NATASHA

* Andrei Sakharov records a joke in scientific circles at that time. A Soviet delegation attends a conference on elephants and delivers a 4-part report: (1) Classics of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism on Elephants; (z) Russia - the Elephant's Homeland; (3) The Soviet Elephant: The Best Elephant in the World; and (4) The Belorussian Elephant - Little Brother to the Russian Elephant (A. Sakharov, Memoirs (London, 1990), p. 123).

the Soviet achievement. 'Stalin's cathedrals', the seven elephantine wedding-cake-like structures (such as the Foreign Ministry and the Moscow University ensemble on the Lenin Hills) which shot up around Moscow after 1945, are supreme examples of this ostentatious form. But metro stations, 'palaces of culture', cinemas and even circuses were also built in the Soviet Empire style, with massive forms, classical facades and porticoes, and neo-Russian historical motifs. The most striking example is the Moscow metro station Komsomolskaia-Kol'tsevaia, built in 1952. Its huge subterranean 'Hall of Victory', conceived as a monument to Russia's military heroes of the past, was a model of the Russian baroque. Its decorative motifs were largely copied from the Rostov Kremlin Church.¹⁸²

Soviet pride in Russian culture knew no bounds in the post-war period. The Russian ballet was pronounced the best, the Russian classics in literature and music the most popular in the world. Russia's cultural domination was also imposed on the satellite regimes of eastern Europe and on the republics of the Soviet Union, where Russian became a compulsory language in all schools and children were brought up on Russian fairy tales and literature. Soviet 'folk' choirs and dancing troupes made frequent tours to eastern Europe, whose own state-sponsored 'folk' ensembles (the Lado and the Kolo in Yugoslavia, the Mazowsze in Poland, the Sluk in Czechoslovakia and the Hungarian State Ensemble) sprang up on the Soviet design.¹⁸³ The stated aim of these 'folk' groups was to promote regional and national cultures within the Soviet bloc. Soviet policy, since 1934, had been to foster cultures that were 'national in form and socialist in content'.¹⁸⁴ But these groups had little real connection with the folk culture they were meant to represent. Made up of professionals, they performed a type of song and dance which bore the clear hallmarks of the ersatz folk songs performed by Red Army ensembles, and their national character was reflected only in their outward forms (generic 'folk costumes' and melodies).

The long-term plan of Soviet policy was to channel these 'folk cultures' into higher forms of art on the lines set out (or so it was believed) by the Russian nationalists of the nineteenth century. Russian composers were assigned by Moscow to the Central Asian and

Caucasion republics to set up 'national operas' and symphonic

traditions in places where there had been none before. The European opera house and concert hall arrived in Alma Ata and Tashkent, in Bukhara and Samarkand, as pillars of this imported Soviet-Russian culture; and soon they were filled with the strange sound of a wholly artificial 'national music' which was based on native tribal melodies notated in the European style then placed in the musical framework of the Russian national movement of the nineteenth century.

The Russian composer Reinhold Gliere (the composition teacher of the young Prokofiev) wrote the first 'national opera' of Azerbaijan, mixing old Azeri melodies with European forms and harmonies. Gliere also composed the first Uzbek opera, Gulsara (1937), an epic Soviet tale of women's liberation from the old patriarchal way of life, with Uzbek folk tunes harmonized and orchestrated in the style of Berlioz. The Kirghiz opera was established by two Muscovites (Vladimir Vla-sov and Vladimir Fere) who orchestrated Kirghiz melodies (notated by the Kirghizian Abdilas Maldybaev) in their own imaginary Kirghiz national style with lots of raw and open harmonies. The Russian founder of the Kazakh national opera, Evgeny Brusilovsky, continued writing Kazakh opera until the 1950s, long after a new generation of native-born composers had emerged from the conservatory in Alma Ata. The campaign against the 'formalists' encouraged many composers to flee Moscow and Petersburg for the relatively liberal atmosphere of these remote republics. Alexander Mosolov, perhaps better known as a composer of experimental music in the 1920s, moved via the gulag to Turkmenistan, where he remained until his death in 1973, a composer of national Turkmen music in the style of Borodin. Maximilian Steinberg, Stravinsky's closest rival in St Petersburg in the 1900s and teacher to the leading avant-garde composers (including Shostakovich) in the early 1920s, ended his career as People's Artist of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.¹⁸⁵

As the Cold War became more intense, and Stalin's own paranoic fear of 'internal enemies' and 'spies' increased, his regime's suspicions of all foreign influence turned to hatred of the Jews. This anti-Semitism was thinly veiled by Soviet (that is, Russian) patriotic rhetoric, but there was no mistaking that the victims of the vicious inquisition against 'cosmopolitanism' were predominantly Jewish. In January 1948, the well-known Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of

the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), was killed by state security troops. The assassination was carried out on the strict personal instructions of Stalin, who, three days before the brutal killing, had summoned all the members of the Politburo, denounced Mikhoels in a fit of rage and, in a way that suggests that this was to be a symbolic murder,* specified that 'Mikhoels must be struck on the head with an axe, wrapped up in a wet quilted jacket and run over by a truck'.¹⁸⁶

The murder of Mikhoels was linked to the arrest of several dozen leading Jews accused of taking part in an American-Zionist conspiracy organized by the JAFC against the Soviet Union.+ The JAFC had been established on Stalin's orders in 1941 to mobilize Jewish support abroad for the Soviet war campaign. It received enthusiastic support from the left-wing Jewish community in Palestine, so much so that Stalin even thought he might turn the new state of Israel into the main sphere of Soviet influence in the Middle East. But Israel's growing links with the USA after 1948 unleashed Stalin's lifelong hatred of the Jews.¹⁸⁷ The JAFC was abolished, its members all arrested and accused of plotting to turn the Crimea into an American-Zionist base for an attack on the Soviet Union. Thousands of Jews were forcibly evicted from the regions around Moscow and despatched as 'rootless parasites' to the Siberian wilderness, where a special 'Jewish Autonomous Region' had been established in Birobidzhan: it was a sort of Soviet version of Hitler's Madagascar, where the Nazis had once thought to export the Jews. In November 1948 the Central Committee decided that all the Jews in the Soviet Union would have to be resettled in Siberia.¹⁸⁸

In the cultural sphere the 'ugly distortions' of the avant-garde were put down to the influence of Jews like Eisenstein, Mandelstam,

* Stalin's father had been murdered by an axe wrapped in a quilted jacket; and his likely killer, an Armenian criminal who had worked with Stalin for the Tsarist secret police in Tiflis in the 1900s, was killed on Stalin's orders, sixteen years later in 1922,, when he was run over by a truck (R. Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life (London, 2001), pp. 38-43).

+ Even two of Stalin's own relatives by marriage, Anna Redens and Olga Allilueva, were arrested for their Jewish connections. Explaining the arrest of her two aunts to his own daughter, Stalin stud: 'They knew too much. They blabbed a lot' (S. Allilueva, Only One Year (New York, 1969), p. 154).

Chagall. The offensive was personally instigated by Stalin. He even studied linguistics, and wrote at length about it in Pravda during 1949, with the aim of denouncing the 'Jewish' theory, originally advanced by Niko Marr in the 1900s, that the Georgian language had Semitic origins.¹⁸⁹ In 1953 Stalin ordered the arrest of several Jewish doctors who worked for the Kremlin on trumped-up charges (the so- called 'Doctors' Plot') of having poisoned Zhdanov and another Politburo member, A. S. Shcherbakov.* The tirade in the press against the 'murderers in white coats' produced a wave of anti-Jewish hatred, and many Jews were evicted from their jobs and homes. Jewish scientists, scholars and artists were singled out for attacks as 'bourgeois nationalists', even if (as was so often the case) they were more Russian than Jewish. The fact that they had 'Jew' written in their Soviet passports was enough to condemn them as Zionists.+

Jewish film directors (Leonid Trauberg, Dziga Vertov, Mikhail Romm) were accused of making 'anti-Russian' films and forced out of their studios. Vasily Grossman's novel Stalingrad, based on his work as a war correspondent, was banned principally because its central character was a Russian Jew. The Black Book (first published in Jerusalem in 1980), Grossman's still-unrivalled memoir-based account of the Holocaust on Soviet soil, which he assembled for the Literary Commission of the JAFC, was never published in the Soviet Union. When Grossman started writing in the 1930s, he thought of himself as a Soviet citizen. The Revolution had brought to an end the Tsarist persecution of the Jews. But in his last novel, the epic wartime story Life and Fate (first published in Switzerland in 1980), he portrayed the Nazi and Soviet regimes, not as opposites, but as mirror images of each other. Grossman died in 1964, a quarter of