The Magical Chorus

The theater canceled the performance of Hamlet, starring Vysotsky, and offered money back to ticket-holders; no one returned a single ticket. Busloads of police pulled up to the square in front of the theater. Tension ran high. It is a miracle that there was no fatal crush like the one during Stalin’s funeral.

July 28, 1980, will be one of those milestones in Russian history marking the division, mutual lack of understanding, and deeply rooted distrust between the masses and the Soviet regime in the post-Khrushchev era. The fact that even after his death Vysotsky did not get recognition as a national singer, even though everyone from Siberian workers to Politburo members hummed his songs, evinced the immobile and ossified nature of the official ideology and cultural policy.

The myth about Brezhnev is that he was a mediocre politician pushed around by his aides and advisors. That image was basically the result of efforts by Khrushchev’s team, who tried to spin a new historical narrative in the years of Gorbachev’s glasnost: revenge for the defeat of their old boss. It is unlikely that Brezhnev was less of a master politician than Khrushchev, otherwise he would not have lasted eighteen years in power (seven more than Khrushchev).

Brezhnev was not stupider than Khrushchev, but he was significantly more cautious and guarded. After Khrushchev’s removal, the question of expanding cultural freedom was debated in an inner Party circle, and Brezhnev expressed his sympathy for the idea, adding that it was embarrassing to see Khrushchev yelling at artists and writers. The ladies’ man Brezhnev was particularly upset at the ruthless treatment of the poet Margarita Aliger.

Brezhnev announced then that he wanted to establish “confidential relations” with the intelligentsia.⁶ In 1964, a new film appeared in Soviet film theaters by the young director Elem Klimov. Welcome, or No Admittance was a sharp satire on Soviet society, depicted as a Pioneer summer camp, where the children are brainwashed, driving out all traces of independence, and turned into tiny mean-spirited robots.

The film was topical, because it was seen as a mockery of Khrushchev (the director of the camp, comically arrogant, kept trying to push corn on everyone, as did the former Soviet leader). The talented Klimov managed to catch the wave of change, because his father held a high position in the Party apparatus. At the time, the joke about him was: “It’s handy to be a lefty when you have support from the right.”

But his next comedy, Adventures of a Dentist, created serious problems for him with the authorities. It was an allegory about the place of talent in the Soviet Union, with a screenplay by Alexander Volodin, perhaps the most Chekhovian Russian playwright of the second half of the century.

Volodin, a strange, shy, and hard-drinking man who seemed to come out of a Chekhov story, went into film because his plays—Factory Girl and Big Sister—were attacked as “slander of Soviet life.” His play Five Evenings (and I still remember Georgi Tovstonogov’s 1959 deeply moving production at the Leningrad Bolshoi Dramatic Theater) was characterized as “spiteful barking from an alleyway,” and the main charge against his popular The Appointment, produced by Efremov at the Sovremennik Theater, was that it “hammered a wedge between the people and the government.”⁷

Misfortune followed Volodin in his move to film: the censors were reluctant to release Adventures of a Dentist because, allegedly, “everything in the film is upside down. In our society the individual is responsible to the society, but you have the society responsible before the individual.”⁸ With the help of his mentor, Mikhail Romm (and his father’s connections), Klimov managed to get the film approved, but it was shown in very few theaters and hushed up. Klimov made no more comedies. In the West he would be known subsequently for his epic narrative about the fall of the Russian monarchy, Agony, and the violent antiwar film, Come and See.

Volodin once wrote perceptively about the Theater on Taganka: “Lyubimov hated the authorities and he did not hide it…. But he dressed his anger in such festive, fantastically inventive theatrical clothes that sometimes even the authorities wanted to think that his allusions were not to them.”⁹ In 1968, when Lyubimov was fired and expelled from the Party for yet another “slanderous” production, he wrote a letter to Brezhnev, who responded with the resolution, “Let him work,” thereby reprieving the death sentence given to the theater by Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva. As Lyubimov recalled, he was also immediately reinstated in the Party: “Sorry, we got overexcited.”¹⁰

According to his aides, Brezhnev unlike Stalin had no great love for fiction or nonfiction, limiting his reading to newspapers and popular magazines, and his preferred films were nature documentaries. He was bored by serious feature films, although he liked, and shed a tear over, Andrei Smirnov’s Belorussian Station (1971), a sentimental story of four former soldiers, which premiered Okudzhava’s song “We Won’t Stand for the Price,” one of the best about World War II.

But Brezhnev could astound his entourage when he was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party by reciting a long poem by Symbolist classic Dmitri Merezhkovsky, or the poems of Esenin.¹¹ These works had been banned under Stalin, but as a young man Brezhnev had dreamed of becoming an actor and had performed with one of the many amateur theater groups popular in the early years of the revolution—whence his unorthodox poetic interests. Until his illness, Brezhnev liked to affect people emotionally. Once, in a moment of frankness, he told an aide that he considered his charm an important political tool.¹²

The culmination of Brezhnev’s artistic ambitions was the publication in 1978 of his memoir trilogy: Small Land, Resurrection, and Virgin Soil. Naturally, the books were written by literary ghosts, paid by state funds—there is nothing unusual about that or the fact that despite their more than modest literary qualities, Brezhnev’s books were published in printings of millions: after all, these were the memoirs of the leader of one of the two superpowers.

But his works, besides being made mandatory reading for the public and Party members especially, were praised as unsurpassed masterpieces in numerous reviews by leading writers, were given the Lenin Prize for literature, and their author was accepted into the Writers’ Union with membership card No. 1. Films were hastily made based on the memoirs, plays written and oratorios composed; at the Tretyakov Gallery, the finest museum of Russian art, Small Land, a large painting by Dmitri Nalbandyan, a Soviet court painter since the Stalin days, depicted Brezhnev as one of the main heroes of World War II.

A popular joke of the time had Brezhnev telephoning members of the Politburo to get their opinions of his books; they, naturally, were unanimous in their praise, and Brezhnev then wondered, “Everyone likes them. Maybe I should read them, too?” There is a transcript of a Politburo meeting on April 13, 1978, when Brezhnev, speaking of the publication of the first part of his memoirs, says that in meeting with leading officials, military men, and other comrades he was told that his books are extremely useful in bringing up the people.¹³

Brezhnev probably also enjoyed the fact his work had finally upstaged Khrushchev, whose “illegal” memoirs were published to great publicity in the West in 1970–1974 and declared “forgeries” in the Soviet Union. (Khrushchev’s memoirs, like Brezhnev’s, were taped and edited by others.)

Despite Brezhnev’s personal benevolence, softheartedness, and even sentimentality, culture came under increasing pressure in his regime. The signals from above were mixed, like Khrushchev’s. In the same month, September 1965, Leningrad poet Joseph Brodsky was released early from his exile in the North, where he had been sentenced in the last year of Khrushchev’s rule to five years of forced labor for “parasitism”(fighting which was one of Khrushchev’s favorite ideas), and the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested. Their crime was the publication in the West of anti-Soviet satirical prose. They apparently used Pasternak as a