Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  Although Feuchtwanger had come to a completely strange city, he was surrounded by acquaintances, fellow writers and friends – even if one friend whose presence he would have welcomed was not there: Bertolt Brecht. But he was accompanied by Maria Osten and Mikhail Kol'tsov, who had travelled to Sanary-sur-Mer to bring him the invitation to visit Moscow and persuade him to take it up. In Moscow he met Willi Bredel, his fellow editor of the journal Das Wort, writers he knew from the Congresses in Defence of Culture in Paris, German exiles who had come to anchor not in Paris but in Moscow: Erich Weinert, Johannes R. Becher and Friedrich Wolf.24 He returned by train together with two leaders of the French Communist Party – Marcel Cachin and Paul Vaillant-Coutourier. He met famous filmmakers and the star of the State Jewish Theatre, Solomon Mikhoels, whom he had seen in the role of King Lear. The person he did not meet was Bukharin; this was because an appointment had been fixed for him to meet Stalin in the Kremlin. Six months earlier Bukharin had gone to a meeting with Gide in the Hotel Metropol, although in the event it was cut short.25 Now Bukharin was under house arrest and caught up in investigations that would end a month after Feuchtwanger’s departure from Moscow with his exclusion from the Central Committee and his arrest during the session of the plenum of the Central Committee.

  The phenomenology of confusion and the creation of unambiguous meaning: credo quia absurdum

  In his tour of the Soviet lifeworld, Feuchtwanger encountered things that lay beyond the control of the secret police, things that both impressed and irritated him at the same time. In the first place, there was the visible transformation of Moscow, the gigantic construction site, and then the overwhelming desire of people, especially younger ones, to read, see and acquire knowledge and education. There was also much that irritated him, in particular the naïve self-assurance and ignorance of young people who had seen nothing but Moscow and Russia, their tendency to exaggerate, their trust in authority, and the leadership cult, especially the cult of Stalin. But even that was something to be endured as the price of a youthful society thrust into the process of modernization. What is striking is just how detailed and precise his observations are. In general, where Feuchtwanger and Gide confine themselves to their observations, to ‘what is actually the case’, the differences between them are not all that great. Feuchtwanger registers numerous criticisms at the level of detail, but there is no criticism of the general line as such. The city has crass defects, but the overwhelming feeling is that, for all his reservations, things are improving. The shops contain the essentials, but goods that increase comfort are entirely absent. Life is arduous and bureaucratic, dependent upon countless approvals and permits.

  Worst of all is the housing problem. The greater part of the population lives herded together, in mean and tiny rooms, which in winter are almost airless. Queues form outside the lavatories. Eminent politicians, writers and scientists with large incomes live more primitively than many a humble citizen of the West.

  Feuchtwanger describes the meaning of the dramatic change in the lives of the new Muscovites who had been peasants only the previous day. He regards young people as ‘the greatest asset of the Soviet Union’. Everything is done for them, and it is they who are ‘the most resolute supporters of the Soviet government’. ‘It is an inspiration to see in the Soviet Union millions who, twenty years ago, would have wasted away in the most complete ignorance throng enthusiastically into the educational centres.’ The same thing – thirst for knowledge, longing for education – applies to the new Soviet reading public, whose earnest endeavour Feuchtwanger vividly describes: ‘It was not always easy to cope with the points they raised. These young peasant and proletarian intellectuals come along with most unexpected questions. They defend their opinions, respectfully but firmly and pertinaciously.’26 Feuchtwanger listened incredulously to the size of the editions of the classics, the newspapers, the visitor numbers in cinemas and theatres, but he was also disturbed by the preference for ‘heroic optimism’. ‘In fact, the effect of the Soviet Union’s artistic policy is to make the production better than the play. The Soviet Union has a fine theatre but no drama.’27 Many drawbacks of ordinary life are compensated for by the prospect of better things to come.

  The many clubs for manual and office workers, the numerous libraries, parks, and athletic grounds, are spacious and well-appointed. The public buildings are admirably representative of the principle, while electrification has made Moscow by night shine as brightly as any city in the world … The pleasant rooms of his club make his own unlovely home more bearable. But, above all, he is compensated for his ugly dwelling by the promise that Moscow shall become beautiful.28

  Needless to say, the construction process produces friction, but this should not be confused with the acts of sabotage of whose existence Feuchtwanger is convinced. ‘But gradually, a real “wrecker” psychosis has grown up amongst the people. They have come to interpret everything that goes wrong as sabotage, whilst most certainly a great part of the defects are traceable to incompetence pure and simple.’29 He is full of enthusiasm about the careers that have been thrown open to Jews.30 He notes that his own presence in the second show trial melted his own reservations, ‘as naturally as salt dissolves in water. If that was lying or prearranged, then I don’t know what truth is.’31 He bases his interpretation on the authenticity of the indictment and the sincerity of the confessions, and yet: ‘I must admit that although the trial has convinced me of the guilt of the prisoners, I can find no completely satisfactory explanation for their behaviour before the court notwithstanding the arguments of the Soviet people’. And – like Ernst Bloch – he wishes to make a mental reservation to the effect that ‘What I have understood was excellent. From which I conclude that the rest which I have not understood, is also excellent.’32 That is the moment in which faith and the wish to believe part company with observation and knowledge.

  Leave-taking at Belorusskii Station

  Feuchtwanger set out for home on a journey that would take him back to Sanary-sur-Mer via Prague and Paris. At his departure the press, photographers, and fellow writers all gathered once again. Some of them accompanied him to the frontier in Negoreloye so as to produce reports for their newspapers from there. What Feuchtwanger says there is basically the same as he would write in his account of his visit, which would be published that summer by the Querido Verlag in Amsterdam.33

  Of those who came to see him off at Belorusskii Station, the following were killed shortly afterwards: Sergei Tretiakov was arrested on 26 July 1937, sentenced to death as a Japanese spy and shot; Isaak Babel' was arrested on 16 May 1939 and condemned as a Trotskyist on 26 January 1940; Mikhail Kol'tsov was arrested on 12 December 1938 and sentenced to death, although he was not executed until 1 February 1940; Maria Osten, Kol'tsov’s life’s companion, was arrested on 24 June 1941, condemned to death for ‘spying’ and shot; Boris Tal, his interpreter, was arrested on 2 November 1937 and condemned to death. Many of his friends and acquaintances from his days in Munich were arrested, forced to spend many years in camps or were killed: Zenzl Mühsam, the wife of Erich Mühsam, was arrested in 1936, released, rearrested, condemned in 1939 and in a Gulag until 1946; she emigrated to the GDR in 1955. The actress Carola Neher had been arrested as early as 25 July 1936 as a ‘Trotskyist agent’, was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment on 17 March 1937, and died in a camp in Orenburg on 26 June 1942.34 He himself, together with many other visitors to Moscow of the 1920s and 1930s – Walter Benjamin, Joseph Roth, Oskar Maria Graf, Ludwig Marcuse, Arthur Koestler – was forced to flee from Hitler; not all could be saved. But ten years after Feuchtwanger’s Moscow 1937 there appeared – likewise in the Querido Verlag – the Dialectic of Enlightenment, written by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Feuchtwanger’s neighbours in exile in California. This book does not contain even a hint of Feuchtwanger’s experience.

  6

  In the Glare of Battle: Spain and Other Fronts

  Everything that happened in Moscow in 1937 happ
ened against the background of war. War was omnipresent, and every event acquired its contours only from the threat of war. ‘People talk of war not as an event in the distant future but as an imminent fact.’ That was Lion Feuchtwanger’s impression of his stay in Moscow early in 1937. Since people regarded war as inevitable, they included it in their calculations, ‘assuming that this war will take place come what may, that it will in fact take place tomorrow, and so they prepared themselves mentally for it.’ Feuchtwanger had served – briefly – in the First World War; in Moscow he felt reminded of his wartime experience. Everywhere he felt surrounded by war films, books, newspapers and posters: ‘One could hardly have seen at the front in the four years of the Great War as much slaughter, battle and conflict as appeared on the stage and screen during the ten weeks of my visit to Moscow.’1 That this was not the over-excited view of a bourgeois pacifist quickly becomes apparent if we look at the Moscow papers, the cultural programme and the great themes of the year. There we find the picture of a world which, having only just emerged from the confusions of war and civil war, seemed to be preparing itself for yet another new war. The flames of conflict were already flickering everywhere, from Manchuria to Spain; there were incidents and skirmishes at many points along the All-Union frontiers. But they appeared to be only the precursors of a new great universal conflagration. War, the Spanish Civil War above all, was as vividly present in people’s minds in Moscow as if the front lines ran straight through the Soviet capital.

  Moscow maps: the scene is Spain

  From 16 July 1936, the first day of the revolt of the officers around General Franco against the Spanish Republic, to the capitulation of Republican Spain at the end of April 1938, Spain was a central topic of all reporting:

  The front is much extended. It goes far beyond the trenches of Madrid; it goes right through Europe, through the whole world. It passes through countries, villages and towns, its reverberations can be heard in assembly halls, it creeps silently over the shelves in bookshops. The greatest peculiarity of this invisible war front in humanity’s striving for peace and culture lies in the fact that writers can nowhere find a zone of tranquillity and neutrality where a person pining for peace might hide.

  This was the view of Mikhail Kol'tsov, who wrote regularly about Spain for Pravda.2 Thanks to such reports, Moscow was in direct contact with events on the peninsula, and indeed with the whole of Europe. Whatever happened there was connected to the life of Moscow by telegraph, agency reporting, newspaper reports, Comintern emissaries, military advisers and secret police. The newspapers provided daily updates – often filling a whole page. There was a constant stream of reports by special correspondents such as Mikhail Kol'tsov and Il'ia Ehrenburg. The use of maps to represent the course of the war was of outstanding importance – as it had been in the First World War. Week by week, day by day, readers could form an impression of movements at the front, of the to and fro between the fascist and anti-fascist forces, between the Falange and the Republic. In those years Madrid, Albacete, Teruel, Valencia and Barcelona became talking points for an entire generation. Added to this were the photographs of bombed streets, group snapshots of volunteer units, and pictures of the propaganda work going on behind the lines. In this way, images were produced, a sense of proximity was created, and a public was prepared mentally for a conflict taking place at the other end of Europe, and yet it was also a conflict affecting the war and peace of the citizens of the Soviet Union. Readers were informed that the war to come would be fought in the air, a war of aeroplanes and bombardments. All of civilian life took on military features. Parachute jumping – a favourite lei-sure-time activity in the capital – and activities in recreation parks ceased to be merely spare-time pursuits or sports and became part of a military toughening-up programme. In the schools children learned how to use gas masks and succour the wounded. Ever since the days of force-fed industrialization, work had been ‘shock work’ and struggle, and work discipline was ultimately measured against military discipline. The metaphors and the romantic transfiguration of the heroes of the Civil War were gradually revived. The shocking experience of the images of an approaching war (which had already started) was outdone only by the war photographs and documentary images of the newsreels.

  As in other European countries, there was considerable sympathy in the Soviet Union for the Popular Front government elected in February 1936 and destined to be overthrown by an officers’ coup in July of that year. Unlike elsewhere in Europe, however, sympathy for the Spanish Republic was not isolated or diffuse. After initial hesitation, support for the Republic became part of official Soviet foreign policy. In late August– early September 1936, the Soviet government responded to the Republican government’s pleas for assistance and started to transport goods and weapons. At the same time, a well-organized and well-orchestrated solidarity movement was launched through the media and fed directly into every factory. The Soviet government was concerned primarily not with altruistic assistance for the threatened democracy in Spain, but with strengthening the Soviet position so as to gain power and influence in a theatre where a European war had been brought one step closer by the military intervention of National Socialist Germany and fascist Italy. Spain was the overture, the proving ground for the coming world war.

  The reports of the fighting in Soviet newspapers show how the war had begun to seep into the very pores of social life. War was becoming a universal condition that was brought home to everyone through its details, through precise information. War as a component of everyday life, news about the war, involved everyone, enabling them to experience military prowess both near and far. News reports about the Spanish Civil War and later on about the skirmishes on the Manchurian–Soviet frontier had a pedagogical effect; it drew everyone together. The experience of war helped to build identity, and pictures of war showed that the struggle about who would defeat whom was as yet unresolved and had merely entered a new phase.

  The struggle was played out daily and in sight of everyone on the maps reproduced on the front pages of the papers. Its chief milestones were Franco’s advance to Galicia and the conquest of Ferrol on 21 July 1936; the support given by the Axis powers to Franco after 26 July 1936; the conquest of Toledo on 27 September; the Republican government’s move to Valencia on 6 November 1936; Franco’s failed push to Madrid in January and February 1937; the conquest of Málaga by Franco’s troops on 8 February 1937; the bombardment of Guernica on 26 April 1937 and the subsequent occupation of the town; the reconquest of Segovia by Republican forces on 8 February 1937 and the counter-attack by the Republicans at Brunete; the evacuation of the Republican government to Barcelona in November 1937; fighting around Teruel, ending with the occupation of the town by Franco on 22 February; the breakthrough of Franco’s forces to the Mediterranean on 14 April 1938 and preparations for the conquest of Catalonia in the Battle of the Ebro; the conquest of Tarragona on 14 January 1939 and of Barcelona on 28 January; and the occupation of Madrid on 28 March 1939.3

  The war began to permeate people’s everyday thoughts. It became the backdrop enabling them to integrate the small daily events into the larger events of global importance. News of the war frequently figured on the title page, between information about conferring honours, a story or a theatre premiere. A report on the capture of a Soviet ship with a cargo of aid for the Republic stood alongside a report on a New Year’s celebration in the Central Park of Culture and Rest. News from Spain was caught up in the celebrations of the Pushkin jubilee, in the debates about the new constitution and the preparations for the opening of the Moscow–Volga Canal; articles on Spain were sandwiched between reports on the failure of the spring harvest or reflections on the 110th anniversary of Beethoven’s death. The reader also learned about alleged cases of Trotskyist sabotage and subversive activities in the ranks of the united front.4 The sinking of a Soviet ship by Franco’s forces featured alongside the report of a meeting of Moscow Stakhanovite workers.5

  Nor were matters left to jou
rnalists or confined to mere expressions of solidarity. A well-organized wave of rallies in support of the Republic swept through the city.