The Magical Chorus

got to use all the announced perks. But even the crumbs from their table were very tempting in a society of shortages in everything.

Gorky kept coming up with new publishing ideas, which he brought to Stalin. He wanted to bring out several monumental book series: The History of the Village, The History of Factories and Plants, and The History of the Civil War. At first Stalin supported the writer’s initiatives, even joining the editorial board for the History of the Civil War, and not just as a figurehead, but making corrections and insertions on literally every page of manuscript. When the first volume of the series came out in 1936 in an edition of 300,000 copies and sold out completely, Gorky asked Stalin for a second edition of another 100,000, and Stalin complied with his wish. (After Gorky’s death, the project was dropped.)

Gorky’s plan for The History of Factories and Plants was unusual—each book in the enormous series would be devoted to a single industrial enterprise. It was an innovative idea, a precursor to today’s cross-discipline approach to the history of production as part of cultural development. At the time, Stalin approved of this project, too (even though it was never fully implemented): it supported his ambitious plans for industrializing the Soviet Union.

Interestingly, in 1924 Stalin declared that the main character trait to be developed by a true Leninist and the new Soviet man was “the combination of Russian revolutionary sweep and American businesslike approach.”²⁰ Stalin suggested in a cycle of lectures he gave in Moscow soon after Lenin’s death, “American business character is that irrepressible force that knows no bounds, that washes away all obstacles with its business persistence. But American business has every chance of degenerating into a narrow and unprincipled small-time hustle if it is not combined with Russian revolutionary sweep.”²¹

This curious position had unexpected consequences for culture. Positioning himself as a cultural pragmatist, the leader tried to involve various artists in his plans for industrialization—not only the traditionalists dear to his heart, but also the Russian avant-garde, which he considered repulsive.

By the early 1920s some Russian innovators considered that experimentation in painting had exhausted itself (where could one go after Malevich’s Black Square or Alexander Rodchenko’s 1921 triptych called Smooth Color: Pure Blue, Pure Red, and Pure Yellow?) and moved on to so-called industrial art. The Constructivists came to the fore, with their leader and constant opponent of Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, who had declared: “Not the old, not the new, but the necessary!”

Tatlin’s most famous project was his two-meter wooden model called Monument of the Third International, intended in imitation of the Eiffel Tower as a planned construction for the propaganda apparatus of the Soviet state. The idea was utopian, eventually erecting a glass building 400 meters tall and consisting of three segments revolving at different speeds: a cube below, for the legislative organs, in the middle a pyramid, for administrative and executive agencies, and the top cylinder was to house media, “all the various means of mass information for the international proletariat.” As Punin, a leading theoretician of the avant-garde, commented in 1920, “Implementing this form would mean embodying the dynamic with the same unexcelled majesty as the static is embodied by the pyramids.”²²

Tatlin’s bold project remained unfulfilled, as did another idea close to his heart, on which he worked for almost twenty years—an engineless flying machine that would be operated by the occupant’s muscle power, a kind of winged aerial bicycle, which the artist dubbed “Letatlin”(short for Letayushchii Tatlin, Flying Tatlin).

Tatlin’s fantastic aviation model was developed with the help of Soviet military specialists and test pilots and in the early 1930s was demonstrated and discussed in quasi-governmental defense organizations like Osoaviakhim (Volunteer Association for Helping Aviation and the Navy).

Some of Tatlin’s ideas were used in the construction of the latest Soviet planes of the times, and Tatlin was even rewarded financially.²³ Along with his students, he also designed furniture, dishes, sanitary and other coats from rubberized fabric, wooden sleighs of a new design, and even an environmentally improved stove that gave more heat using less wood. Tatlin now called himself “lifestyle organizer” and all these works “material culture.” They could also be used in the defense industry.

The desire to do the “necessary” was equally felt by another leading avant-garde artist, Alexander Rodchenko. He set out with Mayakovsky in the 1920s to create the new Soviet advertising: Rodchenko’s vivid drawings and Mayakovsky’s brief and catchy slogans were extremely popular. As Rodchenko recalled: “All of Moscow was covered with our advertisements. All the kiosks of Mosselprom, all the signs, all the posters, all the newspapers and magazines were filled with them.”²⁴

Rodchenko was taken by photography and photomontage, becoming one of its leading innovators with the influential El Lissitzky. Rodchenko’s first works in that medium were phantasmagoric illustrations for Mayakovsky’s poem About That. Having developed his easily recognizable bold photographic style— dynamic composition and unusual angles—the former abstract artist turned into a dominant Soviet photographer and worked with the magazine USSR on the Construction Site (the magazine was yet another of Gorky’s ideas, implemented by Stalin).

Rodchenko went north on assignment for the magazine in 1933 to photograph the construction of the Stalin Belomor-Baltic Canal, built by thousands of convicts. A heavy tome edited by Gorky was published after a highly publicized trip of one hundred twenty writers to the construction site, which took the lives of so many people. A number of major names appeared among the writers of the anthology: Alexei Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Nikolai Tikhonov, Valentin Katayev, D. S. Mirsky; one chapter, about an international thief who turned into a model construction worker at the canal, was written by the popular Soviet satirist, Mikhail Zoshchenko, a favorite of Gorky, which later prompted Solzhenitsyn’s wrath in his Gulag Archipelago: “Oh, humanologist! Have you ever pushed a canal wheelbarrow while on punitive rations?”

Present-day commentators ponder why outstanding writers agreed to participate in an anthology in praise of forced labor and wonder if it was sincere misapprehension? Blindness? Hypocrisy? Fear of repressions? It was probably a complex mix of them all.

Gorky’s moral guilt (he gave his blessing to the volume and wrote the foreword) is obvious, even though it is unlikely that he could have done anything to change Stalin’s plans to use gulag prisoners in Soviet construction projects. On his desk in the luxurious mansion Stalin gave Gorky in Moscow, he kept a netsuke, a small Japanese ivory carving, depicting three monkeys, one covering its eyes, one its ears, and the third its mouth: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. It was a startling symbol of Gorky’s position in that period, and not only his.

Many of Rodchenko’s photographs were used in that ill-starred book, and he tried to explain his emotions in 1935. “I was confused, stunned. I was caught up in the enthusiasm. It all seemed close, everything became clear…Man came and conquered, conquered and rebuilt himself.”²⁵ But his photographs, which at the time probably played the propaganda role expected of them, today tell a completely different story. Intended to be in an optimistic key, they make a devastating impression, serving as one of the great photographic exposes of the Stalinist era.

An outstanding figure among the avant-garde artists Stalin wanted to press into service for his policy of collectivization and industrialization was the crafty favorite of the world film elite, Sergei Eisenstein, sybarite and eccentric. Highly pleased with his influential revolutionary film Battleship Potemkin, Stalin commissioned Eisenstein in 1926 to make a propaganda film about the benefits of collective agriculture, under the grandiloquent title The General Line. The production schedule dragged and the film did not appear until 1929, as Old and