Stalin: A Biography

of Pushkin’s and Tolstoi’s writings were banned. Even so, much of the pre-revolutionary artistic heritage with its conservative, liberal and apolitical elements was made available to the public. Stalin’s cultural programme was an unstable mixture. He could kill artists at will and yet his policies were incapable of producing great art unless he either deliberately or unconsciously overlooked, at least to some extent, what his artists were really doing.

Culture in general attracted his occasional — and unpredictable — interventions. Stalin’s aide Lev Mekhlis rang up Pravda cartoonist Boris Yefimov in 1937 and told him to come immediately to the Kremlin. Suspecting the worst, Yefimov feigned influenza. But ‘he’ — Stalin — was insisting; Yefimov could postpone the visit at most by a day. In fact Stalin simply wished to say that he thought Yefimov should cease drawing Japanese figures with protruding teeth. ‘Definitely,’ replied the cartoonist. ‘There won’t be any more teeth.’¹⁴ Stalin’s interventions were equally direct in film production. Boris Shumyatski, the People’s Commissar in charge of Soviet cinema until his arrest in 1938, understood that the General Secretary was the sole reviewer who had to be taken seriously.¹⁵ Stalin had screening facilities set up in his dachas outside Moscow and by the Black Sea. Films such as Lenin in October were among his favourites; but he liked audiences to be entertained as well as indoctrinated. He did not object to an escapist melodrama like Circus; and as propaganda came to stress patriotism, Stalin applauded the films Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevski directed by Sergei Eizenshtein. It was a favour which Eizenshtein both relished and feared: he knew that Stalin would pounce with fury upon any scenes he deemed to conflict with current official politics.

Such artistic works of distinction as were created in the 1930s — with very few exceptions — came into being despite him. The works of Anna Akhmatova, who composed her wonderful elegiac cycle of poems Requiem in 1935–40, were banned from the press. (Only in the Second World War, when her verses were useful for raising public morale, did Stalin somewhat relent.)¹⁶ That masterpiece of Russian prose, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, remained in his desk drawer at his death and was not published in full in the Soviet Union until 1975. Stalin even terrorised the genius of mid-century Russian classical music Dmitri Shostakovich, who was denounced for writing pieces which nobody could whistle. Shostakovich was constrained to ‘confess’ his errors; indeed his Fifth Symphony in 1937 became known as ‘A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism’. Music, however, was less harshly treated than the other arts. Terrified though he had been, Shostakovich went on writing and having his symphonies performed. Just a few fine literary pieces were printed. Among them were Sholokhov’s two novels and some of Andrei Platonov’s short stories. But generally Stalin’s rule spread a blight over the already damaged artistic environment of the USSR.

The Great Terror of 1937–8 was to scare most intellectuals into cooperating overtly with the state or else just keeping their heads down. Just a very few of them challenged authority. Osip Mandelshtam in 1934 read out an anti-Stalin poem to a private soiree:¹⁷

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,
Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

But where there’s so much as half-conversation
The Kremlin man of the mountains will be mentioned.

His fingers are as fat as grubs
And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer
And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders — fawning
Half-men for him to play with.
They whinny, purr or whine
As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung
Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat
For the broad-chested Ossete.

The last line reproduced the (unproved) rumour that Stalin was of Ossetian ancestry.

The listeners that evening included an informer, and the poet was arrested. Even Stalin, though, was unsure what to do with him. His instinct was to execute him; but instead he telephoned another great poet, Boris Pasternak, and asked whether Mandelshtam’s was a truly wonderful talent. Pasternak was in acute embarrassment: if he said yes, he too might be arrested; but to say no would be to condemn his friend and rival to the Gulag. Pasternak gave an equivocal answer, prompting Stalin to comment sarcastically: ‘If I had a poet friend who was in trouble, I’d throw myself at a wall to save him!’¹⁸ Mandelshtam was sent to the Gulag in 1938. The list of fine artists who were shot or incarcerated is depressingly long. More great intellectuals perished in the 1930s than survived. Isaak Babel, writer of wonderful short stories about the Red cavalry in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920, was a victim. So was the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerkhold. Even Mikhail Bulgakov, whose plays had pleased Stalin in the 1920s, was ushered into the pits of depression. He perished a broken man in freedom in 1940. Anna Akhmatova suffered despite never being arrested: her son Lev was taken by the police in her place. Unlike Bulgakov, she endured her situation with lasting fortitude.

The repression came also to scholarship and the natural sciences. Among the victims of the show trials in 1929–31 were historians such as Sergei Platonov who were accused of Russian nationalist activity. Yevgeni Tarle, who later became one of Stalin’s favourite historians, was locked up. Literary criticism was another dangerous scholarly area. Although Stalin enlisted nineteenth-century poetry and prose in his programme for cultural revolution, he was not going to permit the publication of unorthodox interpretations. Scientific teaching and research were also persecuted whenever he saw them as a threat to the regime. The list of outstanding figures who were repressed is a long one. It included the biologist Nikolai Vavilov, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and the physicist Lev Landau.

This treatment of the country’s scientists clashed with the official campaign to put the USSR in the vanguard of scientific progress. Yet the Soviet Union was a political despotism and Stalin had prejudices which he imposed even on areas of human enquiry where he had no expertise whatever. He also had a bias in favour of scientists who came from the working class or peasantry and, regardless of their limited education, challenged conventional ideas. He was further attracted to any scientific idea which appeared congenial to the crude version of Marxist epistemology and ontology which he espoused (and which he wrote up in the chapter on dialectical materialism in the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): A Short Course.¹⁹) The most notorious case was Timofei Lysenko, a self-styled geneticist who claimed to be able to breed new strains of plant by changing their climatic environment. Trained geneticists such as Vavilov protested that Lysenko ignored decades of proof that plants did not pass on their environmentally acquired characteristics from one generation to another. Lysenkoism was a bastard form of the Lamarckian propositions of natural selection. Vavilov failed to interest Stalin; Lysenko captivated his enthusiasm. The result was a catastrophe for Soviet genetics and the consignment of Vavilov to a forced-labour camp.