Natasha's Dance (79 page)

    Party’s mythic version of its own revolutionary history; even senior writers were forced to change their works if they did not adhere to this doxology.*

    To the sophisticated Western reader this no doubt seems a horrible perversion of the role of literature. But it did not appear so in Stalin’s Russia, where the overwhelming mass of the reading public was new to the conventions of literary fiction, and there was less awareness of the difference between the real world and the world of books. People approached literature, as they had perhaps once approached the icons or the stories of the saints, in the conviction that it held up moral truths for the guidance of their lives. The German writer Lion Feuchtwanger commented on this peculiar characteristic of the Soviet reading public when he visited Moscow in 1937:

    Among Soviet people the thirst for reading is totally unimaginable. Newspapers, journals, books - all this is absorbed without quenching the thirst to the tiniest degree. Reading is one of the main activities of daily life. But for the reader in the Soviet Union there are, as it were, no clear divisions between the reality in which he lives and the world he reads about in books. The reader treats the heroes of his books as if they are actual people. He argues with them, denounces them, and he even reads realities into the events of the story and its characters.’
⁷

    Isaiah Berlin noted the same attitudes to literature on his visit to the Soviet Union in 1945:

    The rigid censorship which, with so much else, suppressed pornography, trash and low-grade thrillers such as fill railway bookstalls in the West, served to make the response of Soviet readers and theatre audiences purer, more direct and naive than ours; I noticed that at performances of Shakespeare or Sheridan or Griboedov, members of the audience, some of them obviously country folk, were apt to react to the action on the stage or to lines spoken by the

    * The most famous example is Alexander Fadeev. In 1946 he won the Stalin Prize for
The Young Guard,
a semi-factual novel about the underground youth organization in occupied Ukraine during the Second World War. Attacked in the press for under-rating the role of the Party leadership, Fadeev was forced to add new material to his novel. This enlarged version, published in 1951, was then hailed as a classic Socialist Realist text.

    actors… with loud expressions of approval or disapproval; the excitement generated was, at times, very strong and, to a visitor from the West, both unusual and touching.
⁹⁸

    In the cinema the state’s concern for art to play a morally didactic role was crucial to the rise of the Socialist Realist film. With the start of the Five-year Plan the Party expressed its impatience with the avant-garde directors, whose intellectual films never really drew a mass audience. Surveys showed that the Soviet public preferred foreign films, action-packed adventures or romantic comedies to the propaganda films of Vertov or Eisenstein.
⁹⁹
In 1928 a Party Conference on Cinema was held at which there were louds calls for film to play a more effective role in mobilizing mass enthusiasm for the Five-year Plan and the class war. The avant-garde directors of the 1920s -Vertov, Pudovkin, Kuleshov - were all condemned as ‘formalists’, intellectuals who were more concerned with cinema as art than with making films that could ‘be understood by the millions’.
¹⁰⁰
Eisenstein’s
October,
which had been released on the eve of the conference, was bitterly attacked for its ‘formalist’ preoccupation with montage, for the lack of any individual heroes in the film which made it hard for a mass audience to identify with, for the
typage
casting of the Lenin character (played by a worker named Nikandrov), whose woodenness did so much to offend Party sensibilities, and - of special offence to Stalin, who ordered that his image be cut out after previewing the film at the studio - for the fact that it depicted Trotsky, the military leader of the October insurrection, who had been kicked out of the Party just three months before the conference began.
¹⁰¹

    But there were just as many criticisms of the leadership of Sovkino, the Soviet film trust under the command of Lunacharsky’s Commissariat, for failing to provide an attractive and more healthy Soviet alternative to the cheap entertainment films imported from abroad. As a propaganda weapon of the state, the Soviet cinema needed to be popular. ‘Our films must be 100 percent ideologically correct and 100 percent commercially viable,’ declared one Party official.
¹⁰²

    In 1930 Sovkino was finally disbanded, together with the independent studios which had flourished in the 1920s, and the Soviet cinema was nationalized as one vast state enterprise under the centralized

    direction of Soiuzkino (Ail-Union Soviet Film Trust). Its chief apparatchik, Boris Shumiatsky, became the ultimate authority in the world of Soviet cinema (until his own arrest and execution as a ‘Trotskyite’ in 1938), although Stalin, who loved the cinema and frequently watched movies in his Kremlin cinema, kept a beady eye on the latest films and often intervened in their production.* Shumiatsky ran a sort of ‘Soviet Hollywood’, with huge production studios in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and Minsk reeling off a succession of smash-hit Soviet musicals, romantic comedies, war adventures and Western-modelled frontier films (‘Easterns’) like
Chapaev
(1934), Stalin’s favourite film.+ Shumiatsky drew up a Five-year Plan for the cinema which called for no less than 500 films to be made in 193 2 alone. All of them were to conform to the new ideological directives, which demanded optimistic pictures about Soviet life with positive individual heroes drawn from the ranks of the proletariat. Party-controlled producers and script departments were placed in charge of the production to ensure that all this entertainment was politically correct. ‘Life is getting gayer, comrades,’ Stalin famously remarked. But only certain types of laughter were allowed. This was the climate to which Eisenstein returned in 1932. For the previous three years he had been abroad - a semi-dissident ambassador of the Soviet cinema. He travelled to Europe and on to Hollywood to learn about the new techniques of sound, signing up for several films he never made. He enjoyed the freedom of the West, and he was no doubt fearful of going back to Russia, where Shumiatsky’s attacks on the ‘formalists’ were at their most extreme when directed against him. Stalin accused Eisenstein of defecting to the West. The NKVD bullied his poor mother into begging Eisenstein to return home, threatening her with some form of punishment if he failed to do so. In the first two years after his return Eisenstein had several film proposals turned

    * In 1938, in the final stages of the editing of Eisenstein’s
Alexander Nevsky,
Stalin asked to see the rough cuts. The film-maker hurried to the Kremlin and, in his haste, left behind one reel. Stalin loved the film but, since no one dared to inform him that it was incomplete, it was released without the missing reel (J. Goodwin.
Eisenstein, Cinema and History
(Urbana, 1993), p. 162).

    + Stalin could apparently recite long passages of the dialogue by heart. See R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds.),
The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema Documents, 1896-
1939 (London, 1994), p. SX4.

    down for production by Soiuzkino. He withdrew to a teaching post at the State Film School and, although he lavished praise (in his public statements) on the mediocre films that were churned out at that time, he stood firm by the films which he had made, courageously refusing to denounce himself, as he was called upon to do, at the Party’s Second Conference on Cinema in 1935.
¹⁰³

    Under pressure to produce a film which conformed to the Socialist Realist mould, Eisenstein accepted a commission from the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) in 1935. He was to realize a film scenario that took its title, although not much else, from Turgenev’s ‘Bezhin Meadow’, a story about peasant boys discussing supernatural signs of death which formed one of the
Sketches from a Hunter’s Album.
The film was actually inspired by the story of Pavlik Morozov, a boy hero who, according to the version of his life propagandized by the Stalinist regime, had been murdered by the ‘kulaks’ of his remote Urals village after he had denounced his own father, the chairman of the village Soviet, as a kulak opponent of the Soviet campaign for collectivization.* By 1935, the Morozov cult was at its height: songs and poems, even a cantata with full orchestra and chorus, had been written about him. This no doubt persuaded Eisenstein that it was safe to make a film about him. But his conception of the film was deemed unacceptable. He turned it from a story about individuals to a conflict between types, between old and new, and, in a scene that showed the communists dismantling a church to break the resistance of the kulak saboteurs, he came dangerously close to suggesting that collectivization had been something destructive. In August 1936, with most of the film already shot, Eisenstein was ordered by Shumiatsky to rewrite the script. With the help of the writer Isaac Babel he recommenced shooting in the autumn. The church scene was cut and a speech in tribute to Stalin was added. But then, in March 1937, Shumiatsky ordered all work on the film stopped. In an article in
Pravda
he accused Eisenstein of depicting collectivization as an elemental conflict between good and evil, and

    * In fact Morozov was murdered by the NKVD, which then executed thirty-seven kulak villagers, falsely charged with the boy’s murder for propaganda purposes. For the full story, see Y. Druzhnikov,
Informer 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov
(New Brunswick, 1997).

    denounced the film for its ‘formalist’ and religious character.
¹⁰⁴
Eisen-stein was forced to publish a ‘confession’ of his mistakes in the press, although it was penned in such a way as to be read by those whose opinions mattered to him as a satirical attack on his Stalinist masters. The negatives of the film were burned - all, that is, except a few hundred stills of extraordinary photographic beauty which were found in Eisenstein’s personal archive following his death in 1948.
¹⁰⁵

    The suppression of
Bezhin Meadow
was part of the continuing campaign against the artistic avant-garde. In 1934, at the First Writers’ Congress, Party leader Karl Radek, a former Trotskyite who was now making up for his past errors by proving himself the good Stalinist, condemned the writings of James Joyce - a huge influence on Eisenstein and all the Soviet avant-garde. Radek described
Ulysses
as ‘a dung heap swarming with maggots and photographed by a movie camera through a microscope’.
¹⁰⁶
This no doubt held a reference to the famous maggot scene in
The Battleship Potemkin,
in which Eisenstein zooms in on the offending larvae by filming them through the monocle of the commanding officer. Then, in January 1936,
Pravda
published a diatribe against Shostakovich’s opera
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk,
which had been a great success, with hundreds of performances in both Russia and the West since its premiere in Leningrad in 1934. The unsigned article, ‘Chaos Instead of Music’, was evidently written with the full support of the Kremlin, and evidence suggests, as it was rumoured at the time, that Andrei Zhdanov, the Party boss in Leningrad, wrote it on the personal instructions of Stalin, who, just a few days before the article appeared, had seen the opera and clearly hated it.
¹⁰⁷

    From the first moment, the listener is shocked by a deliberately dissonant, confused stream of sound. Fragments of melody, embryonic phrases appear - only to disappear again in the din, the grinding, and the screaming… This music… carries into the theatre… the most negative features of ‘Meyerholdism’ infinitely multiplied. Here we have ‘leftist’ confusion instead of natural, human music… The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear. Leftist distortion in opera stems from the same source as the leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science. Petty-bourgeois innovations lead to a break with real art, real science and real literature… All this is primitive and vulgar.
¹⁰⁸

    This was not just an attack on Shostakovich, although, to be sure, its effect on him was devastating enough that he never dared again to write an opera. It was an attack on all modernists - in painting, poetry and theatre, as well as in music. Meyerhold, in particular, who was brave and self-assured enough to speak out publicly in defence of Shostakovich and against the Party’s stifling influence on art, was subjected to denunciations of a feverish intensity. He was condemned in the Soviet press as an ‘alien’, and even though he tried to save himself by staging the Socialist Realist classic
How the Steel Was Tempered
in 1937, his theatre was closed down at the beginning of the following year. Stanislavsky came to his old student’s aid, inviting him to join his Opera Theatre in March 1938, although artistically the two directors were poles apart. When Stanislavsky died that summer, Meyerhold became the theatre’s artistic director. But in 1939 he was arrested, tortured brutally by the NKVD to extract a ‘confession’, and then, in the arctic frost of early 1940, he was shot.
¹⁰⁹

    This renewed assault against the avant-garde involved a counterrevolution in cultural politics. As the 1930s wore on, the regime completely abandoned its commitment to the revolutionary idea of establishing a ‘proletarian’ or ‘Soviet’ form of culture that could be distinguished from the culture of the past. Instead, it promoted a return to the nationalist traditions of the nineteenth century, which it reinvented in its own distorted forms as Socialist Realism. This reassertion of the ‘Russian classics’ was a fundamental aspect of the Stalinist political programme, which used culture to create the illusion of stability in the age of mass upheaval over which it reigned, and which championed its version of the nationalist school in particular to counteract the influence of the ‘foreign’ avant-garde. In all the arts the nineteenth-century classics were now held up as the model which Soviet artists were expected to follow. Contemporary writers like Akhmatova could not find a publisher, but the complete works of Pushkin and Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy (though not Dostoevsky),* were