Stalin's most important contribution to world culture lay in his perfection of a new technique of governing through systematic alternation between terror and relaxation. This 'artificial dialectic' required the building of a manipulable and 'cast-iron' apparatus totally dependent on the dictator, and the determination to make 'permanent purge' a calculated instrument of statecraft.58 The true homo sovieticus was the disciplined and secretive professional officer of the dictator's sprawling police and intelligence apparatus.59 Just as technicians in the infamous Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior found that one of the simplest ways to 'break' a reluctant prisoner was by a blinking alternation of total light and total darkness, so the servants of Stalin sought to disorient and subdue the outside world with an incessant and bewildering alternation between smiles and scowls, amity and threat.
In the remote apex of this society stood the solitary dictator, regulating the ebb and flow of mood, ingeniously playing on the masochistic and xenophobic impulses of a populace long accustomed to collective suffering and feelings of inferiority. Whenever rewards were in order or respites to be granted, the Caligula of collectivism suddenly emerged smiling from inside the Kremlin. When terror was loose, even the victims tended to speak of it as the creation of an underling: Yezhovshchina in the thirties, Zhdanovshchina in the forties.
In his last years, Stalin kept about him such shadowy figures as Beria, a fellow Georgian and Yezhov's successor as head of the evergrowing police empire; Poskrebyshev, his private secretary; and Michael Suslov, a lean and ascetic former Old Believer who bore the name of the founder of the flagellant sect.
On Christmas eve of 1952, Suslov sounded the first note in a fresh campaign of denunciation that was both a throwback to the witch-hunting at the court of Ivan III and the apparent harbinger of a vast new purge. Suslov's denunciation of editors for insufficiently rigorous self-criticism over long-forgotten issues of economic development was followed by an announcement in Pravda that nine doctors had been charged with assassinating through mistreatment and poisoning a variety of leading Soviet figures, including Zhdanov. This campaign against the predominately Jewish 'doctor-poisoners' who had allegedly infiltrated the Kremlin was apparently directed against Beria, as head of state security, and his close associate, Georgy Malenkov. As the most intelligent and powerful of Stalin's lieutenants, they were the logical candidates for victimization; and their careers were saved (though only temporarily) by the convenient death of Stalin himself
on March 5, 1953. The last time he was seen alive by a non-Communist observer, Stalin was doodling wolves in red ink; and the last officially announced medical treatment administered to him before death was bleeding with leeches.60
For nearly ten years, a mummified and faintly smiling Stalin lay alongside Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum. It was an awesome reminder of the carefully cultivated myth of infallibility-the idea that, however absurd Soviet policy may have seemed to those on the front lines, there was always an omniscient leader at the command post: a 'magic citadel' within the Kremlin inviolable to assault from ordinary experience and common- sense doubts. As one student of the Stalin formula wrote:
The strength of communism and its originality come from the disinterested militants and sympathizers. . . . Their sympathy and faith will not become untenable while the remote inner citadel remains intact-that magic citadel within which evil is transformed to good, fact into myth, history into legend, and the steppes of Russia into paradise.61
Giant, omnipresent statues of Stalin had provided Russia with a new image of omnipotence: a macabre parody of the Byzantine Pantokrator. This divine image had stared down from the central domes of the original cathedrals of the holy wisdom to provide sanctifying power and some mystical foretaste of the splendors of heaven to those who gathered on feast days in these original centers of Russian civilization. So Stalin smiled down his assurances of holy wisdom and sanctifying authority to those who gathered on the new feast days for the pathetic foretaste of heaven on earth provided by a 'park of culture and rest.' This quasi-religious myth of Stalin with its many psychologically satisfying features could not be easily dispelled. When his body was finally removed from the mausoleum in Red Square late in 1961, an ancient woman who had known Lenin and spent seventeen years in prison under Stalin issued the call rather in the manner of a sectarian prophetess:
The only reason I survived is that Il'ich was in my heart, and I sought his advice, as it were. (Applause) Yesterday I asked Il'ich for advice, and it was as if he stood before me alive and said: 'I do not like being next to Stalin, who inflicted so much harm on the Party.' (Stormy prolonged applause.)62
The scene of ritual reburial is reminiscent of late Muscovite politicst with Khrushchev calling forth his sanctifying approval of the woman's, recommendation from the podium of the Twenty-second Party Congress as it bellowed forth its antiphonal responses of 'Stormy, prolonged applause.' One Soviet intellectual of the post-Stalin era has written:
Ah, if only we had been more intelligent; if only we had surrounded his death with miracles! We should have given it out on the radio that he was not dead but had gone up into heaven, whence he was still looking at us silently, over his mystical moustache. His relics would have cured paralytics and people possessed with devils. And children, before going to bed, would have been praying by their windows, with their eyes turned toward the bright stars of the celestial Kremlin.63
Perhaps the best synoptic view of Russian culture under Stalin is provided by the development of the cinema, an art medium with little history prior to the Soviet period. The innumerable movie theaters large and small that sprang up all over the USSR in the twenties and thirties were the new regime's equivalent to the churches of an earlier age. Within the theaters, the prescribed rituals of the new order-its chronicles of success and promises of bliss-were systematically and regularly presented to the silent masses, whose main image of a world beyond that of immediate physical necessity was now derived from a screen of moving pictures rather than a screen of stationary icons. Like Soviet industry, the cinema produced in the age of Stalin a great quantity of films, including some of real quality. Yet despite the many new techniques and skilled artists involved, the Stalinist cinema represents a regressive chapter in the history of Russian culture. At best, it offered little more than a pretentious extension of the most chauvinistic aspects of pre-Revolutionary culture; at worst it was a technological monstrosity seeking to cannibalize one of the world's most promising theatrical traditions.
Hopes were high when idealistic young revolutionaries first wandered into the deserted studios of the infant Russian film industry during the Revolutionary period. Here was an art medium closely linked to the liberating force of technology, uniquely suitable for spreading the good news of a new social order to all people. Here also was a relatively untouched world of artistic possibility: a cultural tabula rasa. For, since the first public movie theater had appeared in 1903, the Russian film industry had assumed no very distinctive character. It was an imitative, commercially oriented medium largely involved in producing never-never land sentimentality and melodramatic happy endings.
Placed under the commissariat of education by a Leninist decree of August, 1919, and faced with the emigration of almost all its artists and technicians, the Soviet film industry became a major center for on-the-job training in the arts and an arena for florid experimentation.
During the relatively relaxed period of the early twenties a variety of new styles appeared, and a vigorous discussion ensued about the nature of cinematic art and its relation to the new social order. The remarkable
'movie eye' (kinoko) group flourished briefly, with its fanatical dedication to documentary accuracy and
