Soviet filmmakers followed similar trends. The breakthrough of Christianity and Russian nationalism in film was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev of 1966. Rarely shown in the Soviet Union, the film depicted the fifteenth century icon painter Rublev as a man who survives the disasters of his time by faith and art. Tarkovsky later moved on to more psychologically introspective themes, usually with religious overtones, in his later works such as Stalker (1979), more or less science fiction. Though the film was seen in the Soviet Union, its showings were extremely limited. Tarkovsky had had enough and moved to the West, dying in Paris in 1986. Other film directors also divided their time between historical epics (Siberiade, also made in 1979 by director Andrei Konchalovsky) and mildly modernist films from the private life of the Soviet intelligentsia.
One of the most striking features of Soviet life from the 1960s onward was the emergence of popular culture. The beginnings lay in the Stalin era, and to a limited extent were there even before the revolution. In those years, however, the audience of popular culture was mainly the thin middle layer of urban society, with some extensions into the working classes. The main examples were the musical stages (estrada in Russian), which featured Soviet jazz bands and comedy routines, and film. The boundaries with the culture of the intelligentsia were fluid: Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote film music, and major writers produced scripts as well. Some writers produced science fiction and detective stories, though both were under a cloud after the middle 1930s. The more liberal atmosphere of the Khrushchev era brought about a revival of popular fiction, especially science fiction, and jazz came back onto the radio and into musical theaters. What really changed Soviet popular culture, however, were television and the availability of Western popular music, not just jazz but eventually some forms of rock and roll. Television took popular music out of the theaters and into everyone’s apartment. While Soviet television put on some culture programs, it was the popular entertainment that made a mass audience, like Iulian Semenov’s World War II spy story, Seventeen Minutes of Spring, the hit miniseries of 1973 that so impressed the young Vladimir Putin.
Popular music had a complex history. As elsewhere, the jazz audience was increasingly elite after the 1960s, and American rock took its place. Soviet youth heard rock music on foreign radio stations, but also massive amounts of tape recordings began to circulate, many homemade, as tape recorders and players became widely available. The Brezhnev regime did not prohibit rock music. It tried to restrict what it saw as the more erotic and wild versions, but much rock music circulated openly, and the state began to sponsor rock bands and popular singers with eclectic styles. Some of them, like Alla Pugacheva, became wildly popular. Parallel to these more official versions of popular music were underground bands like Aquarium in Leningrad that also relied for a long time on taped recordings but by 1980 had acquired some state recognition. All late Soviet popular music was derived from Western models, even if modified with a local twist, and it also imitated Western music in creating a series of rapidly changing generational subcultures. Each new moment, from jazz to the disco craze of the late 1970s, had its own audience that often did not extend to listeners even a few years younger. Soviet popular culture, at least the musical variants, now had very little to do with “Soviet reality.” It also had little to do with the culture of the intelligentsia, official, critical, or dissident culture, though it did share in the sense of alienation of much of the intelligentsia. It also shared a social background as many of the popular musicians, even rockers, came from privileged backgrounds in the intelligentsia or even the party elite.
By the 1980s most of the great writers and artists of the early Soviet days were gone: Pasternak died in 1960, Shostakovich in 1975, and Sholokhov in 1984. Almost all of the first wave of film directors and actors of the 1920s were gone. The newer generation of writers and artists was not in the league of their predecessors, no more than their counterparts in the West were in the league of Proust or Joyce. Soviet writers and artists had the additional burden of an ossified but obligatory cultural policy, one that no longer attracted the new generations among the intelligentsia. Even if the dissidents seemed to many educated people shrill and unconvincing, their own views of the Soviet system were scarcely enthusiastic. The official cultural line and its products became more and more a fantasy world that ignored what the public actually read or watched. For the intelligentsia, Gorbachev’s Perestroika was an earthquake – a welcome earthquake, as they were sure that political freedom and a market economy would produce a great flowering of culture. They were sure that the time for the intelligentsia had finally come. They would find out otherwise.
23 The Cold War
The Cold War lasted for the whole of the last forty-six years of Soviet history. It was an epic contest, ranging over the whole world, from Berlin and Peking to the most distant parts of Africa and Latin America. For much of the time the Soviet Union seemed to have a good chance of “winning” in some form, and indeed the more hysterical of its opponents were convinced that it was immensely powerful. In reality, the Soviet Union came from behind in the struggle and was never close to defeating its new enemy, the United States. For most of the time, it struggled just to keep up and survive with its newfound power more or less intact.
At the end of the Second World War the two new powers seemed relatively evenly matched, for both were industrial powers and similar in population, the United States at 151 million and the Soviet Union at 182 million. The population figures were an illusion, however, for the Soviet figure was the result of concealment of war losses and may have been as low as 167 million. Soviet industry, however, had been only third in 1940 behind the United States and Germany and much of it was now in ruins. The devastation of the country was unparalleled, even in Germany, and the United States had suffered no war damage at all, outside of Pearl Harbor and the Aleutian Islands. The war had restored American prosperity after the Depression and was a huge boost to American technology and industry, as the rapid success of the atomic project demonstrated. At the time Stalin was convinced that after the war the “contradictions” between the United States and other Western powers would grow, especially as he anticipated a rapid recovery and rearmament of Germany and Japan. Eventually there could be another war among the Western powers. Some in the Soviet hierarchy questioned this view, pointing out that England, for all its differences with the United States, was fundamentally dependent on American money and power, and so would be Germany and Japan. Stalin simply suppressed such dissent.
In spite of his optimistic assessment of the world, Stalin took no chances. During the war he had paid little attention to the construction of an atomic bomb at first, in spite of repeated warnings from Soviet scientists, who were concerned both about Germany and the United States. Soviet intelligence had actually acquired some very valuable information early in the war from Britain, but it sat in Beria’s files unused. As always, he was afraid it might be just clever disinformation. Soviet physicists wrote to Stalin lobbying for action, for they realized that the Americans were working on a bomb (all publications by the relevant physicists in the United States had disappeared from science journals) and were fearful that the Germans might make a bomb first. Finally in 1943 Stalin decided to establish a research unit to build a reactor and put Igor Kurchatov in charge, one of the talented physicists to come out of Ioffe’s Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute. Starting in a small building in the south of Moscow, Kurchatov and his group were able to make the reactor, but only with the news of Hiroshima did Stalin put the bomb project into full gear, establishing a laboratory south of Moscow called Arzamas-16 in the buildings of the famous nineteenth-century Sarov monastery. Beria was in charge of the bomb project, as well as the whole nuclear industry that was extracting and processing uranium in the USSR, eastern Germany, and Czechoslovakia. There remained the problem of the exact design of the bomb, and this time intelligence from Klaus Fuchs at Los Alamos and the mere fact of American success helped Soviet scientists
to gain at least a year in time. In 1949 they exploded their first atomic bomb in secret. The US government learned of it only from analyzing atmospheric fallout.
The construction of the bomb was an immense technological feat for a relatively backward country, one that came at equally immense cost in capital investments. The mere existence of the bomb did not solve all Soviet military problems. No Soviet bomber then existing could fly from the Soviet Union to strike the United States, and bombers were the only delivery vehicles then available. To make things worse, the Soviets did not have aircraft engines big enough to power a large bomber. The United States maintained a network of bases in Western Europe and Turkey from which aircraft could strike virtually any important target in the USSR, but the only reply or preventive action would have to target those bases, not the United States itself. The Soviet air force had been primarily a ground support weapon, having abandoned strategic bombing before the war to build smaller bombers to support the infantry. Thus Stalin had to order the construction of long-range bombers and a massive air defense network to defend the main Soviet target cities, all at colossal expense. By the time of his death the foundations of these forces were in place.
Military power was all very well, but Stalin and his circle realized that their greatest advantage was in the political sphere, in the prestige of the Soviet victory over Hitler and of the Communist movement in the world generally. Spreading Communist rule and the socialist system, they assumed, would also spread Soviet power. The first arena in which they saw possibilities was quite naturally in Eastern Europe, which had been liberated from the Nazis and was now under Soviet occupation.
The Soviets hosted many exiled Communists in Moscow during the war, and came into contact with the underground as they advanced into Eastern Europe. The strategy that Stalin developed and required the local Communists to follow was the establishment of a regime of “people’s democracy.” The Communist party was to make a coalition in each country with other leftist and agrarian groups rather than seize power in its own name. New constitutions were to be worked out with new elected governments (a change from pre-war dictatorships) and in the one previously democratic country, Czechoslovakia, the old constitution was restored. Stalin, however, was by no means relinquishing the opportunity for control provided by the victory in the war. In all of the liberated countries the Communists were to be a major partner in the government, and if they could not do that honestly, then by manipulation of the elections. The local Communists everywhere took charge of the ministries of the interior that controlled the various police forces, and those ministries were effectively controlled by the Soviet security forces. Further, the local Communists consulted the Soviet authorities, either the Soviet ambassador or Moscow directly on virtually every issue of importance.
This situation was not stable in the long run. It had the same problems that the Popular Front did in the Spanish Civil War, the incompatibility of the Communist parties with their coalition “partners” in methods and aims. The disastrous economic situation of most East European countries added more instability, and the war had left a residue of violence and hatred that further complicated matters. Even the Soviet ambassadors were shocked at the amount of anti-Semitism in post-war Czechoslovakia and other countries, and were nervous at its exploitation by local Communists. As they came to realize, nationalism was just under the surface even in the Communist parties, for all East European countries had a modern history where nationalist movements predominated, not liberalism or socialism, and the war had only exacerbated the situation. The non-Communist coalition parties were determined not to surrender complete control to the Communists, something they found increasingly difficult. Finally, the Soviets were not popular everywhere, even if they had defeated Hitler. If the Yugoslavs and the populations of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria greeted the Red Army as liberators, Hungary and Rumania were a different matter. The nationalist dictatorships had been popular until Hitler began to lose the war, and both were stridently anti-Soviet and anti-Russian. In Poland the Communists were a minority in a mass resistance movement that was also anti-Communist and anti-Russian, and the Warsaw uprising remained a bone of contention. Germany was especially difficult, as support for Hitler had been nearly universal and the victorious Red Army had behaved as conquerors toward Germans civilians, not as liberators, looting houses and raping women.
The turning points came late in 1947, when Stalin created the Communist Information Bureau as a smaller successor to the Comintern, signaling his intention to maintain formal control over his comrades. In February 1948, a government crisis in Czechoslovakia led the Communists under Klement Gottwald to form “action committees” and with some Soviet prompting, to seize power. The constitutional president Edvard Beneš soon resigned and the Communists were now in complete control. By various devices the Communists took power in all the other East European countries. The new governments then moved way beyond the original slogans of “people’s democracies” (though officially the term remained) toward full nationalization and collectivization of agriculture. The new Communist governments also deployed the full arsenal of terror against their opponents, executions and imprisonment for hundreds of thousands. Show trials of allegedly dissident Communist leaders, like that of Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia, imitated earlier Soviet show trials. With opposition cowed, the East European states began huge construction projects on the Soviet model, relying on very real enthusiasm for socialism, especially among youth, but nowhere did they approach a level of support large enough to maintain themselves without the threat of force and Soviet backing.
The one exception to many of these rules was Yugoslavia, which provided Stalin with a challenge from within the Communist movement that he never succeeded in crushing. Unlike his neighbors, Josip Broz Tito had come to power with considerable mass support, the fruit of his years leading the partisans against German and Italian occupation. In the postwar years Tito was more Stalinist than Stalin, and also had tactical disagreements over post-war Balkan structures and over the Greek Civil War, where Stalin ended his support of the Communists and thus enraged Tito. Finally in 1948 Stalin condemned Tito’s “deviations” and tried to isolate Yugoslavia, without much success given tacit Western support. Later Tito came up with the idea that his socialist industries would be “self-managed” to differentiate them from Soviet practice, but fundamentally the issue was simply that Tito was not dependent on the Soviets for survival and did not see any reason to follow orders.
The other area in which Stalin was at least partially stymied was Germany. The four-power occupation gave the Soviets control over the eastern part of the new Germany and the eastern part of Berlin. As in Eastern Europe, the Soviets set up a people’s democracy in the eastern zone with the Communists at the center. Otherwise the situation was somewhat different from East Europe. Germany was an industrialized country with much of that industry in the Soviet zone. The German Communists before Hitler had been a major political force and the tiny anti-Nazi resistance in Germany was heavily Communist. At the same time almost all of the Communists’ pre-1933 supporters had enthusiastically embraced Hitler. The new German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht and his comrades were generals without an army. Furthermore, Stalin wanted to solve the German problem as a whole, not just set up a rump Communist state, so that all the decisions about the eastern zone were in effect temporary measures. He seems to have hoped for a united neutral Germany with major Soviet influence. Part of his reasoning was that such a policy would be a successful propaganda ploy, but he also seems to have believed that a neutral Germany would necessarily differ in its interests from the United States and Britain and even come into conflict with them. Molotov would stick to this policy well after Stalin’s death. It was not until western Germany began to coalesce, starting in 1947 with the Marshall Plan, then the establishment of a common west zone currency, the failure of the Berlin blockade (1948–49), and finally the foundation of the Federal Republic in the West that Stalin accepte
d the inevitable. He allowed Ulbricht to form the German Democratic Republic in 1949, though even then it remained somewhat provisional into the 1950s.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 51