were to be cheerleaders along his assembly lines-deliberately kept uncertain of what cheer was required of them and denied that last refuge of human integrity in most earlier tyrannies: the freedom to be silent.
It is hard to know how Lenin would have reacted to all of this. He suffered his first stroke in 1922, just a little more than a year after the end of the Civil War, and was virtually incapacitated for nearly a year before his death in January, 1924. He never had time clearly to indicate how fully he would have applied to a society at peace the totalitarian principles advocated earlier for a revolutionary party in times of war and crisis. Cultural problems had always been peripheral to his interests. Despite his party-centered
perspective, he had many friends among non-party intellectuals, many years of exposure to Western society, and a fairly rich grounding in the nineteenth-century Russian classics. There was, to be sure, a foreshortening of intellectual vistas from Marx, who knew his Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, to a Lenin steeped largely in the civic poetry and realistic prose of his native land. But Lenin's vistas were still ranging compared with those of Stalin; and Lenin must at least be given credit for belatedly warning against the 'rudeness' of his successor in his long-suppressed political testament.45
Born into an obscure cobbler's family in the mountains of the Caucasus, educated in the seminaries and tribal traditions of his native Georgia, Stalin shared none of the broader European perspectives of Lenin and most other Bolshevik leaders. This small, pock-marked figure never knew the life of the Russian intelligent, did not even write in Russian until late in his twenties, and spent only four months outside Russian-occupied territory-during brief trips to Party congresses in Sweden and England in 1906 and 1907, and to study the national question in the Austro- Hungarian empire in 1912 and 1913.
The qualities that Stalin professed to admire in Lenin-'hatred for snivelling intellectuals, confidence in one's own strength, confidence in victory'-were those which he attempted to instill in himself. To these were added the compulsive chauvinism of the provincial parvenu, the scholastic dogmatism of the half-educated seminarian, and a preoccupation with organizational intrigue already noticeable during his revolutionary apprenticeship in the world's largest oil fields in Baku.
Stalin's only god was Lenin; yet in Stalin's depiction the god acquires a bestial if not satanic form. Stalin compared Lenin's arguments to 'a mighty tentacle which twines all around you and holds you as a vice'; Lenin was said to have been obsessively concerned that the enemy 'has been beaten but by no means crushed' and to have rebuked his friends 'bitingly through clenched teeth: 'Don't whine, comrades. . . .' '4e
Stalin's formula for authoritarian rule was experimental and eclectic. It might be described as Bolshevism with teeth or Leninism minus Lenin's broad Russian nature and ranging mind. Lenin, for all his preoccupation with power and organization, had remained, in part, a child of the Volga. He had a revolutionary mission thrust upon him and took his revolutionary name from one of the great rivers of the Russian interior: the Lena.
Stalin, by contrast, was an outsider from the hills, devoid of all personal magnetism, who properly derived his revolutionary name from stal', the Russian word for 'steel.' His closest comrade-and the man he picked to succeed him as formal head of state throughout the 1930's went even
further--shed his family name of Scriabin, so rich in cultural association, for Molotov, a name derived from the Russian word for 'hammer.' No figure better illustrates the unfeeling bluntness and technological preoccupations of the new Soviet culture than this expressionless bureaucratic hammer of the Stalin era, who was generally known as 'stone bottom' (from 'the stone backside of the hammer'-kamenny zad molotovd).
Yet for all the grotesqueness, gigantomania, and Caucasian intrigue of the Stalin era, it may in some way have had roots in Russian culture deeper than those of the brief age of Lenin. Lenin benefited from the St. Petersburg tradition of the radical intelligentsia, studied briefly in St. Petersburg, began his Revolution there, and was to give his name to the city. When Lenin moved the capital from St. Petersburg and entered the Moscow Kremlin for the first time on March 12, 1918, he was uncharacteristically agitated, remarking to his secretary and companion that 'worker-peasant power should be completely consolidated here.'47 Little did he imagine how permanent the change of capital was to prove and how extensive the consolidation of power in the Kremlin. The year of Lenin's death brought a flood to the former capital, newly rebaptized as Leningrad. It was an omen perhaps of the traditionalist flood that was about to sweep the revolutionary spirit out of the Leninist party. With Stalin in the Kremlin, Moscow at last wreaked its revenge on St. Petersburg, seeking to wipe out the restless reformism and critical cosmopolitanism which this 'window to the West' had always symbolized.
Stalin had many roots in the Russian past. His addiction to mass armies overbalanced with artillery follows a long tradition leading back to Ivan the Terrible; his xenophobic and disciplinarian conception of education is reminiscent of Magnitsky, Nicholas I, and Pobedonostsev; his passion for material innovation and war-supporting technology echoes Peter the Great and a number of nineteenth-century Russian industrialists. But Stalinism in the full sense of the word seems to have its deepest roots in two earlier periods of Russian history: the nihilistic 1860's and the pre-Petrine era. First of all, Stalinism appears as a conscious throwback to the militant materialism of the i86o's. Insofar as there was a positive content to Stalinist culture, it was rooted in the ascetic dedication to progress of the materialistic sixties rather than the idealistic spirit of the populist age. Stalin and some of his close associates-Molotov, Khrushchev, and Mikoyan-were like Chernyshevsky and so many other men of the sixties largely educated by priests, and had merely changed catechisms in midstream. Stalin's belief in physiological and environmental determinism-evidenced in his canonization of Pavlov and Lysenko-reflects the polemic prejudices of Pisarev more than the complex theories of Engels, let alone the thoughts of prac-
ticing scientists. His suspicion of all artistic activity without immediate social utility reflects the crude aesthetic theory of the sixties more than that of Marx.
All of the enforced artistic styles of the Stalin era-the photographic posters, the symphonies of socialism, the propagandistic novels, and the staccato civic poetry-appear as distorted vulgarizations of the predominant styles of the 1860's: the realism of the 'wanderers,' the programmatic music of the 'mighty handful,' the novels of social criticism, and the poems of Nekrasov. This artificial resurrection of long-absent styles brought a forced end to the innovations in form so characteristic of art in the silver age. Whole areas of expression were blighted: lyric poetry, satirical prose, experimental theater, and modern painting and music.
Art was, henceforth, to be subject not just to party censorship but to the mysterious requirements of 'socialist realism.' This doctrine called for two mutually exclusive qualities: revolutionary enthusiasm and objective depiction of reality. It was, in fact, a formula for keeping writers in a state of continuing uncertainty as to what was required of them: an invaluable device for humiliating the intellectuals by encouraging the debilitating phenomena of anticipatory self-censorship. It seems appropriate that the phrase was first used by a leading figure in the secret police rather than a literary personality.48 Publicly pronounced in 1934 at the first congress of the Union of Writers by Andrew Zhdanov, Stalin's aide-de-camp on the cultural front, the doctrine was given a measure of respectability by the presence of Maxim Gorky as presiding figurehead at the congress. Gorky was one of the few figures of stature who could be held up as an exemplar of the new doctrine. He had a simple background, genuine socialist convictions, and a natural realistic style developed in a series of epic novels and short stories about Russian society of the late imperial period.
Socialist realism no less than the Revolution itself was to 'dispose of its children.'49 Gorky died under still- mysterious circumstances two years later in the midst of the terror which swept away imaginative storytellers like Pil'niak and Babel, lyric poets like Mandel'shtam, theatrical innovators like Meierhold, as well as the inclination toward experimentalism in such gifted young artists as Shostakovich.
