Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

shot. ² Stalin had no precise plan for the growing Terror, just the belief that the Party had to be terrorized into submission and that old enemies had to be eradicated. Opportunistic and supersensitive, Stalin meandered towards his goal. The NKVD could not link Leningrad to the “Moscow Centre” of Zinoviev and Kamenev but it had the means to persuade its prisoners to do so. By mid-January, they had indeed encouraged a prisoner to implicate Zinoviev and Kamenev who were sentenced to ten and five years respectively. Stalin distributed a secret letter that warned that all the opposition had to be “treated like White Guards” and “arrested and isolated.” The flood of arrests was so huge that the camps were deluged by “Kirov’s Torrent,” yet, simultaneously, Stalin orchestrated a jazz-playing “thaw”: “Life has become merrier, comrades,” he said. “Life has become better.”³[79]

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On 11 January 1935, Stalin and most of the Politburo attended a gala celebration of the Soviet film industry at the Bolshoi which was a sort of “Oscars without the jokes.” The directors were handed Orders of Lenin.

“For us,” Lenin had said, “the most important of all the arts is cinema,” the art form of the new society. Stalin personally controlled a “Soviet Hollywood” through the State Film Board, run by Boris Shumiatsky with whom he had been in exile. Stalin did not merely interfere in movies, he minutely supervised the directors and films down to their scripts: his archive reveals how he even helped write the songs. He talked about films with his entourage and passed every film before it was shown to the public, becoming his own supreme censor. Stalin was Joseph Goebbels combined with Alexander Korda, an unlikely pair united by love of celluloid, rolled into one.⁴

He was an obsessional movie buff. In 1934, he had already seen the new Cossack “Eastern” Chapaev and The Jolly Fellows so often he knew them by heart. Directed by Grigory Alexandrov, the latter was personally supervised by Stalin. When this director finished The Jolly Fellows,[80] Shumiatsky decided to tantalize Stalin by showing only the first reel, pretending the second was unfinished. The Vozhd loved it: “Show me the rest!”

Shumiatsky summoned Alexandrov, nervously waiting outside: “You’re wanted at court!”

“It’s a jolly film,” Stalin told Alexandrov. “I felt I’d had a month’s holiday. Take it away from the director. He might spoil it!” he quipped.

Alexandrov immediately started a series of these happy-go-lucky light musical comedies: Circus was followed by Stalin’s all-time favourite, Volga, Volga. When the director came to make the last in the series, he called it Cinderella but Stalin wrote out a list of twelve possible titles including Shining Path which Alexandrov accepted. Stalin actually worked on the lyrics of the songs too: there is an intriguing note in his archive dated July 1935 in which he writes out the words for one of the songs in pencil, changing and crossing out to get the lyric to scan:

A joyful song is easy for the heart;
It doesn’t bore you ever;
And all the villages small and big adore the song;
Big towns love the tune.

Beneath it, he scrawls the words: “To spring. Spirit. Mikoyan” and then “Thank you comrades.”⁵

When the director Alexander Dovzhenko appealed for Stalin’s help with his movie Aerograd, he was summoned to the Little Corner within a day and asked to read his entire script to Voroshilov and Molotov. Later Stalin suggested his next movie, adding that “neither my words nor newspaper articles put you under any obligation. You’re a free man… If you have other plans, do something else. Don’t be embarrassed. I summoned you so you should know this.” He advised the director to use “Russian folk songs—wonderful songs” which he liked to play on his gramophone.

“Did you ever hear them?” asked Stalin.

No, replied the director, who had no phonograph.

“An hour after the conversation, they brought the gramophone to my house, a present from our leader that,” concluded Dovzhenko, “I will treasure to the end of my life.”⁶

Meanwhile, the magnates discussed how to manage Sergei Eisenstein, thirty-six, the Latvian-German-Jewish avant-garde director of Battleship Potemkin. He had lingered too long in Hollywood and, as Stalin informed the American novelist Upton Sinclair, “lost the trust of his friends in the USSR.” Stalin told Kaganovich he was a “Trotskyite if not worse.”

Eisenstein was lured back and put to work on Bezhin Meadow, inspired by the story of Pavlik Morozov, the boy-hero who denounced his own father for kulakism. The tawdry project did not turn out as Stalin hoped. Kaganovich loudly denounced his colleagues’ trust: “We can’t trust Eisenstein. He’ll again waste millions and give us nothing… because he’s against Socialism. Eisenstein was saved by Vyacheslav [Molotov] and Andrei Zhdanov who were willing to give the director another chance.” But Stalin knew he was “very talented.” As tensions rose with Germany, he commissioned Eisenstein to make a film about that vanquisher of foreign invaders, Alexander Nevsky, promoting his new paradigm of socialism and nationalism. Stalin was delighted with it.

When Stalin wrote a long memorandum to the director Friedrich Emmler about his film The Great Citizen, his third point read: “The reference to Stalin must be excluded. Instead of Stalin, mention the Central Committee.”⁷

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Stalin’s modesty was in its way as ostentatious as the excesses of his personal cult. The leaders themselves had promoted Stalin’s cult that was the triumph of his inferiority complex. Mikoyan and Khrushchev blamed Kaganovich for encouraging Stalin’s concealed vanity and inventing “Stalinism”:

“Let’s replace Long Live Leninism with Long Live Stalinism!” Stalin criticized Kaganovich but he knew Stalin better and he continued to promote “Stalinism.”

“Why do you eulogize me as if a single person decides everything!” asked Stalin. Meanwhile he personally supervised the cult that was flourishing in the newspapers: in Pravda, Stalin was mentioned in half the editorials between 1933 and 1939. He was always given flowers and photographed with children. Articles appeared: “How I got acquainted with Comrade Stalin.” The planes that flew over Red Square formed the word “Stalin” in the skies. Pravda declared: “Stalin’s life is our life, our beautiful present and future.” When he appeared at the Seventh Congress of Soviets, two thousand delegates screamed and cheered. A writer described the reaction as “love, devotion, selflessness.” A female worker whispered: “How simple he is, how modest!”

There were similar cults for the others: Kaganovich was celebrated as “Iron Lazar” and the “Iron Commissar” and in thousands of pictures at parades. Voroshilov was honoured in the “Voroshilov Rations” for the army and the “Voroshilov Marksman’s Prize” and his birthday celebrations were so grandiose that Stalin gave one of his most famous speeches at them. Schoolchildren traded picture postcards of these heroes like football players, the dashing Voroshilov trading at a much higher price than the dour Molotov.⁸

Stalin’s modesty was not completely assumed: in his many battles between vainglory and humility, he simultaneously encouraged eulogy and despised it. When the Museum of the Revolution asked if they could display the original manuscripts of his works, he wrote back: “I didn’t think in your old age, you’d be such a fool. If the book is published in millions, why do you need the manuscript? I burned all the manuscripts!” ⁹ When the publishers of a Georgian memoir of his childhood sent a note to Poskrebyshev asking permission, Stalin banned Zhdanov from publishing it, complaining that it was “tactless and foolish” and demanding that the culprits “be punished.” But this was partly to keep control of the presentation of his early life.¹⁰

He was aware of the absurdities of the cult, intelligent enough to know that the worship of slaves was surely worthless. A student at a technical college was threatened with jail for throwing a paper dart that struck Stalin’s portrait. The student appealed to Stalin who backed him: “They’ve wronged you,” he wrote. “I ask… do not punish him!” Then he joked: “The good marksman who hits the target should be praised!” ¹¹