Natasha's Dance

which demanded optimistic pictures about Soviet life with positive individual heroes drawn from the ranks of the proletariat. Party-controlled producers and script departments were placed in charge of the production to ensure that all this entertainment was politically correct. ‘Life is getting gayer, comrades,’ Stalin famously remarked. But only certain types of laughter were allowed. This was the climate to which Eisenstein returned in 1932. For the previous three years he had been abroad - a semi-dissident ambassador of the Soviet cinema. He travelled to Europe and on to Hollywood to learn about the new techniques of sound, signing up for several films he never made. He enjoyed the freedom of the West, and he was no doubt fearful of going back to Russia, where Shumiatsky’s attacks on the ‘formalists’ were at their most extreme when directed against him. Stalin accused Eisenstein of defecting to the West. The NKVD bullied his poor mother into begging Eisenstein to return home, threatening her with some form of punishment if he failed to do so. In the first two years after his return Eisenstein had several film proposals turned

    * In 1938, in the final stages of the editing of Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, Stalin asked to see the rough cuts. The film-maker hurried to the Kremlin and, in his haste, left behind one reel. Stalin loved the film but, since no one dared to inform him that it was incomplete, it was released without the missing reel (J. Goodwin. Eisenstein, Cinema and History (Urbana, 1993), p. 162).

    + Stalin could apparently recite long passages of the dialogue by heart. See R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds.), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema Documents, 1896- 1939 (London, 1994), p. SX4.

    down for production by Soiuzkino. He withdrew to a teaching post at the State Film School and, although he lavished praise (in his public statements) on the mediocre films that were churned out at that time, he stood firm by the films which he had made, courageously refusing to denounce himself, as he was called upon to do, at the Party’s Second Conference on Cinema in 1935.103

    Under pressure to produce a film which conformed to the Socialist Realist mould, Eisenstein accepted a commission from the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) in 1935. He was to realize a film scenario that took its title, although not much else, from Turgenev’s ‘Bezhin Meadow’, a story about peasant boys discussing supernatural signs of death which formed one of the Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. The film was actually inspired by the story of Pavlik Morozov, a boy hero who, according to the version of his life propagandized by the Stalinist regime, had been murdered by the ‘kulaks’ of his remote Urals village after he had denounced his own father, the chairman of the village Soviet, as a kulak opponent of the Soviet campaign for collectivization.* By 1935, the Morozov cult was at its height: songs and poems, even a cantata with full orchestra and chorus, had been written about him. This no doubt persuaded Eisenstein that it was safe to make a film about him. But his conception of the film was deemed unacceptable. He turned it from a story about individuals to a conflict between types, between old and new, and, in a scene that showed the communists dismantling a church to break the resistance of the kulak saboteurs, he came dangerously close to suggesting that collectivization had been something destructive. In August 1936, with most of the film already shot, Eisenstein was ordered by Shumiatsky to rewrite the script. With the help of the writer Isaac Babel he recommenced shooting in the autumn. The church scene was cut and a speech in tribute to Stalin was added. But then, in March 1937, Shumiatsky ordered all work on the film stopped. In an article in Pravda he accused Eisenstein of depicting collectivization as an elemental conflict between good and evil, and

    * In fact Morozov was murdered by the NKVD, which then executed thirty-seven kulak villagers, falsely charged with the boy’s murder for propaganda purposes. For the full story, see Y. Druzhnikov, Informer 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov (New Brunswick, 1997).

    denounced the film for its ‘formalist’ and religious character.104 Eisen-stein was forced to publish a ‘confession’ of his mistakes in the press, although it was penned in such a way as to be read by those whose opinions mattered to him as a satirical attack on his Stalinist masters. The negatives of the film were burned - all, that is, except a few hundred stills of extraordinary photographic beauty which were found in Eisenstein’s personal archive following his death in 1948.105

    The suppression of Bezhin Meadow was part of the continuing campaign against the artistic avant-garde. In 1934, at the First Writers’ Congress, Party leader Karl Radek, a former Trotskyite who was now making up for his past errors by proving himself the good Stalinist, condemned the writings of James Joyce - a huge influence on Eisenstein and all the Soviet avant-garde. Radek described Ulysses as ‘a dung heap swarming with maggots and photographed by a movie camera through a microscope’.106 This no doubt held a reference to the famous maggot scene in The Battleship Potemkin, in which Eisenstein zooms in on the offending larvae by filming them through the monocle of the commanding officer. Then, in January 1936, Pravda published a diatribe against Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which had been a great success, with hundreds of performances in both Russia and the West since its premiere in Leningrad in 1934. The unsigned article, ‘Chaos Instead of Music’, was evidently written with the full support of the Kremlin, and evidence suggests, as it was rumoured at the time, that Andrei Zhdanov, the Party boss in Leningrad, wrote it on the personal instructions of Stalin, who, just a few days before the article appeared, had seen the opera and clearly hated it.107

    From the first moment, the listener is shocked by a deliberately dissonant, confused stream of sound. Fragments of melody, embryonic phrases appear - only to disappear again in the din, the grinding, and the screaming… This music… carries into the theatre… the most negative features of ‘Meyerholdism’ infinitely multiplied. Here we have ‘leftist’ confusion instead of natural, human music… The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear. Leftist distortion in opera stems from the same source as the leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science. Petty-bourgeois innovations lead to a break with real art, real science and real literature… All this is primitive and vulgar.108

    This was not just an attack on Shostakovich, although, to be sure, its effect on him was devastating enough that he never dared again to write an opera. It was an attack on all modernists - in painting, poetry and theatre, as well as in music. Meyerhold, in particular, who was brave and self-assured enough to speak out publicly in defence of Shostakovich and against the Party’s stifling influence on art, was subjected to denunciations of a feverish intensity. He was condemned in the Soviet press as an ‘alien’, and even though he tried to save himself by staging the Socialist Realist classic How the Steel Was Tempered in 1937, his theatre was closed down at the beginning of the following year. Stanislavsky came to his old student’s aid, inviting him to join his Opera Theatre in March 1938, although artistically the two directors were poles apart. When Stanislavsky died that summer, Meyerhold became the theatre’s artistic director. But in 1939 he was arrested, tortured brutally by the NKVD to extract a ‘confession’, and then, in the arctic frost of early 1940, he was shot.109

    This renewed assault against the avant-garde involved a counterrevolution in cultural politics. As the 1930s wore on, the regime completely abandoned its commitment to the revolutionary idea of establishing a ‘proletarian’ or ‘Soviet’ form of culture that could be distinguished from the culture of the past. Instead, it promoted a return to the nationalist traditions of the nineteenth century, which it reinvented in its own distorted forms as Socialist Realism. This reassertion of the ‘Russian classics’ was a fundamental aspect of the Stalinist political programme, which used culture to create the illusion of stability in the age of mass upheaval over which it reigned, and which championed its version of the nationalist school in particular to counteract the influence of the ‘foreign’ avant-garde. In all the arts the nineteenth-century classics were now held up as the model which Soviet artists were expected to follow. Contemporary writers like Akhmatova could not find a publisher, but the complete works of Pushkin and Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy (though not Dostoevsky),* were

    * Dostoevsky was despised (though not read) by Lenin, who once famously dismissed his novel The Devils, which contains a devastating critique of the Russian revolutionary mentality, as a ‘piece of reactionary trash’. Apart from Lunacharsky, none of the Soviet leadership favoured his retention in the literary canon, and even Gorky wanted to get rid of him. Relatively few editions of Dostoevsky’s works were therefore published in

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    issued in their millions as a new readership was introduced to them. Landscape painting, which had been a dying art in the 1920s, was suddenly restored as the favoured medium of Socialist Realist art, particularly scenes that illustrated the heroic mastery of the natural world by Soviet industry; all of it was styled on the landscape painters of the late nineteenth century, on Levitan or Kuindzhi or the Wanderers, with whom some of the older artists had even studied in their youth. As Ivan Gronsky once remarked (with the bluntness one might expect from the editor of Izvestiia), ‘Socialist Realism is Rubens, Rembrandt and Repin put to serve the working class.’110

    In music, too, the regime put the clock back to