It was not so much left-wing sympathy that was in play here as the affinity between the countries and their societies. They were both large countries encompassing entire continents. Despite the racial divide in the United States, both countries had mixed societies that surpassed the European nation-state in this respect. Above, all, however, both countries were societies in the course of change; they were in flux, dynamic and full of opportunities for breathtaking careers – and also failures.30 The consequence was that both Russians and Americans could feel a small degree of comfort in each other’s company. They were citizens of a world that had left the Old Europe behind, and this was the true foundation of their mutual understanding.31
The American way of life in 1937
Il'f and Petrov had concluded their book with the observation that ‘It is interesting to study this country, but we would not care to live there.’32 This was evidently intended as the expression not of their political conformism but of their own true feeling. What indeed could such celebrated Soviet writers have done with their lives outside their own country! There were other distancing effects to be seen in their account. Nevertheless, they all sound rather formulaic and dogmatic, whereas the impression conveyed by their description of life in America is that they were amazed, confused and fascinated by what they saw. This applied with particular force to those aspects of American life that related to practical affairs occupying a pre-political space and constituting a life this side of politics and the state. The state and its presence scarcely figure in their reports. They explore what later became known as ‘civil society’, and what fascinated them about their stay in America was the American way of life, the sensible, rational organization of ordinary life. This includes traffic routes as well as the visible qualities of life in the community, the goods displayed in the shops and friendliness as a general form of behaviour, the hard realities of the struggle for survival as much as the miracles of technology. What interests them is the unspectacular, unsensational, ordinary everyday practicalities of life that are actually not worthy of mention. But, when viewed against the backdrop of Soviet life, all these things were simply unprecedented: everything was available in exchange for money – there were no queues and no shops for the privileged; the idea that the customer was king was not just an empty slogan but a precondition of commercial success. In America there was no time for endless consultations, meetings or discussions. This made for a stark contrast with the bizarre and endless meetings characteristic of the Soviet bureaucracy. And the fact that they could simply attend a press conference at the White House, and that at the end of it the journalists could just take their leave from President Roosevelt with a ‘Good bye, Mr President’, amounted to outright blasphemy in a country where the representatives of power surrounded themselves with a ring of secrets and secret agents.33 And this fact remains astonishing even when we recall that, with the passing of the new ‘Stalin Constitution’ and the preparations for the elections to the Supreme Soviet, the public space was simply full to bursting with pseudo-democratic rhetoric.
This encomium to American democracy, the American culture of service and consumerism – in short, the American way of life – did not pass unnoticed or uncommented on in the Moscow of 1937. Alongside respectful or friendly reviews – Lev Nikulin called the book ‘a beautiful, clever and joyful book’ and Aleksei Tolstoi said it was ‘astonishingly mature’ – there were also reprimands. In Izvestiia on 21 March 1937, the authors were accused of having failed to ‘compare the results of the victory of the proletarian revolution with the situation of their American working-class brethren’.34 In another review, the authors were rebuked for conveying the view that services were the fundamental feature of American reality.35 Nevertheless, Il'f and Petrov’s reports and the America book were published and circulated throughout the country in huge editions, in instalments, as a series of reports and in book form. And all of these appeared not just in the capital, but also in Ivanovo, Smolensk and Khabarovsk.36 In this way it came about that in the year of the Great Terror, in which personal connections with America could provide grounds for suspicion and denunciations, it was still possible for a eulogy of the American way of life to be published, and a hymn of praise to actually existing democracy in America could be sung in the same year as the hysterical, murderous mass campaigns.37
Utopia as present-day reality
Evgenii Petrov survived his co-author Il'ia Il'f by no more than five years. He died during the war, when the plane in which he was returning to Moscow was shot down by the Germans. But he left behind the unfinished manuscript of a novel titled Journey into the Land of Communism. It was set in the year 1963, and the impressions Petrov gained in his trip to America were pervasive motifs. This fragment of a novel was not published until the 1960s. It deals with the journey to the USSR undertaken by some Americans – chief among them a journalist and a diplomat. After years of tempestuous modernization the Russia familiar to the diplomat from the thirties had become unrecognizable. By way of compensation, the description of the homeland of communism in 1963 was given many of the features of America that Il'f and Petrov had identified in their book of 1936. Old Moscow had ceased to exist, or it survived only as a museum. The new underground central station is a blend of the Moscow Metro and New York Central Station. All employees speak English. Luggage is brought directly to the hotel. Moscow is encircled by a five-lane motorway ring. The streets are cleared by snowploughs, ‘just like in America’. The express train with an observation car and a library is clearly modelled on American transcontinental trains. The landscape it rushes through, with its single-storey bungalows, gas stations and drugstores, is reminiscent of the American suburbs. In the meantime, a ‘People’s Commissar for Services’ has been created; absolutely every product can be ordered by telephone or mail order and it will be delivered punctually to your home address. In many respects the Soviet Union has come to resemble pre-war America, but with important differences. It is like New York, but minus the Bronx and Harlem; the capital resembles Washington, but is not disfigured by the proximity of the slums. American democracy has been adopted, but without its vulgarity. The lessons of American pragmatism have been absorbed, but this does not prevent a preoccupation with higher things – art, philosophy and aesthetics. During the entire journey he does not see a single advertisement – advertising has been banned for the last ten years! Although he finds that the whole of Russia looks American, he feels there is a fundamental distinction. ‘And once again a modern Russian landscape flew past. It had something American about it, or rather there was nothing American about it at all.’ Something irritates the traveller who cannot rid himself of these comparisons with America.
I shall have a lot more to say on the subject of America and the Soviet Union, firstly because I am looking at everything through American eyes, and secondly because in my opinion there is nothing more interesting than the topic of America and the Soviet Union. But, at this precise moment, I was astonished less by the differences based on the fundamental difference between the two social systems than by something more superficial. There was an amazingly sharp distinction, which was somehow underlined by the undoubted similarity, but which I was nonetheless unable to grasp. What was it? Everything was present: the American spaces, the American distances, American speeds, American roads, and finally the one-storey American townships, their streets blocked by automobiles – it all looks exactly the same. Yet I was unable to discover the source of the all-important difference.
It turns out to be the emptiness created by the absence of advertisements! However, this emptiness gradually fills up as the train approaches Moscow and the lights in the train are switched off to enable the passengers to enjoy the view of the city. On the horizon, the building of the Palace of the Soviets looms up with the statue of Lenin at its apex.38 Advertisements versus monumental propaganda – the difference of life forms has been re-established.
At around the same time, when Evgenii Petrov was working on
his Journey into the Land of Communism, the thoughts of Nikolai Bukharin were also preoccupied by America. Ever since 1937, he had been sitting in the Lubianka, waiting to be put on trial. Of the roughly two hundred poems that he wrote in the Lubianka as Stalin’s prisoner, one bore the title ‘Skyscraper’ – perhaps it was a reminiscence of his years in exile in America.39 And in the letter he wrote to Stalin in December, he said that, if his life were to be spared, he would have one request: to be expelled from Russia and allowed to go to America.
32
‘I Know of No Other Country …’: 1937 and the Production of Soviet Space
The image of the Soviet Union as a new fatherland extended into the very heart of its courts of law. Arkadii Rozengol’ts was the former People’s Commissar for Foreign Trade and was now one of the accused in the third Moscow show trial, in which he received a death sentence. In his final plea to the court on 12 March 1938, he took his leave of the world, quoting from a song:
The pain of parting is increased by the fact that we already have genuine results from the programme of socialist construction. For the first time we have life, a vigorous life, full of joy and colour. Millions, dozens of millions of people, children and citizens of the Soviet Union, my own children included, sing the song ‘Spacious is my homeland … I know of no other country on earth where a person can breathe so freely.’ And I repeat these words, I, the prisoner, I repeat these words – for there is no other country on earth where there is such enthusiasm for work, where you can hear such happy, joyful laughter, where people sing and dance so freely, where love is so splendid, and I say, ‘Farewell, my beloved country!’ I hope that people will believe me. I need nothing, neither from the court nor from other people. I neither will nor can utter a single false word when I turn to my fellow human beings one last time.1
His reference to this song is no accident.
The birth of the Soviet Union from the spirit of songs for the masses
The ‘Song of the Motherland’, from the popular Soviet film The Circus has been called the true national anthem of the USSR. Written by Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, composed by Isaak Dunaevskii and sung by Liubov Orlova, the star of the Soviet cinema, to the accompaniment of a choir under the direction of the master conductor Grigorii Aleksandrov, the song had become the signature tune of an entire epoch, or at least a generation.2
Refrain:
Spacious is my homeland;
Streams and fields and forests full and fair.
I know of no other country
Where a man can breathe a freer air!
From great Moscow to the farthest border,
From the Arctic seas to Samarkand,
Man can walk and feel that he’s the owner
Of his own unbounded Motherland.
Here his life can flow as freely, broadly,
As the Volga brimming and unchecked.
Here the young will always have clear roadway
And the old are always shown respect.
Refrain.
You can’t see the end to all our fields
Or recall the names of all the towns you’ve heard,
Most precious of all words is ‘Comrade’,
It means more to us than any other word.
With this word we are at home in all places
And with this word we always comprehend:
There are no longer black or coloured races,
For with it the whole world is your friend.
The breeze of spring is blowing o’er our homeland,
Every day we live more joyfully,
And in the world you won’t find any people,
Who know better than us how to laugh and love.
If an enemy should wish to crush us,
We shall set our faces stern and hard.
Like a bride we love our homeland dearly,
And o’er our tender mother we stand guard.3
This song encapsulated the feelings of people who lived in a country that had experienced traumatic shocks. It was intended to provide them with the assurance that they were part of a great community and that together they would master the future. The song is written in an optimistic major key and with a steady rhythm. It provides a sketch of the space in which this community is at home. It is vast, limitless even. It has its own typical landscapes – forests, rivers and fields. Only one river is named – the Volga – and only one city – Moscow – but the song speaks not of ‘Russia’ but of an ‘unbounded Motherland’, a supranational, non-national space, without ethnic definition. The song does not celebrate a national community but the communities of nations and, above all, generations which, working together, will give birth to a new world. Nevertheless, this ‘Song of the Motherland’ symbolizes the birth of the Soviet homeland better than any other cultural document. In 1937 it was joined by a further document, the ‘Stalin Constitution’, which had been approved by the Eighth Congress of the Soviets in December 1936 and which provided the legal basis for the elections to the Supreme Soviet in December 1937. Both together stand for the production of ‘Sovietness’: the song for the masses stood for the creation of solidarity of feeling, the electoral campaign for the creation of a quite particular Soviet version of ‘constitutional patriotism’. But even these were merely steps on the way to a state of a novel kind, namely a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that transcended both the old empire and the traditional nation-state.
What was expressed by the popular ‘Song of the Motherland’ – the projection of the Soviet Union as a homeland –was repeated daily and a million times over in all genres and media of every kind. Moscow was the capital because it could supply the images that constituted this new space. Moscow was the point at which images from the ends of the earth could come together and form a new unified image.4
Moscow as an image-making machine
The concentration of media in Moscow made the city into a synthesizing and homogenizing machine.5 To convince ourselves of that, we need only look through the calendar of cultural and other events during 1937. The whole empire seemed to be on show on the stages of the capital.6 In the so-called Decades of Culture we find the cultures of all the nationalities of the USSR. Moscow theatres played host to Uzbek singers and poets; the ageing Kazak poet Dzhambul Dzhabaev became a star of the Moscow literary scene. Tadzhik music and dance ensembles displayed their art. In the Moscow Metro, visitors from Central Asia stood out, thanks to their flamboyant colourful clothing. In exhibitions, in the culture parks and on Red Square, mountain tribesmen from the Caucasus performed with their falcons. Moscow celebrated not just Pushkin, but also Shota Rustaveli, the poet of the national Georgian epic, and Taras Shevchenko, the father of Ukrainian national literature. The All-Union Agriculture Exhibition, planned for 1937 but not opened until 1939, was the USSR in miniature. It filled a vast exhibition site in the north-east of the capital. There you could find the Soviet commonwealth laid out in its entirety and travel through the different time zones of the empire, with their diverse climates and economies. There were the vineyards and tea plantations of Georgia, the cotton fields of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the sugar beet industry of Ukraine, the wheat fields of Kuban and the mink farms of Siberia. Of the fifty-two pavilions of the Exhibition, twenty-two represented individual republics and autonomous territories designed to express the national character, the ‘spirit’ and the culture of the ethnic groups of the USSR. The architects made every effort to design the pavilions in the national style – and, in many instances, their buildings in fact signalled the birth of a modern national style. The Uzbek pavilion was a striking case in point. Only Russia had no pavilion of its own and therefore no building that might have been able to exemplify a specific Russian style. Russia was represented solely by individual regions: the Volga region, Leningrad, the territories of Moscow, Riazan and Tula – and, of course, by the ‘themed pavilions’ such as ‘Mechanization’ or ‘Collective Farms’.7 In this way, visitors to this and other exhibitions learned not just about the new
state symbols, the coats of arms of the republics and the scripts of unfamiliar languages, they also learned something about the countries and the peoples concerned.8
Figure 32.1 Poster for the Karakum Rally
‘The country was infinitely vast, but technology made it possible to overcome the distances. Car rallies led from Moscow to Simferopol or Tashkent. There were reports about long-distance skiers who travelled the length and breadth of European Russia and about motor races that went from Leningrad to the Pamir Mountains or Irkutsk.’
The fact that the Soviet Union was a ‘state of the nations’, rather than an empire in the old sense or a nation-state in the modern sense, was evident throughout. The mass media celebrated heroes of labour and model women collective farmers: they had Ukrainian, Armenian, Russian, Uzbek or Jewish names. Every parade on Red Square, every sizeable festivity, became a multinational march – not without an exotic flavour – and in this respect it was not unlike the parades and state rituals of the late tsarist empire.
Week by week, pictures were circulated round the country – in newspapers and magazines, cinema newsreels and popular films. The Soviet Union was pictured as a continent of its own, with sun-drenched beaches in the south, mountainous landscapes, steppes, and snow- and ice-covered expanses. The country was indeed infinitely vast, but technology made it possible to overcome the distances. Even its furthest point was accessible. Traversing the country and eliminating blank spots became the popular topics among travel and sports reporters. Car rallies led from Moscow to Simferopol or Tashkent. There were reports about long-distance skiers who travelled the length and breadth of European Russia and about motor races that went from Leningrad to the Pamir Mountains or Irkutsk. This gave rise to a new sense of space. Aeroplanes had at last made it possible to reach every point, at first for the pioneers of aviation, but later also for ordinary transport and passenger flights. The USSR was held together by a network of air routes that traversed the space with ease. Nature, so hostile in many regions, was forced to yield up its secrets; the map of the USSR had to be redrawn. The tabula rasa of the map of the Old Russian Empire was suddenly filled with brightly coloured cartographic symbols. They showed mineral deposits, mining and industrial locations, new towns, canals and railway lines. In this way an empty landscape was transformed into a landscape full of wealth and unsuspected prospects. There were now no insuperable barriers: there was no mountain that could not be climbed, and no river that could not be tamed or dammed or compelled to flow through a new riverbed.9 An infinite space was thus transformed into a manageable territory. After centuries of impenetrability, Russia had now become passable and accessible. Forests that had been endless and uncharted were now open to logging, and timber was their ‘white gold’. New names began to appear on these maps for places known only for their unsuitability for human habitation: Magadan, Vorkuta, Kotlas and Dudinka.10 These territories had had settlements imposed on them by force in recent years: they had become prisons for hundreds of thousands of people. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the gulags – the labour camps on which so many of the large-scale building projects of the Stalin era depended – left few signs of their presence on publicly available maps. Vast expanses of land that appeared blank on the maps were in fact inhabited by prisoners. The land had been ‘conquered’ and ‘tamed’ by grandiose construction projects. But these spaces, settled only by inmates of the camps, were secret places, invisible on maps, statistically ‘out of reach’.11 Bases were established in the teeth of a hostile environment, even in the polar regions. The picture worlds of Soviet magazines – SSSR na stroike (the magazine appeared in four languages, including English: USSR in Construction), Ogonek and Vokrug Sveta among others12 – were explorations in a vast country, conducted with reindeer sleds, in automobiles, on the backs of camels, by train, but for preference by plane. Looking at the view from the window of a plane was the only way to see the country as a whole. The plane was the best method of overcoming and annihilating space.13 This picture world also had a frontier and a world beyond that frontier, one that was mostly hostile. The frontier guard with a dog, most commonly an Alsatian, was one of the central figures of those years (the All-Union Exhibition included a dog breeding pavilion), living in a solitude that lasted months on end, like trappers in Wild West films, always on the move in forests, in mountains or on the shores, and maintaining a vigilant watch to protect the homeland from foreign interlopers.14 What was interesting about reports from abroad and about foreign countries was how different they were from the USSR and to what advantage the USSR and ‘Soviet achievements’ emerged from the comparison. These ethnographic and geographical investigations seem to have served the purpose of enabling the country to become acquainted with itself.15
Moscow, 1937 Page 65
