The often chromatic and grotesque extension of verismo opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which Shostakovich fashioned from Leskov's bleak novella, was denounced after two years of performances and forcibly shut in 1936. Thenceforth, after nearly two years of silence, he turned almost exclusively to instrumental music, breaking the promise of distinctive national music drama that was implicit in his first opera, The Nose of 1930, which (Uke the preparatory work of Musorgsky) was based on a text by
Gogol. The unfinished fragment of a later, wartime effort to make an opera of Gogol's Gamblers and the post-Stalin revival of Lady Macbeth (revised and retitled Katerina Izmailova) offer tantalizing hints of what might have been. Nor was the full promise of Prokof'ev ever realized, perhaps the most technically gifted and versatile of all modern Russian composers. As a nine-year-old boy in the first year of the new century he roughed out his first complete opera score, The Giants; and his rapid development of a clean, 'cubist' style combined with a love of rugged, often satirical themes seemed to herald the arrival of a creative giant whose return from emigration might in some way compensate for the permanent flight from the new order of Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and so many others. His protean powers shine through even the confining forms of expression forced on artists in the Stalin era: infant pedagogy {Peter and the Wolf) and heroic movie scores (Alexander Nevsky), and the reshaping of 'safe' literary classics for the musical stage (the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the opera War and Peace). Denounced by Zhdanov and harassed by his lieutenants, this giant of Russian music died on March 4, 1953, just one day before Stalin, the man who had so crippled its development.
Zhdanov died under mysterious circumstances in 1948 after launching the purge of 'homeless cosmopolitans' in the post-war era. Michael Zoshchenko, the last of the great satirists of the twenties, was silenced; the patriotic poet and widow of Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, was called 'half-nun, half-harlot' for her apolitical lyricism; and a bewildered Communist historian of philosophy was reviled as a 'toothless vegetarian' for paraphrasing Western thinkers without sufficient polemic ridicule.60 The search for distinctive proletarian art forms had, of course, been suppressed no less than the aristocratic experimentalism of the silver age. Stalin consistently favortJd a melodramatic art glorifying 'heroes of socialist labor' and a pretentious architectural style variously characterized as sovnovrok ('new Soviet rococo') and-in a play on a line of Pushkin-'the empire style from the time of the plague.'51
The peculiarities of Stalinist architecture lead us into a world very different from anything imagined by Lenin, let alone the materialists of the 1860's. The mammoth mosaics in the Moscow subway, the unnecessary spires and fantastic frills of civic buildings, the leaden chandeliers and dark foyers of reception chambers-all send the historical imagination back to the somber world of Ivan the Terrible. Indeed, the culture of the Stalin era seems more closely linked with ancient Muscovy than with even the rawest stages of St. Petersburg-based radicalism. One can, to be sure, find a certain bias in favor of bigness in the earlier period of rapid industrial development in the 1890's- evidenced in the preponderance of large factory complexes
and in the building of the Trans-Siberian railway. There are also hints of classical Oriental despotism in the spectacle of giant canals and ostentatious public buildings thrown up by forced labor. Plans for a canal strikingly similar to Stalin's famous White Sea Canal of the early thirties had been mooted late in the Muscovite era at the court of Alexis Mikhailovich.52 If this, the first major forced labor project of the Soviet era, had in some ways been anticipated in the Muscovite era, the site chosen in the twenties for the first of the new prison camp complexes of the USSR was one of the enduring symbols of Old Muscovy: the Solovetsk monastery. Ivan IV had been the first to use this bleak island monastery near the Arctic circle as a prison for ideological opponents, and the Soviet government-by evacuating the monks-was able to accommodate large numbers.
Quietly heroic testimony to some survival of Old Russian culture into the twenties is provided in the works published with the apparent consent of camp authorities by intellectuals incarcerated on the archipelago. In the monthly journal Solovetsk Islands, 'an organ of the directorate of the Solovetsk Camps of ordinary designation OGPU,' we read during the twenties of new discoveries of flora, fauna, and historical remains; of the founding of new museums; of 234 theatrical performances in a single year; and of a nineteen-kilometer ski race between inmates, Red Army guards, and the camp directorate. One article writes with obvious sympathy about Artemius, the first prisoner in Solovetsk under Ivan IV, as 'a great seeker of truth and an agitator for freedom of thought.'53
The camps of the Stalin era seemed at times to contain more scholars than the universities; but the relative freedom of Solovetsk in the early days was not to be maintained in the thirties; and only the terrible northern cold was to remain a constant feature of Stalin's concentration-camp empire. It seems eerily appropriate that the last publications to appear from Solovetsk (in 1934-5, long after the monthly journal had ceased to appear) tell of discovering prehistoric relics on the archipelago and exploring the vast, uncharted labyrinths that had long fascinated visitors to the monastery.54
At the very time when the emaciated prisoners of Solovetsk were plunging down to chart its frozen catacombs, thousands of laborers under various forms of compulsion were plunging even deeper beneath Moscow itself to build the greatest of all monuments of the Stalin era: the Moscow subway. From all over the empire party officials flocked to the capital like the faceless priests of some prehistoric religion to place ornate stalactites and stalagmites from the local republics into this giant communal labyrinth. The cult of the underground party also began in earnest at this time. Traditional idealistic leaders of foreign Communist parties began to be replaced by
serpentine Stalinists: a cold-blooded species capable of fast, lizard-like movements in dark places and sudden chameleon-like changes of color.
Silenced prisoners in Solovetsk and authoritarian power in the Moscow Kremlin present a picture strangely reminiscent of ancient Muscovy. In some ways, the Stalin era calls to mind the compulsive Byzantine ritualism of those pre-Petrine times which had remained 'contemporary' for so many Russians throughout the Romanov era. Icons, incense, and ringing bells were replaced by lithographs of Lenin, cheap perfume, and humming machines. The omnipresent prayers and calls to worship of Orthodoxy were replaced by the inescapable loudspeaker or radio with its hypnotic statistics and invocations to labor. The liturgy or 'common work' of believers was replaced by the communal construction of scientific atheists. The role once played by the sending of priests and missionaries along with colonizing soldiers into the heathen interior of Russia was now assumed by 'soldiers of the cultural army,' who departed from mass rallies for 'cultural relay races' into the countryside to see who could win the most converts for communism and collectivization in the shortest possible time.55
Something like the role of the holy fools and flagellants of Muscovy was played by frenzied 'heroes of Socialist labor' ascetically dedicated to 'overfulfilling their norms.' Just as Ivan the Terrible canonized his favorite holy fool and built a cathedral later named for him, so Stalin canonized and built a national movement around Nicholas Stakhanov, a coal miner who in a fit of heroic masochism cut out 102 tons of coal (fourteen times his quota) in one shift. 'Voluntary subscriptions to the state loan' replaced earlier tithes as a token of devotion to the new church; the 'shock quarter' of the year replaced Lent as the periodic time of self-denial in the name of a higher cause. Like the zealous Old Believers, who sought to storm the gates of heaven by outdoing the Orthodox in their fanatical adherence to the letter of the old liturgy, the Stakhanovites sought to hasten the millennium by their 'storming' (shturmovshchina) of production quotas. These were looked at in the way the Old Believers looked at sacred texts: as something not to be tampered with by bureaucratic innovators or scoffed at by Western sceptics, as a program of salvation if acted upon with urgency.
The Third Rome had been succeeded by a new Third International; and the ideal cultural expression in the latter as in the former was the believer's cry of hallelujah in response to the revealed word from Moscow. The term
