Stalin

Pravda followed up (October 27) with additional details from Keke: “‘Our Lavrenti came and announced that Soso had arrived and that he was already here and coming in. . . . The door opened, and there he stood on the threshold: it’s him, my own. . . . I look and I can’t believe my eyes.’” She notices that he has gray hair. “‘What’s that, son, have you gone gray?’” Stalin answers: “‘It’s nothing, Mother, a little gray. It’s not important. I feel terrific, and you should not doubt it.’”¹⁹⁷ (The account omitted the part where she said, “What a shame that you didn’t become a priest,” which Stalin, according to Svetlana, liked to repeat.) Keke was quoted as revealing that Stalin’s father had removed him from school to apprentice him to a shoemaker, against her strenuous objections. On October 29, Stalin exploded. “I ask that you prohibit the vulgar rubbish that infiltrated our central and local press, publishing an ‘interview’ with my mother and sundry other promotional nonsense right up to portraits,” he wrote from Sochi to Molotov, Kaganovich, Andreyev, Zhdanov, and Boris Tal (head of publishing in the apparatus). “I ask that you spare me from the promotional hoopla of these scum.”¹⁹⁸

LIFE BECOMES MORE JOYOUS

Stalin’s first order of business back in Moscow, on November 2, 1935, was to receive Kandelaki, just returned from a meeting in Berlin with Schacht, who had revisited the proposal for a large new credit, now half a billion marks, while Kandelaki had again raised the need for political rapprochement and reemphasized Soviet interest in state-of-the-art military technology (automatic piloting of aircraft, remote control of vessels). France’s Laval, who had concurrently become prime minister, was also working all channels to secure rapprochement with Germany while delaying formal ratification of the Soviet alliance. Hitler perceived weakness.¹⁹⁹ Schulenburg, Germany’s ambassador, reported that at the dinner for the diplomatic corps on Revolution Day, Litvinov had raised his glass and loudly proclaimed, “I drink to the rebirth of our friendship!” Schulenburg added, “The British ambassador, who was sitting opposite, said: ‘Well, that’s a fine toast.’”²⁰⁰

The capital was having its usual chilly, white winter, but at the November 7, 1935, parade, for the first time, Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky, and others appeared with gold shoulder boards. Not long thereafter, Stalin allowed the reintroduction of the snapped-hand salute and formal ranks.²⁰¹ The dictator named five “marshals”: Voroshilov, Yegorov, Tukhachevsky, Blyukher, and Budyonny.²⁰² In the process of awarding ranks for thousands of others, some officers were effectively demoted because it was remembered that they happened to be the sons of priests or gentry or had once run afoul of a bigwig.²⁰³ The NKVD also got ranks. Zakovsky, conductor of the post-Kirov meat grinder in Leningrad, became commissar of state security first rank, equivalent to general in the army; Stalin had raised this from the proposal in the draft. Yagoda became general commissar of state security, the sole person in that rank.²⁰⁴ Grasping for rank, uniforms, and medals, as well as grand apartments, dachas, and cash bonuses, the new elite was becoming ever more conspicuous.²⁰⁵

On November 8, the extended family of the Alliluyevs and Svanidzes gathered for the third consecutive year in memory of Nadya. The night before Stalin had spent with the cronies until 3:00 a.m. Now, concerned about the dictator’s mood on the occasion, Molotov called to suggest watching a film together, but Stalin begged off.²⁰⁶ His elder son, Yakov, had found a new woman, Judith Meltzer (b. 1911), a ballerina from Odessa who went by Yulia. Yakov had been cohabiting with and gotten engaged to Olga Golysheva (b. 1909), a fellow student at the Moscow Aviation School from Stalingrad province, but they broke up and she went home.²⁰⁷ Meltzer had evidently come to Yakov’s attention at a Moscow restaurant, where he had an altercation with her second husband, Nikolai Bessarab, an NKVD officer who served as an aide to Redens, Stalin’s brother-in-law and now head of the Moscow province NKVD. “She is a fine woman, 30–32 years old, coquettish, speaks stupidities with aplomb, reads novels, gave herself the goal of leaving her husband and making a ‘career,’ and succeeded,” Maria Svanidze acidly wrote of Meltzer at the holiday dinner. “She already lives with Yasha, but her belongings are with her husband.”²⁰⁸

Between November 14 and 17, 1935, the regime held the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Pressure for labor intensification had been high even before Stalin’s approval of capital investment increases—but an apparent solution fell into the regime’s lap. At the Central-Irmino mine in Kadievka (Donbass), Alexei Stakhanov (b. 1906), a jackhammer operator, hewed 102 tons of coal in a single overnight shift, more than fourteen times his quota of seven. At 6:00 a.m., the mine’s party cell voted to award Stakhanov bonus pay of 220 rubles (a month’s salary) and give him permanent passes to the workers’ club. Pravda carried a report of Stakhanov’s feat (September 2); the next day he had a new apartment. Stakhanov’s innovation was to ask that hewers like himself be freed from periodically setting down their jackhammers in order to prop the coal face. Additionally, a local party organizer had hauled in extra equipment and workers, whose names went unmentioned in the shower of publicity he arranged. Orjonikidze, in Kislovodsk, read the Pravda account and telephoned aides in Moscow and the coal trust in Kadievka. Pravda (September 11) launched a “movement” across industrial sectors and into the Gulag.²⁰⁹

Record chasing often left follow-on shifts bereft of supplies and labor to meet, let alone exceed, norms, provoked breakdowns and injuries, and exacerbated tensions among workers. But managers who tried to contain Stakhanovism’s deleterious consequences risked accusations of sabotaging worker initiative.²¹⁰ (The mine director at Central-Irmino would be arrested for “wrecking”; his place would be taken by the party organizer.)²¹¹ Stakhanovism became a truncheon against both managers and workers, forcing norms upward. At the Stakhanovite conference, Orjonikidze, as always, stressed the need to raise quality, not just quantity.²¹² On the closing day, as Voroshilov regaled the Stakhanovites with the paratrooper exploits at the recent army maneuvers, Stalin walked in, inciting delirium.

The dictator soon took the podium, attributing the “profoundly revolutionary” movement to initiative from below, in the country’s new conditions. “Life has become better, comrades,” he observed. “Life has become more joyous. And whenever life is joyful, work goes better.” (Earlier in the proceedings, the 3,000 attendees had spontaneously broken out into the catchy march from Jolly Fellows.) “If there had been a crisis in our country, if there had been unemployment—that scourge of the working class—if people in our country lived badly, drably, joylessly, there would have been nothing like the Stakhanovite movement. (Applause.) . . . If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone. (Shouts of approval. Applause.)”²¹³

Stalin closed by asking for approval to reward the country’s best workers with the highest state honor, again inciting delirium. Stakhanov would be awarded the Order of Lenin, admitted to the party, promoted into mine management, and made the author of texts extolling Stalin for originating his movement.²¹⁴ He would take to drinking, lose his Order of Lenin and party card in a drunken brawl, smash the mirrored walls at the Metropole Hotel restaurant, and wed a fourteen-year-old. Stalin would lose interest in Stakhanovism, but he now paid still more attention to the cultivation of public heroes.

DIPLOMATIC DELUSIONS

The Soviet envoy to Bulgaria, Fyodor Ilin, the son of a priest and himself a storied Bolshevik, who adopted the surname Raskolnikov (from Dostoevsky’s character), was in Moscow in late November 1935. He and his wife decided to see Oleksandr Korniychuk’s play Platon Krechet, about the new Soviet intelligentsia’s quest for genuine humanism and social justice, at the affiliate of the Moscow Art Theater on Theological Lane. Unexpectedly, Raskolnikov encountered Stalin and Molotov. (The pair had first gone to the Moscow Art Theater, but the show they went to see had been switched out.) During intermission, Stalin engaged Raskolnikov in a discussion of Soviet policy in Bulgaria. Molotov took note of Stalin’s respect for Raskolnikov, and the next morning Zhemchuzhina, Molotov’s wife, phoned to invite Raskolnikov and his wife to their dacha. During billiards, drinking, and dancing, the men discussed the threat of fascism, and Molotov exclaimed, “Our main enemy is England!”²¹⁵

At the theater, Stalin had asked Raskolnikov to visit him in his office, but when the envoy phoned from the foreign affairs commissariat, a disbelieving Poskryobyshev gave him the runaround. Once, when Raskolnikov dialed Stalin’s number, the dictator himself picked up—and invited him over right then. It was December 9, 1935. Raskolnikov got twenty minutes one-on-one, his first (and sole) visit to the Little Corner. “Stalin’s working office in the recently refurbished Kremlin building was furnished, point for point, the same way as his office on the top floor of the immense building of the Central Committee on Old Square,” Raskolnikov noted. The dictator came out from behind the desk, placed Raskolnikov at the large felt table, took a seat, and, after pinching some tobacco, lit his pipe. Raskolnikov relayed that his superiors had declined Sofia’s request to buy Soviet weapons. “A mistake!” Stalin interjected, adding that the Bulgarians would just buy them from the Germans. Raskolnikov received authorization to report Stalin’s view at the commissariat. The conversation widened. “‘England now stands for peace!’ Stalin stated ironically, opening his palms wide, animatedly approaching me,” Raskolnikov recalled. “‘England now will be plucked. Its colonies are spread around the whole world. Defending them is unthinkable: they would need 100 navies to do that. It’s not like us, where everything is gathered in a single space. Therefore, England, of course, stands for peace.’”²¹⁶

Behind the scenes, Litvinov persisted in his anti-Nazism, writing to Stalin to confirm a TASS report that Schacht had confided to a French banker that Germany intended to partition Soviet Ukraine with Poland. Litvinov urged that the dictator issue “a directive about opening a systematic counter-campaign against German fascism and fascists,” whose attacks on Bolshevism had reached “Homeric proportions.” But other foreign affairs personnel pushed in Stalin’s preferred direction. Twardowski, back in the German foreign ministry, phoned Yakov Surits, the Soviet envoy to Berlin, to arrange a courtesy appointment—and suddenly Sergei Bessonov, the embassy counselor for trade, called asking to be received before Surits. Twardowski arranged to see them separately on December 10. Bessonov, given the first meeting, bluntly opened: “How could German-Soviet relations be improved?” Surits posed the same question in the guise of seeking advice. Bessonov wrote to the foreign affairs commissariat that his conversations confirmed “the existence of strata and groups in Germany interested, for various reasons, in normalizing relations,” singling out big business and the old-line military, and said they were looking for concrete steps from the USSR to help them in domestic policy battles.²¹⁷

Hitler had his own idées fixes. On December 13, he received UK ambassador Sir Eric Phipps at the latter’s request to discuss stalled air force limitations talks. Germany’s decision to build a fleet and the ensuing naval arms race had helped precipitate the Great War, but British officialdom feared an air arms race even more.²¹⁸ Phipps had been telling himself that the feral Führer was more reasonable than the lunatic entourage surrounding him. But Hitler launched a tirade, condemning the Franco-Soviet pact as a “military alliance unmistakably directed against Germany” (according to the German notetaker) and observing (according to the British notetaker) “that Berlin might easily in a few hours be reduced to [a] heap of ashes by a Russian air attack.” He lashed out at British diplomatic engagement with Moscow, asserting that Whitehall was cozying up to the Soviet Union only because it wanted a counterweight to Japan. Phipps denied this, and insisted that “we are living in the same house” with the Soviet Union and could not ignore it. Hitler countered that the Soviets were “a foul and unclean inhabitant of the house with whom the other dwellers should have no political truck whatsoever.”

Hitler, ever more darkly and loudly, raged on that Communist pledges in bilateral pacts not to interfere in the affairs of other countries were belied by Moscow’s “most aggressive and insolent underground interference in the affairs of all civilized states, not excluding the British empire.” He shouted that he had resisted internal demands to request a fleet half the size of the British navy, taking only one third, yet Britain still tolerated the French alliance with Bolshevism and was contemplating one of its own. “At one moment Herr Hitler referred savagely to Lithuania, declaring that neither that country nor the Baltic states in general would present any obstacle to a Russian attack on Germany,” Phipps noted in his summary, adding that “even when pretending to fear a Russian attack, he spoke of Russia with supreme contempt, and declared his conviction that Germany was vastly superior to her both militarily and technically. At times he ground the floor with his heel.”²¹⁹

SMASHED PIPE

Moscow’s Triumphal Square was renamed for Mayakovsky.²²⁰ Lily Brik, who lived in Leningrad caring for Mayakovsky’s archive, had written to Stalin in despair that the dead poet’s books were nearly impossible to obtain, a special room at the Communist Academy promised for his literary heritage had never been provided, and a request to turn his last residence in a small wooden house into a library had never been supported. “I alone cannot overcome this bureaucratic indifference and resistance—and after six years of work I am turning to you, since I see no other means to realize the enormous revolutionary bequest of Mayakovsky,” she wrote. Stalin instructed Yezhov that “Mayakovsky was and remains the best, most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. The indifference to his memory or his works is a crime. Brik’s complaints are correct.”²²¹ Suddenly, Pravda (December 5, 1935) published a laudatory essay on the poet, citing Stalin calling him “talented” (an intentional toning down, which would be corrected).²²² Pasternak wrote privately to the dictator expressing gratitude for the recognition of his fellow poet (“warmly loving you and loyal to you”).²²³

Japan was busy confirming Stalin’s prescience about its vaulting ambitions.²²⁴ In Manchukuo, it had gone on to create a vast autonomous province for ethnic Mongols and fostered preservation of traditional lifestyles, the opposite of Soviet social engineering in its Mongolian satellite.²²⁵ Chiang Kai-shek had conceded territory to the Japanese occupiers, planning to take them on decisively after he had annihilated the Communists, but the Communist escape to the interior had put off that reckoning. Surviving Communists had united in a new sanctuary in impoverished Shaanxi province, where Mao, carried on a palanquin during the Long March, emerged as the paramount leader.²²⁶ Chiang approached the Soviet envoy Dimitri Bogomolov asking for weapons, as if the Nationalists were finally going to launch a war to evict the Japanese. “From all my conversations, I am left with the impression that they would like to precipitate a possible conflict between ourselves and Japan,” Bogomolov informed Moscow (December 9, 1935).Stalin agreed to ship the arms (via Xinjiang), worried that Chiang might otherwise cut a side deal with Japan. On December 9, the Comintern’s “united front” policy was stretched to include cooperation with Chiang—unbeknownst to Mao in the remote interior, who would erupt when apprised.²²⁷

A Soviet official “close to the Kremlin” told U.S. embassy personnel that any moves by Japan against Mongolia would be regarded as a threat to Soviet territorial integrity, but a week later Japanese-Manchukuo forces burned down a Mongolian frontier post, killing or kidnapping several Mongolian border guards, and this drew only a protest.²²⁸ In the meantime, on December 12, a Mongolian delegation arrived in Moscow, again led by Prime Minister Genden, who was dragging his feet over Stalin’s orders to extirpate lama influence and enlarge the penurious country’s military budget.²²⁹ Genden was quick-tempered, and known to indulge in wine, women, and indiscreet song. Before his departure from Ulan Bator, he had supposedly boasted, “I’ll deal with that Georgian with the knife-tipped nose. . . . I’ll enjoy a quarrel with him.”²³⁰

The Mongols in Moscow had to cool their heels. On Stalin’s official fifty-sixth birthday (December 21, 1935) at the Near Dacha, the Alliluyevs and Svanidzes discovered that they were now outnumbered by politburo officials. “Zhdanov played the accordion beautifully, but it broke down on him a few times,” Maria Svanidze recorded in her diary. “They sang graceful Abkhaz and Ukrainian songs, old student songs, and some plain silly ones. Postyshev was in high spirits. He was jokingly dancing the Russian national dance with Molotov, spoke to him in Kazakh, and this pair entertained I[osif] and all the guests. After supper, everyone went through to the study (the large room). I[osif] wound up the gramophone and people danced the Russian dance, Anastas Ivanovich [Mikoyan] danced the lezginka, wildly, and sometimes lost the rhythm. As usual, we danced the foxtrot. . . . We asked I[osif] to join in, but he said that since the death of Nadya he no longer danced.”²³¹

The regime held a Central Committee plenum from December 21 to 25, and on the final day Yezhov reported on the ongoing party card verification campaign: of the 2.34 million members and candidate members, 1.915 million had gone through the process, and of those, 175,166 had been expelled. Two thirds of the expulsions were for “passivity,” that is, failing to attend meetings, pay dues, or study. Some 20 percent were dropped as White Guards or kulaks, 8.5 percent as swindlers and scoundrels, and some 1 percent as foreign spies. Around 3 percent, 5,500 party members, were expelled as “Trotskyites and Zinovievites.”²³² About 15,000 of those expelled would also be arrested. The process, still not complete, was now to be followed by a physical exchange of party cards, old for new. Yezhov congratulated himself.²³³ On the plenum’s eve, resistance to Stakhanovism had been designated as terrorism.²³⁴ At a heavy industry conference the day after the plenum, Orjonikidze conspicuously mentioned nothing of sabotage.²³⁵

Stalin had decided to allow, for the first time, the genuine number for projected Soviet military spending for the coming year to be released—a staggering, meant-to-impress 14.8 billion rubles, 16 percent of the state budget.²³⁶

Late on December 30, he and his inner circle received the delegation from Mongolia in Molotov’s office, and took an aggressive posture. Molotov: “You, Genden, when drunk, all the time speak anti-Soviet provocations. We know that before your departure to come here, you said that we would recommend a long stay in the Kremlin hospital or holiday in Crimea, ‘in connection with your health.’” Stalin reprimanded Genden for spending only 25 percent of the state budget on the military, asserting that the USSR would spend 70–80 percent when necessary, and demanding that Mongolia spend 50–60 percent. “If you, Genden, are not concerned with the defense of your country, and you think that Mongolia suffers from its ties to the USSR, which you think cheats and takes advantage of Mongolia, and you want to get friendly with Japan, then go ahead!” Stalin declared disingenuously. “We do not compel you to have relations with us if you do not want to.” He added: “You do nothing about the lamas. . . . They can undermine a good army and the rear.”²³⁷

Molotov declared a break and invited them to “tea” (often code for spirits). Demid, the defense minister, understood that his country could not manage against possible Japanese aggression without Soviet assistance, while Genden preferred to rely on the country’s own army, with more Soviet weapons, even as he feared excessive debt to, and therefore dependence on, Moscow.²³⁸ Whether at this Kremlin session or a New Year’s reception at the Mongolian embassy, Genden, in a drunken state, did something no one else ever had or would—he snatched Stalin’s pipe and smashed it.²³⁹

“INTERESTING”

Stalin welcomed the year 1936 with a larger crowd than usual at the Near Dacha: the inner circle and nearly all the people’s commissars as well as his relatives.²⁴⁰ “The country has never lived so full-blooded a life as at present,” Pravda announced in an editorial (January 1, 1936). “Vivacity, confidence, and optimism are universally dominant. The people are, as it were, taking to wing. The country is in the process of becoming not only the richest but also the most cultured in the entire world. The advance of the working class to the level of professional engineers and technicians is on the agenda.” The editorial, “The Stakhanovite Year,” was accompanied by an oversized portrait of Stalin smiling and smoking a pipe.

Molotov boasted to the central executive committee, as reported by the Soviet press, that “representatives of the German government had raised the question of a new and larger credit facility covering a ten-year period.”²⁴¹ In Berlin, Kandelaki presented a list of desiderata that included submarines, IG Farben chemical patents, and Zeiss optical technology.²⁴² The British embassy in Berlin warned the foreign office about a grand deal in the offing.²⁴³ Schacht, who had originally deflected Kandelaki’s attempts to shift their conversations to political matters, now remarked to him, “If a meeting between Stalin and Hitler could take place, it would change many things.” Stalin wrote on his copy of the secret report: “Interesting.”²⁴⁴

“Trotskyites” had also seized attention. Valentin Olberg, a provincial teacher who happened to have just returned from Germany, was arrested by the NKVD (January 5, 1936), which extracted “testimony” from him that he had come back with a special task assigned to him by none other than Trotsky: a “terrorist act” against Stalin. Olberg named other “terrorists” he had “recruited”; arrests followed.²⁴⁵ By spring the NKVD would arrest 508 “Trotskyites,” one of whom was found in possession of Trotsky’s personal archive for 1927. Stalin ordered the NKVD to furnish Yezhov with copies of all documents pertaining to Trotskyites and freed him from overseeing party organs, a task passed to Yezhov’s deputy, Georgy Malenkov (b. 1902). Yezhov now oversaw the NKVD full time.²⁴⁶

In Ulan Bator on January 20, Choibalsan, minister of livestock and agriculture, made an impassioned speech in favor of accepting Soviet “proposals.” Many of the top Mongolian party officials present were reluctant to submit to Stalin’s diktat; some perhaps even favored negotiations with Japan, but they knew someone would immediately inform Moscow. They approved a formal invitation to the USSR for two army brigades, and resolved to increase their own army to 17,000 and their national guard to 2,500.²⁴⁷

Also on January 20, King George V died near midnight, at age eighty-three, after being administered a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine to put him out of his suffering and, according to his physician, to allow his death to feature in the morning rather than the afternoon papers.²⁴⁸ Stalin named Tukhachevsky, alongside Litvinov, to the Soviet delegation for the funeral, in Windsor Castle on January 28. Tukhachevsky traveled by train via Berlin, where he stopped off for a few hours, setting off a speculative frenzy about meetings with the German general staff. The Soviet press was silent about the stopover; Germany denied the rumors.²⁴⁹ Stalin does seem to have tried to contrive a meeting.²⁵⁰

Tukhachevsky had visited Germany nine times, but despite his respect for German military achievements, he distrusted that country.²⁵¹ In Britain, where he spent not hours but thirteen days, he met French general Maurice Gamelin, also in London for the funeral, who hosted him at an embassy reception, where the Soviet commander met officers who had been interned with him in the German POW camp. Gamelin invited him to stop in Paris, where Tukhachevsky was afforded a lavish program of meetings and military inspections. In long hours with Gamelin, Tukhachevsky made plain his concern over the threat of German aggression.²⁵² Maisky and Litvinov were urging Eden, newly named foreign secretary, to use the League of Nations and other instruments to halt the German danger before it came to war. Eden wrote in an internal memo that he told them he was “unable to imagine what else could be done,” and to Litvinov’s suggestion for a Soviet-British-French bloc against Germany, he responded, “I cannot imagine how that could be done.”²⁵³

“FRIENDSHIP OF PEOPLES”

On January 27, 1936, Stalin and his entourage received a sixty-seven-person delegation of milkmaids, artists, and functionaries from Buryat-Mongolia in the Russian republic. A report sent by the region’s leaders in advance noted that the autonomous republic had 82 percent collectivization and stood first in the Union among national republics in livestock per capita, with 3.36 cows, 3.91 sheep, 0.9 goat, and 0.23 pig held collectively per household. (The numbers for Kazakhstan were 0.84, 1.47, 6.9, and 0.09.)²⁵⁴ Pravda’s coverage of the Kremlin reception included a photograph of Stalin in Buryat robes, with a dagger in his sash. These receptions for national groups in traditional dress constituted a recent invention.²⁵⁵ Pravda had hit upon the slogan, enunciated at one such reception, of the “Friendship of Peoples.”²⁵⁶

In the Buryat-Mongolia coverage, there was also a photo of Stalin with Engelsina “Gelya” Markizova, a seven-year-old Buryat girl wearing a brand-new sailor’s outfit and beaming in his arms.²⁵⁷ Named for Engels (her brother was named Vladlen, after Vladimir Lenin), she was the daughter of a Buryat-Mongolia official and lived on Stalin Street in Ulan Ude. She had presented him with two bouquets that her mother, a student at the Moscow Institute of Medicine, had thought to purchase (one was supposed to be for Voroshilov). Stalin had picked her up, and she had wrapped her arms around his shoulders, creating an indelible image.²⁵⁸ Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, had recently appeared with him in a photograph in Pravda (he was shown looking down, cupping her head with his good arm, her bright face smiling).²⁵⁹ Stalin also permitted a photograph of Vasily and Svetlana together in Pioneer Pravda (which he instructed Svetlana to “treasure”).²⁶⁰ Thereafter, his two younger children faded from public view. But the images with children persisted, creating a sense of a paternal leader. The depictions of traditional dances and rural females—which had once conveyed the backwardness to be overcome—now signified supposed harmony in diversity, embodied by a happy father figure.²⁶¹

Russians, too, constituted a nation, but their folklore was presented as imperial culture.²⁶² Even as workers remained the vanguard class, Russians became the vanguard nation.²⁶³ “All the peoples, participants in the great socialist construction, can take pride in the results of their work,” Pravda editorialized (February 1, 1936). “But first among equals are the Russian people, the Russian workers, the Russian toilers, whose role throughout the whole Great Proletarian Socialist Revolution has been exceptionally large, from the first victories to the present day’s brilliant period of development.” Celebration of the expansion of the state from Muscovy allowed restoration of even Ivan the Terrible to a pedestal. Stalin’s leftist critics decried what they perceived as his abandonment of pure Marxism, a perception of retreat that Stalin’s rightist critics shared but welcomed.²⁶⁴ In fact, Stalin’s embrace of the imperial Russian inheritance was selective, showing little concern for churches, large numbers of which had been destroyed. (Kaganovich had dynamited Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the world’s largest Orthodox church, built in the nineteenth century to commemorate the victory over Napoleon.)²⁶⁵ The absence of private property, the leading role of the party, and the red flag with hammer and sickle amply reinforced the fact that this was a Communist regime. But Stalin’s willingness—and ability—to blend imperial Russian étatisme with Marxist-Leninist class approaches strengthened the socialist state.²⁶⁶

MUDDLE

Stalin revealed his theory of cultural oversight in a letter to Shcherbakov’s deputy, Vladimir Kirpichnikov, known as Stavsky. “Take a look at comrade Sobolev,” the dictator instructed. “He is, unquestionably, a major talent (judging by his book Capital Repairs). He is, as you see from his letter, capricious and uneven. . . . But these traits, in my view, could be found in any giant literary talent (perhaps with a few exceptions). It is not necessary to oblige him to write a second Capital Repairs. Such an obligation would lead to nothing. It is not necessary to oblige him to write about collective farms or Magnitostroi. It is impossible to write about such matters under obligation. Let him write what and when he wants. In a word, let him. And take care of him.”²⁶⁷ But apparatchiks capable of nurturing talent as well as loyalty were rare. Stories of poorly educated censors forbidding the music of someone named Schubert over the radio because he might be a “Trotskyite” were the least of it.²⁶⁸ The censor (glavlit) had obtained power over plays, films, ballets, broadcasts, and even circus acts, as well as literature, but it was often overwhelmed and had the NKVD and party commissions looking over its shoulder. Taking chances (saying yes) carried no upside; prohibition was the safest recourse, leading to round after round of supplication, paperwork, and foot dragging, unless someone with sufficient authority and confidence put an end to the runaround and said yes.²⁶⁹

Shcherbakov admitted to Stalin that, after fifteen months as secretary of the writers’ union, he was being criticized for not being sufficiently on top of things.²⁷⁰ But Stalin was besieged, and trying to preserve himself to oversee only the most outstanding cultural figures. Finally, on his initiative, the politburo approved the creation of an all-Union Committee for Artistic Affairs, placed not in the party apparatus but in the Council of People’s Commissars, with Platon Lebedev, known as Kerzhentsev (b. 1881), as chairman. The son of a physician–cum–tsarist Duma deputy, he had been educated at gymnasium and then Moscow University, was a prolific writer on topics ranging from the new science of time management to the Paris Commune, and an experienced functionary, whose most recent appointment had been as head of Soviet radio.²⁷¹

Kerzhentsev arrived just when a storm broke in music. During the entire previous year, only three long-playing records with Soviet music had been issued, and only one was symphonic: the score of Dmitry Shostakovich (b. 1906) for Hamlet.As for opera, Shcherbakov had written to Stalin, Andreyev, and Zhdanov (January 11, 1936) that Leningrad’s Maly Opera Theater was, “in essence, the sole theater that vigorously and systematically is working out the extremely important problem of the Soviet theater—namely, the creation of a contemporary musical spectacle.” He cited Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, by Shostakovich; Quiet Flows the Don, by Ivan Dzerzhinsky (b. 1909); and two works by Valery Zhelobinsky (b. 1913). Shcherbakov proposed that the Leningrad theater be renamed the State New Academy Opera Theater, and that its personnel receive state awards and pay raises to the level of the Kirov Ballet. Stalin redirected Shcherbakov’s letter to Kerzhentsev.²⁷² The Leningrad theater was not renamed, but its ambitious conductor, Samuil Samosud, was anointed a “people’s artist” of the RSFSR and got approval to showcase his theater at a festival in Moscow. On opening night, much of Moscow’s creative intelligentsia showed for Quiet Flows the Don, based on the novel by Sholokhov. The opera—a patriotic glorification of the Don Cossacks’ immutable spirit and readiness to defend the motherland—proved a crowd-pleaser, with its lyrical and accessible music. After the final act, Stalin edged forward in the imperial box, making himself visible, and applauded demonstratively.

Stalin summoned Samosud to his box, and the discussion ended up lasting two hours; TASS distributed an account, heralding the advent of a Soviet opera repertoire. On January 17, 1936, Stalin ordered the director of the Bolshoi to stage its own production of Quiet Flows the Don, and the director decided to stage all the Samosud works, engaging Fyodor Lopukhov as principal dancer (he had danced the operas in Leningrad). The Bolshoi opened with Lady Macbeth, which was easier to mount than the other two. On January 26, Stalin and entourage attended. Unlike Quiet Flows the Don, Shostakovich’s music was subversive of operatic convention, with discord and hyper‐naturalistic portrayals of rape and murder. Stalin exited before the final curtain. This afforded Kerzhentsev a chance to establish his authority as the head of the new committee, at the expense of the existing culture power brokers, above all Shcherbakov. An unsigned denunciation, “A Muddle Instead of Music,” appeared in Pravda (January 28). (Kerzhentsev was the likely author, not Stalin, as rumored.)²⁷³ Only a short while before, Pravda had been over the top in praising the same opera. Even though Samosud had originated the production of the Shostakovich opera, the dictator had seen the Bolshoi version. He named him artistic director of the Bolshoi effective immediately.²⁷⁴

Shumyatsky, who remained head of Soviet cinema (and became Kerzhentsev’s second deputy), learned that Stalin viewed the Pravda article as “programmatic,” a demand “not for rebuses and riddles,” but music accessible to the masses, citing the “realistic music” of great Soviet films, especially Jolly Fellows, in which “all the songs are good, simple, melodic.”²⁷⁵ The “signal” got across. (“Don’t you read the papers?” a voice from the audience shouted at a speaker during a meeting of the Moscow Artists’ Union, referring to the denunciation of Shostakovich.)²⁷⁶ Shostakovich inveigled an audience with Kerzhentsev (February 7), and accepted “the majority” of the criticisms. Kerzhentsev advised the composer to travel around villages and acquaint himself with the folk music of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Georgia, as Rimsky-Korsakov had once done. Shostakovich promised to do so, while noting that composers would appreciate a meeting with Stalin.²⁷⁷ The press launched a vicious campaign against “formalists,” which targeted not only Shostakovich but also Eisenstein and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, leaders of the 1920s avant-garde. Kerzhentsev soon took the initiative to purge avant-garde works in museums.²⁷⁸

Bulgakov had two plays about to run: Molière (originally titled The Cabal of Hypocrites), at the Moscow Art Theater, which was to premiere on February 15, 1936, and Ivan Vasilevich, which was in final revisions for the Theater of Satire. Molière opened to a packed hall and wild applause.²⁷⁹ Behind the scenes, Kerzhentsev pointed out to Stalin and Molotov that Bulgakov had written Molière back when most of his works were banned and that, in the travails of a writer under the Sun King (Louis XIV), he intended to evoke what it was like when a playwright’s ideas “went against the political system and plays were prohibited.” He conceded the brilliance of the play, which “skillfully, in the lush netherbloom, carries poisonous drops,” and recommended killing it with damning reviews.²⁸⁰ Pravda ran just such a damning article (“external brilliance and false content”).²⁸¹ Molière closed after seven successful performances. Ivan Vasilevich—a comedy mocking Ivan the Terrible—never opened, a blow to the writer but also, given Stalin’s views, a blessing.²⁸² On February 19, after a month in his new post, Kerzhentsev wrote to Stalin and Molotov proposing a competition for a play and screenplay on 1917, promising to “show the role of Lenin and Stalin in the preparation and implementation of the October Revolution.” Stalin took a pencil and crossed out his own name.²⁸³

AMERICAN MIRROR

Being a great power meant looking into the American mirror. Shumyatsky had launched the idea of a Soviet Hollywood. A severe lack of factory capacity meant that Soviet film prints were in short supply—usually fewer than forty copies per film for the entire country—and he wanted a film industry capable of producing its own quality film stock, cameras, projectors, sound-recording machines, and lighting, all of which were expensive to import.²⁸⁴ He had headed an eight-person commission to Paris, London, Rochester (Eastman Kodak), and Los Angeles, whence he published stories about his film viewings and meetings, returning determined to found a Soviet Cinema City in the mild, sunlit climate on the Black Sea, permitting year-round work.²⁸⁵ At a Kremlin screening, he had gotten Stalin to approve the Hollywood idea. “Opponents cannot see farther than their own noses,” the dictator had intoned. “We need not only good pictures but also more of them, in quantity and in distribution. It becomes obnoxious when the same films remain in all the theaters for months on end.”²⁸⁶ At a follow-up screening, when Stalin saw Chapayev for the thirty-eighth time, the dictator said he had heard that Mussolini would build his Cinecittà outside Rome in just two years. But despite Stalin’s verbal support, the expensive Hollywood on the Black Sea never materialized.²⁸⁷

Opposition came not just from industrial and budget officials. Yechi’el-Leyb Faynzilberg, known as Ilya Ilf, and Yevgeny Katayev, known as Petrov, wrote a letter to Stalin opposing the Soviet Hollywood idea (February 26, 1936).²⁸⁸ Already household names for their satirical novels The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf, featuring the con man Ostap Bender, Ilf and Petrov had just returned from several months in the United States and would write One-Story America, which was about not only the “girls who are half naked, three-quarters naked, and nine-tenths naked [who] dance, or act,” but the real America—that of working people, a country of democracy if not of socialism. Their book related details of traveling in a Ford through twenty-five states with set pieces about skyscrapers, well-paved roads, vending machines, Mark Twain’s hometown, hunters, cowboys, boxers, farmers, Negroes, Indians—an unimaginable world for a Soviet audience.²⁸⁹

America surfaced in Yagoda’s reports, too. Gulag camps and colonies together held around 1.2 million forced laborers, while exiled “kulaks” in “special settlements” numbered around 900,000.²⁹⁰ Camps were releasing invalids, which burnished mortality statistics, and Yagoda pressed for financial accountability and better sanitation.²⁹¹ Gold output in the Kolyma camps would jump to 36.77 tons in 1936 (from 15.94 the year before), which, an internal report stressed, beat California.²⁹² Mass arrests by the NKVD in 1936 would decline to 131,168, as compared with 505,256 in 1933 (and with 205,173 in 1934 and 193,093 in 1935). In March 1936 Yagoda bragged at the Council of People’s Commissars that, because of increased professionalism, reorganization, and new methods, criminality had been sharply reduced, and the problem of mass social unrest (such as during collectivization) resolved. He conceded that organized hooliganism, robbery, and theft of socialist property persisted, and that ordinary police did not feel safe patrolling working-class districts in mushrooming industrial cities. He also admitted that crime rates were not diminishing as noticeably in rural settlements, where police were almost absent. Still, in the previous year, he gloated, there had been fewer reported murders across the Soviet Union than in the city of Chicago.²⁹³

HITLER, AGAIN

Hitler continued his manipulative mastery. On February 21, 1936, he granted an interview to Bertrand de Jouvenel for Paris-Midi, stressing his policy of peace, the unifying threat of Bolshevism, and the folly of Franco-German enmity. “Let us be friends,” the Führer pleaded, calling his Mein Kampf outdated and promising “correction of certain pages.”²⁹⁴ (Unlike Stalin, with his useful idiots, Hitler did not get to edit the transcripts.) A few days later, the Führer sought out Arnold Toynbee, a philosopher of history who was in Berlin to address the Nazi Law Society. “I want England’s friendship, and if you English will make friends with us, you may name your conditions—including, if you like, conditions about Eastern Europe,” he told the professor, who predicted to the foreign office that “any response from the British side . . . would produce an enormous counter-response from Hitler.”²⁹⁵ Göring, hunting in Poland again (February 19–24), proclaimed at a luncheon hosted by Beck, “in the name of the Führer and chancellor, that any rumors that Germany intended to enter into closer relations with the Soviet Union were unfounded.”²⁹⁶

In Mongolia on February 26, Choibalsan was named head of a new interior ministry (the NKVD equivalent) and, along with Demid, promoted to marshal. (Soviet personnel accounted for one quarter of Mongolian interior ministry personnel.) That same day, in Tokyo, young officers of the Imperial Japanese Army staged a putsch, intending to submit demands to the emperor for the dismissal of their rivals and the appointment of a new prime minister and military-dominated cabinet. They occupied central Tokyo and assassinated two former prime ministers and other high officials, but failed to capture the sitting prime minister or the Imperial Palace. The emperor opposed the action; on February 29 the rebels surrendered.²⁹⁷

On March 1, 1936, Stalin granted an interview to Roy Howard, president of Scripps-Howard News, which, unlike his earlier exchanges with foreigners, he allowed to be published in mass-circulation newspapers. Stalin observed that the situation in Japan after the recent putsch remained unclear, but that “for the time being, the Far Eastern hotbed of danger shows the greatest activity,” and issued an unequivocal public warning: “If Japan should venture to attack the Mongolian People’s Republic and encroach upon its independence, we will have to help.” Howard suggested that the Italian fascists and the German Nazis characterized their systems as state-centric, and the Soviets had built “state socialism.” Stalin rejected the term (“inexact”) and any comparison: “Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works—of the land, the banks, transport, and so on—has remained intact, and therefore capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy.” Howard pressed Stalin about world revolution. Stalin: “We never had such plans and intentions.” Howard countered with examples. Stalin: “This is all the result of a misunderstanding.” Howard: “A tragic misunderstanding?” Stalin: “No, a comic, or, perhaps, a tragicomic one.”²⁹⁸

Stalin gestured toward Rome, telling Howard that fascist Italy’s much-condemned invasion of Abyssinia was a mere “episode,” but he noted that, even as Hitler spoke about peace, the Führer could not “avoid issuing threats”—Stalin’s first unequivocal public rebuke of Nazism. He added that Germany might join with Poland or the Baltic states against the USSR, just as it had in the Great War against Russia.²⁹⁹