The Magical Chorus

war, now turned it to the service of the war effort.

Propaganda material was devised for varying audiences. For the masses there were pop songs, patriotic films, and plain army broad-sheets. For the intelligentsia and Western allies, there were novels, symphonies, and operas like Vassily Grossman’s novel For the Just Cause, Shostakovich’s Seventh and Eighth symphonies, and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony and his opera War and Peace, based on the Tolstoy novel, but also the sophisticated historical film Ivan the Terrible, on which Eisenstein worked starting in 1941, when he was evacuated from Moscow to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan at the start of the war.

The film was commissioned by Stalin, and he spared no expense. Even though it was made during the war, Ivan the Terrible, with its meticulously constructed historical sets, opulent boyar costumes, and multitudes of extras, looked much more expensive than Eisenstein’s prewar film Alexander Nevsky. The director shot so much material that he planned to make it in three parts (the music was written by Prokofiev, who had also done the score for Nevsky).

But while the first part (in which the sixteenth-century tyrant Ivan, who deals ruthlessly with his enemies, was played by Nikolai Cherkasov as a tall, long-haired, and handsome man whose nostrils flared dramatically) was approved by Stalin, the second, in which Eisenstein, almost in a Dostoevskian manner, showed Tsar Ivan contorted in spiritual torment, infuriated the Soviet leader. The historical allusions were too obvious: Eisenstein was clearly suggesting that Stalin should repent.

Eisenstein and Cherkasov were called to the Kremlin to be chastised, Stalin banned part 2 of Ivan the Terrible (“abominable!”), and the film did not appear on the Soviet screen until 1958, ten years after the director’s death and five after Stalin’s. Eisenstein’s planned third part was never made.

The mass movie audience in the Soviet Union never shared Stalin’s interest in Eisenstein, and even he often found the director’s “formalist” mannerisms irritating. During the war years less sophisticated movies played a much more important propaganda role, particularly Chapaev (1934), a film about the CivilWar made by Georgy and Sergei Vasilyev, who were not related—they used “the brothers Vasilyev” as a nom de camera.

According to the notes made by Boris Shumyatsky, head of the film industry then (he was shot in 1938 as a saboteur and “enemy of the people”), between November 1934 and March 1936, Stalin watched Chapaev in his private screening room at the Kremlin (usually with several members of the Politburo) thirty-eight times.¹ He considered it the best Soviet film, and many Russians agree even today: an entertaining plot, sure direction, and solid acting make this “brothers Vasilyev” work a landmark. Even though the Red commander Chapaev dies at the end, his screen exploits never failed to inspire Soviet soldiers in the war.

The literary work that played a similar role was Alexander Tvardovsky’s narrative poem Vassily Terkin. The young poet came from a peasant family that had suffered under Stalin’s forced collectivization. The poem’s protagonist, an ordinary soldier, became a new quasi-folkloric Soviet hero with traditional roots, who goes through the war with jokes and a wink, without looking like a propaganda cartoon.

Tvardovsky’s Terkin won the admiration not only of millions of grateful readers at the front and back home, but of Bunin, who lived in exile in France, and who like many other White emigres became patriotic during the war with Hitler. The picky Bunin, who criticized Gorky and even Dostoevsky, proclaimed Terkin, apparently quite sincerely, a great work. “This is a truly rare book: what freedom, what marvelous boldness, what precision and accuracy in everything, and what an extraordinary folksy soldier’s language—free flowing, without a single false, ready-made, that is, literary-cliched, word!”²Vassily Terkin (like Chapaev earlier) received a Stalin Prize First Degree, even though Stalin was not even mentioned in either work. They performed their propaganda function all the better for it.

Of the celebrated emigres who radically revised their attitude toward the Soviet Union because of the war, like composer Rachmaninoff and conductor Serge Koussevitzky, the most unusual is the story of chansonnier Alexander Vertinsky (1889–1957). He was the first in the group of great poet singers who would hold an important place in twentieth- century Russian culture, like Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky. He created the “Vertinsky style,” which retains its popularity almost a century after his first songs appeared—simultaneously overwrought and ironic micronovellas (they were called “Les Vertinettes”) about exotic people and places: “The Purple Negro,” “God’s Ball,” “Little Creole Boy.”

Tall, slender, and elegant, Vertinsky had a slight but distinctive voice, augmented by the singer’s expressive gestures. He began his career in prerevolutionary Moscow, appearing in crowded nightclubs and cabarets, costumed and made up like a contemporary Pierrot. Vertinsky captured the spirit of that decadent era with songs of religion- tinged erotica (from the arsenal of the early Akhmatova) and cocaine, but his work miraculously retains its charms even today. Vertinsky’s secret, as one of his fans put it, is that “the sad seems funny in his art, and vice versa, therefore the banal becomes original.”³ His oeuvre could be regarded as high kitsch, or in Susan Sontag’s term, camp, and in that quality, along with the best examples of Gypsy ballads, continue to be appealing.

Curiously, one of Vertinsky’s fans was Stalin, who would privately play his records, issued in huge numbers in the West where the singer had fled after the revolution, and banned in the Soviet Union, because the music was considered harmful for the masses as emigre and “decadent.” (In 1924 the secret police compiled a long list of banned recordings, and these lists were updated regularly.) Stalin’s sympathy for Vertinsky remained through the years, and the singer, who had become a Soviet patriot, was permitted to return home in 1943. His appearance created a small sensation and generated intense gossip.

An entry dated February 12, 1944, in Leonid Timofeyev’s secret diary is typical: “The singer Vertinsky is in Moscow. He came from China. Before his arrival he had to spend seven years singing the Soviet repertoire. Besides that, he donated three million to the Red Army. In Moscow, as usual, he became rationed through passes for special audiences. Today there is a rumor that he died of a stroke.”⁴ Vertinsky, fifty-five then, continued performing widely for another thirteen years, giving more than three thousand concerts. For all the external signs of success (tickets sold out instantly), it was a strangely spectral existence, without reviews in the press, without radio broadcasts, and most importantly, without mass distribution of his recordings, to which he had grown accustomed in the West.

For his niche audience (Vertinsky often performed in closed officers’ clubs and before the elite) the singer, now in elegant white tie and tails, was a mirage of sorts from the emigre Western world, mysteriously materializing in the drab Soviet reality. Yes, he sang of the emigres’ longing for home. But Vertinsky’s public, living behind the Iron Curtain, also learned (in tango, foxtrot, or shimmy rhythms) about the “dives of San Francisco,” the Piccadilly bar, and the singer’s affair with Marlene Dietrich in Hollywood.

Denunciations of Vertinsky constantly arrived at the Kremlin. Vigilant Bolsheviks wrote to Stalin that his repertoire must be Sovietized quickly. According to the recollections of the singer’s widow, Stalin’s reaction was unexpected: “Why should the artist Vertinsky create a new repertoire? He has his repertoire. The people who don’t like it don’t have to listen.”⁵

The ruler’s fondness for Vertinsky went as far as giving him the Stalin Prize in 1951, not for little songs about