battles with the White Army and in the early Soviet construction sites;
Tellingly, these propaganda works, written in a very entertaining way and therefore consumed as adventure stories by many, were primarily about martyr heroes or war cripples. This was a topical issue for the devastated country, where it would be hard to find a family without a loss. My father returned from the front with an amputated leg, and so I was particularly moved by Polevoy’s description of the amputee pilot’s struggle to return to aviation.
This story also touched the outwardly cynical Prokofiev, who used Polevoy’s book as the basis for his last opera,
Stalin regarded Soviet culture as a huge hose for brainwashing his subjects before what he considered the inevitable Third World War, in the course of which Communism would at last conquer the whole world. He was a firm believer in the Communist idea and moved toward its final implementation disregarding all losses, while making only occasional tactical concessions.
The Russian cultural elite had already grown weary of Stalin’s ruthless and inhumane methods by the late 1930s. The war against Hitler, even though at some point it put the very existence of the Soviet state at risk, added nationalist fire to the cooling boiler of Communist ideals. But the endless circumstance of combat readiness, hysterical vigilance, and ridiculously exaggerated xenophobia could not continue. In that corrosive atmosphere, any unexpected quiet or lyrical work, like Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony, seemed like manna from heaven.
Stalin continued pulling on the ideological levers, provoking new campaigns and drives. He seemed to be trying things out—should he use anti-Semitism as a weapon? Or the tried-and-true espionage and sabotage scare? Or a truly strange method—a national discussion on linguistics? All these actions were actually implemented and added to an already surreal situation.
Where would it have led—to yet another bloodbath in the Soviet Union? A global nuclear catastrophe? Or did Stalin, as some historians now contend, not want either but was simply trying to outmaneuver his real and imaginary opponents inside and outside the country?
It is doubtful that we will be able to ever reach final conclusions on this, because when Stalin died on March 5, 1953 (officially, of brain hemorrhage), he left no political will and had not shared his plans with any of his comrades—apparently he did not trust any of them.
I remember the fear and horror I felt when on the dark and damp morning of March 6 as I was getting ready for school I heard the radio announcer speak slowly and with bathos: “Last night, at nine twenty p.m., our dear and beloved leader passed away without regaining consciousness.” I did not know then that on the same day, and also from brain hemorrhage, Prokofiev had died. The composer was weak and the tension that was in the air in the last days of Stalin’s life had apparently hastened his end.
In those chaotic days the significance of the deaths of the ruler and the composer seemed incomparable; no one thought of Prokofiev except his closest friends, and it was difficult to scrape up flowers for his coffin because all the flowers and wreaths in Moscow had been requisitioned for Stalin’s funeral. But in 1963, on the tenth anniversary of Prokofiev’s demise, marked after the official condemnation of the “cult of personality” of Stalin, there were jokes circulating that apparently Stalin was an insignificant political figure in the era of Prokofiev.
The following decades altered that value balance, too, as it turned out to be equally politically motivated. Apparently that balance will be continually shifting, reflecting the inevitable changes and vacillations in the comparative evaluation of Stalin and Prokofiev. It reminds us of the dialectical intertwining of politics and culture.
Before Stalin’s funeral, which took place in Moscow on March 9, 1953, the coffin with his body went on display at the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions. For several days, in relays, the best Soviet symphonic orchestras and soloists played during the viewing. The musicians included David Oistrakh, the violinist, and Sviatoslav Richter—the pianist was flown in from Tbilisi by special plane, and he was the only passenger, the rest of the plane filled with flowers sent to the capital for the funeral.
Richter later maintained that he had hated Stalin even then. There is no reason to doubt him: his father, a Russian German, was executed in June 1941 on charges of espionage for the Nazis. In 1941, his teacher Genrikh Neihaus (another of his students was Emil Gilels) was arrested as anti-Soviet and a “defeatist” (he was also of German descent) and kept almost nine months in solitary confinement in the notorious Lubyanka Prison. But in 1950, the thirty-five-year-old Richter accepted the Stalin Prize, as had other recipients—Oistrakh (he received it in 1943), Gilels (1946), conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky (1946), and twenty-four-year-old cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1951).
The prizes for these artists, which reflected Stalin’s belief that classical music was an effective propaganda tool, symbolized the importance of musical performers in official Soviet culture. As Stalin saw it, classical composers in the interpretation of these talented musicians were mobilized to serve Marxist ideology, and the performers were turned into ideal representatives of the socialist camp: they possessed formidable musical technique (paralleling Stalin’s policy of industrialization of the USSR), were optimistic, and civic-minded (as they were depicted in the media), and were happy to travel at the beck and call of the Party and state to the farthest reaches of Central Asia, the Far East, or Siberia to play for the worker and peasant masses there thirsting for high culture (as the media reports trumpeted).
The real picture was rather different. Yes, the state gave its best musicians significant privileges, but saw them as no better than celebrity slaves, obliged to service any official occasion, be it a performance in a regional election campaign headquarters, a factory lunch break (concerts by symphony orchestras, those mobile Potemkin villages, were particularly awkward for the musicians and the forced audience of weary laborers), before and after various political speeches, or at funerals, like Stalin’s, where Richter and Oistrakh and the other musicians were not allowed to leave the Hall of Columns for several days and nights, kept there on dry rations.
While the musicians were under lock and key at the Hall of Columns, in their breaks watching the endless procession of Muscovites come to pay their final respects to the leader, the last bloody drama of the Stalin era played out in the streets. Thousands of people tried to make their way to the bier. The young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko found himself in that crowd and later recalled, “It was a horrific, fantastic sight. The people who poured into that flow from behind kept pushing and pushing. The crowd turned into a terrifying vortex.”1
The tragedy that had occurred in Moscow fifty-seven years earlier was repeated. In 1896, during the coronation of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, several thousand people were crushed to death in the crowds. The difference was that this time the catastrophe was not in suburban Khodynka field, but in the center of Moscow, and yet the tragedy was hushed up completely. Still, some witnesses paradoxically sensed that “even in that terrible, tragic surge of Muscovites there was some passion of nascent freedom.”2
