The Icon and The Axe

2. The Soviet Era

FOR A LONG TIME after 1917, it was not entirely clear how profound a break in cultural tradition was implied in the founding of a new social order. The various proposals for bringing about a total break with past culture—whether through the God-building intoxication of Proletkult or the masochistic Eurasianism of the Scythians—were rejected along with the visionary social and economic programs of “war communism.” Following the end of the Civil War and beginning of the New Economic Policy in 1921, a more permissive atmosphere was established; and some came to think in the course of the twenties that considerable cultural variety was to be tolerated within the new Revolutionary state.¹

Perhaps the dominant literary group of the early twenties, the so-called fellow travelers (poputchiki), accepted the new Soviet state while professing reservations about its ideology. The even more heterodox “Serapion Brotherhood” took shape in 1921, and a number of leading pre-revolutionary literary figures soon returned to resume their writing careers. Two gifted young novelists, Alexis Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg, came back from the emigration in 1923 to produce works that showed little hint of the servility to Stalin that became characteristic of their later works. Tolstoy incorporated into his prose writings many of the anti-urban, anti-utopian ideas of the peasant poets, notably in his “Sky-blue Cities,” in which an anarchistic intellectual sets fire to a newly constructed Soviet town.² Ehrenburg introduced Jewish themes into his writings of the twenties. The founding of the Yiddish magazine Shtrom (Stream) in Moscow in 1922 helped Russia retain its central role in vernacular Yiddish culture despite Jewish population losses to newly independent Poland and to the emigration. A more ancient Hebrew culture also spoke forth through the newly formed Moscow Habima Theater, which was soon taken over by the prestigious advocate of “fantastic realism,” Eugene Vakhtangov. Until his death in 1924, this Hebrew theater exerted a strange fascination on its Russian audiences. Ancient chants mixed with modern gestures in humorous yet haunting scenes showing the soul—the famed Dybbuk—coming back from the dead to take possession of the living.

… all of Moscow, ravaged, reduced to rags, weary from hunger, fear, and revolution without regard to race or religion … rushed every evening to assault the 125 seats of the minute and improvised Habima amphitheater.… Subjugated, gasping for breath in this suburb—cemetery of the vanities of a condemned nobility—men who had just lived through the most modern, the most implacably mechanical of revolutions crowded around words that they did not understand.… The theater was returning to its origins and they were submitting to its religious spell. The mysticism, the ancient chaos, the animal divinity of the crowd—all that makes up the secret and powerful depth of revolutions was expressed by the Dybbuk and imposed on Moscow.³

It may seem surprising that a Hebrew troupe was able to provide such a vital leaven for Russian culture, particularly at a time when the native stage was itself in full flower. But

In certain liturgical hymns each verse is preceded with a word in Hebrew. The faithful do not understand it; but by modulating it strangely and mysteriously, the clear Christian hymn is impregnated, the unknown word strikes against the faithful and confers an unsuspected profundity. Thus did the Hebraic soul of the Habima act upon the Russian soul.⁴

At the same time, the futurists provided a more secular form of cultural stimulus, continuing to clamor for public attention on the pages of Lef (“Left Front in Literature”), which began to appear in 1923 with the collaboration of Maiakovsky and Meierhold. Older traditions of satirizing contemporary life were revived by promising new writers, such as the Odessa team of Ilf and Petrov and Michael Zoshchenko. The latter, the son of a Russian actress and a Ukrainian painter, became probably the most widely read contemporary Soviet writer in the twenties, with more than a million copies of his works sold from 1922 to 1927.⁵ In the field of history, non-Marxist and pre-Revolutionary figures like Tarlé and Platonov continued to work inside Russia, though some of their works (and many in the literary world) were published in Berlin. Serge Prokof’ev, one of the greatest Russian composers, returned to take up permanent residence in the USSR in 1927, and was followed within a year by Maxim Gorky, its most renowned prose writer.

Even religion seemed to be receiving a new lease on life in the USSR of the mid-twenties. In 1926 the newly chosen Patriarch of the Russian Church was released from prison. In the following year, both he and the patriarchal church were grudgingly recognized by the regime and the puppet “Living Church” allowed to die. The various sects—and particularly the locally organized and administered communities of the newly consolidated Protestant community (the “Evangelical Christians-Baptists”)—grew rapidly in strength. Lenin’s secretary, V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, was an historian of Russian sectarianism who argued with some success that the industriousness, productivity, and communal methods of the sects might have something to contribute to the construction of a socialist society.⁶

The relatively permissive cultural atmosphere of the twenties was, in part, the result of Bolshevik preoccupation with political consolidation and economic reconstruction in the aftermath of seven years of international and internal war. In part also it was the result of the relatively optimistic and humanistic reading of Marx’s theories of culture that were advanced by the reigning ideologists of the early Soviet period: Deborin in philosophy and Voronsky in literature.⁷ These men insisted that a new culture must follow rather than precede a new proletarian society. Following Marx and his most brilliant interpreter among the Bolsheviks, Nicholas Bukharin, they considered literature and art part of the superstructure rather than the base of human culture. Art could, thus, be transformed only in the wake of profound social and economic change. In the meantime, the arts had a duty to absorb the best from past culture and provide an independent reflection of reality in a complex era of transition. The practical consequences of this position were to discredit the earlier hopes for “immediate socialism.” One could no longer speak seriously of replacing the traditional university with a new “fraternity ef teachers, students and janitors”; nor of replacing the family system with “the new family of the working collective.”⁸

Gradually, however, it became apparent that this relaxation of control and return to old ways was only temporary. Whereas about two fifths of all publishing was outside of government hands at the time of Lenin’s death early in 1924, only one tenth had survived three years later.⁹ The beginnings of tightening ideological control can be traced to the founding of the official theoretical journal of the Communist Party, Bolshevik, in 1924,¹⁰ and to a series of party discussions on the role of literature in the new society held in 1924 and 1925. Although the party resolutions rejected the demand of the extremist “on guard” faction for detailed party regulation of literature, they did assert the right of party control over “literature as a whole” and call for a centralized “All-Union Association of Proletarian Writers” (VAPP): the first in an apostolic succession of increasingly powerful organs for tight regulation. In the same 1925 a comparable group was formed on what was soon to be called “the musical front,” “The Association of Young Professional Composers”; and a new shock army was constituted in the “struggle for scientific atheism,” the notorious “League of the Militant Godless.” The suicide of Esenin and the collapse of Maiakovsky’s LEF movement within a few months of each other in 1925 provided testimony to the growing gulf between the new regime and some of the very intellectuals who had initially supported the Revolution.

The destruction of a living Russian culture was made complete in 1930 with the suicide of Maiakovsky, the formal abolition of all private printing, and Stalin’s sweeping demand at the Sixteenth Party Congress that the first five-year plan be expanded into a massive “socialist offensive along the entire front.”¹¹ Not a single delegate abstained, let alone dissented, as Stalin began to introduce his techniques of therapeutic purges and prescriptive uncertainty. The classical Leninist opposition to relying on “spontaneity” (stikhiinost’) rather than strict party guidance in preparing a political revolution was expanded into a new Stalinist opposition to tolerating “drift” (samotek) on the “cultural front” while preparing a social and economic revolution.

Moderate planners who argued that there were unavoidable limitations on the productive possibilities of the Soviet economy were denounced as “mechanists” and “geneticists,” devoid of Revolutionary spirit and “dialectical” understanding. The purge of Bukharin, the apostle of relative freedom in the agricultural sphere and of balanced development of heavy and light industry, was accompanied by the purge of advocates of relative freedom and balance in the cultural sphere. Thus, Voronsky in literary theory and Deborin in philosophy were denounced for “Menshevizing idealism” and forced to recant publicly. Marxist philosophical ideas were not to be permitted to interfere with the development of the new authoritarian state; and Deborin and his followers were swept from the direction of Under the Banner of Marxism in 1930. The dominant idea in the twenties, that state law was a “fetish” of the bourgeoisie and “the juridical world view … the last refuge of the remnants and traditions of the old world,” was replaced by the new concept of “socialist legality.”¹² The dictatorship of the proletariat would not wither away in the foreseeable future, and the authority of the Soviet state and Soviet law would have to be strengthened, Stalin told the Party Congress in 1930. This contradiction of one of Lenin’s fondest beliefs was pronounced “a living, vital contradiction” which “completely reflects Marxist dialectics.”¹³ Freud, whose doctrines of psychic determinism had been hailed in the twenties as “the best antidote to the entire doctrine of free will,”¹⁴ was denounced at the first All-Union Congress of Human Behavior in 1930 for denying the possibility of “a socially ‘open’ man, who is easily collectivized, and quickly and profoundly transformed in his behaviour.”¹⁵

A collective shock treatment paralleling that being given to the reluctant peasantry was being administered to the intellectual elite. Figures like Averbach in literary theory and Pokrovsky in history were used in this first “proletarian” phase of Stalinist terror to discredit others before being rejected themselves. Stalin emerged from it all as the benign father, the voice of moderation and protector of the little man from the “dizziness from success” of his less humane lieutenants.¹⁶ This “proletarian episode” in Russian culture, which lasted roughly from the first party decree on literature in December, 1928, to the abolition of the distinctively proletarian organs of culture in April, 1932, was coterminous with the period of the first Five-Year Plan; part of the unprecedented effort to transform Russian society by forced-draft industrialization and agricultural collectivization.

The cultural transformations of the age, no less than the social and economic changes, bear little relationship to anything that went before in Russian history—not even to the garrison atmosphere and fierce proletarian emphases of the Civil War period. Proletarian origins and Marxist convictions were losing all importance. Indeed, the Marxist intellectuals who had played a key part in refining Communist ideology and building the new Soviet state became increasingly prime victims in the new purges of the thirties, and fanatical proletarian advocates of Revolutionary egalitarianism were denounced as “levelers” and left deviationists. There was no serious threat to the Soviet state in the late twenties; and by 1930 the depression in the West had made the danger of “capitalist encirclement” even more remote and contrived. The purpose of this “second revolution” was—as Stalin made clear in a famous speech in 1931—to create a “new Soviet intelligentsia”¹⁷ dedicated to acquiring the technological skills needed for Soviet construction. The demand for a new intelligentsia required the destruction, or drastic remaking, of the old, including those whose emotional dedication to radical humanism might also stand in the way of building the new authoritarian state. Technological skill alone was not enough. Rigid obedience to party leaders was required. As Stalin put it bluntly in 1935: “Cadres decide everything,”¹⁸ and the ideal cadre is the tempered, “cast-iron” servant of the dictator. To understand how such a drastic conclusion was reached one must look back to the legacy left by Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, the founder and patron saint of Bolshevism, the man in whose name Stalin tightened his totalitarian grip on all of Russian society. One must consider as well the relationship which both Lenin and Stalin bear to the complex cultural heritage of the land they ruled.

The Leninist Legacy

AT FIRST GLANCE, the powerful and arresting figure of Lenin seems to be only a particularly intense example of the alienated Russian intellectual of the nineteenth century. Born and educated in the Volga region, classic center of Russian revolutionary sentiment, brought up as a member of the petty, provincial nobility in a bookish home where he was closer to his mother than his father, Lenin was an educated and qualified lawyer, but never really had any other profession than that of an illegal publicist turned revolutionary. One is tempted to see in Lenin’s sudden vault to power the vindication of the intelligentsia’s long-frustrated hopes for a new order in which they would play a key part.

Yet Lenin was different from almost all his intellectual predecessors in nineteenth-century Russia; and it was his profound alienation from the dominant intellectual trends of the late imperial period which enabled him to appear as the bearer of a genuinely new order of things.

First of all, Lenin was uniquely single-minded in an age of diffusion. In the midst of the soaring visionaries, Lenin focused his attention on one all-consuming objective that had not traditionally been uppermost in the thinking of the intelligentsia: the attainment of power. His dedication to this objective enabled him to establish a puritanical discipline over his own emotions and those of his associates. By never giving himself over to the enervating enthusiasms of the late imperial period, he avoided its unsettling alternations between Promethean optimism and morbid sensualism. He was able to capitalize on the sense of expectation generated by the intelligentsia without becoming involved in the ebb and flow of its inner feelings.

Sentiment of all sorts was suppressed in Lenin, whose icy and ascetic manner sets him off strikingly from the traditional loose camaraderie of the intelligentsia and its conviction that feelings were inextricable parts of the thought process. His beloved mother was German, and most of his foreign travel was in Northern Europe: the advanced areas of industrialization and urbanization. Southern Europe with its sunlight, wine, and song played— with one exception—little role in his bleak life.¹⁹ Even before he turned to Marxism in the early nineties, Lenin seems to have acquired a hatred for the vagueness, sentimentality, and—above all—futility of the aristocratic intelligentsia. He was embittered by the execution of his elder brother, a revolutionist, in 1887, and soon acquainted himself with revolutionary circles in Kazan. He introduced himself to his future wife, the stolid revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaia, in 1894, as the younger brother of the martyred revolutionary, and identified himself in this fashion in a short autobiographical sketch. There are few traces of tenderness in his childless, ideological marriage.²⁰

Lenin’s vituperation provides a striking contrast with the accustomed form of discourse even among revolutionary intellectuals. There is some precedent in Marx for his language of denunciation. But his acerbic style and constant imputation of deformity to his opponents often seems closer to the rough-hewn fanaticism of peasant insurrectionists, schismatics, and sectarians—all of whom flourished in the Simbirsk-Samara-Kazan regions of Lenin’s youth. His style seems more a throwback to the powerful intermixture of prophecy and epithet in Ivan the Terrible and Avvakum than a continuation of the traditional debates of the nineteenth century.

When earlier revolutionary leaders spoke of “them and us,” they were contrasting power with truth, the ruling bureaucracy with the rulers in the world of ideas. For Lenin, however, “purity of ideas” was equated with “impotence.”²¹ Potency requires power, which in turn, demands not truth, “but a true slogan of the struggle.”²² Morality was not to be based on “idealistic” standards or inner feelings, but on the ever-changing dictates of revolutionary expediency. Thus, Lenin was not fundamentally concerned with truth (pravda) in either of its two meanings of scientific fact (pravda-istina) or moral principle (pravda-spravedlivost’). Pravda became, instead, the title of his newspaper, with its daily directives for action. “Cursed questions” were replaced by cursory commands.

These commands were binding because of a second basic and novel feature of Lenin’s teaching: his emphasis on organization. The tradition of secret, disciplined, hierarchical organization had never struck deep roots in the Russian revolutionary tradition—though there was a substantial theoretical literature of Jacobin proposals from such figures as Pestel, Ogarev, Nechaev, and Tkachev. Even the full-time revolutionaries within the People’s Will were undisciplined, politically naive, and visionary—their most professional members being members not of an organization but of a “disorganization group.” Lenin’s new conception was partly dictated by the techniques needed for self-protection against the vastly improved methods of police espionage and enforcement; in part also it followed from the re-examination of revolutionary methods that had gone on steadily since the failure of the People’s Will. Increasingly, the idea of consolidation under a more military type of organization had been mooted. The term “cadre,” which became such a key concept in Bolshevik organizational thinking, was introduced in the late eighties, along with the idea of the manipulative use of “front” groups.²³ The leading theoretician of refurbished revolutionary populism, Victor Chernov, head of the new Social Revolutionary Party, also insisted in 1901 that unity would have to be superimposed on the revolutionary movement so that “we will not have social democrats and social revolutionaries, but one indivisible party.”²⁴

Lenin’s final formula for organizational discipline was that of “democratic centralism,” whereby decisions were reached on the basis of free discussion among party members, moving from the bottom to the top. Ultimate decisions were reached in the central committee of the party, of which the first secretary was the absolute center. Once made, a decision became totally binding. Such a system logically lent itself to the “substitutism” foreseen from the very beginning by Trotsky, whereby “the party organization supersedes the party as a whole; then the central committee supersedes the organization; and finally a single dictator supplants the central committee.”²⁵

Elaborating Marx’s theory of a coming dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin insisted that such a form of rule would emerge only after the total destruction of the bourgeois state machine; that the dictatorship would then “wither away” with the imminent transformation to full communism;²⁶ but that it would, in the interim, exert power “that is unrestricted by any laws.”²⁷

What Lenin actually brought to Russia was the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party: his own “party of a new type” which, once in power, was renamed “Communist” to set it off from the more familiar European label of “socialist” or “social democratic.”²⁸

Within this party, relationships were to be animated not just by the mechanical laws of democratic centralism but by the untranslatable principle of partiinost’. This “party-mindedness” or “sacrificial party spirit” appealed to the sectarian impulse to find new life in some dedicated, secret group. Lenin sought to preserve and develop the sacrificial revolutionary tradition of Chernyshevsky and of his own elder brother to develop “complete comradely confidence among revolutionaries.”²⁹ He refused to call himself a materialist (even a dialectical one) unless it be recognized—as he wrote in 1894—that “materialism contains within itself, so to speak, partiinost’.”³⁰

Even more appealing to intellectuals than the new spirit within Lenin’s party was its promise to overcome their classic separation from “the people.” Lenin insisted that “all distinctions between workers and intellectuals” be “utterly eliminated”³¹ within his party; but that, at the same time, it must act as a “vanguard” within, rather than a “Blanquist” clique outside, other mass movements of the age. In fleeing from “Blanquism,” the party must not fall into “tail-endism”: the renunciation of Revolutionary goals in favor of “gazing with awe upon the ‘posteriors’ of the Russian proletariat.”³² Indeed, no “spontaneous” movement will produce the all-important political changes for which strategic organization and discipline are required. Lenin’s party offered the intellectuals an intoxicating sense of identification with the true interests of the masses, a program for involvement in their activities, and the promise of union with them in the coming liberation.

Lenin’s manifesto and proposal of 1902, What Is To Be Done?, had given Russia a new answer to that classic question, which induced Lenin’s Bolsheviks to split from the Mensheviks at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903. Unlike Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? of 1863, Lenin’s did not present the picture of a new social order; unlike Tolstoy’s What Is To Be Done? of 1883, Lenin’s does not call for a regeneration of individual moral responsibility. Lenin called rather for a new organization dedicated to the attainment of power by an ethic of expediency.

In the wake of the Revolution of 1905 Lenin introduced a series of opportunistic modifications of traditional Marxist doctrine: the neo-populist idea of a fusion (smychka) of poor peasants with workers in the revolutionary party;³³ the conception of a “growing over” (pererastanie) of the bourgeois into the proletarian revolution without the long interim which Marx had foreseen; and the idea that imperialism was the “highest stage” of a new cannibalistic finance capitalism, that was inevitably leading to world war and world-wide revolution.³⁴

Liberal democracy rather than autocracy was Lenin’s principal foe as he steered his party along the road to power in the chaotic and fateful year of 1917. He was aided in exile and in his return from Switzerland in April by autocratic Germany; he overthrew not a tsarist, but a provisional democratic Russian government. Constitutional Democrats were the first political rivals he arrested after the coup d’état of November 7; and the Constituent Assembly was forcibly dismissed in January after only one meeting. Lenin rejected not just the “parliamentary cretins” of liberalism, but also those more orthodox Marxists like the Mensheviks and Plekhanov, who believed that socialist forms of ownership could only be superimposed on an advanced industrial society that had developed democratic political institutions.

The one indispensable pre-condition for Bolshevik success in gaining and holding power was the First World War. It put intolerable strains on the old Russian Empire and on Russia’s brief experiment with democracy in 1917. Wartime divisions among the European powers and post-war lassitude enabled Lenin to consolidate power in the critical 1918-21 period. Yet Lenin’s ability to capitalize on such conditions stemmed from his realization that crisis was part of the nature of things, and that the job of a revolutionary party was not to create revolutionary situations, but to provide organized leadership for them.

His prophetic opposition to the war placed him in a strong position for appealing to the war-weary Russian populace. Lenin arrived at the Finland Station surrounded by the aura of a genuine alternative coming from another world to demand an end to war, and promising the beginning of a new era to all who would follow him “with icons against cannon.”³⁵ The establishment and consolidation of his dictatorship represents a masterful case study of the opportunism and daring of a gifted strategist clearly focused on the realities of power. Details of the Bolshevik rise to power belong properly to political and military history; but inextricably involved in this story are a number of profound, if only partly conscious, Bolshevik borrowings from the radical traditions of the Russian intelligentsia. In at least four important ways, Bolshevism benefited from these traditions in threading its way from a relatively obscure revolutionary party of twenty-five thousand on the eve of the March revolution of 1917 to the unchallenged ruling force of an empire of 150,000,000 by the end of the Civil War four years later.

The first and most important debt to the Russian intellectual tradition was the conviction that any alternative to tsarist authority must be cemented together by an all-embracing ideology. From the time of the early Boehmists, Martinists, Schellingians, Hegelians, and Fourierists, Russian reformers had tended to gravitate toward Western thinkers who offered a new view of the world rather than mere piecemeal proposals for reform. The turn in the late nineteenth century from romantic ideologists to sweeping pseudo-scientific theorists, such as Comte and Spencer, prepared the way for the Bolsheviks’ turn to Marx. Tkachev, the lonely Jacobin theorist who anticipated many of Lenin’s elitist ideas, had written to Engels in 1874 that Russia, in contrast to the West, required “an intelligentsia-dominated revolutionary party.”³⁶ Lenin provided such a party far more adequately than the Mensheviks, for whom Marx provided a rational guide for practical social and economic changes rather than a prophetic invocation for the coming millennium. Lenin was truer to the tradition of ideinost’, of being “possessed with an idea,” than most rival groups, who in the turbulence of 1917 still seemed immersed in the world of meshchanstvo: of philistinism and “small deeds.” The ideiny, or ideological quality, of Lenin’s party helped attract a much-needed increment of gifted intellectuals to its ranks in 1917: the so-called mezhraiontsy, or “interregional” group, of Trotsky, Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and others.

In the second place, Lenin benefited from the Russian predilection for theories of history that promise universal redemption but attach special importance to Russian leadership. The appeal of such philosophies of history had been a constant feature of the Russian intellectual tradition, and was rooted in the subconscious hold of an historically oriented theology. The old belief in a coming millennium had been secularized by a century of preaching that “the golden age lies ahead and not behind us”; and a people steeped in utopian thought patterns were attracted by Lenin’s claim that the transition to classless communism was imminent, and that all human problems were about to be solved in the manner that friendly crowds arbitrate occasional squabbles on the street.³⁷

The belief that Russia was destined to provide ideological regeneration for the decaying West had been propagandized by conservative as well as radical theorists. And the radical belief in a coming earthly utopia had often fascinated even those who rejected it. Dostoevsky, as he moved from radicalism to conservatism, still felt the seductive power of this “marvellous dream, lofty error of mankind”:

The Golden Age is the most implausible of all the dreams that ever have been. But for it men have given up their life and all their strength, for the sake of it prophets have died and been slain, without it the peoples will not live and cannot die.…³⁸

For this dream people proved willing to die resisting the counterattacks of the old order during the Civil War. In times of chaos and disruption the most utopian visions may provide the most practical banner for rallying popular support.

A third area of indebtedness to the indigenous traditions of Russian radical thought lay in the Bolshevik expropriation of the populist myth of “the people” as a new source of moral sanction. Shortly after the Bolshevik coup, enemies of the new regime were denounced as “enemies of the people,” and ministries of state were rebaptized as “people’s commissariats.”³⁹ Summary executions soon came to be glorified as “people’s justice”; and Bolshevik dictatorships dressed up for export as “people’s democracies.”⁴⁰ The vaguely appealing populist belief that “the people” carried within themselves the innate goodness for building a new social order provided the Bolsheviks with the opportunity of camouflaging instruments of state control with the lexicon of popular liberation. Without this widespread belief in “the people” as a regenerative life force, the Bolsheviks would have had far more difficulty convincing the Russian people and themselves that their own coercive measures were morally justified.

A final borrowing from earlier tradition was the subtle Bolshevik adoption of the concept of the “circle” as a new type of dedicated community in which all distinctions of class and nationality were eliminated. Such Bolshevik concepts as sacrificial “party spirit” and internal “selfcriticism” had been in many ways characteristic of Russian intellectual circles from the first secret gatherings of Novikov and Schwarz in the eighteenth century. The idea that diverse social groupings could find common unity and purpose in a circle dedicated to radical change had been present in some of the early masonic groups, and had become dominant with the entrance of non-aristocratic and national minority elements into the main stream of Russian intellectual life in the late nineteenth century. Lenin accepted in practice, if not in theory, the populists’ highly un-Marxian idea that the instrument of radical social change would be an alliance of “workers, peasants, and the intelligentsia.” “Poor” and “poor middle” peasants were said to be the proletariat of the countryside; and “progressive” intellectuals and “oppressed” nationalities were invited to join the revolutionary movement.⁴¹ During the brief period between the end of the Civil War and his physical deterioration and death, Lenin’s attitude toward culture was more that of a nineteenth-century Russian radical fervently committed to Westernization and secularization than that of a twentieth-century totalitarian despot. He had been generally unsympathetic with Bogdanov’s wartime effort to build a monolithic new “proletarian culture,” and permitted a variety of new artistic schools to flourish after the initiation of the more relaxed New Economic Policy in 1921. Lenin disliked the artistic avant-garde, but viewed their work as incomprehensible rather than dangerous, irrelevant rather than subversive. His main cultural preoccupations were with the spread of basic education and the inexpensive mass publication of older literary classics. It was in essence a neo-populist program tempered with a Victorian emphasis on general utility.

Elements of populist evangelism had already appeared in Lenin’s call for a new elite to raise the historical “consciousness” of the working class, and in his insistence on beginning with a new journal. Elements of Victorianism were already evident in his patronizing, pedagogic manner, his humorless moral puritanism, and his matter-of-fact distaste for either primitive, popular superstition or sophisticated, intellectual metaphysics. Once in power, Lenin did not forbid further flights of fancy; but he did seek to bring Russian culture back to earth. He was interested in the technical task of spreading literacy rather than the imaginative art of creating literature.⁴²

For all the benefits which he received from the radical intellectual tradition and all of his inner links with it, Lenin paved the way for its destruction. It is not just that he severed the ties that Russia had been developing with Westward-looking political and cultural experimentation. Periods of repression and forced isolation were not new in Russian culture, and democracy was a relatively recent and unfamiliar concept for many Russians. What was profoundly revolutionary in Lenin was his deliberate break with a belief that underlay almost all previous Russian radical thought: belief in the existence of objective moral laws for human behavior.

With only a few, peripheral exceptions in the nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals had resisted all efforts to find a totally new basis for morality whether in a calculus of social utility in the manner of Bentham or in the manufacture of mythic goals for the self-realizing ego in the manner of Fichte. Russian radicals had continued to use religious terminology, juxtaposing the ethical teachings of Christ to the corrupt practices of a supposedly Christian society; or the language of idealism in relating their ethical passion to the nature of goodness, or to the absolute dictates of conscience.

With Lenin, however, morality was made relentlessly relative, dictated by party expediency. He reviled not just traditional religion and philosophical idealism but also the practical idealism implicit in traditional secular humanism. His movement was to be based on a scientific theory that would free his cause from the charge of myth and purify his ethic of expediency from any trace of caprice and sentimentality. The moralistic exhortations that populists like Lavrov and Mikhailovsky had mixed in with their pseudo-scientific theories of progress were only “bourgeois phrasemongering.” Modern revolutionaries needed the resilient armor of science, not the ceremonial uniforms of tradition.

Of course, the open inductive thinking of the modern scientific spirit was totally unfamiliar to Lenin, whose relentlessly political mind tended to equate it with anarchism. His longest philosophic treatise was devoted to refuting the “empirio-criticism” of those most intimately concerned with the philosophical implications of contemporary science.⁴³ In Lenin’s activist ideology, morality was deduced from scientific Marxism, of which he, the son of a schoolmaster, was the leading teacher, and he, the student of jurisprudence, the final judge. In the last analysis, arguments were not to be resolved but cut off, because the chief justice was also chief of the Revolutionary army. And this was no ordinary army, but a messianic band scientifically certain of utopia, ruthlessly fighting for peace.

The full-blown totalitarianism that emerged under Stalin thus had organic roots in Leninist theory. There were no external criteria by which the actions of the Leninist party could be judged and criticized; no limitations established on the types of questions it was entitled to resolve. Nothing could better illustrate the depth of his break with the critical tradition of Russian letters than his 1905 article insisting that partiinost’ in literature requires that literature for the proletariat not only

not be an instrument of gain for individuals or groups, but not be an individual matter at all, independent of the common proletarian cause. Down with non-party writers! Down with literary supermen! Literature must become a part of the common proletarian cause: a “wheel and screw” of the one and only great social-democratic mechanism which is driven by the entire conscious avant-garde of the entire working class. Literature must become a component part of organized, planned, unified social-democratic party-work.⁴⁴

The fact that there was genuine intra-party dissent and debate in Lenin’s lifetime, that he never intended the party to regulate all of human life, and that he was personally fond of simple living and sincerely convinced that a new age was about to dawn—all is of primarily biographical interest. Far more important to the historian is the fact that the totalitarianism of Soviet society under Stalin followed logically (even if it may not have followed necessarily) from the Leninist doctrine of the party.

The Revenge of Muscovy

FOR THE HISTORIAN of culture, Lenin’s brief rule was still something of a chaotic interregnum; and it is the age of blood and iron under Stalin that marks the real watershed. Once his dictatorial power was securely established in the late twenties, Stalin systematically imposed on Russia a new monolithic culture that represented the antithesis of the varied, cosmopolitan, and experimental culture that had continued on into the twenties from pre-Revolutionary days. During the quarter of a century that stretched from the beginning of his first five-year plan in 1928 to his death in 1953, Stalin sought to convert all creative thinkers into “engineers of the human soul.” They were to be cheerleaders along his assembly lines—deliberately kept uncertain of what cheer was required of them and denied that last refuge of human integrity in most earlier tyrannies: the freedom to be silent.

It is hard to know how Lenin would have reacted to all of this. He suffered his first stroke in 1922, just a little more than a year after the end of the Civil War, and was virtually incapacitated for nearly a year before his death in January, 1924. He never had time clearly to indicate how fully he would have applied to a society at peace the totalitarian principles advocated earlier for a revolutionary party in times of war and crisis. Cultural problems had always been peripheral to his interests. Despite his party-centered perspective, he had many friends among non-party intellectuals, many years of exposure to Western society, and a fairly rich grounding in the nineteenth-century Russian classics. There was, to be sure, a foreshortening of intellectual vistas from Marx, who knew his Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, to a Lenin steeped largely in the civic poetry and realistic prose of his native land. But Lenin’s vistas were still ranging compared with those of Stalin; and Lenin must at least be given credit for belatedly warning against the “rudeness” of his successor in his long-suppressed political testament.⁴⁵

Born into an obscure cobbler’s family in the mountains of the Caucasus, educated in the seminaries and tribal traditions of his native Georgia, Stalin shared none of the broader European perspectives of Lenin and most other Bolshevik leaders. This small, pock-marked figure never knew the life of the Russian intelligent, did not even write in Russian until late in his twenties, and spent only four months outside Russian-occupied territory—during brief trips to Party congresses in Sweden and England in 1906 and 1907, and to study the national question in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1912 and 1913.

The qualities that Stalin professed to admire in Lenin—“hatred for snivelling intellectuals, confidence in one’s own strength, confidence in victory”—were those which he attempted to instill in himself. To these were added the compulsive chauvinism of the provincial parvenu, the scholastic dogmatism of the half-educated seminarian, and a preoccupation with organizational intrigue already noticeable during his revolutionary apprenticeship in the world’s largest oil fields in Baku.

Stalin’s only god was Lenin; yet in Stalin’s depiction the god acquires a bestial if not satanic form. Stalin compared Lenin’s arguments to “a mighty tentacle which twines all around you and holds you as a vice”; Lenin was said to have been obsessively concerned that the enemy “has been beaten but by no means crushed” and to have rebuked his friends “bitingly through clenched teeth: ‘Don’t whine, comrades.…”’⁴⁶

Stalin’s formula for authoritarian rule was experimental and eclectic. It might be described as Bolshevism with teeth or Leninism minus Lenin’s broad Russian nature and ranging mind. Lenin, for all his preoccupation with power and organization, had remained, in part, a child of the Volga. He had a revolutionary mission thrust upon him and took his revolutionary name from one of the great rivers of the Russian interior: the Lena.

Stalin, by contrast, was an outsider from the hills, devoid of all personal magnetism, who properly derived his revolutionary name from stal’, the Russian word for “steel.” His closest comrade—and the man he picked to succeed him as formal head of state throughout the 1930’s went even further—shed his family name of Scriabin, so rich in cultural association, for Molotov, a name derived from the Russian word for “hammer.” No figure better illustrates the unfeeling bluntness and technological preoccupations of the new Soviet culture than this expressionless bureaucratic hammer of the Stalin era, who was generally known as “stone bottom” (from “the stone backside of the hammer”—kamenny zad molotova).

Yet for all the grotesqueness, gigantomania, and Caucasian intrigue of the Stalin era, it may in some way have had roots in Russian culture deeper than those of the brief age of Lenin. Lenin benefited from the St. Petersburg tradition of the radical intelligentsia, studied briefly in St. Petersburg, began his Revolution there, and was to give his name to the city. When Lenin moved the capital from St. Petersburg and entered the Moscow Kremlin for the first time on March 12, 1918, he was uncharacteristically agitated, remarking to his secretary and companion that “worker-peasant power should be completely consolidated here.”⁴⁷ Little did he imagine how permanent the change of capital was to prove and how extensive the consolidation of power in the Kremlin. The year of Lenin’s death brought a flood to the former capital, newly rebaptized as Leningrad. It was an omen perhaps of the traditionalist flood that was about to sweep the revolutionary spirit out of the Leninist party. With Stalin in the Kremlin, Moscow at last wreaked its revenge on St. Petersburg, seeking to wipe out the restless reformism and critical cosmopolitanism which this “window to the West” had always symbolized.

Stalin had many roots in the Russian past. His addiction to mass armies overbalanced with artillery follows a long tradition leading back to Ivan the Terrible; his xenophobic and disciplinarian conception of education is reminiscent of Magnitsky, Nicholas I, and Pobedonostsev; his passion for material innovation and war-supporting technology echoes Peter the Great and a number of nineteenth-century Russian industrialists. But Stalinism in the full sense of the word seems to have its deepest roots in two earlier periods of Russian history: the nihilistic 1860’s and the pre-Petrine era.

First of all, Stalinism appears as a conscious throwback to the militant materialism of the 1860’s. Insofar as there was a positive content to Stalinist culture, it was rooted in the ascetic dedication to progress of the materialistic sixties rather than the idealistic spirit of the populist age. Stalin and some of his close associates—Molotov, Khrushchev, and Mikoyan—were like Chernyshevsky and so many other men of the sixties largely educated by priests, and had merely changed catechisms in midstream. Stalin’s belief in physiological and environmental determinism—evidenced in his canonization of Pavlov and Lysenko—reflects the polemic prejudices of Pisarev more than the complex theories of Engels, let alone the thoughts of practicing scientists. His suspicion of all artistic activity without immediate social utility reflects the crude aesthetic theory of the sixties more than that of Marx.

All of the enforced artistic styles of the Stalin era—the photographic posters, the symphonies of socialism, the propagandistic novels, and the staccato civic poetry—appear as distorted vulgarizations of the predominant styles of the 1860’s: the realism of the “wanderers,” the programmatic music of the “mighty handful,” the novels of social criticism, and the poems of Nekrasov. This artificial resurrection of long-absent styles brought a forced end to the innovations in form so characteristic of art in the silver age. Whole areas of expression were blighted: lyric poetry, satirical prose, experimental theater, and modern painting and music.

Art was, henceforth, to be subject not just to party censorship but to the mysterious requirements of “socialist realism.” This doctrine called for two mutually exclusive qualities: revolutionary enthusiasm and objective depiction of reality. It was, in fact, a formula for keeping writers in a state of continuing uncertainty as to what was required of them: an invaluable device for humiliating the intellectuals by encouraging the debilitating phenomena of anticipatory self-censorship. It seems appropriate that the phrase was first used by a leading figure in the secret police rather than a literary personality.⁴⁸ Publicly pronounced in 1934 at the first congress of the Union of Writers by Andrew Zhdanov, Stalin’s aide-de-camp on the cultural front, the doctrine was given a measure of respectability by the presence of Maxim Gorky as presiding figurehead at the congress. Gorky was one of the few figures of stature who could be held up as an exemplar of the new doctrine. He had a simple background, genuine socialist convictions, and a natural realistic style developed in a series of epic novels and short stories about Russian society of the late imperial period.

Socialist realism no less than the Revolution itself was to “dispose of its children.”⁴⁹ Gorky died under still-mysterious circumstances two years later in the midst of the terror which swept away imaginative storytellers like Pil’niak and Babel, lyric poets like Mandel’shtam, theatrical innovators like Meierhold, as well as the inclination toward experimentalism in such gifted young artists as Shostakovich.

The often chromatic and grotesque extension of verismo opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which Shostakovich fashioned from Leskov’s bleak novella, was denounced after two years of performances and forcibly shut in 1936. Thenceforth, after nearly two years of silence, he turned almost exclusively to instrumental music, breaking the promise of distinctive national music drama that was implicit in his first opera, The Nose of 1930, which (like the preparatory work of Musorgsky) was based on a text by Gogol. The unfinished fragment of a later, wartime effort to make an opera of Gogol’s Gamblers and the post-Stalin revival of Lady Macbeth (revised and retitled Katerina Izmailova) offer tantalizing hints of what might have been. Nor was the full promise of Prokof’ev ever realized, perhaps the most technically gifted and versatile of all modern Russian composers. As a nine-year-old boy in the first year of the new century he roughed out his first complete opera score, The Giants; and his rapid development of a clean, “cubist” style combined with a love of rugged, often satirical themes seemed to herald the arrival of a creative giant whose return from emigration might in some way compensate for the permanent flight from the new order of Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and so many others. His protean powers shine through even the confining forms of expression forced on artists in the Stalin era: infant pedagogy (Peter and the Wolf) and heroic movie scores (Alexander Nevsky), and the reshaping of “safe” literary classics for the musical stage (the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the opera War and Peace). Denounced by Zhdanov and harassed by his lieutenants, this giant of Russian music died on March 4, 1953, just one day before Stalin, the man who had so crippled its development.

Zhdanov died under mysterious circumstances in 1948 after launching the purge of “homeless cosmopolitans” in the post-war era. Michael Zoshchenko, the last of the great satirists of the twenties, was silenced; the patriotic poet and widow of Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, was called “half-nun, half-harlot” for her apolitical lyricism; and a bewildered Communist historian of philosophy was reviled as a “toothless vegetarian” for paraphrasing Western thinkers without sufficient polemic ridicule.⁵⁰ The search for distinctive proletarian art forms had, of course, been suppressed no less than the aristocratic experimentalism of the silver age. Stalin consistently favored a melodramatic art glorifying “heroes of socialist labor” and a pretentious architectural style variously characterized as sovnovrok (“new Soviet rococo”) and—in a play on a line of Pushkin—“the empire style from the time of the plague.”⁵¹

The peculiarities of Stalinist architecture lead us into a world very different from anything imagined by Lenin, let alone the materialists of the 1860’s. The mammoth mosaics in the Moscow subway, the unnecessary spires and fantastic frills of civic buildings, the leaden chandeliers and dark foyers of reception chambers—all send the historical imagination back to the somber world of Ivan the Terrible. Indeed, the culture of the Stalin era seems more closely linked with ancient Muscovy than with even the rawest stages of St. Petersburg-based radicalism. One can, to be sure, find a certain bias in favor of bigness in the earlier period of rapid industrial development in the 1890’s—evidenced in the preponderance of large factory complexes and in the building of the Trans-Siberian railway. There are also hints of classical Oriental despotism in the spectacle of giant canals and ostentatious public buildings thrown up by forced labor. Plans for a canal strikingly similar to Stalin’s famous White Sea Canal of the early thirties had been mooted late in the Muscovite era at the court of Alexis Mikhailovich.⁵² If this, the first major forced labor project of the Soviet era, had in some ways been anticipated in the Muscovite era, the site chosen in the twenties for the first of the new prison camp complexes of the USSR was one of the enduring symbols of Old Muscovy: the Solovetsk monastery. Ivan IV had been the first to use this bleak island monastery near the Arctic circle as a prison for ideological opponents, and the Soviet government—by evacuating the monks—was able to accommodate large numbers.

Quietly heroic testimony to some survival of Old Russian culture into the twenties is provided in the works published with the apparent consent of camp authorities by intellectuals incarcerated on the archipelago. In the monthly journal Solovetsk Islands, “an organ of the directorate of the Solovetsk Camps of ordinary designation OGPU,” we read during the twenties of new discoveries of flora, fauna, and historical remains; of the founding of new museums; of 234 theatrical performances in a single year; and of a nineteen-kilometer ski race between inmates, Red Army guards, and the camp directorate. One article writes with obvious sympathy about Artemius, the first prisoner in Solovetsk under Ivan IV, as “a great seeker of truth and an agitator for freedom of thought.”⁵³

The camps of the Stalin era seemed at times to contain more scholars than the universities; but the relative freedom of Solovetsk in the early days was not to be maintained in the thirties; and only the terrible northern cold was to remain a constant feature of Stalin’s concentration-camp empire. It seems eerily appropriate that the last publications to appear from Solovetsk (in 1934-5, long after the monthly journal had ceased to appear) tell of discovering prehistoric relics on the archipelago and exploring the vast, uncharted labyrinths that had long fascinated visitors to the monastery.⁵⁴

At the very time when the emaciated prisoners of Solovetsk were plunging down to chart its frozen catacombs, thousands of laborers under various forms of compulsion were plunging even deeper beneath Moscow itself to build the greatest of all monuments of the Stalin era: the Moscow subway. From all over the empire party officials flocked to the capital like the faceless priests of some prehistoric religion to place ornate stalactites and stalagmites from the local republics into this giant communal labyrinth. The cult of the underground party also began in earnest at this time. Traditional idealistic leaders of foreign Communist parties began to be replaced by serpentine Stalinists: a cold-blooded species capable of fast, lizard-like movements in dark places and sudden chameleon-like changes of color.

Silenced prisoners in Solovetsk and authoritarian power in the Moscow Kremlin present a picture strangely reminiscent of ancient Muscovy. In some ways, the Stalin era calls to mind the compulsive Byzantine ritualism of those pre-Petrine times which had remained “contemporary” for so many Russians throughout the Romanov era. Icons, incense, and ringing bells were replaced by lithographs of Lenin, cheap perfume, and humming machines. The omnipresent prayers and calls to worship of Orthodoxy were replaced by the inescapable loudspeaker or radio with its hypnotic statistics and invocations to labor. The liturgy or “common work” of believers was replaced by the communal construction of scientific atheists. The role once played by the sending of priests and missionaries along with colonizing soldiers into the heathen interior of Russia was now assumed by “soldiers of the cultural army,” who departed from mass rallies for “cultural relay races” into the countryside to see who could win the most converts for communism and collectivization in the shortest possible time.⁵⁵

Something like the role of the holy fools and flagellants of Muscovy was played by frenzied “heroes of Socialist labor” ascetically dedicated to “overfulfilling their norms.” Just as Ivan the Terrible canonized his favorite holy fool and built a cathedral later named for him, so Stalin canonized and built a national movement around Nicholas Stakhanov, a coal miner who in a fit of heroic masochism cut out 102 tons of coal (fourteen times his quota) in one shift. “Voluntary subscriptions to the state loan” replaced earlier tithes as a token of devotion to the new church; the “shock quarter” of the year replaced Lent as the periodic time of self-denial in the name of a higher cause. Like the zealous Old Believers, who sought to storm the gates of heaven by outdoing the Orthodox in their fanatical adherence to the letter of the old liturgy, the Stakhanovites sought to hasten the millennium by their “storming” (shturmovshchina) of production quotas. These were looked at in the way the Old Believers looked at sacred texts: as something not to be tampered with by bureaucratic innovators or scoffed at by Western sceptics, as a program of salvation if acted upon with urgency.

The Third Rome had been succeeded by a new Third International; and the ideal cultural expression in the latter as in the former was the believer’s cry of hallelujah in response to the revealed word from Moscow. The term alliluishchik (“hallelujah singer”) was in fact widely used in the Stalin era. Russia, which had overthrown a discredited monarchy, suddenly fell back on the most primitive aspect of the original tsarist mystique: the idea that the batiushka, the father-deliverer in the Kremlin, would rescue his suffering children from malevolent local officials and lead them into the promised land.

Thus, Stalin was able to succeed Lenin as supreme dictator not only because he was a deft intriguer and organizer but also because he was closer than his rivals to the crude mentality of the average Russian. Unlike most other Bolshevik leaders—many of whom were of Jewish, Polish, or Baltic origin—Stalin had been educated only in the catechistic theology of Orthodoxy. At Lenin’s funeral, when the other Bolshevik leaders were speaking in the involved rhetoric and glowing generalities of the intellectual community, Stalin spoke in terms more familiar to the masses with his litanylike exhortations:

Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to hold high and keep pure the great title of member of the Party. We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, that we will fulfill thy bequest with honor! …

Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to guard the unity of our party like the apple of our eye. We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, that this obligation too, we will fulfill with honor!⁵⁶

The seminarian was clearly in a better position than the cosmopolitan to create a national religion of Leninism. He felt no sense of embarrassment as Lenin’s embalmed body was laid out for public veneration with hands folded in the manner of the saints in the monastery of the caves of Kiev. The incongruous mausoleum in Red Square, which paid tribute to Lenin and the new order by exemplifying the purely proletarian “constructivist” style of architecture, was forced to pay a deeper tribute to an older order represented by the crypt beneath and the Kremlin walls above it. Stalin transformed the simple building into a shrine for pilgrims and the site of his own periodic epiphanies on festal days. He chose the traditional, theological way of immortalizing Lenin in contrast to the Promethean effort by the Revolutionary intellectuals to discover after Lenin’s death the material forces behind his genius through “cyto-architectonic” research (involving imported German scientists, innumerable microphotographs of his brain, and the projected comparative study of minute cranial slices from other leading thinkers).⁵⁷

For the rest of his life Stalin claimed to be nothing more than the rock on which Lenin had built his church. His theoretical writings were always presented as updated thoughts on “problems of Leninism.” In the name of Lenin’s theory of the past Stalin felt free to contradict both Lenin and himself and, of course, to suppress Lenin’s final uncomplimentary assessment of Stalin.

Along with the forms of theological discourse went the new content of Great Russian patriotism. Stalin rehabilitated a whole host of Russian national heroes in the thirties and introduced ever sharper differentiations in pay and privilege to goad on production. The ingeniously Marxist and almost nameless sociological histories of Pokrovsky, which had dominated Soviet historical writing until his death in 1932, were “unmasked” two years later as a deviation from “true Marxism,” which henceforth glorified such unproletarian figures as Peter the Great and General Suvorov. The fiercely proletarian novels of the period of the first five-year plan, such as Cement and How the Steel Was Tempered, were replaced by a new wave of chauvinistic novels and films glorifying Russian warriors of the past.

By the late thirties, Stalin had produced a curious new mass culture that could be described by inverting his classic phrase “nationalist in form, socialist in content.” The forms of Russian life were now clearly socialist: all agriculture had been collectivized and all of Russia’s expanding means of production brought under State ownership and central planning. But socialization throughout the Stalin era brought few material benefits to the consumer, or spiritual benefits to those concerned with greater equality or increased freedom. The content of the new ersatz culture was retrogressively nationalistic. Under a patina of constitutions and legal procedures lay the dead hand of Nicholas I’s official nationalism and some of the macabre touches of Ivan the Terrible. Stalin’s proudly announced “wave of the future” looks, on closer analysis, more like backwash from the past: ghostly voices suddenly returning like the legendary chimes from the submerged city of Kitezh on Midsummer Eve—only to jangle on uncontrolled and out of tune.

Even the most servile of Bolshevik poets, Efim Pridvorov (“the courtier”), who wrote under the name Bedny (“the poor”), was thrown out of court in 1936 for his Bogatyrs, which made the “vulgar Marxist” error of burlesquing these popular heroes of the early Russian epics. The following year saw a host of purely patriotic festivals: a Pushkin centenary, a 125th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, and a revival of Glinka’s Life for the Tsar (under the alternate title of Ivan Susanin). The growing fear first of Japan and then of Germany accelerated Stalin’s tendency to rely on nationalistic rather than socialistic appeals. The general staff and many traditional army titles were reintroduced in the late thirties; the League of the Militant Godless was abolished shortly before the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and a limited concordat with the Patriarch of Moscow agreed upon shortly after. So traditionalist did Stalin seem to have become that many in the West were prepared to accept at face value the gesture of their wartime ally in abolishing the Communist International in 1943.

Yet for all these links with Russian tradition, the age of Stalin introduced industrial development and social changes that should not be compared lightly with anything that preceded it. His effort to destroy the free creative culture of Russia was more sweeping than that of his authoritarian ancestors, and was launched against a culture that had attained unprecedented variety, sophistication, and popular support. He enlisted in his campaign all the cynical manipulative techniques of modern mass advertising, lacquering over his atrocities with a veneer of misleading statistics and insincere constitutional guarantees.

Behind it all lay untold human suffering and degradation. The peasants’ hopes—rekindled during the era of the New Economic Policy—for a better life and greater freedom from their traditional urban exploiters were dashed by Stalin’s determination to collectivize. The burning of grain and slaughter of livestock by the protesting peasantry at the beginning of the thirties launched a chain reaction of unnatural death in the human realm. Peasants perished as kulak “class enemies,” repopulated forced laborers, or victims of artificial starvation from bad planning or forcible grain collections. The “leftist” activists who perpetrated this horror in the countryside were the next to perish in the purges of the mid-thirties; and, then the executors were themselves executed to placate the masses and insure the safety of the supreme assassin.

Deaths were recorded not individually or by the thousands but by the millions. More than ten million cattle were slaughtered in the early stages of collectivization, perhaps five million peasants in the social upheaval of the thirties. Membership in the Party elite provided no refuge, for 55 out of its 71 Central Committee members and 60 of 68 alternate members disappeared between the Seventeenth Congress of the party in 1934 and its Eighteenth Congress in 1939. Indeed, all but a very few of those who had made the Revolution and launched the Soviet state were purged in the thirties. Then came Hitler and the terrible suffering of the war, in which twelve million Russians perished.

Always and unremittingly, Stalin suspected those flights of the imagination and experiments with form and idea which lay at the heart of creative culture. None was more suspect in Eastern Europe than the large Jewish community, with its intellectual traditions and international perspectives. Jewish Bolsheviks were deprived of their revolutionary names and sent to the anonymous death that was shortly to become the fate of the Jewish masses under the more systematic and distinctively racist totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. The final reprise on the totalitarian age was Stalin’s effort to cut out “the ulcer of cosmopolitanism” by obliterating the survivals of Yiddish culture and the new interest in Western Europe that appeared in Russia in the wake of World War II.

Stalin’s most important contribution to world culture lay in his perfection of a new technique of governing through systematic alternation between terror and relaxation. This “artificial dialectic” required the building of a manipulable and “cast-iron” apparatus totally dependent on the dictator, and the determination to make “permanent purge” a calculated instrument of statecraft.⁵⁸ The true homo sovieticus was the disciplined and secretive professional officer of the dictator’s sprawling police and intelligence apparatus.⁵⁹ Just as technicians in the infamous Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior found that one of the simplest ways to “break” a reluctant prisoner was by a blinking alternation of total light and total darkness, so the servants of Stalin sought to disorient and subdue the outside world with an incessant and bewildering alternation between smiles and scowls, amity and threat.

In the remote apex of this society stood the solitary dictator, regulating the ebb and flow of mood, ingeniously playing on the masochistic and xenophobic impulses of a populace long accustomed to collective suffering and feelings of inferiority. Whenever rewards were in order or respites to be granted, the Caligula of collectivism suddenly emerged smiling from inside the Kremlin. When terror was loose, even the victims tended to speak of it as the creation of an underling: Yezhovshchina in the thirties, Zhdanovshchina in the forties.

In his last years, Stalin kept about him such shadowy figures as Beria, a fellow Georgian and Yezhov’s successor as head of the evergrowing police empire; Poskrebyshev, his private secretary; and Michael Suslov, a lean and ascetic former Old Believer who bore the name of the founder of the flagellant sect.

On Christmas eve of 1952, Suslov sounded the first note in a fresh campaign of denunciation that was both a throwback to the witch-hunting at the court of Ivan III and the apparent harbinger of a vast new purge. Suslov’s denunciation of editors for insufficiently rigorous self-criticism over long-forgotten issues of economic development was followed by an announcement in Pravda that nine doctors had been charged with assassinating through mistreatment and poisoning a variety of leading Soviet figures, including Zhdanov. This campaign against the predominately Jewish “doctor-poisoners” who had allegedly infiltrated the Kremlin was apparently directed against Beria, as head of state security, and his close associate, Georgy Malenkov. As the most intelligent and powerful of Stalin’s lieutenants, they were the logical candidates for victimization; and their careers were saved (though only temporarily) by the convenient death of Stalin himself on March 5, 1953. The last time he was seen alive by a non-Communist observer, Stalin was doodling wolves in red ink; and the last officially announced medical treatment administered to him before death was bleeding with leeches.⁶⁰

For nearly ten years, a mummified and faintly smiling Stalin lay alongside Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum. It was an awesome reminder of the carefully cultivated myth of infallibility—the idea that, however absurd Soviet policy may have seemed to those on the front lines, there was always an omniscient leader at the command post: a “magic citadel” within the Kremlin inviolable to assault from ordinary experience and common-sense doubts. As one student of the Stalin formula wrote:

The strength of communism and its originality come from the disinterested militants and sympathizers.… Their sympathy and faith will not become untenable while the remote inner citadel remains intact—that magic citadel within which evil is transformed to good, fact into myth, history into legend, and the steppes of Russia into paradise.⁶¹

Giant, omnipresent statues of Stalin had provided Russia with a new image of omnipotence: a macabre parody of the Byzantine Pantokrator. This divine image had stared down from the central domes of the original cathedrals of the holy wisdom to provide sanctifying power and some mystical foretaste of the splendors of heaven to those who gathered on feast days in these original centers of Russian civilization. So Stalin smiled down his assurances of holy wisdom and sanctifying authority to those who gathered on the new feast days for the pathetic foretaste of heaven on earth provided by a “park of culture and rest.” This quasi-religious myth of Stalin with its many psychologically satisfying features could not be easily dispelled. When his body was finally removed from the mausoleum in Red Square late in 1961, an ancient woman who had known Lenin and spent seventeen years in prison under Stalin issued the call rather in the manner of a sectarian prophetess:

The only reason I survived is that Il’ich was in my heart, and I sought his advice, as it were. (Applause) Yesterday I asked Il’ich for advice, and it was as if he stood before me alive and said: “I do not like being next to Stalin, who inflicted so much harm on the Party.” (Stormy prolonged applause.)⁶²

The scene of ritual reburial is reminiscent of late Muscovite politics, with Khrushchev calling forth his sanctifying approval of the woman’s recommendation from the podium of the Twenty-second Party Congress as it bellowed forth its antiphonal responses of “Stormy, prolonged applause.” One Soviet intellectual of the post-Stalin era has written:

Ah, if only we had been more intelligent; if only we had surrounded his death with miracles! We should have given it out on the radio that he was not dead but had gone up into heaven, whence he was still looking at us silently, over his mystical moustache. His relics would have cured paralytics and people possessed with devils. And children, before going to bed, would have been praying by their windows, with their eyes turned toward the bright stars of the celestial Kremlin.⁶³

Perhaps the best synoptic view of Russian culture under Stalin is provided by the development of the cinema, an art medium with little history prior to the Soviet period. The innumerable movie theaters large and small that sprang up all over the USSR in the twenties and thirties were the new regime’s equivalent to the churches of an earlier age. Within the theaters, the prescribed rituals of the new order—its chronicles of success and promises of bliss—were systematically and regularly presented to the silent masses, whose main image of a world beyond that of immediate physical necessity was now derived from a screen of moving pictures rather than a screen of stationary icons. Like Soviet industry, the cinema produced in the age of Stalin a great quantity of films, including some of real quality. Yet despite the many new techniques and skilled artists involved, the Stalinist cinema represents a regressive chapter in the history of Russian culture. At best, it offered little more than a pretentious extension of the most chauvinistic aspects of pre-Revolutionary culture; at worst it was a technological monstrosity seeking to cannibalize one of the world’s most promising theatrical traditions.

Hopes were high when idealistic young revolutionaries first wandered into the deserted studios of the infant Russian film industry during the Revolutionary period. Here was an art medium closely linked to the liberating force of technology, uniquely suitable for spreading the good news of a new social order to all people. Here also was a relatively untouched world of artistic possibility: a cultural tabula rasa. For, since the first public movie theater had appeared in 1903, the Russian film industry had assumed no very distinctive character. It was an imitative, commercially oriented medium largely involved in producing never-never land sentimentality and melodramatic happy endings.

Placed under the commissariat of education by a Leninist decree of August, 1919, and faced with the emigration of almost all its artists and technicians, the Soviet film industry became a major center for on-the-job training in the arts and an arena for florid experimentation.

During the relatively relaxed period of the early twenties a variety of new styles appeared, and a vigorous discussion ensued about the nature of cinematic art and its relation to the new social order. The remarkable “movie eye” (kinoko) group flourished briefly, with its fanatical dedication to documentary accuracy and precise chronology; a former architect and sculptor, Leo Kuleshov, pioneered in the use of open-air scenes, untrained actors, and monumental compositions; and scattered efforts were made to break down the flow of pictures into expressionistic or abstract forms.

But as in all fields of Soviet culture, the rise of Stalin to absolute power in the late twenties led to the adoption of a propagandistic official style that brought an end to creative experiment. The new style was perhaps the best example of that blend of Revolutionary message and realistic form that came to be called socialist realism. At the same time, the subject matter of the cinema in the thirties and forties illustrates the increasing drift toward chauvinistic traditionalism in Stalinist Russia.

There were many influences behind the new Soviet film style. In a sense it was a return to the old tradition of the illustrated chronicle (litsevaia letopis’) with which the heroic history of the Church Victorious had been popularized in the late Muscovy. It was also a continuation and vulgarization of the traditions of heroic historical painting and mammoth exhibitions that had been developed in the nineteenth century. To these traditions was added the dream of a new type of revolutionary mystery play originated during the exciting days of War Communism. Open-air mass theatrical pageants were improvised as thousands took part in a cycle which attempted to re-enact seven major popular revolutions in Russian history; eighty thousand took part in Maiakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe, and more than one hundred thousand in the ritual re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace. Michelet said that the French Revolution really began not with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, but with the symbolic re-enactment of the event a year later. In like manner, one could say that the Russian Revolution—as a symbol of liberation—was born not in the turbulent events of November, 1917, but in these subsequent scenes of pictorial pageantry and mythic re-creation.

The key cinematic task of Lenin’s heir was the transposition to the screen of this monumental myth. As the “movie trains” of Revolutionary days with their itinerant pictorial propaganda were replaced by stationary theaters, it became essential to have a codified version of the Revolutionary myth. This was provided by three major films, which were all produced in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup and comprise a kind of heroic trilogy: Pudovkin’s Last Days of Petersburg, Eisenstein’s Ten Days That Shook the World, and Barnet’s Moscow in October. Together with the panoramic and equally fanciful picture of the Civil War provided by Alexis Tolstoy’s Road to Calvary (which became a trilogy in the film version), these films dramatized for the Russian masses the mystery of the new incarnation in which the hopes and fears of all the years suddenly found fulfillment in Russia.

Of the cinematic iconographers of the Revolution, Pudovkin and Eisenstein are deservedly the best remembered. They were both creatures of the experimental twenties and pupils of Kuleshov. Each scored his greatest triumph in 1926—Eisenstein with Battleship Potemkin and Pudovkin with the film version of Gorky’s Mother. Each had a long subsequent career of film-making that came to an end only when they died late in the Stalin era —Eisenstein in 1948, Pudovkin in 1953.

Pudovkin was the more thoroughly Stalinist and—as a result—the less memorable of the two. A rugged and athletic child of the Volga region, he was, from the beginning, anxious to expend his energies in the service of the new order. His theoretical writings emphasized the use of technological innovation for practical purposes of indoctrination. He favored the Stanislavsky method of acting realism over more experimental styles and exalted the semi-dictatorial function of the film editor and director.

Though capable of projecting simple and powerful emotions, he increasingly followed Stalin in turning toward monumental subjects. Traditional Russian patriotic themes replaced Revolutionary ones in his most important later works: Suvorov, Minin and Pozharsky, and Admiral Nakhimov. At the same time, he demonstrated in his theoretical writings the passion for statistical self-congratulation in pseudo-Marxist terms which was so characteristic of the Stalin mentality.

On the stage an actor plays before hundreds of persons, in the film actually before millions. Here is a dialectical instance of quantity increasing over the boundary into quality to give rise to a new kind of excitement.⁶⁴

He expressed a kind of nouveau riche contempt for the older traditions of the theater with his bluff confidence that “socialist realism is just as immortal, as eternally young and inexhaustible as the people itself.”⁶⁵

Eisenstein was a far more complex and interesting figure. Born in Riga and educated as an architect, he was more deeply immersed in the experimental tendencies of the twenties and more broadly versed in twentieth-century European culture than Pudovkin. He was influenced by Kandinsky and others to believe that the basic ingredients of line and color could of their own accord bring spiritual qualities into visual art. He drew directly from mystical precursors of Scriabin like Castel and Eckartshausen the belief that true art must affect a “synchronization of senses.”⁶⁶ He became active in the constructivist theater of Proletkult and worked as an artistic designer in Meierhold productions before his epoch-making filming of Potemkin.

The film used an enormous cast to depict with poetic license and cinematic skill the brief revolt of the crew of the battleship Potemkin in Odessa during the Revolution of 1905. Based on a scenario written especially for the movie in honor of the twentieth anniversary of that Revolution, Potemkin drew heavily on the old tradition of the open-air mass theater to produce a near-perfect parable of Revolutionary heroism. The battleship itself—rather than any individual—was the hero. Its crew was a triumphant, spontaneous chorus of Revolutionary joy struggling against both the vermin gnawing at their paltry ration of meat, and the priests and officials gnawing at their souls. Just as John the Baptist, “the precursor,” was placed next to Christ Enthroned on the iconostasis, so this Revolutionary precursor of October acquired a venerated place in the iconography of the Revolution. Few scenes up to that time had so brilliantly engaged the capabilities of the infant cinema industry for political purposes as the famous sequence of a baby carriage coming loose from its mother’s grasp and gathering momentum as it rolled down the steps pursued by a mechanically advancing phalanx of dehumanized Tsarist soldiers.

Unlike Pudovkin, Eisenstein experimented with non-realistic forms of cinematic art and incurred official rebukes for several of his efforts in the late twenties and early thirties. But like Pudovkin, he eventually followed the trend toward more conventional patriotic themes in the thirties. His Alexander Nevsky was a milestone in this genre, glorifying the famous monk-warrior so admired by Peter the Great. But whereas the famous cinematic eulogy of Peter the Great produced at the same time merely transposed onto the screen the pictorial images of nineteenth-century painters, Eisenstein’s depiction of Peter’s patron saint incorporated elements of grotesque hyperbole that suggested continued borrowings from the expressionistic theater.

If Peter the Great, the builder of St. Petersburg and lover of technological innovation, was a natural hero for the early Stalin era, the dark figure of Ivan IV was in many ways a suitable hero for the later years of Stalin, with their macabre reversions to Muscovite ways. Thus, in the late thirties, Eisenstein turned to producing a large-scale life of Ivan the Terrible, assembling an extraordinary array of talent: the music of Prokof’ev, the acting of Cherkasov, the finest black-and-white and color photographers, and even the services of Pudovkin for a minor acting role.

Yet for all its promise, this work became yet another of those unfinished trilogies in which Russian cultural history abounds. The first part was filmed during the war, in the distant haven of Alma Ata, and was hailed with a variety of accolades, including the Stalin Prize First Class shortly after its release in January, 1945. The second part was, however, denounced by the Central Committee in September, 1946. The eerie sounds and shadows of the first part became caricatures in the second, which alternated between black-and-white and color scenes in its depiction of boyar conspiracies. The atmosphere of hovering intrigue and impending assassination was all too close to real life, and the hypersensitive Stalin appears to have seen in the frank depiction of cruelty by Ivan and his oprichnina implied criticism of himself and his secret police. Thus, the second part of the trilogy was not publicly released until 1958—ten years after Eisenstein’s death and five years after Stalin’s. The third part was not completed; and Eisenstein died in the same condition of semi-disgrace that had been his lot in the early thirties.

The cinema in the early post-war years was devoted mainly to stereotyped ideological romances between collective farmers and party activists or to the attempt to hypnotize audiences with the omniscience of Stalin’s leadership and the omnipotence of Soviet armed force in films like The Battle of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin. In this age of systematic photographic falsification, Soviet movies disintegrated literally as well as figuratively because of the repeated editorial splicing of films by the Soviet propaganda agencies that controlled their distribution. Small wonder that Eisenstein in his last years was contemplating shifting his efforts from the ill-fated Ivan IV to a proposed study of the life of Nero.⁶⁷ There seemed no honorable calling left for the human spirit that did not risk martyrdom at the hands of the new Nero. Even Nicholas Virta, who had written the script for The Battle of Stalingrad, may have been hinting that calamity was at hand in his play of the late Stalin era that was published only in 1954, The Fall of Pompeii.

With Stalin as with Ivan, there was method in the madness. Like Ivan, Stalin vastly increased the power of the Russian state, and his authority over it.⁶⁸ Whether by luck or by careful planning, Stalin in a quarter of a century lifted Russia from a position of being one of the least of the world’s great powers to being one of its only two super-powers: from fifth or sixth to second place in industrial production. These were the criteria by which Stalin—and many others in the twentieth century—measured success; and in these terms Stalin was successful. Out of the raw strength and complex psychology of the Russian people, he fashioned an impressive political machine, which he handled with great skill and more flexibility than is sometimes remembered.⁶⁹ Even in the area of culture he could point to such superficially imposing accomplishments as the virtual disappearance of illiteracy and gigantic editions of all kinds of literary classics.

The only official socialist realism likely to endure beyond the memory of the Stalin era is that of Michael Sholokhov’s novels, which captured some of the flavor of its epic transformations and violent inhumanity. The Leninist and Stalinist revolutions are retold in credible if somewhat two-dimensional terms in his And Quiet Flows the Don and his Virgin Soil Upturned, respectively. But even this scrupulously loyal (and fundamentally anti-Western and anti-intellectual) writer was harassed and delayed in his effort to tell the second of these stories. In the high Stalin era, he withdrew increasingly to the countryside of his native Ukraine, summoning up the image and authority of an enduring nature in titles and descriptive passages, publishing the full version of Virgin Soil only after Khrushchev had denigrated Stalin, and becoming after Khrushchev’s fall the third Russian writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize.⁷⁰

For the historian of Russian thought, the Stalin era has an importance quite apart from the personality of the dictator. For it was a period in which many long silent forces suddenly came to play an important role in Russian cultural life. Like forms of growth incubating in the frozen subsoil, masochistic and chauvinistic impulses suddenly shot forth as Stalin’s mechanized plows dug below the surface and brought them closer to the light.

At the same time, the soil overturned by this “second revolution” proved hospitable to new crops that sprang up from fresh seeds of literacy and learning. Though Stalin liked to fancy himself as having infinite power to control the vegetable as well as the human world (as his deification of Lysenko’s environmentalism reveals), he was faced with some unexpected crops on the steppelands that he had so systematically harrowed and burned out. If the political and economic historian must deal largely with Lenin’s seeding and Stalin’s weeding, the cultural historian must look at the deeper problems of the soil, and—however tentatively—at the relation of present harvests to those of the past and the future.