As the Twenties progressed, Stalin’s watchdogs kept their eye on serious film-makers. Alexandr Dovshenko’s Zvenigora, with its exploration of human nature in relation to the land, was criticised for being ‘bourgeois’ and ‘nationalistic’. By contrast, Earth – the final film of Dovshenko’s War Trilogy – combined the kinetic thrill of early Soviet cinema with a positive vision of the Five-Year Plan. Dovshenko’s message was that if you give the right tools to the working class, it can oust rich, drunken kulaks who are too idle to compete with technological and ideological advances. In the film, the workers instinctively know how to use the tractors.
While Lenin was keen to proselytise through film, Stalin was alert to the emotional pull of music. In 1926, the Leningrad Philharmonic premiered Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1st Symphony. Originally offered as his diploma composition for the Leningrad Conservatoire, the symphony – allowing the first glimpse of the composer’s disquiet – was recognised as remarkable and was taken up by the Leningrad Philharmonic. During the period of the NEP, before the Soviet Union turned inwards, it was possible for a musician like Shostakovich to hear the work of foreign composers such as Berg or Hindemith conducted by a rich array of visiting conductors, including Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter. In 1926, the composer Boris Asafiev formed the Leningrad Circle for New Music and, two years later, Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, based on Gogol’s short story, was accepted by the MALEGOT, or Leningrad Maly State Theatre of Opera and Ballet. But during rehearsals there were signs of intolerance towards a piece that was described as ‘individualistic’ or ‘modern’. It was not the kind of music that would serve Stalin, who was in the process of compromising Russia’s capacity for technological advance and artistic excellence by replacing intelligence and expertise with ignorance and inexperience. At Leningrad’s Conservatoire, party members with no musical training were put in charge. The aim of the institution was redirected to the production of rousing songs to motivate farm and factory workers. Under RAPM, the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians, music likely to fall on deaf ears was discouraged. Simplicity was the goal. Folk song – ‘proletarian in content, national in form’ – became dominants.27 During the First Five-Year Plan, RAPM launched an attack on the ‘narcotic’ nature of Western popular music, which encouraged ‘man to live not so much by his head as by his sexual organs’. Although RAPM was disbanded in 1932 in the cultural volte-face that accompanied the successful conclusion of the First Five-Year Plan, its simplistic attitudes towards music persisted.
The equivalent body in literature, RAPP – the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers-campaigned against authors who were not prepared to ignore individuality by making a pact with Soviet platitude. In painting, Socialist Realism mendaciously celebrated the achievements of the people. Yet, among the early work of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin and Alexander Deineka – social realists before Socialist Realism there were striking images that were politically pointed and gently modernist. Later, Socialist Realism descended into idealised, painted propaganda in the work of painters like Alexander Gerasimov.
While the West was living through a Great Depression that called capitalism into question, it still had Fred and Ginger and open argument. In Soviet Russia the drabness, deprivation and danger were paralysing. During Stalin’s tyrannical drive for modernisation, the standard of living declined and about 44 per cent of household income went on food, which, in 1929, was rationed once again.28 Leningrad, however, remained something of a case apart. Enjoying a remarkably high literacy rate compared with other Russian cities, it was also home to more than sixty institutes of higher education. There was a marked increase in the number of women studying – not only subjects such as medicine and law, but also construction, transport and industry. Yet in many ways socialism had let women down. Post-revolution party meetings had urged them to imagine a brighter future. The Family Code of 1918 awarded eight weeks’ paid maternity leave to women before and after giving birth. But, all too soon, the state cut back on supportive institutions such as childcare, forcing Zhenotdel, the Women’s Bureau, to struggle hard for women’s rights. Thousands lost their jobs to soldiers returning from the war. Only in the traditionally female and worst-paid sectors, such as textiles and food-processing, did they continue to dominate. What is more, although there was a considerable number of women doctors, in the 1930s, there were only four female chief physicians in Leningrad hospitals. The Commissariat of Labour – allegedly committed to equality of opportunity – favoured men during the First Five-Year Plan, and large numbers of women were left unemployed. In desperation, 700 Leningrad women falsely registered as diseased prostitutes merely to get into the ‘labour clinic’ where 100 places had been set up to prepare ‘fallen women’ for work.29 As for prostitution, the Bolsheviks failed to eradicate it and simply drove it underground.
The New Family Code of the mid-Twenties sought to protect women, but the ease of divorce created a situation in which men became serial husbands, leaving a trail of wives with dependent children as they moved on to the next amusement.30 Upping the cost of divorce on each successive occasion was an attempt to curb the problem – as was abortion. Legalised from 1920, the numerous abotaria, or termination clinics, had long waiting lists of women, often in the advanced stages of pregnancy. Eight or nine terminations were not uncommon, and some women had as many as sixteen. 31 When, in an attempt to strengthen the family, Stalin made abortion a criminal offence in 1937, ‘quantities of cheap contraceptives made of metal, celluloid and composite rubber’ were put on sale.32 Against the backdrop of Stalin’s terror, the stable, cosy – almost bourgeois – family was promoted in Russia and brandished abroad by Willi Münzenberg’s Comintern propaganda magazines. Using faked photographs, they presented the well-dressed ‘family Filipov’ enjoying a hearty meal at a table crowned by a gleaming samovar. The Filipovs became the laughing stock of the embattled Soviet housewife who, if she managed to get hold of a smoked fish that didn’t make the gums bleed, or decent herring, or sausage made from anything but horse meat, was hailed as a veritable ‘Mrs Filipov’ – a figure with obvious connections.33
Successful socialism promised adequate supplies of basic foods, shoes and suitable clothing for everybody. The wait to purchase such items – if they materialised – could be endless and was largely the lot of women, employed or otherwise. When rationing ended, prices rose, outstripping wage increases, and ‘repulsive’ goods of decreasing quality were produced to match diminished purchasing power. 34 The gulf between the poor and the party elite widened. Glavosobtorg, set up in 1930, served privileged customers in its bakeries, food shops and department stores. The flagship Gastronom shops in Moscow and Leningrad sold live carp from a fish tank and greenhouse-grown strawberries. Priced well beyond the means of the average household, their forty-one varieties of canned or frozen fish and assortment of sixty-seven different kinds of smoked fish and caviar were sold to people who were well placed within the system. From 1930 Torgsin shops, where the cash-strapped went to offload heirlooms, sold to tourists and the Soviet elite. Cooperatives that were exclusive to the NKVD offered what was simply unobtainable elsewhere – newspapers began to include advertising for products that most people couldn’t afford. When a department store opened in Passazh on the Nevsky Prospekt in the early Thirties, there were speeches, bunting and orchestras to celebrate the event. But, behind the foofaraw, clothing departments had neither fitting rooms nor mirrors.35
To bolster pride in a regime that was badly organised and increasingly unfair, schoolchildren were fed antiquated notions of capitalist countries, where – it was suggested – boys under ten lived in squalor and worked the mines for capitalists who preferred cheap, expendable labour to expensive machines. Extracts of the texts they studied were taken from writers such as Charles Dickens, Mrs Gaskell and Upton Sinclair.36 When André Gide visited Russia in the mid-1930s, he found the population ‘in an extraordinary state of ignorance concerning other countries’ work men actually asked him if th
ey had schools in France.37 Meanwhile, the developing cult of Stalin, which originated with his fiftieth-birthday celebrations in 1929, attempted to sugar-coat a bitter pill. Busts of Stalin’s smug face were churned out for mass adoration, and images of the mass murderer became increasingly saccharine.
From the earliest days of his leadership, Stalin’s venom and vindictiveness had been patently apparent, but it was the assassination of the First Secretary of the Leningrad Party, the enormously popular Sergei Kirov, that marked the threshold of an abyss. On the afternoon of 1 December 1934, a troubled young drifter called Leonid Nikolaev was unaccountably admitted to Leningrad Party headquarters in the Smolny. Possibly Stalin’s hit-man, Nikolaev proceeded to murder Kirov. Hours later, Stalin boarded a train for Leningrad in order to investigate. The following day, Kirov’s apparently negligent bodyguard also died. Some claimed it was an NKVD murder, others that the terrified man had thrown himself from the back of the lorry to avoid interrogation by Stalin. Within a week, Nikolaev and the alleged ‘co-conspirators’ had been executed and the head of the Leningrad NKVD sacked.38
Kirov’s lifestyle, evident in his flat on the smart Kamennoo-strovsky Prospekt, offers some insight into the minimal sacrifice expected of the socialist elite. The portraits of Kirov’s communist superiors and heroes, his 20,000-volume glassed-in library, his extensive desk with the array of phones so beloved of communist bureaucrats, his ‘red star’ hotline to Moscow – all seem fitting accessories for an important local party leader. Otherwise, the flat appeared altogether bourgeois, with its large kitchen range, refrigerator and ample pantry. Kirov’s passion for hunting – his trophies, his skin rugs, his exquisitely made equipment – recall the hunting expeditions so beloved of the late-nineteenth-century tsars. Yet Kirov was an accomplished orator who came across as a man of the people, a champion of the workers who did much to improve standards of welfare in Leningrad.’39 Recklessly independent, he worked with whoever he considered best for the job – party veterans or even those whom Stalin disliked or distrusted. During the XVIIth Party Congress in the winter of 1934, Kirov was solicited by prominent party members as a possible replacement for the General Secretary. Seen as a threat, the hunter became the prey to someone who distrusted his successful popular touch perhaps Stalin himself.
More than half of Leningrad filed past Kirov’s body, lying in state in the Uritsky Palace. They proposed to name streets and build statues in his honour. The Mariinsky had been renamed GATOB - the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet. Anxious to rid the city of at least one ugly acronym, comrades wished to rename the theatre the Kirov, which happened in 1935.
If Stalin did arrange the killing, he needed to cover his tracks. If he did not, then a purge would curb dissent.40 With zeal, he set to work on the Leningrad party and the city’s residual nobility and bourgeoisie. There was a trial of twelve Leningrad NKVD chiefs, who were committed to concentration camps for negligence. Nearly 850 associates of the former Leningrad party leader, Grigory Zinoviev, were arrested early in 1935, and 11,000 Leningraders were sent off to Corrective Labour Camps, or gulags, where they worked in appalling conditions to help achieve Stalin’s ambitious industrial targets. Kamenev and Zinoviev were sentenced to imprisonment and – in 1936 – retried and executed. By the end of 1938, the ‘old communists’, including Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, had been purged. Abroad, the NKVD was eliminating Trotskyites fighting in the Spanish Civil War and was tracking Leon Trotsky himself. In Russia, torture became a standard mode of questioning. The new Leningrad party leader, Andrei Zhdanov, dismantled Kirov’s power-structures – of the 154 Leningrad delegates to the XVIIth Party Congress of 1934, only two were re-elected to the next congress in 1939.
In the years following Sergei Kirov’s murder, Stalin used the assassination of the Leningrad party leader as a pretext for unrestrained terror. Under the close, unrelenting control of the Soviet leader, the NKVD effectively waged war against the party and the population. Victims were rounded up in vans marked ‘Milk’ or ‘Vegetables’ and herded in cattle-trucks to camps where they perished from cold, malnutrition, disease or despair, while Stalin chortled, ‘Life has become better, life has become merrier.’ Shostakovich had a private toast- ‘Let’s drink to life not getting any better.’ Of nearly 2,000 delegates to the XVIIth Party Congress, 1,100 were shot over the following years. Between 1934 and 1938, 1.5 million party members were purged. Those who aided and abetted Stalin – the notorious security chiefs – fell like dominoes, along with thousands of NKVD operatives who knew too much. Like the monster who vacuums up everything around him, Stalin would soon have no victims left, no population to celebrate his great leadership. Every day, at the height of the Terror, an average of 1,500 people were shot. Official records admit that 681,692 people were executed in 1937-8, while so many of the three million who were incarcerated died in prisons and labour camps.41 Countless Soviet citizens were put to death for their alleged part, however remote, in the so-called conspiracy surrounding what was, for Stalin, the politically useful murder of Kirov. Arthur Koestler remembered how the party taught him to watch his step, guard his words and thoughts, in the knowledge that anything he said could, one day, be turned against him. He learned to ‘avoid any original form of expression, any individual turn of phrase . . . nuances of meaning were suspect. Language, and with it thought, underwent a process of dehydration.’42
Shostakovich – cunning, courageous and po-faced – sailed very close to the wind. His second opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was based on Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella about a highly sensual woman forced into an unsuitable marriage by brutes. It was to have been the first in a tetralogy, intended to celebrate the liberation of women in Russia. The second was meant to focus on Sofia Perovskaya, who led the plot to assassinate Alexander II, but Shostakovich abandoned the project. A scene in Lady Macbeth set in a police station was taken as a satire on Stalin’s NKVD and rattled the dictator when he attended a performance. In January 1936, the opera was attacked in Pravda as ‘a petit-bourgeois formalist attempt to produce originality’. In such an unfavourable climate, it was surprising that the composer’s 4th Symphony was accepted by the Leningrad Philharmonic. Indeed, after ten distressing rehearsals under a frightened conductor, Shostakovich withdrew the work, excusing it as a ‘failure’, and it remained unperformed until 1961. When the composer courageously premiered his 5th Symphony under Yevgeny Mravinsky at the Philharmonic Hall in November 1937, the audience wept during the performance and cheered after it was over, giving what they suspected to be a covert criticism of Stalinism a resounding thirty-minute ovation. When interviewed, Shostakovich disarmingly claimed that the 5th was about ‘man in all his feelings’.43 Earlier in the year, the composer had been summoned to the ‘Big House’ – NKVD Leningrad headquarters on Liteiny Prospekt. Shostakovich had been friendly with General Tukhachevsky since the mid-1920s and he was interrogated about the general’s alleged plot to kill Stalin. Surely, after his bumpy relationship with the state, Shostakovich’s implication in the trumped-up charges meant that his luck had run out. He was instructed to return to the ‘Big House’ several days later. He duly bid goodbye to his family and prepared for exile. But when he arrived at NKVD headquarters, he was dismissed. In the intervening days the investigator in charge of his case had himself been arrested.44
Although Shostakovich was obviously as lucky as he was cunning and courageous, it is remarkable that he got away with so much, when everybody else around him did not. Perhaps he was saved by the international success of Lady Macbeth – the composer had become a celebrity abroad. His spirited music for Soviet cinema probably also played a part. As a young man, Shostakovich had worked as a pianist for silent films in Leningrad cinemas and the experience, combined with his love of jazz, served him well. When he produced the huge hit ‘Song of the Counterplan’, for a 1932 film about the way in which Soviet workers dealt with a bunch of‘wreckers’ in a Leningrad factory, Stalin – like Napoleon with the
‘Marseillaise’ – knew he had a cultural weapon worthy of a thousand cannon. Shostakovich, despite erring in the direction of obscurity and ‘formalism’ in his serious work, could be relied upon to deliver a damned good tune that would rouse the nation.45
The ‘Big House’: NKVD Leningrad headquarters on Liteyny Prospekt.
After its popularity during the NEP years in the early Twenties, jazz came back into fashion during the 1930s. Against the backdrop of the purges and developing terror, people were encouraged to be merry.46 Gramophones appeared in shops. But none of this disguised the fact that fear was taking its toll on mental stability, as people became suspicious and confused, living in perpetual fright. Any semblance of ordinary life was illusory when people feared the midnight knock of the NKVD. To add to their distress, Leningrad’s poor were crammed into communal apartments, or kommunalki, in which families shared kitchens and bathrooms and everybody knew what everybody else was up to. Forced into living public lives, people were reduced to a state of paralysing isolation and loneliness. Victor Serge remembered that, from the late Twenties, ‘the lie in the heart of all social relationships’ became ‘even fouler’.47 People sold out to the authorities in order to stay alive. If two people were talking, there was a strong chance one of them might be from state security. In this climate of distrust and betrayal, the twelve-year-old Pavlik Morozov became a national hero for denouncing his own father. The incident may well have been apocryphal but, through the poems, songs and plays that it spawned, it served Stalin. When accusing someone, evidence was not necessary it was simply fabricated to suit the situation. The phrase ‘he lies like an eyewitness’48 became a common simile.
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