Even sympathetic contemporaries mistakenly took him for a self-centered eccentric remote from real life. The social theme was a natural component in Mandelstam’s work from his youth. His artistic response to every political situation was always sincere, significant, and original—for instance, his 1918 poem “Twilight of Freedom,” a substantial ode to Lenin, whom the poet, according to Mirsky, “praised for something that I think no one else ever did: for the courage of responsibility…. Here we are very far from the Scythians and Mayakovsky. The Bolshevism in Mandelstam is combined with courageous and positive Christianity.”30
It was Mandelstam, with his reputation as sophisticated master and bookish aesthete and seemingly infinitely far from the New Peasant poets (even though he rated Klyuev’s work very highly and liked some lines in Esenin), who was one of the few to respond to the famine that befell the peasant regions of the Soviet Union as a result of Stalin’s collectivization in the early 1930s.
Mandelstam’s “Fourth Prose,” a stunning example of the Russian confessional genre (comparable to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground), describing the animal fear engulfing Soviet society, the fear that “writes denunciations, beats people when they are down, and demands execution for the prisoner,” reveals the author’s revulsion for such antipeasant slogans of the Stalin regime as “The muzhik has hidden rye in his storeroom—kill him!”
This growing horror and anger (“The authorities are as revolting as a barber’s hands”) burst out in May 1933, when Mandelstam poured out several political poems, the most biting of which was the openly anti-Stalin satire “We live, not feeling the country beneath us.” It has become perhaps his most famous poem.
The irony is that this work, which lacks complex associative images, is not at all typical of Mandelstam’s work: Akhmatova observed that Stalin’s portrait in it resembles the primitive folk style known as lubok:
His fat fingers are as flabby as worms,
His words are as accurate as pound weights,
His cockroach eyes mock
And his boots are shiny.
Boris Pasternak refused to recognize these lampoon lines as poetry when Mandelstam rushed to declaim them to him: Pasternak was horrified not only by the poem’s unheard-of political daring but its provocatively direct, almost caricature-like style: “This is not a literary fact but an act of suicide, of which I do not approve and in which I do not want to take part.”31
Mandelstam saw his anti-Stalin lampoon in a different light, according to his friend Emma Gershtein: “The Young Communists will sing it in the streets! At the Bolshoi Theater…at congresses…from every row.” He knew what he was risking: “If they find out, I could be…EXECUTED!”32
Even though Mandelstam was not executed for this work, he had been essentially right: the poem started a spiral of events that led to his death on December 27, 1938, at a transit camp in the Far East. Mandelstam was first arrested in Moscow in 1934 for anti-Stalin and anti-kolkhoz poetry, after one of his listeners informed on him. The poems were characterized by the investigators as a “terrorist act against the leader,” but Stalin, in response to a plea for mercy from Bukharin, unexpectedly ordered: “Isolate but preserve.”33
Mandelstam was then forty-three, but he looks like a very old man in photographs of the period. The arrest and interrogations broke him. In prison he slit both wrists, and in exile, where he was sent, he threw himself out of the second-story window of the local hospital. He was saved each time (Stalin’s orders!), but the inner logic of the situation inexorably pushed Mandelstam to the position of outcast despite his attempts to make peace with Soviet reality and Stalin himself.
It all ended predictably: a repeated arrest (on the denunciations of zealous colleagues) and a martyr’s demise in the camps, where the crazed Mandelstam, dressed in rags and plagued by lice, offered to read his anti-Stalinist poetry to prisoners for a hunk of bread.
Mandelstam did not live long enough to create his own mythos. His posthumous legend in Soviet times was the work of two completely different people—his widow, Nadezhda, an independent and ambitious writer herself, and the influential journalist and novelist of current events, Ilya Ehrenburg. He managed to push through a long essay about the poet, after a twenty-year hiatus, as part of the publication of his memoirs, People, Years, Life, which the journal Novy Mir began serializing in 1960. Ehrenburg was the first to talk about Mandelstam’s tragic death publicly and with an emotional tone that was not typical of the old cynic: “Who could have been bothered by that poet with his puny body and that music of verse that fills the nights?”
Ehrenburg’s memoirs are not a masterpiece, but I remember the powerful impression they made on the Soviet intelligentsia with their massive erudition, unusual European tone, and effort to revive the half-forgotten or still-banned names of persecuted writers and artists. Those qualities made it very difficult for the book to pass the censor’s eyes.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s monumental memoir about her late husband, written in the 1960s, could not get into print at all. But the manuscript was circulated widely in samizdat. I remember that this upset the envious Akhmatova, who had expended a lot of effort on the creation of her own version of the posthumous mythos of Mandelstam (with her by his side) and who quipped acidly about Nadezhda that “talent is not transmitted by rubbing.”
Brodsky, on the contrary and perhaps to spite Akhmatova, always considered Nadezhda Mandelstam’s prose (which in its stylistic sharpness is comparable with other masterpieces of twentieth-century Russian nonfiction—Benois’s memoirs, Andrei Bely’s autobiographical trilogy, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Other Shores, in its English version called Speak, Memory) on par with the works of Andrei Platonov, whom he admired greatly.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs were eventually published in the West, where they unexpectedly became a sensation in the 1970s, for many years being the only source of detailed, albeit not always objective, information and opinion about Mandelstam and also perhaps the most vivid description of the fate of the nonconformist artist in the Stalin era.
Another great urban poet whose fate took a sharp turn after writing about the Stalin collectivization was Nikolai Zabolotsky, a follower of the refined literary experimenter Velimir Khlebnikov and one of the leaders of the Dadaist group OBERIU (Association of Real Art).
The son of an agronomist, Zabolotsky spent his childhood in the country. A solid bespectacled man who did not look like the highly original and eccentric absurdist poet he was (he was frequently taken for an accountant) and whose hobby was pondering philosophical issues, Zabolotsky wrote the utopian poem Triumph of Agriculture, which could have had as its motto, the author said, Khlebnikov’s lines: “I see the horses’ freedom / and the equality of cows.” It was published in 1933, during the famine caused by collectivization, and it was immediately targeted for attack by the official critics.
Pravda and other newspapers derided Zabolotsky’s poem as a “lampoon on collectivization.” “This is not simply abstruse nonsense but politically reactionary priest-loving rubbish which is in solidarity with the kulak and in literature with the Klyuevs and Klychkovs.”34 Zabolotsky was thus included in the doomed circle of New Peasant poets, with whom he had little in common, both in his avant-garde style and his world view.
Zabolotsky’s “crime” from the orthodox point of view was that the poet did not want and did not know how to praise the creation of the kolkhozes: “He presented the greatest struggle in the world as a pointless and mad pastime. He danced, grimaced, stuck out his tongue, and made scabrous jokes when talking about work led by the Leninist Party and by a steel Bolshevik with a name of steel [Stalin].”35
In a situation when, as Stalin had pointed out, the class struggle in the Soviet Union had become more acute, “jesters” were superfluous. On March 19, 1938, Zabolotsky was arrested and then put through the “conveyor,” when investigators took turns interrogating and beating prisoners day and night until they got the confessions they wanted.
Zabolotsky, in his appeal in 1944, described the effect of the conveyor this way: “Without food or sleep, under an endless barrage of threats and humiliation, on the fourth day I lost clarity of thought, forgot my name, stopped understanding what was going on around me, and gradually reached the state of numbness when a man cannot be responsible for his actions. I remember that I gathered my remaining spiritual strength to keep from signing lies about myself and others.”36
But the investigators were not worried that Zabolotsky, despite the beatings, did not admit his guilt in writing “anti-Soviet works used by the Trotskyite organization in their counterrevolutionary agitation.” The poet was sent to a labor camp in the Far East. When Zabolotsky was transported there in a frozen freight car filled with dozens of prisoners, Mandelstam, the other poet also sentenced to five years in the camps, had already died.
At the camp, Zabolotsky was sent to fell trees, where exhausted men (dinner was 30 grams of bread and a ladle of thin gruel) were expected to work until they dropped, and, as the poet recalled, “If you sat down for a moment, they set dogs on you.”37
He learned about the cruel jokes of the Stalin regime. The investigators in Leningrad tried to beat an admission out of him that the leader of the counterrevolutionary organization to which he allegedly belonged was the noted poet Nikolai Tikhonov, who was a member of the Serapion Brothers, an avant-garde literary group. Zabolotsky denied it categorically, but was certain that they would arrest Tikhonov anyway.
In the camps, Zabolotsky heard that Tikhonov was not only not arrested but given the highest Soviet award, the Order of Lenin, in early 1939. That happened, apparently, because in 1937 at a meeting at the Bolshoi Theater dedicated to the centenary of Pushkin’s death, attended by Stalin, Tikhonov (dubbed “little wooden soldier” by some) made a fiery speech that “spoke about Pushkin but praised Stalin,”38 as contemporaries recalled. Stalin liked the speech and that became a good shield for the little soldier, who moved from one official honor to the next.
The irony was that at the very same time, the Leningrad secret police continued concocting the mythical “case of the counterrevolutionary organization headed by Tikhonov.” People arrested in the case were beaten to get compromising material on Tikhonov, and some of them were shot in 1938, including the poets Benedikt Livshits and Boris Kornilov. In 1959, I was a teenager passionate about poetry, and I tried to get the gray-haired and pompous Tikhonov to talk about the fate of Livshits and Kornilov, who had been posthumously rehabilitated a few years earlier, but he condescendingly evaded an answer.
By this time, Tikhonov was a very big shot. However, his poetry, which even a demanding critic like Tynyanov once considered worthy of Pasternak, became ever blander, until he turned into a purely ceremonial figure. It was said that right until his death at eighty-two in 1979, he kept a portrait of Stalin over his desk.
Zabolotsky survived the camps. His friends from OBERIU were not as lucky. The great absurdist poets Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky died in prison, and another Dadaist, the handsome Nikolai Oleinikov, who had also been fitted up in the “Tikhonov group” case, was executed.
Chapter Five
Present-day neo-Slavophiles are convinced that Stalin, being irrationally hostile toward the Russian peasantry, dealt with the peasant poets and writers with particular cruelty. In fact Stalin, the politician par excellence, always ruthlessly attacked whatever social stratum seemed most dangerous to him at the moment. Along with that group, its cultural leaders were usually repressed as well. At one moment, they could have been the peasant poets Klyuev, Klychkov, and Vasilyev, but at another, the urbanists Mandelstam, Zabolotsky, Vvedensky, and Kharms.
Even though Stalin’s formal education ended when he was expelled from the Tiflis Seminary in 1899 for revolutionary notions, he read a lot (some recall his reading 400 pages a day, both fiction and nonfiction) and had a lively interest in cultural issues. But as with other Bolshevik leaders, this interest was colored strongly by political considerations. And as Stalin’s political views evolved, his cultural positions changed. After Lenin’s death, Stalin (whose Russian was literate but with a marked Georgian accent that increased when he was agitated) addressed cultural matters more frequently, and gradually his soft, muffled voice grew more confident.
Recently declassified documents of the early meetings of the Politburo of the Bolshevik Party show that Stalin apparently did not participate actively in writing the relatively liberal Politburo 1925 resolution “On the Party’s policy in the sphere of literature”—it was Bukharin, Trotsky, and Lunacharsky—but by 1925 Stalin was airing his ideas on cultural affairs at Politburo meetings.
When in 1926 the Politburo discussed the possible return to the Soviet Union of the émigré artist Ilya Repin, the patriarch of the realist movement who had settled in Finland, Kliment Voroshilov, the culture-loving military leader who had recently replaced the outcast Trotsky, felt it necessary to speak with Stalin first before writing a memo. “Knowing your opinion on this matter will make it be resolved more easily and quickly at the Politburo.” The leader approved of loyal Voroshilov’s initiative. “Klim! I think that the Soviet regime must support Repin in every way. Greetings. J. Stalin.”1 Still, the elderly artist was afraid to return to the Soviet Union and died in 1930 in Finland.
Stalin’s role was crucial in a series of extraordinary and often ambivalent decisions made by the Politburo in 1927–1929 about permitting or closing Mikhail Bulgakov’s plays Days of the Turbins, Zoyka’s Apartment, and Flight. The leader’s hand was also obvious in the vicious attacks that began in 1929 on the major writers Yevgeny Zamyatin and Boris Pilnyak: the former dared to publish his dystopian novel We in a Prague émigré journal and the latter his novella The Red Tree in a Berlin émigré publishing house; both works were deemed hostile to the Soviet regime.
The short and pockmarked Stalin came out on the stage of cultural life rather cautiously (a quality that was a hallmark of his political style) and weighed every word. In that sense, the turning point came in 1929, when the leader stepped forward as cultural arbiter for the first time, writing two letters that were immediately disseminated in party circles: one was addressed to the leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), the most powerful literary pro-Communist organization of that period, with great state support, and the second was a reply to the complaint of the “proletarian” playwright Vladimir Bill-Belotserkovsky about RAPP.
In both letters, Stalin tries to find a middle way, calling for restraint on the “literary front,” seemingly endorsing the liberal Politburo resolution of 1925, which RAPP wanted disavowed. Stalin expressed his displeasure with the excessively aggressive tactics of RAPP: “Who now needs a ‘polemic’ which resembles an empty squabble: ‘Oh, you bastard!’ ‘Look who’s talking!’…That is no way to unite people of the Soviet camp. That is the way to scatter them and confuse them, pleasing the ‘class enemy.’”2 Tellingly, in sending copies of these letters to Maxim Gorky, Stalin still felt it necessary to say that it was merely “personal correspondence.” When his henchmen obligingly asked Stalin to publish his letter to Bill-Belotserkovsky, “since it, in essence, is the only expression of your thoughts on our policy in art” and therefore “has found rather widespread distribution in party circles,”3 Stalin refused—he was not fully confident of such a move yet. (Stalin published that letter only twenty years later, in the eleventh volume of his collected works.)
But he had already formulated his opinion about the need and wisdom of his personal supervision of Soviet culture in that letter to RAPP quite firmly: “It is necessary. It is beneficial. It is, after all, my duty.” It was no accident that Stalin made Lunacharsky retire as cultural commissar in September 1929.
This move signaled the transition from one era to another, when the strengthened and solidly placed Soviet regime no longer felt it necessary even to pretend to play up to the intelligentsia to attract it to its side. Now, on the contrary, the intelligentsia was expected to prove its loyalty. This new hard line was sarcastically formulated by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, coauthors of the two funniest Soviet novels, The Twelve Chairs and The Golden Calf. “No point in hiding it, comrades, we all love the Soviet regime. But loving the Soviet regime is not a profession. You must also work. It is not enough to love the Soviet regime, you must make it love you. The love must be reciprocal.”
Lunacharsky was a confirmed Communist, but he spoke out often against the personal tastes of the leaders defining the state’s cultural policies. Stalin was of a different opinion. It did not crystallize immediately, but through trial and error. By 1929, after his fiftieth birthday, Stalin was ready to manage Soviet culture more or less single-handedly (which did not exclude calling in expert opinion from time to time).
His most important expert, who for a time was truly Stalin’s viceroy in culture, was Maxim Gorky, even though neither man publicized it and many of their meetings were private.
The well-informed émigré journal Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik reported as early as 1933 (and it is thought now that their source was Babel) that Gorky “is considered the second-most important person in the Union, by weight following Stalin. It must be said that the friendship of the latter with Gorky has taken on planetary scale: Gorky is the only man whom Stalin not only takes into account but courts.”4
A friendship like this between ruler and writer is unique in Russian culture, and not only for the twentieth century. Neither before nor after did a cultural figure have such access to Russia’s leader. Both sides had a lot to gain, which is why both Stalin and Gorky were willing to make significant compromises to retain the friendship.
Stalin had “inherited” Gorky from Lenin, who had rated the writer very highly as a “European celebrity.” Gorky certainly was the most major cultural figure whom Lenin knew personally, and one with a marked pro-Bolshevik orientation even before the revolution. Lenin used Gorky’s popularity in the interests of his party, including pumping enormous sums of money out of Gorky himself and with his help from others to support the illegal Bolshevik activities.
Before the revolution the fame and influence of Gorky and Lenin were incomparable: one was an international cultural superstar, the other a marginal political radical. Naturally, Lenin was not an authority for Gorky, and after the overthrow of Nicholas II in 1917, their paths diverged sharply, since Gorky considered the Bolshevik seizure of power from the Provisional Government not only premature but dangerous—“the Russian people will pay for this with lakes of blood.”5
Immediately following the October 1917 revolution, Gorky was very negative about Lenin, even though he had already noted Lenin’s extraordinary abilities as a political figure: “A talented man, he has all the qualities of a ‘leader,’ and also the requisite lack of morals and a pure landowner’s ruthless attitude toward the lives of the masses.”6 In response, in 1918, Lenin shut down the newspaper Novaya Zhizn’, where the writer regularly printed similar and even harsher attacks on the Bolshevik government.
For a few more years Gorky got on Lenin’s nerves, constantly pestering him about the misery of the impoverished Russian intelligentsia and with pleas on behalf of many who were arrested. Lenin, himself from the intellectual class, felt nothing but contempt for the intelligentsia, expressing his opinion in a notorious letter to Gorky dated September 15, 1919: “The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing stronger in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and its helpers, the petty intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact, they’re not the brain, they’re shit.”7
Gorky’s innumerable appeals on behalf of persecuted intellectuals finally made Lenin lose his temper (in one letter to Gorky he called him “irresponsible”) and push the writer abroad using the excuse that he needed “to recuperate and rest.”
Gorky did not want to end his activities in defense of Russian culture from Bolshevik excesses, but Lenin added, “If you don’t go, we’ll exile you.” So when Gorky finally left Soviet Russia in 1921, his relationship with Lenin was badly soured. In 1922, Lenin had a stroke and in January 1924, he died.
Living in Germany and later Italy, Gorky through the second half of the 1920s gradually strengthened his relations with the new Soviet leadership, particularly Bukharin and Stalin. Ironically, it was Stalin (at Lenin’s urging, certainly) who had attacked Gorky viciously in the newspaper Rabochii Put’ in 1917, when Gorky vainly called on the Bolsheviks not to take power into their hands. Stalin lectured the famous author and recent ally: “The Russian revolution has overthrown quite a few authorities. Its power is expressed, incidentally, by how it does not bow to ‘famous names,’ but takes them into its service or throws them into oblivion.”8 Stalin warned Gorky that if he did not climb out of the “swamp of the intelligentsia’s confusion,” he would find himself in the “archives” of history.
The criticism of Gorky was not signed: this was typical of Stalin as a party columnist and a method he would use later (cf. his article “Muddle Instead of Music,” aimed at Shostakovich in Pravda in 1936). In 1951, when the writer had been dead for fifteen years, Stalin included this anti-Gorky pamphlet in the third volume of his collected works, revealing his authorship. But Gorky must have been informed at the time who had attacked him in 1917.
Stalin could have assumed that Gorky, who did not forgive easily, would hold that insult against him. Gorky, on the other hand, had learned early and personally that if you got Stalin angry, he did not care how famous the opponent was. As Stalin wrote: “The revolution does not know how to pity or how to bury its dead.”9
Undoubtedly, Gorky remembered Leo Tolstoy as he created his own relationship with the authorities. Tolstoy was an example of the Olympian heights a Russian writer could reach as a public figure. From an early age, when his ambition could have appeared unseemly and therefore was carefully hidden even from his friends, Gorky was already aiming at Tolstoy’s fame and influence.
The prose writer Konstantin Fedin, who knew Gorky well, noted a curious passage in the latter’s reminiscences of Tolstoy: “He was the devil and I was still an infant, and he should not have touched me.” Fedin commented: “I jumped up in delight, reading that ‘still’—‘and I was still an infant!’ What pride, I laughed, running around the room in my unbuttoned army coat, and look where it revealed itself! Still an infant!”10
Gorky had neither Tolstoy’s literary might nor his Yasnaya Polyana estate. But he started early to create a public forum for himself: at the age of thirty-two in 1900, the year he met Tolstoy, Gorky formed the Znanie Publishing House and began by printing his own works in huge numbers, followed by forty collections of works by writers of the realistic and progressive camp, usually edited by Gorky and instantly becoming best sellers.
The aesthete critics attacked the Znanie publications: “Everyone who loves Russian literature and the Russian language should fight the influence of these collections.”11 Interestingly, in 1907 these books, quite uneven in quality but immensely popular, in their distinctive green covers (where you could find Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Kuprin’s The Duel, a sensational work about army life, and the latest by Bunin, but also a dreary naturalistic hodgepodge by someone like Yevgeny Chirikov), were defended by none other than the demanding poet Blok. His article supporting Gorky (albeit with many reservations) drew such indignation from Symbolist circles that Blok almost had a duel with his former best friend, Andrei Bely.
Blok had always considered Leo Tolstoy “the only genius of contemporary Europe.” But when they feted Gorky in starving 1919 Petrograd, it was Blok, famous for his directness and honesty, who essentially declared Gorky Tolstoy’s successor in social and political spheres: “Fate has placed a great burden on Maxim Gorky, as the greatest artist of our day. It has made him the intermediary between the people and the intelligentsia, between two countries which neither yet understand themselves or each other.”12
Even while praising Gorky, Blok still underestimated his ambitions. For Gorky, like Tolstoy, felt being the intermediary between the people and the intelligentsia was not nearly enough. Tolstoy, for all his proclaimed reverence for the people’s initiative, so vividly reflected in War and Peace, still understood that without the direct involvement of the regime, nothing gets done in Russia—thus his appeals by letter to Alexander III and Nicholas II.
Gorky, unlike Tolstoy, did not idealize the Russian people. He characterized them thus: “The most sinful and filthy people on earth, stupid about good and evil, intoxicated by vodka, disfigured by the cynicism of violence, hideously cruel and, at the same time, inexplicably good-natured—and at the end, this is a talented people.”13 So for Gorky, effective dialogue with higher-ups played an even more important role than for Tolstoy.
The émigré poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who knew Gorky well, recalled that “in the depths of Gorky’s soul there always lived awe of power, authority, with its external attributes, which Lenin despised. (You should have heard Gorky’s raptures when describing the visit of Emperor Alexander III to Nizhny Novgorod.)”14 (In 1932, Stalin renamed Nizhny Novgorod as Gorky in the writer’s honor; it became notorious in the 1980s as the closed city where Academician Andrei Sakharov was exiled. It is Nizhny Novgorod now once more. Sic transit gloria mundi.)
Understandably, the former tramp was much more fascinated by power than Count Tolstoy. But Gorky was also a greater realist and in particular realized that Tolstoy’s practical influence on reforms had been limited by the count’s intentional stance as political outsider. It must have seemed a mistake to Gorky.
So, as soon as the February 1917 revolution that overthrew the tsar gave him the opportunity, Gorky enthusiastically plunged into organizational affairs, becoming for a while the de facto minister of culture. The former Imperial Academy of Sciences, which twenty years earlier under pressure from Nicholas II had rescinded its decision electing Gorky an honorary academician, hurriedly crowned him with the title again. Gorky headed countless commissions and committees, composed appeals and resolutions, signed letters. He was in his element, the man of a thousand and one projects.
Gorky’s life motto could have been his declaration: “Knowledge must be democratized, it must be made accessible to the entire nation.” Gorky’s god was culture: “I know of nothing else that can save our country from disaster.” Unlike Tolstoy, a great cultural skeptic, he worshipped this god his whole life: headlong, without a second thought.
Gorky never tired of saying that “ignorance and lack of culture are characteristic of the entire Russian nation. Out of that multimillion mass of unenlightened people, devoid of the concept of life value, we can distinguish just a few thousand of the so-called intelligentsia…. These people, despite all their flaws, are the greatest achievement of Russia throughout its difficult and ugly history, these people were and are the true brains and heart of our country.”15 (Lenin, as we know, did not share this view.)
Gorky devoted the last twenty years of his life to nurturing the “brains and heart” of Russia and defended it tirelessly from danger from above and from below, from the real possibility of being wiped out by rebel peasants or being thrown onto the dustbin of history by the Communist regime. He perceived this as his historical mission. Gorky was unable to come to terms with Lenin and his anti-intelligentsia attitude. Now he was pinning his hopes on the new strong ruler of Russia—Stalin.
The interests and plans of dictator and writer coincided in many aspects, which cemented their relationship. Tsarist cultural policy had been conservative and protective; Nicholas II had no radical plans to enlighten the Russian people. Lenin had embarked on a grand economic and cultural experiment, which Stalin considered his task to bring to a successful conclusion: the building of a completely new society and the creation of the new Soviet man. For Stalin, a necessary part of that unprecedented plan was a forced modernization of Russian society: collectivization, industrialization, and what was particularly close to Gorky’s heart, a planned “acculturation” of the masses.
In letters to Gorky in Italy, Stalin laid out his ambitious program: “The USSR will be a first-class country with the largest, technologically equipped industrial and agricultural production. Socialism is invincible. There will be no more ‘pathetic’ Russia. It’s over! There will be a mighty and abundant progressive Russia.”16 Replying to the leader, Gorky not only supported Stalin’s plans but gave them a cultural footing: “You destroy the way of life that has existed for millennia, a way of life that created a man who is extremely ugly and capable of horrifying bestial conservatism.”17
Stalin apparently found this interesting. In his youth, he had written poetry, and he was a lifelong avid reader of varied nonfiction (history, economics, and so on) and fiction, including foreign and naturally Russian classics as well as contemporary Soviet literature, which Stalin read in real time, as it appeared in periodicals.
He was a great lover of film and classical music, especially Russian opera (Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov). He was frequently seen at the theater. Less educated than Lenin, Stalin was more of a consumer and connoisseur of high culture. Therefore his plans for the overall “civilizing” of the Soviet public gave an important role to literature and art.
Stalin revealed his ideas in 1929 during a three-hour meeting at the Central Committee with party-member Ukrainian writers. It was a frank discussion “among friends” when one of the participants published a few fragments of Stalin’s speech, he was severely chastised by his bosses. Stalin’s unedited remarks were only recently declassified. He explains that without making the entire population literate and “cultured” they will not be able to raise the level of agriculture, industry, or defense.
The peasants and workers must learn to use more complex machinery, soldiers must learn to use maps, explained Stalin to the Communist writers, and therefore “culture is the oxygen without which we cannot take a step forward.” Echoing Gorky, Stalin juxtaposed the backward peasant “who lives sloppy and dirty” to the progressive laborer who “has picked up some knowledge, reads books, wants to manage agriculture in a new way.”18
For such readers there should be new quality works of literature and art: “An awful lot depends on the form, without it there can be no content.”19 (Here too Stalin’s position is similar to that of Gorky, who made constant appeals to writers to raise their craftsmanship, to work on language and form.)
There was one more important issue where they were of one mind then: both felt that Soviet culture needed “consolidation,” and that varying and not necessarily strictly orthodox approaches could coexist under a single Communist umbrella. When overly zealous party writers demanded an implacable class approach to literature, Stalin put them in their place: “Then we’d have to get rid of all the non-Party writers.” And Stalin did not want that in the least.
Apparently, this cultural umbrella under which all writers loyal to the Soviet regime could gather was socialist realism, as invented by Stalin, Gorky, and a few others. Socialist realism was proclaimed the official cultural doctrine in late August 1934 in Moscow at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, a very showy and solemn event, widely covered in the Soviet press, which became the culminating point in Gorky’s work as Stalin’s cultural advisor.
Gorky achieved a number of important goals. During the preparations for the congress, which took several years, the Politburo issued a special resolution on April 23, 1932, liquidating the super-orthodox “proletarian” cultural associations, foremost of them RAPP, which were an obstacle, Gorky felt (and Stalin agreed) to a successful consolidation of the most productive forces in Soviet culture. The chairman of the new literary megastructure, the Union of Soviet Writers, completely formed in 1934, was Gorky.
His dream of state support for cultural workers came to pass, too. A special system was created—first for writers and then for other members of the “creative” intelligentsia—to guarantee members of the unions of writers, artists, architects, cinematographers, composers, and so on, a multitude of privileges that included state commissions for new works, large printings, high fees, more comfortable living conditions, special food parcels, special vacation resorts, and hospitals.
This system of privileges lasted unchanged for almost sixty years, until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It was complex, extremely detailed, and strictly hierarchical, which I discovered in 1972 when I became a member of the Union of Soviet Composers (musicologists could be members, just as literary critics could be members of the Writers’ Union). Naïvely assuming that now I could have a free vacation in one of the tempting resorts that I had heard so much about from my older colleagues, I went to the Moscow Composers’ Union (where I was listed as senior editor of Sovetskaya Muzyka magazine) with an application. They treated me as a loony: there wasn’t a space to be had in any of the resorts, they had all been reserved by more honored comrades.
I had to vacation as I had in years past, visiting my parents in Riga, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. This was my first lesson in how the hidden mechanisms of the Soviet “creative” unions worked. I soon discovered that other privileges written into the bylaws remained empty promises for many of the members: only the nomenklatura elites got to use all the announced perks. But even the crumbs from their table were very tempting in a society of shortages in everything.
Gorky kept coming up with new publishing ideas, which he brought to Stalin. He wanted to bring out several monumental book series: The History of the Village, The History of Factories and Plants, and The History of the Civil War. At first Stalin supported the writer’s initiatives, even joining the editorial board for the History of the Civil War, and not just as a figurehead, but making corrections and insertions on literally every page of manuscript. When the first volume of the series came out in 1936 in an edition of 300,000 copies and sold out completely, Gorky asked Stalin for a second edition of another 100,000, and Stalin complied with his wish. (After Gorky’s death, the project was dropped.)
Gorky’s plan for The History of Factories and Plants was unusual—each book in the enormous series would be devoted to a single industrial enterprise. It was an innovative idea, a precursor to today’s cross-discipline approach to the history of production as part of cultural development. At the time, Stalin approved of this project, too (even though it was never fully implemented): it supported his ambitious plans for industrializing the Soviet Union.
Interestingly, in 1924 Stalin declared that the main character trait to be developed by a true Leninist and the new Soviet man was “the combination of Russian revolutionary sweep and American businesslike approach.”20 Stalin suggested in a cycle of lectures he gave in Moscow soon after Lenin’s death, “American business character is that irrepressible force that knows no bounds, that washes away all obstacles with its business persistence. But American business has every chance of degenerating into a narrow and unprincipled small-time hustle if it is not combined with Russian revolutionary sweep.”21
This curious position had unexpected consequences for culture. Positioning himself as a cultural pragmatist, the leader tried to involve various artists in his plans for industrialization—not only the traditionalists dear to his heart, but also the Russian avant-garde, which he considered repulsive.
By the early 1920s some Russian innovators considered that experimentation in painting had exhausted itself (where could one go after Malevich’s Black Square or Alexander Rodchenko’s 1921 triptych called Smooth Color: Pure Blue, Pure Red, and Pure Yellow?) and moved on to so-called industrial art. The Constructivists came to the fore, with their leader and constant opponent of Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, who had declared: “Not the old, not the new, but the necessary!”
Tatlin’s most famous project was his two-meter wooden model called Monument of the Third International, intended in imitation of the Eiffel Tower as a planned construction for the propaganda apparatus of the Soviet state. The idea was utopian, eventually erecting a glass building 400 meters tall and consisting of three segments revolving at different speeds: a cube below, for the legislative organs, in the middle a pyramid, for administrative and executive agencies, and the top cylinder was to house media, “all the various means of mass information for the international proletariat.” As Punin, a leading theoretician of the avant-garde, commented in 1920, “Implementing this form would mean embodying the dynamic with the same unexcelled majesty as the static is embodied by the pyramids.”22
Tatlin’s bold project remained unfulfilled, as did another idea close to his heart, on which he worked for almost twenty years—an engineless flying machine that would be operated by the occupant’s muscle power, a kind of winged aerial bicycle, which the artist dubbed “Letatlin”(short for Letayushchii Tatlin, Flying Tatlin).
Tatlin’s fantastic aviation model was developed with the help of Soviet military specialists and test pilots and in the early 1930s was demonstrated and discussed in quasi-governmental defense organizations like Osoaviakhim (Volunteer Association for Helping Aviation and the Navy).
Some of Tatlin’s ideas were used in the construction of the latest Soviet planes of the times, and Tatlin was even rewarded financially.23 Along with his students, he also designed furniture, dishes, sanitary and other coats from rubberized fabric, wooden sleighs of a new design, and even an environmentally improved stove that gave more heat using less wood. Tatlin now called himself “lifestyle organizer” and all these works “material culture.” They could also be used in the defense industry.
The desire to do the “necessary” was equally felt by another leading avant-garde artist, Alexander Rodchenko. He set out with Mayakovsky in the 1920s to create the new Soviet advertising: Rodchenko’s vivid drawings and Mayakovsky’s brief and catchy slogans were extremely popular. As Rodchenko recalled: “All of Moscow was covered with our advertisements. All the kiosks of Mosselprom, all the signs, all the posters, all the newspapers and magazines were filled with them.”24
Rodchenko was taken by photography and photomontage, becoming one of its leading innovators with the influential El Lissitzky. Rodchenko’s first works in that medium were phantasmagoric illustrations for Mayakovsky’s poem About That. Having developed his easily recognizable bold photographic style—dynamic composition and unusual angles—the former abstract artist turned into a dominant Soviet photographer and worked with the magazine USSR on the Construction Site (the magazine was yet another of Gorky’s ideas, implemented by Stalin).
Rodchenko went north on assignment for the magazine in 1933 to photograph the construction of the Stalin Belomor-Baltic Canal, built by thousands of convicts. A heavy tome edited by Gorky was published after a highly publicized trip of one hundred twenty writers to the construction site, which took the lives of so many people. A number of major names appeared among the writers of the anthology: Alexei Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Nikolai Tikhonov, Valentin Katayev, D. S. Mirsky; one chapter, about an international thief who turned into a model construction worker at the canal, was written by the popular Soviet satirist, Mikhail Zoshchenko, a favorite of Gorky, which later prompted Solzhenitsyn’s wrath in his Gulag Archipelago: “Oh, humanologist! Have you ever pushed a canal wheelbarrow while on punitive rations?”
Present-day commentators ponder why outstanding writers agreed to participate in an anthology in praise of forced labor and wonder if it was sincere misapprehension? Blindness? Hypocrisy? Fear of repressions? It was probably a complex mix of them all.
Gorky’s moral guilt (he gave his blessing to the volume and wrote the foreword) is obvious, even though it is unlikely that he could have done anything to change Stalin’s plans to use gulag prisoners in Soviet construction projects. On his desk in the luxurious mansion Stalin gave Gorky in Moscow, he kept a netsuke, a small Japanese ivory carving, depicting three monkeys, one covering its eyes, one its ears, and the third its mouth: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. It was a startling symbol of Gorky’s position in that period, and not only his.
Many of Rodchenko’s photographs were used in that ill-starred book, and he tried to explain his emotions in 1935. “I was confused, stunned. I was caught up in the enthusiasm. It all seemed close, everything became clear…Man came and conquered, conquered and rebuilt himself.”25 But his photographs, which at the time probably played the propaganda role expected of them, today tell a completely different story. Intended to be in an optimistic key, they make a devastating impression, serving as one of the great photographic exposés of the Stalinist era.
An outstanding figure among the avant-garde artists Stalin wanted to press into service for his policy of collectivization and industrialization was the crafty favorite of the world film elite, Sergei Eisenstein, sybarite and eccentric. Highly pleased with his influential revolutionary film Battleship Potemkin, Stalin commissioned Eisenstein in 1926 to make a propaganda film about the benefits of collective agriculture, under the grandiloquent title The General Line. The production schedule dragged and the film did not appear until 1929, as Old and New (another title supplied by Stalin).
The pampered gentleman filmmaker did not know or care for the countryside. He created a film that was fantasy, pure and simple: a story about how a peasant woman (played by a real country girl, Marfa Lapkina) joins an agricultural cooperative and becomes a tractor driver. The problem was that the real Marfa never did learn to drive a tractor (which was imported from America), and so they used a double, Eisenstein’s assistant, Grigory Alexandrov, who dressed as a woman and drove the tractor past amazed crowds of peasants.26 It all took place against backdrops of plywood farms built for the film in a village near Moscow from designs by the talented Constructivist architect Andrei Burov, a friend of Le Corbusier.
This Potemkin village served as a backdrop and excuse for Eisenstein to demonstrate his usual cascade of formal experiments, such as the “overtone montage,” which he invented while working on Old and New. According to the director, in this form of editing, the “central stimulus” in a shot is accompanied by “secondary stimuli.” As an example, he gave the episode from Old and New where a scene of harvesting is followed by shots of rain: “the tonal dominant—movement as light oscillation—is accompanied here by the second dominant, a rhythmic one, that is, movement as transference.”27
The dazzling film documentaries of Dziga Vertov were filled with such experimentation in the 1920s—Forward, Soviet!, One Sixth of the World, The Eleventh, and Man with a Movie Camera. Meant to be propaganda for collectivization and industrialization, these Vertov films were not popular among the very masses for whom they were allegedly intended (Old and New was a bomb, too), but along with the works of Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and other Soviet avant-garde filmmakers, they became a veritable encyclopedia of virtuoso technical and artistic techniques later widely employed by many Western directors, cameramen, and editors.
It is difficult to judge the sincerity of the great Soviet avant-garde artists when they still insisted in the late 1920s and early 1930s that the mass audience could and would learn to love their art. In the more than ten years since the revolution, they should have seen that they were unlikely to achieve popular recognition. But almost all of them, as it befits true prophets and utopians, continued to fool themselves and others by trying to prove that they could still be useful to the Soviet regime.
Vladimir Mayakovsky, who today is esteemed most as an intensely lyric poet of great imagination and expressiveness, made superhuman efforts in that regard, insisting publicly, in a speech in Moscow on October 15, 1927, “I don’t give a damn that I’m a poet. I’m not a poet, but first and foremost someone who has placed his pen at the service—note, service—of the current moment, the true reality and its guide—the Soviet government and the party.”28
We can guess that these relentlessly repeated statements were a painful pose, in light of Mayakovsky’s final, tragic act. On April 14, 1930, the poet, thirty-six, shot himself: he was tired of “stepping on the throat of my own song,” as he put it.
The bitter irony was that when Esenin hanged himself in 1925, Mayakovsky condemned the suicide unflinchingly in the name of all the poets loyal to the Soviet regime, “who have organically welded themselves with the revolution, with the class, and see before them the big and optimistic path.”29 At that time, Mayakovsky fulfilled the “civic commission” of the state, writing the poem “To Sergei Esenin,” which was supposed to counteract the effect of the last lines of Esenin’s farewell poem that had prompted so many suicides:
In this life dying is nothing new,
But living, of course, is no newer.
Mayakovsky’s reply to that was:
In this life dying is not hard,
Making a life is significantly harder.
And now, Mayakovsky repeated Esenin’s move, when dying was obviously easier than living, and chose the “false beauty of death”(as he had condemned Esenin’s suicide) to “making life” in a socialist society.
Mayakovsky’s fans were profoundly shocked. Boris Pasternak later recalled, “I think that Mayakovsky shot himself out of pride, over something in himself or around him that his pride could not accept.”30 For the authorities, his suicide must have been an unforgivable weakness. That made all the more inexplicable Stalin’s cultural and political gesture some five years later when he declared (via Pravda) that Mayakovsky was “the best, the most talented poet of our Soviet era.”31
This totally unexpected statement by the country’s supreme cultural arbiter, which immediately elevated Mayakovsky to join Gorky as patron saint of Soviet literature, stunned many: why aggrandize a patently avant-garde poet? It seemed to counter Stalin’s general preference for realism in literature and art.
Stalin must have been pleased, for with one brief declaration he had achieved several goals. First, he created a kind of counterbalance to Gorky’s overly saintly reputation as the highest Soviet literary authority. Then, he demonstrated a certain independence from the cultural tastes of his mentor, Lenin, who disliked Mayakovsky’s poetry. And last, in a growing atmosphere of pushing the avant-garde artists out, even from “industrial art,” where they had been allowed for some time to frolic with their utopian projects, Stalin tossed a bone to the comparatively small but very active (and therefore politically important) stratum of revolutionary urban youth, who idolized Mayakovsky with his propagandistic “temperament of the prophet Elijah,” in Gorky’s envious observation.
People forget now that in his time even Lenin had to take that into account. When on February 21, 1921, he met with a group of Moscow art students and asked, “What do you read? Do you read Pushkin?” the reply was, “Oh, no, he was bourgeois. We read Mayakovsky.”32 Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who left a record of this episode, recalled that after that meeting Lenin “grew a bit kinder” to Mayakovsky: he saw that the poet had a following, as she put it, of “young people, full of life and joy, ready to die for the Soviet regime, not finding words in the contemporary language to express themselves and seeking that expression in the hard-to-understand poems of Mayakovsky.”33
Stalin was even more pragmatic than Lenin in his attitude toward the political aspects of culture. In 1935 he was preparing to destroy his political opponents, including Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Bukharin. Each had his own followers. They could be scared off by terror, which was Stalin’s plan. But Stalin also wanted to win some of them over to his side—after all, they were fanatically loyal to communist ideals, honest, energetic, hardworking, and optimistic. Many of them adored Mayakovsky’s poetry.
For that part of the urban youth, as the playwright Alexander Gladkov, himself a great fan of Mayakovsky’s, later recalled, typical character traits were “spiritual fastidiousness and disdain for chauvinism, bribe-taking, and false erudition.”34 Those were the people Stalin had in mind when he spoke of combining American business spirit with Russian revolutionary sweep as a model for the progressive Soviet workers. His approving words about Mayakovsky seemed like an important signal to them. For Stalin it was just one of many moves in his lengthy and ingenious political and cultural chess game.
Chapter Six
December 5, 1935, the day Pravda published Stalin’s definitive assessment of Mayakovsky as “the best, the most talented poet of our Soviet era,” was the culminating point in the political history of Russian left art. No other avant-garde artist was ever—before or after—heralded on such a high state level as a model for national culture. No other oeuvre of a committed Futurist ever became the object, even in a distorted and truncated form, of such intense inculcation into the masses from above. The result was a half-century cult of Mayakovsky’s personality and work that the poet could have only dreamed about. The paradox is that this canonization also marked the end of any real participation of actual avant-garde art in the country’s cultural development.
As Stalin had undoubtedly planned, a frontal attack on “formalism” in culture was initiated in 1936. Formalism was defined by the authoritative Soviet Short Literary Encyclopedia as “an aesthetic tendency expressed in a disparity between form and content and the absolutization of the role of form.”1 In practice, the word was used as a political label to suppress the slightest deviation from the current party line in culture, both in Stalin’s lifetime and for many years after his death.
It would be hard to find an outstanding Soviet writer, poet, artist, director, or composer who at some point, somewhere, was not accused by someone at least once of the sin of formalism. They repented of the sin just as ritually, almost mechanically.
The antiformalist campaign of 1936 began with the infamous editorial whose title, “Muddle Instead of Music,” has become a symbol of the state’s diktat in the cultural sphere. It appeared in Pravda, the country’s main newspaper, on January 28 and was most probably written or dictated by Stalin.2 The editorial brutally criticized the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, based on a story by Nikolai Leskov, which was written by the young composer Dmitri Shostakovich and had been running with great success for two years in Leningrad, before Stalin heard it on January 26, 1936, at a performance of the Bolshoi Theater’s annex in Moscow.
Stalin left the theater enraged by this “tragedy-satire,” as the composer named it, about a provincial merchant’s wife, Katerina Izmailova, who kills her husband and father-in-law to be with her lover and commits suicide on the way to a prison camp in Siberia. He expressed his indignation in the Pravda editorial: “The listener from the very first minute is stunned by the opera’s intentionally unharmonious muddled flow of sounds. Snatches of melody, embryos of musical phrases drown, escape, and once again vanish in rumbling, creaking, and squealing. To follow this ‘music’ is difficult, to remember it impossible.”
But Stalin would not have been the effective politician he was if he had not used a concrete excuse (in this case, his real irritation with Shostakovich’s expressionist music and macabre plot) to let the urban intelligentsia know that the time of comparative tolerance of avant-garde culture, which could be called the “Lunacharsky era,” was over once and for all. “The danger of this tendency in Soviet music is clear. Leftist ugliness in opera is growing from the same source as leftist ugliness in painting, poetry, pedagogy, and science. Petty bourgeois ‘innovation’ is leading to a gap away from true art, science, from true literature.” For those who were slow on the uptake, Stalin warned quite unambiguously: “This is playing at esoteric things, which can end very badly.”3
First to hand, Shostakovich got battered two more times by Pravda: in an editorial on February 6, “Ballet Falsehood” (aimed at his colossally successful comic ballet at the Bolshoi Theater about kolkhoz life, The Limpid Stream) and on February 13 in another unsigned article (“Clear and Simple Language in Art”), which once again attacked Shostakovich’s opera and ballet: “Both these works are equally far from the clear, simple, and truthful language in which Soviet art must speak.”4
At the same time, Pravda fired an entire antiformalist volley, printing another four editorials between February 13 and March 9 with threatening headlines: “A Crude Scheme Instead of Historical Truth”(about film), “Cacophony in Architecture,” “About Blotting Artists,” and “External Glitter and False Contents” (about dramatic theater). Stalin’s ideas on the fate of the avant-garde were coming to pass; back in 1932, in a conversation with a culture functionary, Ivan Gronsky, he said, “The nonsense with these fashionable tendencies in art has to be ended.”
Unexpectedly for Stalin, Maxim Gorky, whom he had elevated so high, came out against the antiformalist attack. The dictator had expected Gorky to be his ally in this matter: the idea, after all, was “to banish crudity and savagery from every corner of Soviet life,” as it was put in “Muddle Instead of Music.” Stalin and Gorky both believed that Russia, that backward agrarian country with a population that was mostly illiterate, had to be made kulturny in the shortest time possible. The achievement of collectivization and industrialization, a top priority for Bolsheviks, was impossible without such forced “acculturation.”
The fate of the hapless Russian peasantry, caught in these catastrophic developments, did not worry Gorky as much as the vicissitudes of the “leading proletariat” and the urban intelligentsia. He also needed to maintain his reputation as the “great humanist” in Europe, where Gorky’s influential friends, like Romain Rolland and André Malraux, were voicing alarm about the treatment of Shostakovich and other “formalists”(the peasants were of much less concern for the French as well).
That is why Gorky reacted quite nervously to Stalin’s antiformalist pogrom. In the middle of March 1936, Gorky wrote a terse letter to Stalin, which was basically a demand that he disavow the attacks on Shostakovich in Pravda. The secret police also reported to Stalin that “Gorky is very displeased by discussions of formalism.”
Despite the prevalent view in our day of Stalin as a one-track tyrant, he knew how to maneuver when it suited him. He cut off the attack on Shostakovich and supported his 1937 Fifth Symphony, characterizing it (anonymously, again) as a “businesslike creative response of a Soviet artist to just criticism.”5 For Stalin this was a tactical (and rather humiliating) retreat, which he avenged more than a decade later.
Stalin came to power bolstered by many qualities needed by a successful politician: inhuman energy and capacity to work; the ability to comprehend and formulate the essence of a social problem, to understand the emotion of the masses and direct it as needed; the knack for maneuvering, biding his time, pitting his opponents against one another, and coolly choosing the right moment for getting rid of them and destroying them.
Yet there was one quality that is quite desirable in the leader of an influential European state with planetary ambitions, as the Russian empire had traditionally been (and also was in its incarnation as the Soviet Union), that Stalin lacked: international experience. Unlike Lenin and his comrades-in-arms, much less the high officials of tsarist Russia, Stalin had never spent much time abroad and was not acquainted with the Western political and cultural elite.
Trotsky maintained that when Stalin met with Westerners, he demonstrated the “insecurity and shyness of a provincial who does not speak foreign languages and is lost when dealing with people he cannot order about and who do not fear him.”6 We know of a private remark by Maxim Litvinov, Commissar of Foreign Affairs, about Stalin’s foreign policy: “He doesn’t know the West…. If our enemies were a few shahsor sheiks, he would outsmart them.”7 Litvinov underestimated his boss. Tricked by Hitler, Stalin won in the end, and in dealing with such giants as Churchill and Roosevelt, he showed himself to be at least their equal in international maneuvering. The road to this intellectual parity was not an easy one for Stalin, but he was a good student, mastering the lessons and advice of people with a wider worldview, knowledge of languages, and European connections, such as Lenin and other old party leaders with émigré experience.
It is also obvious that Gorky was an excellent advisor for Stalin. Lenin had told Gorky: “It is always stimulating speaking with you, since you have a more varied and wider set of impressions.” It was through Gorky that Stalin made personal contact with the luminaries of European culture. Here is an interesting chronology: June 29, 1931, Stalin met George Bernard Shaw; December 13, Emil Ludwig, a popular German writer at the time; August 4, 1933, the French writer and Communist Henri Barbusse; July 23, 1934, H. G. Wells; and June 28, 1935, Romain Rolland. They all came away charmed by Stalin.
After Gorky’s death in 1936 Stalin had only one more meeting with a prominent foreign writer (Lion Feuchtwanger, January 8, 1937). It was the last such dialogue in Stalin’s life. Without Gorky’s helpful hints on how to deal with people like that, Stalin apparently decided not to risk it. And he must have been tired of playing the role of the “great humanitarian” and controlling himself.
Nobel laureate Rolland’s impressions of Stalin were typical: “Absolute simplicity, straightforwardness, truthfulness. He does not impose his viewpoint. He says, ‘Perhaps we were mistaken.’”8 One can imagine Stalin’s hidden laughter when he told Rolland: “It is very unpleasant for us to condemn and execute. It is dirty work. It would be better to remain above politics and keep our hands clean.”9
Gorky seems to have been sincere in believing that his influence could “humanize” Stalin. Their correspondence, declassified in the late 1990s, shows that the writer showered Stalin with requests (as he had earlier done to Lenin) to help countless cultural figures. This had to have annoyed Stalin at some point, as it had Lenin. Moreover, Gorky had lost some of his aura as world luminary in Stalin’s eyes. This happened when the writer, despite enormous support from the Soviets, did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In the early 1930s a serious battle broke out among the Western literati over which Russian writer would be the first to win the Nobel Prize. Neither Leo Tolstoy nor Chekhov had become Nobel laureates (Chekhov had died too soon, and Tolstoy irritated the Swedish Academy with his radical political views and “hostility toward culture”). The prize had grown to be the most prestigious literary award in the world. Inevitably, political considerations as well as aesthetics went into the decision-making process. One of the polarizing political issues was the division of Russian culture after 1917 into two parts: the mainland—that is, Soviet—and the diaspora—émigré.
More than two million former citizens of the Russian empire were tossed outside the country’s borders by the Bolshevik revolution. These émigrés settled in dozens of countries, literally all over the world, but the biggest centers of the diaspora were first Berlin (where more than half a million former Russians lived in the early 1920s) and then Paris.
The intelligentsia formed the majority of the immigrants, which was rather an exception for such mass resettlements. This explains the extraordinary cultural activity of the Russian diaspora. In Berlin alone there were dozens of Russian-language newspapers and magazines and close to seventy publishing houses.
Understandably, most of the immigrants were hostile to the Soviet regime. It repaid them in kind, having good reason to fear that the intellectual potential of these people would be used in the struggle with Bolshevism. This is exactly what happened. The Western states tried to create a “cordon sanitaire” around Soviet Russia, using the scattered elements of the White Army that had lost the Civil War to the Bolsheviks. The Russian cultural émigrés gave ideological support for the military. In Paris, Dmitri Merezhkovsky and his wife, Zinaida Hippius, formerly prominent Russian Symbolists, were active in “White” circles.
Gorky had tense relations with these people. In 1906, Merezhkovsky had written: “Gorky deserves his fame: he opened new, unknown countries, a new continent of the spiritual world; he is the first and the only, in all likelihood, unique in his field.”10 But just two years later Merezhkovsky grumbled: “Once Gorky had seemed a great artist—and has stopped being one.”11 It went downhill from there.
With some émigrés Gorky was more friendly; he valued Vladislav Khodasevich, a truly great poet who wrote a precious few refined and profoundly pessimistic poems. Early on, Gorky considered him “the best poet of contemporary Russia” and raved: “Khodasevich for me is immeasurably higher than Pasternak.”12 But later, in a letter to Stalin (1931), Gorky changed his mind: “He is a typical decadent, a man both physically and spiritually flabby, filled with misanthropy and hatred for all people.”13
Particularly complex were relations between Gorky and Ivan Bunin, the leading figure of the Russian literary diaspora. Introduced in 1899 on the Yalta boardwalk by Chekhov, they became fast friends, and Gorky published a lot of Bunin (especially his fine poetry) in the popular collections of his Znanie Publishing House.
Gorky was always impressed by Bunin’s craftsmanship, but he was more skeptical of his human qualities: “A talented artist, marvelous connoisseur of every word, he is a dried-up, unkind man, who is ridiculously careful of himself. He knows his own value, even somewhat exaggerates it, and he is demanding and vain, capricious to the people close to him, and tends to use them cruelly.”14
Gorky the tramp and Bunin the aristocrat had similarly unsentimental views of the Russian muzhik, which Bunin expressed most vividly in his novella (which he considered a novel), The Village (1910). Gorky wrote to Bunin in delight: “In every phrase there are compressed three, four objects, every page is a museum!”15 Gorky considered Bunin among the major figures of the Znanie circle (along with Leonid Andreyev and Alexander Kuprin). After the revolution, which the conservative Bunin abhorred, he distanced himself from Gorky, declaring that he considered their relationship “ended forever.”
In emigration, Bunin continually attacked Gorky’s pro-Soviet position, his work and even his image, mocking Gorky’s “crude fairy tales about his allegedly miserable childhood, sprinkled with thousands of adventures, his laughably innumerable travels and encounters, and his imaginary life as a tramp.”16
Bunin was jealous of Gorky’s bond with Tolstoy. He had met Tolstoy, whom he idolized, only a few times. Tolstoy had no interest in Bunin, either as a writer or a human being, and once made a very disparaging remark about him. His attitude toward Gorky was very different, he was curious about him, this vibrant person from a different world. (The perceptive Marina Tsvetaeva sensed this intuitively; she considered Gorky “bigger, and more human, and more exceptional, and more needed” than Bunin: “Gorky is an era, while Bunin is the end of an era.”)17
In his reminiscences of Tolstoy, Gorky’s descriptions of the great elder are sometimes barbed, and Tolstoy could appear, as Eikhenbaum noted, as “a devious old man, a wizard, listlessly speaking of God, an obscenity-spewing mischief maker.”18 Gorky never felt himself to be Tolstoy’s devout ideological follower, so different were their cultural positions. At the end of his life, Tolstoy became a cultural anarchist in his rejection of high art for its pretense and falsehood. Gorky, on the contrary, adulated culture.
Gentlemen! If the world
Cannot find the way to holy truth,
Glory to the madman
Who can instill the golden dream in mankind.
Those simplistic verses from his play Lower Depths contain “Gorky’s motto that determined his entire life, as a writer, social figure, and personally,”19 observed Khodasevich. For Bunin, who was a Tolstoyan in his youth and in the 1930s wrote a book filled with the greatest piety, The Liberation of Tolstoy, in which he compared the writer to Jesus Christ and Buddha, Gorky’s position was alien. Now, their political and aesthetic disagreements were intensified by the ever-growing rivalry between Gorky and Bunin in the international cultural arena, centering on the Nobel Prize.
The prize was first awarded in 1901 in Stockholm in accordance with the will of the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel, who had died five years earlier. Given every fall by the Swedish Academy on the recommendations of the Nobel Committee, it soon became internationally authoritative. It aroused nationalistic and political passions. A ritual developed that continues to this day: the world press begins its guessing game in September and October, publicizing various lists of potential winners and creating an atmosphere of tense anticipation.
Because of the secrecy surrounding the selection, the press is more often wrong than right in its predictions. The lucky winner is hailed and derided and all this adds to the mystic aura of the Nobel.
Much has been written about Alfred Nobel and his family, but the Russian connection is not often remembered. Ludwig, Alfred’s older brother, turned the steel mill founded by their father in St. Petersburg in 1862 into one of Europe’s largest diesel manufacturing enterprises. (It still exists under the name Russkii Dizel.)
The innovative diesel engines ran on oil, so the Nobels built an oil refinery in Baku in the Caucasus. Ludwig’s son, Emmanuel Nobel (1859–1932), ran the family business in Russia for almost thirty years, until the revolution of 1917. His sister, Marta, married a Russian journalist, Oleinikov, her senior by seventeen years. Thus the scene was set for the intrigue around the Nobel Prize that pitted Gorky against Bunin.
Romain Rolland played a direct role in this intrigue from the start. In the early 1920s, Rolland, enraptured by Bunin’s short story “The Gentleman from San Francisco,” agreed to support his bid for the award (“He is zealously, biliously antirevolutionary, antidemocratic, antipopulist, almost antihumanitarian, a pessimist to the marrow of his bones. But an artist of genius!”),20 but with one proviso: “If Gorky were to be nominated, I would vote for him.”21 However, in 1928, when Gorky was one of the finalists, the prize went to the Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset.
During the NEP period (1921–1927), the Soviet government permitted some cultural contacts with the émigrés, and works by Bunin—of course, without his permission and without any royalties—were printed in Russia even by state publishing houses. At that time, in an attempt to divide and neutralize the emigration, the Soviet regime was playing complicated games with some intellectual diaspora groups, such as the Eurasianists.
This ambivalent picture changed sharply after 1928, when books by Bunin and other leading émigré writers were banned and even expunged from libraries. (The remarkable writer Varlam Shalamov, sent to Siberian labor camps in 1943, got an additional ten-year sentence for carelessly characterizing Bunin as a “great Russian author” in a conversation.) That was when the real iron curtain fell between Moscow and the diaspora, for a long sixty years (with a brief hiatus in the early postwar years, when the Soviet poet Konstantin Simonov was sent to Paris by Stalin to meet with Bunin).
This explains why it was so politically important which Russian writer would first receive the Nobel Prize. Giving it to Gorky could be interpreted as support from the world cultural community for the revolutionary changes in Russia. Awarding it to Bunin or another émigré (the names of Merezhkovsky, Kuprin, Balmont, and Ivan Shmelev were circulating as possible candidates) would send exactly the opposite message.
The prize would also show whom Europe considered the true heir to Leo Tolstoy in Russian literature. Before the very first Nobel Prize was announced in 1901, the general expectation was that the recipient would be Tolstoy. When instead it was given to the minor French poet Sully-Prudhomme, a group of indignant Swedish writers and artists, including August Strindberg, Selma Lagerlöf, and Andreas Zorn, sent Tolstoy a letter that also appeared in the Russian press: “Everyone is outraged by the fact that the Academy out of political and religious considerations that have nothing to do with literature demonstratively ignored the achievements of Tolstoy.”22
Both sides used all their behind-the-scenes resources. Bunin’s most powerful ally may have been Emmanuel Ludwigovich (as the Bunin family called him) Nobel. This is apparent from a close reading of the diaries of Bunin and his wife (and also of Galina Kuznetsova, then Bunin’s mistress) of the early 1930s, when the question of the “Russian Nobel” leaped back on the agenda.
Emmanuel Nobel even sent his Russian brother-in-law, Oleinikov, as an emissary to Bunin in France to discuss the ticklish details—after all, officially Nobel had no right to influence the members of the academy. (Kuznetsova recorded in her diary that Nobel sent a letter in 1931 “where he writes that he is for Bunin: he had read five or six of his books and is delighted by them.”)23 That is why when Oleinikov let them know that his brother-in-law had a brain hemorrhage (he died the following year), Bunin took this as a catastrophe.24
Another important figure who supported Bunin in his quest for the Nobel was Thomas Masaryk, president of Czechoslovakia, an influential patron of the Russian diaspora culture. The Soviet government went on the counterattack, pressuring the Swedes through diplomatic channels: as Bunin was informed, “the Bolsheviks are agitating against an ‘émigré prize,’ and spreading rumors that if it happens they will break the agreement”25 (the Soviet Union and Sweden were close to announcing telephone communications between the two countries).
The Soviet candidate for the Nobel Prize was Gorky, naturally. According to information given to Bunin, the Bolsheviks had support from Germany. The democratic West, especially France, backed Bunin. The Soviet strategy did not succeed: after two unsuccessful attempts, Bunin finally got the Nobel Prize in 1933, thereby beating not only Gorky, but Stalin as well (which was gleefully noted in the international press). The fact that Bunin stayed at the Nobel house in Stockholm instead of a hotel like the other laureates who had come for the ceremonies was not reported widely.
Bunin’s speech, which he delivered in French, after accepting the Nobel medal (and a check for 80,000 francs) from King Gustav V in Stockholm on December 10, 1933, was broadcast all over the world. The thin, gray author, looking like a Roman patrician, was restrained—undoubtedly by previous arrangement with the Nobel family. He did not say a single word about the Bolsheviks, but did stress that this was the first time in the prize’s history that it was given to an exile and that the gesture, politically significant, “proved once more that in Sweden the love of liberty is truly a national cult.” As Kuznetsova wrote in her diary, “the word ‘exile’ created a stir” among the VIPs attending the ceremony, “but everything turned out all right.”26
But once Bunin returned to France, he no longer felt constrained by diplomatic protocol and he spoke out about Bolshevism without euphemisms: “I am personally completely certain that nothing more despicable, lying, evil, and despotic than this regime ever existed in human history, even in the most depraved and bloody times.”27
The presentation of the Nobel Prize to Bunin had to be perceived by Stalin not only as a serious blow to the international authority (and therefore, to his potential usefulness on the international scene) of his most trusted cultural advisor, but also as an unforgivable cultural humiliation for the entire country. And so the extraordinary political mystique of the Nobel Prize for Literature for twentieth-century Russian culture was born. Here is an intriguing note. In Bunin’s published diary for October 1, 1933, that is, almost six weeks before the official announcement of his award, a laconic and somewhat mysterious reference appears to a postcard that he allegedly received from Stalin.28 What could the Communist dictator have had to say to the great White émigré author?
The coolness that arose between Stalin and Gorky, noticed by many observers, affected the result of a notable international cultural and political event: suggested by Ilya Ehrenburg and formulated by Gorky and Stalin, the International Writers’ Congress “in defense of culture from fascism” took place in Paris in June 1935.
At the time, some European intellectuals perceived the Soviet Union as the most reliable anti-Hitler force. They considered the barbaric Nazi ideas a grave threat to the traditional values of European humanism. So-called Popular Fronts uniting liberals and communists were organized in France and Spain to combat fascism. The writers’ congress in Paris was intended to cement this union on a world scale.
Stalin allocated major expenditures for the congress. He wanted superstars like George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway to come to Paris and to support the USSR’s leadership in the antifascist coalition. Soviet backstage ideologue Ehrenburg and the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, Stalin’s favorite, dealt with the practical side. But the central role had been assigned to Gorky from the start, and his presence would have guaranteed the congress both gravitas and the “correct” political line.
However, Gorky suddenly refused to go to Paris, blaming his health in a letter to Stalin and adding that the congress “does not seem particularly important to me.”29 In Gorky’s absence, the situation in Paris quickly spun out of control. In Thomas Mann’s stead came his brother, Heinrich, not nearly as important; instead of Shaw and Wells, there was Aldous Huxley. André Gide and André Malraux, representing France, were no match for Romain Rolland, who pointedly went to Moscow to be with Gorky. Besides, Gide and Malraux demanded that Babel and Pasternak, who were not in the original list of the Soviet delegation, attend the congress, and they permitted French Trotskyites to be heard at the congress, criticizing Soviet policy. The latter, from Stalin’s point of view, was an open challenge. Pathologically suspicious, Stalin must have wondered whether Malraux and Gide were sabotaging his policies intentionally and who was helping them on the Soviet side.
Still, Stalin permitted both writers to visit the Soviet Union as honored guests. This was done on the insistent recommendation of Gorky and Koltsov. Malraux had already been to Moscow before the congress, and now came to spend time with Gorky at his Crimean dacha, after a meeting in Moscow with Meyerhold to discuss a planned Moscow production of a play based on his novel La Condition humaine [Man’s Fate]. At the time, Malraux was secretary of the leftist international Association of Writers in the Defense of Culture, founded under the aegis of the congress and intended to actively participate in world politics. He was full of ambitious projects, including a new journal and a large-scale Encyclopedia of the Twentieth Century, modeled after the famous Encyclopédie of eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot.
According to his plan, this new Encyclopédie would be published simultaneously in four languages—French, English, Spanish, and Russian. Malraux suggested Bukharin as head of the Soviet editorial board. The encyclopedia would be funded, of course, by the Soviets.
Gorky, who adored all kinds of grandiose epochal projects, was in full agreement with Malraux’s plan and personnel suggestions. He informed Stalin of them right away, in March 1936. Citing the opinions of Babel (who “understands people very well and is the wisest of our literary figures”) and Koltsov, Gorky endorsed Malraux’s idea that “by organizing the intelligentsia of Europe against Hitler and his philosophy, against Japanese warmongering, we are instilling the idea of the inevitability of world social revolution.”30
The Frenchman’s crazy projects paradoxically fit the Soviet political and cultural intrigues at the highest level. We now know that Gorky and Bukharin were nurturing the idea of creating a political association that would be an alternative to the communists—the “party of nonparty members,” or “union of intellectuals.” Gorky was to head the organization.
Interestingly, Stalin at first toyed with this idea, for he was thinking about uniting all the strata of Soviet society while at the same time positioning himself as leader of the international antifascist forces. A cultural “party of nonparty members,” controlled by Stalin, could be a useful tool. That is why Malraux’s propositions were for a moment taken so seriously in the Soviet Union. All this was crushed with Gorky’s death and led to calamity.
Gorky died on June 18, 1936. It is still hotly debated whether people in Gorky’s inner circle, infiltrated with informers and secret agents, had hastened his end on Stalin’s orders. (The old writer annoyed the dictator with his unpredictability and whims.) In any case, it is clear that Gorky was seriously ill: the autopsy revealed that his lungs were almost totally calcified (as a result of many years of tuberculosis); when the pathologist tossed them into a basin they made a clanking noise, a witness recalled.
Moscow radio announced the death of a “great Russian writer, a genius of verbal art, the selfless friend of the working man, and fighter for the victory of communism.” More than a half million paid their respects to Gorky on his bier in the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions, on June 19; and about one hundred thousand people were let in by special pass to the funeral on Red Square. Standing atop Lenin’s mausoleum, Stalin listened to the Chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars, Vyacheslav Molotov, opening the ceremony: “After Lenin, the death of Gorky is the greatest loss for our country and for humanity.”
One of the speakers was André Gide, who had arrived in Moscow on the eve of Gorky’s death. He spoke on behalf of the Association of Writers in the Defense of Culture that was headed by Malraux. His interpreter was Koltsov, who later told his brother that Stalin had asked him: “Comrade Koltsov, what, does this André Gide have great authority in the West?” When Koltsov answered affirmatively, Stalin regarded him suspiciously and said, skeptically: “Well, please God. Please God he is.”31 He did not like being led around by the nose.
Stalin’s grave doubts were quickly confirmed; as Ehrenburg wrote in his memoirs, in the Soviet Union, André Gide “was wholeheartedly delighted by everything but when he got back to Paris, he condemned everything just as wholeheartedly. I don’t know what happened to him: another person’s soul is a mystery.”32 Even toward the end of his life, Ehrenburg maintained the fiction of being surprised, not mentioning the fact that the last days of Gide’s sojourn in the USSR coincided with the open Moscow trial of the “anti-Soviet united center”(Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and other old Bolsheviks who were opposed to Stalin), which signaled the beginning of the Great Terror.
All sixteen defendants were executed on August 24, 1936, a little more than two months after Gorky’s death. Such brutality was a shock not only to Gide; even the experienced cynic Babel had been certain that they would be pardoned. Stalin did not allow Gide to attend the trial, despite his requests; he did not grant the writer a meeting, either.
The somersault in Gide’s attitude toward the Soviets was now seen by Stalin as a planned act of sabotage (“the enemy’s calculation is evident here”). Stalin decided that Malraux was also a spy and saboteur. In 1938–1939, the Soviet intellectuals in contact with the two French writers—Koltsov, Babel, and Meyerhold—were arrested on Stalin’s personal orders. Only Ehrenburg was spared.
The causes, sources, aims, and consequences (including the total number of victims) of the Great Terror (its parameters usually defined as the summer of 1936 to the end of 1938) are still not fully understood and measured, and it is unlikely that much-needed clarity will come in the near future, despite the research being done.
The differences of opinion on the Great Terror in contemporary Russia are astonishing, especially within the conservative wing. Solzhenitsyn characterized this period as a frontal “attack of the Law on the People,” when innocents were delivered a “crushing blow,” while the ultranationalist historian Oleg Platonov in his 2004 book, State Treason: The Conspiracy Against Russia, stated that “the majority of people repressed in 1937 and later were enemies of the Russian people. In destroying the Bolshevik guard, Stalin not only dealt with his rivals for power but to some degree expiated his guilt before the Russian people, for whom the execution of the revolutionary pogrom attackers was an act of historical vengeance.”33
There is a certain smugness in the writings of some Russian conservative historians when it comes to the repressions during the Great Terror against the urban intelligentsia, which, they feel, did not come to the defense of the peasantry in time. The Russian intelligentsia may be guilty of many sins, but it did not deserve the blow that befell it in those years. Behind every person arrested and sucked into the funnel of the Stalin repressions came the family and relatives, followed by distant relatives, coworkers, subordinates, and mere acquaintances. As a historian noted: “It seemed as if the flywheel of repression slipped out of the hands of those who were turning it: the resulting purges shattered the system of management of the economy, beheaded the army, and demoralized the party.”34 It also frayed the fabric of the culture.
At least six hundred published authors were arrested during the Great Terror, that is, almost a third of the members of the Union of Soviet Writers. They are all to be pitied as human beings. There weren’t all that many major writers among them; many of the figures were party workers first and foremost, “moonlighting” as writers. The cultural damage, however, cannot be calculated only by the number of arrested and executed geniuses; the corrosive atmosphere of omnipresent fear, suspicion, uncertainty, and epidemic levels of informing and self-censorship of the Great Terror fatally poisoned the moral climate.
As historians now believe, Stalin began the Great Terror with several political goals: to cement his personal rule, to quash real and imaginary opposition and the Fifth Column, to intimidate the populace, and as an economic bonus, to guarantee cheap slave labor for his industrial efforts. Once he thought he had achieved those ends and saw that society was on the verge of total destabilization, Stalin started curtailing the terror in 1939, admitting that it had been accompanied by “numerous errors.”
But it was that moment when the demoralized elites tried to catch their breath that Stalin sent another terrifying signal to the intelligentsia: Koltsov, Babel, and Meyerhold were arrested in late 1938 and early 1939 and shot, after an unusual delay, probably caused by Stalin’s deliberations, in early 1940.
All three had been accused of being part of an “anti-Soviet Trotskyite group” and of participating in a “conspiratorial terrorist organization” as agents of French and other foreign intelligence services. They were blamed for their contacts with Malraux, who at that moment in Stalin’s imagination had turned into a major Western spy and provocateur, responsible for many failures in Stalin’s foreign policy. (A prominent Soviet writer told me that in the 1960s, when he began traveling to the West, the KGB tried to recruit him, using Malraux as an example and model: for some reason the recruiter thought that an irresistible argument.)
Koltsov, Babel, and Meyerhold were forced to confess their “guilt” and inform on the crème de la crème of Soviet culture—Pasternak, Shostakovich, Eisenstein, Alexei Tolstoy, and Yuri Olesha, author of the fine short novels Envy and Three Fat Men. We know the methods used from the statements (to the prosecutor and also to the Chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars Molotov) by Meyerhold, who had renounced his statements, as had Babel. “I was beaten—a sick sixty-year-old man, they made me lie face down on the floor, beating me with a rubber hose on the soles of my feet and back, when I was seated in a chair, they used the rubber to hit my feet (from above, with great force) and along the legs from the knee to the top of the feet. And in subsequent days, when those parts of my legs were covered with large internal bruises, they beat me again on those red-blue-yellow spots with the hose, and the pain was so strong that it felt as if they were pouring boiling water on those painful, sensitive spots (I screamed and wept with pain). They beat my back with that hose, they beat my face with big swings from above…the investigator kept repeating and threatening me: ‘If you don’t sign (that is, make it up?), we will keep beating you leaving only your head and right hand untouched, the rest we’ll turn into a piece of formless bloody chopped meat.’ And I signed everything.”35
The fate of major figures like Meyerhold was decided by Stalin personally: when he put two vertical lines next to the name of the accused, it meant a ten-year sentence; one line meant execution. Stalin put one line on Meyerhold’s file.
It is often said that he did it because he did not like Meyerhold’s avant-garde theater productions. That is hard to believe. Stalin, a politician through and through, was capable of overcoming aesthetic and personal dislike if it served his cause. He praised the avant-garde poet Mayakovsky and he did not touch Tatlin or Rodchenko. Andrei Platonov, whose prose he hated, was never arrested. On the other hand, Stalin never had a more loyal cultural functionary than Koltsov, whom he had killed.
The answer to this riddle may lie in the fact that for Stalin the removal of an important opponent was just a winning move in a political chess game. Did Stalin ever make mistakes, even from his own extremely cynical and ruthless, often cannibalistic, point of view? Of course, more than once. One such grave error within Stalin’s political paradigm was killing Koltsov, Meyerhold, and Babel.
Stalin was obviously basing his thinking on the situation at hand. In 1939, the Soviet leader unexpectedly changed his foreign policy, entering into an alliance with Hitler and thus giving up his antifascist pretense. Consequently, he dropped all his carefully developed plans for uniting the international anti-Hitlerite and liberal intellectuals under the aegis of the Soviet Union.
Stalin now considered all that effort and expense an abject failure. A particularly painful event was the loss of the Soviet-supported republican government of Spain in the civil war begun by General Francisco Franco in 1936. Franco was helped by Germany and fascist Italy, and antifascists from all over the world came to help the republicans, including Ernest Hemingway and Malraux. Stalin’s political emissary in Spain was Koltsov, whose attempts to bond the pro-Soviet elements in Spain failed. Someone had to pay for that and other international fiascoes.
Stalin always found “traitors” and “saboteurs” to be useful lightning rods and scapegoats. In this case, the part was given to a group of leading Soviet cultural figures who in his view had been mere puppets in the hands of Gide and Malraux and through them served their “real masters,” the European imperialists and plutocrats from France and England.
This explanation fit both Stalin’s worldview and the current needs for his policy. But he still hesitated. Meyerhold’s heartbreaking appeal, as we know, did not weaken Stalin’s resolve. But it is telling that the information obtained under duress during interrogations was never used to arrest other celebrities like Shostakovich, Pasternak, or Eisenstein: apparently, Stalin reconsidered his plan to hold a sensational show trial of major cultural figures.
Nevertheless, the execution of Koltsov, Meyerhold, and Babel, which was not reported in the press at the time, poisoned the relationship between Stalin and the intelligentsia. Their ruthless dispatch showed that nothing—not talent, not achievements on behalf of the Soviet regime, not personal loyalty and closeness to Stalin (everyone knew that Koltsov, the de facto editor-in-chief of Pravda, was his favorite)—could save you from the dictator’s wrath. In his own way an extremely pragmatic man, Stalin suddenly took on terrifying irrational traits in the eyes of the cultural elite. Perhaps that is what he wanted. In that case, he had made another mistake.
Yet another signal, loud and clear, was sent by Stalin: all contact with the West was fatally dangerous. In culture, the iron curtain fell then, in early 1940—only to be lifted a bit during the war, when relations had to be mended with the British and American allies. Stalin had expended a lot of effort in order to establish cordial personal ties with Soviet intellectuals. At some point, he decided that crude intimidation would be more effective. It was: the intellectuals were frightened, but the honeymoon with Stalin—and therefore, with the Soviet regime—was over.
Chapter Seven
What is socialist realism? Ask five specialists and you will get five different answers. Should it interest us in the least? I believe so: socialist realism reigned in Soviet culture from the early 1930s for an entire half century, and after World War II it was declared to be the dominant force in culture for all countries of the Soviet bloc, that is, on the territory of over a dozen countries in Europe and Asia with a total population of almost a billion people.
For Russia, the significance of socialist realism cannot be overestimated. It is an inalienable and important part of its cultural heritage. Russian culture of the twentieth century was created in large part before our eyes, yet its history contains many mysterious “black holes,” as if it were a long-vanished civilization. The doctrine of socialist realism is one of those mysteries.
Soviet people of a certain age still remember the time when the words “socialist realism” were used as frequently as “Soviet rule” or “Communist Party,” that is, constantly. But unlike the other two terms, which stood for something concrete and had more or less clearly defined features, the true meaning of socialist realism, despite the thousands of articles and books attempting to explain it, remained quite elusive.
This vagueness was built into the original definition of socialist realism from 1934, of which Stalin was a coauthor, as “the basic method of Soviet literature and art,” which “demands of the artist a truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development.”1
Like Lenin before him, Stalin preferred slogans that were simple and clear and easily understood by the masses. According to Stalin’s confidant Ivan Gronsky, the ruler chose the label “socialist realism” because of “its brevity (just two words), second, perspicuity, and third, its connection with tradition.”2 (Stalin was referring to the label’s link with the great literature of “critical realism,” that is, Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Chekhov.)
The sought-after clarity was illusory, however. An animated discussion of the meaning of socialist realism continues to this day. Is it a method or only a style, or both? Can only works with a strongly expressed Communist ideology be considered socialist realist? Mayakovsky’s narrative poems Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Good! come to mind, but their style is rather more expressionist than realist. But if we accept that these works are examples of socialist realism, in accordance with Soviet doctrine, then why not use the same criteria for the poems of Pablo Neruda and Paul Eluard? (This was done in 1972 in the Moscow Short Literary Encyclopedia, which also made Romain Rolland and Bertolt Brecht socialist realist writers, an absurd proposition.)
But if you consider German and Chilean Expressionists and a French Surrealist as socialist realists, then why deny the appellation to Boris Pasternak’s revolutionary narrative poems Nineteen Hundred Five and Lieutenant Schmidt? Contemporary Russian literary criticism tends to leave Pasternak and Andrei Platonov, who also wrote quasi-Communist works, outside the limits of socialist realism: they, you see, are “good” writers, and today only “bad” ones are considered socialist realists. (In the Soviet Union, in their time Pasternak and Platonov were also not regarded as socialist realists, but precisely because they were viewed as “bad” writers.)
One way to deal with this confusion would be an attempt to place the problem in a historical context. Let us try to put ourselves in the shoes of the man who was personally responsible for the appearance and later wide usage of the term “socialist realism,” Joseph Stalin. We can understand better what he himself considered real socialist art and literature, worthy of state support, if we open Pravda for March 16, 1941. This issue of the country’s main newspaper was full of materials on the first winners of the Stalin Prize, instituted in 1939, when he was celebrating his sixtieth birthday.
Stalin’s idea was to recognize the most outstanding works of Soviet art and literature. A special multilevel bureaucratic system was set up for the selection process, which was topped by the Stalin Prize Committee chaired by the artistic lion Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who had founded the Moscow Art Theater with Stanislavsky. But the last word always belonged to Stalin, who personally wrote in or crossed out names and who was impressively enthusiastic and informed. At the beginning, the prize was awarded in the first and second degrees (respectively 100,000 and 50,000 rubles), but a third degree (25,000 rubles) was added in 1948.
Stalin was particularly attentive and demanding when it came to the very first winners of the prize named for him. Subsequent awards were given for works that appeared the previous year, but the first ones were given, as the Resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of March 15, 1941, stated, “for outstanding works in art and literature for the period of the last 6–7 years,” that is, since 1935.
The editorial of the “laureate” issue of Pravda formulated the current cultural priorities: “Soviet art must inspire the masses in their struggle for a full and final victory of socialism, it must help them in this struggle. In the great competition of two systems—the system of capitalism and the system of socialism—Soviet art must also serve as a weapon in this struggle, glorifying socialism. The era of the struggle for Communism must become the era of Socialist Renaissance in art, for only socialism creates the conditions for a complete flourishing of all national talents.”3
The characteristically catechistic style of this lecture, with its tautology and fixation on the words “socialism” and “struggle,” suggests that the author is Stalin. I’ve argued (in my book Shostakovich and Stalin) that the ruler was not only an attentive reader of Pravda but one of its main authors, and often the texts that he wrote or dictated appeared without his signature. No one but Stalin could have dared propose the unexpected parallel with the Italian Renaissance, for that would inevitably lead to a rather ambivalent comparison of him as a patron of the arts with the violent Medici family and the willful Roman popes of that period.
Without a doubt it was Stalin’s decision to publish the photos of the six winners on page one. The “magnificent six” appeared in an order that surely was meaningful for Stalin: Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexander Gerasimov, Vera Mukhina, Valeria Barsova, Sergei Eisenstein, and Mikhail Sholokhov. Four men, two women (Stalin was apparently not a misogynist), some of whom are geniuses known to the entire world, and others who today are known even in Russia only to specialists. But Stalin saw them as the most representative examples of his cultural renaissance.
Valeria Barsova (1892–1967), a lyric coloratura soprano and soloist of the Bolshoi Theater, is rarely remembered today, but in the 1930s and 1940s she was one of the most popular and beloved Soviet singers. She was called the “Soviet nightingale” and shone in the Verdi roles of Gilda and Violetta, but Stalin liked her best in her nuanced performance (she consulted with Stanislavsky) as Antonida, daughter of the Russian peasant patriot Ivan Susanin in Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, the first mature Russian opera. Stalin loved Glinka’s work, which had been banned after the revolution for its monarchism; he returned it to the repertoire in 1939, with a new title, Ivan Susanin, purged of pro-tsarist sentiments (the revisions were quite skillful).
As always with Stalin’s cultural gestures, politics mattered. A fan of Russian classical opera (he would interrupt a meeting of the Politburo to get to the Bolshoi in time for his favorite aria in Susanin), Stalin also used Glinka’s majestic work to legitimize, on the eve of the war with Hitler, the nationalistic emotions that had been downplayed by the internationalist Lenin.
It’s quite possible that Stalin chose Barsova not only for her talent and high professionalism (on the plump side, she tortured herself with exercises to stay trim enough even after fifty to leap around the stage as Rosina in The Barber of Seville; on vacation, she swam far out into the sea and sang voice exercises out there), but also for her civic activities—Barsova was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR and then of the Moscow Soviet. Of the “magnificent six,” she and Sholokhov were the only card-carrying Party members at the time of the award.
Rumor had the beautiful Barsova as Stalin’s mistress, but even if we discount that, we can see why her picture graced Pravda’s page one. Barsova was the personification of the new type of music theater artist—a sphere Stalin loved and considered important and where there had been superstars before the revolution, too: the bass Chaliapin, the tenor Leonid Sobinov, the sopranos Antonina Nezhdanova and Nadezhda Obukhova, and ballet dancer Anna Pavlova.
The ruler wanted to show that the new generation of stars of opera and ballet were as good as the prerevolutionary masters, so that is why the early winners of the Stalin Prize included the great performers of the Soviet era—basses Maxim Mikhailov and Mark Reizen, tenors Ivan Kozlovsky and Sergei Lemeshev, and the ballet dancer Galina Ulanova (the only one in this list to become a legendary figure in the West, as well).
Although the name of sculptor Vera Mukhina, the second woman among the first round of Stalin Prize winners, is not well known outside Russia, her most famous work, The Laborer and the Farm Worker, a twenty-five-meter composition of stainless steel, weighing seventy-four tons and erected above the Soviet pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937 (the task was to visually block the nearby German pavilion), is still widely reproduced in countless posters and book covers.
Many people (including Romain Rolland) considered this dynamic depiction of two gigantic, semi-nude figures striving forward (she brandishing a sickle and he a hammer) the most eloquent symbol of Soviet art and even of the Soviet state. (There are some who insist that honor belongs to El Lissitzky’s poster for the Soviet exhibition in Zurich in 1929, which elaborates a theme similar to Mukhina’s, of the ecstatic unity of the male and female in the name of the socialist idea in a more avant-garde key.)
The beloved daughter of a wealthy merchant, the mannish Mukhina studied in Paris and with her friends Nadezhda Udaltsova and Lubov Popova was one of the “Amazons” of the Russian avant-garde. Mukhina was particularly close to one of the leading Amazons, Alexandra Exter; together they designed the modernist plays of the influential Moscow Chamber Theater, under the direction of Alexander Tairov, and also extravagant hats for the capital’s fashion plates in the early 1920s.
In 1930, Mukhina was arrested and exiled for a year for an attempt to escape abroad, but that did not keep her from becoming one of Stalin’s favorite sculptors just a few years later. Highly admiring her Laborer and Farm Worker, he protected Mukhina from potentially lethal accusations of maliciously hiding an image of Trotsky in the billowing folds of the couple’s drapes.
In her lifetime, Mukhina received five Stalin Prizes (she outlived Stalin by seven months, dying in 1953), but she never did produce the obligatory portrait of the country’s leader. When she was asked to do so, she played the principled realist and set one condition: Stalin had to pose for her personally. (They say that the artist Petr Konchalovsky used the same ruse to avoid having to paint Stalin.)
It would be hard to find a greater opposite to the severe and principled Mukhina than the painter Alexander Gerasimov, who received the Stalin Prize for his painting Stalin and Voroshilov at the Kremlin; most memoirists depict him as a cynical opportunist. Gerasimov always underscored his birth to a peasant family of former serfs: this gave him substantive preeminence in Soviet society over the “socially alien” merchant’s daughter Mukhina. In his youth an epigone of the French Impressionists, Gerasimov began denouncing them publicly as decadent and formalist as soon as the Party directive was announced.
A stocky, curly-haired man who swore freely and sported a foppish, thin mustache, Gerasimov privately enjoyed painting nudes, while millions of reproductions circulated around the country of his formal portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, patron and friend of Gerasimov (who often stopped by the artist’s studio to see the latest depiction of a plump nude beauty).
As president of the Academy of Arts of the USSR, created in 1947 in imitation of the prerevolutionary one, Gerasimov became “chief artist” of the land and a symbol of socialist realism in art, paid fantastic sums by the state for the huge, multifigured official canvases churned out in his studio. Yet to demonstrate his unbreakable bonds with his folksy past, he had his chauffeur pile hay in the backseat of his state-supplied limousine, and he rode up front.
Gerasimov was a colorful figure, but his paintings, recipients of many awards (including four Stalin Prizes and gold medals at the World’s Fairs in Paris and Brussels), are now considered artistically uninteresting: anemic in composition and technically inept. Critics are as dismissive of other idols of socialist realism, even though there were true painterly virtuosi among them: Isaak Brodsky, one of Repin’s favorite students, Vassily Efanov, and Alexander Laktionov.
But is it even possible to judge the work of Gerasimov and his socialist realist colleagues using purely artistic criteria that are based on the aesthetic of the Western avant-garde of the last hundred years while ignoring their social function in Stalin’s society?
Such asocial methods of evaluation until recently were applied to the cultural artifacts of non-European traditions—the sculptures and masks of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. They were ritual objects, valued by their peoples and tribes for their social utility rather than their artistic merit. In the West the artifacts were viewed through the prism of the prevalent modernist aesthetic—what resembled it got high marks, the rest was considered less “interesting,” and therefore, less artistically valuable. Now, this approach is being reconsidered.
The art of Stalin’s era apparently must be treated as ritual to a high degree. In that sense, we can discover intriguing roots of socialist realism (which Western and Russian art historians have recently been examining). At the source of socialist realism stood Gorky and Lunacharsky, who before the revolution toyed with quasi-religious cultural ideas (for which they were berated by Lenin), and the slogan of socialist realism was introduced by Stalin, a former Orthodox seminarian. Both Lunacharsky and Gorky spoke often of the shamanistic influence of art on human behavior. Stalin did not speak of that aloud, but he undoubtedly sensed the magical powers of art as something real; this was noted by Osip Mandelstam: “That is a superstition with him [Stalin]. He thinks we poets are shamans.”4
Gorky considered socialist realism a tool to “arouse a revolutionary attitude toward reality, an attitude that will practically change the world.”5 Here, Gorky is apparently referring to the ritual, magical role of socialist realism. Lunacharsky was even more frank: “Soviet art is in no essential way different from religious art.”6
As befitted a professional politician, Stalin avoided frank declarations but persistently pushed Soviet culture to perform quasi-religious functions: novels had to play the part of lives of the saints, plays and films of religious mysteries, and paintings of icons. The cult of the late Lenin portrayed him as God the Father, with Stalin as the son. Lenin, and after his death, Stalin, were displayed in a mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square, embalmed as the relics of Communist saints.
The architecture of the Stalin period served the same goal. Even the subway, which in Western cities had strictly utilitarian purposes, in Moscow was used as a showcase, the stations secular temples that were part of the obligatory tour for foreigners and meant to inspire ritual awe in them as well as in Soviet citizens. The anticlerical skeptic Malraux is said to have responded to the underground miracle with a bon mot: “Un peu trop de métro.”7
The monumental socialist realist paintings and sculptures of the Stalin period that depicted the rulers and their meetings with the people, the exploits of heroes, and mass demonstrations and festivities should also be viewed as ritual objects, even if they are in museums. Only by situating these works in a historical and social context can we appreciate the craft of their creators, crowned by Stalin Prizes, and to see that the awards were not given without good reason.
Probably the most controversial figure of the first group of Stalin Prize winners was Mikhail Sholokhov, who later became the third Russian Nobel laureate. The range of opinions about Sholokhov is astounding even for the contentious twentieth century—from recognition of him as a great writer, one of the world classics of our time, to Solzhenitsyn’s disdainful remarks: “With Sholokhov, one shouldn’t even speak of whether he’s educated or not, but if he is literate or not.”8 This about the man who in 1939 became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
Stalin gave Sholokhov the prize for his epic novel The Quiet Don (also known in the West as And Quiet Flows the Don), depicting the tragic trajectory of the Don Cossack Grigory Melekhov in the years of World War I and the Civil War, against the background of the period’s tectonic social shifts. Even Solzhenitsyn has high regard for the novel; what then was the cause for his dismissive attitude toward Sholokhov?
As soon as the twenty-three-year-old Sholokhov published the novel in 1928, rumors began circulating that he was not the real author, but had plagiarized the manuscript (or diaries) of another writer, Fedor Kryukov, who died in 1920; other sources were also mentioned. With time the search for the person behind The Quiet Don turned into a small industry, with thick volumes written pro and contra.
This problem, considering that Sholokhov’s archives for the 1920s and 1930s are missing (allegedly burned during World War II), is unlikely to be resolved in the near future. So in this case, following Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes, we can treat the question of “authorship” as a conditional one. Sholokhov, contrary to the opinion of his numerous foes, was a major figure and an ambivalent one, and he remains inseparable from the dramatic fate of The Quiet Don.
The legend that the Soviet regime embraced Don from the beginning has become entrenched. But in reality it was not the case. Sholokhov did not come from a proletarian background, growing up in a wealthy family, and the “proletarian” critics immediately dismissed the novel as “an idealization of the kulaks and White Guards.” When it came to the publication of the third and final volume, Sholokhov encountered stiff resistance: influential literary bureaucrats, all-powerful Fadeyev among them, felt that the publication of this book “would give great satisfaction to our enemies, the White Guards, who emigrated.”9 It was held up for more than two years.
Sholokhov turned to his patron Gorky for support and in July 1931 the young writer met at Gorky’s apartment with the country’s main censor, Stalin. He already knew the first two volumes and read the third in manuscript before the meeting, and at Gorky’s (who, as Sholokhov recalled, kept quiet, smoked, and burned matches over the ashtray) he interrogated Sholokhov: why were the Whites shown “in a soft way” in The Quiet Don? On what documents was the novel based? (Knowing about the plagiarism charges, Stalin must have been checking Sholokhov’s historical erudition.)
In self-defense, Sholokhov argued that General Lavr Kornilov, who fought against the Bolsheviks on the Don River, was “subjectively an honest man.” The writer later recalled that Stalin’s “yellow eyes narrowed like a tiger’s before it leaps,” but the ruler continued the argument with restraint, in his favorite catechistic manner: “A subjectively honest man is one who is with the people, who fights for the good of the people.” Kornilov had gone against the people, had spilled a “sea of blood.” How could he be an honest man?
Sholokhov was forced to agree. Stalin must have been pleased with his conversation with the short and boyishly thin twenty-six-year-old with a shock of curls over his large forehead. His resolution was: “The depiction of the course of events in the third book of The Quiet Don works in our favor, for the Revolution. We will publish it!”10
But Sholokhov’s foes did not lay down their weapons. The discussion of The Quiet Don at the Stalin Prize Committee was a battlefield. The great filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko, who created one of the masterpieces of Soviet silent film, Earth (1930), and who was one of Stalin’s favorites (he got the Stalin Prize for his film Shchors, about Ukraine during the Civil War), rose to an emotional speech. “I read the book The Quiet Don with a feeling of great inner dissatisfaction…. I can summarize my impressions this way: for centuries the quiet Don lived, Cossack men and women rode horses, drank, and sang…their life was juicy, aromatic, stable, and warm. The Revolution came, Soviet rule and the Bolsheviks destroyed the quiet Don, chased people away, pitted brother against brother, father against son, husband against wife, impoverished the country…infected it with gonorrhea and syphilis, sowed filth, anger, and pushed the strong men with character into banditry…. And so it ended. That is an enormous mistake in the author’s concept.”11
Other members of the Committee also spoke out against The Quiet Don, but the most damning conclusion about the novel came from Fadeyev, head of the Writers’ Union of the USSR then (and known as Stalin’s trusted person): “My personal opinion is that it does not show the victory of the Stalinist idea.” Fadeyev later admitted to Sholokhov that he had voted against him. But Sholokhov, as we know, received the prize and appeared on the front page of Pravda. Why?
The answer lies in part in the fact that Stalin apparently encouraged the writer not only for The Quiet Don but also for the first part of his second novel, which had been published by then. Virgin Soil Upturned was about collectivization, that is, a very important topic for the country and for Stalin personally. Stalin’s opinion of the book is reflected in a letter to his henchman Lazar Kaganovich, dated June 7, 1932: “An interesting work! You can see that Sholokhov studied the kolkhozes on the Don. Sholokhov, I believe, has a great creative gift. Besides which, he is a very conscientious writer: he writes about things he knows well.”12 (That is, Stalin had further confirmation that Sholokhov was not a plagiarist.)
But that is not all. It seems that Stalin was rewarding Sholokhov’s actions, about which very few people knew then. They remained a secret for many years and even though they were first mentioned by Nikita Khrushchev in 1963, the details of the story did not surface until the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, when the correspondence between Sholokhov and Stalin was declassified.
Fifteen letters and notes from Sholokhov to Stalin, and a letter and two telegrams from Stalin to Sholokhov read like a riveting novel, with the difference that this is the true (albeit not complete) story of the interactions of the ruler and the writer over the most tragic events of that era, collectivization and the Great Terror.
Sholokhov, not yet thirty, sent the first letters to Stalin in 1931–1933, during the throes of an agricultural crisis caused by the forced collectivization. In order to supply the cities with food, the government confiscated all the grain the kolkhoz farmers had. Sholokhov depicted the situation straightforwardly, with rare candor and directness: “Right now kolkhoz farmers and individual farmers are starving to death; adults and children are swelling and eating everything that humans are not supposed to eat, starting with carrion and ending with oak bark and all kinds of swamp roots.”13 In another letter he wrote, “It is so bitter, Comrade Stalin! Your heart bleeds when you see it with your own eyes.”
Sholokhov describes the “disgusting ‘methods’ of torture, beatings, and humiliations” used to find out where peasants are hiding their grain: “At the Vashchaevsk kolkhoz, they poured kerosene on the women’s legs and hems of their skirts, set them on fire, and then put them out: ‘Will you tell me where the pit is? I’ll light it again if you don’t.’”
There are many stark examples of torture, threats, and violence in Sholokhov’s letters to Stalin; he piles them up, like an experienced writer, and remarkably, dares to pressure him by threatening to denounce the Soviet regime in his new book: “I decided that it was better to write to you than to use this material for the last volume of Virgin Soil Upturned.”(You have to be certain of your own genius to write like this to Stalin; it’s unlikely that an ordinary plagiarist would be so bold.)
How did Stalin react? Khrushchev recalled later that Stalin, whenever he was told about something wrong, would usually grow irritable, even if he knew the situation had to be corrected: he would agree but be angry. This complex brew of contradictory emotions can be seen in Stalin’s reply to Sholokhov (dated May 6, 1933), in which he thanks the writer for his alarmist letters, “since they lift the scab from our party-Soviet work, reveal that sometimes our workers, wanting to shackle the enemy, accidentally strike our friends and even become sadistic.”
But Stalin also points out to Sholokhov that the peasants the writer wanted to protect (Stalin mockingly refers to them as the “esteemed grain-harvesters”) were in his view saboteurs who were trying to deny bread to the workers and the Red Army and that those “esteemed grain-harvesters were in fact waging a ‘quiet’ war against Soviet rule. A war of starvation, dear Comrade Sholokhov.” At the same time, Stalin gave orders to send food to Sholokhov’s starving fellow countrymen. That was a typical move for Stalin, making temporary and small concessions while basically pressing on with his plans.
Sholokhov appealed to Stalin with another long letter on February 16, 1938, at the peak of the Great Terror. The writer was threatened with arrest as an enemy of the people (a detained member of a Cossack choir testified under duress that Sholokhov ordered him to assassinate a government official during the choir’s performance in Moscow), but Sholokhov spends most of the letter defending his friends who were in prison and being tortured: “Comrade Stalin! This method of investigation in which the prisoner is given into the hands of the investigators without any control is profoundly corrupt…. We must put an end to the shameful system of torture used on prisoners.”
Sholokhov was called into the Kremlin to see Stalin and there, in the presence of the much-feared head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, he told a joke making the rounds. A hare making a headlong dash is asked why he’s running.
“I’m afraid they’ll shoe me!”
“They don’t shoe hares, they shoe camels!”
“Once they catch you and put shoes on you, go prove that you’re not a camel!”
Telling the dictator a political joke was really working without a net. As Sholokhov recalled later, Yezhov laughed out loud; Stalin, not so much, and said sarcastically, “They say you drink a lot, Comrade Sholokhov?” Sholokhov continued in the same jesting tone, “A life like this, Comrade Stalin, will drive you to drink.”
There was no point in denying it: the writer had been brought to the Kremlin from a Moscow restaurant where he had been drinking heavily with Fadeyev, who also had a weakness for booze. Stalin forgave both of them. His personal secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, had a much more severe reaction to the drunken writer’s appearance in the Kremlin. “Blotto, you motley fool?” Before Sholokhov’s audience with Stalin, the secretary threw him into a hot shower, gave him a fresh shirt with a white celluloid collar, and sprayed him with cologne, to disguise the vodka reek.
Stalin, who generally disliked so-called immoral behavior, overlooked more than Sholokhov’s drinking. At the time of that conversation, he knew—and he knew that Yezhov also knew—that the NKVD chief’s beautiful wife, thirty-four-year-old Yevgenia (“Zhenya”) Khayutina-Yezhova, had been Sholokhov’s mistress for several months.
The boldest novelist might have hesitated over a plot like this, but its reality was confirmed by secret documents declassified in 2001. Dubbed the Iron Commissar by friends and the Bloody Dwarf by enemies, Yezhov was put in charge at age forty-one of the Great Terror, a policy that became known as yezhovshchina. He was remembered as a sadist and monster, but Nadezhda Mandelstam and Lili Brik, who knew him personally in more “vegetarian” times, thought him a “rather pleasant” man.14 He was also bisexual, and his marriage to Yevgenia Khayutina, an independent, energetic, and amorous woman (her numerous lovers included the writer Babel) was rather open.15
The matchmaker—intentionally or not—in this relationship was the omnipresent Fadeyev, in whose company Sholokhov, who had come to Moscow, went to visit Khayutina in August 1938. The three had lunch at the National Hotel, where Sholokhov was staying. The next day Khayutina came back to see Sholokhov at the National, but alone. The transcripts of the recording made by the secret police in Sholokhov’s bugged room notes not only the conversation (“We have a difficult love, Zhenya,” “I am afraid”) but sounds as well (“go into the bathroom,” “kiss,” “lie down”).16
Khayutina had good reason to be afraid. It is strange that the wife of the head of the secret police did not realize that the rooms at the National, one of Moscow’s most choice hotels, would be bugged. In any case, the transcript was on Yezhov’s desk the next day; he took it home to the dacha that night and slapped his wife in the face with it (a female friend was a witness), but did not go further. The recently omnipotent commissar (Babel used to say, “When Yezhov calls in members of the Central Committee, they dump into their pants”) was beginning to feel the ground beneath his feet slipping away.
Stalin had apparently decided that the Great Terror had achieved its aim and that the pressure could be eased. That is why he appeared to agree with Sholokhov’s emotional protest against the lawlessness of the secret police. A special resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars and the Central Committee appeared on November 17, 1938, “On arrests, procuratorial supervision, and investigative procedures,” which read like a direct reply to Sholokhov’s complaints: “The mass operations of destroying and rooting out hostile elements implemented by the organs of the NKVD in 1937–1938, with a simplified investigation and trial, could not have avoided leading to a number of major flaws and perversions in the work of the organs of the NKVD and the Procurator’s Office.”
Now Stalin would make Yezhov the scapegoat. Khayutina took a fatal dose of sleeping medication on November 21, 1938, and two days later, Yezhov handed Stalin his resignation as head of the NKVD. When the Bloody Dwarf was arrested six weeks later, the charges were “treasonous and espionage ties” with Poland, Germany, England, and Japan, but they also included poisoning his wife: the investigators fabricated a theory that Yezhov, Khayutina, and her lover Babel had planned to assassinate Stalin and that Yezhov killed his wife to cover up traces of the conspiracy.
Yezhov was executed on February 4, 1940, eight days after Babel and two days after the execution of Khayutina’s other lover, Koltsov. Her third lover, Sholokhov, had another fate in store: a little over a year later, he became the Stalin Prize winner—not only as a writer (for two novels simultaneously) but as a public figure in the traditional Russian cultural role of “defender of the people” as well (Stalin had told him, “Your letters are not literary writing, they’re nothing but politics”), and even as a colorful personality.
If Sholokhov was walking a tightrope in his relations with Stalin, so was Sergei Eisenstein, who won the Stalin Prize for his famous 1938 film Alexander Nevsky.
Eisenstein was of medium height and rounded (some described him as being boneless), with stubby legs, thinning hair that stuck out around his bald spot, and a constant ironic smile playing on his lips. At first glance he created an impression of coziness, but that was misleading: the sexually ambivalent Eisenstein had been a tormented personality since adolescence with an interest in sadism and torture, as well as an “abnormal” (in the words of his friend, the filmmaker Mikhail Romm) habit “of drawing lewd pictures in front of ladies.”17 But Eisenstein, who had a heart condition, led an exceptionally moderate and orderly life and did not drink or smoke; his only known vice was a childish love of sweets.
Alexander Nevsky is a formally brilliant but cold work. Done at Stalin’s personal request, it had to be completed as speedily as possible, so the central scene of the battle between the thirteenth-century Prince Alexander Nevsky and the Teutonic knights on frozen Lake Peipus had to be filmed in the summer, on a back lot of Mosfilm, the asphalt covered with a thick layer of liquid glass and sprinkled with crushed chalk to create a winter landscape.
In that landscape Eisenstein played out his film as if it were a smart chess game with the end required by Stalin, Alexander Nevsky intoning: “And if anyone comes to us with a sword, then he shall die by the sword, that is the foundation of the Russian land.”(Eisenstein had planned to end the film with Nevsky’s death on his return from the Golden Horde, but Stalin rejected it: “Such a good prince cannot die.”)
The film was basically conceived for the sake of its final slogan, but when in 1939 Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler and the Nazis became “sworn friends,” Nevsky vanished from movie screens. That made even more significant the fact that Eisenstein and also Nikolai Cherkasov, who played Nevsky in the film, and two members of the crew were awarded prizes for the film in March 1941, when the pact was formally still in place.
Interestingly, at a private screening of Alexander Nevsky in Moscow for visitors from America—the writer Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White—in mid-June, a week before the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, Eisenstein confidently predicted that the film would be in wide distribution again very soon.
The director’s political intuition was highly tuned. But apparently not Stalin’s, because the neo-Teutonic attack, vividly foretold in Eisenstein’s film, came as a total surprise in reality. The consequences of Stalin’s miscalculation were catastrophic: the German army that attacked on June 22, 1941, rolled through the Soviet Union and reached Moscow by October.
Along with the rest of the country, the workers of the “cultural front” were mobilized against the enemy, thereby proving their usefulness to the Fatherland. The patriotic anthem Sergei Prokofiev wrote for Alexander Nevsky was played everywhere: “Arise, Russian people, for the glorious battle, the mortal battle!” The composer himself liked the anthem, and justly so. But in 1941, Stalin did not recognize Prokofiev’s work with a prize. At the time (and today, too) it looked like a punishment for something, especially since Prokofiev’s main rival, Shostakovich (who was fifteen years younger), not only got the Stalin Prize for his Piano Quintet, composed in 1940, but his photograph was placed first, clearly not alphabetically, in the display of the six “main” laureates on the front page of Pravda.
The story of Shostakovich’s prize is puzzling. We remember that in 1936 the young composer and his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District became central scapegoats in Stalin’s antiformalist campaign, which intended to define the parameters of Soviet art. Essentially, Stalin purged Shostakovich’s work from the confines of socialist realism. But in late 1937, the composer was rehabilitated for his Fifth Symphony.
The Fifth can be described as a symphony-novel (just as Alexander Nevsky can be described as a film-opera). A comparison to The Quiet Don seems appropriate. Both works are profoundly ambivalent and were at different times perceived as being Soviet and anti-Soviet. The very nature of symphonic music permits a wide variety of interpretations. Shostakovich’s opus is a magical vessel: each listener fills it in his imagination as he wishes. That is why the Fifth Symphony will remain for many people the most shattering reflection on the Great Terror, while The Quiet Don will compete with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago for the most vivid depiction of Russia during World War I and the Civil War.
Strangely, while giving the award to Sholokhov for The Quiet Don, Stalin singled out in Shostakovich’s oeuvre not the Fifth Symphony, of which he had obviously approved, but the Piano Quintet, which did not fit at all even in the fairly broad spectrum of socialist realist works (from The Quiet Don to Alexander Nevsky, with Mukhina’s and Gerasimov’s creations in the middle) that he presented as “models.”
Symphonies, while not as high in the official genre hierarchy as Stalin’s beloved opera and not in the approved category of program music, were still epic works, which as a lover of the Russian classical tradition, Stalin preferred. Instead, the Piano Quintet was a refined chamber work in a neoclassical style, with a definite nod to Western tradition, which as we now know, was pointed out to Stalin by Shostakovich’s detractors among the Soviet musical bureaucrats.18
In literature, an analogous work to Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet would be a late poem by Khodasevich or a short story by Nabokov, in art—a drawing by Tatlin. Nothing of the sort could possibly be glorified on the front page of Pravda—not then, not later.
What had attracted Stalin in the Quintet? Its political and “civic” value must have seemed like zero to him then. Could he have been charmed by its neo-Bachian restraint, spiritual profundity, and impeccable craftsmanship? We can only guess.
But we can presume that Stalin did not regret his generous advance to Shostakovich when he was informed at the end of 1941 that the composer had completed his Seventh Symphony, dedicated to Leningrad, which was under Nazi siege. The composition’s fate is unprecedented. Hurriedly performed in March 1942 (first in Kuibyshev and then Moscow, with the composer attending both premieres, after he was brought out of besieged Leningrad on a special plane on Stalin’s orders), the Seventh took on instant political relevance, unheard-of in the history of symphonic music.
Like the Fifth, this symphony-novel is semantically ambiguous. The forceful finale of the Fifth can be perceived as a straightforward tableau of mass rejoicing or as an attempt at an ironic depiction of the forced gaiety and imposed “carnival”-like (to use the word in Bakhtin’s sense) enthusiasm typical of the Stalin era. The first movement of the Seventh provides the same opportunity for polar interpretations: is the vicious march theme with eleven variations, performed with an inexorable, avalanche-like crescendo (the “invasion episode”), a depiction of the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, as the world press instantly announced, or is it a reflection of the insidious expansion of Stalin’s repression apparatus, as the composer himself hinted in conversation with close friends?19
The polysemantic nature of the Seventh Symphony is intensified by the religious motif that is in the subtext: originally Shostakovich (influenced by Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, which he admired so fervently that when he was flown out of Leningrad, the piano score he made of this great work was one of the few belongings he took with him) intended to use a chorus that would intone excerpts from David’s Psalms.
Russian audiences were extremely sensitive to these religious overtones and they wept at every performance in the Soviet Union: in the difficult war years Shostakovich’s music had a cathartic effect, and the concert hall substituted for the church, proscribed in socialist life. An important symbolic event that promoted the transformation of the symphony into a quasi-religious work was its performance in Leningrad. It was organized on Stalin’s orders with great efficiency, like a real military operation, and played on August 9, 1942, by the starved musicians of Leningrad, which by then was already considered a martyr-city.
For the democratic West, which for the sake of victory over Hitler had given up its anti-Bolshevik prejudices while entering into an “unholy” alliance with Stalin, the high point in the Seventh’s political status came with the national broadcast of its New York radio premiere on July 19, 1942, conducted by Arturo Toscanini; hundreds of North American performances followed, and after his picture appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Shostakovich, thirty-six, became the most popular contemporary “serious” composer in the Unites States and in the Soviet Union.
The Seventh Symphony was the second work by Shostakovich to receive the Stalin Prize, and once again, of the first degree. That was on April 11, 1942, a little over a month after its premiere, an unprecedented haste in the annals of the Stalin Prize. Of course, the geopolitical situation was extraordinary then, too. Behind lay the battle for Moscow, ahead, the fateful battle of Stalingrad. Washington announced that Allied troops were prepared to open a second front in Europe against Hitler.
Stalin had little faith that these promises would come to pass soon. But he cared about every cultural bridge that brought closer the two sides so far apart socially and politically. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was such an opportunity. That is why Shostakovich was probably Stalin’s most valued composer at that moment. But we cannot blame Shostakovich for that. It was the way the political cards fell then.
Chapter Eight
On August 31, 1941 (while Shostakovich was completing the first movement of his Seventh Symphony in besieged Leningrad), Marina Tsvetaeva, forty-eight, who had been evacuated to the small town of Elabuga in Tatarstan, hanged herself. This was the third suicide of a great Russian poet in the twentieth century, after Esenin in 1925 and Mayakovsky in 1930. Mourning these deaths later, Pasternak wrote: “Once they reach the idea of suicide, they give up on themselves, they condemn their past, declaring themselves bankrupt and their memories nonexistent.”1 Pasternak speculated that Tsvetaeva, “not knowing where to hide from the horror, hastily hid in death, shoving her head into a noose as if under a pillow.”2
In fact, Tsvetaeva’s fatal decision had not been spontaneous. A year earlier her fifteen-year-old son, Georgy (“Mur”), wrote in his unusually frank diary: “Mother is living in an atmosphere of suicide and keeps talking about it. She keeps crying all the time and talking about the humiliations she must endure…. We sent a telegram to the Kremlin, to Stalin: ‘Help me, I am in dire straits. The writer Marina Tsvetaeva.’”3
The figure of the outsider is common in twentieth-century Russian culture. Among them, Tsvetaeva was perhaps the most extreme case. She positioned herself early on as “the last romantic” in her work and life, and resembling an exotic bird, with piercing eyes peeking out beneath her bangs, the bisexual Tsvetaeva always made clear her rejection of the established order, whatever it may be. Joseph Brodsky, who insisted that she was the greatest twentieth-century poet in any language, described her viewpoint as Calvinist, with the poet feeling guilt for all human suffering.
Tsvetaeva was among the first to be repulsed by the mass chauvinist passions of World War I; while living in Bolshevik Moscow she openly sang the praises of the counterrevolutionary White Guards (her husband Sergei Efron had fought on their side), and when she immigrated in 1922 to the West, she took an intransigently antibourgeois position, which isolated her from the émigrés.
Tsvetaeva’s loneliness in the West increased as her husband’s political views radicalized: Efron evolved from a fierce opponent of the Bolsheviks to an equally staunch supporter. He joined a small but ideologically influential émigré movement, the Eurasianists, which included some of the greatest minds of the Russian diaspora, the linguist and philosopher Prince Nikolai Trubetskoy, the theologian Georgy Florovsky, the literary critic D. S. Mirsky, the music critic Pierre Souvtchinsky, and the philosopher Lev Karsavin.
The central idea of the Eurasianists was Russia’s special geopolitical place and destiny as the bridge between Europe and Asia (Eurasia). They were the successors of the Scythian group in Russia, with right and left wings: the right (Trubetskoy, Florovsky) tending toward Christian Orthodoxy while the left (Mirsky, Efron) drifted to the side of the Soviet Union, which the Eurasianists considered the true heir to the Russian empire and the force to be reckoned with. The Kremlin took a keen interest in this movement, gradually bringing the left Eurasianists under the control of the Soviet secret services.
Son of the tsarist minister of internal affairs, Mirsky, whom Edmund Wilson affectionately called “comrade prince,” joined the British Communist Party in 1931. By then he had published the best—then and now—history of Russian literature in English, but in 1932, craving Gorky’s patronage, he returned to Moscow from England. It was a fatal mistake: in 1937, twelve months after Gorky died, “comrade prince” was arrested and expired in a Siberian prison camp.
Efron, together with Mirsky and Souvtchinsky, published the literary almanac Versty (Mileposts), which printed Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, and colorful Alexei Remizov. In 1931, Efron became an agent of the NKVD in France. On orders from Moscow, he helped Spanish antifascists, kept surveillance on Trotsky’s son, and procured new agents. He had a flair for it, recruiting twenty-four people for Soviet intelligence.
Tsvetaeva, who considered Efron “the most noble and selfless man in the world,” explained that “he had seen Russia’s salvation and the truth” in the White movement, and “when he discovered otherwise, he left it completely and wholly and never looked back.”4
In 1937, after a notorious “wet” operation (killing former Soviet agent Ignace Reiss, who defected to the West), Efron and a few comrades fled France to the Soviet Union, where Ariadna (“Alya”), Efron and Tsvetaeva’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, had been living for the last six months. Tsvetaeva was called in for questioning by the Paris prefecture but released when she started reciting poetry in French, her own and other writers’: they thought her mad. The less-kind Russian émigrés, who had already been suspicious of Tsvetaeva, now rejected her completely.
Through Soviet diplomatic channels, Efron pleaded with Tsvetaeva to join him in Russia, and in June 1939 she and Mur came to Moscow. Soon after, her husband and daughter were arrested as part of a purge of the NKVD and particularly its foreign agents initiated by Lavrenti Beria, who replaced Yezhov.
Alya later recalled her predeparture conversation in Paris with Nobel laureate Bunin: “Where are you going, you little fool? What for? What’s pushing you? They’ll arrest you.”
“Me? For what?”
“You’ll see. They’ll find a reason.”5
Tsvetaeva’s strong, passionate, highly emotional, even occasionally overwrought (some said hysterical) poetic voice and her image as a willful, independent, and proud Amazon made her a favorite in gender studies. But the attempts by her admirers to prove that she had no idea of her husband’s secret work are absurd and belittle her intelligence. Tsvetaeva herself claimed to have had nothing to do with underground pro-Soviet work “and not only out of total inability but out of a profound revulsion toward politics, all of which—with the rarest of exceptions—I consider filth.”6
She was not being sincere. Her hatred of Nazism (so clearly expressed in her great cycle of angry poems on Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939) and her sympathy for the Spanish republicans are well documented. Even émigré poet and essayist Georgy Adamovich, who was rather skeptical of Tsvetaeva, noted her “innate awareness that everything in the world—politics, love, religion, poetry, history, absolutely everything—converges.”7
Much of Tsvetaeva’s work (especially the poetry and prose relating to public figures and events—Nicholas I, Nicholas II, the White movement, Mayakovsky) is clearly political. She raised her children, Alya and Mur, as Soviet patriots (Alya even becoming a Soviet agent in France). Her lover and later close friend in Paris, Konstantin Rodzevich, to whom she dedicated two of her masterpieces, Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End, was also a Soviet spy, recruited by Efron.
Tsvetaeva herself apparently did not participate in her husband’s underground activities. Still, she used the apolitical mask mainly as a survival tactic. It helped her to endure interrogations by the French police, but it did not work in Moscow, where she wrote on September 5, 1940: “Everyone considers me brave. I don’t know a more fearful person than I. I’m afraid of everything. Eyes, blackness, steps, and most of all—myself.” And on the same day: “I do not want to die. I want not to be.”8
In other circumstances the ambitious Efron could have become a big shot in Soviet intelligence. But he was executed on October 16, 1941, in the Moscow Butyrka Prison on the ridiculous charges of espionage for France.
On that day the Butyrka Prison was being “cleansed” of prisoners: the Germans were at the gate of Moscow. Knowing nothing of the execution of his father, Mur wrote in his diary, which was first published in 2004: “An enormous number of people are running away, loaded up with sacks and trunks…. The Academy of Sciences, the institutes, the Bolshoi Theater—they’ve all vanished like smoke…. Some say that the Germansare expected in Moscow tonight.”9
Mur did not know he was all alone. (His sister, Alya, had been sent to a northern prison camp the year before.) The sixteen-year-old’s political views were changing quickly now that he was experiencing Soviet reality: “When I lived in Paris, I was definitely a Communist. I attended hundreds of rallies, frequently took part in demonstrations…André Gide, Hemingway, Dos Passos were very close to the Communists. Then they grew disillusioned, for various reasons…. So am I, and how!”10
In 1944, when Tsvetaeva’s son was nineteen, he was sent to the front, where he was killed; the whereabouts of his grave—and of his father’s and mother’s—are unknown. They say that when Mirsky was dying in the Soviet prison camp he laughed bitterly at his Communist illusions. Probably Tsvetaeva had profound regrets about returning to the Soviet Union. But there is also an example of a great master hounded by the Soviet regime who remained true until his dying breath to communist ideals, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and atheism.
Photo Insert
Count Leo Tolstoy in his favorite photograph, 1908
Anton Chekhov (left) with Maxim Gorky, Crimea, 1900
The great bass Fedor Chaliapin in the role of Tsar Boris Godunov, Bolshoi Theater, 1918
Sergei Rachmaninoff, in a portrait by Konstantin Somov, 1925
Impresario Sergei Diaghilev, in a portrait by Valentin Serov, 1908
Vaslav Nijinsky, 1906
Igor Stravinsky, 1928
An avant-garde exhibition in Petrograd in 1913, with Black Square, the icon of twentieth-century abstract art, by Kazimir Malevich, hanging high up in the corner of the gallery
Anna Akhmatova with her husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, and their son, Lev, 1916
Boris Pasternak, in a portrait by Yuri Annenkov, 1921
The first Soviet Commissar of Education (who dealt with all cultural issues), Anatoly Lunacharsky, in a portrait by Yuri Annenkov, 1920
Four pillars of the Soviet avant-garde: the composer Dmitri Shostakovich (far left) with the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold (seated), the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (behind them), and the artist Alexander Rodchenko (standing, far right), 1929
Konstantin Stanislavsky, 1928
Sergei Prokofiev (at the piano, left) with Sergei Eisenstein, working on the film Alexander Nevsky
George Balanchine
Photo by Marianna Volkov
Vladimir Horowitz
Photo by Marianna Volkov
Vladimir Ashkenazy
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The theater director Yuri Lyubimov (left) with the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny
Photo by Marianna Volkov
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Photo by Marianna Volkov
Vassily Aksyonov
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The poet and singer Bulat Okudzhava
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The actor, singer, and poet Vladimir Vysotsky
Photo by Marianna Volkov
Solomon Volkov (left) interviewing Joseph Brodsky in the poet’s New York residence
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The composer Alfred Schnittke at his Moscow apartment
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The movie director Andrei Tarkovsky at work
Courtesy of the Ivanovo Museum, Russia
Maya Plisetskaya
Photo by Marianna Volkov
Rudolf Nureyev
Photo by Marianna Volkov
Mikhail Baryshnikov
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The artists Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Vassiliev, and Grisha Bruskin (left to right)
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The poet and artist Dmitri Prigov
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The violinist and conductor Vladimir Spivakov
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The conductor Valery Gergiev
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The rock musician Yuri Shevchuk
Photo by Marianna Volkov
The movie director Nikita Mikhalkov
Photo by Marianna Volkov
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Courtesy of Ignat Solzhenitsyn
That is the case of the artist Pavel Filonov, one of the leaders of the Russian avant-garde before the revolution, who moved from his early works, influenced by German Expressionism, to meticulously crafted kaleidoscopic paintings where the eye slowly discovers outlines of people and objects. He called these works “formulas”—Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat (1920), Formula of a Komsomol Member (1924), Formula of Imperialism (1925).
Filonov is much less known in the West than Kandinsky, Chagall, Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko, and other Russian avant-garde artists. Filonov’s manifestos are even more mangled than Malevich’s coarse and clumsy statements. He never traveled to the West and sold practically nothing, hoping that all his works would one day be displayed in a special museum in Leningrad.
Filonov wanted, as he wrote in his diary, first published almost sixty years after his death, “to give all my works to the state, the party, the proletariat.”11 But the Party replied that “Filonov is a bourgeois artist. A ruthless struggle is being waged against him, and filonovism will be uprooted.”12 Even Filonov’s portrait of Stalin, vastly superior to Picasso’s famous likeness of the ruler, remained unwanted.
Filonov modeled his life after revolutionary artists of the past, like Van Gogh. Tall, pale, and ascetic, with a biblical prophet’s fanaticism, Filonov was surrounded, in the tradition of the Russian avant-garde, by loyal students whom he taught for free. There were not many commissions and the artist was often hungry. His diary entry of August 30, 1935, is typical: “Seeing that my money was coming to an end, I used the last to buy tea, sugar, shag tobacco, and matches and began, not having money for bread, to bake pancakes from the white flour I still had. On the 29th, having economized on the flour, I baked my last pancake, preparing to follow the example of many, many other times—to live, not knowing for how long, without eating.”13
When the Germans began the 900-day siege of Leningrad in September 1941, no one even thought of evacuating Filonov, unlike Shostakovich, Akhmatova, and Zoshchenko (whom Stalin considered valuable cultural cadres then). Tending to his paralyzed wife, who was twenty years his senior, Filonov, fifty-eight, was among the first to die in early December, as soon as the famine began in Leningrad. As survivors of the siege explained, “The men died first, because they are muscular and have little fat. Women, even small ones, have more subcutaneous fat.”14 Filonov’s wife died in 1942. Between December 1941 and February 1942, more than a quarter million Leningraders died of starvation.
One of Filonov’s students recalled: “When Filonov died, I was dystrophic myself, but could still move, so I dragged myself to his house. He lay on a table in the cold room, majestic among his paintings, which still hung on the walls.”15 There are now precious few works by Filonov available on the art market (the great majority are in St. Petersburg at the Russian Museum), but when one appears, it is valued in the millions of dollars.
Tsvetaeva’s suicide in evacuation and Filonov’s hungry death in besieged Leningrad, depriving Russian culture of two of its geniuses, went practically unnoticed in the war years that plunged the country into a sea of despair and suffering and took tens of millions of lives. These were tense times. Still, Ilya Ehrenburg, whose numerous propaganda articles in the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda [Red Star] made him perhaps the most popular writer in the Soviet Union at the time, noted an important paradox in his memoirs: “Usually war brings with it the censor’s scissors; but here in the first year and a half of the war, writers felt much freer than before.”16
The loosening of the ideological noose that Stalin had sanctioned was intended to unite the country in the face of mortal danger. Stalin also made an alliance with the Orthodox Church: as a former seminarian, he understood the enormous spiritual potential of a religious appeal.
Among those for whom, in the words of Pasternak, “the war was a cleansing storm, a breath of fresh air, a portent of deliverance,” was Andrei Platonov, considered by many today as the greatest twentieth-century Russian prose writer after Leo Tolstoy and Chekhov. (Joseph Brodsky felt that Platonov was on the level of Joyce and Kafka; sometimes he would add, “and maybe, higher.”)17
Filonov and Platonov could be considered twins in art, although there was little physical similarity. Filonov was tall and had eyes that his friend the poet Khlebnikov described as “cherry-like,” and his voice was beautiful, deep and rich. Platonov had childlike blue eyes, was short, and spoke in a muffled voice. Both had high foreheads and piercing eyes, but fanaticism dominated in Filonov’s charismatic appearance, while broad-faced Platonov, who could be sarcastic in his youth (especially when drunk), became withdrawn over time, more and more resembling his favorite character, the Russian “hidden man.”
In his works, Platonov often depicted frenzied and inarticulate “non-Party Bolsheviks” like Filonov, while the writer himself, with his sullen proletarian looks (as a friend once put it, Platonov could easily be taken for a drunkard waiting outside a liquor store for someone to split the price of a bottle), would have fit into any of Filonov’s expressionist urbanist drawings.
Platonov was born to the family of a locomotive engineer in 1919, and at the age of twenty he volunteered for the railroad Unit of Special Assignments (ChON), the notorious Bolshevik punitive corps. He began publishing his work early, and in 1927 his novella “The Sluices of Epiphany” (a parable about Russian folk wisdom and the willfulness of the authorities) caught Gorky’s attention. Encouraged, Platonov sent Gorky the manuscript of his masterpiece, Chevengur, a novel about a bizarre attempt to build “separate communism” in a provincial Russian town.
Gorky’s sympathetic response makes Platonov’s dilemma clear: “For all the indisputable high qualities of your work, I do not believe that it will be published. That will be prevented by your anarchic mindset, apparently a trait of your ‘spirit.’ Whether you wanted it or not—you have given your depiction of reality a lyrical satirical character, which, naturally, is unacceptable for our censorship. For all your tenderness toward people, they are colored ironically, and appear before the reader not so much revolutionary as ‘eccentric’ and ‘half-witted.’”18
Gorky’s prediction came true: Chevengur was not printed in Platonov’s lifetime, and in the USSR it was published only at the height of perestroika, sixty years after it was written. But when Platonov’s works did break through the censorship of Stalinist Russia, the consequences for the writer were often catastrophic.
In 1931, Stalin, who followed the Soviet literary magazines closely, read Platonov’s novella “Benefit” in Krasnaya Nov’. His remarks in the margins (the issue is in the archives) make the dictator’s reaction clear: “This is not Russian, but some gobbledygook language,” “Fool,” Scoundrel,” “Bastard,” and so on. Stalin’s resolution is on the first page: “A story by an agent of our enemies, written with the goal of sabotaging the kolkhoz movement.”19
One of the literary bosses of those years, Vladimir Sutyrin, later recalled how he and Fadeyev, then editor-in-chief of Krasnaya Nov’, were brought late one evening in June 1931 to the Kremlin, to a Politburo meeting. Stalin, puffing on his pipe and holding a copy of Krasnaya Nov’, paced around the table, where Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikhail Kalinin, and other leaders of the country were seated. Stalin attacked Fadeyev when he was still in the door: “It was you who printed Platonov’s kulak anti-Soviet story?” Pale, Fadeyev replied that the issue had been prepared by the previous editor. That editor was brought to the Kremlin within a half hour, during which total silence reigned.
The former editor, face to face with Stalin, could barely stand up and babbled something incoherent in self-justification. Sweat poured down his face. Turning to his secretary, Poskrebyshev, Stalin said disdainfully: “Take him away…. Someone like that manages Soviet literature…. And you, comrade Sutyrin and comrade Fadeyev, take this magazine, it has my comments, and write an article that will expose the anti-Soviet meaning of Platonov’s story. You may go.”20
A car brought Fadeyev and Sutyrin to the latter’s apartment, where they immediately wrote a strong anti-Platonov article, hastily published in the official newspaper Izvestiya and signed by Fadeyev. At the same time an entire series of brutal attacks against Platonov appeared in the press with such characteristic titles as “Lampoon on a Kolkhoz Village” and “More Attention to the Tactics of a Class Enemy.” They were also, without a doubt, instigated by Stalin. The authorities stopped publishing Platonov completely.
Yet Stalin did not execute Platonov. When he attended the famous meeting with writers at Gorky’s apartment on October 26, 1932 (it was then that Stalin called Soviet writers “engineers of the human soul”), his first question was “Is Platonov here?” No one had ever intended to invite “class enemy” Platonov to the literary summit, but after the ruler expressed interest in him, the writer’s life grew a little easier: they knew that Stalin did not pose random questions.
In 1933 a report from the secret police was placed on Stalin’s desk, with an account by an informer of how Platonov reacted to Stalin’s criticism of “Benefit.” “I don’t care what others will say. I wrote that novella for one man (for Comrade Stalin), that man read it and responded substantively. The rest does not interest me.” The same memorandum said that Platonov’s works were “characterized by a satiric and essentially counterrevolutionary approach to the basic problems of socialist construction,” but also noted that Platonov was “popular among writers and highly esteemed as a master,” and that he himself felt that his work “helps the Party see all the mold on some things better than the Worker-Peasant Inspection.”21
In literary circles, where many people knew Stalin’s wrathful reaction in 1931, Platonov was treated like a doomed man. But disaster befell Platonov from an unexpected side: on May 4, 1938, his son, Anton, barely sixteen, was arrested on the denunciation of a classmate (they were both in love with the same girl), and sentenced as a member of an “anti-Soviet youth terrorist organization” to exile in Siberia.
Sholokhov, an admirer of Platonov, offered to help the boy. According to Platonov, Sholokhov reached Stalin, who immediately asked for information by phone about Anton. The youth was returned to Moscow, his case was reviewed, his explanation that he confessed to terrorism “under threats of the prosecutor who said that if I did not sign my parents would be arrested” was accepted.22 Platonov’s son was one of the very few people for whom Stalinist justice went into reverse: on the eve of the war he was released. But Anton had contracted tuberculosis in prison and died on January 4, 1943, in the arms of his grief-stricken parents.
Despite all his misfortunes, Platonov was patriotic during the years of the war with Hitler. Lev Gumilevsky, a writer friend, recalled meeting Platonov in the fall of 1941 in one of the ubiquitous Moscow lines (this was for cigarettes), and Platonov expressed his firm conviction that Russia would win. “But how?” asked bewildered Gumilevsky. “How?…With their guts!” Platonov replied.23
Although official historiography would like to convince us otherwise, such optimism was not shared by all in those tragic days. The literary scholar Leonid Timofeyev recorded in his secret diary (published only in 2002), the same day, October 16, 1941, that Tsvetaeva’s husband, Sergei Efron, was executed: “Apparently, it’s all over…. A defeat that will be hard to recover from. I can’t believe that they will manage to organize resistance somewhere. Thus, the world, apparently, will be united under the aegis of Hitler…. In the lines and in town there is a sharply hostile attitude regarding the ancien régime: they betrayed us, abandoned us, left us. The populace has started burning portraits of the leaders and the works of the church fathers.”24 (Timofeyev meant the classics of Marxism.)
Platonov, moving through chaotic Moscow that day, noticed with his acute writer’s eye a collection of the works of Karl Marx left on the street by a frightened resident, neatly stacked on a clean cloth, and commented wryly to his companion, Gumilevsky: “Done by a decent man.”25
The writer Vassily Grossman, later to write the great epic novel about the war and Stalin’s camps, Life and Fate, but during the war years in Stalin’s good favor, recommended Platonov as a war correspondent to the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. That was quite risky: Stalin read the paper every day, very attentively, often calling the editor with comments and criticism about the contents—he considered Krasnaya Zvezda an important instrument for the army’s political education. But Grossman’s plan worked: Platonov’s essays and stories began appearing regularly in the newspaper, to be followed by collections of his articles.
As the army newspaper’s editor recalled, he was very nervous: “I expected Stalin’s call every minute: who gave you permission to hire that ‘agent of the class enemy’ at Krasnaya Zvezda?” But the call never came, even though Stalin occasionally was vexed by Platonov’s “holy fool” style, and then Pravda would print irritated reviews that characterized his works as being “a heap of oddities.”26
When the war ended in victory in May 1945, the tactical need to be tolerant of such talented but suspicious writers as Platonov disappeared. The final blow against Platonov came on January 4, 1947, when Literaturnaya Gazeta ran a big piece by one of the most vicious critics of those years, Vladimir Ermilov, titled “A. Platonov’s Slanderous Story,” with a categorical conclusion: “We are tired of the whole manner of ‘holy fool for Christ’ that characterizes A. Platonov’s writing…. The ugly andimpure little world of A. Platonov is repulsive and alien to the Soviet people.”27
Platonov was ill in bed, the tuberculosis he had contracted from his son flaring up. He said bitterly to a friend who had come to visit him: “He knows I’m in bed, he’s kicking me when I’m down!” And as the newspaper with the merciless review fell from Platonov’s hands, “he shut his eyes, tears glistened.”28
From that day, editors and publishers steadily rejected all of Platonov’s essays, stories, film scripts, and plays. We know that Sholokhov tried to help him even in those years; he got him scarce imported medicines. When Platonov died on January 5, 1951, he was fifty-one. In the history of modern Russian culture, full of warped lives and premature deaths, this was one of the greatest losses.
Chapter Nine
The war with Hitler, which brought the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse, demanded huge sacrifices from the entire country. Stalin, who was among the first political leaders of the century to appreciate the propaganda potential of culture, constructing a highly effective cultural apparatus even before the war, now turned it to the service of the war effort.
Propaganda material was devised for varying audiences. For the masses there were pop songs, patriotic films, and plain army broad-sheets. For the intelligentsia and Western allies, there were novels, symphonies, and operas like Vassily Grossman’s novel For the Just Cause, Shostakovich’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies, and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony and his opera War and Peace, based on the Tolstoy novel, but also the sophisticated historical film Ivan the Terrible, on which Eisenstein worked starting in 1941, when he was evacuated from Moscow to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan at the start of the war.
The film was commissioned by Stalin, and he spared no expense. Even though it was made during the war, Ivan the Terrible, with its meticulously constructed historical sets, opulent boyar costumes, and multitudes of extras, looked much more expensive than Eisenstein’s prewar film Alexander Nevsky. The director shot so much material that he planned to make it in three parts (the music was written by Prokofiev, who had also done the score for Nevsky).
But while the first part (in which the sixteenth-century tyrant Ivan, who deals ruthlessly with his enemies, was played by Nikolai Cherkasov as a tall, long-haired, and handsome man whose nostrils flared dramatically) was approved by Stalin, the second, in which Eisenstein, almost in a Dostoevskian manner, showed Tsar Ivan contorted in spiritual torment, infuriated the Soviet leader. The historical allusions were too obvious: Eisenstein was clearly suggesting that Stalin should repent.
Eisenstein and Cherkasov were called to the Kremlin to be chastised, Stalin banned part 2 of Ivan the Terrible (“abominable!”), and the film did not appear on the Soviet screen until 1958, ten years after the director’s death and five after Stalin’s. Eisenstein’s planned third part was never made.
The mass movie audience in the Soviet Union never shared Stalin’s interest in Eisenstein, and even he often found the director’s “formalist” mannerisms irritating. During the war years less sophisticated movies played a much more important propaganda role, particularly Chapaev (1934), a film about the CivilWar made by Georgy and Sergei Vasilyev, who were not related—they used “the brothers Vasilyev” as a nom de camera.
According to the notes made by Boris Shumyatsky, head of the film industry then (he was shot in 1938 as a saboteur and “enemy of the people”), between November 1934 and March 1936, Stalin watched Chapaev in his private screening room at the Kremlin (usually with several members of the Politburo) thirty-eight times.1 He considered it the best Soviet film, and many Russians agree even today: an entertaining plot, sure direction, and solid acting make this “brothers Vasilyev” work a landmark. Even though the Red commander Chapaev dies at the end, his screen exploits never failed to inspire Soviet soldiers in the war.
The literary work that played a similar role was Alexander Tvardovsky’s narrative poem Vassily Terkin. The young poet came from a peasant family that had suffered under Stalin’s forced collectivization. The poem’s protagonist, an ordinary soldier, became a new quasi-folkloric Soviet hero with traditional roots, who goes through the war with jokes and a wink, without looking like a propaganda cartoon.
Tvardovsky’s Terkin won the admiration not only of millions of grateful readers at the front and back home, but of Bunin, who lived in exile in France, and who like many other White émigrés became patriotic during the war with Hitler. The picky Bunin, who criticized Gorky and even Dostoevsky, proclaimed Terkin, apparently quite sincerely, a great work. “This is a truly rare book: what freedom, what marvelous boldness, what precision and accuracy in everything, and what an extraordinary folksy soldier’s language—free flowing, without a single false, ready-made, that is, literary-clichéd, word!”2Vassily Terkin (like Chapaev earlier) received a Stalin Prize First Degree, even though Stalin was not even mentioned in either work. They performed their propaganda function all the better for it.
Of the celebrated émigrés who radically revised their attitude toward the Soviet Union because of the war, like composer Rachmaninoff and conductor Serge Koussevitzky, the most unusual is the story of chansonnier Alexander Vertinsky (1889–1957). He was the first in the group of great poet singers who would hold an important place in twentieth-century Russian culture, like Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky. He created the “Vertinsky style,” which retains its popularity almost a century after his first songs appeared—simultaneously overwrought and ironic micronovellas (they were called “Les Vertinettes”) about exotic people and places: “The Purple Negro,” “God’s Ball,” “Little Creole Boy.”
Tall, slender, and elegant, Vertinsky had a slight but distinctive voice, augmented by the singer’s expressive gestures. He began his career in prerevolutionary Moscow, appearing in crowded nightclubs and cabarets, costumed and made up like a contemporary Pierrot. Vertinsky captured the spirit of that decadent era with songs of religion-tinged erotica (from the arsenal of the early Akhmatova) and cocaine, but his work miraculously retains its charms even today. Vertinsky’s secret, as one of his fans put it, is that “the sad seems funny in his art, and vice versa, therefore the banal becomes original.”3 His oeuvre could be regarded as high kitsch, or in Susan Sontag’s term, camp, and in that quality, along with the best examples of Gypsy ballads, continue to be appealing.
Curiously, one of Vertinsky’s fans was Stalin, who would privately play his records, issued in huge numbers in the West where the singer had fled after the revolution, and banned in the Soviet Union, because the music was considered harmful for the masses as émigré and “decadent.” (In 1924 the secret police compiled a long list of banned recordings, and these lists were updated regularly.) Stalin’s sympathy for Vertinsky remained through the years, and the singer, who had become a Soviet patriot, was permitted to return home in 1943. His appearance created a small sensation and generated intense gossip.
An entry dated February 12, 1944, in Leonid Timofeyev’s secret diary is typical: “The singer Vertinsky is in Moscow. He came from China. Before his arrival he had to spend seven years singing the Soviet repertoire. Besides that, he donated three million to the Red Army. In Moscow, as usual, he became rationed through passes for special audiences. Today there is a rumor that he died of a stroke.”4 Vertinsky, fifty-five then, continued performing widely for another thirteen years, giving more than three thousand concerts. For all the external signs of success (tickets sold out instantly), it was a strangely spectral existence, without reviews in the press, without radio broadcasts, and most importantly, without mass distribution of his recordings, to which he had grown accustomed in the West.
For his niche audience (Vertinsky often performed in closed officers’ clubs and before the elite) the singer, now in elegant white tie and tails, was a mirage of sorts from the émigré Western world, mysteriously materializing in the drab Soviet reality. Yes, he sang of the émigrés’ longing for home. But Vertinsky’s public, living behind the Iron Curtain, also learned (in tango, foxtrot, or shimmy rhythms) about the “dives of San Francisco,” the Piccadilly bar, and the singer’s affair with Marlene Dietrich in Hollywood.
Denunciations of Vertinsky constantly arrived at the Kremlin. Vigilant Bolsheviks wrote to Stalin that his repertoire must be Sovietized quickly. According to the recollections of the singer’s widow, Stalin’s reaction was unexpected: “Why should the artist Vertinsky create a new repertoire? He has his repertoire. The people who don’t like it don’t have to listen.”5
The ruler’s fondness for Vertinsky went as far as giving him the Stalin Prize in 1951, not for little songs about the dives of San Francisco, but for his part in Conspiracy of the Doomed, an anti-American propaganda film by Mikhail Kalatozov (later director of the famous war film The Cranes Are Flying), in which Vertinsky played a plotting cardinal in a characteristically grotesque style. Yet, even after this, his records were not made available. The first Vertinsky LPs appeared only in the early 1970s and became instant best sellers.
Stalin, who personally rated Russian classical music—Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov—as the highest form, understood the need for popular entertainment: “One likes the accordion with Gypsy songs. We have that. Another likes restaurant songs. We have that, too.”6 At the turn of the century, gramophone records made popular numerous Gypsy and pseudo-Gypsy songs about unrequited love, mad passions, and wild drinking sprees (“Black Eyes,” “The Autumn Wind Moans Piteously,” “The Night Breathed with the Delight of Lust”) and created the first stars of the Russian entertainment industry—the Gypsy Varya Panina, who sang in a low, almost masculine voice (her admirers included Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Blok), the “incomparable” Anastasia Vyaltseva, and sprightly Nadezhda Plevitskaya, who performed her quasi folksongs for Nicholas II himself.
After the revolution the star system went underground for twenty years, but began a cautious revival before the war, when the first Soviet celebrities of pop music began to appear, including the composer Isaak Dunaevsky and the singers Leonid Utesov and Klavdia Shulzhenko. They performed at the front throughout the war years with patriotic and entertainment programs, trying to make up for the severely reduced production of records.
The war situation, which had paradoxically created more liberal conditions for all of Soviet culture, gave rise to an unprecedented number of great songs that have retained their appeal to this day: “Dark Night” by Nikita Bogoslovsky, “Dug Out” by Konstantin Listov, “The Cherished Stone” by Boris Mokrousov, “Evening on the Road” and “Nightingales” by Vassily Solovyov-Sedoy, and a series of songs by Matvei Blanter with lyrics by Mikhail Isakovsky—“In the Woods by the Front,” “Under the Balkan Stars,” and “The Enemy Burned Down His House,” the last about a soldier who returns home from the war:
The enemy burned down his house,
Killed his entire family.
Where can the soldier go now,
Who will listen to his sorrow?
The tragedy of a country that lost tens of millions of lives in the war was expressed in that song with such power and simplicity that it became one of the best epitaphs for the period. But the song was not played then; it waited fifteen years on the shelf. Stalin attributed the victory over Hitler to his own military genius and did not want any reminders of the horrible price the people paid for it.
Stalin’s superman attitude toward his citizens was reflected in a strange episode described by former Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas. In the spring of 1945, after a dinner at the Kremlin in honor of visiting leader of Yugoslavia Marshal Tito, Stalin screened a 1938 film by Efim Dzigan, If Tomorrow There Is War, which was awarded one of the early Stalin Prizes.
If Tomorrow There Is War, described in the opening credits as a “battle film on newsreel materials,” painted a fairy-tale picture of a swift, easy, and bloodless victory in the then-hypothetical clash with the Nazis. In the film, the war that the Germans try to win with poison gases ends with them crushed in just a few days, and the German proletariat rises to support the Soviet Union.
Djilas wrote in astonishment that, after the screening, Stalin said to his Yugoslav guests, “It’s not too different from what really happened, except there was no poison gas and the German proletariat did not rebel.”7
In that period, Stalin, a gifted actor, deftly projected the image of a powerful, calm, and wise politician to Western leaders at their meetings. But behind the façade, he hid a growing irritation and anxiety. He might have considered two pivotal events in Russian history: the Decembrist antimonarchical uprising in 1825 and the fall of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917. In both cases the Russian army picked up “harmful” liberal ideas during campaigns in Europe and involved itself in the country’s political life.
In 1825, Nicholas I dealt decisively with the rebels, “chilled” Russia, and reigned for thirty years. His ideological formula “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” was strong enough to create a comparatively stable foundation for the monarchy a half century after his death, that is, at least until 1905. A weak Nicholas II did not bother to assert the ruling ideology, and he let loose the cultural reins. The army, the intelligentsia, and the populace united and swept away the monarchy.
The similarities in 1946 had to have made Stalin, knowledgeable in historical parallels, quite wary. Soviet intellectuals had been talking for a while about the probability that Russia’s Anglo-Saxon Allies in the anti-Hitler coalition would pressure him into making democratic concessions after the war.
Reports were placed on Stalin’s desk by the secret police on the malcontent statements of notable Soviet cultural figures, such as the popular critic and children’s poet Kornei Chukovsky: “Soon we must expect some more decisions to please our masters (Allies), our fate is in their hands. I am glad that a new, rational era is beginning. They will teach us culture.”8 Here is what the poet Iosif Utkin said in a private conversation, according to the report: “We must save Russia, not conquer the world…. Now we have the hope that we will live in a free democratic Russia, for without the Allies we will not manage to save Russia, and that means making concessions, which will lead to internal changes.”9
The multimillion-man Soviet army crossed Europe in 1944–1945 and came face to face with the Western way of life, so clearly superior, even in wartime, that this “visual-aid propaganda” threatened to overcome years of Soviet ideological indoctrination. An unstable mass of bewildered soldiers and an intelligentsia looking hopefully to the West—Russian history teaches that this combination could be explosive. That is why Stalin chose to repeat what he had done in 1936, making a series of strikes that would guarantee him ideological control.
In 1946–1948, he attacked outstanding cultural figures, followed by mass brainwashing. The victims included Eisenstein, a group of leading Soviet composers (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Aram Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin, and Gavriil Popov), and in literature, the poet Akhmatova and the popular satirical writer Zoshchenko.
Anna Akhmatova’s “life scenario” is impressive: she began as a young and “cheerful sinner” (as she called herself), slender and graceful, a bohemian poet with a memorable profile (a bump on her nose) and signature bangs, whose early collections of love lyrics Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914) brought her scandalous protofeminist fame; she became the author of the anti-Stalinist Requiem in 1940, and she proclaimed her voice to express the suppressed scream of the “one hundred million nation” and later, in her old age, she was the heavyset, gray-haired, majestic empress who considered her “personal life as the national life, the historical life”10 (according to Eikhenbaum).
Akhmatova was the master par excellence of self-fashioning. Back before the revolution she wove a legend into her poems about a love affair with the most popular Russian poet of the time, Blok, and about her allegedly masochistic relationship with her first husband, the poet Lev Gumilev, whom she divorced in August 1918. When both Blok and Gumilev died in August 1921 (the former of exhaustion, the latter executed by Bolshevik firing squad), Akhmatova was accepted by the Russian elite as the spiritual widow of both poets (even though they both left real widows).
Akhmatova did not serve the Soviets, nor did she leave for the West, remaining in what was called “internal emigration.” After 1922, her books of poetry were no longer published and she lived in proud isolation. But in 1935, when her husband, Punin, and her son, Lev Gumilev, were arrested, Akhmatova wrote to Stalin: “Iosif Vissarionovich, I do not know of what they are accused, but I give you my word of honor that they are not fascists, or spies, or members of counterrevolutionary societies. I have lived in the USSR since the start of the Revolution, I have never wanted to leave the country to which I am tied by mind and heart. Despite the fact that my poetry is not published and reviews by critics cause me many bitter minutes, I have not given in to despair; I continued to work in very difficult moral and material conditions…In Leningrad I live in great isolation and am frequently ill for long periods. The arrest of the only two people close to me is a blow that I will not be able to survive. I ask you, Iosif Vissarionovich, to return my husband and son to me, certain that no one will ever regret it.”11
Stalin wrote his resolution on the letter: “Free both Punin and Gumilev from arrest and report on the implementation.” From that moment, Akhmatova felt that she was in dialogue with the ruler. She had good reason. There is a story that in 1939 Stalin saw his young daughter, Svetlana, copying Akhmatova’s poetry from somebody’s notebook into her own, and asked her: “Why don’t you just use the book?” Learning from her that there were no easily available books of Akhmatova, Stalin, as the poet later wrote, “was bitterly stunned.”12
Akhmatova also maintained that in early 1939, “Stalin asked about me at a banquet for writers.”13 The fact remains that on November 11, 1939, the Presidium of the Union of Writers met urgently for a closed session where they voted on the resolution proposed by Union Secretary Fadeyev, Stalin’s tried and true henchman, on aid for Akhmatova—“bearing in mind Akhmatova’s great contributions to Russian poetry.”14
Who was behind the abrupt change in the official organization’s formerly hostile and scornful attitude toward Akhmatova can be guessed from Fadeyev’s letter to then Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Andrei Vyshinsky: Fadeyev asked him to find Akhmatova a room in Leningrad, since she “was and remains the most major poet of the prerevolutionary period.”15 This definition, strikingly similar to Stalin’s famous evaluation of Mayakovsky (who “was and remains the best, the most talented poet of our Soviet era”), must have been a quote from Stalin’s verbal order, since Vyshinsky, an infamously ruthless Stalinist butcher, supported Fadeyev’s request with extraordinary readiness.
Akhmatova was also given “a one-time grant of 3,000 rubles” and a monthly pension. (Fadeyev’s argument was charming: “After all, she doesn’t have that long to live.” As it happens, Akhmatova lived another twenty-seven years, outliving Fadeyev, who shot himself in 1956, by eleven years.)
The publishing house Sovetskii Pisatel (according to Akhmatova, on orders from Stalin “to publish my poetry”16) speedily printed her collection Iz shesti knig [From Six Books], in fact, her selected works. There is a story that Sholokhov had asked Stalin to do this.17 Most interestingly, the book came up in May 1940, just at the peak of the feverish intrigues in preparation for the first series of Stalin Prizes; it was instantly nominated for the prize by the most influential writers of the time—Sholokhov, Fadeyev, and Alexei Tolstoy. They were supported by Nemirovich-Danchenko, chairman of the Committee on Stalin Prizes.
However, Akhmatova did not get the Stalin Prize (neither did Pasternak, who had been nominated for his translation of Hamlet): someone reversed. Was it Stalin himself? We have only Zhdanov’s resolution: “How could this ‘depravity with prayer in the praise of god’ of Akhmatova’s ever appear? Who promoted it?”18
A special decree of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Party banned the Akhmatova collection as being “ideologically harmful” and required it to be removed from sale—an empty gesture, since the entire printing had sold out long before. All this was a tremendous blow for Akhmatova then, but later it helped cement her anti-Stalinist image (while, for example, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are often blamed nowadays for their numerous Stalin Prizes).
In 1941, along with other leading cultural figures of Leningrad like Shostakovich and Zoshchenko, Akhmatova was evacuated on Stalin’s orders. She landed in Tashkent in Central Asia, where on February 23, 1942, she wrote her famous patriotic poem “Courage.” It was published two weeks later in Pravda, the central Party newspaper.
We are not afraid of dying beneath bullets,
We will not be bitter left without shelter—
We will preserve you, Russian speech,
The mighty Russian word.
One of the somewhat mysterious episodes in Akhmatova’s biography took place that same year. A military base located near Tashkent was the training site for a Polish anti-Hitler army under the command of General Wladislaw Anders. Stalin had these forces under his personal control and often summoned Anders to the Kremlin.
Anders was playing a complicated game with Stalin. His goal was to bring his men, Polish soldiers and officers who were interned in the Soviet Union, to Iran, where he would join up with the British (which he managed to do eventually). In order to lull Stalin’s suspicions, Anders had to keep sending him signals of his loyalty. With that in mind, he invited the famous writer and Stalin favorite, the Red Count Alexei Tolstoy, author of the historical novel Peter the First, to visit his headquarters. The visit was organized by Count Jozef Czapski, a cavalry officer who handled cultural issues for Anders and also, as Brodsky told me (having learned it from Akhmatova), counterintelligence.19
In response, Tolstoy invited the count to lunch. There, forty-six-year-old Czapski, an artist and writer in peacetime, met Akhmatova, who was fifty-three. In his memoirs, Czapski described her as a woman with vestiges of former beauty and big gray eyes. Her confidante, Lydia Chukovskaya, asserts that the poet began meeting the Polish officer secretly, trying to escape his Soviet surveillance. Akhmatova later wrote a poem about their meetings, which begins clearly enough: “That night we drove each other mad.”
Did Akhmatova really think that she and Czapski managed to hide from the vigilant eyes of Stalin’s spies? Brodsky expressed his doubts: “How could you even consider that, especially in those times? In Tashkent, I believe, a whole multitude followed their every step.”20
You couldn’t call Akhmatova naïve; she was a tough nut. We know that she wrote down her anti-Stalinist poems (including Requiem, about the Great Terror) for her closest friends, let them read the lines, and then burned the paper on the spot. She feared—and properly so—that her rooms were bugged. (Remember careless Sholokhov in the National Hotel.) Why was Akhmatova not punished for her forbidden liaison with a Polish officer? Another girlfriend of Czapski’s in Tashkent was arrested by the Soviet authorities, as he wrote in his memoirs.21
Akhmatova might have begun to think that she was indeed under “higher protection,” as Czapski put it. That certainty played her false in late November 1945, when she was back in Leningrad and spent a night talking with Isaiah Berlin, a thirty-six-year-old British diplomat of Russian descent. This was her second contact with a foreigner in the Soviet Union, and this time Stalin was furious, as Akhmatova learned soon enough.