The Magical Chorus

New (another title supplied by Stalin).

The pampered gentleman filmmaker did not know or care for the countryside. He created a film that was fantasy, pure and simple: a story about how a peasant woman (played by a real country girl, Marfa Lapkina) joins an agricultural cooperative and becomes a tractor driver. The problem was that the real Marfa never did learn to drive a tractor (which was imported from America), and so they used a double, Eisenstein’s assistant, Grigory Alexandrov, who dressed as a woman and drove the tractor past amazed crowds of peasants.²⁶ It all took place against backdrops of plywood farms built for the film in a village near Moscow from designs by the talented Constructivist architect Andrei Burov, a friend of Le Corbusier.

This Potemkin village served as a backdrop and excuse for Eisenstein to demonstrate his usual cascade of formal experiments, such as the “overtone montage,” which he invented while working on Old and New. According to the director, in this form of editing, the “central stimulus” in a shot is accompanied by “secondary stimuli.” As an example, he gave the episode from Old and New where a scene of harvesting is followed by shots of rain: “the tonal dominant—movement as light oscillation—is accompanied here by the second dominant, a rhythmic one, that is, movement as transference.”²⁷

The dazzling film documentaries of Dziga Vertov were filled with such experimentation in the 1920s—Forward, Soviet!, One Sixth of the World, The Eleventh, and Man with a Movie Camera. Meant to be propaganda for collectivization and industrialization, these Vertov films were not popular among the very masses for whom they were allegedly intended (Old and New was a bomb, too), but along with the works of Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and other Soviet avant-garde filmmakers, they became a veritable encyclopedia of virtuoso technical and artistic techniques later widely employed by many Western directors, cameramen, and editors.

It is difficult to judge the sincerity of the great Soviet avant-garde artists when they still insisted in the late 1920s and early 1930s that the mass audience could and would learn to love their art. In the more than ten years since the revolution, they should have seen that they were unlikely to achieve popular recognition. But almost all of them, as it befits true prophets and utopians, continued to fool themselves and others by trying to prove that they could still be useful to the Soviet regime.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, who today is esteemed most as an intensely lyric poet of great imagination and expressiveness, made superhuman efforts in that regard, insisting publicly, in a speech in Moscow on October 15, 1927, “I don’t give a damn that I’m a poet. I’m not a poet, but first and foremost someone who has placed his pen at the service—note, service—of the current moment, the true reality and its guide—the Soviet government and the party.”²⁸

We can guess that these relentlessly repeated statements were a painful pose, in light of Mayakovsky’s final, tragic act. On April 14, 1930, the poet, thirty-six, shot himself: he was tired of “stepping on the throat of my own song,” as he put it.

The bitter irony was that when Esenin hanged himself in 1925, Mayakovsky condemned the suicide unflinchingly in the name of all the poets loyal to the Soviet regime, “who have organically welded themselves with the revolution, with the class, and see before them the big and optimistic path.”²⁹ At that time, Mayakovsky fulfilled the “civic commission” of the state, writing the poem “To Sergei Esenin,” which was supposed to counteract the effect of the last lines of Esenin’s farewell poem that had prompted so many suicides:

In this life dying is nothing new,

But living, of course, is no newer.

Mayakovsky’s reply to that was:

In this life dying is not hard,

Making a life is significantly harder.

And now, Mayakovsky repeated Esenin’s move, when dying was obviously easier than living, and chose the “false beauty of death”(as he had condemned Esenin’s suicide) to “making life” in a socialist society.

Mayakovsky’s fans were profoundly shocked. Boris Pasternak later recalled, “I think that Mayakovsky shot himself out of pride, over something in himself or around him that his pride could not accept.”³⁰ For the authorities, his suicide must have been an unforgivable weakness. That made all the more inexplicable Stalin’s cultural and political gesture some five years later when he declared (via Pravda) that Mayakovsky was “the best, the most talented poet of our Soviet era.”³¹

This totally unexpected statement by the country’s supreme cultural arbiter, which immediately elevated Mayakovsky to join Gorky as patron saint of Soviet literature, stunned many: why aggrandize a patently avant-garde poet? It seemed to counter Stalin’s general preference for realism in literature and art.

Stalin must have been pleased, for with one brief declaration he had achieved several goals. First, he created a kind of counterbalance to Gorky’s overly saintly reputation as the highest Soviet literary authority. Then, he demonstrated a certain independence from the cultural tastes of his mentor, Lenin, who disliked Mayakovsky’s poetry. And last, in a growing atmosphere of pushing the avant-garde artists out, even from “industrial art,” where they had been allowed for some time to frolic with their utopian projects, Stalin tossed a bone to the comparatively small but very active (and therefore politically important) stratum of revolutionary urban youth, who idolized Mayakovsky with his propagandistic “temperament of the prophet Elijah,” in Gorky’s envious observation.

People forget now that in his time even Lenin had to take that into account. When on February 21, 1921, he met with a group of Moscow art students and asked, “What do you read? Do you read Pushkin?” the reply was, “Oh, no, he was bourgeois. We read Mayakovsky.”³² Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who left a record of this episode, recalled that after that meeting Lenin “grew a bit kinder” to Mayakovsky: he saw that the poet had a following, as she put it, of “young people, full of life and joy, ready to die for the Soviet regime, not finding words in the contemporary language to express themselves and seeking that expression in the hard-to- understand poems of Mayakovsky.”³³

Stalin was even more pragmatic than Lenin in his attitude toward the political aspects of culture. In 1935 he was preparing to destroy his political opponents, including Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Bukharin. Each had his own followers. They could be scared off by terror, which was Stalin’s plan. But Stalin also wanted to win some of them over to his side—after all, they were fanatically loyal to communist ideals, honest, energetic, hardworking, and optimistic. Many of them adored Mayakovsky’s poetry.

For that part of the urban youth, as the playwright Alexander Gladkov, himself a great fan of Mayakovsky’s, later recalled, typical character traits were “spiritual fastidiousness and disdain for chauvinism, bribe-taking, and false erudition.”³⁴ Those were the people Stalin had in mind when he spoke of combining American business spirit with Russian revolutionary sweep as a model for the progressive Soviet workers. His approving words about Mayakovsky seemed like an important signal to them. For Stalin it was just one of many moves in his lengthy and ingenious political and cultural chess game.

Chapter Six

December 5, 1935, the day Pravda published Stalin’s definitive assessment of Mayakovsky as “the best, the most talented poet of our Soviet era,” was the culminating point in the political history of Russian left art. No other avant-garde artist was ever—before or after—heralded on such a high state level as a model for national culture. No other oeuvre of a committed Futurist ever became the object, even in