Vishnevsky was referring to a play about two major figures of the imperial Russian pantheon, Prince Dmitrii Pozharsky and “Citizen” Kuzma Minin, the “saviors” of Moscow from the Polish occupation in 1612. Heroes of prerevolutionary Russia, celebrated inter alia in a monument erected on Red Square in Moscow in the early nineteenth century, Pozharsky and Minin had been ridiculed in the 1920s by numerous Bolshevik authors, among them Demian Bedny, who had accused the prince of corruption. Now the duo was restored to favor, and one of Stalin’s favorite Russian authors, Mikhail Bulgakov, wrote the libretto for the new opera in the summer of 1936. The opera was never performed, as Bulgakov was accused of presenting the Polish characters in a positive light and not showing enough love for the Russian people. True Russian patriotism was found instead in the imperial opera A Life for the Tsar by Nikolai Glinka. It was performed to great acclaim in February 1939 under the politically correct title Ivan Susanin—the name of a Russian peasant who allegedly saved Tsar Mikhail Romanov by sacrificing his own life. The opera dealt with the same period of Russian history as Bulgakov’s Minin and Pozharsky.
It was not just Russian history and its heroes that were back in favor but also the tsars, previously anathematized by Bolshevik propaganda. They were featured in books and articles as well as in films—by far the most effective Soviet propaganda instrument of the period. In November 1937, Stalin declared at a reception in honor of his commissar of defense: “The Russian tsars… did one good thing—they shook up the huge state all the way to Kamchatka. We received that state as an inheritance. And we Bolsheviks were the first to bind and strengthen that state as one indivisible state, not in the interest of the landowners and capitalists but for the benefit of the workers—all the peoples making up the state.” That year, a feature film, Peter the First, based on a novel by the former White émigré Aleksei Tolstoy, was released to the Soviet public. The production was sanctioned by Stalin himself.
The following year saw the release of another Soviet blockbuster dedicated to the heroic deeds of Russian rulers of the past. The main character of the film Aleksandr Nevsky, produced by the outstanding Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, was Prince Aleksandr Nevsky, a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church. The film glorified his thirteenth-century war with the Swedes and the Teutonic Knights as a heroic defense of the Russian land. In one line, Nevsky, referring to his Western enemies, says: “Whoever comes to us with a sword shall perish by the sword.” The phrase, which became a classic of Soviet propaganda, was never spoken by the real prince but was based on the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: “For all who take the sword shall perish by the sword.” Stalin wanted more, asking his aides to produce a film about another Russian tsar and enemy of the West, Ivan the Terrible. Imperial Russian glory was revived for the sole purpose of mobilizing Russian nationalism in preparation for what Stalin and his circle regarded as an inevitable war with the capitalist West.
In 1939, the Tretiakov Gallery invited Muscovites and visitors to the Soviet capital to view masterpieces of imperial Russian art from its vast collection. It was a major hit with the public, which was happy to feel reconnected with the homeland’s imperial past. If that feeling was familiar for older visitors, it was somewhat disturbing to the young people, who had been brought up in an atmosphere of Bolshevik internationalism devoid of attachment to Russian history or identity. “Last night, as I walked home from the exhibit through the center of the city, along Red Square, past the Kremlin, past the old spot where executions took place, past St. Basil’s Cathedral, I suddenly felt again a sort of deep kinship with the paintings at the exhibit,” wrote the teenage schoolgirl Nina Kosterina in her diary. “I am a Russian. At first this frightened me—were these, perhaps, chauvinistic stirrings within me? No, chauvinism is foreign to me, but at the same time, I am a Russian. As I looked at Antokolsky’s magnificent sculptures of Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, I was swept with pride: these people were Russians.”
THE STALIN REGIME’S LEGITIMIZATION OF ASPECTS OF IMPERIAL Russian politics and culture helped mobilize Russian nationalism in the service of the Soviet state and solidified Russia’s status as the leading Soviet nation.
In May 1936, a Pravda editorial lauded the patriotism of all Soviet peoples and their contributions to the construction of socialism, placing special emphasis on the Russians. “First among these equals are the Russian people, the Russian workers and the Russian toilers, whose role throughout the whole great proletarian revolution has been exceptionally large, from the first victories to the present day’s brilliant period of development,” it said. This theme was further developed by the former Soviet censor Boris Volin, then editor in chief of the Historical Journal, who published an article titled “The Great Russian People” in the journal Bol’shevik (where Stalin had forestalled the publication of Engels’s article) in the fall of 1938. “The great Russian people leads the struggle of all the peoples of the Soviet land for the happiness of mankind, for communism,” wrote Volin. “The friendship and love of all the peoples of the USSR is growing for the first among equals and the leader among the foremost—the Russian people.” From then on, the Russians would be referred to not only as “first among the equals” but also as the “great Russian people.”
The official formula used by Soviet propaganda to define relations between the Soviet nations was “The friendship of peoples.” But when it came to relations between the regime and the population, officialdom appeared to consider some nations friendlier to the state than others. The newfound trust in the Russians went hand in hand with distrust of other nationalities. Gone were the days when the party had readied itself for a revolutionary war that would bring communism to the rest of Europe and the world. In the years leading up to the outbreak of World War II, Stalin was preparing his country for possible foreign invasion and busy clearing the space behind prospective front lines of potential traitors, the so-called fifth column. Ethnicity, not class, was becoming the criterion whereby true patriots could be distinguished from traitors.
If the Russians were solid citizens, then non-Russians with traditional homelands or significant diasporas outside the Soviet Union were seen as potential traitors and targeted in a number of repressive operations that culminated during the Great Terror of 1937–1938. As Stalin purged the party and state apparatus, targeting real or potential enemies of his rule, millions of people were arrested in the middle of the night and sentenced by “troikas”—panels of three “judges,” including a party official, a secret policeman, and a prosecutor. The majority would be sent to the Gulag, a network of concentration camps where prisoners worked in the harsh conditions of Siberia and other remote parts of the USSR to extract gold and iron ore and cut lumber. Sentences ranged from ten to twenty-five years without the possibility of parole. But those who were sent to the Gulag were the lucky ones. At least 600,000 of those arrested and judged by the troikas were summarily executed. The whole society would be terrorized and traumatized. The families of those who were killed or imprisoned, designated as “family members of an enemy of the people,” were left to live as second-class citizens. Children who had both parents arrested were sent to foster homes for “reeducation.”
First on the list were Soviet citizens of German, Polish, and Japanese or of Far Eastern origin whose loyalty to Moscow, it was thought, might be divided in the event of a crisis between the Soviet state and their brethren abroad. In August and September 1937, Stalin’s secret police arrested and sentenced more than 55,000 ethnic Germans, who were accused of being German agents. Close to 42,000 of them were sentenced to death and executed by secret-police squads. Next came the Poles. In the fall of 1937, close to 140,000 Soviet citizens of Polish nationality were sentenced for alleged acts of espionage and anti-Soviet activities, and more than 110,000 of them were shot. Also targeted were Romanians, Bulgarians, Latvians, Finns, Greeks, and members of other nationalities. The repatriates were suspected of being Japanese spies. Altogether, between August 1937 and Novemb
er 1938, the Soviet regime sentenced more than 335,000 people who had been arrested as part of the “nationality operations.” Close to 250,000 of those arrested, or 73 percent, were executed.
The victims of the purge included Ardan Markizov, the commissar of agriculture of the Buriat-Mongolian Autonomous Republic, whose daughter, Gelia, had presented Stalin with flowers in January 1936. Markizov was arrested in November 1937 and accused of belonging to a bogus pan-Mongolian organization that was allegedly seeking to tear the Buriat-Mongol republic away from the USSR. He was shot in June 1938. Gelia’s career as a child star (she was routinely invited to school events, and girls all over the Soviet Union had their hair cut in her style) came to an end when she was eight years old. The posters and statues with the image of her embracing Stalin stayed in place, but propaganda now referred to them as a depiction of Stalin and Mamlakat, a Tajik girl who had received the Order of Lenin for her work on a collective farm. Gelia wrote a letter to Stalin declaring her father’s innocence. The response came in the form of the arrest of her mother, who had dictated the letter. Both mother and daughter were exiled to Kazakhstan. Two years later, Gelia’s thirty-two-year-old mother was dead. According to one version, she committed suicide; according to another, she was assassinated by the secret police to avoid further embarrassment to the authorities—the Markizovs kept Stalin’s gifts and portraits of Gelia with Stalin in their Kazakhstan exile.
RUSSIA’S RETURN TO PRIMACY IN THE 1930S CAME AT THE EXPENSE of many other Soviet nationalities. It was a zero-sum game that began in the wake of the war scare of 1927 with Poland and reached its peak in the months leading up to the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. That period was punctuated by a number of foreign-policy shifts caused, among other things, by Hitler’s assumption of power in Germany in early 1933 and the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan in the fall of 1936. Stalin had abandoned the communist dreams of the 1920s about a victorious world revolution and was preparing for a potential defensive war on two fronts, against Germany in the west and Japan in the east. The non-Russian peoples, earlier regarded as vanguard elements of a future revolutionary war, were now perceived as potential turncoats. Ensuring the loyalty of the Russians, the largest Soviet nationality, became crucial in the preparations for war.
The transformation of the Russians from a people guilty of imperial domination to the leading Soviet nation coincided with and was fueled by Stalin’s defeat of his opponents in the late 1920s and his rise to supreme power in the course of the 1930s. Accordingly, the revival of traditional notions of fatherland and patriotism went hand in hand with the Stalin regime’s emphasis on the paramount importance of the Russian state, and these positions were accompanied by a growing cult of strong rulers involving the rehabilitation of the Russian tsars, most notably Peter I and Ivan the Terrible. Although Russian nationalism often returned to the political scene in the garb of imperial Russia, the new understanding of Russianness was different from the one prevailing before 1917. The Russian nation of the late 1930s no longer included the Little or White Russians, who were now officially recognized as distinct Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities. This made the Russian nation of the pre–World War II era coterminous in ethnic and territorial terms with the Great Russians of the pre–World War I period. The shock of war would test the new boundaries, the strength of the new nation, and the commitment of its members to the state that had helped to create it.
16
THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR
THE CHALLENGE WAS TO FIND THE RIGHT FLAG. THERE WAS NO shortage of red flags or red fabric in the Soviet Union, but getting a red flag with a white circle and a black swastika in the middle was no easy task in the Moscow of 1939. Hitler had gotten rid of the black, red, and yellow tricolor of the Weimar Republic the year he came to power, replacing it with the black, white, and red flag of the new Reich. In 1935, he changed the flag once again, choosing a red field with a swastika in a white circle. Since then, no senior German officials had visited the Soviet Union, and neither the People’s Commissariat of International Affairs nor the Kremlin protocol service had appropriate flags available to greet the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was coming on a hastily organized visit on August 23, 1939. They finally found the flags they needed at a Moscow movie studio, where they were used to shoot antifascist propaganda films.
As Ribbentrop’s plane made a soft landing at the Moscow airport, he was greeted not only with swastika flags but also by a guard of honor and the friendly faces of Soviet officials. In the early hours of August 24, Ribbentrop signed a nonaggression treaty with his Soviet counterpart, Viacheslav Molotov. Photos taken on the occasion show a happy Joseph Stalin, with a portrait of Lenin looking on benevolently. In signing the communist-fascist alliance with Germany, the Soviet Union made an about-face in international politics, breaking off negotiations with Britain and France.
The secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact envisioned the division of Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin, effectively launching World War II, which would begin on September 1, 1939, with a German attack on Poland. Stalin believed that by signing the pact he had outmaneuvered the Western powers, postponed a Soviet conflict with Germany, and pushed Hitler toward a war with the West. He also believed that by claiming Moldavia, eastern Poland, and most of the Baltics as his sphere of influence, and, if required, as an occupation zone, he had moved the first Soviet line of defense farther west, improving the country’s geostrategic position.
The pact with Nazi Germany meant not only a change of Soviet foreign-policy rhetoric but also a major shift in propaganda efforts at home. The attacks on Hitler and Germany that had until recently been a hallmark of Kremlin propaganda were abandoned, but that was not all. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had a major impact on the Stalin regime’s nationality policy. It was not only the alliance with Hitler that had to be justified at home and abroad, but also the impending annexation of territory on the western borders of the USSR. In the 1930s, non-Russian Soviet nationalities with a significant presence outside the Soviet Union had been regarded as liabilities. But as the government’s foreign policy switched from one of defense to offense, those nationalities suddenly became an asset, allowing the regime to destabilize neighboring countries and legitimize its forthcoming aggression. It was something of a return to the policy of the 1920s, when the regime had expected a victorious revolutionary march to the West in which the non-Russian nationalities would play a major auxiliary role. The immediate beneficiaries of the foreign-policy shift were the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus.
When the Soviet Union entered World War II in September 1939, it justified its annexation of the Polish-ruled western Ukrainian and Belarusian lands as the liberation of fraternal peoples from oppression and their reunification with their brethren. From then on, Stalin would have to balance the interests of the newly empowered Russian nation with the demands and expectations of the minorities. That balancing act would prove most important in the case of relations between the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians—the East Slavic core of the Soviet Union.
ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1939, THE RED ARMY CROSSED THE POLISH-Soviet border and began its advance into central Poland, which was already under German control. Viacheslav Molotov, who had signed the nonaggression pact with Ribbentrop less than a month earlier, addressed Soviet citizens by radio to explain what many of his compatriots, to say nothing about the rest of the world, saw as an act of naked aggression undertaken in conjunction with the antidemocratic and anticommunist Nazi regime. Molotov’s explanation was surprisingly simple: the Red Army had crossed the border to protect fellow Eastern Slavs—the Ukrainians and Belarusians who had settled in the eastern provinces of Poland. “The Soviet government,” claimed Molotov, “cannot be expected to take an indifferent attitude to the fate of its blood relatives, Ukrainians and Belarusians residing in Poland who previously found themselves in the position of nations without rights and hav
e now been completely abandoned to the vagaries of fate. The Soviet government regards it as a sacred obligation to extend a helping hand to its brethren Ukrainians and brethren Belarusians residing in Poland.”
The formula had been produced by Stalin himself in the course of nocturnal deliberations with the German ambassador in Moscow, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, whom Stalin summoned to his Kremlin office in the early hours of September 17. A week earlier, Molotov had told Schulenburg that the Soviet government was going “to declare that Poland was falling apart and that it was necessary for the Soviet Union, in consequence, to come to the aid of the Ukrainians and the White Russians ‘threatened’ by Germany.” He then added, according to the German report on the meeting: “This argument was to make the intervention of the Soviet Union plausible to the masses and at the same time avoid giving the Soviet Union the appearance of an aggressor.” The Germans protested, but Molotov would not budge. “The Soviet government unfortunately saw no possibility of any other motivation,” he allegedly told Schulenburg, “since the Soviet Union had thus far not concerned itself about the plight of its minorities in Poland and had to justify abroad, in some way or other, its present intervention.”
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