Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

CHAPTER 6

REVERSE ENGINEERING

Stalin and Soviet Literature

Stalin read literature for leisure, pleasure and edification. As a young man his first love was poetry, and patriotic poems were his earliest published writing. Radical fiction guided the young Stalin to the revolutionary cause. Like Marx and Lenin, he valued the enlightening role of literary classics, and quickly grasped the mobilisational power of theatre and film. Famously, he described writers in a socialist society as ‘engineers of the human soul’. For Stalin, literature was the means to win hearts as well as minds.

Tragically, his vast collection of novels, plays and poems was dispersed after his death: it is the gaping hole among the archival remnants of Stalin’s library. Yet we know quite a lot about how he read and appreciated literature because from the late 1920s he was highly active in this realm of Soviet cultural policy. His various interventions reveal how he felt about fiction as well as what he saw as its political function. From his policy pronouncements and detailed criticisms of particular texts we can identify his preferences as a reader.¹

Andrei Gromyko was Soviet ambassador to the United States during the Second World War. He attended the Yalta and Potsdam summits in 1945 and served as deputy foreign minister after the war. He recollected of Stalin:

As to his taste in literature, I can state that he read a great deal. This came out in his speeches: he had a good knowledge of the Russian classics, especially Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Also, to my own knowledge, he had read Shakespeare, Heine, Balzac, Hugo, Guy de Maupassant – whom he particularly liked – and many other western European writers.²

FROM NEP TO RAPP

A letter from Trotsky prompted Stalin’s first foray in the field of cultural politics. Trotsky wrote to the Politburo in June 1922 that the party needed to foster relations with young writers. Trotsky proposed a register of writers, and the preparation of dossiers to guide party relations with specific individuals, the aim being to give material support and provide an alternative to bourgeois role models and publishing houses. Trotsky also suggested the creation of a non-party literary journal that would allow scope for ‘individual deviations’.³

In response, Stalin asked deputy party agitprop chief Ya. A. Yakovlev to report on the situation among writers. Yakovlev’s report highlighted the political struggle between the Bolsheviks and counter-revolutionary elements in relation to young writers. He also identified a number of writers who were close to the Bolsheviks politically and suggested organising a non-party association to gather them together, perhaps as a ‘Society for the Development of Russian Culture’. Yakovlev emphasised it would be necessary for the party writers in such a society to avoid ‘unjustifiable communist arrogance’.⁴

In forwarding the report to the Politburo on 3 July 1922, Stalin endorsed Trotsky’s approach, as well as Yakovlev’s ‘Society’ idea. Such a society, wrote Stalin, would contribute to the development of a ‘Soviet culture’ by bringing together ‘Soviet-inclined’ writers.⁵ The resultant Politburo resolution combined Trotsky’s and Stalin’s proposals, i.e. various supports for young writers were to be put in place, including a non-party literary publishing house (rather than a journal), and the possibility of establishing a suitable society for sympathetic writers would be investigated.⁶

This relatively liberal approach to literary affairs was typical of the moderate politics of the NEP era and represented pushback against militants who wanted to impose a uniform ‘proletarian’ culture on all writers. A wide-ranging Politburo resolution ‘On Party Policy in the Sphere of Literature’, dated June 1925, pointed out that it would take the proletariat time to develop its own literature. In the meantime, there had to be an alliance with pro-Soviet ‘fellow traveller’ writers. The party would combat counter-revolutionary manifestations in literature but also be on guard against ‘communist conceit’. It would steer writers’ political preferences but not insist on any particular literary form; it would, indeed, stand for ‘free competition among the various groups and trends in this sphere’.⁷

At the end of the 1920s Stalin executed a sharp left turn in pursuit of accelerated industrialisation and the forced collectivisation of agriculture. He attacked Bukharin and the so-called Right Opposition, who wanted to continue the moderate economics and politics of the NEP years. Internationally, the Comintern declared world revolution imminent. In the cultural field, the militant campaign was spearheaded by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (Russian acronym: RAPP). Formed in 1928, the association aimed to achieve ‘proletarian hegemony’ over Soviet literature. In practice that meant pushing for a class-struggle line in creative works and attacking as politically deviant anyone who disagreed with RAPP’s approach.

RAPP’s importance and influence should not be exaggerated. As John Barber pointed out, it ‘never enjoyed anything like complete control over the literary world. It was never acknowledged by the party as its spokesman on literary affairs, never achieved hegemony over other literary groups, and never even succeeded suppressing dissident voices within its own ranks.’⁸

Certainly, Stalin responded cautiously to the ‘cultural revolution’ he had unleashed. In December 1928 a group of proletarian playwrights wrote warning him of the ‘right-wing’ danger in literature. Their main target was Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) and his plays about the counter-revolutionary White movement of the civil war years, Days of the Turbins and Flight.

Stalin replied on 1 February 1929, writing that he didn’t think it appropriate to talk about a ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ in literature. Better to use descriptive concepts such as ‘Soviet’, ‘anti-Soviet’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘anti-revolutionary’. While he thought that Flight was anti-Soviet, he wasn’t against staging the play if Bulgakov ‘were to add to his eight dreams, one or two more dreams depicting the internal social springs of the civil war in the USSR’.

Why are Bulgakov’s plays produced so often, asked Stalin?

Probably because we don’t have enough of our own plays good enough for staging. In a land without fish, even Days of the Turbins is a fish. It is easy to ‘criticise’ and demand a ban on non-proletarian literature. But easiest is not always best. It is not a matter of ban but of . . . competition . . . only in a situation of competition can we achieve the formation and crystallization of our proletarian literature. As to Days of the Turbins itself, it’s not all that bad, it yields more good than harm. Don’t forget that the main impression the viewer takes away from this play is an impression favourable for the Bolsheviks.

Stalin sprang to Bulgakov’s defence again a couple of weeks later, this time at a meeting with Ukrainian writers. As Leonid Maximenkov has commented, the document recording this meeting has a unique feature: ‘we witness Stalin engaged in a spontaneous dialogue’.⁹ Stalin spoke a set-piece at the start but most of the meeting consisted of a no-holds-barred discussion in which he was shown little or no deference by his audience.

During the course of this sometimes-raucous exchange, Stalin displayed knowledge of the work of quite a few Russian and Ukrainian writers: Vsevolod Ivanov, Boris Lavrenev, Fedor Panferov, Yakov Korobov, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Vladimir Bill-Belotserkovsky and Anton Chekhov. But a lot of what he had to say concerned the national question, not literature itself. The way to unite different national cultures, he argued, was to intensify their separate development. This formula – ‘disunite in order to unite’ – he attributed to Lenin, the idea being that once nations stopped being suspicious of one another they would voluntarily coalesce and culturally unify on a socialist basis.

Bulgakov’s work came up because some of those present didn’t like the way Days of the Turbins depicted the civil war in Ukraine. Again, Stalin defended the play (one he was rumoured to have seen fifteen times) on grounds that overall it gave a good impression of the Bolsheviks. He also made some more general points:

I cannot demand of a literary author that he must be a communist and that he must follow the party point of view. For belletristic literature other standards are needed – non-revolutionary and revolutionary, Soviet and non-Soviet, proletarian and non-proletarian. But to demand that literature be Communist – this is impossible. . . . To demand that belletristic literature and the author follow the party line – then all non-party people would have to be driven out.

Stalin also invoked what would later be called reader-reception theory in support of Bulgakov:

Workers go to see that play and they see . . . there’s no power that can beat the Bolsheviks! There you have it – the general impression left by the play, which can in no way be called Soviet. There are negative sides to that play. Those Turbins are, in their own way, honourable people. . . . But Bulgakov . . . doesn’t want to show . . . how these people . . . are sitting on the neck of other people and that’s why they are being driven out. . . . But even from Bulgakov certain useful things can be taken.

In a June 1929 letter to Maxim Gorky, Stalin wrote that a play about the 1918 Baku Commune was ‘generally speaking . . . weak’. The short-lived commune had ended in tragedy when it was overthrown by counter-revolutionaries and its Bolshevik leaders captured and executed. Stalin thought the play sinned against historical truth because it didn’t deal with how and why the Baku Bolsheviks had ‘abandoned power’. Nor did Stalin like the dramatist’s depiction of Caspian sailors as ‘mercenary drunks’ or the absence in the play of Baku’s oil workers ‘as subject’. Stalin, who had been a Bolshevik agitator in Baku before the revolution, concluded that while the play contained a few ‘juicy pages’ that spoke to the author’s talent, its characters were mostly ‘vague and lacklustre’.¹⁰

In 1930 the poet and satirist Demyan Bedny – a Bolshevik favourite – upset the authorities by publishing poems that caricatured Russian people as inherently lazy. Having been publicly censured by the central committee, he protested to Stalin, who rejected his pleas for artistic respect and berated him for slandering the USSR. He reminded Bedny that revolutionaries all over the world now looked to the Russian working class for leadership, something that filled ‘the hearts of Russian workers with a feeling of revolutionary national pride. . . . And you? Instead of grasping the meaning of this process . . . retired to a quiet spot in the country and . . . began to shout from the house-tops that Russia was an abomination of desolation . . . that “laziness” and [lying on the couch] are well-nigh national traits of the Russian. . . . And this you call Bolshevik criticism!’¹¹

Stalin’s strictures were mild by Bolshevik standards of robust debate and rudeness. Not until 1932 was Bedny ejected from his Kremlin apartment, ostensibly because of building works, allegedly because he had complained that ‘he didn’t like to lend books to Stalin because of the dirty marks left on the white pages by his greasy fingers’.¹²

The thrust of the RAPP-led campaign for a strictly proletarian literature was summed up by playwright V. M. Kirshon’s belligerent speech to the 16th party congress:

We must pass over to a decisive offensive, mercilessly liquidating bourgeois ideology. . . . The class enemy on the literary front is becoming active. At a time of sharpened class struggle any liberalism, any respect for aesthetic language . . . is direct aid to the class enemy. . . . The whole purpose of our activity and our work lies in the fight for the building of socialism.¹³

This was too radical for Stalin, especially since the literature produced by the RAPPers was not particularly good. In April 1932 the Politburo resolved to abolish RAPP on the grounds that it had become an impediment to artistic creativity. Together with all the other writer organisations, it would be replaced by a single union of writers that would unite party members with all those who supported Soviet power and the construction of socialism.¹⁴ Further insight into the rationale behind this move may be gleaned from Stalin’s remarks at two informal meetings of writers held in Maxim Gorky’s place in October 1932.

Gorky (1868–1936), a long-time ally of the Bolsheviks, was their most famous and prestigious literary associate. He was critical of the Bolsheviks’ post-revolutionary repressive measures but never an outright opponent. In the 1920s he lived abroad, mostly in Italy, where he had resided before the First World War. In 1928 he returned to Soviet Russia for a countrywide tour and in 1929 published a travelogue, Around the Union of Soviets, that was highly favourable to the regime. Stalin was keen to entice him home permanently and showered him with honours and flattery. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and Moscow’s main street, Tverskaya, was renamed after him, as was his birthplace, Nizhny Novgorod (both street and city reverted to their original names after the collapse of communism). Upon his return to Moscow, Gorky was allocated a grand mansion in the city centre.¹⁵

SOCIALIST REALISM

That first meeting at Gorky’s house, on 20 October, was a gathering of communist writers. Stalin told them there had been too many writers’ groupings and too much internal squabbling, at the forefront of which had been RAPP. Non-party writers had been neglected and the task on the literary front was to unite them with party writers. The shared aim of building socialism did not mean destruction of the diversity of literary forms and creative approaches.

Stalin urged communist writers to write plays because staged drama was a very popular form. Poems, novels and short stories remained important but they weren’t going to be discussed by millions of people. Asked about non-party writers and the mastery of Marxist dialectics, he responded:

Tolstoy, Cervantes and Shakespeare were not dialecticians but that did not stop them being great artists. They were great artists and their works reflected their epochs quite well. Those who argue that writers should learn dialectics do not understand that writers have to study the classics of literature as well as those of Marxism. [Lenin] taught us that without the knowledge and preserved experience of past human culture we won’t be able to build a new socialist culture.¹⁶

Romanticism, Stalin said, was ‘the idealisation, the embellishment of reality’ but Shakespeare’s romanticism was different from Schiller’s, and Gorky’s radical version had been that of a rising class, struggling for power and humanity’s future. ‘Revolutionary socialist realism must be the main current in the literature of our epoch. But that doesn’t exclude making use of the writers and methods of the romantic school.’¹⁷

Non-party as well as party writers were present during the second meeting at Gorky’s place a few days later. As he often did when he addressed two different audiences on the same topic, Stalin recycled the points and formulations he had used a week earlier, including the importance of writing plays. Then he said:

I forgot to talk about what you are ‘producing’. There are different products: artillery, automobiles, machines. You also produce ‘commodities’, ‘works’, ‘products’. Very important things. Interesting things. People’s souls. . . . You are engineers of human souls. . . . Production of souls is more important than the production of tanks. . . . Man is remade by life itself. But you, too, will assist in remaking his soul. This is important, the production of human souls, That is why I propose a toast to writers, to the engineers of human souls.

When someone asked about dialectics, Stalin responded that an artist might well be a dialectical materialist:

But I want to say that he will not then want to write poetry (general laughter). I’m joking, of course. But, seriously, you mustn’t stuff an artist’s head with abstract theses. He must know the theories of Marx and Lenin. But he must know life. An artist must above all portray life truthfully. And if he shows our life truthfully, he cannot but show it as leading to socialism. That will be socialist art. That will be socialist realism.¹⁸

It seems Stalin came to regret his engineering metaphor, since the statement attributed to him published by Literaturnaya Gazeta in August 1934 was deliberately omitted from publication in his collected works.¹⁹ Be that as it may, it featured front and centre at the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, as did the concept of socialist realism.

Stalin didn’t attend the congress; he was on holiday. It opened on 8 August 1934 with a statement by the party’s ideology chief, Andrei Zhdanov:

Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers of human souls. What does that mean? In the first place, it means knowing life so as to be able to depict it truthfully in works of art. The truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic portrayal should be combined with the ideological remoulding and education of the toiling people in the spirit of socialism. This method is what we call socialist realism. To be an engineer of human souls means standing with both feet planted on the basis of real life. And this in turn denotes a rupture with romanticism of the old type. Our literature cannot be hostile to romanticism, but it must be a romanticism of a new type, revolutionary romanticism. Soviet literature should be able to portray our heroes; it should be able to glimpse our tomorrow.

One cannot be an engineer of the human soul without knowing the technique of literary work. You have many different types of weapons (genres, styles, forms and method of literary creation). The mastery of the technique of writing, the critical assimilation of the literary heritage of all epochs, represents a task which you must fulfil without fail, if you wish to become engineers of human souls.²⁰

Another prominent participant was Nikolai Bukharin, at that time back in favour and serving as editor of Pravda, who gave a report on poetry and socialist realism. Nothing that Stalin ever said about literature matched Bukharin’s depth, breadth, subtlety and rhetorical power. Socialist realism was not naturalism, Bukharin told the congress, because it ‘dares to dream’ about the new world and about the new men and women being created by socialism. Socialism was anti-individualistic but not anti-lyrical because it entailed the flourishing of personality and a growth of individuality that united rather than divided people.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, the avant-garde poet who had committed suicide in 1930, was described by Bukharin as a ‘Soviet classic’: ‘The poetry of Mayakovsky is poetry in action. It is poles asunder from the “contemplative” and “disinterested” concepts contained in the aesthetics of idealist philosophers. It is a hailstorm of sharp arrows shot against the enemy. It is devastating, fire-belching lava. It is a trumpet call that summons to battle.’²¹

Among Mayakovsky’s works was the 3,000-line epic poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. A copy of the 1925 edition was part of Stalin’s library and he was present in January 1930 when the poet recited the poem at a Lenin memorial meeting in the Bolshoi Theatre.

In November 1935 Mayakovsky’s muse, Lilya Brik, wrote to Stalin appealing for help to save the poet’s revolutionary legacy. Mayakovsky’s memory, works, archive and artefacts were being neglected by the Soviet literary establishment, Brik complained, and his Lenin poem had been ‘thrown out of the modern literature textbook’ by the Enlightenment Commissariat. In response, Stalin instructed that Brik’s complaints be looked into because ‘Mayakovsky was and is the best and most talented poet of our Soviet era. Indifference to his memory and works is a crime.’²² Stalin’s laudatory comment soon surfaced publicly and the poet’s reputation and place in the Soviet canon were rapidly restored.

Stalin’s literary tastes were, like Lenin’s, conservative and conventional. From the 1930s onwards that attitude prevailed in Soviet culture as a whole, not only in literature but in architecture, music, film and the fine arts. Some historians describe this retreat from the avant-gardism of the 1920s as a cultural counter-revolution. Its self-conscious political aim, however, was to connect more effectively Soviet culture to the masses. That was also the point of socialist realism, intended to be both popular and accessible as well as politically acceptable.

When anti-fascist German writer Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958) met Stalin in January 1937 he asked him about the function of writers, noting that he had called them engineers of the human soul. ‘If he is in touch with the present needs of the masses, a writer can play an important role in the development of society,’ replied Stalin. ‘He captures the vague feelings and unconscious moods of the advanced sectors of society and makes explicit the instinctive actions of the masses. He shapes the epoch’s public opinion. He helps society’s vanguard realise its tasks.’

Asked by Feuchtwanger to differentiate scientific writers from artistic ones, Stalin said the former were concerned with concepts and analysis of the concrete and the latter were more interested in images and expressiveness. Scientific writers catered to a select audience, whereas artists aimed their works at the masses. Artistic writers were also less calculating and more spontaneous than their scientific counterparts.

Except for the ban on fascist and chauvinist works, said Stalin, Soviet writers were the freest in the world. But he agreed with Feuchtwanger you could learn from reactionaries and emphasised that a writer’s Weltanschauung should not be confused with their artistic works, one example being Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, whose title alluded to the status of serfs in Tsarist society, as well as to the characters that peopled his book: ‘Gogol was undoubtedly a reactionary. He was a mystic. He was against the abolition of serfdom. . . . Yet . . . the artistic truth of Gogol’s Dead Souls had a huge impact on generations of the revolutionary intelligentsia. . . . The world views of writers should not be confused with the impact of their works on readers.’²³

Stalin also quoted to Feuchtwanger Hegel’s well-known aphorism that ‘the Owl of Minerva flies out at dusk’. He was fond of this metaphor, and in his 1938 edition of Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History, he underlined this passage:

The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at night. When philosophy begins tracing its grey patterns on a grey background, when men begin to study their own social order, you may say with certainty that that order has outlived its day and is preparing to yield place to a new order, the true character of which will again become clear to mankind only after it has played its historical part: Minerva’s owl will once again fly out only at night. It is hardly necessary to say that the periodical aerial travels of the bird of wisdom are very useful, and are even quite essential. But they explain absolutely nothing; they themselves require explanation.²⁴

Shakespeare was a ubiquitous figure in Soviet culture in the 1930s. The 1934 writers’ congress was adorned by a huge portrait of Shakespeare, and Gorky urged those present to emulate the great Bard. Writers should ‘Shakespeare-ise more’, demanded the party. There was a project to translate Shakespeare into all the languages of the USSR. ‘Stalin Learning English. Wants to Read Shakespeare’, claimed the headline of a Tasmanian newspaper in September 1936.²⁵

STALIN AT THE MOVIES

In the mid-1930s Stalin began to review film scripts and view and preview films in the Kremlin’s new cinema. The transition to ‘talkies’ had made the medium more attractive to the text-obsessed Stalin, a particular influence being Chapaev (1934), the story of a Red Army commander who died a heroic death during the Russian Civil War – one of the most popular Soviet films of all time, which he is said to have watched thirty-eight times.

His general take on the scripts he read was that films should be historically accurate and aesthetically true to life, as well as politically progressive.

Stalin’s response to Fridrikh Ermler’s script The Great Citizen – a fictionalised account of the Kirov assassination – was that the politics that had led to murder should be at the centre of the screenplay, i.e. the struggle for the victory of socialism in the USSR versus the restoration of capitalism.²⁶

Asked to choose between two screenplays about Giorgi Saakadze, a military commander who battled for Georgia’s unity and independence in the early seventeenth century, Stalin opted for the one he thought was a better piece of history. However, he complained that even this version ended with an inaccuracy – with Saakadze’s victory when, in fact, he had ultimately suffered defeat at the hands of the country’s feudal princes. ‘I think that this historical truth should be restored in the screenplay,’ wrote Stalin. ‘And if it is restored, the screenplay . . . could be characterised as one of the best works of Soviet cinematography.’²⁷

In September 1940 Stalin was drawn into a controversy about a film called Zakon Zhizni (The Law of Life), based on a novel by Alexander Avdeenko, who also wrote the screenplay. Since the story concerned a morally corrupt Komsomol official, it went through quite an extensive process of censorship before being released, whereupon it was reviewed positively in Izvestiya and other publications. However, a Pravda review objected that such corruption was not typical of Soviet society and complained about the film’s main protagonist being too richly drawn while other Komsomol members were depicted as his dupes.²⁸

Stalin was among Avdeenko’s critics at a specially convened meeting of the central committee but he also told the comrades that ‘you have to give freedom of art. You have to let people express themselves. . . . There is one artistic line, but it can be reflected in different ways, various methods, approaches and ways of writing.’²⁹ Towards the end of the meeting, he made some general remarks about truthfulness and objectivity in literature.³⁰ He was all in favour of both but that didn’t mean fiction should be impartial:

Literature cannot be a camera. That’s not how truthfulness should be understood. There cannot be literature without passion, it sympathises with someone, despises someone. . . . There are different ways of writing – the way of Gogol or of Shakespeare. They have outstanding heroes – negative and positive. When you read Shakespeare or Gogol, or Griboedov, you find one hero with negative features. All the negative features are concentrated in one individual. I would prefer a different manner of writing – the manner of Chekhov, who has no heroes but rather grey people . . .

I would prefer we were given enemies not as monsters but as people hostile to our society but not lacking all human traits. . . . I would prefer it if enemies were shown to be strong. . . . Trotsky was an enemy but he was a capable person, undoubtedly he should be depicted as an enemy with negative features, but as one who also has positive qualities. . . . We need truthfulness depicting the enemy in a full-fledged way. . . . It’s not that comrade Avdeenko presents enemies in a good light but that the victors, who beat them, are sidelined and lack colour. That’s the problem. That’s the fundamental inobjectivity and untruthfulness.³¹

Stalin’s remark about the recently assassinated Trotsky was macabre, to say the least. There was no mention of his good points in the Pravda obituary that Stalin had personally edited and entitled ‘Death of an International Spy’.

Stalin didn’t have much time to read film scripts during the war. One exception was Alexander Dovzhenko’s Ukraine in Flames. Dovzhenko was an important Soviet filmmaker, considered by some to be on a par with Eisenstein and Pudovkin. In 1943 he made the documentary Battle for Our Soviet Ukraine. His follow-up fictional treatment of the war in Ukraine was not so welcome and in January 1944 he was summoned to a meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin, who accused him of ‘revising Leninism’, of prioritising national pride above the class struggle, and of blackening the party’s name.³²

Ukraine in Flames never saw the light of day but in 1945 Dovzhenko redeemed himself with another documentary, Victory in Right-Bank Ukraine. And, as we have seen, he was the director selected to make the film about Annabelle Bucar’s book, The Truth about American Diplomats.

In an August 1946 speech to the central committee’s Orgburo, Stalin criticised three films: Vsevolod Pudovkin’s biopic of the nineteenth-century Russian Admiral Nakhimov; part two of Leonid Lukov’s A Grand Life, which dealt with postwar reconstruction in Ukraine; and Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part Two (see p. 140 above).

Stalin’s general gripe was that these filmmakers did not do enough research. He compared them unfavourably to Charlie Chaplin, who worked on projects for several years. ‘You can’t make good films without details,’ said Stalin. ‘Goethe, he worked on Faust for thirty years, that’s how honestly and conscientiously he regarded what he was doing.’

Stalin praised Pudovkin as a capable producer and director, but he detected ‘elements of an unconscientious’ attitude, which had resulted in a film full of trivia and not enough history. The film had been sent back to Pudovkin but Stalin wasn’t confident the filmmaker would make the requisite changes. In the event, Pudovkin was able to rework the film enough to secure its release in 1947.

Part one of A Grand Life, set in the 1930s, had been awarded a Stalin Prize in 1941, but the award’s namesake was scathing about part two, complaining that it was aimed at ‘the undemanding viewer’. Very little of the film was devoted to reconstruction, said Stalin.

It’s simply painful when you look, can it really be that our producers, who live among golden men, among heroes, can’t depict them as they should but must necessarily dirty them? We have good workers, damn it! They showed themselves in the war. . . . What kind of reconstruction is shown in the film where not a single machine figures? They’ve confused what took place after the Civil War, in 1918–1919, with what is taking place, say, in 1945–1946.³³

This film was shelved until 1958.

Stalin was later to level similar complaints against a 1950 documentary, Fishermen of the Caspian. The director, Yakov Bliokh, was accused of using dramatisations that had the effect of ‘distorting real life by showing faked episodes’. Most importantly, ‘Instead of a truthful display of the organisation of labour among Caspian Sea fishermen, as well as advanced methods of fishing and fish processing, the film reproduces the old backward fishing technology based on manual labour.’³⁴

It was not all work and no play on the film front. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana remembered being thrilled by the many films she saw in the Kremlin as a child: ‘The next day at school I could think of nothing but the heroes I’d seen on film the night before.’³⁵ While visiting the United States in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev told President Eisenhower, ‘When Stalin was alive, we used to watch Westerns all the time. When the movie ended, Stalin always denounced it for its ideological content. But the very next day we’d be back in the movie theatre watching another Western.’³⁶ Stalin’s trade minister, Anastas Mikoyan, recalled that Stalin was particularly fond of an English film about a marauding pirate who returned home with a fortune after raids on India and other countries. But the pirate did not want to share the glory (or the loot) with his erstwhile comrades-in-arms so got rid of them by destroying figurines of them.³⁷

ZHDANOVSHCHINA

Having served as Leningrad party secretary, after the Second World War Zhdanov returned to his duties as the party’s ideology chief. At Stalin’s behest he initiated a campaign for a more ideologically orthodox, politically correct and patriotically inclined Soviet literature. A gathering of party propaganda officials in April 1946 was told by Zhdanov that Stalin was dissatisfied with Soviet literary journals. They published ‘weak works’ and there was a lamentable lack of proper criticism. To rectify this situation, the party’s propaganda section would recruit some capable people and involve itself in literary criticism.

In August 1946 Zhdanov received a report from his officials on the ‘unsatisfactory state’ of the literary-artistic journals Leningrad and Star – both published in Leningrad. ‘Over the last two years, these journals have published a number of ideologically harmful and artistically very weak works,’ they informed Zhdanov. Among those singled out for criticism were Anna Akhmatova’s poem ‘A Kind of Monologue’, and the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko’s children’s story ‘Adventures of a Monkey’.³⁸

The next day, during the same Orgburo meeting at which Stalin lambasted the cinematographers for their lack of professionalism, the editors of the two journals were hauled over the coals. Stalin emphasised the political responsibilities of the two journals and their role in the patriotic education of Soviet youth.³⁹ He wanted to know why Zoshchenko’s story had been published in the Star rather than in a children’s journal: ‘This is the silliest piece, it has nothing for the mind or the heart. It’s a puppet-show anecdote.’ Another concern was the two journals’ deference to foreigners: ‘You walk on tiptoe in front of foreign writers. . . . This is how you cultivate servile feelings, this is a great sin.’ But Stalin’s harshest words were reserved for Zoshchenko: ‘A whole war went by, all the peoples were soaked in blood, and he didn’t give us a single line. He writes some nonsense, it’s an absolute mockery. The war is in full swing and he doesn’t have a single word for or against, but he writes all kinds of cock-and-bull stories, nonsense that offers nothing for the mind or heart.’

When Leningrad’s editor pleaded for his journal because it was dear to the city’s heart, Stalin responded: ‘If the journal goes, Leningrad will remain.’

Zoshchenko had been a bad boy before. His 1943 novella Before Sunrise was banned for being too satirical. He pleaded with Stalin to allow publication of his book on grounds that it demonstrated ‘the might of reason and its triumph over the basest of forces’, but received no reply to his entreaties.⁴⁰

In accordance with Stalin’s wishes, Leningrad was banned, while the editorial board of Star was replaced.⁴¹ The Orgburo passed a resolution on the two journals in which Zoshchenko and Akhmatova once again came under fierce fire. Zoshchenko was described as having ‘long specialised in writing vapid, contentless, vulgar pieces, in the advocacy of rotten unprincipledness, vulgarity and apoliticalness calculated to disorient our young people and poison their minds’, while Akhmatova’s poetry was condemned for its ‘pessimism and decadence’. ‘The Soviet order’, stated the resolution,

cannot allow youth to be educated in the spirit of indifference to Soviet policy. . . . The strength of Soviet literature . . . consists in the fact that it is a literature that does not and cannot have other interests besides the interest of the people, the interests of the state. The aim of Soviet literature is to help the state correctly educate young people.⁴²

Both authors were expelled from the Writers’ Union and publication of their poetry and prose prohibited. By the early 1950s, however, they were back in favour. In April 1952 Zoshchenko was wheeled out to meet a British writers’ delegation that included the future Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, who was then still a communist. Asked by Arnold Kettle, another British communist, about the impact of the Zhdanovshchina on him personally, Zoshchenko replied:

For me it was strange that my comic stories had made such a painful impression, and in the direction of telling me this, the criticism was useful. It was unpleasant. I felt bitter and offended, but I love literature more than anything in life, and that is why I will listen to anything for the sake of literature. If the criticism had offended me as a person, it would have been bad. But it was to me as a writer. And so it was very good.⁴³

DOSTOEVSKY AND GOGOL

Fedor Dostoevsky was another writer Stalin believed was a bad influence on Soviet youth. He was a great reactionary as well as a great writer, Stalin told the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas in January 1948.⁴⁴ This was not the first time that Dostoevsky’s name had come up in conversation between Stalin and Djilas. ‘You have, of course, read Dostoevsky?’ Stalin asked him in April 1945, in response to the Yugoslav’s complaints about the behaviour of invading Red Army troops:

Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul, man’s psyche? Well, then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade – over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones! How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors. You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal. . . . The Red Army is not ideal. The important thing is that it fights Germans.⁴⁵

‘My father did not care for poetical and deeply psychological art,’ wrote Svetlana, who was herself a literature student. ‘Yet about Dostoevsky he once said to me that he was a ‘great psychologist’. Unfortunately, I did not ask him what he had in mind – the profound social psychology of The Possessed or the analysis of human behaviour in Crime and Punishment.’⁴⁶

Zhdanov’s deputy, Dmitry Shepilov, recalled that one day the boss called him into his office and told him Stalin was concerned that Soviet commentary was neglecting Dostoevsky’s politics and social philosophy. ‘As Dostoevsky saw it,’ Zhdanov quoted Stalin saying,

there is an element of the satanic and the perverse in each of us. If a man is a materialist, if he does not believe in God, if he – oh horror! – is a socialist, the satanic element wins out, and he becomes a criminal. What an abject philosophy. . . . No wonder Gorky called Dostoevsky the ‘evil genius’ of the Russian people. True, in his best work Dostoevsky described with stunning power the lot of the humiliated and injured, the savage behaviour of those in power. But for what? To call upon the humiliated and injured to struggle against evil, oppression, and tyranny? Far from it. Dostoevsky called for the renunciation of struggle; he called for humility, resignation, Christian virtue. Only that, according to him, could save Russia from the catastrophe of socialism.⁴⁷

Like all memoirs, Shepilov’s story should be treated with caution but politics was always to the fore in Stalin’s judgements of great writers. The year 1952 was the centenary of Gogol’s death, and his life and works were widely commemorated in the USSR. The principal speaker at a celebration meeting in the Bolshoi Theatre in March 1952 told his audience that Marx, Lenin and Stalin approved of Gogol because he was a ‘great ally in the struggle to oppose with ruthless satire all the forces of darkness and hatred, all the forces hostile to peace on earth’. That same day a Pravda editorial declared, in words assumed to be Stalin’s, that ‘Soviet literature is the herald of a new communist morality. Its duty is to paint life in all its diversity and to unmask ruthlessly all that is stagnant, backward and hostile to the people. We need our Gogols and Shchedrins!’ These words were echoed by Georgy Malenkov in his report to the 19th party congress in October 1952 – a speech heavily edited by Stalin: ‘We need Soviet Gogols and Shchedrins who, with the fire of their satire, would burn everything which is undesirable, rotten and dying, everything which retards our progress.’⁴⁸

STALIN’S PRIZES

Another source for Stalin’s views on literature are the deliberations on the award of the state prizes that bore his name. Established in 1939 in honour of Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, more than 11,000 Stalin prizes for scientific, technological and artistic works and achievements were awarded to individuals or groups between 1941 and 1955 (when the award was replaced by the Lenin Prize). Writers, poets and playwrights were the recipients of 264 of these awards. The prizes were prestigious, and lucrative: the top category of award earned the recipient a 100,000-rouble bonus. Most important, the award of a prize signalled that the work in question had the approval of the highest levels of the party and state. In theory, the prizes were awarded on the basis of recommendations by independent committees composed mainly of academics and practitioners. In practice, the awards process was subject to political interference by Stalin and the Politburo. This was particularly true of the work of the Committee on Literature and Art.⁴⁹

Discussion of nominated works usually took place in Stalin’s office: ‘Stalin was probably better prepared for the meetings than anyone else,’ recalled Shepilov. ‘He was always a close reader of current literature, and found time to go over everything of any artistic, social or economic significance.’ Confident as well as diligent, Stalin once asked a group of writers what they thought of this plot line: ‘She’s married, has a child, but falls in love with another man. Her lover does not understand her and she commits suicide.’ Banal, replied the writers. ‘With this banal plot,’ Stalin retorted, ‘Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina.’

Stalin’s views on works of art oscillated between stressing the importance of political considerations when making awards and insisting on high artistic standards. Among the writers he championed during these discussions were Konstantin Fedin, Alexander Korneichuk, Mikhail Bubennov, Vera Panova, Fedor Panferov, Nikolai Tikhonov, August Jakobson and Semen Babaevsky.⁵⁰

Konstantin Simonov was another witness to Stalin’s ruminations. A renowned poet, writer and journalist, he was deputy head of the Writers’ Union as well as the chief editor of the ‘thick’ Soviet literary journal Novyi Mir (New World). According to Simonov, Stalin said of Kruzhilikha, Panova’s novel about factory life during the Great Patriotic War: ‘Everyone’s criticising Panova for the fact that in the novel there’s no unity between the personal and the social. . . . But surely in life things are not . . . so easily combined? It happens that they are not combined. . . . Her people are shown truthfully.’⁵¹

A novel by the Belorussian writer Yanka Bryl’, Light beyond the Marshes, Stalin characterised as ‘conflictless’.⁵² ‘We are so bad at drama,’ said Stalin. ‘It’s as if we have no conflict, no bastards. It turns out that our dramatists think they are forbidden from writing about negative stuff. Critics demand of them ideals and the ideal life. If someone shows anything negative in their work they are immediately attacked . . . but we do have bad and nasty people. We have more than a few fakes and bad people and we need to combat them. Not to depict them is a sin against the truth. . . . We have conflict. There are conflicts in life. These conflicts have to be reflected in drama, otherwise it’s not drama.’⁵³

Stalin was particularly interested in historical dramas about events in which he had played a part. In the December 1949 issue of Novyi Mir, dedicated to him on his seventieth birthday, it was a play about ‘The Unforgettable Year 1919’ that caught Stalin’s eye. He decided to edit it, striving mainly to improve playwright Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s prose but also correcting historical inaccuracies such as characters referring to Lenin and Stalin by the patronymics rather than calling them comrade, and changing ‘embassy’ to ‘diplomatic mission’.⁵⁴

Stalin’s dissatisfaction with the work of the Art and Literature Committee was evidenced by a critical central committee report of May 1952. Of the 133 works nominated for awards in 1951, fifty had been turned down by the government and nineteen other works given prizes had not even been considered by the committee. The committee had made serious mistakes in excluding from consideration novels such as Vilis Latsis’s Toward New Shores, Orest Mal’tsev’s Yugoslav Tragedy, and Dmitry Eremin’s Storm over Rome – all highly political works. Members of the committee, including Simonov, were criticised for not attending meetings and for cavalier attitudes when assessing submitted works, for example, Wanda Wasilewska’s novel The Rivers Are Burning. The committee was also accused of parochialism and cronyism when it came to selecting works for consideration. The report concluded that the committee’s personnel should be changed and steps taken to ensure that new members were conversant with different artistic styles and familiar with all significant works of literature, including the theory and history of art and literature.⁵⁵

That report had been preceded by one of Stalin’s weirder interventions in the cultural arena: an anonymously published defence of Latsis’s Toward New Shores, which was prompted by an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta that had reported criticisms of the novel in the writer’s native Latvia.⁵⁶

Latsis was chairman of Latvia’s Council of People’s Commissars, but that didn’t protect him from the severe criticism of high-ranking officials in the country’s cultural bureaucracy. Latsis’s novel was about Latvia’s path to socialism, said his critics, but its main hero was a peasant who was a kulak and, therefore, an enemy of the people.

Stalin’s article, published anonymously in Pravda on 25 February 1952, expressed a different opinion: if the novel had an individual hero, it was an Old Bolshevik character. More importantly, the true hero of the book was the Latvian people and their epic struggle for socialism. ‘We think that V. Latsis’s Toward a New Shore is one of the great achievements of Soviet artistic literature, and is ideologically and politically mature from beginning to end,’ concluded the unnamed ‘group of writers’ who had supposedly authored the article.⁵⁷

As this episode shows, politics generally trumped all other considerations in Stalin’s reading of literature. He preferred writing that captured complexity, conflict and contradiction and was reluctant to impose a party line on literature, but only fiction that depicted socialist progress did he consider to be really ‘true to life’.

Stalin complained about the timidity of Soviet writers and critics, but in the authoritarian system he had done so much to create, the safest option was always to keep your head down and avoid saying anything that could be construed as overly critical. Those like Zoshchenko, who were deemed to have overstepped the mark, often found themselves facing official ire, not least from Stalin himself.

A prize for peace also bore Stalin’s name. A rival to the Nobel Peace Prize, it was an international award and among its recipients were a good many writers, for example, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, the American novelist Howard Fast, and the Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg.

Neruda, who also served on the prize committee, was told by a Russian contact that when Stalin was presented with a list of possible winners, he exclaimed, ‘And why isn’t Neruda’s among them?’⁵⁸

Among the poems penned by Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, was an ‘Ode to Stalin’:

Lenin left an inheritance

of a homeland free and wide.

Stalin populated it

with schools and flour,

printhouses and apples.

Stalin from the Volga

to the snow

of the inaccessible North

put his hand and in his hand a man

he started to build.

The cities were born.

The deserts sang

for the first time with the voice of water.⁵⁹

Ehrenburg was another beneficiary of Stalin’s patronage but not in relation to the peace prize award: as the Soviet Union’s foremost international peace campaigner in the 1940s and 1950s, he was among the worthiest of its recipients. But Stalin was instrumental in awarding him a first-class literature prize for his 1948 novel The Storm, a story set in wartime France. Reviewers had criticised the novel for portraying the French resistance as more heroic than the Soviet people, so the literature prize committee recommended the award of only a second-class prize. When Stalin asked why, he was told the novel had no real heroes and that one of its main characters was a Soviet citizen who falls in love with a Frenchwoman, which was not a typical situation during the war. ‘But I like this Frenchwoman, she’s a nice girl. And besides, such things do happen in real life,’ said Stalin. ‘As regards heroes, I think that few people are born heroes, it’s ordinary people who become heroes.’

Reflecting on this episode, Ehrenburg wrote in his memoirs: ‘The more I think about Stalin the more it is fully borne in on me how little I understand.’⁶⁰ Around the same time, Stalin vetted a play by Simonov based on the Kliueva–Roskin affair. Alien Shadow concerned a Soviet microbiologist infatuated with the west who inadvertently betrays state secrets. At Stalin’s insistence, Simonov changed the play’s ending to one in which the government forgives the protagonist’s sins. Some critics considered the play too weak and liberal. The play was awarded a Stalin Prize, but only a second-class one.⁶¹