The Magical Chorus

the dives of San Francisco, but for his part in Conspiracy of the Doomed, an anti- American propaganda film by Mikhail Kalatozov (later director of the famous war film The Cranes Are Flying), in which Vertinsky played a plotting cardinal in a characteristically grotesque style. Yet, even after this, his records were not made available. The first Vertinsky LPs appeared only in the early 1970s and became instant best sellers.

Stalin, who personally rated Russian classical music—Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov—as the highest form, understood the need for popular entertainment: “One likes the accordion with Gypsy songs. We have that. Another likes restaurant songs. We have that, too.”⁶ At the turn of the century, gramophone records made popular numerous Gypsy and pseudo-Gypsy songs about unrequited love, mad passions, and wild drinking sprees (“Black Eyes,” “The Autumn Wind Moans Piteously,” “The Night Breathed with the Delight of Lust”) and created the first stars of the Russian entertainment industry—the Gypsy Varya Panina, who sang in a low, almost masculine voice (her admirers included Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Blok), the “incomparable” Anastasia Vyaltseva, and sprightly Nadezhda Plevitskaya, who performed her quasi folksongs for Nicholas II himself.

After the revolution the star system went underground for twenty years, but began a cautious revival before the war, when the first Soviet celebrities of pop music began to appear, including the composer Isaak Dunaevsky and the singers Leonid Utesov and Klavdia Shulzhenko. They performed at the front throughout the war years with patriotic and entertainment programs, trying to make up for the severely reduced production of records.

The war situation, which had paradoxically created more liberal conditions for all of Soviet culture, gave rise to an unprecedented number of great songs that have retained their appeal to this day: “Dark Night” by Nikita Bogoslovsky, “Dug Out” by Konstantin Listov, “The Cherished Stone” by Boris Mokrousov, “Evening on the Road” and “Nightingales” by Vassily Solovyov-Sedoy, and a series of songs by Matvei Blanter with lyrics by Mikhail Isakovsky—“In the Woods by the Front,” “Under the Balkan Stars,” and “The Enemy Burned Down His House,” the last about a soldier who returns home from the war:

The enemy burned down his house,

Killed his entire family.

Where can the soldier go now,

Who will listen to his sorrow?

The tragedy of a country that lost tens of millions of lives in the war was expressed in that song with such power and simplicity that it became one of the best epitaphs for the period. But the song was not played then; it waited fifteen years on the shelf. Stalin attributed the victory over Hitler to his own military genius and did not want any reminders of the horrible price the people paid for it.

Stalin’s superman attitude toward his citizens was reflected in a strange episode described by former Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas. In the spring of 1945, after a dinner at the Kremlin in honor of visiting leader of Yugoslavia Marshal Tito, Stalin screened a 1938 film by Efim Dzigan, If Tomorrow There Is War, which was awarded one of the early Stalin Prizes.

If Tomorrow There Is War, described in the opening credits as a “battle film on newsreel materials,” painted a fairy-tale picture of a swift, easy, and bloodless victory in the then-hypothetical clash with the Nazis. In the film, the war that the Germans try to win with poison gases ends with them crushed in just a few days, and the German proletariat rises to support the Soviet Union.

Djilas wrote in astonishment that, after the screening, Stalin said to his Yugoslav guests, “It’s not too different from what really happened, except there was no poison gas and the German proletariat did not rebel.”⁷

In that period, Stalin, a gifted actor, deftly projected the image of a powerful, calm, and wise politician to Western leaders at their meetings. But behind the facade, he hid a growing irritation and anxiety. He might have considered two pivotal events in Russian history: the Decembrist antimonarchical uprising in 1825 and the fall of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917. In both cases the Russian army picked up “harmful” liberal ideas during campaigns in Europe and involved itself in the country’s political life.

In 1825, Nicholas I dealt decisively with the rebels, “chilled” Russia, and reigned for thirty years. His ideological formula “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” was strong enough to create a comparatively stable foundation for the monarchy a half century after his death, that is, at least until 1905. A weak Nicholas II did not bother to assert the ruling ideology, and he let loose the cultural reins. The army, the intelligentsia, and the populace united and swept away the monarchy.

The similarities in 1946 had to have made Stalin, knowledgeable in historical parallels, quite wary. Soviet intellectuals had been talking for a while about the probability that Russia’s Anglo-Saxon Allies in the anti-Hitler coalition would pressure him into making democratic concessions after the war.

Reports were placed on Stalin’s desk by the secret police on the malcontent statements of notable Soviet cultural figures, such as the popular critic and children’s poet Kornei Chukovsky: “Soon we must expect some more decisions to please our masters (Allies), our fate is in their hands. I am glad that a new, rational era is beginning. They will teach us culture.”⁸ Here is what the poet Iosif Utkin said in a private conversation, according to the report: “We must save Russia, not conquer the world…. Now we have the hope that we will live in a free democratic Russia, for without the Allies we will not manage to save Russia, and that means making concessions, which will lead to internal changes.”⁹

The multimillion-man Soviet army crossed Europe in 1944–1945 and came face to face with the Western way of life, so clearly superior, even in wartime, that this “visual-aid propaganda” threatened to overcome years of Soviet ideological indoctrination. An unstable mass of bewildered soldiers and an intelligentsia looking hopefully to the West—Russian history teaches that this combination could be explosive. That is why Stalin chose to repeat what he had done in 1936, making a series of strikes that would guarantee him ideological control.

In 1946–1948, he attacked outstanding cultural figures, followed by mass brainwashing. The victims included Eisenstein, a group of leading Soviet composers (Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Aram Khachaturian, Vissarion Shebalin, and Gavriil Popov), and in literature, the poet Akhmatova and the popular satirical writer Zoshchenko.

Anna Akhmatova’s “life scenario” is impressive: she began as a young and “cheerful sinner” (as she called herself), slender and graceful, a bohemian poet with a memorable profile (a bump on her nose) and signature bangs, whose early collections of love lyrics Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914) brought her scandalous protofeminist fame; she became the author of the anti-Stalinist Requiem in 1940, and she proclaimed her voice to express the suppressed scream of the “one hundred million nation” and later, in her old age, she was the heavyset, gray-haired, majestic empress who considered her “personal life as the national life, the historical life”¹⁰ (according to Eikhenbaum).

Akhmatova was the master par excellence of self-fashioning. Back before the revolution she wove a legend into her poems about a love affair with the most popular Russian poet of the time, Blok, and about her allegedly masochistic relationship with her first husband, the poet Lev Gumilev, whom she divorced in August 1918. When both Blok and Gumilev died in August 1921 (the former of exhaustion, the latter executed by Bolshevik firing squad), Akhmatova was accepted by the Russian elite as the spiritual widow of both poets (even though they both left real widows).