In the remote apex of this society stood the solitary dictator, regulating the ebb and flow of mood, ingeniously playing on the masochistic and xenophobic impulses of a populace long accustomed to collective suffering and feelings of inferiority. Whenever rewards were in order or respites to be granted, the Caligula of collectivism suddenly emerged smiling from inside the Kremlin. When terror was loose, even the victims tended to speak of it as the creation of an underling: Yezhovshchina in the thirties, Zhdanovshchina in the forties.
In his last years, Stalin kept about him such shadowy figures as Beria, a fellow Georgian and Yezhov's successor as head of the evergrowing police empire; Poskrebyshev, his private secretary; and Michael Suslov, a lean and ascetic former Old Believer who bore the name of the founder of the flagellant sect.
On Christmas eve of 1952, Suslov sounded the first note in a fresh campaign of denunciation that was both a throwback to the witch-hunting at the court of Ivan III and the apparent harbinger of a vast new purge. Suslov's denunciation of editors for insufficiently rigorous self-criticism over long-forgotten issues of economic development was followed by an announcement in Pravda that nine doctors had been charged with assassinating through mistreatment and poisoning a variety of leading Soviet figures, including Zhdanov. This campaign against the predominately Jewish "doctor-poisoners" who had allegedly infiltrated the Kremlin was apparently directed against Beria, as head of state security, and his close associate, Georgy Malenkov. As the most intelligent and powerful of Stalin's lieutenants, they were the logical candidates for victimization; and their careers were saved (though only temporarily) by the convenient death of Stalin himself
on March 5, 1953. The last time he was seen alive by a non-Communist observer, Stalin was doodling wolves in red ink; and the last officially announced medical treatment administered to him before death was bleeding with leeches.60
For nearly ten years, a mummified and faintly smiling Stalin lay alongside Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum. It was an awesome reminder of the carefully cultivated myth of infallibility-the idea that, however absurd Soviet policy may have seemed to those on the front lines, there was always an omniscient leader at the command post: a "magic citadel" within the Kremlin inviolable to assault from ordinary experience and common-sense doubts. As one student of the Stalin formula wrote:
The strength of communism and its originality come from the disinterested militants and sympathizers. . . . Their sympathy and faith will not become untenable while the remote inner citadel remains intact-that magic citadel within which evil is transformed to good, fact into myth, history into legend, and the steppes of Russia into paradise.61
Giant, omnipresent statues of Stalin had provided Russia with a new image of omnipotence: a macabre parody of the Byzantine Pantokrator. This divine image had stared down from the central domes of the original cathedrals of the holy wisdom to provide sanctifying power and some mystical foretaste of the splendors of heaven to those who gathered on feast days in these original centers of Russian civilization. So Stalin smiled down his assurances of holy wisdom and sanctifying authority to those who gathered on the new feast days for the pathetic foretaste of heaven on earth provided by a "park of culture and rest." This quasi-religious myth of Stalin with its many psychologically satisfying features could not be easily dispelled. When his body was finally removed from the mausoleum in Red Square late in 1961, an ancient woman who had known Lenin and spent seventeen years in prison under Stalin issued the call rather in the manner of a sectarian prophetess:
The only reason I survived is that Il'ich was in my heart, and I sought his advice, as it were. (Applause) Yesterday I asked Il'ich for advice, and it was as if he stood before me alive and said: "I do not like being next to Stalin, who inflicted so much harm on the Party." (Stormy prolonged applause.)62
The scene of ritual reburial is reminiscent of late Muscovite politicst with Khrushchev calling forth his sanctifying approval of the woman's, recommendation from the podium of the Twenty-second Party Congress as it bellowed forth its antiphonal responses of "Stormy, prolonged applause." One Soviet intellectual of the post-Stalin era has written:
Ah, if only we had been more intelligent; if only we had surrounded his death with miracles! We should have given it out on the radio that he was not dead but had gone up into heaven, whence he was still looking at us silently, over his mystical moustache. His relics would have cured paralytics and people possessed with devils. And children, before going to bed, would have been praying by their windows, with their eyes turned toward the bright stars of the celestial Kremlin.63
Perhaps the best synoptic view of Russian culture under Stalin is provided by the development of the cinema, an art medium with little history prior to the Soviet period. The innumerable movie theaters large and small that sprang up all over the USSR in the twenties and thirties were the new regime's equivalent to the churches of an earlier age. Within the theaters, the prescribed rituals of the new order-its chronicles of success and promises of bliss-were systematically and regularly presented to the silent masses, whose main image of a world beyond that of immediate physical necessity was now derived from a screen of moving pictures rather than a screen of stationary icons. Like Soviet industry, the cinema produced in the age of Stalin a great quantity of films, including some of real quality. Yet despite the many new techniques and skilled artists involved, the Stalinist cinema represents a regressive chapter in the history of Russian culture. At best, it offered little more than a pretentious extension of the most chauvinistic aspects of pre-Revolutionary culture; at worst it was a technological monstrosity seeking to cannibalize one of the world's most promising theatrical traditions.
Hopes were high when idealistic young revolutionaries first wandered into the deserted studios of the infant Russian film industry during the Revolutionary period. Here was an art medium closely linked to the liberating force of technology, uniquely suitable for spreading the good news of a new social order to all people. Here also was a relatively untouched world of artistic possibility: a cultural tabula rasa. For, since the first public movie theater had appeared in 1903, the Russian film industry had assumed no very distinctive character. It was an imitative, commercially oriented medium largely involved in producing never-never land sentimentality and melodramatic happy endings.
Placed under the commissariat of education by a Leninist decree of August, 1919, and faced with the emigration of almost all its artists and technicians, the Soviet film industry became a major center for on-the-job training in the arts and an arena for florid experimentation.
During the relatively relaxed period of the early twenties a variety of new styles appeared, and a vigorous discussion ensued about the nature of cinematic art and its relation to the new social order. The remarkable
"movie eye" (kinoko) group flourished briefly, with its fanatical dedication to documentary accuracy and precise chronology; a former architect and sculptor, Leo Kuleshov, pioneered in the use of open-air scenes, untrained actors, and monumental compositions; and scattered efforts were made to break down the flow of pictures into expressionistic or abstract forms.
But as in all fields of Soviet culture, the rise of Stalin to absolute power in the late twenties led to the adoption of a propagandists official style that brought an end to creative experiment. The new style was perhaps the best example of that blend of Revolutionary message and realistic form that came to be called socialist realism. At the same time, the subject matter of the cinema in the thirties and forties illustrates the increasing drift toward chauvinistic traditionalism in Stalinist Russia.
There were many influences behind the new Soviet film style. In a sense it was a return to the old tradition of the illustrated chronicle (litsevaia letopis') with which the heroic history of the Church Victorious had been popularized in the late Muscovy. It was also a continuation and vulgarization of the traditions of heroic historical painting and mammoth exhibitions that had been developed in the nineteenth century. To the
se traditions was added the dream of a new type of revolutionary mystery play originated during the exciting days of War Communism. Open-air mass theatrical pageants were improvised as thousands took part in a cycle which attempted to re-enact seven major popular revolutions in Russian history; eighty thousand took part in Maiakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe, and more than one hundred thousand in the ritual re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace. Michelet said that the French Revolution really began not with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, but with the symbolic re-enactment of the event a year later. In like manner, one could say that the Russian Revolution-as a symbol of liberation-was born not in the turbulent events of November, 1917, but in these subsequent scenes of pictorial pageantry and mythic re-creation.
The key cinematic task of Lenin's heir was the transposition to the screen of this monumental myth. As the "movie trains" of Revolutionary days with their itinerant pictorial propaganda were replaced by stationary theaters, it became essential to have a codified version of the Revolutionary myth. This was provided by three major films, which were all produced in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup and comprise a kind of heroic trilogy: Pudovkin's Last Days of Petersburg, Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Bamet's Moscow in October. Together with the panoramic and equally fanciful picture of the Civil War provided by Alexis Tolstoy's Road to Calvary (which became a trilogy in the film version), these films dramatized for the Russian masses the mystery of the
new incarnation in which the hopes and fears of all the years suddenly found fulfillment in Russia.
Of the cinematic iconographers of the Revolution, Pudovkin and Eisen-stein are deservedly the best remembered. They were both creatures of the experimental twenties and pupils of Kuleshov. Each scored his greatest triumph in 1926-Eisenstein with Battleship Potemkin and Pudovkin with the film version of Gorky's Mother. Each had a long subsequent career of film-making that came to an end only when they died late in the Stalin era -Eisenstein in 1948, Pudovkin in 1953.
Pudovkin was the more thoroughly Stalinist and-as a result-the less memorable of the two. A rugged and athletic child of the Volga region, he was, from the beginning, anxious to expend his energies in the service of the new order. His theoretical writings emphasized the use of technological innovation for practical purposes of indoctrination. He favored the Stanislavsky method of acting realism over more experimental styles and exalted the semi-dictatorial function of the film editor and director.
Though capable of projecting simple and powerful emotions, he increasingly followed Stalin in turning toward monumental subjects. Traditional Russian patriotic themes replaced Revolutionary ones in his most important later works: Suvorov, Minin and Pozharsky, and Admiral Nakhimov. At the same time, he demonstrated in his theoretical writings the passion for statistical self-congratulation in pseudo-Marxist terms which was so characteristic of the Stalin mentality.
On the stage an actor plays before hundreds of persons, in the film actually before millions. Here is a dialectical instance of quantity increasing over the boundary into quality to give rise to a new kind of excitement.64
He expressed a kind of nouveau riche contempt for the older traditions of the theater with his bluff confidence that "socialist realism is just as immortal, as eternally young and inexhaustible as the people itself."95
Eisenstein was a far more complex and interesting figure. Born in Riga and educated as an architect, he was more deeply immersed in the experimental tendencies of the twenties and more broadly versed in twentieth-century European culture than Pudovkin. He was influenced by Kandinsky and others to believe that the basic ingredients of line and color could of their own accord bring spiritual qualities into visual art. He drew directly from mystical precursors of Scriabin like Castel and Eckartshausen the belief that true art must affect a "synchronization of senses."66 He became active in the constructivist theater of Proletkult and worked as an artistic designer in Meierhold productions before his epoch-making filming of Potemkin.
The film used an enormous cast to depict with poetic license and cinematic skill the brief revolt of the crew of the battleship Potemkin in Odessa during the Revolution of 1905. Based on a scenario written especially for the movie in honor of the twentieth anniversary of that Revolution, Potemkin drew heavily on the old tradition of the open-air mass theater to produce a near-perfect parable of Revolutionary heroism. The battleship itself-rather than any individual-was the hero. Its crew was a triumphant, spontaneous chorus of Revolutionary joy struggling against both the vermin gnawing at their paltry ration of meat, and the priests and officials gnawing at their souls. Just as John the Baptist, "the precursor," was placed next to Christ Enthroned on the iconostasis, so this Revolutionary precursor of October acquired a venerated place in the iconography of the Revolution. Few scenes up to that time had so brilliantly engaged the capabilities of the infant cinema industry for political purposes as the famous sequence of a baby carriage coming loose from its mother's grasp and gathering momentum as it rolled down the steps pursued by a mechanically advancing phalanx of dehumanized Tsarist soldiers.
Unlike Pudovkin, Eisenstein experimented with non-realistic forms of cinematic art and incurred official rebukes for several of his efforts in the late twenties and early thirties. But like Pudovkin, he eventually followed the trend toward more conventional patriotic themes in the thirties. His Alexander Nevsky was a milestone in this genre, glorifying the famous monk-warrior so admired by Peter the Great. But whereas the famous cinematic eulogy of Peter the Great produced at the same time merely transposed onto the screen the pictorial images of nineteenth-century painters, Eisenstein's depiction of Peter's patron saint incorporated elements of grotesque hyperbole that suggested continued borrowings from the ex-pressionistic theater.
If Peter the Great, the builder of St. Petersburg and lover of technological innovation, was a natural hero for the early Stalin era, the dark figure of Ivan IV was in many ways a suitable hero for the later years of Stalin, with their macabre reversions to Muscovite ways. Thus, in the late thirties, Eisenstein turned to producing a large-scale life of Ivan the Terrible, assembling an extraordinary array of talent: the music of Prokof'ev, the acting of Cherkasov, the finest black-and-white and color photographers, and even the services of Pudovkin for a minor acting role.
Yet for all its promise, this work became yet another of those unfinished trilogies in which Russian cultural history abounds. The first part was filmed during the war, in the distant haven of Alma Ata, and was hailed with a variety of accolades, including the Stalin Prize First Class shortly after its release in January, 1945. The second part was, however, denounced
by the Central Committee in September, 1946. The eerie sounds and shadows of the first part became caricatures in the second, which alternated between black-and-white and color scenes in its depiction of boyar conspiracies. The atmosphere of hovering intrigue and impending assassination was all too close to real life, and the hypersensitive Stalin appears to have seen in the frank depiction of cruelty by Ivan and his oprichnina implied criticism of himself and his secret police. Thus, the second part of the trilogy was not publicly released until 1958-ten years after Eisenstein's death and five years after Stalin's. The third part was not completed; and Eisenstein died in the same condition of semi-disgrace that had been his lot in the early thirties.
The cinema in the early post-war years was devoted mainly to stereotyped ideological romances between collective farmers and party activists or to the attempt to hypnotize audiences with the omniscience of Stalin's leadership and the omnipotence of Soviet armed force in films like The Battle of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin. In this age of systematic photographic falsification, Soviet movies disintegrated literally as well as figuratively because of the repeated editorial splicing of films by the Soviet propaganda agencies that controlled their distribution. Small wonder that Eisenstein in his last years was contemplating shifting his efforts from the ill-fated Ivan IV to a propos
ed study of the life of Nero.67 There seemed no honorable calling left for the human spirit that did not risk martyrdom at the hands of the new Nero. Even Nicholas Virta, who had written the script for The Battle of Stalingrad, may have been hinting that calamity was at hand in his play of the late Stalin era that was published only in 1954, The Fall of Pompeii.
With Stalin as with Ivan, there was method in the madness. Like Ivan, Stalin vastly increased the power of the Russian state, and his authority over it.68 Whether by luck or by careful planning, Stalin in a quarter of a century lifted Russia from a position of being one of the least of the world's great powers to being one of its only two super-powers: from fifth or sixth to second place in industrial production. These were the criteria by which Stalin-and many others in the twentieth century-measured success; and in these terms Stalin was successful. Out of the raw strength and complex psychology of the Russian people, he fashioned an impressive political machine, which he handled with great skill and more flexibility than is sometimes remembered.89 Even in the area of culture he could point to such superficially imposing accomplishments as the virtual disappearance of illiteracy and gigantic editions of all kinds of literary classics.
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