Socialist realism no less than the Revolution itself was to "dispose of its children."49 Gorky died under still-mysterious circumstances two years later in the midst of the terror which swept away imaginative storytellers like Pil'niak and Babel, lyric poets like Mandel'shtam, theatrical innovators like Meierhold, as well as the inclination toward experimentalism in such gifted young artists as Shostakovich.
The often chromatic and grotesque extension of verismo opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which Shostakovich fashioned from Leskov's bleak novella, was denounced after two years of performances and forcibly shut in 1936. Thenceforth, after nearly two years of silence, he turned almost exclusively to instrumental music, breaking the promise of distinctive national music drama that was implicit in his first opera, The Nose of 1930, which (Uke the preparatory work of Musorgsky) was based on a text by
Gogol. The unfinished fragment of a later, wartime effort to make an opera of Gogol's Gamblers and the post-Stalin revival of Lady Macbeth (revised and retitled Katerina Izmailova) offer tantalizing hints of what might have been. Nor was the full promise of Prokof'ev ever realized, perhaps the most technically gifted and versatile of all modern Russian composers. As a nine-year-old boy in the first year of the new century he roughed out his first complete opera score, The Giants; and his rapid development of a clean, "cubist" style combined with a love of rugged, often satirical themes seemed to herald the arrival of a creative giant whose return from emigration might in some way compensate for the permanent flight from the new order of Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and so many others. His protean powers shine through even the confining forms of expression forced on artists in the Stalin era: infant pedagogy {Peter and the Wolf) and heroic movie scores (Alexander Nevsky), and the reshaping of "safe" literary classics for the musical stage (the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the opera War and Peace). Denounced by Zhdanov and harassed by his lieutenants, this giant of Russian music died on March 4, 1953, just one day before Stalin, the man who had so crippled its development.
Zhdanov died under mysterious circumstances in 1948 after launching the purge of "homeless cosmopolitans" in the post-war era. Michael Zoshchenko, the last of the great satirists of the twenties, was silenced; the patriotic poet and widow of Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, was called "half-nun, half-harlot" for her apolitical lyricism; and a bewildered Communist historian of philosophy was reviled as a "toothless vegetarian" for paraphrasing Western thinkers without sufficient polemic ridicule.60 The search for distinctive proletarian art forms had, of course, been suppressed no less than the aristocratic experimentalism of the silver age. Stalin consistently favortJd a melodramatic art glorifying "heroes of socialist labor" and a pretentious architectural style variously characterized as sovnovrok ("new Soviet rococo") and-in a play on a line of Pushkin-"the empire style from the time of the plague."51
The peculiarities of Stalinist architecture lead us into a world very different from anything imagined by Lenin, let alone the materialists of the 1860's. The mammoth mosaics in the Moscow subway, the unnecessary spires and fantastic frills of civic buildings, the leaden chandeliers and dark foyers of reception chambers-all send the historical imagination back to the somber world of Ivan the Terrible. Indeed, the culture of the Stalin era seems more closely linked with ancient Muscovy than with even the rawest stages of St. Petersburg-based radicalism. One can, to be sure, find a certain bias in favor of bigness in the earlier period of rapid industrial development in the 1890's-evidenced in the preponderance of large factory complexes
and in the building of the Trans-Siberian railway. There are also hints of classical Oriental despotism in the spectacle of giant canals and ostentatious public buildings thrown up by forced labor. Plans for a canal strikingly similar to Stalin's famous White Sea Canal of the early thirties had been mooted late in the Muscovite era at the court of Alexis Mikhailovich.52 If this, the first major forced labor project of the Soviet era, had in some ways been anticipated in the Muscovite era, the site chosen in the twenties for the first of the new prison camp complexes of the USSR was one of the enduring symbols of Old Muscovy: the Solovetsk monastery. Ivan IV had been the first to use this bleak island monastery near the Arctic circle as a prison for ideological opponents, and the Soviet government-by evacuating the monks-was able to accommodate large numbers.
Quietly heroic testimony to some survival of Old Russian culture into the twenties is provided in the works published with the apparent consent of camp authorities by intellectuals incarcerated on the archipelago. In the monthly journal Solovetsk Islands, "an organ of the directorate of the Solovetsk Camps of ordinary designation OGPU," we read during the twenties of new discoveries of flora, fauna, and historical remains; of the founding of new museums; of 234 theatrical performances in a single year; and of a nineteen-kilometer ski race between inmates, Red Army guards, and the camp directorate. One article writes with obvious sympathy about Artemius, the first prisoner in Solovetsk under Ivan IV, as "a great seeker of truth and an agitator for freedom of thought."53
The camps of the Stalin era seemed at times to contain more scholars than the universities; but the relative freedom of Solovetsk in the early days was not to be maintained in the thirties; and only the terrible northern cold was to remain a constant feature of Stalin's concentration-camp empire. It seems eerily appropriate that the last publications to appear from Solovetsk (in 1934-5, long after the monthly journal had ceased to appear) tell of discovering prehistoric relics on the archipelago and exploring the vast, uncharted labyrinths that had long fascinated visitors to the monastery.54
At the very time when the emaciated prisoners of Solovetsk were plunging down to chart its frozen catacombs, thousands of laborers under various forms of compulsion were plunging even deeper beneath Moscow itself to build the greatest of all monuments of the Stalin era: the Moscow subway. From all over the empire party officials flocked to the capital like the faceless priests of some prehistoric religion to place ornate stalactites and stalagmites from the local republics into this giant communal labyrinth. The cult of the underground party also began in earnest at this time. Traditional idealistic leaders of foreign Communist parties began to be replaced by
serpentine Stalinists: a cold-blooded species capable of fast, lizard-like movements in dark places and sudden chameleon-like changes of color.
Silenced prisoners in Solovetsk and authoritarian power in the Moscow Kremlin present a picture strangely reminiscent of ancient Muscovy. In some ways, the Stalin era calls to mind the compulsive Byzantine ritualism of those pre-Petrine times which had remained "contemporary" for so many Russians throughout the Romanov era. Icons, incense, and ringing bells were replaced by lithographs of Lenin, cheap perfume, and humming machines. The omnipresent prayers and calls to worship of Orthodoxy were replaced by the inescapable loudspeaker or radio with its hypnotic statistics and invocations to labor. The liturgy or "common work" of believers was replaced by the communal construction of scientific atheists. The role once played by the sending of priests and missionaries along with colonizing soldiers into the heathen interior of Russia was now assumed by "soldiers of the cultural army," who departed from mass rallies for "cultural relay races" into the countryside to see who could win the most converts for communism and collectivization in the shortest possible time.55
Something like the role of the holy fools and flagellants of Muscovy was played by frenzied "heroes of Socialist labor" ascetically dedicated to "overfulfilling their norms." Just as Ivan the Terrible canonized his favorite holy fool and built a cathedral later named for him, so Stalin canonized and built a national movement around Nicholas Stakhanov, a coal miner who in a fit of heroic masochism cut out 102 tons of coal (fourteen times his quota) in one shift. "Voluntary subscriptions to the state loan" replaced earlier tithes as a token of devotion to the new church; the "shock quarter" of the year replaced Lent as the periodic time of self-denial in the name of a higher cause. Like the zealous Old Believers, who sought to storm the gates of heaven by outdoing
the Orthodox in their fanatical adherence to the letter of the old liturgy, the Stakhanovites sought to hasten the millennium by their "storming" (shturmovshchina) of production quotas. These were looked at in the way the Old Believers looked at sacred texts: as something not to be tampered with by bureaucratic innovators or scoffed at by Western sceptics, as a program of salvation if acted upon with urgency.
The Third Rome had been succeeded by a new Third International; and the ideal cultural expression in the latter as in the former was the believer's cry of hallelujah in response to the revealed word from Moscow. The term alliluishchik ("hallelujah singer") was in fact widely used in the Stalin era. Russia, which had overthrown a discredited monarchy, suddenly fell back on the most primitive aspect of the original
tsarist mystique: the idea that the batiushka, the father-deliverer in the Kremlin, would rescue his suffering children from malevolent local officials and lead them into the promised land.
Thus, Stalin was able to succeed Lenin as supreme dictator not only because he was a deft intriguer and organizer but also because he was closer than his rivals to the crude mentality of the average Russian. Unlike most other Bolshevik leaders-many of whom were of Jewish, Polish, or Baltic origin-Stalin had been educated only in the catechistic theology of Orthodoxy. At Lenin's funeral, when the other Bolshevik leaders were speaking in the involved rhetoric and glowing generalities of the intellectual community, Stalin spoke in terms more familiar to the masses with his litanylike exhortations:
Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to hold high and keep pure the great title of member of the Party. We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, that we will fulfill thy bequest with honor! . ..
Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to guard the unity of our party like the apple of our eye. We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, that this obligation too, we will fulfill with honor!56
The seminarian was clearly in a better position than the cosmopolitan to create a national religion of Leninism. He felt no sense of embarrassment as Lenin's embalmed body was laid out for public veneration with hands folded in the manner of the saints in the monastery of the caves of Kiev. The incongruous mausoleum in Red Square, which paid tribute to Lenin and the new order by exemplifying the purely proletarian "constructivist" style of architecture, was forced to pay a deeper tribute to an older order represented by the crypt beneath and the Kremlin walls above it. Stalin transformed the simple building into a shrine for pilgrims and the site of his own periodic epiphanies on festal days. He chose the traditional, theological way of immortalizing Lenin in contrast to the Promethean effort by the Revolutionary intellectuals to discover after Lenin's death the material forces behind his genius through "cyto-architectonic" research (involving imported German scientists, innumerable microphotographs of his brain, and the projected comparative study of minute cranial slices from other leading thinkers).57
For the rest of his life Stalin claimed to be nothing more than the rock on which Lenin had built his church. His theoretical writings were always presented as updated thoughts on "problems of Leninism." In the name of Lenin's theory of the past Stalin felt free to contradict both Lenin and himself and, of course, to suppress Lenin's final uncomplimentary assessment of Stalin.
Along with the forms of theological discourse went the new content of Great Russian patriotism. Stalin rehabilitated a whole host of Russian national heroes in the thirties and introduced ever sharper differentiations in pay and privilege to goad on production. The ingeniously Marxist and almost nameless sociological histories of Pokrovsky, which had dominated Soviet historical writing until his death in 1932, were "unmasked" two years later as a deviation from "true Marxism," which henceforth glorified such unproletarian figures as Peter the Great and General Suvorov. The fiercely proletarian novels of the period of the first five-year plan, such as Cement and How the Steel Was Tempered, were replaced by a new wave of chauvinistic novels and films glorifying Russian warriors of the past.
By the late thirties, Stalin had produced a curious new mass culture that could be described by inverting his classic phrase "nationalist in form, socialist in content." The forms of Russian life were now clearly socialist: all agriculture had been collectivized and all of Russia's expanding means of production brought under State ownership and central planning. But socialization throughout the Stalin era brought few material benefits to the consumer, or spiritual benefits to those concerned with greater equality or increased freedom. The content of the new ersatz culture was retrogressively nationalistic. Under a patina of constitutions and legal procedures lay the dead hand of Nicholas I's official nationalism and some of the macabre touches of Ivan the Terrible. Stalin's proudly announced "wave of the future" looks, on closer analysis, more like backwash from the past: ghostly voices suddenly returning like the legendary chimes from the submerged city of Kitezh on Midsummer Eve-only to jangle on uncontrolled and out of tune.
Even the most servile of Bolshevik poets, Efim Pridvorov ("the courtier"), who wrote under the name Bedny ("the poor"), was thrown out of court in 1936 for his Bogatyrs, which made the "vulgar Marxist" error of burlesquing these popular heroes of the early Russian epics. The following year saw a host of purely patriotic festivals: a Pushkin centenary, a 125th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, and a revival of Glinka's Life for the Tsar (under the alternate title of Ivan Susanin). The growing fear first of Japan and then of Germany accelerated Stalin's tendency to rely on nationalistic rather than socialistic appeals. The general staff and many traditional army titles were reintroduced in the late thirties; the League of the Militant Godless was abolished shortly before the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and a limited concordat with the Patriarch of Moscow agreed upon shortly after. So traditionalist did Stalin seem to have become that many in the West were prepared to accept at face value the gesture of their wartime ally in abolishing the Communist International in 1943.
Yet for all these links with Russian tradition, the age of Stalin introduced industrial development and social changes that should not be compared lightly with anything that preceded it. His effort to destroy the free creative culture of Russia was more sweeping than that of his authoritarian ancestors, and was launched against a culture that had attained unprecedented variety, sophistication, and popular support. He enlisted in his campaign all the cynical manipulative techniques of modern mass advertising, lacquering over his atrocities with a veneer of misleading statistics and insincere constitutional guarantees.
Behind it all lay untold human suffering and degradation. The peasants' hopes-rekindled during the era of the New Economic Policy-for a better life and greater freedom from their traditional urban exploiters were dashed by Stalin's determination to collectivize. The burning of grain and slaughter of livestock by the protesting peasantry at the beginning of the thirties launched a chain reaction of unnatural death in the human realm. Peasants perished as kulak "class enemies," repopulated forced laborers, or victims of artificial starvation from bad planning or forcible grain collections. The "leftist" activists who perpetrated this horror in the countryside were the next to perish in the purges of the mid-thirties; and, then the executors were themselves executed to placate the masses and insure the safety of the supreme assassin.
Deaths were recorded not individually or by the thousands but by the millions. More than ten million cattle were slaughtered in the early stages of collectivization, perhaps five million peasants in the social upheaval of the thirties. Membership in the Party elite provided no refuge, for 55 out of its 71 Central Committee members and 60 of 68 alternate members disappeared between the Seventeenth Congress of the party in 1934 and its Eighteenth Congress in 1939. Indeed, all but a very few of those who had made the Revolution and launched the Soviet state were purged in the thirties. Then came Hitler and the terrible suffering of the war, in which twelve million Russians perished.
Always and umemittingly, Stalin suspected those flights of the imagination and experiments with form and idea which lay at t
he heart of creative culture. None was more suspect in Eastern Europe than the large Jewish community, with its intellectual traditions and international perspectives. Jewish Bolsheviks were deprived of their revolutionary names and sent to the anonymous death that was shortly to become the fate of the Jewish masses under the more systematic and distinctively racist totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. The final reprise on the totalitarian age was Stalin's effort to cut out "the ulcer of cosmopolitanism" by obliterating the
survivals of Yiddish culture and the new interest in Western Europe that appeared in Russia in the wake of World War II.
Stalin's most important contribution to world culture lay in his perfection of a new technique of governing through systematic alternation between terror and relaxation. This "artificial dialectic" required the building of a manipulable and "cast-iron" apparatus totally dependent on the dictator, and the determination to make "permanent purge" a calculated instrument of statecraft.58 The true homo sovieticus was the disciplined and secretive professional officer of the dictator's sprawling police and intelligence apparatus.59 Just as technicians in the infamous Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior found that one of the simplest ways to "break" a reluctant prisoner was by a blinking alternation of total light and total darkness, so the servants of Stalin sought to disorient and subdue the outside world with an incessant and bewildering alternation between smiles and scowls, amity and threat.
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