The House of Government

13

THE IDEOLOGICAL SUBSTANCE

The canonical Soviet histories of the First Five-Year Plan consisted, like Marxism in Lenin’s definition, of three components: industrialization, which stood for the construction of the economic foundations of socialism; collectivization, which stood for the destruction of the force that “engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a massive scale”; and the cultural revolution, which represented the conversion of all nominal Soviets to genuine Marxism-Leninism. As a proletarian judge in Platonov’s “For Future Use” says of a former fool named Pashka (little Paul), “Capitalism gave birth to fools as well as to the poor. We can handle the poor just fine, but what are we to do with the fools? And this, Comrades, is where we come to the Cultural Revolution. So therefore I propose that this comrade, entitled Pashka, must be thrown into the cauldron of the Cultural Revolution so we can burn away the skin of ignorance, get at the very bones of slavery, crawl into the skull of psychology, and fill every nook and cranny with our ideological substance.”¹

The goal of the cultural revolution was to fill every nook and cranny with the Bolshevik ideological substance. The most visible part of the campaign was the remaking of the arts and sciences. When in the summer of 1931, Ilya Zbarsky was admitted to Moscow University (his father’s Order of the Red Banner of Labor for preserving Lenin’s body was officially equated with proletarian origin), he wanted to enroll in the department of organic chemistry, but was told there was no such specialization:

“Perhaps physical chemistry then?”

“We do not have that specialization either.”

“So what specializations do you have?”

“‘Engineer specializing in the production of sulphuric acid,’ ‘engineer specializing in the production of aniline dyes,’ ‘engineer specializing in the production of plastic materials,’ ‘engineer …’”

“I’m sorry, but I was actually thinking of studying chemistry.”

“We need specialists, who are essential for socialist industry, not desk-bound scholars.”

Zbarsky wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, but he was not sure which engineering specialization would be appropriate.

I walked over to the Biology Department, but it turned out that there was no such thing. Instead there were botany and zoology departments. When I said I wanted to study biochemistry, I was told that there was no such specialization, but that there was hunting science (formerly “zoology of the vertebrates”), fishing science (formerly “ichthyology”), physiology of labor (formerly “physiology of animals”), and so on, including “physicochemical biology.” They probably could not think of a way to rename it. It sounded like the only department in which science had survived, and I applied and was accepted.²

Ilya Zbarsky’s job after graduation was exempt from Marxist exegesis. (He liked to call himself a “paraschite,” but his official title was “Lenin Mausoleum employee.”) In other arts and sciences, young proletarian true believers of mostly nonproletarian origin were trying to oust their former teachers while fighting among themselves over Party patronage and definitions of orthodoxy. Urbanists, disurbanists, constructivists, RAPPists, AKhRRists, and sulphuric acid engineers were planning a new world in the ruins of the old. The only criterion of success was endorsement by the Party. The most conclusive revolutions took place in agrarian economics (because Stalin intervened directly) and literature (because it meant so much to the Bolsheviks and because Stalin intervened directly).³

The Party’s turn toward the policy of forced collectivization had formalized the triumph of Kritsman’s Agrarian Marxists (who were studying the spread of capitalist class relations in the countryside) over Chayanov’s “neopopulists” (who had insisted on the traditional nonmarket specificity of peasant agriculture). Chayanov had lost his institute, renounced his views, and abandoned the study of peasant households in favor of the study of large state farms. On the last day of the First All-Union Conference of Agrarian Marxists in December 1929, Stalin was expected to congratulate the delegates and set the goals for future work. (“Given the complete contamination of virtually all agricultural experts with Chayanovism,” wrote Aron Gaister in a private letter to Kritsman, “the struggle against it by means of daily agitation and Marxist propaganda is a huge and important task.”) Instead, Stalin used the occasion to proclaim the policy of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, rendering Kritsman’s and Gaister’s work on social differentiation meaningless and possibly harmful.⁴

Ilya Zbarsky as a student(Courtesy of I. B. Zbarsky)

On June 21, 1930, Chayanov was arrested for membership in a Peasant Labor Party, allegedly led by his colleague, Professor N. D. Kondtratiev. The party was an OGPU fiction, but, as is often the case in thought-crime inquisitions, the fiction had been of Chayanov’s own making. According to his 1920 novella, My Brother Alexei’s Journey into the Country of Peasant Utopia, peasant representatives were going to enter the government around 1930, become the majority party in 1932, and embark on the wholesale destruction of the cities in 1934. Now, in real-life 1930, the ten-year-old fantasy had become a plausible reaction to the wholesale destruction of the peasantry. On September 2, 1930, Stalin wrote to Molotov: “Might the accused gentlemen be prepared to admit their mistakes and publicly drag themselves and their politics through the mud, while at the same time admitting the strength of the Soviet state and the correctness of our collectivization strategy? That would be nice.” In the end, the alleged members of the Peasant Labor Party were not asked to do this (unlike the alleged members of the Industrial Party, who were, and did). “Wait before turning the Kondratiev ‘case’ over to the courts,” wrote Stalin to Molotov on September 30. “It is not entirely risk free.” On January 26, 1932, the OGPU Collegium sentenced Chayanov to five years in a labor camp.⁵

At the time of Chayanov’s arrest, Kritsman was being publicly criticized for having incurred Stalin’s criticism. On July 12, 1930, he wrote to Stalin asking whether his (Stalin’s) speech at the Conference of Agrarian Marxists should be interpreted as criticism of his (Kritsman’s) work. In January 1931, Stalin told Kritsman that he disapproved of the press campaign being waged against him. In April 1931, he pointed out certain faults in Kritsman’s speech at the international agrarian conference in Rome. In his response, Kritsman wrote that his words had been misrepresented, and that he had followed Stalin’s instructions to the letter not only because he considered them “compulsory in general,” but because they corresponded with his own “understanding of these things.” The cultural revolution on the agrarian front ended with the victory of Kritsman’s “understanding” to the extent that it corresponded with Comrade Stalin’s instructions.⁶

In literature, the monopoly of Leopold Averbakh’s Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) survived until April 1932. The role of Chayanov had been played first by Voronsky, and then, after his fall, by his shadow. “Voronskyism” stood for neopopulism, “blini nationalism,” and “abstract humanism.” One of the latter-day representatives of Voronskyism was Andrei Platonov, who seemed to oppose his holy fools to those who “only thought of the big picture, and not of the private Makar.” As Averbakh wrote in his review of “Doubting Makar,”

It is well-known that both Marx and Lenin often compared the building of socialism to childbirth, i.e., to a painful, difficult, and excruciating process. We are “giving birth” to a new society. We need to muster all our strength, strain all our muscles, concentrate totally on our goal. But then some people come along with a sermon about easing up! They want to evoke our pity! And they come to us with their propaganda of humanism! As if, in this world, there were something more genuinely human than the class hatred of the proletariat; as if it were possible to demonstrate one’s love for the “Makars” other than by building new houses, in which the heart of the socialist human being will beat!⁷

Platonov’s story was ambiguous, concluded Averbakh, but “our time does not tolerate ambiguity.” The Party was “making it impossible to oppose ‘private Makars’ to ‘the big picture.’”⁸

Of the many proletarian groups contesting RAPP’s monopoly on Marxism in literature, the most serious was the circle of Serafimovich’s protégés, which included Isbakh, Parfenov, and Ilyenkov. On the day of the publication of the Politburo decree of April 22, 1932, which put an end to the search for orthodoxy (and Averbakh’s rule) by abolishing all proletarian writers’ groups in favor of an all-encompassing writer’s union, they gathered in Serafimovich’s apartment in the House of Government. “What has happened, has happened,” said Serafimovich, according to Isbakh. “It’s as if we had finally recovered from a terrible fever. But now let’s think ahead, about how we will work from now on. So, young men, what are your plans? What can you say in your defense?”⁹

The cultural revolution in literature ended with the victory of private Makar to the degree that he fit into the big picture. Helping the writers with their plans and occasionally calling on them to say something in their defense was the greatly expanded central censorship office (the Main Directorate for Literary and Publishing Affairs, or Glavlit) under its new head, Boris Volin (himself a former RAPP activist). Upon taking over, Volin announced “a decisive turn toward extreme class vigilance,” and, two years later, on April 9, 1933, promised the creation of an “integral censorship” and the use of “repression” against errant censors.¹⁰

Another institution that had been designed to discipline literary production was the Association of State Book and Magazine Publishers (OGIZ). On August 5, 1931, the head of OGIZ, Artemy Khalatov, was scheduled to report to the Politburo. The editor of Izvestia, Ivan Gronsky (who lived in Entryway 1, on the other side of the State New Theater from Khalatov’s Entryway 12), described the proceedings in his memoirs:

On the agenda was the work of OGIZ. The presenter was Khalatov. He entered the room and stood, not where he was supposed to, but at the other end of the table, closer to Stalin. Just as Khalatov was about to begin, Stalin suddenly asked:

“Why are you wearing a hat?”

Khalatov looked lost.

“But you know I always wear this hat.”

“It shows a lack of respect for the Politburo! Take off your hat!”

“But, Iosif Vissarionovich, why?”

I had never seen Stalin in such a state. Usually he was polite and spoke softly, but now he was absolutely furious. Khalatov still did not remove his ill-fated hat. Stalin jumped up and ran out of the room. We all began to reason with Khalatov in semi-facetious terms: “Artem, don’t be silly …” Khalatov relented, and began his report. Stalin came back, sat down, and raised his hand. Molotov, as usual, said: “Comrade Stalin has the floor.”

The General Secretary’s brief intervention can be summarized as follows: “The political situation in the country has changed, but we have not drawn the appropriate conclusions. It seems to me that OGIZ should be split up. I propose taking five publishing houses out of OGIZ.”

The proposal was accepted. Khalatov left the meeting as a nobody.¹¹

In fact, only two publishing houses were taken out of OGIZ (the State Science and Technology Publishers and the Party Press), and Khalatov was not formally dismissed until April 1932. Bureaucratic politics seem to have been at least as important as Khalatov’s hat. One of the initiators of the removal of the Party Press from OGIZ was Aleksei Stetsky, the head of the Central Committee’s Cultural-Propaganda Department and a close friend of Gronsky. (Soon after moving into the House of Government, Stetsky and Gronsky had switched apartments: Stetsky moved into Apt. 144, Gronsky’s original assignment, and Gronsky, who had a larger family, moved into Apt. 18, in Entryway 1, under Radek, who often wrote for Gronsky’s Izvestia and sometimes walked home with him.) Khalatov became Head of Personnel at the People’s Commissariat of Transportation and, three years later, chairman of the All-Union Society of Inventors. He continued to live in the House of Government and to wear his hat.¹²

Artemy Khalatov (left) with Maxim Gorky. Khalatov had led the effort to persuade Gorky to return to the Soviet Union

■ ■ ■

The transformation of the arts and sciences and the creation of an integral censorship system provided the necessary conditions for the cultural revolution’s principal goal: the penetration of the skull of Comrade Pashka’s psychology and the filling of every nook and cranny of his mind with the Bolshevik ideological substance.

The best kind of surgery was a purge, or a public confession before a general assembly of the congregation, and the best possible purge subject was the prototypical underground Bolshevik, Aleksandr Voronsky. Voronsky’s purge took place at the State Fiction Publishing House on October 21, 1933, four years after his readmission to the Party and a year and a half after the banishment of all Averbakhs. Asked “what Voronsky had done to root out ‘Voronskyism,’” he said: “Very little. I think that ‘Voronskyism’ is, in essence, correct.” Not everyone was happy with this answer, but he insisted that his political mistakes were distinct from his literary opinions. “I do not think these questions are connected to the opposition. I do not understand what the theory of immediate impressions has to do with Trotskyism…. And, as I said before, I have the same view of the psychology of literary creativity now as I did then, and consider it the only correct theory for Soviet art.”¹³

Voronsky was not saying that he had the right to have views contrary to those of the Party: he was saying that the Party—unlike Averbakh—did not have an official view on the psychology of literary creativity. Ultimately, there was only one correct theory of anything, the correctness of any theory depended on what was good for the building of socialism, and the determination of what was good for the building of socialism was the job of the Party leadership. But when the Party leadership was silent, and Averbakhs were in power, it was better to give up altogether. “In the end, I arrived at the conviction that the right thing for me to do was to break my critic’s pen in two. And that is what I did.”¹⁴

According to the purge commission, he had no right to do so. “You say that you broke your pen,” said one of the interrogators. “But that is not your decision to make. The Party must say to you: ‘No, do not break your pen, you must disavow your position on politics and literature, because, with your pen, you did great damage to the whole proletarian revolution, the Party and Soviet literature.’” But this was just the beginning. Since the Party made no distinction between private Makars and the big picture, making things right with the Party meant remaking oneself in its image. “Personally, I don’t doubt Aleksandr Konstantinovich’s sincerity,” said the director of the State Fiction Publishing House, Nikolai Nakoriakov. “But this admission of his errors took so much out of him that he has become inactive…. His breaking of his pen, which was a political weapon handed to him by the Party, will certainly be followed by the breaking of many other weapons and, ultimately, himself.” Voronsky needed to return to the ranks as a Party soldier, and he needed to do so sincerely.¹⁵

Voronsky was willing, but he kept repeating that he could not say things he did not believe, while also claiming (unconvincingly, according to several inquisitors) that his beliefs would change by themselves if the Party issued a formal decree to that effect. While offering a full confession of his fall into heresy and subsequent reawakening, he proposed a general theory of the cultural revolution. “I have thought long and hard about what happened to me,” he said. “My answer is this: the central objective of our opposition was to struggle against the Central Committee and the Soviet apparatus…. And now I ask myself: how did it happen that I set such an objective? My answer to this question is as follows: I gave an incorrect answer to the question of the relationship between the mass movement … and the apparatus, democracy and centralism, democracy and the Party, the Party and its leaders.” This was, he argued, an old question. Bakunin had proposed mass struggle; the People’s Will had proposed conspiracies by the leaders; and Lenin had provided the answer by demonstrating that the leaders were the embodiment of the masses. Lenin’s early disciples (he went on) had constituted an organic body of believers:

It was based on a certain mutual trust. No one told you that you had to do something in a certain way. You did it yourself, without any need for formal rules. And then after the revolution happened, in the early days, as you well know, spontaneity prevailed…. And then the Civil War ended, and the question of building arose. I saw that a large state apparatus was being built. I also saw that a mass, well-organized, and inclusive Party was being built. And so, the same questions regarding the relationship between mass struggle and the leaders, the class and the Party, the Party and the leaders—those questions arose again, and in this case I was not able to resolve them. It seemed to me that we were being weighed down by domesticity. It seemed to me that our apparatus, both the Party and state branches, was becoming too top-heavy. It seemed to me that the leaders were prevailing over democracy and centralism was prevailing over democracy—and from that everything else flowed.

Everything else included his joining the opposition, signing various appeals, and taking an active part in the events of 1927:

You see how things could unfold logically. If the apparatus is this way, if it is weighed down, if it is becoming alien, if it is becoming overly bureaucratic, then the building of socialism is out of the question, serious industrialization is out of the question, the real victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat is out of the question. That is how matters looked to me then, and I made my decision….

So what happened next? Next, I realized that I had made a mistake. And what was my mistake? What made me realize my mistake? The thing that made me realize my mistake was collectivization and industrialization. When the industrialization and collectivization plan began to be implemented, I asked myself: okay, so if our apparatus is so very bad and so very bureaucratic, if Party leadership prevails over work with the masses and mass initiative, then how can this same apparatus move such a huge thing off the ground? It’s one or the other: either this whole thing fails, or my criticism is wrong.¹⁶

In Voronsky’s telling, Stalin’s “revolution from above” was, indeed, from above, insofar as it was launched by the apparatus. It was also, indeed, a revolution, insofar as the apparatus managed to move such a huge thing off the ground. The second coming of the real day was significantly different from the first, but it was accomplishing the same goals: the building of socialism and the real victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The same was true of personal conversion: spontaneous “mutual trust” had been replaced by formal institutional obedience, but the commitment to organic wholeness (intolerance of ambivalence) remained the same. The point of the cultural revolution was to restore and universalize the original spontaneity by decree: to transform a sect into a church without losing innocence. Voronsky, who had once served as a volunteer in the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising, was again free of doubt and ready to serve.

The success of the general enterprise—as suggested by the construction/conversion plot—was assured. But was this possible in the case of Voronsky? Was he, in fact, ready to serve again? Most members of the purge commission seemed impressed by his sincerity (and perhaps by his proximity to Stalin), but no one accepted his distinction between the political and the literary. “As for my literary views,” he said at the end of his confession, “I said before, and will say again, that I still consider my theoretical views correct, and cannot, at this time, renounce them. If someone were to come to me and say: ‘One way or the other, you must renounce them,’ I, to be absolutely frank with you, would not be able to do it.”

Aleksandr Voronsky

Did this mean that his confession was incomplete? And if so, was it incomplete because he had not fully “disarmed” or because, “at this time,” the Party had no clear position on Voronskyism? And what if the person coming to him were Stalin himself? The chairman of the purge commission (the Old Bolshevik, head of the printers’ union, and Central Committee member, Boris Magidov) saved his best question for last:

CHAIRMAN. What is the role of Comrade Stalin in our Party?

VORONSKY. There is no need for you to ask this question, because, personally, Comrade Stalin and I have always been on the best of terms. Our differences of opinion were exclusively about matters of principle. I, like the Party as a whole, consider him our Party’s best leader and ideologue.

CHAIRMAN. With this, let us conclude today’s session.¹⁷

Voronsky had passed his purge trial and was retained in the Party.

■ ■ ■

Fedor Kaverin had “passed the test of modernity” and earned his place in the House of Government by staging The Recasting (about the conversion of the redeemable). His subsequent attempt to tackle “the other side of the heart” had proved premature and resulted in a serious financial and creative crisis. His theater’s survival now depended on a new treatment of conversion. His last hope was Mikhail Romm’s The Champion of the World. As he wrote in his diary in May 1932, “I have to do everything possible to make sure this play takes off in the new building.” And as he wrote to the theater’s administrative director, Yakov Leontiev, “in this atmosphere of uncertainty, occasional general hostility, unwanted loneliness, and my own prickliness, the only breath of fresh air is my copy of ‘The Champion.’”¹⁸

Mikhail Davidovich Romm (no relation to the film director) was one of Russia’s first soccer players, a member of the 1911–12 national team, Tuscany’s champion as a defender for Firenze in 1913, coach of the Moscow all-stars at the first “Spartakiad of the Peoples” in 1928, and a close collaborator of N. I. Podvoisky at Sports International. The Champion of the World was his first literary effort. It is set in the United States. A magnate named Ferguson sponsors an amateur boxer named Bob, who is training for a championship fight. Bob is a miner; his opponent, Crawford, is black. Ferguson’s plan is to use the fight in his campaign for governor. Crawford is the better boxer, but he receives anonymous threats and throws the fight so as to avoid “Negro pogroms.” Bob finds out about the plot and exposes Ferguson. Ferguson loses the election, blacks and miners find a common language, and the Communist Party gets more votes than usual. According to the censor’s memo, “the play shows the ugly chauvinism of the Americans, the plight of the oppressed Negroes, and the shameless political machinations of American capitalists.”¹⁹

Most important, it showed a doctrinally unimpeachable conversion in an exotic setting perfectly suited for “nonliteral realism.” Kaverin was enraptured to the point of ecstasy, of delirious infatuation. As part of his preparation, he read Theodor Dreiser, Jack London, John Dos Passos, several brochures about sports and racism, and Lenin’s articles on the national question. He designed an important scene in a black club where Negro proletarians in bright clothes get together to sing “Deep River,” drink Coca-Cola, and eat corn and watermelon. As he wrote in his notes for the production, “culturally, the Negro population lags far behind the average level in America. Only the sailor, Strang, is able to establish contact with them by pointing to a way out of slavery in simple language. Strang shows them Soviet illustrated magazines, and when the whole crowd gathers around him, the political leaders who have been arguing with each other—the Zionist Almers, the chauvinist Hollis, and the appeaser Forrest—find themselves together, in one hostile group.” The culmination of the show was to be the fight scene as glimpsed from the locker room to the accompaniment of drums, whistles, loudspeakers, megaphones, and banging doors. During the intermission, the “noisy sensationalism” of the election campaign and championship fight was to follow the spectators to the foyer, café, and back to their seats. The singing of the “Internationale,” by contrast, was to be done with “convincing simplicity.” “Of help here should be the conspiratorial atmosphere in which the Negro workers listen to the new song, and the uncertain performance by Strang, who does not just strike up the tune, but slowly tries to figure it out.” The goal was to depict spiritual awakening by means of “good theatricality” and “forceful expressiveness.”²⁰

Romm was worried. “I am afraid that the stress on dancing is, on the whole, wrong,” he wrote to Kaverin on July 2, 1932, “and so is the stress on primitiveness, because American Negroes have left primitiveness behind, but have not yet arrived at urbanism.” What was needed was less theatricality and more simplicity. “Sport is about the vast expanse and clean lines of a stadium. Sport is about a simple movement, beautiful in its rationality and devoid of anything superfluous, cumbersome, or ineffective. Sport is about a simple, comfortable costume, a simple, healthy psyche, and simple, healthy relations between men and women.” The theater’s administrative director, Yakov Leontiev, was worried, too. After months of disagreement over the move to the House of Government, the need for a new aesthetic, and the new play, he had decided to resign. In his last letter to Kaverin, he wrote that his excitement about Romm’s play was not warranted “either by the general circumstances or by the quality of the play.” He warned Kaverin about the danger of misguided enthusiasms, but offered his continued affection and sympathy. “I am very sad about the state you are in.”²¹

Kaverin persevered. By spring 1933, the production had been completed, and the censor’s approval was secured. The last remaining hurdle was a special review by the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. On March 4, 1933, Kaverin wrote in his diary:

Very soon, in three hours or so, some very serious and important people will come here, to our theater: Stetsky, Bubnov, Litvinov, Krestinsky, Karakhan, Shvernik, Kamenev, Kiselev, and many others. They will come in order to see the dress rehearsal of “The Champion of the World” and decide whether we will be allowed to go ahead with the production. The show has no great sins, either political or artistic. The issue is America, about which the show has some tough things to say. In this tense moment on the world scene, diplomatic relations with it may require the removal of that toughness—or, simply put, the banning of the show for an indefinite period of time.

My conscience is clear. And yet, I am very nervous. I am nervous because the plan for the year, derailed by the construction of the stage, which is still not quite finished, is unraveling and slipping through my hands. I feel awful about the seven months of work by the whole troupe (and, in my own case, almost a year). I am afraid that before such an audience, the actors will feel unsure of themselves, and the show will lose its vitality for reasons that have nothing to do with substance. Such important, but nontheatrical, people will not take this into account, and the accidental casualty will be the fate of the show that was supposed to be the start of our new life.²²

According to Aleksandr Kron’s version of Fedor Kaverin’s favorite dinner-table story, the important people came, “sat stone-faced through the whole show, and, when it was over, whispered for a long time among themselves and left with hardly a word of goodbye.” The show was put on hold, but Kaverin did not lose hope, and he eventually managed to reach the people’s commissar of foreign affairs, Litvinov, who lived upstairs in Apt. 14. Litvinov promised to come to a private performance:

Several days later, a middle-aged man with extraordinarily intelligent and mischievous eyes in a broad face was sitting in the fifth or sixth row of the cold and empty theater with a winter coat draped around his shoulders. The performance was meant for him alone. There were no more than ten people in the auditorium, all theater employees or friends. They had received no instructions from Kaverin, but it was understood that they would not be looking only at the stage.

The famous diplomat turned out to be a remarkably responsive spectator. He laughed, gasped, slapped his knees, and even wiped his eyes with his handkerchief several times. It was a joy to watch him. With each new act, hope grew.

After the viewing, Fedor Nikolaevich walked over to the people’s commissar in his usual bobbing way and, smiling shyly, asked what he thought of the show. Maksim Maksimovich shook Kaverin’s hand warmly and repeatedly:

“Thank you for getting me out. With my awful schedule, I hardly ever make it to the theater. And, in this case, it was both business and pleasure—work-related and fun.”

“Did you like it?”

“Very much. You know, I knew almost nothing about your theater. It’s been a while since I got so caught up in a performance.”

“So, you think that we have succeeded in conveying, to some degree …”

“More than some. It’s very accurate. That’s exactly how it works.”

Fedor Nikolaevich beamed:

“So, the show can be released?”

Litvinov’s expression changed abruptly.

“Absolutely not. Don’t you know, my dear fellow? Oh well, I guess you don’t. No, this is the worst possible timing.”

“Maksim Maksimovich, but this is a catastrophe. So much work, so much money! We’ve used a whole train car’s worth of plywood …”

Livinov burst out laughing. He could not stop for a long time. The train car’s worth of plywood had amused and touched him.

“My dear man … A train car’s worth of plywood …”

Suddenly, he turned serious, took Kaverin by the arm, and walked toward the exit.

When Fedor Nikolaevich came back, he looked so happy that everyone thought there was still hope.

“What a man! If only everyone talked to me this way …”

The show was banned.²³

On November 16, the Soviet Union and the United States established diplomatic relations. On December 19, the Politburo issued a secret decision on the desirability of joining the League of Nations.²⁴

All millenarian eruptions—from Jesus to Jim Jones—take place in hostile surroundings, real or imagined. The Stalin revolution had been framed by the “war scare” in 1927, the Comintern’s turn against appeasement in 1928, the Wall Street crash in 1929, and the launching of Litvinov’s “collective security” policy in 1933–34. The immediate threat from Germany had resulted in the postponement of the potential threat from the rest of the capitalist world. The siege had been lifted, and the Stalin revolution was coming to an end. Fedor Kaverin had failed his test by the House of Government. The Champion of the World came too late.

■ ■ ■

The Stalin revolution began to slow down in early 1933 (with the lowering of production plans, reduction in the number of forced laborers, cessation of mass deportations, and promise to help each peasant household purchase a cow). But the solemn inauguration of a new age and final redefinition of the ideological substance took place in 1934 at the Seventeenth Party Congress, also known as the “Congress of Victors,” where it was officially announced that the prophecy had been fulfilled, the old world destroyed, and the new one founded and reinforced. In the words of the head of the Central Control Commission, Yan Rudzutak (Jānis Rudzutaks),

Whereas Marx provided the general, theoretical guidelines for the historical development of society, the inevitability of the demise of capitalism, and the inevitability of the creation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which represents a transition toward a classless society; and whereas Lenin further developed Marx’s teachings relative to the age of imperialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat; Stalin provided both the theoretical framework and practical methods for applying the theory of Marx-Lenin to certain historical and economic conditions in order to guide the whole society toward socialism by way of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Under the guidance of Comrade Stalin, our Party, in fulfilling its plan of great construction, has created a firm foundation for socialism.²⁵

This steel-and-concrete foundation rested on solid bedrock, permanently drained of the idiocy of rural life. In the words of the Leningrad Party boss and Politburo member, Sergei Kirov, “the socialist transformation of the petit bourgeois peasant economy was the hardest, most difficult, and most complicated problem for the dictatorship of the proletariat in its struggle for a new socialist society. It is this problem, this so-called peasant question, that engendered, in the minds of the oppositionists, doubt in the possibility of a victorious construction of socialism in our country. This central question of the proletarian revolution has now been solved completely and irreversibly in favor of socialism.”²⁶

It had not been easy (“one must say candidly and completely unequivocally,” said Postyshev, referring to Ukraine, “that, in those difficult years, repressions were the main form of ‘governance’”), but the victory had been won, the victors could only be judged by history, and history’s whole point consisted of that victory’s inevitability. The task for the next five years included “the final liquidation of capitalist elements and classes in general, the complete elimination of the causes of class differences and exploitation, the overcoming of the survivals of capitalism in economic life and in people’s consciousness, and the transformation of all the working people of the country into conscious and active builders of a class-free socialist society.”²⁷

Pavel Postyshev (right) and G. K. Ordzhonikidze at the Seventeenth Party Congress

Some of the repentant oppositionists were allowed to join in the celebration by making public confessions. All claimed to have been born again. “If I have the courage to present to you, from this podium, my chronicle of defeats, my chronicle of errors and crimes,” said Kamenev, “it is because I feel within myself the realization that this page of my life has been turned, that it is gone, that it is a corpse that I can perform an autopsy on with the same equanimity and personal detachment with which I dissected, and hope to be able to dissect again, the political corpses of the enemies of the working class, the Mensheviks and Trotskyites.”²⁸

All echoed Voronsky by claiming that they had been born again by witnessing the miracle of universal rebirth. Evgeny Preobrazhensky, who had stood next to Smilga during the opposition’s protest on November 7, 1927, was now a new man filled with the right ideological substance. “I remember that sad date in my biography. For a long time, I stood on the balcony of the France Hotel shouting in a hoarse voice at the passing columns of demonstrators: ‘Long live the international leader of the world revolution, Trotsky!’ (laughter). It was a moment, comrades, that I am ashamed to remember, ashamed not in the everyday sense, but in the political sense, which is much worse.” The reason he was not ashamed in the everyday sense was that the non-Party part of him was now dead, and the reason it was dead was “the miracle of the fast revolutionary transformation of the millions of small-peasant households along collective lines. It was something, comrades, that none of us had foreseen, it was something done by the Party under the leadership of Comrade Stalin.”²⁹

This was the crux of the matter and the main theme of the congress. The miracle performed by the Party had been performed by Comrade Stalin. There was no other way to define the Bolshevik ideological substance. Everyone understood this, but it was the former oppositionists who, as part of their confessions, attempted to reflect on what it meant. “As far as Comrade Stalin is concerned, I feel the most profound sense of shame—not in the personal sense, but in the political sense, because here I probably erred more than in any other matter,” said Preobrazhensky.

You know that neither Marx nor Engels, who wrote a great deal about the question of socialism in the countryside, knew the specifics of how the rural transformation was going to occur. You know that Engels tended to think that it would be a fairly long evolutionary process. It has been Comrade Stalin’s tremendous insight, his tremendous courage in setting new goals, his tremendous firmness in accomplishing them, his profoundest understanding of the age and of the correlation of class forces that have made it possible to achieve this great task in the way in which the Party, under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, has done it. It has been the greatest transformation in the history of the world.³⁰

Rykov—who had fought against Preobrazhensky when Preobrazhensky was on the left while he was on the right but thought he was at the center—felt the same way. His opposition to Comrade Stalin filled him with “an enormous sense of guilt before the Party,” a guilt he would “try to expiate, come what may. I would like to stress that the main guarantee that the cause of the working class will prevail is the leadership of our Party. I state with absolute sincerity and with the profoundest conviction based on what I have lived through during these years, that this guarantee is the present leadership and the unswerving defense of Marxism-Leninism that this leadership ensures. I state that this guarantee is Comrade Stalin’s contribution to the practical application and theoretical development of the teaching of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.”³¹

Stalin had become, as Bukharin put it, “the personal embodiment of the mind and will of the Party.” The mind and will of the Bolshevik Party had been formed around Lenin. Lenin’s death and the NEP retreat had produced great disappointment, dissention, and doubt. The revolution from above had restored faith and unity by performing the miracle of rebirth. The man who had presided over that revolution was a new Lenin—a reincarnation of what Koltsov had called “not a duality, but a synthesis,” a human being who embodied the fulfillment of the prophecy. As Zinoviev said at the congress, “we can see how the best representatives of the advanced collectivized peasantry yearn to come to Moscow, to the Kremlin, yearn to see Comrade Stalin, to touch him with their eyes and perhaps with their hands, yearn to receive from his mouth direct instructions that they can pass on to the masses. Doesn’t this remind you of pictures of Smolny in 1917 and early 1918, when the best people from among the peasants … would show up at Smolny Palace in order to touch Vladimir Ilich with their eyes, and perhaps with their hands, and hear from his mouth about the future course of the peasant revolution in the village, about how things will be?”³²

Stalin was even greater than Lenin—not only because Lenin was “more alive than the living,” whereas Stalin was both more alive than the living and actually alive—but because Stalin was at the center of a society where peasants had been collectivized and souls had been recast: a society that had become a sect. The most important outcome of the Stalin revolution was the expectation of absolute unity and cohesion beyond the Party; the assumption that all Soviet citizens—with the exception of various enemies to be redeemed or cast aside—were Bolsheviks by definition (Party or “non-Party”). Stalin represented that unity, guaranteed its permanence, and stood for its cause and effect. It had been Stalin’s leadership, according to Preobrazhensky, that had made it possible to achieve the great victory in the way in which the Party, under Stalin’s leadership, had done it; and it would be Stalin’s leadership, according to Rykov, that would guarantee the unswerving defense of Marxism-Leninism that his leadership guaranteed. Stalin had become fully sacralized.³³

This gave greater urgency and consistency to the traditional sectarian belief that any internal sectarianism was a form of blasphemy. As Tomsky explained in his speech, not only did any attack against Stalin constitute an attack against the Party, but—even worse—any attack against the Party constituted an attack against Stalin, “who personified the Party’s unity, provided the Party majority with its strength, and led the rest of the Central Committee and the whole Party.” Rykov called his former self a “secret agent” of the enemy, and Bukharin said that the success of their opposition would have led to foreign intervention and the restoration of capitalism. What was needed now was “cohesion, cohesion, and more cohesion … under the leadership of the glorious field marshal of the proletarian forces, the best of the best, Comrade Stalin.”³⁴

But how could more cohesion be achieved? How could one resist doubt, heterodoxy, and subsequent perdition? Preobrazhensky’s solution was a stripped-down version of Voronsky’s (the fact that both were priests’ sons may or may not be a coincidence):

What should I have done if I had returned to the Party? I should have done what the workers used to do when Lenin was still alive. Not all of them understood the complicated theoretical arguments with which we, the “clever ones,” used to oppose Lenin. Sometimes you’d see a friend voting for Lenin on one of these points of theory, and you’d ask him: “Why are you voting for Lenin?” And he would say: “Always vote with Ilich, and you can’t go wrong” (laughter). It is this proletarian wisdom, which conceals great modesty and a capacity for disciplined fight—for you cannot win otherwise—it was this that I did not understand in the beginning, after I had rejoined the Party….

I must say that at this moment I feel more than ever before and understand more than ever before the wisdom of that worker who told me: “even if you don’t understand everything, go with the Party, vote with Ilich.” And so today, comrades, now that I understand everything and can see everything clearly and have realized all my mistakes, I often repeat that worker’s words to myself, only now in a different stage of the revolution, saying: “vote with Comrade Stalin, and you can’t go wrong.”³⁵

Not everyone agreed. One delegate interrupted Preobrazhensky, saying: “we don’t need someone who thinks one thing but says another,” while another (Ivan Kabakov, head of the Urals Party Committee and peasant’s son who never made it beyond the parish school) said: “It is not true that the program set forth by Lenin and Stalin has ever been accepted blindly by the workers who have voted for them. Then and now, the workers have voted for the Lenin-Stalin theses with great enthusiasm and conviction; they accept the program outlined by Comrade Stalin at the Seventeenth Congress because it is a proletarian program, which expresses the hopes and desires of the working class of the entire world.” Toward the end of the proceedings, Radek congratulated the audience on rejecting his “friend” Preobrazhensky’s remarks. “For if having been taught for a number of years, we still cannot come to the Congress and tell the Party, ‘thank you for teaching us a lesson; we have learned it very well and will never sin again’ (laughter), then things really do look bad. I am going to hope that this was just a slip of the tongue on Preobrazhensky’s part.”³⁶

But was it? And how did things look for Radek, his friend Preobrazhensky, the rest of the former oppositionists, and all those who might sin in the future? The delegates knew that the lesson Radek had learned was a harsh one. “I was sent by the Party, a little involuntarily (laughter), to relearn Leninism in some not-too-distant parts…. And, sadly, I have to admit that whatever did not enter my brain through the head had to enter it from the other direction (burst of laughter).” The Party’s way of making sure that lost members thought what they said and said what they should might have to begin with an act of blind obedience.³⁷

Finally, there was the question of whether the hard-won cohesion was genuine and whether Radek and the people he called his “fellow sinners” actually meant what they said. “Comrade Zinoviev spoke with sufficient enthusiasm,” said Solts’s former son-in-law, Isaak Zelensky, “but whether he spoke sincerely is, I think you will all agree with me, something that only time will tell.” Kirov devoted a whole section of his speech to an extended metaphor of a disciplined army waging a mortal battle, while a few cowards and doubters, some of them former commanders, fall behind, hide in the supply train, sow indiscipline and confusion, and enter increasingly into the enemy’s calculations:

And now imagine the following scene. The army has won several decisive battles against the enemy and taken some key positions; the war is not over, far from it, but there is something like a brief breathing space, if I can put it that way, and the whole great victorious warrior host is singing its powerful victory song. At this point, what are all the ones who have been back in the supply train all this time supposed to do? (applause, laughter).

They come out, comrades, and try to insert themselves into the general celebration, they try to march in step, to the same music, and participate in our festivities.

Take Bukharin, for example. He sang according to the score, from what I could tell, but he was a bit off key (laughter, applause). And I haven’t even mentioned Comrade Rykov and Comrade Tomsky.

ROIZENMAN. Yes! Yes!

KIROV. In their case, even the tune was wrong (laughter, applause). They sing out of key and can’t keep step either.

I must admit, comrades, that, in human terms, it is not easy; we can appreciate the plight of these people who have spent long years, the decisive years of the toughest battles waged by the Party and the working class, sitting in the supply train.

ROIZENMAN. Supply-train warriors, supply-train warriors.

KIROV. It is hard for them to identify with the Party’s platform. And it seems to me—I do not want to be a prophet, but it seems to me that it will take some time before this supply-train army fully joins the ranks of our victorious Communist host (applause).

ROIZENMAN. Bravo, bravo.³⁸

Words of repentance were “meaningless, ephemeral, hot air.” Six-fingers could not be trusted; the other Klim could not be trusted; Tomsky could not be trusted; and, since no one’s soul was fully transparent, the undoubting Bolshevik Makar Hardbread could not be trusted, either. Four years after Tomsky first asked whether his lot was to “repent, repent without end, do nothing but repent,” the answer still seemed to be “yes.” Words had to continue to be spoken, for there were few other windows to thoughts. To become meaningful, they had to be backed up by virtuous acts. Virtue—Bolshevik or any other—is obedience to the Eternal Law. To make sure that obedience arose spontaneously, it had to be cultivated and, if necessary, enforced. Kirov’s chorus, Boris Roizenman, received one of the first Orders of Lenin ever awarded for his achievements “in carrying out sensitive assignments of special state importance concerning the purge of the state apparatus in the foreign legations of the USSR.”³⁹

But “enough about them, already,” as one delegate shouted during Zelensky’s speech. The supply-train army was marginal, and, as Kirov put it, “the Congress had listened to those comrades’ speeches without particular attention.” What mattered was the celebration of the great victory, the continued cohesion of the glorious host, and the “implementation of the program designed for us by Comrade Stalin.” Rather than passing a formal resolution, the Congress of Victors, on Kirov’s suggestion, pledged “to fulfill, as Party law, all the theses and conclusions contained in Comrade Stalin’s report. (Voices: That’s right! Prolonged, tumultuous applause. Everyone rises, while continuing to applaud.)”⁴⁰

■ ■ ■

The task of reflecting on the implications of the theses and conclusions of the Congress of Victors fell to the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, which opened on August 17, 1934, more than a year behind schedule. The Congress of Victors had announced the victory of the Stalin revolution and formally identified the Bolshevik ideological substance with the person of Stalin. The job of the writers’ congress was to explain what this meant on the cultural front.

The original head of the organizing committee and secretary of its Party cell was the editor in chief of Izvestia and Novyi mir, Ivan Gronsky (Fedulov). The son of a peasant migrant to St. Petersburg, Gronsky went through the usual stages of proletarian awakening, from the reading of Oliver Twist to apprenticeship in prisons and underground circles and work as an itinerant propagandist. After the Revolution, Gronsky served as a Party official in Yaroslavl, Kursk, and Moscow, and, in 1921–25, studied at the Institute of Red Professors (while working at the Karl Liebknecht Pedagogical Institute and, as part of the “Lenin mobilization” of 1924, secretary of the Kolomna District Party Committee). After graduating, he joined Izvestia as head of the economics department and married Lydia Vialova, an amateur actress and painter and the daughter of an expropriated drugstore owner. Before proposing, he asked her whether she wanted to have more children (she had a two-year-old son by a previous marriage) and what she thought about the relative merits of work and family. Her answers proved satisfactory, and they moved in together. She had two more children (Vadim, born in 1927, and Irina, born in 1934) and stayed at home, taking painting lessons. In 1931, they moved into the House of Government, first into Apt. 144 and then into Stetsky’s Apt. 18, with a large dining room and a view of the river.⁴¹

Ivan Gronsky

By 1932, when the thirty-eight-year-old Gronsky was appointed head of the organizing committee of the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, he (along with Postyshev and Stetsky) had become Stalin’s personal liaison to “creative workers.” His formal assignment from the Central Committee was “to guide the work of the Soviet and foreign intelligentsia.” He had a direct telephone line to Stalin, but Stalin was not always available. “Not infrequently,” he wrote later, “I had to take risks by making important decisions of a political nature not knowing in advance what Stalin would say.” Regular meetings held in the Gronskys’ large dining room involved thirty to fifty people and a great deal of drinking, singing, and poetry reading. The challenge was to overcome “factionalism,” create comfortable conditions for creative work, and agree on the general principles of representing a world free of both kulaks and Averbakhs. Most writers appreciated the support. As the writer Georgy Nikiforov put it, “if the Party keeps us alive, no Averbakh will eat us alive.”⁴²

The solution proved elusive. Gronsky suspected the “honorary chairman” of the organizing committee, Maxim Gorky, of factionalism and self-promotion, and found Radek’s and Bukharin’s congress speeches (submitted in advance and approved by Gorky), as “more than reprehensible both politically and aesthetically.” Stalin listened to everyone but backed Gorky. Gronsky resigned; Gorky became the sole organizer; and Radek and Bukharin delivered their speeches. As for the general principles of representing the new world, Stalin’s guidelines were general enough to force the delegates to take risks by making important decisions of a political nature not knowing in advance what Stalin would say. “The artist must show life the way it is,” Stalin had said. “And if he shows our life the way it is, he cannot help noticing, and showing, the forces that are leading it toward socialism. This is what we call ‘socialist realism.’”⁴³

The point of departure was the fact of the great victory. “Your congress is meeting at a time,” said Andrei Zhdanov, opening the proceedings, “when, under the leadership of the Communist Party and under the guidance of our great leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin (tumultuous applause), the socialist mode of production has triumphed fully and irreversibly in our country.” The fears that the miracle of total transformation might take a long time, said Aleksandr Serafimovich, have proved unfounded. “The first layer of scaffolding,” said Isaak Babel, “is being taken down from the house of socialism. Even the most nearsighted people can see this house’s shape, its beauty. We are all witnesses to the fact that our country has been gripped by a powerful feeling of pure, physical joy.” The Soviet people, said Leonid Leonov, “are standing guard at the gate of a new world full of buildings of the most perfect social architecture.” The Soviet present was “the morning of a new era,” “the most heroic period of world history,” “the most capacious historical age of all those experienced by humankind.”⁴⁴

Leonid Leonov (N. A. of Makarov)

Leonov’s The Sot’ was the most widely acclaimed Soviet construction novel. Like all such novels, it ended just short of fulfillment, with a faint vision of the city that was to come. The new—postconstruction—challenge was to show its shape, its beauty—and its Adam. This was an enormously difficult undertaking—“as difficult as tracing the shadow of a thunder cloud on a huge meadow.” But it had to be done, and done by writers who had been shaped by the old world. (Leonov was the grandson of a Zariadie grocer, the son of a proletarian poet, the son-in-law of a famous publisher, and a veteran of both the Red and, unbeknownst to the delegates, White armies.) “Our mirror is too small for the central hero of our time. And yet, we all know full well that he has come into the world—its new master, the great planner, the future geometer of our planet.”⁴⁵

There were two ways of representing a hero this large. The first was “to step back a century, so as to reduce a bit the angle of vision from which we, his contemporaries, view him.” The second, and the only one acceptable to a Soviet writer, was “to become equal to his character in size and, above all, in creative fervor.” The writer was to become his own hero:

This means that we must rise to the height from which we can see most clearly the barbarity of yesterday’s stone age and understand more deeply the historical force of the new truths, whose philosophical depth and social greatness consist in their very simplicity; become, at last, an inalienable part of the Soviet order, which has taken upon itself Atlas’s task of building a society on the basis of the highest humanity, the socialist kind. If we do, comrades, we will not have to waste time on technical gimmicks, which fill our books, or on scholastic discussions, which often do nothing but corrupt the living matter of literature; we will not have to worry about the longevity of our books, because the hormone of immortality will be contained in their very material. If we do, we will have every reason to say that we are worthy of being Stalin’s contemporaries.⁴⁶

Babel took the argument further. The Soviet writer, as an “engineer of souls,” was a central participant in the work of construction; the writer’s tools were words; the building of socialism required few words, “but they must be good words, because contrived, hackneyed, and stilted words are bound to play into the hands of our enemies.” Bad writers, or good writers who used bad words, were wreckers because, “in our day, bad taste is no longer a personal defect; it is a crime. Even worse, bad taste is counterrevolution.” Good writers who used good words would bring about the victory of good taste. “It will not be an insignificant political victory because, fortunately for us, we have no such thing as a nonpolitical victory.” Writers’ words must be as big as the writers themselves, and the writers themselves must be as big as their heroes. “Who should we model ourselves after? Speaking of words, I would like to mention a man who does not deal with words professionally: just look at the way Stalin forges his speech, how chiselled his spare words are, how full of muscular strength.” As Babel had written on a different occasion: “Benia says little, but he says it with gusto. He says little, but you wish he would say more.”⁴⁷

Arosev added to Babel’s formula by referring to a moment of comic relief in Stalin’s report to the Congress of Victors six months earlier: “You all know that at the Seventeenth Congress Comrade Stalin gave us two types of characters: the conceited grandee and the honest windbag. The form in which Comrade Stalin expressed this was highly accomplished aesthetically, especially in the part about the windbag. The dialogue he cited was of great artistic quality. The previous speaker, Comrade Babel, said that we should learn from Comrade Stalin how to handle words. I would like to amend his statement: we must learn from Comrade Stalin how to identify new literary types.”⁴⁸

All this made good sense given Stalin’s uncontested place at the center of the victorious new world. But what should texts worthy of the time—worthy of being Stalin’s contemporaries—actually look like? In the central speech of the congress, Bukharin defined socialist realism in opposition to “old realism” or “simply-realism.” The literature of an emerging world could not be reduced to “objectivism,” which “claimed to represent reality ‘the way it actually is.’” This meant that it could not be divorced from romanticism, which implied a revolutionary transformation. “If socialist realism is characterized by its activism and efficacy; if it offers more than a simple photograph of the historical process; if it projects the whole world of struggle and emotions into the future; and if it places the heroic on the throne of history, then revolutionary romanticism is its inalienable part.” Unlike traditional revolutionary romanticism, however, socialist realism was “not anti-lyrical.” The fact that socialism opposed individualism did not mean that it opposed the individual. On the contrary, socialism, and therefore socialist realism, stood for “the flourishing of the individual, the enrichment of his inner world, the growth of his self-awareness.” Socialist realism, like the struggle for socialism that it represented, combined realism and heroic romanticism, collectivism and lyricism, monumentalism and ‘the entire world of emotions of the emerging new man, including the ‘new eroticism.’”⁴⁹

There were two reasons, according to Bukharin, why such an art was possible, even for writers shaped by the old world. One was implicit in the congress’s mandate: if the victory of socialism was both a reality and a promise, so was its artistic reflection. The other, more specific reason was that it had been done before. “Opposed to the old realism in the conventional sense is the kind of poetic work that depicts the most general and universal features of a particular epoch, representing them through unique characters that are both specific and abstract, characters that combine the greatest possible generalizability with enormous inner richness. Such, for example, is Goethe’s Faust.”⁵⁰

There were other models as well. Samuil Marshak began his discussion of children’s literature with The Song of Roland; Bukharin ended his speech by referring to Pushkin; Fadeev called on F. Panferov to write a Soviet Don Quixote (about a peasant who travels through the country in search of a noncollectivized village); and Leonov compared the central hero of the age to the “international constellation of human types whose members include Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, Figaro, Hamlet, Pierre Bezukhov, Oedipus, Foma Gordeev, and Raphael de Valentin.” The main task of Soviet literature was to capture “the new Gulliver” by learning from Jonathan Swift. Abulkasim Lakhuti (Abulqosim Lohuti), a Persian poet representing Tajik literature, called for the mastery of the work of Daqiqi, Rudaki, Avicenna, Ferdowsi, Saadi, Havez, Omar Khayyam, “and dozens more brilliant craftsmen of the word.”⁵¹

Ehrenburg agreed (his examples were War and Peace and the novels of Balzac), but cautioned against eclectic imitation, citing the plight of Soviet architecture:

We used to build American-style buildings. They were good for factories and offices. But it is difficult to live in them. The eyes of the workers demand a great deal more joyousness, intimacy, and individuality from a residential building. The workers are justified in protesting against barracks-like housing. All this is true. But does this mean that it is okay to take a quasi-classical portal, add a bit of Empire, a bit of Baroque, a bit of old Trans-Moskva (laughter, applause) and represent the whole thing as the architectural style of the great new class? …

The main character of our novel is not fully formed yet. Our life is changing so fast that a writer sits down to write his novel and by the time he is finished, he realizes that his hero has already changed. That is why the form of the classic novel, transferred to our time, creates false assumptions and, most important, false endings.⁵²

Ehrenburg was defending the documentary style of his The Second Day, but Ehrenburg, like his novel, was still in the creation/construction mode. As Bukharin suggested, echoing many other speakers and demonstrating his mastery of Hegelian dialectics, the history of Soviet poetry consisted of three periods. The first was “cosmic” and “abstract-heroic”; the second, associated with the “feverish, practical work of construction,” was analytical and discrete; and the third, the one the congress was meant to inaugurate, was “synthetic.” The central character of the new Soviet literature was, pace Ehrenburg, mostly formed. The shadow of a thundercloud on a huge meadow could, in principle, be traced: Goethe, among others, had done it before. Faust was “not about a particular historical process”: it was about both “the struggle of the human spirit” and the “poetic-philosophical self-affirmation of the bourgeois era.” Socialism was but the final chapter in the story of historical materialism. “Poetry such as Faust, with a different content and, consequently, different form, but with the same extreme degree of generalization, is an integral part of socialist realism.” Or, as Gronsky put it on another occasion, “socialist realism in painting is Rembrandt, Rubens, and Repin in the service of the working class and socialism.”⁵³

What all these names had in common was that they represented “golden ages,” or what Bukharin (quoting Briusov) called “the Pamirs”: no longer the miracle of birth and early growth and certainly not the skepticism and rigidity of old age, but the strength, dignity, and self-confidence of young adulthood. Socialist realism was to socialism what Faust had been to the bourgeois era. As Stalin said two years earlier, “it is no accident that, early in its history, the bourgeois class produced the greatest geniuses in drama: Shakespeare and Molière. At that time, the bourgeoisie was closer to the national spirit than the feudal lords and the gentry.” And as Radek said at the first writers’ congress,

In the heyday of the slaveholding era, when it produced ancient culture, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristotle did not see any cracks in the foundation of the slaveholding society. They believed that it was the only possible and the only rational society, and so they could do creative work without any sense of doubt.…

In the heyday of capitalism, when it was the carrier of progress, capitalism could produce bards who knew and believed that their works would find a response from hundreds of thousands of people who considered capitalism a good thing.

We must ask ourselves: Why did Shakespeare appear in the sixteenth century, and why is the bourgeoisie incapable of producing a Shakespeare now? Why were there great writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Why are there no writers as great as Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Heine, or even Victor Hugo today? …

It is enough to read Coriolanus or Richard III to see the enormous passion and tension depicted by the author. It is enough to read Hamlet to understand that the author was confronted by the big question: where is the world going? The author grappled with this question, he said, “alas, I have to set right the world that is out of joint,” but those great questions were his life.

When, in the eighteenth century, Germany was recovering from a period of total exhaustion, when it kept asking itself what the solution was—and the solution was unification—it gave birth to Goethe and Schiller.

When a writer can affirm reality, he can produce an accurate representation of that reality.

Dickens produced an unvarnished picture of the birth of English industrial capitalism, but Dickens was convinced that industry was a good thing, and that industrial capital would propel England to a higher level, and so Dickens was able to show the approximate truth of that reality. He softened it with his sentimentality, but in David Copperfield and other works he painted a picture that today’s reader can still use to see how modern England was born.⁵⁴

The art of the newly constructed socialism was an art that affirmed the reality of socialism. It was an art produced by artists who did not see any cracks in the foundation of socialism and believed that socialism was the only possible and the only rational society. The fact that they happened to be right was, contrary to the avant-garde’s discredited claims, not relevant to how socialism was to be represented. What mattered was that genuine socialist art affirmed reality, and an art that affirmed reality was realist art by definition—in the sense in which the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristotle were realist. As Lunacharsky had said about classical architecture, it was “essentially rational” and “correct irrespective of time periods.” “Having died during the Romanesque era, which was replaced by the Gothic, it was resurrected as the self-evident style of reason and joy during the Renaissance, adapting itself to new conditions. Having been preserved at the core of the baroque and rococo, which were but peculiar versions of classicism, it was reborn again in the Louis XVI style, grew stronger during the revolutionary age, and then spread all over Europe as the empire style.” And as Aleksei Tolstoy had put it, also a propos of architecture, the art of victorious socialism was the “reinterpretation of the culture of antiquity” by means of a “proletarian renaissance.” It was more mature than the abstract-heroic art of the real day and incomparably more vigorous than the corrupt art of the bourgeoisie, which was dominated by impotent irony (in the sense of producing one underground man after another and believing that cracks were inescapable, youth doomed, and time cyclical). There was no definition of socialist realism that did not apply to Faust. Now that the first layer of scaffolding had been taken down from the house of socialism, Soviet artists, gripped by a powerful feeling of pure, physical joy, were to describe its shape and beauty in ways that were correct irrespective of time periods. Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis. Everything transient was but a likeness.⁵⁵