by Peter Watson
On 20 June 1936 Maxim Gorky died at his dacha, in Gorki, just outside Moscow. He was, at the time of his death, probably the most well-known writer in Russia, a novelist, a playwright, and a poet, though he had first become famous as a short-story writer in the 1890s. He had participated in the 1905 revolution, joined the Bolsheviks, but from 1906 to 1913 had lived in Capri.111 His novel The Mother (1906) is generally regarded as the pioneer of socialist realism; it was written in the United States while he was fund-raising for the Bolsheviks. A friend of Lenin, he was in favour of the 1917 revolution and afterward founded the newspaper Novaya zhizm. He left Russia again in the early 1920s, as a protest against the treatment of intellectuals, but Stalin persuaded him back in 1933.
To those who knew the sixty-two-year-old writer and his poor health, his death was not a surprise, but wild rumours immediately began to circulate. One version had it that he had been killed by Genrikh Yagoda, the bureaucrat in charge of the Writers’ Union, because he intended to denounce Stalin to André Gide, the French author (and someone who had retracted his earlier enthusiasm for Soviet Russia). Another rumour had it that Gorky had been administered ‘heart stimulants in large quantities,’ including camphor, caffeine, and cardiosal. According to this version, the ultimate culprits were ‘Rightists and Trotskyites’ funded by foreign governments, intent on destabilising Russian society by the murder of public figures.112 When Vitaly Shentalinsky was given access to the KGB literary archive in the 1990s, he found the Gorky file. This contained two versions of Gorky’s own death, the ‘official’ one and the authentic one. What does seem at least theoretically possible is that the murder of Gorky’s son in 1934 was designed to break the father, psychologically speaking. Even this is not entirely convincing because Gorky was not an enemy of the regime. As an old friend of Lenin, he may have felt he had to tread carefully where Stalin was concerned, and certainly, as time went by, a coldness developed between Stalin and Gorky. But as the KGB’s file makes clear, Stalin visited the writer twice during his last illness. Gorky’s death was natural.113
The rumours surrounding his death nevertheless underline the unhappy atmosphere in which writers and other artists, no less than scientists, lived. In the decade between the Great Break and World War II, literature in Russia went through three distinct phases, though this owed more to attempts by the authorities to coerce writers than to any aesthetic innovations. The first phase, from 1929 to 1932, saw the rise of proletarian writers, who followed Stalin rather than Lenin. This movement was led by RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, infiltrated by a new breed of author who began a campaign against the older literary types, who held to the view that the writer, like all intellectuals, should remain ‘outside society, the better to be able to criticise it.’ RAPP therefore attacked ‘psychologism’ on the grounds that a concern with individual motives for action was ‘bourgeois.’ RAPP also took exception to writing in which the peasants were portrayed in anything other than a flattering light.114 The peasants were noble, not envious; and the kulaks warranted no sympathy. RAPP took part in the establishment of ‘Writers’ Brigades,’ whose job it was to describe what the party bureaucrats were doing, collectivisation in particular. Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky were all criticised by RAPP.115 From 1932 to 1935 the pendulum swung back. Anyone with any sense could see that under the RAPP system, people with little or no talent were hounding much better writers into silence. The new approach granted authors special privileges – dachas, rest homes, sanitaria, foreign travel – but they were also required to join a new organisation: RAPP was abolished, to be replaced by the Writers’ Union. This was more than just a union, however. It epitomised a compulsory orthodoxy: socialist realism. It was the introduction of this dogma that caused Gorky to be called home.
Socialist realism was a trinity. First, it was required to appeal to the newly educated masses and to be didactic, ‘showing real events in their revolutionary context.’116 Second, writing should not be ‘too abstract’, it had to be ‘a guide to action,’ and involve a ‘celebratory’ tone, since that made it ‘worthy of the great epoch in socialism.’ Third, socialist realism should show Partiinost, or ‘party-mindedness,’ an echo of ‘Cadres decide everything’ in the scientific field.117 Gorky, for one, realised that great literature was unlikely to be produced under such circumstances. Certain ponderous projects, such as a vast history of the civil war, a history of factories, and a literature of the famine, were worth doing, but they were bound to be stolid, rather than imaginative.118 Gorky’s main aim, therefore, was to ensure that Soviet literature was not reduced to banal propaganda. The high point of socialist realism was the infamous First Congress of Soviet Writers, which met in the Hall of Columns in Moscow in 1935. For the congress, the hall was decorated with huge portraits of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pushkin, and Tolstoy – none of these immortals, so it seemed, was bourgeois. Delegations of workers and peasants, carrying tools, trooped through the proceedings to remind Soviet delegates of their ‘social responsibilities.’119 Gorky gave an ambiguous address. He underlined his sympathies with the emerging talents of Russia, which the revolution had uncovered, and he went out of his way to criticise bureaucrats who, he said, could never know what it was like to be a writer. This barb was, however, directed as much at the bureaucracy of the Writers’ Union itself as at other civil servants. He was implying that socialist realism had to be real, as well as socialist – the same point that Vavilov was fighting in biology. As it turned out, all the proposals the congress gave rise to were overtaken by the Great Terror. That same year a score of writers was shot in Ukraine, after the murder of Kirov. At the same time, libraries were told to remove the works of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others. Most chilling of all, Stalin began to take a personal interest in literature. There were phone calls to individual writers, like Pasternak, verdicts on specific works (approval for Quiet Flows the Don, disapproval for Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District). Stalin even read L. M. Leonov’s Russian Forest, correcting it with a red pencil.120
Stalin’s involvement with Osip Mandelstam was much more dramatic. Mandelstam’s file was another of those discovered in the KGB archive by Vitaly Shentalinsky, and the most moving. Mandelstam was arrested twice, in 1934 and 1938. The second time he was seized while Anna Akhmatova was in his flat (she had just arrived from Leningrad).121 Mandelstam was later interrogated by Nikolay Shivarov, in particular about certain poems he had written, including one about Stalin.
Question: ‘Do you recognise yourself guilty of composing works of a counter-revolutionary character?’
Answer. ‘I am the author of the following poem of a counter-revolutionary nature:
We live without sensing the country beneath us,
At ten paces, our speech has no sound
And when there’s the will to half-open our mouths
The Kremlin crag-dweller bars the way.
Fat fingers as oily as maggots,
Words sure as forty-pound weights,
With his leather-clad gleaming calves
And his large laughing cockroach eyes.
And around him a rabble of thin-necked bosses,
He toys with the service of such semi-humans.
They whistle, they meouw, and they whine:
He alone merely jabs with his finger and barks,
Tossing out decree after decree like horseshoes —
Right in the eye, in the face, the brow or the groin.
Not one shooting but swells his gang’s pleasure,
And the broad breast of the Ossetian.’
There was also a poem about a terrible famine in Ukraine. As a result, Mandelstam was sent into exile for three years; it might have been worse had not Stalin taken a personal interest and told his captors to ‘isolate but preserve’ him.122 Mandelstam was accused again in 1938, under the same law as before. ‘This time the sentence was to “isolate” but not necessarily “preserve.” ’123 Mandelstam, who had no
t been back from his first exile for very long, was already thin and emaciated, and the authorities, Stalin included, knew that he would never survive five years (for a second offence) in a camp. Sentence was passed in August; by December, in the transit camp, he had not even the strength to get up off his bed boards. He collapsed on 26 December and died the next day. The file says that a board was tied to his leg, with his number chalked on it. Then the corpse was thrown onto a cart and taken to a common grave. His wife Nadezhda only found out he had died on 5 February 1939, six weeks later, when a money order she had sent to him was returned ‘because of the death of the addressee.’124
Isaac Babel, a celebrated short story writer whose best-known works include Red Cavalry (1926) and Odessa Tales (1927), an account of his civil war experience, was never a party member; he was also Jewish. Appalled at what was happening in Russia, he wrote little in the 1930s (and came under attack for it). Nonetheless, he was arrested in May 1939 and not seen again. Throughout the 1940s his wife was told periodically, ‘He is alive, well and being held in the camps.’125 In 1947 she was officially told that Isaac would be released in 1948. Not until March 1955 was she told that her husband had died ‘while serving his sentence,’ on 17 March 1941. Even that was wrong. The KGB file makes it clear he was shot on 27 January 1940.
The period 1937–8 became known among intellectuals as the era of Yezhovshchina (Yezhov’s misrule), after N. I. Yezhov, boss of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. The term was originally coined by Boris Pasternak, who had always referred to shigalyovshchina, recalling Shigalyov in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, a book that features a dystopia in which denunciation and surveillance are paramount. Writers, artists, and scholars killed in the Great Terror included the philosopher Jan Sten, who had taught Stalin; Leopold Averbakh, Ivan Katayev, Alexander Chayanov, Boris Guber, Pavel Florensky, Klychkov Lelevich, Vladimir Kirshans, Ivan Mikhailovich Bespalov, Vsevelod Meyerhold, Benedikt Livshits, the historian of futurism, and Prince Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky.126 Estimates for the number of writers who died during the Terror range from 600 to 1,300 to 1,500. Even the lower figure was a third of the membership of the Writers’ Union.127
The result of all this brutality, obsession with control, and paranoia was sterility. Socialist realism failed, though this was never admitted in Stalin’s lifetime. The literature of the period – the history of factories, for example – is not read, if it is read at all, for pleasure or enlightenment, but only for its grim historical interest. What happened in literature was a parallel of what was happening in psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and biology. In retrospect, the best epitaph came from a real writer, Vladimir Mayakovsky. In an early futurist poem, one of the characters visits the hairdresser. When asked what he wants, he replies simply: ‘Please, trim my ears.’128
18
COLD COMFORT
Despite what was happening in Germany, and in Soviet Russia, and despite the widespread unemployment on both sides of the Atlantic, new ideas, new works of art, could not be suppressed. In some ways the 1930s were surprisingly fertile.
At the time of the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the depression which followed, the cinema was overtaken by the introduction of sound.1 The first film director to appreciate fully the implications of sound was the Frenchman René Clair. The first ‘talkie’ was The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson, directed by Alan Crosland. That film was an example of what the film historian Arthur Knight calls the early ‘tyranny of sound,’ in which raw noise was used at every available opportunity simply because it was new. In early talkies you could hear picknickers crunching celery, in the place of written credits, actors were introduced by other actors wearing capes. Billboards advertised movies as the first ‘100% all-talking drama filmed outdoors,’ or ‘the first all-Negro all-talking picture.’2
Clair was much more subtle. To begin with, he was actually opposed to sound. Overcoming his reluctance, he chose to use dialogue and sound effects sparingly, most notably employing them against the images for heightened effect. He didn’t show a door closing; instead, the audience heard it slam. The most dramatic instance of Clair’s technique is a fight in Sous les toits de Paris, which happens in the dark near a railway line. The clatter and urgent rhythm of the passing trains – which we hear but do not see – adds to the muffled thuds and grunts of the shadowy fighters. Clair’s invention was in essence a new filmic language, an allusive way of adding information, moods, and atmosphere that had been entirely absent hitherto.3
The psychological change that showed in the movies made in America in particular owed a lot to the depression, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his prompt introduction of New Deal relief measures in 1933, designed to stimulate economic revival. This brought a measure of optimism to the public mood, but the speed with which the president acted only underlined the urgency and depth of the problem. In Hollywood, as the depression lasted, the traditional comedies and even the vogue for musicals since the introduction of sound no longer seemed to be enough to help people cope with the grim reality of the early 1930s. Audiences still wanted to escape at the movies, but there was also a growing demand for realistic stories that addressed their problems.
Warner Brothers’ Little Caesar was the first gritty drama in this vein to become big box office, the earliest successful gangster movie (it was based on the life of Al Capone). But Hollywood quickly followed it with a long string of similar films (fifty in 1931 alone) and equally sensational exposés, lifting the lid on rackets, political corruption, prison brutality, and bank failures. Among these were The Big House (1930), The Front Page (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and The Secret Six (1931), each with a story that took the audience behind the headlines.4 Some oversimplified, but by no means all. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) was based on a true story and brought about real changes in the chain-gang system. Poverty was tackled head on in Blonde Venus (1932) and Letty Lynton (1932).5 After Roosevelt’s election, the mood changed again. The focus on social problems – slum housing, unemployment or the conditions of agricultural workers – remained, but films now conveyed the view that these matters needed to be addressed by democracy, that whether the actual story line had a happy or an unhappy ending there were systematic political faults in the country underlying the personal tragedies. The developing taste for ‘biopics’ likewise grew out of the same sensibility by showing the heroic struggle of successful individuals to overcome the odds. Biopics of Lincoln, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, and Paul Ehrlich all proved popular, though the best was probably The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which in Zola’s classic defence of Captain Dreyfus offered a scathing attack on anti-Semitism, which was not only disfiguring Nazi Germany but prevalent in the United States as well.6
At the New York World’s Fair in 1939, every conceivable kind of film – from travelogue to sales promotion – was on display, but what stood out was a very different way of filming the 1930s. This was the British documentary. In straightforward entertainment films, Britain was already far behind not only Hollywood but other European countries.7 The documentary tradition, however, was a different matter. It owed its early virility to the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit, which was begun in 1929 as a propaganda outfit that devised posters and brochures to promote Britain’s food supply from what was then still the Empire. A film unit was added after a gritty Scot, John Grierson, educated in America and much impressed by American advertising skills, persuaded Sir Stephen Tallents, who ran the board, that film could have a much wider effect than the written word.8 Grierson’s aim was to use the talents of major directors – people like Eric von Stroheim and Serge Eisenstein — to bring ‘real life’ to the screen, to convey the drama and heroism of real people, mainly working-class people which he believed was now possible with the invention of sound. For Grierson, the documentary was a new art form waiting to be born.9 The early films, of fishermen, potters, or miners, in fact contained little drama and even less art. Then, in 1933, the Film Unit was moved, virtually intact, to
the General Post Office, where it was to remain until the war.10 In its new home the Film Unit produced a groundbreaking series of documentaries; the new art form that Grierson had yearned for was finally born. There was no one style. Basil Wright’s touch in Song of Ceylon was allusive, gently intercutting ‘the ageless ritual of tea-picking’ with the harsher sounds of tea traders and the more prosaic sights of parts of the London Stock Exchange. Harry Watts’s Night Mail was probably the most famous documentary of all for generations of British people (like the others, it was distributed by schools). It followed the nightly run of the mail train from London to Scotland, with a commentary by W. H. Auden and set to the music of Benjamin Britten. Auden was a perfect choice; his poem conveyed at once the lyrical rhythms of the train, its urgency, and the routine ordinariness of the operation, plus the effect that even an unexceptional letter can have on the lives of people:11
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?12
It would take a war for the British to see the propaganda value of film. By then, however, Germany had been living with propaganda for nearly a decade – Hitler moved in on the filmmakers as soon as he moved in on the artists. One of the first initiatives of Joseph Goebbels, when he was appointed propaganda minister, was to call together Germany’s most prominent filmmakers and show them Eisenstein’s Potemkin, his 1925 masterpiece that commemorated the revolution, and which was both a work of art and a piece of propaganda. ‘Gentlemen,’ Goebbels announced when the lights came on, ‘that’s an idea of what I want from you.’13 The minister wasn’t looking for obvious propaganda; he was clever and knew better. But the films he wanted must glorify the Reich: there was to be no argument about that. At the same time, he insisted that every cinema must include in its program a government-sponsored newsreel and, on occasions, a short documentary. By the outbreak of war, Goebbels’s newsreels could be as long as forty minutes, but it was the documentaries that had most effect. Technically brilliant, they were masterminded by Leni Riefenstahl, an undistinguished actress in the Weimar years who had reinvented herself as a director and editor. Any summary of these films sounds boring – party meetings, Göring’s new air force, the land army, the Olympic Games. It was the method of presentation, Riefenstahl’s directorial skills, that made them memorable. The best was Triumph of the Will (1937), at three hours hardly short as Goebbels had stipulated, but then it was commissioned by the Führer himself as a record of the first party convention at Nuremberg. To judge by what was captured on camera – the parades, the oratory, the drilling of the troops, the vast numbers of people engrossed in sports or simply being fed – there were almost as many people behind the cameras as in front of them. In fact, sixteen cameras crews were involved.14 When it was shown, after two years of editing, Triumph of the Will had a mesmerising effect on some people.15 The endless torchlit parades, one speaker after another shouting into the microphone, the massive regularity of Brownshirts and Blackshirts absorbed in the rhetoric and then bellowing ‘Sieg Heil’ in unison, were hypnotic.16