The Magical Chorus

Yevtushenko also maintained that at that moment he “thought of the man we were burying for the first time with hatred.” That must have been a seismic shift for the poet who just the previous year in his first book of poetry, Scouts of the Future, called Stalin “my best friend in the world,” and had responded to the anti-Semitic campaign of 1953 against the “killer doctors” this way: “None of the killers will be forgotten. They will not leave without paying. Gorky may have been killed by others, I think, it’s the same ones now.”³

(In 1989, a wiser Yevtushenko included that troubling episode in his perestroika-era film, Stalin’s Funeral, adding the commonsense advice that he himself had followed rarely: “Let future poets be more careful when they start writing ‘civic poetry.’”

The impetus for the shift in the mindset of the capital’s intelligentsia is usually considered to be the Moscow International Festival of Youth and Students in 1957 (which the pianist Maria Yudina dubbed “mass derailment”) and the sensationally successful American Exhibition at Sokolniki in 1958. But there is reason to suppose that the ideological crack in postwar Soviet society, which had seemed fairly monolithic to the majority of Western observers, appeared earlier, somewhere in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Stalin used his endless brainwashing in an attempt to patch the holes that appeared in the Soviet ideological space after World War II and the return of the Red Army from Europe. In terms of the Soviet masses, Stalin succeeded rather well, but the Western virus lay hidden but alive, at—of all places—the very top of Soviet society.

The writer Vassily Aksyonov described a youth party in 1952 at the home of an important Soviet diplomat that he, a nineteen-year-old provincial student, was lucky enough to attend. The American Victrola played jazz records by Louis Armstrong, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole. The young stilyagi (as the over- the-top admirers of American fashion and pop culture were called in the hostile press articles; they called themselves shtatniki, from shtaty, “the States”), in fashionable Western-made jackets with huge padded shoulders, pegged black trousers, and thick-soled shoes, sipped whiskey and smoked Camels. The daughter of a big KGB boss danced with Aksyonov and stunned him straight off: “I hate the Soviet Union and love the United States of America!” Aksyonov observed, “The stilyagi could be called the first Soviet dissidents.”⁴

Such luxuries as American cigarettes, whiskey, and records in postwar Soviet Union were available only to the super elite. But even in that period of tight self-isolation, when in Churchill’s memorable phrase an iron curtain fell across Europe, dividing the Soviet and American spheres of influence, American culture managed to infiltrate the Soviet masses, too. Most strangely, that American cultural intervention came about from Stalin’s initiative permitting mass exhibition of Western films from the “trophy fund,” that is, films that were wartime booty or were gifts from the Allies.

This was intended to make money and also entertain the people: after the war domestic production of films diminished rapidly—seventeen films were made in 1948 and only five in 1952. So, thanks to Stalin’s permission, Soviet audiences could see, among other films, John Ford’s Stagecoach (renamed The Trip Will Be Dangerous) and under the title A Soldier’s Fate in America, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives. A special Politburo resolution called for “necessary editorial corrections” to be made in each film and anti-American introductory texts and commentaries were added.

It is amazing that Stalin took this step. He knew better than most the propaganda value of film. Back in 1928, he had spoken of it in a conversation with Eisenstein: “Abroad there are very few books with Communist content. Our books are almost not read at all there, because they do not know Russian. But Soviet films are watched with interest by everyone and they understand everything.”⁵

Stalin always bore in mind the influence on progressive Western intellectuals of the films of Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Dziga Vertov—that is why he respected these directors. Then why did he not consider the possible results of showing “trophy films” in the USSR? Perhaps he had overestimated the sanitizing effect of Soviet censorship. The consequences were quite significant.

Joseph Brodsky described the liberating effect of the American films: “They were presented to us as entertaining stories, but we perceived them as a sermon on individualism.”⁶ Aksyonov confirms that: “For us it was a window into the outside world from Stalin’s smelly den.”⁷

I knew people who watched The Roaring Twenties thirty or more times, eagerly memorizing every detail of the American way of life: clothing, hairstyles, manners. The greatest popularity was enjoyed by four films of the Tarzan series in the early 1950s; Brodsky’s paradoxical opinion is that they promoted de-Stalinization more than Khrushchev’s subsequent anti-Stalin speech at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress or even the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. “It was the first film in which we saw natural life. And long hair.”⁸

Rebels throughout the Soviet Union grew their hair long like Tarzan, and his famous cry was heard in backyards and even school corridors. Teachers, obeying orders, tried to quell this and other enthusiasms for “American fashion” by what means they could, including expulsion from college, which could ruin a person’s permanent record forever. Along with the media campaign against the stilyagi (they were denounced in films, radio, and newspapers and mocked in nasty cartoons in satirical magazines), this created tension among young people.

Could Stalin’s miscalculation with the Western films be explained partially by the dictator’s desire to prepare Soviet people for the decisive battle with the Americans? The films would have served as an inoculation against the Western “contagion.” Privately, Stalin spoke frankly: “Our propaganda is badly done, it’s a mush instead of propaganda…. The Americans refute Marxism, they slander us, they try to debunk us…. We must expose them. We must familiarize the people with the ideology of the enemies, criticize that ideology, and that will arm our cadres.”⁹

Trying to tighten the screws again, Stalin started a xenophobic cultural campaign. But at the same time, he understood that the Soviet Union now had to compete with the United States on the international cultural arena: “We are now dealing not only with domestic policy but world policy. Americans want to subordinate everything to themselves. But Americans are not respected in any capital. We must expand the worldview of our people in Pravda and Party magazines, we must have a broader horizon, we are a world power.”¹⁰

The Communists had always relied heavily on international ideological propaganda. The role played by the Communist International (Comintern), created on Lenin’s initiative in 1919, and its cultural emissary in Europe and the United States, Willy Munzenberg, is well known today. It was Munzenberg who used his international network of pro-Soviet film clubs to promote Battleship Potemkin and other revolutionary films in the West. Stalin used technical innovations for these goals: on his orders in 1929, Moscow International Radio was created, the first state broadcast of its kind in the world, which with time became a powerful propaganda center.

Americans had a traditional aversion to the use of state-sponsored propaganda abroad, even though during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee for Public Information. That experience was used later for organizing the Voice of America after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When the war was over, some congressmen wondered why American taxpayers had to continue to pay for international radio.

Those doubts vanished with the onset of the Cold War. On May 6, 1948, John Foster Dulles expressed the feelings of the American political elite faced with the world expansion of Communist ideas: “For the first time since