by Philipp Blom
A procession of prominent writers and intellectuals from different Western countries, including such luminaries as H. G. Wells, André Gide, Theodore Dreiser, Romain Rolland, George Bernard Shaw, and Lion Feuchtwanger, visited the Soviet Union on minutely managed trips. “I came back from the USSR a different man,” confessed a deeply moved Louis Aragon, who had been André Breton’s brother-in-arms and a cofounder of surrealism in Paris. Like Breton, Aragon had turned to communism, and the two prominent surrealists were not alone. Even Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, then already well on his journey toward fascism, was so deeply fascinated and preoccupied by the Soviet Union and its apparent ability to realize the dreams of humanity that he wrote: “Now, the fire from Moscow. From now on, within each man there is an inner dialogue in which Moscow is inevitably one of the interlocutors.”14
The cultural tourism of Western intellectuals became so important that it spawned a minor Soviet industry, which might be best described as a factory for Potemkin villages. According to legend, Count Potemkin, a favorite of Catherine the Great, had tried to impress his empress by building a series of phantom villages consisting only of façades in a region she had commanded him to develop. The story is likely apocryphal, but it showed a remarkable longevity, not least because it appeared to describe a salient feature of Russian culture: a combination of rank incompetence and a gift for keeping up appearances. A team of dedicated Soviet officials worked tirelessly to ensure that the experiences of the invited writers would exceed their highest expectations.
As of 1927, tour guides assigned to foreign dignitaries received special training not only in standard subjects such as political economy, Lenin and Leninism, and revolutionary history, but also in the history and constitutional arrangements of the major guest countries, world geography, and foreign languages. They were also drilled on common talking points. Child poverty and child homelessness were shocking, it was true, but this was a hangover from tsarist times. The speed of improvement and transformation, on the other hand, was truly staggering. To prove this, visitors were taken to a series of factories, orphanages, universities, kolkhoz farms, and other large projects where they could see for themselves the huge steps being made toward a happier, more humane future. Officials at these institutions had been issued an ever-evolving catalogue of taboo subjects, informally referred to as “the Talmud.”
Visits under these conditions could be very comfortable affairs indeed. In 1927, star American journalist Theodore Dreiser, who was increasingly popular in Russian translation thanks to his controversial views on his home country, made his first all-expenses-paid trip to the USSR. He was deeply ambivalent about the experience but quickly captivated by some aspects. Arriving in Moscow, he stayed at the Grand Hotel and witnessed a parade on Red Square from his hotel window. His diary captures his surprised delight. “They are marching to show the world how great is their faith in red Russia. And here, where so recently was only poverty, ignorance & blind faith are now more or less educated & trained men & women, boys & girls.”15
At the Leningrad train station, a quite unexpected welcome was prepared for the visitor. “There was an automobile waiting and I was carried off in grand style to the Hotel Europe. En route I was struck by the beauty of the city, the broad streets and fine buildings, the air of smartness and alertness which Moscow lacks. The hotel proved to be much more imposing and comfortable than the notorious Bolshaya Moskovskaya in Moscow. Lackeys opened the car doors. . . . There was an air of grandeur and obsequiousness and order soothing to a soul harassed by the shabby lobbies, wretched service and leaky plumbing.”16
Dreiser’s taste for luxury was well known to the Soviet authorities, who kept detailed files on all visitors. Dreiser himself was described as “typically bourgeois . . . with a specific petit bourgeois individualist ideology” and treated accordingly.17 The final report on his stay concluded that “Dreiser will still present the situation in such a way that his readers will understand that under the Soviet regime, the broad working and peasant masses have been given and are enjoying a freedom that never existed before, either under the czar or elsewhere.”18
The infectious enthusiasm for the great cause of Bolshevism could make uncritical admirers out of people who had never before been defenders of dictatorship. The French novelist Henri Barbusse, the author of the popular antimilitarist novel Under Fire, found authoritarian methods surprisingly unproblematic when they were used in the name of a “dictatorship of Reason.” He argued that the Bolsheviks needed to use violence: “Not only are they right in their orthodoxy, they are also right to impose their authoritarian means. . . . Every revolution imposes a constitution by force. . . . They are right in saying that if you want to abolish classes you should want to impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. To believe that there is a different way of realizing social equality for all is not only mad but criminal.”19
George Bernard Shaw became another prominent apologist for the Soviet dictatorship. Always eager to chastise social injustices in his plays and active in the Fabian movement, led by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Shaw saw no reason to justify Soviet atrocities—he simply declared them just and necessary. He had traveled through the Soviet Union in 1931 together with Conservative MP Lady Nancy Astor, who during their special audience with Stalin had asked the Soviet leader why he kept ruling like a tsar and killing his own people. “I think you are all awful!” Astor exclaimed at one point. In her rather Victorian manner she showed more understanding of the situation than the staunchly socialist Shaw, who was adamant and aggressive about the purity and virtue of the communist revolution in Russia. Having been shown happy peasants and contented, productive factory workers, Shaw lapped it all up, believing the show put on for him to be evidence of the final victory of socialism. He would continue to defend Stalin and to deny Soviet atrocities for many years to come.
Back in Britain, Shaw managed to convert the Webbs to Stalin’s cause. They, too, allowed themselves to be taken in all too readily. Their political opponent Winston Churchill was scathing in his considerably more realistic assessment of the dramatist’s trip to the heart of Soviet power:
The Russians have always been fond of circuses and travelling shows. Since they had imprisoned, shot or starved most of their best comedians, their visitors might fill . . . a noticeable void. And here was the World’s most famous intellectual Clown and Pantaloon in one, and the charming Columbine of the capitalist pantomime . . . Arch Commissar Stalin, “the man of steel,” flung open the closely guarded sanctuaries of the Kremlin, and pushing aside his morning’s budget of death warrants, and lettres de cachet, received his guests with smiles of overflowing comradeship.20
Not all distinguished visitors were taken in so easily. Amid this chorus of near-unanimous praise some skeptical voices stood out. As early as 1920, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, never afraid to give a dissenting opinion, had visited Moscow and met Lenin. On his return he described the Soviet Union as a “continually increasing nightmare.”21 In the 1930s, the French novelist André Gide would play a similar role, denouncing Stalin’s gulags, the show trials, and the general oppression, particularly after his own Russian journey.
Life in Amerikanka
THE CONTROVERSIES ABOUT STALINIST OPPRESSION—indeed, full knowledge of the extent of that oppression—was still some way in the future in 1929, despite the questions asked by Lady Astor. After the Wall Street crash, it really did seem as if socialism had won a historic and predicted victory over capitalism and the future belonged to the workers of Magnitogorsk. Arriving there in 1932, John Scott reveled in the feeling of hope and comradeship amid the deprivation. “In Magnitogorsk I was precipitated into battle. I was deployed on the iron and steel front. Tens of thousands of people were enduring the most intense hardships in order to build blast furnaces, and many of them did it willingly, with boundless enthusiasm, which infected me from the day of my arrival.”22
By then, the Magnetic City was indeed operating a huge steelworks, one
of the largest in the world and the pride of the Soviet leadership. The hectic choir of emergency calls and sirens announcing fires had been replaced by the epic song of the factory of factories. Socialism had wrought the miracle it had promised, and collective effort and true enthusiasm had transformed the most arid steppe into a thriving and productive socialist city inhabited by vigorous proletarians. The entire story was a homage to the new Soviet man and to the great machine that was communism—a machine in which people had value only as cogs that either functioned or had to be replaced.
The day-to-day reality, however, was very different. There had been trouble from the start, but the accidents, acts of sabotage, and thefts at the gigantic building site had been replaced by an oceanic routine of smaller and larger calamities. Built close to a vast reservoir of iron ore, Magnitogorsk was hundreds of miles away from the nearest coal mine, and the railways were always prone to breaking down, which would slow production to a snail’s pace for lack of fuel or other materials. The management wrote a steady stream of begging telegrams and letters to the central administration in Moscow, but the responses were predictably sluggish and often negative.
In addition to the constant problems at the factory, the town was still little more than an assembly of tents, barracks, and a few brick buildings, despite the fact that the winters could be perishingly cold. Inside these primitive dwellings, Stalin’s policy of collectivization was realized further than Moscow cadres had imagined possible. Living with four times as many people as intended, the inhabitants found that all privacy and all possibilities of retreat had simply vanished. “In the barracks, mud and ceaseless noise,” one of them remembered. “Not enough light to read. The library is poor, newspapers are few. They are stolen to roll cigarettes. . . . Gossip, obscene anecdotes, and songs emerge from the mud-filled corners. At night drunks return to the barracks, stupid from boredom. They disturb the sleep of the others. From time to time traveling artists drop in to Magnitogorsk: sword swallowers, jugglers, comedians.”23
The location of the future settlement turned out to be a particularly thorny issue, as poisonous fumes from the steel factory and smoke from the ironworks drifted across the central portion, which had originally been set aside as a living area. The only other residential site was situated nearly two miles away across a river—a long trek to work on a subzero morning in a city that had as yet few motor vehicles and no trams.
Construction of the new buildings proved a miserably drawn-out affair, beset by incompetence, graft, and systematic thievery. Property crime was so high that an attrition rate of 30 percent or more of all materials and goods ordered was assumed to be simply a matter of course. Even years later, there were pitifully few improvements. “The construction was begun in 1935,” reported a local journalist in 1937. “Last year, the walls of four buildings were erected. Now the only thing they are doing is building a single school. There is a night watchman on the site, but in the daytime construction materials are carried off by whoever bothers to take the trouble.”24 The workers left without houses would not have been able to buy furniture for their apartments anyway. The woodworking shop at the factory, charged with producing furniture for factory and domestic use, usually had neither wood nor nails in sufficient quantities.
One of the few buildings already standing was a circus arena, which doubled as a courtroom for public trials, usually open-and-shut cases offering the accused little or no chance of defending themselves. But the prosecutions conducted in this location were mainly part of the political theater of intimidation; all other cases in this city of one hundred thousand were heard by three judges with little or no experience. A true microcosm of the Soviet Union, Magnitogorsk even had its own prison camp, in which mainly political prisoners were interned behind barbed wire. Meanwhile, the prison for common criminals, built to hold four hundred, was filled with nineteen hundred inmates.
In his great novel The Foundation Pit, the Soviet writer Andrei Platonov describes the digging of a gigantic foundation, an undertaking so vast that the workers eventually forget why they are digging and what the eventual goal of their work is. To Platonov, himself formerly an idealistic young engineer burning to build the revolution and to sacrifice his best years for the construction of a shining socialist future, the foundation pit became a symbol of Soviet life, just as the magnetic city became a microcosm of life in the Soviet Union. In 1937, Magnitogorsk was declared a closed site and foreigners were ordered to leave.
Before this exodus, however, the capitalist experts without whom there would have been no Soviet utopia had a conspicuously comfortable life. The American engineers brought in to construct the factory were not living with the Russian workers but were housed in an idyllic settlement outside the main city, an elegant suburb with spacious houses surrounded by lush gardens that could have been anywhere in New England. “Amerikanka” was a comfortable place, sporting such luxuries as indoor toilets, wood-burning stoves, and hot water. The settlement also had a tennis court along with a dining room in which clients were served by waitresses. Soon the top brass of the Soviet administration discovered the comforts of American-style suburban living and took some houses for themselves and their families. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” George Orwell would observe in his 1945 novel Animal Farm. In the Soviet Union, this fiction had already become reality.
·1930·
Lili and the Blue Angel
Falling in love again, never wanted to
What am I to do? I can’t help it.
—“Falling in Love Again” from The Blue Angel, 1930
IMMANUEL RAAT IS A HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER IN A PROVINCIAL GERMAN town. Behind his back, his pupils call him “Professor Unrath”—Professor Garbage. Not that any of them would dare to say it to his face, because in the classroom he is a tyrant, ruling his adolescent subjects with an iron fist. He commands and humiliates, threatens and punishes at will, and the teenage boys in his class stand at attention when he enters the room, as was customary in German high schools. This military theme dominates his approach to education, as he sees his pupils as enemies who must be humiliated and defeated.
Professor Raat’s private life is similarly ruled by discipline. On a meager teacher’s salary, he cannot afford more than two rooms in a garret stuffed with books, a desk overflowing with papers, and a globe, a hint to his status as master of his own small universe. His emotional life is channeled into the heroes and heroines of world literature and his affection for the songbird he keeps in a cage and feeds with sugar every morning. Limited, pompous, and pedantic, he is the incarnation of the old Germany of discipline and Bildung (education), in which the title of professor transforms a schoolteacher into a minor deity in the provincial firmament, despite the fact that he is too poor even to get married.
The character of Professor Raat was the creation of Heinrich Mann, brother of the more famous Thomas Mann and an outstanding novelist in his own right. His novella Professor Unrath chronicled the decline and fall of an honorable man in impossible circumstances and was made into a film by Josef von Sternberg in 1930. When the teacher, played by the Oscar-winning actor Emil Jannings, discovers that his pupils frequent a disreputable bar where they listen to racy cabaret songs performed by an alluring singer called Lola, he decides to confront the woman who is endangering his pupils’ virtue. At the bar, however, he is overwhelmed by the force of the new, a world he had not known existed.
Stumbling into the dressing room of the scandalous soubrette, whose daring costumes appear to drive the teenage boys into a frenzy, the middle-aged professor finds that neither his title nor his status carries any weight in this demimonde of clowns, freaks, titillation, and alcohol. Only the show’s director and magician, a tyrant like himself if a less subtle one, is impressed by being visited by one of the leading citizens of the town.
Sternberg had confided the role of Lola to a young up-and-coming actress who had experienced life in a traveling variety troupe herself at the be
ginning of her career: Marlene Dietrich. With her sex appeal and deliciously offhand, off-key singing, Dietrich made her character, and herself, immortal. “Ich Bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe Eingestellt” (in English, “Falling in Love Again”), her most famous number, became an instant hit, as did the film.
Jannings brilliantly portrays a man whose guiding principles have been oppression and repression and who now completely falls under the spell of the unashamedly sexy, unashamedly ignorant Lola, a typical creature of interwar hardship who does not give a damn about titles and bourgeois rituals and is only interested in making a buck, having a little fun, and living to see tomorrow. Unable to resist Lola and her dangerously seductive life, the high and mighty schoolteacher is finally disgraced and literally turned into a clown, trawling through bars and nightclubs with Lola’s troupe.
Raat’s undoing was a young woman’s shameless twentieth-century appeal; it shattered his nineteenth-century-style emotional personality. What made it a story with much wider resonances in Germany, however, was a powerful political and social context. The professor’s downfall was also a consequence of the 1929 crash and the ensuing Great Depression. For many decades, roughly since the middle of the nineteenth century, German society had been dominated by a tacit deal. In effect, the nation’s cultural capital as well as large parts of its social capital was placed in the hands of the middle class, which had established a hierarchy of its own through titles and qualifications rivaling those of the aristocracy.
No angel: Marlene Dietrich in her first great role, in Der blaue Engel, 1930.
Whereas under the ancien régime the only things that counted were aristocratic titles and the land wealth that went with them, the new, bourgeois culture with its doctors, professors, mayors, and councilmen created new titles resting, in theory at least, not on money and family but on education, competence, and good character. It was this new middle class that had made Germany great, developing its cities, peopling its universities, creating its industries, and bringing forth the poets and thinkers the Germans were so proud of. Their virtues had been described by Max Weber’s characterization of the Protestant work ethic: hard work and frugal living, a constant deferment of pleasure, a sublimation of desire, and a strong sense of duty. They lived for the future, not the present.