The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism

State, the: and economic exploitation, i5i

Stendhal (pseud. of Marie-Henri Beyle), 158

Strauss, Richard, 5i Stravinsky, Igor, 62 Stravinsky, Vera, 74 Stroganov family, 6i students: and Soviet orthodoxy, 158-60

Suslov, Mikhail Andreevich, i0-ii Suvorov, Aleksandr Vasil'evich, 18

Tabidze, Nina, 69 Tabidze, Titsian Yustinovich, 6, 58, 69

Tairov, Aleksandr Yakovlevich, 53 Talbott, Strobe, xx Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, xii Tarle (Tarle), Evgeny Viktorovich, i2 Tartar historians, i2 Tatlin, Vladimir Yevgrafovich, 53 Taylor, Alan John Percivale, xxxii Tchaikovsky, Petr Il'ich: ballets, 30;

Mandel'shtam and, 50-1 Terror, Great, see Great Terror Thatcher, Margaret, xvi theatre, 3-4, 19-22 Tiflis (Tbilisi), i26 Tikhonov, Nikolay Semenovich, ii,

37

Tito, Josip Broz, 100 Tolstoy, Aleksey Nikolaevich: achievements, 4; Akhmatova on, 76; as emigre, 85; emotion in, 1; literary ambitions, i8; Mandel'shtam quarrels with, 47, 75-6; moralising, 130; Pasternak idealises, 60-2; returns from Paris, 4; The Road to Golgotha, 10 Tolstoy, Count Lev Nikolaevich, 85-6; Anna Karenina, xxvi, 76-7; The Kreutzer Sonata, 77; War and Peace, 77 Tomashevsky, Boris Viktorovich, 4 totalitarianism, i36 translations (literary), i4-i5 Transport Theatre, Moscow, i9

Trenev, Konstantin Andreevich, i5 Trieste, 92

Tripp, Brenda Muriel Howard, 29 &

n 3^0, 32 35^, 72 Trotsky, Leon (pseud. of Lev David- ovich Bronstein): advocates prole­tarian dictatorship, 153; character, 136; fall (1928), 3; intellectual arrogance, i44; moderating influ­ence, 5 ; on permanent revolution, ii4, i36-7, i42; supports intel­lectual life, 23; terror policy, 146; theories, 100, 103; as thinker, 141 Tsarskoe Selo, 30 Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna:

describes Pasternak, 56; as emigre, 4; Pasternak's fondness for, 60; popularity, 9; status as writer, 62; suicide, 7, 45, 64, 78 Tukhachevsky, Marshal Mikhail

Nikolaevich, 64 Turgenev, Ivan Sergeevich, 69, 77, 86,

130, 168 Turkey, 92

Tynyanov, Yuri Nikolaevich, 4-6 Tyutchev, Fedor Ivanovich, 6i-2

Ulanova, Galina Sergeevna, 20 United States: Soviet suspicion of, ⁱ²3

Utis, (John) O. (pseud. of I. Berlin), xxix-xxxiii, xxxv-xxxvi, i45 -6, i48-9

Vakhtangov, Evgeny Bagrationovich, 3^, 53

Valery, (Ambroise) Paul (Toussaint

Jules), 42, 8i Varga, Evgeny Samoilovich (Eugen[e]

Varga), i02 Verhaeren, Emile, 60 Vigny, Alfred-Victor, comte de, 42 VOKS (society for cultural relations), 35-6, 38, 121

Vorovsky, Vatslav Vatslavovich, 141 Vrubel', Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 62

Wells, Herbert George, 59 Wendell, Vladimir, 5i Wilson, Edmund, 45 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 58 Woolf, Virginia, 38, 59, 69, 74; The

Waves, 48 Workers' Opposition, i37 World War II: Soviet patriotism in, 55^{, 108}

writers: in Leningrad, 36-7; and Party line, 10-11, 104; in Second World War, 108; self-absorption, 130-1; and Soviet orthodoxy, 161; status in Soviet Union, 152; supervised, 11-12; see also intelligentsia

Writers' Bookshop, Leningrad, 3i, 70 Writers' Union, 4, 9, 11, 38, 54

Yashvili, Pavle (Paolo)

Dzhibraelovich, 6, 58 Yeats, William Butler, 42, 60 Yugoslavia, 92, i6i

Zadkine, Ossip (Osip Zadkin), 53 Zhdanov, Andrey Aleksandrovich, 76, i20

Zhirmunsky, Viktor Maksimovich, 4 Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreevich, 6i Zinoviev (Zinov'ev), Grigory Evse- evich (pseud. of Ovsel Gershon Aronov Radomyslsky), 136, 139 Zola, Emile, 158

Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 4^ 32 35^, 7°

I must admit, because of my great desire to learn about the con­dition of Russian literature and art, about which relatively little was known in the West at that time. I knew something, of course, of what had happened to Russian writers and artists in the 1920s and '30s. The Revolution had stimulated a great wave of creative energy in Russia, in all the arts; bold experimentalism was every­where encouraged: the new controllers of culture did not inter­fere with anything that could be represented as being a 'slap in the face' to bourgeois taste, whether it was Marxist or not. The new movement in the visual arts - the work of such painters as Kandinsky, Chagall, Soutine, Malevich, Klyun, Tatlin, of the sculptors Arkhipenko, Pevsner, Gabo, Lipchitz, Zadkine, of the theatre and film directors Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Tairov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin - produced masterpieces which had a pow­erful impact in the West; there was a similar upward curve in the field of literature and literary criticism. Despite the violence and devastation of the Civil War, and the ruin and chaos brought about by it, Revolutionary art of extraordinary vitality continued to be produced.

I remember meeting Sergey Eisenstein in 1945; he was in a state of terrible depression: this was the result of Stalin's condem­nation of the original version of his film Ivan the Terrible,

1946

Since my qualifications for speaking on the Soviet Union are nothing more than a knowledge of the language, and a period of four months¹ spent in Russia, mine are fugitive impressions only. I have used the word 'insulate' rather than 'isolate' because, while 'isolationist' correctly describes that section of American opinion which desires to dissociate itself entirely from the out­side world, this is not Russia's attitude. She is ready to take a part in international relations, but she prefers other countries to abstain from taking an interest in her affairs: that is to say, to insulate herself from the rest of the world without remaining iso­lated from it.

I will not go over the general background of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian history. The general reasons for Russia's mistrust of the West are familiar: that she has never for long been a part of Europe, has not mingled frequently with the European nations, and, in consequence, feels dangerously infe­rior. It is interesting to note that, with the possible exception of Turgenev, there is no great Russian writer who did not suffer from xenophobia, amounting at times to acute hatred of the West. There is a permanent neurosis resulting from this uneasy position which Russia feels she occupied - 'Scythians' belonging neither to East nor West. Economic backwardness is generally advanced as the main reason for her inferiority complex, but I wonder if it is perhaps more complicated than that.

One peculiar cause of Russia's disquiet about the West, which I have noticed in talks with Soviet officials and journalists, is the

¹ Mid-September 1945 to early January 1946.

Generalissimo Stalin and the Art of Government

¹95²

There was once a man who had taken employment as a steward on a seagoing ship. It was explained to him that, in order to avoid breaking plates when the ship was rolling in heavy weather, he must not walk in a straight line, but try to move in a zigzag man­ner: this was what experienced seamen did. The man said that he understood. Bad weather duly came, and presently there was heard the terrible sound of breaking plates as the steward and his load crashed to the ground. He was asked why he had not fol­lowed instructions. 'I did,' he said. 'I did as I was told. But when

I zigged the ship zagged, and when I zagged the ship zigged.'

Capacity for careful co-ordination of his movements with the dialectical movement of the Party - a semi-instinctive knowledge of the precise instant when zig turns into zag - is the most pre­cious knack that a Soviet citizen can acquire. Lack of facility in this art, for which no amount of theoretical understanding of the system can compensate, has proved the undoing of some of the ablest, most useful and, in the very early days, most fanatically devoted and least corrupt supporters of the regime.¹

i

We are living in an age when the social sciences claim to be able to predict more and more accurately the behaviour of groups and individuals, rulers and ruled. It is strange, then, to find that

¹ These two paragraphs formed the original conclusion of the essay: see p. xxxi above.

1956

I spent four months in Moscow towards the end of 1945 and returned after eleven years' absence, in August 1956. The changes which I found, although considerable, did not seem to me to be as far-reaching or radical as the reports of some Western observers had led one to believe. During my relatively short stay¹ I had less opportunity of observing either institutions or individ­uals than in 1945, and the impressions which follow are therefore inevitably somewhat more superficial.

I entered the USSR via Leningrad, which physically has vastly improved since the immediate post-war days of 1945. The streets were cleaner, the buildings better cared for, the Winter Palace repainted, Peterhof restored, indeed over-restored; the trams no longer chock-a-block with passengers, a good many inexpensive restaurants and 'buffets' (inexpensive, that is, by local standards) open once more, reasonably clean and capable of providing better meals than most similar establishments in England (although less good than, say, their equivalent in Italy, even in the poorest southern towns). There were a great many obvious tourists in the streets and I met a number of my old students from Harvard who had been supplied with Carnegie travel grants for 'twenty-nine days' in the Soviet Union; these grants are at present responsible for a regular influx of young graduate social and historical researchers from the United States, energetic, ubiquitous and determined to collect the maximum quantity of information by means of 'field work' - that is, conversations with the maximum

¹ 1-29 August. This account appears to have been written soon afterwards.

!957

i

o ne of the most arresting characteristics of modern Russian culture is its acute self-consciousness. There has surely never been a society more deeply and exclusively preoccupied with itself, its own nature and destiny. From the 1830s until our own day the subject of almost all critical and imaginative writing in Russia is Russia. The great novelists, and a good many minor novelists too, as well as the vast majority of the characters in Russian novels, are continuously concerned not merely with their purposes as human beings or members of families or classes or professions, but with their condition or mission or future as Russians, members of a unique society with unique problems. This national self-absorption is to be found among novelists and playwrights of otherwise very different outlooks. An obsessed religious teacher like Dostoevsky, a didactic moralist like Tolstoy, an artist like Turgenev regarded in the West as being dedicated to timeless and universal psychological and aesthetic patterns, a 'pure' unpolitical writer like Chekhov, careful not to preach, are all, and throughout their lives, crucially concerned with the 'Russian problem'. Russian publicists, historians, political theor­ists, writers on social topics, literary critics, philosophers, theolo­gians, poets first and last, all without exception and at enormous length, discuss such issues as what it is to be a Russian; the virtues, vices and destiny of the Russian individual and society; but above all the historic role of Russia among the nations; or, in particular, whether its social structure - say the relation of intel­lectuals to the masses, or of industry to agriculture - is sui

¹95 5^-64Х ^v°l. Л p. i²3-

[1] Letter to Jean Floud, 5 July 1968; cited by Michael Ignatieff in Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London and New York, 1998), p. 246.

[2] 'The Pursuit of the Ideal', in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (London, 1990), p. 13.

[3] 'The Sources of Soviet Conduct', Foreign Affairs 25 No 4 (July 1947), pp. 566-82, at p. 582. The article was published under the pseudonym 'X' in what the editor described to Berlin as 'our normal series of anonymous articles signed with an initial' (see p. xxxvi below).

[4] In his The First and the Last (New York/London, 1999), pp. 9-19, at p. 17.

[5] British Minister in Moscow.

[6] British Minister in Washington.

[7] Michael Ignatieff, op. cit. (p. xii above, note 1), p. 161

[8] Letter of 20 February 1946. The poem is the second in the cycle Cinque.

[9] The whole tribute is posted under 'Writing on Berlin' in The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library (hereafter IBVL), the website of The Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust, http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/.

[10] Letter to David Astor, 27 October 1958.

[11] Sunday Times, 21 December 1958, p. 6.

[11] Sunday Times, 7 November 1995, section 7 ('Books'), p. 9. Readers may like to have a note of Berlin's other shorter publications on Pasternak: 'The Energy of Pasternak', a review of Pasternak's Selected Writings, appeared in the Partisan Review 17 (1950), pp. 748-51, and was reprinted in Victor Erlich (ed.), Pasternak: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978); and there is a letter on Pasternak, written in reply to an article by Gabriel Josipovici, in the Times Literary Supplement, 16-22 February 1990, p. 171.

[12] See p. xvi above, note 1.

[13] The story has been added below (p. 98) as an epigraph, as Berlin suggests.

[14] A. J. P. Taylor, 'Stalin as Statesman: A Look at the Record', New York Times Magazine (New York Times, section 6), pp. 9, 53-60.

[15] Berlin annotates: 'Did you know that "grammar" is the same word as "glamour"? It proceeds via "grimoire". If further explanation is needed, I shall provide it when I see you.'

[16] He did; I haven't. So long after Stalin's death, the appellation (used throughout the piece) loses whatever point it had. Even Armstrong had his doubts (28 November): 'I didn't mind the ironical courtesy - indeed, rather liked it - but have a dislike of using a French term in speaking of another nationality. However, to put "Mr" looked ridiculous, so "M." it is.'

[17] Oxford, 1999; published in the USA (Santa Barbara, California, 1999) as Josef Stalin: A Biographical Companion.

xxxvii

[18] Short for 'Levyi front isskustva' (Left Front of Art).

[19] Dora (her given name was Fanya) Kaplan was indeed shot four days after her arrest, on 4 September 1918. Meyerhold was shot on 2 February 1940.

[20] In fact on 31 August 1941.

[21]More accurately 'socialist symbolism', which would have allowed writers to treat a wider range of subject-matter - beyond tractors and blast furnaces - without compromising their political loyalty.

[22] Sandwiches.

[23] Brenda Muriel Howard Tripp (b. 1906), British Council representative in the Soviet Union (arranging exchange of non-military scientific articles with the Academy of Sciences), was formally a FO cultural attache with diplomatic status, since the British Council was not officially allowed to function in the Soviet Union at that time.

[24] Rakhlin was almost certainly an agent of the NKGB (later the KGB), Anatoly Naiman informs me.

[25] Anna Akhmatova.

[26] (Later Sir) John Lawrence, press attache, and George Reavey, translator from Russian.

[27] This is a confusion. The Union of Soviet Writers occupied the other Palace of the Sheremetevs, almost opposite to the Bolshoy Dom on Liteiny, the NKGB Headquarters. Akhmatova lived in Fontanny Dom (named after the Fontanka canal) because she was the wife (and then ex-wife) of the art histo­rian and critic Nikolay Punin (her third husband), who occupied an apartment in the house. I owe this information to Anatoly Naiman.

[28] The Prose of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown (Princeton, 1965).

[28] Berlin means himself: see below, pp. 63-4. More material about this episode has since been published. All the (conflicting) accounts are well sum­marised by Pasternak's lover Olga Ivinskaya in her book A Captive of Time: My Years with Pasternak, The Memoirs of Olga Ivinskaya (London, 1978): see 'The Telephone Call: 1934', pp. 64-71.

1980

i

in the summer of 1945 the British Embassy in Moscow reported that it was short-handed, especially in the matter of offi­cials who knew Russian, and it was suggested that I might fill a gap for four or five months. I accepted this offer eagerly, mainly,

[29] Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam agreed to give him four out of five for his behaviour in this case. I.B.

[30] Cf. Heinrich Heines Samtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel (Leipzig, 1911-20), vol. 4, p. 306.

[31] A similar formula had been used, in a very different context, by the critic Boris Eikhenbaum, in Anna Akhmatova: opyt analiza (Petersburg, 1923), p. 114, to describe the mingling of erotic and religious motifs in Akhmatova's early poetry. It reappeared in 1930, in a caricatured form, in an unfriendly arti­cle on her in the Soviet Literary Encyclopaedia, whence it found its way into Zhdanov's anathema of 1946.

[32] 'Well said, old mole. Canst work i' th' earth so fast?' says Hamlet to the Ghost in Shakespeare's play (act 1, scene 5, line 162). 'Well grubbed, old mole,' says Marx at the end of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11 (London etc., 1979), p. 185. Hegel appears not to have used the image directly, though the tenor of Marx's remarks is broadly Hegelian.

[33] The usual translation of 'bezrodnye kosmopolity' ('bezrodnyi' literally means 'without relations' or 'without a native land'), which was used to refer to Soviet Jews. Though Hitler called Jews 'rootless internationalists' ('wurzellos Internationalen') in a 1933 broadcast, this specific Russian phrase first appears in print (so far as I can discover) in an article by the editor of the journal Ogonek, A[natoly Vladimirovich] Sofronov, 'Za dal'neishii pod'em sovetskoi dramaturgii' ('For the Further Development of Soviet Dramaturgy'), Pravda, 23 December 1948, p. 3 - though 'kosmopolit' on its own had certainly been in use since the 1930s, if not before, as a derogatory tag for anyone who did not toe the official political line; it had also been used pejoratively of Westernisers by Slavophils in the nineteenth century. The Pravda article was preceded by an anti-Semitic letter to Stalin from Anna Begicheva, an arts journalist at Izvestiya, about 'enemies at work in the arts' (letter dated 8 December 1948, currently [November 2003] in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History [RGASPI] 17, 132, 237, 75-81), but this formulation does not appear there.

[34] The problem was not, of course, one of pure theory, and did not arise in the void - in the course of abstract contemplation of history and its laws on the part of Stalin or anyone else. When the excesses of the first Bolshevist ter­ror and 'war Communism' were followed by the compromises of the New Economic Policy, the danger of repeating the pattern of the great French Revolution, or, for that matter, of the revolutions of 1848-9, must have appeared very real to Bolshevik leaders. They were certainly reminded of it often enough, especially by foreign critics. The technique of political naviga­tion here described was therefore born, as most notable inventions are apt to be, of urgent practical need. I.B.

[35] Presumably the Professor Kon mentioned in the note on the next page.

[36] I do not wish to imply that Stalin is solely responsible for all of even the major decisions of Soviet policy. No system so vast, however 'monolithic', can literally be directed by any single individual, whatever his powers. But, on the other hand, we have no reason for supposing that Stalin's henchmen, however competent under his leadership, will prove any more capable of carrying on his methods after him than were the companions of Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great, in whose hands the system of their master disintegrated very fast. On the other side we must place the opposite experience of Kemal's Turkey. Time alone will show. I.B.

[37] The governors, except at the technical level, certainly regard foreigners as potential foes, and adjust their conversation in a more conscious, cruder, more brutal manner to their interlocutor than is done by similar persons in other countries. I.B.

[38] Stalin used this phrase in a speech on the role of Soviet writers made at Maxim Gorky's house on 26 October 1932, recorded in an unpublished man­uscript in the Gorky archive - K. L. Zelinsky, 'Vstrecha pisatelei s I. V. Stalinym' ('A meeting of writers with I. V. Stalin') - and published for the first time, in English, in A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary

Intelligentsia, 1928-39 (Basingstoke and London, 1991), pp. 128-31: for this phrase see p. 131 - and, for the Russian original, 'inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush', I. V. Stalin, Sochineniya (Moscow, 1946-67), vol. 13, p. 410.

[39] Gosudarstvo i revolyutsiya (Moscow, 1918).

[40] Herzen wrote that 'Communism is a Russian autocracy turned upside down' in the Epilogue to his The Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia (1851): A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh (Moscow,

[41]See Berlin's 'The Artificial Dialectic' above, pp. 98-118, originally pub­lished under the pseudonym 'O. Utis'.

[42] 'Sloppiness'.

[43] Milovan Djilas corroborates this forcibly in his book, The New Class (New York, 1957). Whether the system is to be called State capitalism (the State being anything but a democracy) or a 'degenerate workers' State' or a naked autocracy is a question of the most appropriate label. The facts them­selves are not in doubt. I.B.

[44] Nor does the 'oppositionist' literary almanac Literaturnaya Moskva do more than this: it is neither for 'pure' art nor for some alternative policy, how­ever covertly. Its 'suspect' articles cry out for human values. I.B.

[45] 'Komsomol' is an abbreviation of 'Vsesoyuzny leninsky kommunistich- esky soyuz molodezhi' ('All-Union Leninist Communist League of Youth'), the sole official Communist youth organisation for those aged 14-28.

[46] See also p. xxvii above, note 1. There are in addition a number of unpub­lished pieces that belong in this company, but I do not take these into account here. They are listed on the Berlin website under 'Unpublished writings', and their titles plainly announce their connection with this volume.