The revolutionary songs of the past were in the minor key, because they were the songs of the revolutionary underground and because the circumstances they found themselves in were extraordinarily oppressive. Our folksongs were mainly mournful because the entire world surrounding them, the entire oppression that the people experienced, prevented them from creating cheerful songs. This is why we demand that our songwriters should make a distinction in principle between the songs of our time and the song tradition – however wonderful – that came into existence in different circumstances, a tradition that we must study, but in a considered, critical fashion. Does that mean that we are opposed to songs in a minor key? Of course not … But we are resolutely opposed to the lachrymose, despairing minor. It has no place in our songs; it is mendacious, invented by composers because it is so superficially appealing.27
Something quite new had come into being: the first signs of mass culture, albeit of a Soviet hue. Just think of all the things that came together to produce it! They included classical training – Tsfasman had studied with Feliks Blumenfel'd at the Moscow Conservatoire, Dunaevskii had studied classical composition. They further included the influence of the multi-ethnic city of Odessa and the south, where Jewish, Ukrainian and Russian elements were intermingled – Utesov always traced Soviet dzhaz back to the Moldavanka, the Jewish quarter in Odessa. Then there was the transfer of American jazz, which never quite ceased to be introduced via visiting performers, records, personal contacts, and lastly an entirely new public and a change in public taste. This arose from the masses, who had been stirred up and set in motion by the Revolution, especially in the swiftly growing populations of the large towns, where people of all different origins were thrown together.28
The Soviet Union provided endlessly fruitful soil for new music; it brought forth new melodies, new combinations and new forms of instrumentation, as well as musical geniuses and magnificent performers. The ideological interventions and the compulsion that had made itself generally felt had not produced this development, nor could they prevent it. The development of music followed its own ‘laws’. Just consider the factors that impinged on music from outside: the injunction to conform to a policy of social optimism; the simple shortage of instruments, the newspaper polemics, the direct threats that also affected musicians. The leader of the Moscow Radio Dzhaz Ensemble, Georgii Landsberg, the pianist David Gegner, and the leader of the Ladies Dzhaz Orchestra, Vera Dneprova, were all arrested and exiled to the provinces.29 It goes without saying that Soviet composers did not escape the ideological pressures. ‘Thanks be given to Stalin’s People’s Commissar Nikolai Yezhov, the true guardian of the peace of our magnificent homeland’, ran the wording in a resolution of the Leningrad Composers’ Association on 16 March 1938 at the conclusion of the third show trial.30 Restrictions and compromises proved inevitable. ‘The survival of jazz was bought at the price of its vitality.’31 And yet, a career in music was one of the few routes to success away from politics; indeed, it was comparable only to sport and technology in that respect – insofar as this can be said in a country living in a constant state of emergency. It is not by chance that the ‘unpolitical’ careers of aviators, violinists, pianists, chess champions and engineers were among the most attractive to Soviet youth. Music, whether classical or popular, not only contributed to the stability of an unstable, terrorist regime. It was also an aspect of the art of survival in terrible times.
30
Changing Faces, Changing Times
A police photo is often the only thing left of the victims, and the only trace that leads us to them. Countless photographs were taken by the Soviet police in the course of their duties in identifying suspects. The oppressive Stalinist apparatus stockpiled the images of innocent people who had been arrested or condemned, showing them both from the side and from the front, as has become customary in every modern state, together with their names, the date and place of their birth, and the date of their arrest. The same thing is true of materials that were then added to the investigation or the case file.1 The recording, filing and storing of the relevant information and the creation of the system needed for it were among the chief aims and achievements of the Soviet state machinery. This machinery and the routines built up over the years were what made it possible for the authorities to launch their ‘mass operations’ and target specific groups so quickly in accordance with specific criteria. The introduction in December 1932 of the internal passport containing the requisite personal information was an important step on the road to collecting individual data, as was the census of January 1937.2 On 21 October 1937, the Politburo and the Council of the People’s Commissars issued an immediately enforceable decree that all passports should be accompanied by a photograph and that a second photo was to be submitted to the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). This shows how very concerned the Soviet state was to obtain as much reliable information as possible about its citizens.3
The unforeseen effect of these actions by the Stalinist police apparatus was that it preserved the features of people who had been condemned and murdered, and handed them down to posterity. It had photographed them at the moment of maximum terror and inexpressible fear, at the moment of their utter helplessness. They seem composed, prepared for anything. They presumably do not realize what has happened to them. Many of them are marked by the shock, by the strains of searches and arrest, by transportation, and surely also by beatings and interrogations. Torn out of their normal lives, they are reduced to the status of an attachment to a police file. They look exhausted, worn out through lack of sleep, unshaven. They bear the facial features of all the ethnic groups of the Soviet Union and of every profession. Many of them represent physiognomic types who would soon disappear from the repertoire of Soviet society: the true believer with his full beard, the pre-revolutionary intellectual, the simple peasant woman, the wanderer and pilgrim, the migrant who has escaped from Western Europe to Soviet exile, monks and nuns, and members of the tsarist army. This picture gallery is not only a document of the unlimited arbitrary power of the police state, of its ability to intervene according to its own whim, and to destroy whomsoever it wanted. At the same time, the photo gallery captures the lineaments of a doomed country in the moment of the magnesium flash.
The deleting of portraits from the public media, the transformation of known people into non-persons, the removal and effacing of names developed into a normal practice and even a mania during those years. There is scarcely a magazine, an encyclopaedia, an album where portraits have not been crossed out, pictures removed, names expunged or entire pages excised.4
To accompany this portrait gallery of obliteration, there is another gallery displaying the new arrivals. In connection with the elections to the Supreme Soviet on 12 December 1937, magazines such as Ogonek filled many issues with pictures of the newly elected deputies. Of course, at the time of publication no one knew how long they would keep their place in this picture gallery.5 This was a gallery of the nomenklatura, and it may give us a better idea about the new man than the icons of the ‘New Man’ that were produced in the 1930s: Aleksandr Deineka’s Noble People, which was shown at the Paris International Exhibition, and which depicts a series of Stakhanovite workers clad in white suits striding out of the picture towards the viewer; the picture Girl in a Sport’s Dress, by Yury Pimenov, painted a little earlier (1932), which depicted a young, self-confident woman in a manner reminiscent of the New Objectivity; and the outsize sportsmen by Aleksandr Samokhvalov, marching past a tribune on which Sergei Kirov is standing – a picture also shown at the International Exhibition in Paris. Also on display were the pictures of aviators and the members of the North Pole expedition, but most prominent of all were the top workers, collective farm workers and tractor drivers.6 They belong to a specific physiognomic type: robust, sporty, clean-shaven, in a white shirt, perhaps even in a suit, the women in a flowery costume, their faces turned towards the spectator. They are to be found in all possible variation
s: as frescoes, mosaics, paintings, on the cinema screen, as sculptures in bronze or stainless steel, in clay and porcelain.7 The society of the New Man appears at receptions, on holidays or at New Year’s parties: well-dressed, mostly young, with the Red Army mainly over-represented, skilfully dancing the modern steps, career conscious.8
The portrait gallery of Ogonek features the newly elected deputies, admittedly not in Deineka’s luminous colours, but at least it shows the rising stars at the pinnacles of power, the vydvizhentsy of the thirties, the most reliable social and political supporters of Stalin’s regime. Their ascent to those pinnacles was as vertiginous as the fall – indeed, the disappearance – of the entire post-revolutionary political elite. Between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Party Congresses, i.e. between 1934 and 1939, more than half a million mainly young people were promoted to leading positions in the state and the Party, and especially in military organizations, and in those of the economy and the government. Of the 333 Party secretaries in the regions, the oblasts and the republics, 293 were promoted after 1934, the majority of them in 1937–8. These rising stars were young – of the Party secretaries in the republics, the oblasts and the regions, 8.5 per cent were between twenty-six and thirty years old, 53.2 per cent between thirty-one and thirty-five, and 29.4 per cent between thirty-six and forty. The Party of 1939 had very little in common with the Party that had ‘made’ the October Revolution. In 1939, 80.5 per cent of the membership had joined after 1923, and 25 per cent of these had joined after 1938. The year 1937 was the crucial caesura here: at the beginning of 1937, 38.6 per cent of the oblast secretaries had joined the Communist Party before 1917, 41.6 per cent had joined during the Civil War of 1918–20, and only 12.3 per cent became members after 1923. At the lower levels of the Party – taking the 1939 membership as the reference point – 93.5 per cent of the Party secretaries had not joined until after 1924. ‘The young Party members had made astoundingly rapid careers during the period of the mass repressions, and it is this that consolidated their loyalty to the leader and their support for these repressions as against the Old Guard.’9
A similar redistribution of leadership personnel took place in other spheres too. Of the seventy People’s Commissars of the USSR, the RSFSR, the bosses of the chief administrations and the chairmen of the committees in the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the RSFSR who were in office at the beginning of 1939, almost half (29) had been promoted during the years 1937–8. Of 125 of their deputies, more than half (77) also acquired their positions in 1937–8. The same thing holds good for the directors of the central administrations and associations of People’s Commissariats of the USSR and RSFSR. Of 548 bosses, 366 obtained their posts during those two years. In all, by the beginning of 1939, of the 32,899 political and economic bosses listed in the nomenklatura of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, 15,485 had been nominated to their posts in 1937–8. This fast-track promotion of new personnel led to a significant rejuvenation of the political leadership. Of the seventy People’s Commissars, heads of the central administration and chairmen of the committees in the Council of People’s Commissars, ten were between thirty-one and thirty-five years old, twenty-eight were between thirty-six and forty, and twenty-two were between forty-one and forty-five. Many of these had only completed their university education in 1937–8. In all, of the 32,899 bosses of the political and economic system listed in the nomenklatura of the Central Committee, 426 were less than twenty-five years old, 3,331 were between twenty-six and thirty, and almost 59 per cent were between thirty-one and forty. Socially, around half the new vydvizhentsy came from the working class and the peasantry. However, in contrast to the older generation of officials, many had a university education and had passed directly from the university to leadership positions.10
Figure 30.1 These photographs show victims executed in Butovo: (1) Timofei Petrovich Kudinov, (2) Nikolai Petrovich Medvedev, (3) Chao-In-Chuan, (4) Vladimir Alekseevich Pokrovskii, (5) Matvei Fedorovich Kochergin, (6) Stepan Fedorovich Klimov, (7) Anastasia Fedorovna Subbotina, (8) Yegor Grigor'evich Murafetov-Kukhtalev, (9) Klavdia Ivanovna Mel'nikova, (10) Fedor Semenovich Yerusalimskii, (11) Grigorii Arkad'evich Kefeliev (Anisim Davidovich Rafailov), (12) Vera Semenovna Morozova, (13) Miron Matveevich Proiaev
‘With these pictures the Stalinist police inadvertently preserved the features of people who had been condemned and murdered, and handed them down to posterity.’
Figure 30.2 New Year’s party in the Proletarskii District Palace of Culture ‘Their ascent to the pinnacles of power was as vertiginous as the fall – indeed, the disappearance – of the entire post-revolutionary political elite.’
This change of faces documents the change of an epoch, or, more exactly, the end of the change of an epoch and also of the elites who had come to the fore in 1917. And with it a generation came on the scene that would put its stamp on the face of the Soviet Union in the second half of the twentieth century.
31
America, America: The Other New World
In the year of the Great Terror, one of the finest pieces of reportage ever to have been written about America appeared in the Soviet Union. It was produced jointly by two writers, Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov, whose satires, The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf, had made them the best-known and most popular writers of the Soviet Union. In September 1935, Pravda commissioned them to travel to the USA. They returned at the beginning of 1936 and announced in an interview with Literaturnaya Gazeta that they would write a book about America. Together, as always, they proceeded to do just that the following summer, and shortly afterwards they published the book and a photo-reportage in quick succession. The travel sketches Little Golden America appeared at the end of 1936 as a preprint in the magazine Znamia, and a few chapters appeared in Pravda; the series of American Photos appeared in instalments in Ogonek.1
The book edition of Little Golden America followed in 1937. By the time the first copies became available, Il'ia Il'f was already dying; in the event he died of tuberculosis on 13 April 1937. The fact that he died a natural death in 1937, the year of Terror, is almost as worthy of comment as the fact that one of the most remarkable accounts of travel in America could have appeared in the Soviet Union in that year. On closer inspection, however, it becomes evident that this unambiguous hymn of praise to America was no accident, and that even in 1937 relations between the USA and the USSR were still close and highly complex. Both nations thought of themselves as the coming powers of the twentieth century, poised to succeed the Europe that had perished in the First World War. At the end of their book on America, when Il'f and Petrov embarked on the Majestic and bade farewell to the New York skyline, it becomes clear that what fascinated them about America was not just American technology and not just its cars:
American life contains one phenomenon that should interest us just as much as the latest automobile model. That phenomenon is the democratic nature of relations between people. Even if that democracy merely conceals social inequality, and is merely an outer form, such outer democratic forms are helpful to us in our search for social equality between men and our attempts to establish a just social system. The outer forms of such a democracy are magnificent. They are exceedingly useful for work; they undermine bureaucracy and elevate the dignity of man. The Soviet Union and the United States – that is an inexhaustible subject. Our notes are merely the product of our travel observations. We would like to strengthen the interest in America and the study of that great country throughout Soviet society.
Whereas Europeans come to America, enjoy their stay there, but then hurl abuse at it, the situation of Soviet citizens is quite different. ‘America – that is not the premiere of a new play and we are not theatre critics … What can we say about America that both frightens readers and inspires them with enthusiasm, that makes you sad, but also sets an example worthy of respect; what can we say about a country so full of wealth, of misery, of talent and of poverty?’2 The fact that Il'ia Il'f m
anaged to complete the journey even though he was already very ill gives us some insight into the efforts the two authors made to find answers to these questions.
Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov’s journey to America
Their trip lasted from 29 October 1935 until 13 January 1936 and led them from one end of the United States to the other. In the course of their journey in their Ford they visited twenty-five states, stopped over in dozens of towns and talked to hundreds of people. They traversed America geographically, socially and culturally. Their route took them from New York, via Buffalo and Cleveland, to Dearborn and Detroit, from there to Chicago and the Midwest, to Santa Fe and the Grand Canyon, and on to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The return journey went via El Paso, New Orleans, Charleston and Washington, DC. It was a journey full of extreme contrasts. They saw the electric chair in Sing Sing prison and were present at a press conference given by Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House. In Dearborn they met Henry Ford, who grumbled about Wall Street; they admired the Empire State Building and the tents on a Navajo Indian reservation. Under the generous and knowledgeable guidance of an engineer originally from Lithuania, they explored widely different milieus: New York intellectuals and down-and-outs, General Motors engineers and black singers and dancers. Almost everywhere they went they came across acquaintances or else Americans who had their roots in pre-revolutionary Russia and who had escaped from the pogroms and become Americans. Almost everywhere they encountered strong interest and even sympathy for the new Russia, even among people who had seen Russia with their own eyes – Theodor Dreiser, for example. They did not come as unknowns – their books had been translated and were highly successful – and they were just two of the large number of Soviet visitors to the United States during those years. They were handed around from one reading to another, from one salon to the next. In consequence, what they came to know was predominantly liberal, left-wing America. Their route took them to the building sites of the new America: the Rockefeller Center with Radio City Hall in New York, General Motors’ car plant in Dearborn near Detroit, the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the Nevada desert, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which was still being built and would not open before 1937 – this ‘unheard-of triumph of the art of construction’.3 They spent many days visiting the dream factories of Hollywood. But they had not come to America just to tick off the tourist attractions. Their declared goal was to discover ‘the other America’, the America beyond the skyscraper silhouette of Manhattan. It is astonishing to see how confidently and unerringly they made their way around the New World.
Moscow, 1937 Page 63