Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  For an entire week Pravda was full of reports of explosions and mutilations, speeches full of bile, exhortations to seek vengeance and commit murder, appeals for even greater vigilance, and encouragements to learn lessons and work in a better and more disciplined way. The wounds inflicted on the USSR by its enemies must be healed as quickly as possible. In these articles a vocabulary of ritual killing, of lynch justice, was being rehearsed in utter earnestness. ‘Shoot the Trotskyite bandits!’, ‘The hour of reckoning has come’, ‘Destroy the dogs with a bullet from the Soviet people’, ‘No mercy for traitors to the nation’, ‘Destroy the mad dogs of fascism’, ‘These people are animals, not human beings’, ‘Trotsky the Judas’. But the very same pages that printed these hate-filled messages also contained announcements about the forthcoming celebrations of Pushkin’s centenary, the expansion of the network of hairdressing salons or a performance of the Red Army Balalaika Ensemble.51 In between there were guides for agitators about how to deal with the question ‘Why do they confess?’52

  But there was more to it than a torrent of paper. Behind every resolution sent to Moscow there stood a meeting, an on-the-spot rally with choruses, readings or those listening to verdicts and demonstrations. As was illustrated in an article in Pravda headed ‘The verdict delivered by the court is the voice of the people’,53 the movement set in motion throughout the country culminated in great demonstrations like the one in Red Square on 30 January 1937, a massive rally in the heart of the capital to unite people in their feelings of hatred. The news of the sentences and the idea of death by firing squad spread like wildfire through the city during the night. Workers on night shift, together with workers starting up on the following day shift, as well as workers who had given up their free day, spontaneously joined in a march. Although it was extremely cold and there was a cutting wind, columns of marchers set out from the factories towards the city centre – the old, the young, workers, engineers and students. From 5 p.m. on, Red Square filled up to the point where it could no longer contain the mass of demonstrators, who were forced to remain in the adjoining streets. The whole square was filled with 200,000 people, and was covered with banners and portraits of the leaders. The speakers included Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the trade unions, Nikolai Shvernik, the president of the Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Komarov, the first secretary of the Communist Youth Organization, and a woman worker from the Trekhgornaia Works. The large factories were recognizable by their delegations. Above the square, the ruby-red stars recently installed on the Kremlin towers shone brightly, and the square itself was bathed in the brightness of floodlights. Hundreds of posters called for other former members of the leadership – Bukharin, Rykov and Uglanov – to be brought before the court as members of the right-wing opposition. The dramatist Vsevolod Vishnevskii was overwhelmed by the sight, and by the volume of sound in the square and above it. The roar of planes, choirs, the noise of the generators, ‘the sound of the New Moscow’ was something to which one simply had to become accustomed. The people streaming past, he wrote, were not ‘neurasthenic like Europeans’. They could only laugh at André Gide and his like, ‘who had never starved with us, or fought alongside us’.54 The image of the ‘victorious people’ (narod-pobeditel' ), repeated a million times, became an icon and a background noise of the carefully calibrated populist rage that was being unleashed. But, by the time the rally took place, those condemned to death had long since been executed.

  Postscript

  Most observers were struck by the theatrical features of the court proceedings and the accompanying plebiscites in public squares – and not just in Moscow. Lion Feuchtwanger and Joseph Davies regarded the theatrical nature of these demonstrations as their true meaning. Nikolai Evreinov, a Russian dramatist who had been living in exile in Paris since the early 1920s, wrote a ‘dramatic chronicle in six scenes from Party life in the USSR’ (1936–8), with the title The Steps of Nemesis.55 Hardly anyone could have been better qualified to treat this topic than he. Before 1917 and immediately afterwards, Evreinov had emerged as the theorist of the ‘conditioned theatre’, a brilliant and highly cultivated man of the theatre, as illustrious a figure in his day as Vsevolod Meyerhold. Following in the footsteps of the revolutionary theatre of Richard Wagner and Edward Gordon Craig, he aimed at eliminating the gulf between actors and spectators, between theatre and life. But even such a gifted man of the theatre could not quite capture what had actually occurred in the House of the Unions in the centre of Moscow. It was a genuinely theatrical scene, but in a far more radical sense than Evreinov was able to conceive.

  Figure 8.2 ‘Shoot the fascist mad dogs!’ Banners at a hostile demonstration of 200,000 people in Red Square after the announcement of the verdict in the ‘Trotskyite trial’ of January 1937

  ‘Even the accused were forced to take part in this charade. They were led out onto the balcony of the House of the Unions, where they had to submit to the insults of the infuriated masses.’

  Iurii Piatakov, who had been sentenced to death and who was the most prominent member of the accused, the second-in-command of the powerful People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry, already knew the setting for his own execution. As early as 1922, he had taken part in a great scene in the House of the Unions, the former Palace of the Nobility, not as defendant, but as the presiding judge in the show trial against the Socialist Revolutionaries. They had all been condemned to death for actual anti-Bolshevist activities undertaken out of conviction, but had been pardoned following international protests. All the accused had presented themselves in classic revolutionary style as victims and martyrs, and had stood by their actions. It was Piatakov who had helped to set the machinery of the modern show trial in motion.56 The 1922 trial had likewise been accompanied by a smear campaign. Many of the banners carried by the masses demonstrating in front of the House of the Unions called for ‘the mad dogs to be shot’, and Krylenko, the prosecutor, and Piatakov, the judge, displayed their solidarity with the demands of the street. They stood next to Kamenev, who demanded that ‘all those who refused to bow to Soviet power should have their heads struck off’. Even the accused were forced to take part in this charade. They were led out onto the balcony of the House of the Unions, where they had to submit to the insults of the infuriated masses.57 The point of this mass theatre was to demonstrate the existence of a legality that derived its authority from victory in the Civil War and to justify the moulding of the population into a ‘furious, hostile mass’, a process by which to create a ‘plebiscite in favour of killing’.

  Piatakov, who in his capacity as a judge had condemned the Socialist Revolutionaries to death in 1922, was originally intended to assume the role of prosecutor in the first great Moscow show trial against Zinoviev and Kamenev.58 This fits well with his entire history, in which the dividing line between reality and fiction had been dissolved to the point where it threatened to jeopardize his life, so much so that it was pure chance whether he ended up as prosecutor or defendant, as judge or as a criminal to be executed.

  9

  ‘A Feast in the Time of Plague’: The Pushkin Jubilee of 10 February 1937

  On 11 February, barely two weeks after the death sentences had been pronounced on Piatakov and others on 31 January 1937, the festivities organized by the Academy of Sciences in celebration of the centenary of the death of Aleksandr Pushkin were held in the same building, admittedly in the incomparably larger and more splendid Hall of Pillars. The president of the Academy, Vladimir Komarov, gave a speech which culminated in the verses of Aleksandr Bezymenskii, which the latter had written specially for the occasion. In them, a quotation from Pushkin is fused with a political slogan: ‘Long live Lenin, long live Stalin, / Long live the light that breaks after the dark!’1

  A famous line of Pushkin’s in which, according to traditional interpretations, the darkness of Tsar Nicholas’s reactionary rule is evoked, together with the optimistic credo that it will come to an end, is married with the pinnacle of the year 19
37. With this quotation, the president of the Academy revealed more than he intended. And that is how it was with one of the greatest cultural enterprises of the year and one of the most significant: a poet who had long been held to be a representative of the aristocracy, the incarnation of the feudal ‘Golden Age’, a man whom the revolutionaries had not long before pushed overboard from ‘the steamboat of modernity’ (Vladimir Maiakovskii), now moved into the centre of the literary and cultural canon of the Stalin era. The Pushkin centenary was more than a piece of cultural theatre and political instrumentalization. More took place than its initiators had in mind, for cultural processes have their own logic and cannot be manipulated arbitrarily.2

  The New York Times: ‘All Russia was Pushkin-mad today’

  On 11 February 1937, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times reported on the activities surrounding the Pushkin centenary: ‘All Russia was Pushkin-mad today on the hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death.’3 It is easy to understand this when one goes through the press reports from those first February days again. Months before, a central Pushkin Committee had been set up to draw up the guidelines and assume control of the coordination of the numerous activities involved. The Pushkin jubilee was an affair of state. Decisions were taken at the highest levels of the Party leadership, the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and the Council of People’s Commissars about how the great Russian poet should best be commemorated. Decisions were taken about the renaming of towns, squares and streets, as well as theatres and libraries. In the course of implementing these directives, the State Art Museum in Moscow was renamed the Pushkin Museum, Bol'shaia Dmitrovka in Moscow would in future be known as Pushkinskaia Street, and Neskuchnaia Embankment became Pushkin Embankment. The town of Detskoe Selo, near Leningrad, now became Pushkin, Ostankino near Moscow was renamed Pushkinskoie, Stock Exchange Square in Leningrad was changed to Pushkin Square.4 Competitions for new memorials were set up and decisions were taken. Commemorative exhibitions and memorials were organized throughout the country. The centres for editions of the classics and Pushkin exegesis took part, as did the collective farmers in the village of Strakhovo. Izvestiia announced on 10 February:

  The Pushkin jubilee was celebrated everywhere as a genuine popular holiday. In Rostov-on-Don, a radio programme received in Tuapsé from the tanker Batumi lying off the Californian coast tells us that the crew were preparing a celebration in honour of the Pushkin jubilee. On the tanker Elba, which was in the Black Sea at the time, crew members put out a special Pushkin bulletin and an album containing materials that had been collected about Pushkin. In Tuapsé itself preparations were under way for a great Pushkin evening in the new Palace of Culture. The sailors and their wives intended to perform excerpts from Evgenii Onegin, Boris Godunov and Poltava.5

  All the arts played their part. The painter Nikolai Shestopalov produced his large-format picture Komsomol'tsy Place Flowers on the Pushkin Memorial in the Village of Ostaf'evo, the sculptor B. Yakovlev produced sketches for a Pushkin memorial with a picture of a pioneer on its plinth, while the prominent sculptor Ivan Shadr is said to have depicted a Pushkin with a copy of the Short History [of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] under his arm. The artist Kuz'ma Petrov-Vodkin painted a new portrait of Pushkin, the avant-garde painter Gustav Klutsis made a poster, ‘Honour to the Great National Poet’. The filmmakers produced the film The Poet’s Youth.6 The jubilee had been meticulously prepared. In the four months leading up to the actual celebrations, in Leningrad alone there had been 1,495 talks and 1,737 performances given by artists, who were heard and seen by around 700,000 visitors. This was repeated in schools, institutes, factories and state farms throughout the USSR.7

  On 16 February a great exhibition was opened in the Historical Museum in Red Square in Moscow. This was quite close to the locality associated with the protagonists of his plays, within sight of the place of execution where Stepan Razin and Emel'ian Pugachev had been tortured and killed.8 The Pushkin sculpture by Sergei Merkurov had been divested entirely of the introverted and contemplative features of Aleksandr Opekushin’s Pushkin monument and reminds us a little – with Pushkin leaning forward, in a cloak – of the gait of Merkurov’s statue of Stalin at the entrance of the Moscow–Volga Canal. A thousand exhibits were displayed in seventeen rooms, representing the three great phases in Pushkin’s life and work, Pushkin’s influence under the tsars and Pushkin in the Soviet present.

  New museums were built in places of importance in Pushkin’s life, the chief ones in the house where he lived and died on the River Moika in Leningrad, but also in Moscow. New genres came into being, prominent among them guides to Pushkin’s Moscow and a new map of cultural topography with the poet at its centre.9 There were new editions of his collected works. In 1936 alone the edition of his writings reached around 18.6 million copies – in other words, more in a single year than in the entire pre-revolutionary era – and in 1937 it was as many as 13.4 million. His writings were translated and printed in fifty-two languages – ‘Everyone is reading Pushkin. He is the favourite writer of the peoples of the USSR.’10 An émigré paper reported that every fifth book in the Soviet Union was by Pushkin. Celebratory performances by the Bolshoi Theatre were recorded for transmission throughout the land.11 In the Moscow Arts Theatre Olga Knipper-Chekhova recited Pushkin poems, and newspapers wrote about the poet’s descendants – grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.12 A sculpture ensemble in Pushkin’s honour to replace the old statue by Opekushin on Tverskoi Boulevard was to be erected in front of the planned Palace of World Literature at the confluence of the Moscow River and the Iauza – an idea of Maxim Gorky’s.

  In the competitions to restore existing Pushkin monuments or create new ones, the scope for reinterpretation was radically altered. The major influence in the celebrations came from the representatives of high culture – writers, painters, composers, sculptors and translators. But the really new feature was the transformation of Pushkin into an object of mass culture. Pushkin everywhere and in countless new variations: Pushkin on posters and stickers, Pushkin in the lacquer work of the Palekh artists and the chased work of the goldsmiths and silversmiths of Uzbekistan, Pushkin woven into shawls and rugs, as porcelain figurines and on matchboxes. The mint coined commemorative medallions and Pushkin medals. In February, Intourist organized a Pushkin decade for foreigners. Pushkin was celebrated throughout the Union. There were gala performances in the opera houses in Kiev and Tbilisi, in Palaces of Culture in Tashkent and Ashgabat. The newspapers even reported on Pushkin celebrations in London, Oslo and Madrid. This jubilee and the marathon of organized events turned Pushkin into an icon of Soviet culture.

  ‘Comrade Pushkin’: consecration of a classic

  The highpoint of the Moscow Pushkin celebrations was undoubtedly the mass rally on 10 February in Strastnaia Square, which had been renamed Pushkin Square. The setting has been captured in many photos and reports. Up to 1936 the square had been the site of the Strastnoi Monastery, which dated from 1646. Opposite, on the other side of the street at the entrance to Tverskoi Boulevard, stood Opekushin’s statue of Pushkin, which had been officially unveiled in 1880 in the presence of Russia’s entire literary and intellectual establishment. Ivan Turgenev had made a speech, as had the historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii, while, most outstanding of all, on 8 June 1880 Fiodor Dostoevsky had given his famous Pushkin speech, in which the Russian poet was celebrated as a ‘poet of the people’ and a genius of all mankind. By now, however, the Strastnoi Monastery, which latterly had contained a Museum of Atheism, had been demolished; the square was a great piece of waste land, at whose margins new buildings were rising up, among them the ‘constructivist giant’ that had been built in 1925–7, the Izvestiia Building designed by Grigorii Barkhin, and the new buildings along Gorky Street. Of the old monastery complex, only the bell tower survived. This was covered from top to bottom with banners dedicated to ‘Comrade Pushkin’ – a bell tower as an agitprop stand, visible for mile
s around. Beneath the portrait of Pushkin, similarly attached to the tower, were Pushkin’s ‘prophetic verses’ from the poem ‘To Chaadaev’, from the year 1818: