In February 1921, a proclamation was issued by disgruntled workers in Petrograd claiming freedom from the Bolsheviks and, the following month, sailors from Kronstadt mutinied against the fall in living standards and set out to put the revolution back on-course. But the now-sizeable Red Army was commanded by many officers who had been expertly trained in the imperial military schools. The man they sent to quash the Kronstadt rebellion, General Tukhachevsky, was one of them.65 His mid-March attack on the island was made by men camouflaged in white, moving over the frozen gulf. The sailors fired on the advancing troops, and in places the ice started to crack. Hundreds were killed before Tukhachevsky suppressed the rebellion, after which Chekist repression intensified and a new terror reigned in Petrograd. Emma Goldman met sailors from Kronstadt and workers from the forges and the mills, the ‘very brawn of the revolutionary struggle . . . crying out in anguish and bitterness’ against the Bolsheviks whom they had helped to power. As for the Cheka, Goldman put it to John Reed that she never understood that revolution could allow ‘indifference to human life and suffering’. Reed had returned to Russia three years after the October Revolution, which he had greeted with such enthusiasm. He was no longer so sure. Nevertheless, he died a hero and was buried in Moscow’s Kremlin wall. Shortly afterwards, Emma Goldman left Russia with all her ‘dreams crushed’.66
Many artists and writers believed that revolutionary approaches in their respective disciplines could serve the new order, but they were considered out of touch with the workers. Experimentation in theatre and art was questioned by philistine party chiefs, and many modernist artists began to realise that Bolshevism would never accept their ideas.67 Proletkult urged the development of a collective, proletarian art that ignored traditions and movements which meant nothing to the workers. But if modernists were seen to fail the revolution, so the revolution would fail its visionaries. A prime example was Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919 commission for a Monument to the Third International, which was intended to straddle the Neva and soar to twice the height of the as-yet-unbuilt Empire State Building. The tower was designed to suspend a giant glass cylinder, cube and cone. The cylinder would rotate over a period of a year and contain a conference centre. The cone would turn once a month and contain administrative offices. The cube would rotate daily and contain broadcast equipment such as screens and radio speakers. Tatlin’s vision ranged way beyond the limits of soviet skill and it was never built.
V. Panov as ‘The Worker’ in a dramatization of We Grow From Iron on the opening night of The Proletkult Arena Theatre.
Vladimir Tatlin standing with an assistant in front of a model for Monument to the Third International in a Petrograd studio.
By 1920, there were more than 600,000 members of the Communist Party, with a Central Committee of nineteen out of which, Arthur Ransome calculated, there were only five who mattered. There were the Jews, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev. There was the Pole, Dzerzhinsky and the Georgian, Stalin.68 The ailing Lenin was in charge. The Bolsheviks had won the civil war, but needed to stay in power. Nabokov suggested that Lenin and his cronies – rather like the tsars before them – ‘subordinated everything to the retention of power’.69
In the mid-nineteenth century, Alexander Herzen had asked, ‘Who will finish us off? The senile barbarism of the sceptre or the wild barbarism of communism; the bloody sabre or the red flag?’ He also hinted that it might be worse than that: ‘after the Christians were torn and tortured by wild beasts, they themselves, in their turn, began to persecute and torture one another’.70
13
A CITY DIMINISHED
1921–41
Petrograd’s population of 2.5 million in 1917 had fallen to around 740,000 by the early 1920s.1 Almost 170,000 worked, like the clerks of tsarist Russia, in the already-bloated Soviet state administration. Others – estimates stand at 156,000 for 1919 – were illiterate. The city was more extensive than Berlin or Paris but, in those capitals, populations were on the increase and, after the recent war, heading for the boom of the jazz age. Petrograd was an abandoned, half-ruined museum, which few had the time, money or inclination to curate. Mandelstam’s expectation of ‘something very splendid’ was no longer about to happen. The red staining the imperial palaces was a colour – according to Biely’s Ableukhov ‘emblematic of the chaos that was leading Russia to its doom’.2 The tram count had fallen from 724 cars in 1918 to 227 in 1921. Passengers hung on to the running boards for dear life or were pushed off, sometimes losing it. Industry was idle. A quarter of the city’s apartments were empty. Such was the upshot of seven years of war, revolution and civil strife.
Considering the city in the mid-1920s, the religious philosopher Georgy Fedotov suggested that there was ‘something insane in the idea of it, something that has predetermined its demise . . . A Titan rose up against Earth and Heaven and is now suspended in space, poised on a granite rock.’3 While the younger generation in Peter’s city witnessed impressive efforts in education and a drive to improve standards of living, the period between the end of the civil war and Hitler’s downfall was one of turmoil and trauma. According to Arthur Koestler, ‘within the short span of three generations the Communist movement had travelled from the era of the Apostles to that of the Borgias.4 The period saw the socialist vision of Marx’s co-author of the Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels – that government should slowly work itself out of a job – harden into the worst kind of totalitarian bureaucracy. In Russia’s capital, Moscow, a new tsarism was driven by the paranoia of Joseph Stalin. For two centuries Peter’s city had dictated change. Now it was the victim of change – or, rather, of stagnation.
Immediately after the civil war there had been glimmers of hope. In 1922, Viktor Shklovsky observed that spring came early. Professionals returned from the south, and private traders were once again accepted, as Lenin’s economic compromise of 1921 tolerated controlled capitalism. This was forced upon him by the appalling conditions of war and famine and was voted in at the Xth Party Congress, while General Tukhachevsky was putting down the Kronstadt revolt.5 The temporary New Economic Policy (NEP) returned something of St Petersburg to Petrograd. There were restaurants, shops, cinemas showing Hollywood films and galleries hanging avant-garde art. There was a freedom in the press, and opportunity for public discussion. Popular entertainers and con-men were jubilant, as the Nevsky sprang to life again with the gaiety and vice that had reigned before the First World War.6 But while it offered some respite for the bourgeoisie, the NEP was anathema to hard-line Bolsheviks, who viewed ‘NEPmen’ as mobster capitalists. However, when Lenin’s tactical economic retreat was terminated by Stalin in 1928, the ‘NEPman’ mentality went underground. Black markets persisted throughout the Soviet era and morphed – after the break-up of the USSR – into Russia’s racketeering way to get rich quick.7
Alexander Deineka, NEPmen, 1927.
On 22 April 1922, Joseph Stalin – Lenin’s choice – was elected as Party General Secretary. He was a no-nonsense pragmatist, an energetic Bolshevik organiser who had done time in tsarist camps in Siberia. Ten months later, Lenin changed his mind and wanted Stalin out. As with Catherine the Great and her intention to disinherit Paul, Lenin should have spoken sooner – before a third stroke left him incoherent. When, on 21 January 1924, he died of a fourth seizure, Stalin dramatically vowed to complete Lenin’s work and thereby consolidated himself as the natural heir.8 Petrograd, a city that Lenin never much liked, was renamed Leningrad. Local leaders argued that the seedbed of the revolution should become the capital once again. Others – including a few elderly ex-aristocrats still seen walking their dogs – suggested that the city should make a stand against the drabness of life in Soviet Russia.9 Old imperial splendour could become a beacon against the shabbiness of Soviet life. But Peter’s city was instead consigned to oblivion and, in late September, was overwhelmed by its second-largest flood. Water peaked at 380 centimetres – forty centimetres below the level of the worst flood 100 years earlier.
Fel
ix Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka had become the Political Directorate of the State, the GPU, which kept expanding in order to satisfy Stalin’s ruthless campaigns against his fellow countrymen. With the leader’s mesmerising contempt for human life, it took less than the nod of a head in the wrong direction to trigger his distrust. Obtaining false confessions under torture became an efficient way to purge suspected enemies – only a handful from thousands of victims had the will to resist. Complete conformity, Stalin observed, was achieved only at the cemetery. Extermination was his solution: ‘No man, no problem.’10 In 1923, the GPU became the OGPU, the United Political Directorate of the State. In 1934, this evolved into the dreaded NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, which developed through the MGB and the MVD to become the KGB in 1954, the year after the dictator’s death. Much of what was baleful in Stalin’s regime had been created by Lenin in the brutalising turmoil of the civil war. Surveillance, detention, exile and terror were part of Lenin’s scheme of things. The first death-camp became operational in 1922. Stalin merely intensified the campaign against enemies of the revolution – both real and imagined. The OGPU and then the NKVD became the vital instruments of terror. Behind the smiling face of ‘Father’ Stalin stood Saturn devouring his children. So thorough were his methods that, by the end of the 1920s, he was the only member of the original leadership who remained in the central executive committee, the Politburo.11
By the time Stalin adopted the plan to improve the economy in October 1928, he was in full control of the party, the army and the secret police. His drive to modernise was manic. Workers were compelled to ‘donate’ their sobotnik, or day off, in order to speed up the plan.12 Pravda crowed about achieving a Five-Year Plan in four. It was a dangerous acceleration worthy of Peter the Great. In 1929, profiteering kulaks – wealthy peasants accused of hoarding grain while cities starved – became ‘class enemies’. Some were murdered by gangs despatched from the towns, while others were exiled to Siberia, their farms confiscated and merged into huge collectives. By 1930, more than half of Russia’s peasants had been collectivised, but only half the promised number of tractors rolled off the production lines. When they did arrive, many lay idle, as farm workers had no idea how to operate them.13 To escape the threat in the countryside, embattled peasants slaughtered their cattle, burned down their barns and houses in protest and streamed into the cities at the rate of 50,000 a week. Leningrad found itself facing a housing shortage.
Amid the disarray there was excitement, confusion and crisis in the arts. Proletkult, buffeted by conflicting aims, hardly survived the civil war.14 Its desire to provide the workers with their own comprehensible art mutated into Stalin’s cultural terror. Narkompros took over publishing houses, and all manuscripts had to be approved by Glavit, the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs. The intellectual and artistic purge gathered speed. While some classic writers such as Pushkin and Tolstoy remained popular, Dostoevsky’s late, antisocialist ideas kept his works from publication. The verses of Sergei Yesenin, hip alcoholic poet, singer and sometime husband of Isadora Duncan, were filled with raw life and rough weather. In 1925, Yesenin found himself in such an uncongenial climate that he killed himself. The poet Anna Akhmatova lived with mirrors that did not ‘expect smiles’.15 Her work was disparaged by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Trumpeting the value of socialist art, he claimed that Akhmatova’s ‘indoor intimacy’ held no meaning for a ‘harsh and steely age’.16 Mayakovsky’s satire on ‘NEPmen’, The Bedbug, was presented in 1929. Its form and content were attacked and its author subsequently driven to suicide. The Bedbug’s director, Vsevelod Meyerhold, was later tortured and shot in 1940 on a spurious charge of spying for foreign powers. Prokofiev’s ballet for Diaghilev, Le Pas d’acier – intended as a tribute to the artistic possibilities of socialism – was censored for ‘dissonance’ when it was performed in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, treated the increasingly prevalent fear of power. After its 1930 Leningrad premiere, it was attacked for its ‘anti-soviet escapism’.
The ‘red detective story’ became a popular genre in the Twenties. Among the most successful was Marietta Shaginyan’s Mess-Mend: or a Yankee in Petrograd, which was serialised and given a Constructivist photomontage cover by Alexander Rodchenko. Such an avant-garde cover on a popular novel reveals something of the artistic potential of the early 1920s. The book treats capitalism’s collapse into fascism, pictures a socialist revolution in America, champions the Soviet way of life and the triumph of science – a theme reflected in the contemporary vogue for science fiction. Eugene Zamyatin’s futuristic novel We was the most powerful of that genre because it undercut misplaced scientific optimism with a searing attack on mass-surveillance and conformism, in which every last detail of life was planned and monitored. One of the first books banned by communist censors, it remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1988.17
Indecision over what kind of art was appropriate for a working-class revolution was reflected in the programme of the Institute of Artistic Culture, Inkhuk, which initially embraced everything from Kandinsky’s pure painting to Tatlin’s ‘laboratory’ or factory art. Originating in Moscow, Inkhuk was established in Petrograd in 1921 under Tatlin and, in Vitebsk, under Malevich. But when Kandinsky departed for Germany18 – one of the numerous artists, intellectuals and writers who left or were deported from Soviet Russia – easel-painting went with him. The artists who remained were technicians exploring utilitarian designs that could be manufactured and could serve society. But their socialist vision was not allowed to thrive. Oil painting returned, depicting sentimental scenes full of propaganda.
While the NEP witnessed the re-emergence of the private tailor, as inside legs were measured up and down the Nevsky, socialist artists such as Aleksandra Exter, Malevich, Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova and Vavara Stepanova were busy exploring fashion possibilities – both international and anonymous – that would be cheap to produce, hygienic and suited to the activities of the workers. Stunning designs were produced, but projects were hampered by economic constraints or curtailed by a hardening of the leadership against innovation.19
Great success was achieved in typography and photomontage. At Vitebsk, under El Lissitzky, Malevich and Marc Chagall, modern typographical design developed from its futurist origins. Constructivists conceived arresting agitprop posters and emblems for trade unions. Impressive interior designs for clubs offered workers light, bright places for recreation and learning. But Rodchenko’s colourful revolutionary library was, sadly, never more than a Silver Medal installation at the Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925. So many ambitious schemes were never realised. Although Popova and Stepanova did some fashion work in textile plants, Vladimir Tatlin was the only ‘artist-engineer’ who spent much time in a factory. But during his sojourn at Petrograd’s Lessner metallurgical plant he learned little. His ambition to build a stove intended to give out maximum heat using minimum fuel was important, but Tatlin could not make his designs work. The stove and the gigantic Monument to the Third International – like the fledgling Soviet state itself – were remarkable but unrealisable dreams.20
The artist, architect and engineer El Lissitzsky introduced his constructions or ‘prouns’ in 1921. Defining a proun as ‘a station where one changes trains between painting and architecture’, he set about trying to conceive buildings that would serve a population ravaged by hunger and war. The private client, he declared, had been replaced by the ‘social commission’.21 Surveying early Soviet architectural ideas – plans by El Lissitzky, the 1923 Ladvoski Atelier designs for a Moscow skyscraper, Barkhin’s first proposal for the Izvestia Building, Varentsov’s Utopian City – it is clear that the country was being offered a future for which it was not prepared. It was Peter the Great all over again.
Statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky against the reality of the Soviet world he helped to create.
Lenin clearly understood film as a most efficient propaganda tool through which to spread the r
evolutionary message.22 However, the films that came to be recognised as masterpieces of Soviet cinema were not appreciated by a public used to the cheap, sensational and sexy flicks pumped out by a slapdash industry. A typical production featured the adventures of Rasputin. Six shorts could be filmed in two days on the same set, with the props merely repositioned. The public, worn down by deprivation, had an understandable hunger for excitement and glamour. Of the 183 new films shown in Leningrad between late 1924 and mid-1925, only twenty-five were Soviet, while 103 came from America.23 Sergei Eisenstein’s revolutionary Battleship Potempkin caused a sensation abroad and was banned in Berlin in 1926, although in Russia itself American movies proved more popular. Potempkin was prematurely replaced by Douglas Fairbanks’s Robin Hood at a kino in Moscow. In Leningrad, it played in only two major cinemas.24
Eisenstein maintained that he was opposed to constructing unconvincing sets, in the manner of the shoddy Rasputin producers. He shot his tenth-anniversary celebration of the revolution, October, in that most striking of locations, Peter’s capital. Many of his extras had served as Red Guards. For the massacres on the streets of Petrograd, Eisenstein commented that ‘no rehearsal was necessary; the workers knew too well’ how it had happened.25 A triumph of propaganda and hagiography, October merges images inspired by newspaper photographs and agitprop posters to create the seething excitement of the revolution through montage. The technique empowers moments such as the impassioned, quasi-religious manifestation of Lenin outside the Finland Station. It also charges intimate scenes of horror, such as the sequence in which a frocked bourgeoise viciously kills a Red with the point of her frilly umbrella while his copy of Pravda sinks slowly into the Neva. Lev Kuleshov, Pudovkin’s teacher and the man responsible for developing montage, faced a shortage of film stock when he came to make his first full-length feature film, The Unusual Adventures of Mr West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, in Leningrad in 1924.26 He resolved the problem by cutting strictly, in order to tell the story economically, and montage was born.
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