RAPP's 'class war' reached fever pitch, however, in 1929 with its organized campaign of vilification against Zamyatin and Pilnyak. Both writers had published works abroad which had been censored in the Soviet Union: Zamyatin's We appeared in Prague in 1927; and Pilnyak's Red Mahogany, a bitter commentary on the decline of the revolutionary ideals of the Soviet state, was published in Berlin in 1929. But the attack on them had a significance beyond the condemnation of particular works. Boris Pilnyak, who was chairman of the Board of the All-Russian Writers' Union and so effectively the Soviet Union's Writer Number One, was perhaps the widest read and most widely imitated serious prose writer in the country.* His persecution was an advance warning of the strict obedience and conformity which the Soviet state would demand of all its writers from the start of the first Five-year Plan.
For the Five-year Plan was not just a programme of industrialization. It was nothing less than a cultural revolution in which all the arts were called up by the state in a campaign to build a new society. According to the plan, the primary goal of the Soviet writer was to raise the workers' consciousness, to enlist them in the 'battle' for 'socialist construction' by writing books with a social content which they could
* Pilnyak's best-known novels are The Naked Year (192.1), Black Bread (1923) and Machines and Wolves (1924).
understand and relate to as positive ideals. For the militants of RAPP this could only be achieved by writers like Gorky, with his impeccably proletarian background, not by left-wing 'bourgeois' writers who were deemed no more than 'fellow travellers'. Between 1928 and 1931 some 10,000 'shock authors', literary confreres of the 'shock workers' who would lead the charge to meet the Plan, were plucked from the shop-floor and trained by RAPP to write workers' stories for the Soviet press.93
Gorky was hailed as the model for this Soviet literature. In 1921, horrified by the Revolution's turn to violence and dictatorship, Gorky fled to Europe. But he could not bear the life of an exile: he was disillusioned by the rise of fascism in his adopted homeland of Italy; and he convinced himself that life in Stalin's Russia would become more bearable once the Five-year Plan had swept aside the peasant backwardness which in his view had been the cause of the Revolution's failure. From 1928 Gorky began to spend his summers in the Soviet Union and in 1931 Gorky returned home for good. The prodigal son was showered with honours: streets, buildings, farms and schools were named after him; a trilogy of films was made about his life; the Moscow Arts Theatre was renamed the Gorky Theatre; and his native city (Nizhnyi Novgorod) was renamed after him. He was also appointed head of the Writers' Union, the post previously held by Pilnyak.
Gorky had initially supported the RAPP campaign of promoting worker authors as a temporary experiment, but he quickly realized that the quality of the writing was not good. In April 1932 the Central Committee passed a resolution to abolish RAPP, together with all other independent literary groups, and placed them under the centralized control of the Writers' Union. Gorky's influence was instrumental in this sudden change of direction, but things did not quite turn out as he had planned. Gorky's intention had been two-fold: to halt the destructive 'class war' led by RAPP; and to restore to Soviet literature the aesthetic principles established by Tolstoy. In October 1932, a famous meeting attended by Stalin and other Kremlin leaders, as well as fifty writers and other functionaries, took place at Gorky's Moscow house. It was at this meeting that the doctrine of Socialist Realism was formulated, although at the time it was not clear to Gorky that it would become a regimented orthodoxy for all artists in the
Soviet Union. Gorky's understanding was that Socialist Realism would unite the critical realist traditions of nineteenth-century literature with the revolutionary romanticism of the Bolshevik tradition. It was to combine the depiction of the humble everyday reality of life in the Soviet Union with a vision of the Revolution's heroic promise. But in Stalin's version of the doctrine, as defined at the First Congress of the Writers' Union in 1934, it meant that the artist was to portray Soviet life, not as it was in reality, but as it should become:
Socialist Realism means not only knowing reality as it is, but knowing where it is moving. It is moving towards socialism, it is moving towards the victory of the international proletariat. And a work of art created by a Socialist Realist is one which shows where that conflict of contradictions is leading which the artist has seen in life and reflected in his work.94
In this formula the artist was to produce a panegyric or iconic form of art which conformed strictly to the Party's narrative of socialist development.95 Whereas the kinoki and other avant-garde artists of the 1920s had sought to expand their audience's vision of freedom and possibility, now artists were to fix that vision in ways strictly prescribed by the state. The new Soviet writer was no longer the creator of original works of art, but a chronicler of tales which were already contained in the Party's own folklore.96 There was a sort of 'master plot' which Soviet writers were to use in shaping their own novels and characters. In its classic form, as set out in Gorky's early novel Mother (1906), the plot was a Bolshevik version of the Bildungsroman: the young worker hero joins the class struggle and through the tutelage of senior Party comrades he arrives at a higher consciousness, a better understanding of the world around him and the tasks ahead for the Revolution, before dying a martyr to the cause. Later novels added elements to this master plot: Dmitry Furmanov's Chapaev (1923) fixed the model of the civil war hero; while Fedor Gladkov's Cement (1925) and Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered raised the communist production worker to Promethean status, capable of conquering everything before him, even the most untamed forces of the natural world, as long as he allows the Party to direct his energies. But basically the story that the novelist could tell was strictly circumscribed by the
Party's mythic version of its own revolutionary history; even senior writers were forced to change their works if they did not adhere to this doxology.*
To the sophisticated Western reader this no doubt seems a horrible perversion of the role of literature. But it did not appear so in Stalin's Russia, where the overwhelming mass of the reading public was new to the conventions of literary fiction, and there was less awareness of the difference between the real world and the world of books. People approached literature, as they had perhaps once approached the icons or the stories of the saints, in the conviction that it held up moral truths for the guidance of their lives. The German writer Lion Feuchtwanger commented on this peculiar characteristic of the Soviet reading public when he visited Moscow in 1937:
Among Soviet people the thirst for reading is totally unimaginable. Newspapers, journals, books - all this is absorbed without quenching the thirst to the tiniest degree. Reading is one of the main activities of daily life. But for the reader in the Soviet Union there are, as it were, no clear divisions between the reality in which he lives and the world he reads about in books. The reader treats the heroes of his books as if they are actual people. He argues with them, denounces them, and he even reads realities into the events of the story and its characters.'7
Isaiah Berlin noted the same attitudes to literature on his visit to the Soviet Union in 1945:
The rigid censorship which, with so much else, suppressed pornography, trash and low-grade thrillers such as fill railway bookstalls in the West, served to make the response of Soviet readers and theatre audiences purer, more direct and naive than ours; I noticed that at performances of Shakespeare or Sheridan or Griboedov, members of the audience, some of them obviously country folk, were apt to react to the action on the stage or to lines spoken by the
* The most famous example is Alexander Fadeev. In 1946 he won the Stalin Prize for The Young Guard, a semi-factual novel about the underground youth organization in occupied Ukraine during the Second World War. Attacked in the press for under-rating the role of the Party leadership, Fadeev was forced to add new material to his novel. This enlarged version, published in 1951, was then hailed as a classic Socialist Realist text.
actors… with loud expressions of approval or disapproval; the excitement generated was, at times, very strong and, to a visitor from the West, both unusual and touching.98
In the cinema the state's concern for art to play a morally didactic role was crucial to the rise of the Socialist Realist film. With the start of the Five-year Plan the Party expressed its impatience with the avant-garde directors, whose intellectual films never really drew a mass audience. Surveys showed that the Soviet public preferred foreign films, action-packed adventures or romantic comedies to the propaganda films of Vertov or Eisenstein.99 In 1928 a Party Conference on Cinema was held at which there were louds calls for film to play a more effective role in mobilizing mass enthusiasm for the Five-year Plan and the class war. The avant-garde directors of the 1920s -Vertov, Pudovkin, Kuleshov - were all condemned as 'formalists', intellectuals who were more concerned with cinema as art than with making films that could 'be understood by the millions'.100 Eisenstein's October, which had been released on the eve of the conference, was bitterly attacked for its 'formalist' preoccupation with montage, for the lack of any individual heroes in the film which made it hard for a mass audience to identify with, for the typage casting of the Lenin character (played by a worker named Nikandrov), whose woodenness did so much to offend Party sensibilities, and - of special offence to Stalin, who ordered that his image be cut out after previewing the film at the studio - for the fact that it depicted Trotsky, the military leader of the October insurrection, who had been kicked out of the Party just three months before the conference began.101
But there were just as many criticisms of the leadership of Sovkino, the Soviet film trust under the command of Lunacharsky's Commissariat, for failing to provide an attractive and more healthy Soviet alternative to the cheap entertainment films imported from abroad. As a propaganda weapon of the state, the Soviet cinema needed to be popular. 'Our films must be 100 percent ideologically correct and 100 percent commercially viable,' declared one Party official.102
In 1930 Sovkino was finally disbanded, together with the independent studios which had flourished in the 1920s, and the Soviet cinema was nationalized as one vast state enterprise under the centralized
direction of Soiuzkino (Ail-Union Soviet Film Trust). Its chief apparatchik, Boris Shumiatsky, became the ultimate authority in the world of Soviet cinema (until his own arrest and execution as a 'Trotskyite' in 1938), although Stalin, who loved the cinema and frequently watched movies in his Kremlin cinema, kept a beady eye on the latest films and often intervened in their production.* Shumiatsky ran a sort of 'Soviet Hollywood', with huge production studios in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and Minsk reeling off a succession of smash-hit Soviet musicals, romantic comedies, war adventures and Western-modelled frontier films ('Easterns') like Chapaev (1934), Stalin's favourite film.+ Shumiatsky drew up a Five-year Plan for the cinema which called for no less than 500 films to be made in 193 2 alone. All of them were to conform to the new ideological directives, which demanded optimistic pictures about Soviet life with positive individual heroes drawn from the ranks of the proletariat. Party-controlled producers and script departments were placed in charge of the production to ensure that all this entertainment was politically correct. 'Life is getting gayer, comrades,' Stalin famously remarked. But only certain types of laughter were allowed. This was the climate to which Eisenstein returned in 1932. For the previous three years he had been abroad - a semi-dissident ambassador of the Soviet cinema. He travelled to Europe and on to Hollywood to learn about the new techniques of sound, signing up for several films he never made. He enjoyed the freedom of the West, and he was no doubt fearful of going back to Russia, where Shumiatsky's attacks on the 'formalists' were at their most extreme when directed against him. Stalin accused Eisenstein of defecting to the West. The NKVD bullied his poor mother into begging Eisenstein to return home, threatening her with some form of punishment if he failed to do so. In the first two years after his return Eisenstein had several film proposals turned
* In 1938, in the final stages of the editing of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, Stalin asked to see the rough cuts. The film-maker hurried to the Kremlin and, in his haste, left behind one reel. Stalin loved the film but, since no one dared to inform him that it was incomplete, it was released without the missing reel (J. Goodwin. Eisenstein, Cinema and History (Urbana, 1993), p. 162).
+ Stalin could apparently recite long passages of the dialogue by heart. See R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds.), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema Documents, 1896- 1939 (London, 1994), p. SX4.
down for production by Soiuzkino. He withdrew to a teaching post at the State Film School and, although he lavished praise (in his public statements) on the mediocre films that were churned out at that time, he stood firm by the films which he had made, courageously refusing to denounce himself, as he was called upon to do, at the Party's Second Conference on Cinema in 1935.103
Under pressure to produce a film which conformed to the Socialist Realist mould, Eisenstein accepted a commission from the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) in 1935. He was to realize a film scenario that took its title, although not much else, from Turgenev's 'Bezhin Meadow', a story about peasant boys discussing supernatural signs of death which formed one of the Sketches from a Hunter's Album. The film was actually inspired by the story of Pavlik Morozov, a boy hero who, according to the version of his life propagandized by the Stalinist regime, had been murdered by the 'kulaks' of his remote Urals village after he had denounced his own father, the chairman of the village Soviet, as a kulak opponent of the Soviet campaign for collectivization.* By 1935, the Morozov cult was at its height: songs and poems, even a cantata with full orchestra and chorus, had been written about him. This no doubt persuaded Eisenstein that it was safe to make a film about him. But his conception of the film was deemed unacceptable. He turned it from a story about individuals to a conflict between types, between old and new, and, in a scene that showed the communists dismantling a church to break the resistance of the kulak saboteurs, he came dangerously close to suggesting that collectivization had been something destructive. In August 1936, with most of the film already shot, Eisenstein was ordered by Shumiatsky to rewrite the script. With the help of the writer Isaac Babel he recommenced shooting in the autumn. The church scene was cut and a speech in tribute to Stalin was added. But then, in March 1937, Shumiatsky ordered all work on the film stopped. In an article in Pravda he accused Eisenstein of depicting collectivization as an elemental conflict between good and evil, and
* In fact Morozov was murdered by the NKVD, which then executed thirty-seven kulak villagers, falsely charged with the boy's murder for propaganda purposes. For the full story, see Y. Druzhnikov, Informer 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov (New Brunswick, 1997).
denounced the film for its 'formalist' and religious character.104 Eisen-stein was forced to publish a 'confession' of his mistakes in the press, although it was penned in such a way as to be read by those whose opinions mattered to him as a satirical attack on his Stalinist masters. The negatives of the film were burned - all, that is, except a few hundred stills of extraordinary photographic beauty which were found in Eisenstein's personal archive following his death in 1948.105
The suppression of Bezhin Meadow was part of the continuing campaign against the artistic avant-garde. In 1934, at the First Writers' Congress, Party leader Karl Radek, a former Trotskyite who was now making up for his past errors by proving himself the good Stalinist, condemned the writings of James Joyce - a huge influence on Eisenstein and all the Soviet avant-garde. Radek described Ulysses as 'a dung heap swarming with maggots and photographed by a movie camera through a microscope'.106 This no doubt held a reference to the famous maggot scene in The Battleship Potemkin, in which Eisenstein zooms in on the offending larvae by filming them through the monocle of the commanding officer. Then, in January 1936, Pravda published a diatribe against Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which had been a great success, with hundreds o
f performances in both Russia and the West since its premiere in Leningrad in 1934. The unsigned article, 'Chaos Instead of Music', was evidently written with the full support of the Kremlin, and evidence suggests, as it was rumoured at the time, that Andrei Zhdanov, the Party boss in Leningrad, wrote it on the personal instructions of Stalin, who, just a few days before the article appeared, had seen the opera and clearly hated it.107
From the first moment, the listener is shocked by a deliberately dissonant, confused stream of sound. Fragments of melody, embryonic phrases appear - only to disappear again in the din, the grinding, and the screaming… This music… carries into the theatre… the most negative features of 'Meyerholdism' infinitely multiplied. Here we have 'leftist' confusion instead of natural, human music… The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear. Leftist distortion in opera stems from the same source as the leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science. Petty-bourgeois innovations lead to a break with real art, real science and real literature… All this is primitive and vulgar.108
This was not just an attack on Shostakovich, although, to be sure, its effect on him was devastating enough that he never dared again to write an opera. It was an attack on all modernists - in painting, poetry and theatre, as well as in music. Meyerhold, in particular, who was brave and self-assured enough to speak out publicly in defence of Shostakovich and against the Party's stifling influence on art, was subjected to denunciations of a feverish intensity. He was condemned in the Soviet press as an 'alien', and even though he tried to save himself by staging the Socialist Realist classic How the Steel Was Tempered in 1937, his theatre was closed down at the beginning of the following year. Stanislavsky came to his old student's aid, inviting him to join his Opera Theatre in March 1938, although artistically the two directors were poles apart. When Stanislavsky died that summer, Meyerhold became the theatre's artistic director. But in 1939 he was arrested, tortured brutally by the NKVD to extract a 'confession', and then, in the arctic frost of early 1940, he was shot.109
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