alliluishchik ('hallelujah singer') was in fact widely used in the Stalin era. Russia, which had overthrown a discredited monarchy, suddenly fell back on the most primitive aspect of the original
tsarist mystique: the idea that the batiushka, the father-deliverer in the Kremlin, would rescue his suffering children from malevolent local officials and lead them into the promised land.
Thus, Stalin was able to succeed Lenin as supreme dictator not only because he was a deft intriguer and organizer but also because he was closer than his rivals to the crude mentality of the average Russian. Unlike most other Bolshevik leaders-many of whom were of Jewish, Polish, or Baltic origin-Stalin had been educated only in the catechistic theology of Orthodoxy. At Lenin's funeral, when the other Bolshevik leaders were speaking in the involved rhetoric and glowing generalities of the intellectual community, Stalin spoke in terms more familiar to the masses with his litanylike exhortations:
Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to hold high and keep pure the great title of member of the Party. We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, that we will fulfill thy bequest with honor! . ..
Departing from us, Comrade Lenin adjured us to guard the unity of our party like the apple of our eye. We swear to thee, Comrade Lenin, that this obligation too, we will fulfill with honor!56
The seminarian was clearly in a better position than the cosmopolitan to create a national religion of Leninism. He felt no sense of embarrassment as Lenin's embalmed body was laid out for public veneration with hands folded in the manner of the saints in the monastery of the caves of Kiev. The incongruous mausoleum in Red Square, which paid tribute to Lenin and the new order by exemplifying the purely proletarian 'constructivist' style of architecture, was forced to pay a deeper tribute to an older order represented by the crypt beneath and the Kremlin walls above it. Stalin transformed the simple building into a shrine for pilgrims and the site of his own periodic epiphanies on festal days. He chose the traditional, theological way of immortalizing Lenin in contrast to the Promethean effort by the Revolutionary intellectuals to discover after Lenin's death the material forces behind his genius through 'cyto-architectonic' research (involving imported German scientists, innumerable microphotographs of his brain, and the projected comparative study of minute cranial slices from other leading thinkers).57
For the rest of his life Stalin claimed to be nothing more than the rock on which Lenin had built his church. His theoretical writings were always presented as updated thoughts on 'problems of Leninism.' In the name of Lenin's theory of the past Stalin felt free to contradict both Lenin and himself and, of course, to suppress Lenin's final uncomplimentary assessment of Stalin.
Along with the forms of theological discourse went the new content of Great Russian patriotism. Stalin rehabilitated a whole host of Russian national heroes in the thirties and introduced ever sharper differentiations in pay and privilege to goad on production. The ingeniously Marxist and almost nameless sociological histories of Pokrovsky, which had dominated Soviet historical writing until his death in 1932, were 'unmasked' two years later as a deviation from 'true Marxism,' which henceforth glorified such unproletarian figures as Peter the Great and General Suvorov. The fiercely proletarian novels of the period of the first five-year plan, such as Cement and How the Steel Was Tempered, were replaced by a new wave of chauvinistic novels and films glorifying Russian warriors of the past.
By the late thirties, Stalin had produced a curious new mass culture that could be described by inverting his classic phrase 'nationalist in form, socialist in content.' The forms of Russian life were now clearly socialist: all agriculture had been collectivized and all of Russia's expanding means of production brought under State ownership and central planning. But socialization throughout the Stalin era brought few material benefits to the consumer, or spiritual benefits to those concerned with greater equality or increased freedom. The content of the new ersatz culture was retrogressively nationalistic. Under a patina of constitutions and legal procedures lay the dead hand of Nicholas I's official nationalism and some of the macabre touches of Ivan the Terrible. Stalin's proudly announced 'wave of the future' looks, on closer analysis, more like backwash from the past: ghostly voices suddenly returning like the legendary chimes from the submerged city of Kitezh on Midsummer Eve-only to jangle on uncontrolled and out of tune.
Even the most servile of Bolshevik poets, Efim Pridvorov ('the courtier'), who wrote under the name Bedny ('the poor'), was thrown out of court in 1936 for his Bogatyrs, which made the 'vulgar Marxist' error of burlesquing these popular heroes of the early Russian epics. The following year saw a host of purely patriotic festivals: a Pushkin centenary, a 125th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, and a revival of Glinka's Life for the Tsar (under the alternate title of Ivan Susanin). The growing fear first of Japan and then of Germany accelerated Stalin's tendency to rely on nationalistic rather than socialistic appeals. The general staff and many traditional army titles were reintroduced in the late thirties; the League of the Militant Godless was abolished shortly before the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and a limited concordat with the Patriarch of Moscow agreed upon shortly after. So traditionalist did Stalin seem to have become that many in the West were prepared to accept at face value the gesture of their wartime ally in abolishing the Communist International in 1943.
Yet for all these links with Russian tradition, the age of Stalin introduced industrial development and social changes that should not be compared lightly with anything that preceded it. His effort to destroy the free creative culture of Russia was more sweeping than that of his authoritarian ancestors, and was launched against a culture that had attained unprecedented variety, sophistication, and popular support. He enlisted in his campaign all the cynical manipulative techniques of modern mass advertising, lacquering over his atrocities with a veneer of misleading statistics and insincere constitutional guarantees.
Behind it all lay untold human suffering and degradation. The peasants' hopes-rekindled during the era of the New Economic Policy-for a better life and greater freedom from their traditional urban exploiters were dashed by Stalin's determination to collectivize. The burning of grain and slaughter of livestock by the protesting peasantry at the beginning of the thirties launched a chain reaction of unnatural death in the human realm. Peasants perished as kulak 'class enemies,' repopulated forced laborers, or victims of artificial starvation from bad planning or forcible grain collections. The 'leftist' activists who perpetrated this horror in the countryside were the next to perish in the purges of the mid-thirties; and, then the executors were themselves executed to placate the masses and insure the safety of the supreme assassin.
Deaths were recorded not individually or by the thousands but by the millions. More than ten million cattle were slaughtered in the early stages of collectivization, perhaps five million peasants in the social upheaval of the thirties. Membership in the Party elite provided no refuge, for 55 out of its 71 Central Committee members and 60 of 68 alternate members disappeared between the Seventeenth Congress of the party in 1934 and its Eighteenth Congress in 1939. Indeed, all but a very few of those who had made the Revolution and launched the Soviet state were purged in the thirties. Then came Hitler and the terrible suffering of the war, in which twelve million Russians perished.
Always and umemittingly, Stalin suspected those flights of the imagination and experiments with form and idea which lay at the heart of creative culture. None was more suspect in Eastern Europe than the large Jewish community, with its intellectual traditions and international perspectives. Jewish Bolsheviks were deprived of their revolutionary names and sent to the anonymous death that was shortly to become the fate of the Jewish masses under the more systematic and distinctively racist totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. The final reprise on the totalitarian age was Stalin's effort to cut out 'the ulcer of cosmopolitanism' by obliterating the
survivals of Yiddish culture and the new interest in Western Europe that appeared in Russia in the wake of World War II.
