Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  Stalin advocated ideas of this kind in speeches and articles. He embodied them in his public appearance and comportment. His soldierly tunic, his avoidance of the word ‘I’, his issuance of orders in the name of the respective party organs rather than in his own, even his lack of oratorical tricks: all these features helped to convey the message that Soviet modernity would ultimately triumph and bring unprecedented benefit to toiling humanity.

  The ascendant party leadership had cleared a lot of the ground for cultural transformation. The First Five-Year Plan was accompanied by vicious campaigns against religion, and the Red Army and the 25,000-ers arrested clerics and kulaks with equal eagerness. Religion was to be stamped out. Many churches, mosques and synagogues were shut down. Out of 73,963 religious buildings open before 1917, only 30,543 were allowed to function by April 1936.4 Nationalism of every stripe was also trampled underfoot. The elites of the various national and ethnic groups were objects of intense suspicion, including even many people who had aligned themselves with the communists in previous years. Show trials of leading ‘bourgeois nationalists’ were held from 1929. The League of the Militant Godless was given sumptuous funding. When Mykola Skrypnik, a Bolshevik Ukrainian leader who had strongly promoted the interests of his nation, committed suicide, no official regret was expressed. The times had changed, and the USSR was being pointed towards transformations which according to veteran Bolsheviks were overdue. Private printing presses were closed down. Travel between the USSR and foreign countries became impossible unless political and police organs gave their sanction. The ascendant leaders tried to insulate the country from all ideological influences but their own. Basic cultural assumptions of Bolshevism were at last going to be realised.

  Such assumptions had been more pluralistic before the October Revolution than later. Bolshevism’s regimentative side won out over its other tendencies after 1917, and the extremism of Stalin and his cronies prevailed over attitudes once sponsored by the rest of the Politburo. The violence and crudity of the new campaign in the ‘cultural revolution’ was remarkable.

  Nor was high culture overlooked as an arena of struggle. Stalin’s interventions had previously been of a confidential nature, and in the 1920s it had been Trotski and Bukharin who were known for their contacts with the creative intelligentsia. Trotski had written Art and Revolution. Stalin was now seeking to impose himself. In 1930 he gave a ruling on the political history of Bolshevism before 1914.5 Increasingly his subordinates interfered in the arts and sciences through the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Secretariat. Long gone was the period when Anatoli Lunacharski (who died in 1933) or Nadezhda Krupskaya could fix the main lines of policies through the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment. Stalin was determined to get the kind of culture, high and low, appropriate to the state and society he was constructing. He increased his contacts with intellectuals. He watched plays and the ballet more than previously. He kept on reading novels, history books and conspectuses of contemporary science. He got his associates to do the same. Cultural transformation had to be directed just as firmly as the basic changes in economics and politics.

  He welcomed a few intellectuals as his occasional companions. This too was a change from previous years when only his political cronies, apart from the poet Demyan Bedny, got near him. Maxim Gorki, whom he had tempted back from a self-imposed exile in 1931, frequented Stalin’s dacha. Other visitors included the novelists Mikhail Sholokhov and Alexei Tolstoi.

  However highly he valued Gorki as a writer, however, reasons of state were never far from his mind. Gorki was famous in the West and could be turned into an embellishment of the USSR. He was fêted on his return as a great proletarian intellectual. Stalin wanted something for all this. In 1929 he persuaded Gorki to visit the Solovki prison camp; he even cajoled him into becoming co-author of a book on the building of the White Sea Canal.6 Gorki was duped into believing that humanitarian efforts were being made to rehabilitate the convict labourers. He also presided over the First Congress of Writers in 1934 and lent a hand in the formation of the Union of Writers. Gorki’s approval helped Stalin to bring the arts in the USSR under tight political control. The price Stalin had to pay was to have to listen to the writer’s complaints about the maltreatment of various intellectuals by the authorities. But fortunately for Stalin, Gorki died in summer 1936. The rumour grew that the NKVD poisoned him for importuning the General Secretary a little too often. However that may have been, his death freed Stalin to transform Gorki into an iconic figure in the official arts of the USSR.

  Sholokhov and Tolstoi too had dealings with Stalin. Quiet Flows the Don by Sholokhov was one of the few good pieces of Soviet inter-war prose which did not assail the premises of communism. Set in the Cossack villages of south Russia and crammed with regional idioms, the novel was a saga of the Civil War. Its first edition contained episodes thought to be indulgent to the Whites. Sholokhov, after modifying the text as required, entered the classical canon of the regime. He also produced a sequel, The Virgin Soil Upturned, about the collectivisation campaign. This was aesthetically less impressive; it also strengthened the suspicion that he had purloined most of the chapters of Quiet Flows the Don from a deceased Cossack writer.7 Even so, Sholokhov was not a servile hack. He was horrified by what he witnessed in the countryside as the Cossacks were brutally herded into collective farms. Repeatedly he wrote to Stalin pointing this out. As famine grew in south Russia, the correspondence became heated on both sides.8 Sholokhov’s letters testify to his courage; Stalin’s engagement with him signals a recognition that loyalist intellectuals performed a useful function for him by raising difficult questions without ever threatening his political position. No politician got away with such impertinence.

  Another writer who had Stalin’s ear was Alexei Tolstoi, the patriotic novelist and nephew of the nineteenth-century author. Tolstoi had come to think that the Bolsheviks had discharged the historic task of reuniting Russia, seeing off its external enemies and undertaking its overdue industrialisation. The novelist fed ideas to Stalin about the continuities between Imperial and communist patterns of rule. According to Tolstoi, it was the Party General Secretary’s duty to stand firm in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Ivan and Peter had used brutal methods in pursuit of the country’s interests. Tolstoi was knocking at an open door: Stalin, an eager student of Russian history, already saw the connections with the reigns of Ivan and Peter.9

  He knew what he liked in the arts as well as in historical scholarship. At the theatre he had admired Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins since its première in 1926. This was a play about the shifting allegiances in Ukraine during the Civil War. Stalin’s devotion showed a willingness to understand the fighting in terms much less simplistic than in official history textbooks: Bulgakov depicted not only the Reds but also the Whites in sympathetic tones. At the ballet Stalin preferred Chaikovski’s Swan Lake to newer pieces of music and choreography. The significance of this is a matter of speculation. Perhaps he simply wanted to identify himself as an enthusiast for classical dance and anyway found nothing very attractive in Soviet choreography. It was the same with music. Although he began to attend symphonies and operas, few contemporary composers engaged his admiration. Poetry by living writers too was of small interest to him. The poet Vladimir Mayakovski, who committed suicide in 1930, was turned — like Gorki — into an artistic totem of the regime. Stalin paid only lip-service to his memory. (Lenin had claimed it was scandalous at a time of paper shortage to allocate resources for his poems.) The General Secretary had an enduring love for the Georgian poetical classics to the exclusion of Soviet contemporary verse.

  Down the years he was mocked as someone without feeling for the arts. His enemies consoled themselves in defeat by drawing attention to his intellectual limitations. They went too far with their ridicule. Stalin also had himself to blame, for he had deliberately drawn the curtains over his educational level, poetical achievement and range of intellec
tual interests,10 and his verbal exchanges with most writers and painters usually turned on political questions.

  In fact the flame of Stalin’s genuine aesthetic appreciation had not gone out. He displayed it especially when questions arose about the arts in his native Georgia. When Shalva Nutsubidze compiled and translated an anthology of Georgian poetry into Russian in the mid-1930s, Stalin could not resist taking a look at the typed draft. Back flowed his lifelong enthusiasm for poetry, and he pencilled proposed amendments in the margins.11 Nutsubidze and Stalin made for an odd pair. Nutsubidze was a scholar who had refused to join the party; his very project to produce a Georgian literary anthology might have served as a pretext for arresting him. But the two men got on well and Nutsubidze appreciated Stalin’s suggestions as real improvements.12 Stalin did not allow his assistance to be publicised. Nor did he give permanent approval to attempts to resuscitate his fame as a minor Georgian poet. Some of the early verses crept into print and this cannot have happened without his sanction. But second thoughts prevailed. The poems were not widely reprinted in his time in power and did not appear in his multi-volume Works published after the Second World War. Reasons of state prevailed over vanity. Stalin had probably concluded that the romantic poetry of his youth would disfigure his image as the Man of Steel. Presumably he also wanted to set the literary tone for the times. Culture was to be judged by the yardstick of current political requirements.

  Literature, painting and architecture were arts more easily analysed in this reductive fashion than music. Stalin wanted two things at once. He desired culture for the ‘masses’; he also aimed to disseminate high culture. He wished the USSR’s attainments to outmatch any achieved abroad. Insisting on Russia’s centuries-old greatness, he assimilated Russian writers and composers of the nineteenth century — Pushkin, Tolstoi, Glinka and Chaikovski — to the socialist project after 1917. He had a private enthusiasm for Dostoevski, whom he judged a brilliant psychologist;13 but Dostoevski’s overt reactionary politics and mystical religious faith proved too much even for Stalin to approve republication of his works. The librettos of Glinka’s operas were rewritten and many of Pushkin’s and Tolstoi’s writings were banned. Even so, much of the pre-revolutionary artistic heritage with its conservative, liberal and apolitical elements was made available to the public. Stalin’s cultural programme was an unstable mixture. He could kill artists at will and yet his policies were incapable of producing great art unless he either deliberately or unconsciously overlooked, at least to some extent, what his artists were really doing.

  Culture in general attracted his occasional — and unpredictable — interventions. Stalin’s aide Lev Mekhlis rang up Pravda cartoonist Boris Yefimov in 1937 and told him to come immediately to the Kremlin. Suspecting the worst, Yefimov feigned influenza. But ‘he’ — Stalin — was insisting; Yefimov could postpone the visit at most by a day. In fact Stalin simply wished to say that he thought Yefimov should cease drawing Japanese figures with protruding teeth. ‘Definitely,’ replied the cartoonist. ‘There won’t be any more teeth.’14 Stalin’s interventions were equally direct in film production. Boris Shumyatski, the People’s Commissar in charge of Soviet cinema until his arrest in 1938, understood that the General Secretary was the sole reviewer who had to be taken seriously.15 Stalin had screening facilities set up in his dachas outside Moscow and by the Black Sea. Films such as Lenin in October were among his favourites; but he liked audiences to be entertained as well as indoctrinated. He did not object to an escapist melodrama like Circus; and as propaganda came to stress patriotism, Stalin applauded the films Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevski directed by Sergei Eizenshtein. It was a favour which Eizenshtein both relished and feared: he knew that Stalin would pounce with fury upon any scenes he deemed to conflict with current official politics.

  Such artistic works of distinction as were created in the 1930s — with very few exceptions — came into being despite him. The works of Anna Akhmatova, who composed her wonderful elegiac cycle of poems Requiem in 1935–40, were banned from the press. (Only in the Second World War, when her verses were useful for raising public morale, did Stalin somewhat relent.)16 That masterpiece of Russian prose, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, remained in his desk drawer at his death and was not published in full in the Soviet Union until 1975. Stalin even terrorised the genius of mid-century Russian classical music Dmitri Shostakovich, who was denounced for writing pieces which nobody could whistle. Shostakovich was constrained to ‘confess’ his errors; indeed his Fifth Symphony in 1937 became known as ‘A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism’. Music, however, was less harshly treated than the other arts. Terrified though he had been, Shostakovich went on writing and having his symphonies performed. Just a few fine literary pieces were printed. Among them were Sholokhov’s two novels and some of Andrei Platonov’s short stories. But generally Stalin’s rule spread a blight over the already damaged artistic environment of the USSR.

  The Great Terror of 1937–8 was to scare most intellectuals into cooperating overtly with the state or else just keeping their heads down. Just a very few of them challenged authority. Osip Mandelshtam in 1934 read out an anti-Stalin poem to a private soirée:17

  We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

  Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

  But where there’s so much as half-conversation

  The Kremlin man of the mountains will be mentioned.

  His fingers are as fat as grubs

  And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

  His cockroach whiskers leer

  And his boot tops gleam.

  Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders — fawning

  Half-men for him to play with.

  They whinny, purr or whine

  As he prates and points a finger,

  One by one forging his laws, to be flung

  Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

  And every killing is a treat

  For the broad-chested Ossete.

  The last line reproduced the (unproved) rumour that Stalin was of Ossetian ancestry.

  The listeners that evening included an informer, and the poet was arrested. Even Stalin, though, was unsure what to do with him. His instinct was to execute him; but instead he telephoned another great poet, Boris Pasternak, and asked whether Mandelshtam’s was a truly wonderful talent. Pasternak was in acute embarrassment: if he said yes, he too might be arrested; but to say no would be to condemn his friend and rival to the Gulag. Pasternak gave an equivocal answer, prompting Stalin to comment sarcastically: ‘If I had a poet friend who was in trouble, I’d throw myself at a wall to save him!’18 Mandelshtam was sent to the Gulag in 1938. The list of fine artists who were shot or incarcerated is depressingly long. More great intellectuals perished in the 1930s than survived. Isaak Babel, writer of wonderful short stories about the Red cavalry in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920, was a victim. So was the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerkhold. Even Mikhail Bulgakov, whose plays had pleased Stalin in the 1920s, was ushered into the pits of depression. He perished a broken man in freedom in 1940. Anna Akhmatova suffered despite never being arrested: her son Lev was taken by the police in her place. Unlike Bulgakov, she endured her situation with lasting fortitude.

  The repression came also to scholarship and the natural sciences. Among the victims of the show trials in 1929–31 were historians such as Sergei Platonov who were accused of Russian nationalist activity. Yevgeni Tarle, who later became one of Stalin’s favourite historians, was locked up. Literary criticism was another dangerous scholarly area. Although Stalin enlisted nineteenth-century poetry and prose in his programme for cultural revolution, he was not going to permit the publication of unorthodox interpretations. Scientific teaching and research were also persecuted whenever he saw them as a threat to the regime. The list of outstanding figures who were repressed is a long one. It included the biologist Nikolai Vavilov, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and the phys
icist Lev Landau.

  This treatment of the country’s scientists clashed with the official campaign to put the USSR in the vanguard of scientific progress. Yet the Soviet Union was a political despotism and Stalin had prejudices which he imposed even on areas of human enquiry where he had no expertise whatever. He also had a bias in favour of scientists who came from the working class or peasantry and, regardless of their limited education, challenged conventional ideas. He was further attracted to any scientific idea which appeared congenial to the crude version of Marxist epistemology and ontology which he espoused (and which he wrote up in the chapter on dialectical materialism in the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course.19) The most notorious case was Timofei Lysenko, a self-styled geneticist who claimed to be able to breed new strains of plant by changing their climatic environment. Trained geneticists such as Vavilov protested that Lysenko ignored decades of proof that plants did not pass on their environmentally acquired characteristics from one generation to another. Lysenkoism was a bastard form of the Lamarckian propositions of natural selection. Vavilov failed to interest Stalin; Lysenko captivated his enthusiasm. The result was a catastrophe for Soviet genetics and the consignment of Vavilov to a forced-labour camp.