]

Fear of France eclipses the real danger

France was, of course, the power most set against disarmament, haunted by fear of a German revival. But it was also an imperial power overseas of some magnitude, and lines of communication were stretched to the limit. Since the 1920s, when it led in the losses from nationalisation by the Bolsheviks of all private property in Russia, France had chafed at irksome but contain­able Comintern support for troublesome tribes in North Africa. It had been obliged to follow Britain and Germany in recognising the Soviet regime. Sen­timent hardened, however, when, in the spring of 1930, a nationalist revolt of major proportions took hold in Indochina, in which the young Ho Chi Minh's Communist group came to play a role disproportionate to its minuscule size. Paris, on very little evidence but the principle of cui bono, immediately blamed

Moscow and launched a European-wide campaign to renew the economic blockade of Russia ended by the British in March 1921.[141]

In the bleak circumstances of the Great Depression, with industrialised pow­ers now looking anxiously to capture the few lucrative markets that remained and with the Russians favouring Germany, Sweden, Italy, Britain and the United States with sizeable orders for capital goods, the French stood alone (except for its powerless little allies along the Danube who competed with Moscow on the falling world grain market). Yet, because the Russians still lacked an efficient foreign intelligence service, French hostility came to be magnified out of all proportion to its true effectiveness. And a further factor intervened to com­pound Soviet anxieties when, on 18 September 1931, Imperial Japan launched its occupation of Manchuria, overran Soviet-owned railroads and raced to the Soviet border with a view to another excursion at Russian expense. Word soon leaked to the press that the French expressed the wish to the Japanese that they now go north (to Russia) rather than south (to Indochina). The Japanese also reinforced existing military and intelligence links with Finland, Poland and Afghanistan, in an attempt at encirclement of the USSR. Soviet efforts to counteract this met stiff resistance in Washington, where the Republican administration under Hoover stubbornly sought recompense for property appropriated by Lenin in 1918 and had no incentive to appease the Russians while they bought US manufactures anyway. And the British, economically holed beneath the waterline and with a navy of doubtful morale, shied away from confrontation with warlike Japan. Worse still, the Red Army in the Far East deterred no one, a fleet had yet to be put together and the single-tracked Trans-Siberian Railway gave little promise of rapid reinforcement in time of war. The need to rearm speedily in the East placed a new burden on a strained economy and the need to stockpile food for war in Siberia further exacerbated the acute shortage of grain that had opened up with famine in the summer of 1932.¹⁸

Rather than risk allowing the KPD to launch an abortive revolution in Germany, which was sure to fail if merely for the fact that the stooges Stalin had emplaced were better known for unthinking obedience than strategic initiative, Stalin instead chose to encourage German nationalism as the best means of distracting the French. Hitler was seen here, as elsewhere in Europe, to be just another German nationalist. No attempt was therefore made to curb the natural antipathy of the KPD towards long resented 'social Fascists' (the socialists of the SPD), whereas any attempt to open a channel towards them in the name of a still greater threat (the Nazis) was sat upon firmly.[142] The Comintern thus resumed its role as a passive conveyor belt for the furthering of Soviet state interests - as interpreted by Stalin and, in this instance and every other with respect to German matters, by his closest colleague, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and overseer of the Comintern, the dour and taciturn Viacheslav Molotov.

Throughout, Stalin did receive contrary advice. It was at the time reported that Litvinov, who regarded Molotov as a fool, warned of Hitler as a serious and hostile force to be reckoned with; but he was undermined by his deputy, Nikolai Krestinskii, who had behind him nearly a decade of success as ambassador in Berlin.²⁰ Krestinskii confirmed Stalin and Molotov in their complacency. From the unthinking Left in the Comintern, the head of the sector dealing with Germany, Knorin, took a position akin to 'the worse the better', since revolution needed to break the fetters of constitutionalism, to which the work­ing class had apparently become wedded. Hitler was in this deluded image a bulldozer with the KPD at the wheel. Were not most Nazi Party members former members of the KPD? The thinking Left, represented by Trotsky in exile, argued very differently and essentially took Litvinov's position. The fact that both Trotsky and Litvinov were Jewish undoubtedly heightened their powers of perception of an anti-Semite like Hitler. But Trotsky's advocacy - which was closely monitored at great distance in the Kremlin - doubtless also confirmed Stalin in his stubborn resistance to such views.

Salvation too late

From Moscow's vantage point, backing German nationalism was a low-cost policy. Hitler's arrival in power at the end of January 1933 did not occasion an abrupt change of line. Instead the Russians assumed a policy of watchful waiting. At the Comintern the prevailing view was ably expressed by Osip Piatnitskii in a letter to Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich on 20 March. Piatnit- skii carried some weight as head of the international communications section of the Comintern - basically the intelligence section which worked hand in glove with the OGPU - and as a member of the presidium of the Com­intern executive committee (IKKI). He reasserted the current myth that in Germany 'the revolutionary crisis is fast developing' and that it would, under Hitler, gather speed and that therefore the resistance of the masses could not but develop. 'The establishment of an open Fascist dictatorship,' he wrote, 'dispelling all democratic illusions among the masses and freeing the masses from the influence of Social Democracy, will speed up the pace of develop­ment of Germany towards a proletarian revolution.'[143] This bizarre misreading was commonplace in Moscow at the time and was sustained even after the successful persecution of the KPD and simultaneous harassment of the mass of Soviet trade and diplomatic employees in Germany took on alarming pro­portions. By summer the KPD had been suppressed with extraordinary ease and rapidity. Meanwhile in Moscow uneasy inertia began to give way to a more resolute position, though not all illusions - including those of Molotov - were extinguished as late as 1941.[144]

Pressure was building, however, from within Comintern ranks for a change of line. At the head of the British party, Harry Pollitt called for the Comintern presidium to discuss the situation in Germany and the united front strategy (then non-existent). Piatnitskii carefully separated the two, even though they were indissolubly linked in Pollitt's mind and in the minds of others unhappy at the recent course of events.[145] A straw in the wind was the failure of Piatnitskii - then effectively running the Comintern - to prompt what remained of Com­munist supporters in Germany to have Moscow agree to boycotting the referendum forthcoming in Germany that autumn.[146]

At the level of interstate relations Litvinov fought for a policy based on the assumption that Hitler posed a fundamental threat to the peace of Europe, since, on this view, a war begun anywhere on the subcontinent was destined to spread. Therefore the new Germany had to be contained by a system of alliances - what, in effect, had heretofore been the policy of the French that the Russians had always condemned. France was by now courting the Russians for an alliance premissed on the USSR's entry into the League of Nations in order to appease French allies in Eastern Europe, the so-called Little Entente: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania. Within the Comintern calls for a united riposte to German Fascism had begun to have some impact in Moscow, but dogma as well as the refusal to believe the German revolution was well and truly dead held up progress. And if France had turned to Russia for help, was not reliance on German nationalism paying off? The Leninist policy of exploiting contradictions between imperialist powers precluded alliances with them since by definition imperialism meant war. Within the rank and file of the Bolshevik Party opposition to accepting French entreaties was pressed on this basis. The issue came to turn on whether ideological principle or pragmatism should predominate in determining the future course of policy. Domestically ideology had triumphed, duly celebrated at the Seventeenth Party Congress in January 1934, though at a bloody price. Stalin could therefore now afford to accept a degree of ideological heresy abroad as well as at home, provided he could be assured that the Left would not reassert itself and once more accuse him of counter-revolution.

The Popular Front against Fascism

Whereas the united front of working-class parties against a common enemy was well within Leninist doctrine, what came into being as the Popular Front bore no relationship at all to Leninist doctrine. This was partly as a result of accident. After his trial in Leipzig for setting fire to the Reichstag, which Dimitrov successfully exposed as a charade, the Bulgarian militant was evac­uated to Moscow at Soviet behest. Here he used immediate access to Stalin to make the case for dropping the suicidal policy of opposing Social Democracy and for returning to the united front policy dropped in 1928, on the grounds that Fascism was a real danger to one and all. Having agreed to adopt the Litvi- nov line on collective security, it made little sense for the Kremlin to sustain a Comintern policy so at odds with common sense. Stalin moved cautiously, however, and only gave Dimitrov, now general secretary of the Comintern, freedom to experiment before any policy was finalised by a full Congress. In the teeth of resolute opposition from others within the Comintern apparat - head of the German section Knorin was still prattling on about 'The beginning of the crisis of German Fascism'[147] - and most probably also fundamentalists such as Molotov, who tended to a dogmatic vision on foreign affairs, Dimitrov began to loosen the reins and finally, in the summer of 1934, allowed member parties to open contacts with socialist parties along the lines of an anti-Fascist united front.[148]

France was on the front line against Fascism in 1934. The Great Depression hit France late but with as much force as elsewhere. Thus the French political system began to destabilise just as German power was effectively resurrected under Hitler. The initial testing ground for the united front was thus effectively France. Here, however, revolutionary tradition reached back much further than 1917; echoes of 1789,1830,1848 and, not least, 1871 still resounded through the capital. Complications lay in the fact that France was also the natural ally of Russia against any German plans for European conquest. How could the governing classes of France be expected to ally with a revolutionary power when they themselves so feared revolution at home from the very people in receipt of continual advice and subsidy from Moscow? The only hope lay in persuading Stalin that it was in Soviet interests not only to ally with France against Germany but also to nullify the effectiveness of the PCF in the domestic arena. The trouble was that Stalin trusted no one, and the PCF was so anti- military, because the French military was so anti-revolutionary, that this circle could not easily be squared.

It was surely because ofthe potential of France as an ally that Stalin permitted the PCF to go far beyond Comintern orthodoxy in declaring not merely for a united front of workers' parties against Fascism, but also a united front of all parties against Fascism: the so-called Front Populaire, declared by Maurice Thorez on 24 October 1934 at Nantes. Acting for the Comintern the Italian party leader Palmiro Togliatti and other comrades had tried to dissuade Thorez from delivering the speech, but to no avail.[149] In Moscow Thorez's call for unity with not only peasant parties but also, implicitly, the Roman Catholic Church and bourgeois parties against the common enemy created uproar within the Comintern. One of the most vigorous of several severe critics of the Comintern's new line was the Hungarian revolutionary, Bela Kun: once subject to Trotsky's caustic wit after a particularly nasty ad hominem outburst in the late 1920s - 'la maniera di Bela, non e una bella maniera', quipped the leader of the opposition. On 14 November 1934 Kun wrote a letter to members of the Comintern political secretariat condemning Thorez's position. He objected to the absence from Thorez's statements of any reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat and all power to the soviets in France. 'I once again point out the danger that the PCF is misrepresenting united front tactics. Turning them into a vulgar [coalition] policy, and I propose that such misrepresentation of the tactics of the united front be immediately refuted by a detailed rebuttal.'[150]

The fact that no such rebuttal was issued meant that Thorez read the runes in Moscow better than Kun. And in late July 1935 the Seventh Congress of the Comintern placed a firm seal of approval on the entire venture by generalising it across the world movement.

The anti-Japanese front

The Popular Front against Fascism, as we have seen, had indigenous roots and did not result merely from instructions issued in Moscow. The Anti- Imperialist Front in the East, however, fits more closely the preconceived pattern of Moscow dictating policy. Yet its implementation, at the hands of Mao Zedung, actually meant that while the letter of policy was observed, the spirit was broken with such consistency that the results Stalin desired - a solid anti-Japanese front - were never forthcoming. This mattered, because although France had reluctantly agreed a mutual assistance pact, it precluded - at French insistence - any undertaking with respect to the Far East. Moscow's concern was quite clearly lest the threat from the East joined the threat from the West. And Stalin well knew that Poland and Finland both had military contacts with Japan. The prospect of creating a firm united front on the ground in China against the Japanese was therefore high priority as compensation for the lack of alliances in the region to secure Siberia from Japanese attack. The most Litvinov had been able to secure from the United States had been diplomatic recognition (1933); any talk of an anti-Japanese alliance was firmly quashed by President Roosevelt. The underlying contradiction in outlook between Moscow and China remained, however: Stalin saw the best hope in a bourgeois anti-imperialist China led by a coalition including a minority of Communists, who had no immediate hope of a workers' revolution in a peasant country; Mao, undeterred by Moscow preferences and prejudices, and too distant for any sustained exertion of Comintern discipline, was looking for a fully-fledged Communist revolution via the peasantry.

The Japanese invasion of Manchuria from 18 September 1931 had long neces­sitated the unification of resistance in victim China. But the CCP and the Guomindang had long resisted any attempt to draw them back into alliance, not least because of the disastrous experience of the 1920s. Moscow had one major instrument at its disposal - the supply of munitions. The problem was to ensure that these, sent to the Guomindang as the recognised government of China, were used against Japan and not against the CCP. Only an opti­mist could take a generous view of Chiang Kai-shek. From 1934 to 1935 the Chinese Communists sought escape from encirclement and destruction by the Guomindang through a long march to the north-west of China, an area distant from Chiang's deadly reach and much closer to potential Soviet support from Outer Mongolia. Not surprisingly, therefore, even Stalin's pet Chinese Communist Wang Ming (Chen Shaoyu) had held common cause with Dim- itrov's opponents and spoke at the Comintern Congress of Chiang as one of the 'traitors of the nation' - not an encouraging indicator for the prospects of a united front against Japanese imperialism.[151] Mao was still out of reach. Radio contact was not re-established with Moscow until the onset of winter and even then the CCP still lacked reliable codes for transmission. With the party at Wayaobao in northern Shaanxi province, emissaries flew in from Moscow with news of the Comintern Congress and its decisions.[152]

When Chiang came shopping for arms from Moscow, the Russians insisted that agreement must be reached with the Communists for an anti-Japanese front.[153] The Comintern simultaneously now emphasised the need to include Chiang in any united front.[154] But Mao held out against implementing the spirit of the new line and this state of affairs continued even as the Soviet ambas­sador to the Chiang regime pressed for what amounted to total subjugation of the Chinese Communists to the Guomindang.³³ The signing of the German- Japanese anti-Comintern pact on 25 November 1936, effectively an anti-Soviet alliance, represented precisely the danger Moscow had long feared. Yet CCP policy was to 'force the Guomindang Nanzhing Government and its army to take part in a war of resistance against Japan'.³⁴ The effective result that December was Chiang's kidnapping in Xian by warlord of Manchuria Zhang Xueliang - then under the influence of pro-Communist advice. 'Some com­rades', former CCP Politburo member Zhang Guotao later reported, 'were opposed to a peaceful settlement ofthe Incident.'³⁵ The urge on the part ofthe Communists to do away with their hated enemy had to be restrained. 'When Chou En-lai first came to Sian', Chang's main adviser is quoted as having said, 'he wanted a people's assembly to try Chiang Kai-shek, but a wire came from the Comintern and Chou changed his mind'.³⁶

At Moscow's insistence Chiang was permitted to negotiate his freedom, having made some concession to the need for a united front. These conces­sions remained mere verbiage, however, until 7 July 1937 when the Japanese finally embarked on all-out war across the face of China. Chiang Kai-shek immediately pressed the Russians to come to his aid. Stalin was not in any haste to oblige. The month before, in an act of supreme folly borne of deep- seated insecurity, Stalin had the cream of his most senior officers shot, though it is interesting that he avoided decapitating the Far Eastern army until later. By the end of August, however, he was persuaded into conceding the Chinese 200 planes and 200 tanks on the basis of $500 million in credit. But getting the equipment into China was no easy task. Planes came in via Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia. Otherwise armaments had to come by sea until the French closed the routes through Indochina, or via a perilous 3,000-mile journey to Lanzhou by road from the end of the Turksib railway.[155] Thus between 1937 and 1941 Chiang received a total of 904 planes, nearly half of which were bombers, but only 82 tanks and a mass of automobiles, heavy and light arms, plus thou­sands of bombs and some 2 million shells.³⁸ In May 1938 Deputy Commissar Vladimir Potemkin told the French ambassador that the Soviet government was 'counting on resistance by this country for several years, after which Japan will be too enfeebled to be capable of attacking the USSR'.³⁹