The House of Government

by Slezkine, Yuri

  Ivan Gronsky

  By 1932, when the thirty-eight-year-old Gronsky was appointed head of the organizing committee of the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, he (along with Postyshev and Stetsky) had become Stalin’s personal liaison to “creative workers.” His formal assignment from the Central Committee was “to guide the work of the Soviet and foreign intelligentsia.” He had a direct telephone line to Stalin, but Stalin was not always available. “Not infrequently,” he wrote later, “I had to take risks by making important decisions of a political nature not knowing in advance what Stalin would say.” Regular meetings held in the Gronskys’ large dining room involved thirty to fifty people and a great deal of drinking, singing, and poetry reading. The challenge was to overcome “factionalism,” create comfortable conditions for creative work, and agree on the general principles of representing a world free of both kulaks and Averbakhs. Most writers appreciated the support. As the writer Georgy Nikiforov put it, “if the Party keeps us alive, no Averbakh will eat us alive.”42

  The solution proved elusive. Gronsky suspected the “honorary chairman” of the organizing committee, Maxim Gorky, of factionalism and self-promotion, and found Radek’s and Bukharin’s congress speeches (submitted in advance and approved by Gorky), as “more than reprehensible both politically and aesthetically.” Stalin listened to everyone but backed Gorky. Gronsky resigned; Gorky became the sole organizer; and Radek and Bukharin delivered their speeches. As for the general principles of representing the new world, Stalin’s guidelines were general enough to force the delegates to take risks by making important decisions of a political nature not knowing in advance what Stalin would say. “The artist must show life the way it is,” Stalin had said. “And if he shows our life the way it is, he cannot help noticing, and showing, the forces that are leading it toward socialism. This is what we call ‘socialist realism.’”43

  The point of departure was the fact of the great victory. “Your congress is meeting at a time,” said Andrei Zhdanov, opening the proceedings, “when, under the leadership of the Communist Party and under the guidance of our great leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin (tumultuous applause), the socialist mode of production has triumphed fully and irreversibly in our country.” The fears that the miracle of total transformation might take a long time, said Aleksandr Serafimovich, have proved unfounded. “The first layer of scaffolding,” said Isaak Babel, “is being taken down from the house of socialism. Even the most nearsighted people can see this house’s shape, its beauty. We are all witnesses to the fact that our country has been gripped by a powerful feeling of pure, physical joy.” The Soviet people, said Leonid Leonov, “are standing guard at the gate of a new world full of buildings of the most perfect social architecture.” The Soviet present was “the morning of a new era,” “the most heroic period of world history,” “the most capacious historical age of all those experienced by humankind.”44

  Leonid Leonov (N. A. of Makarov)

  Leonov’s The Sot’ was the most widely acclaimed Soviet construction novel. Like all such novels, it ended just short of fulfillment, with a faint vision of the city that was to come. The new—postconstruction—challenge was to show its shape, its beauty—and its Adam. This was an enormously difficult undertaking—“as difficult as tracing the shadow of a thunder cloud on a huge meadow.” But it had to be done, and done by writers who had been shaped by the old world. (Leonov was the grandson of a Zariadie grocer, the son of a proletarian poet, the son-in-law of a famous publisher, and a veteran of both the Red and, unbeknownst to the delegates, White armies.) “Our mirror is too small for the central hero of our time. And yet, we all know full well that he has come into the world—its new master, the great planner, the future geometer of our planet.”45

  There were two ways of representing a hero this large. The first was “to step back a century, so as to reduce a bit the angle of vision from which we, his contemporaries, view him.” The second, and the only one acceptable to a Soviet writer, was “to become equal to his character in size and, above all, in creative fervor.” The writer was to become his own hero:

  This means that we must rise to the height from which we can see most clearly the barbarity of yesterday’s stone age and understand more deeply the historical force of the new truths, whose philosophical depth and social greatness consist in their very simplicity; become, at last, an inalienable part of the Soviet order, which has taken upon itself Atlas’s task of building a society on the basis of the highest humanity, the socialist kind. If we do, comrades, we will not have to waste time on technical gimmicks, which fill our books, or on scholastic discussions, which often do nothing but corrupt the living matter of literature; we will not have to worry about the longevity of our books, because the hormone of immortality will be contained in their very material. If we do, we will have every reason to say that we are worthy of being Stalin’s contemporaries.46

  Babel took the argument further. The Soviet writer, as an “engineer of souls,” was a central participant in the work of construction; the writer’s tools were words; the building of socialism required few words, “but they must be good words, because contrived, hackneyed, and stilted words are bound to play into the hands of our enemies.” Bad writers, or good writers who used bad words, were wreckers because, “in our day, bad taste is no longer a personal defect; it is a crime. Even worse, bad taste is counterrevolution.” Good writers who used good words would bring about the victory of good taste. “It will not be an insignificant political victory because, fortunately for us, we have no such thing as a nonpolitical victory.” Writers’ words must be as big as the writers themselves, and the writers themselves must be as big as their heroes. “Who should we model ourselves after? Speaking of words, I would like to mention a man who does not deal with words professionally: just look at the way Stalin forges his speech, how chiselled his spare words are, how full of muscular strength.” As Babel had written on a different occasion: “Benia says little, but he says it with gusto. He says little, but you wish he would say more.”47

  Arosev added to Babel’s formula by referring to a moment of comic relief in Stalin’s report to the Congress of Victors six months earlier: “You all know that at the Seventeenth Congress Comrade Stalin gave us two types of characters: the conceited grandee and the honest windbag. The form in which Comrade Stalin expressed this was highly accomplished aesthetically, especially in the part about the windbag. The dialogue he cited was of great artistic quality. The previous speaker, Comrade Babel, said that we should learn from Comrade Stalin how to handle words. I would like to amend his statement: we must learn from Comrade Stalin how to identify new literary types.”48

  All this made good sense given Stalin’s uncontested place at the center of the victorious new world. But what should texts worthy of the time—worthy of being Stalin’s contemporaries—actually look like? In the central speech of the congress, Bukharin defined socialist realism in opposition to “old realism” or “simply-realism.” The literature of an emerging world could not be reduced to “objectivism,” which “claimed to represent reality ‘the way it actually is.’” This meant that it could not be divorced from romanticism, which implied a revolutionary transformation. “If socialist realism is characterized by its activism and efficacy; if it offers more than a simple photograph of the historical process; if it projects the whole world of struggle and emotions into the future; and if it places the heroic on the throne of history, then revolutionary romanticism is its inalienable part.” Unlike traditional revolutionary romanticism, however, socialist realism was “not anti-lyrical.” The fact that socialism opposed individualism did not mean that it opposed the individual. On the contrary, socialism, and therefore socialist realism, stood for “the flourishing of the individual, the enrichment of his inner world, the growth of his self-awareness.” Socialist realism, like the struggle for socialism that it represented, combined realism and heroic romanticism, collectivism and lyricism, monumentalism and ‘the entir
e world of emotions of the emerging new man, including the ‘new eroticism.’”49

  There were two reasons, according to Bukharin, why such an art was possible, even for writers shaped by the old world. One was implicit in the congress’s mandate: if the victory of socialism was both a reality and a promise, so was its artistic reflection. The other, more specific reason was that it had been done before. “Opposed to the old realism in the conventional sense is the kind of poetic work that depicts the most general and universal features of a particular epoch, representing them through unique characters that are both specific and abstract, characters that combine the greatest possible generalizability with enormous inner richness. Such, for example, is Goethe’s Faust.”50

  There were other models as well. Samuil Marshak began his discussion of children’s literature with The Song of Roland; Bukharin ended his speech by referring to Pushkin; Fadeev called on F. Panferov to write a Soviet Don Quixote (about a peasant who travels through the country in search of a noncollectivized village); and Leonov compared the central hero of the age to the “international constellation of human types whose members include Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, Figaro, Hamlet, Pierre Bezukhov, Oedipus, Foma Gordeev, and Raphael de Valentin.” The main task of Soviet literature was to capture “the new Gulliver” by learning from Jonathan Swift. Abulkasim Lakhuti (Abulqosim Lohuti), a Persian poet representing Tajik literature, called for the mastery of the work of Daqiqi, Rudaki, Avicenna, Ferdowsi, Saadi, Havez, Omar Khayyam, “and dozens more brilliant craftsmen of the word.”51

  Ehrenburg agreed (his examples were War and Peace and the novels of Balzac), but cautioned against eclectic imitation, citing the plight of Soviet architecture:

  We used to build American-style buildings. They were good for factories and offices. But it is difficult to live in them. The eyes of the workers demand a great deal more joyousness, intimacy, and individuality from a residential building. The workers are justified in protesting against barracks-like housing. All this is true. But does this mean that it is okay to take a quasi-classical portal, add a bit of Empire, a bit of Baroque, a bit of old Trans-Moskva (laughter, applause) and represent the whole thing as the architectural style of the great new class? …

  The main character of our novel is not fully formed yet. Our life is changing so fast that a writer sits down to write his novel and by the time he is finished, he realizes that his hero has already changed. That is why the form of the classic novel, transferred to our time, creates false assumptions and, most important, false endings.52

  Ehrenburg was defending the documentary style of his The Second Day, but Ehrenburg, like his novel, was still in the creation/construction mode. As Bukharin suggested, echoing many other speakers and demonstrating his mastery of Hegelian dialectics, the history of Soviet poetry consisted of three periods. The first was “cosmic” and “abstract-heroic”; the second, associated with the “feverish, practical work of construction,” was analytical and discrete; and the third, the one the congress was meant to inaugurate, was “synthetic.” The central character of the new Soviet literature was, pace Ehrenburg, mostly formed. The shadow of a thundercloud on a huge meadow could, in principle, be traced: Goethe, among others, had done it before. Faust was “not about a particular historical process”: it was about both “the struggle of the human spirit” and the “poetic-philosophical self-affirmation of the bourgeois era.” Socialism was but the final chapter in the story of historical materialism. “Poetry such as Faust, with a different content and, consequently, different form, but with the same extreme degree of generalization, is an integral part of socialist realism.” Or, as Gronsky put it on another occasion, “socialist realism in painting is Rembrandt, Rubens, and Repin in the service of the working class and socialism.”53

  What all these names had in common was that they represented “golden ages,” or what Bukharin (quoting Briusov) called “the Pamirs”: no longer the miracle of birth and early growth and certainly not the skepticism and rigidity of old age, but the strength, dignity, and self-confidence of young adulthood. Socialist realism was to socialism what Faust had been to the bourgeois era. As Stalin said two years earlier, “it is no accident that, early in its history, the bourgeois class produced the greatest geniuses in drama: Shakespeare and Molière. At that time, the bourgeoisie was closer to the national spirit than the feudal lords and the gentry.” And as Radek said at the first writers’ congress,

  In the heyday of the slaveholding era, when it produced ancient culture, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristotle did not see any cracks in the foundation of the slaveholding society. They believed that it was the only possible and the only rational society, and so they could do creative work without any sense of doubt.…

  In the heyday of capitalism, when it was the carrier of progress, capitalism could produce bards who knew and believed that their works would find a response from hundreds of thousands of people who considered capitalism a good thing.

  We must ask ourselves: Why did Shakespeare appear in the sixteenth century, and why is the bourgeoisie incapable of producing a Shakespeare now? Why were there great writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Why are there no writers as great as Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Heine, or even Victor Hugo today? …

  It is enough to read Coriolanus or Richard III to see the enormous passion and tension depicted by the author. It is enough to read Hamlet to understand that the author was confronted by the big question: where is the world going? The author grappled with this question, he said, “alas, I have to set right the world that is out of joint,” but those great questions were his life.

  When, in the eighteenth century, Germany was recovering from a period of total exhaustion, when it kept asking itself what the solution was—and the solution was unification—it gave birth to Goethe and Schiller.

  When a writer can affirm reality, he can produce an accurate representation of that reality.

  Dickens produced an unvarnished picture of the birth of English industrial capitalism, but Dickens was convinced that industry was a good thing, and that industrial capital would propel England to a higher level, and so Dickens was able to show the approximate truth of that reality. He softened it with his sentimentality, but in David Copperfield and other works he painted a picture that today’s reader can still use to see how modern England was born.54

  The art of the newly constructed socialism was an art that affirmed the reality of socialism. It was an art produced by artists who did not see any cracks in the foundation of socialism and believed that socialism was the only possible and the only rational society. The fact that they happened to be right was, contrary to the avant-garde’s discredited claims, not relevant to how socialism was to be represented. What mattered was that genuine socialist art affirmed reality, and an art that affirmed reality was realist art by definition—in the sense in which the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristotle were realist. As Lunacharsky had said about classical architecture, it was “essentially rational” and “correct irrespective of time periods.” “Having died during the Romanesque era, which was replaced by the Gothic, it was resurrected as the self-evident style of reason and joy during the Renaissance, adapting itself to new conditions. Having been preserved at the core of the baroque and rococo, which were but peculiar versions of classicism, it was reborn again in the Louis XVI style, grew stronger during the revolutionary age, and then spread all over Europe as the empire style.” And as Aleksei Tolstoy had put it, also a propos of architecture, the art of victorious socialism was the “reinterpretation of the culture of antiquity” by means of a “proletarian renaissance.” It was more mature than the abstract-heroic art of the real day and incomparably more vigorous than the corrupt art of the bourgeoisie, which was dominated by impotent irony (in the sense of producing one underground man after another and believing that cracks were inescapable, youth doomed, and time cyclical). There was no definition of socialist realism that did not apply to Faust. Now that the first laye
r of scaffolding had been taken down from the house of socialism, Soviet artists, gripped by a powerful feeling of pure, physical joy, were to describe its shape and beauty in ways that were correct irrespective of time periods. Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis. Everything transient was but a likeness.55

  PART IV

  THE REIGN OF THE SAINTS

  14

  THE NEW LIFE

  In the First Five-Year Plan creation story, most Old Bolsheviks presiding over the work of construction had been doomed to martyrdom. Their job was to build the eternal house and leave it for “proletarian infancy and pure orphanhood.” As one of Pilniak’s dam engineers explains (deliberately invoking a Civil War image), “Comrade Moses … searched and fought for a decent living space. But he never reached the Promised Land, leaving it to Joshua the son of Nun to cause the sun to stand still. His children reached it in his stead. People who have known Sodom cannot enter Canaan—they are not fit for the Promised Land.”

  The two great congresses of 1934 had revised the script—or rather, moved the action forward in time, all the way to the end. The eternal house was to become a refuge where Moses could make his home and raise a family until the wolf moved in with the lamb and the leopard lay down with the goat. During the Stalin revolution, the original Bolshevik eschatology had been expanded to include a second great tribulation preceded by a managed retreat. The new creed adopted in 1934 followed St. Augustine and most institutionalized Christianity in proclaiming the millennium to be a spiritual and political allegory. Of the three fundamental solutions to the nonfulfillment of a millenarian prophecy—the extension of the violence of the last days, the indefinite postponement of the final redemption, and the claim that the millenarian prophecy had, in fact, been fulfilled—the Stalin revolutionaries, like most of their predecessors, chose a combination of the last two. The coming of Communism was imminent but beyond anyone’s capacity to schedule; “socialism” as a prelude to eternity was, “in essence,” already there. As Sergei Kirov put it, “the central question of the proletarian revolution has now been solved completely and irreversibly in favor of socialism.”1