7.4 The politics of culture

The dark years between the end of the Second World War and Stalin’s death present us with voluminous material, a veritable case study of a culture under limitless tyranny. In 1945 no one foresaw what was ahead. In the euphoria of victory many believed that the people had showed their commitment to the Soviet form of government and therefore could be trusted, that terror was not necessary to maintain stability. The leaders thought otherwise. During the war for tactical reasons they allowed considerable laxity in ideological matters. Some time in 1946, however, they decided that it was essential to restore communist ideology in its most dogmatic and narrow-minded form, and gradually tightened the screws.

Some Western historians have argued that this tightening was the consequence of the break with the West. It was necessary to mobilize the country to face a new enemy. More likely it was the other way around: the Stalinists, fearing social disintegration and aware of the great weaknesses of the regime, recognized that continued friendly relations with the West were too dangerous and subversive. They needed the cold war.

The major turning point occurred in August and September 1946, when a series of resolutions were published under the authority of the central committee of the Communist Party. The decision was made at the highest level – we cannot tell from archival sources how the decision was made or whether there were discussions or disagreements – that Soviet style discipline had to be reimposed in all aspects of the life of the nation. This tightening was not limited to the intellectual sphere. During the same period the regulation concerning “strengthening the discipline in the collective farms” was also published. The cumulative affect of the condemnations and brutal attacks on individual intellectuals was to further narrow the sphere of the permissible in the intellectual life of the nation. More and more topics were placed beyond legitimate discourse.

We do not know what role Andrei Zhdanov, the man responsible for ideology in the Politburo, played in the adoption of the new policies. But since he articulated them and was their most visible spokesmen, the two years between 1946 and his death in August 1948 came to be called Zhdanovshchina. It would be wrong to see him as the single author. As the “Ezhovshchina” was not Ezhov’s creation, nor was Zhdanovshchina Zhdanov’s. The policies were Stalin’s, even though it was Zhdanov as chief ideologist whose task it was to carry them out. The victims of Zhdanov’s denunciations did not lose their lives, and after Zhdanov’s fall and death in 1948 both the intellectual climate and the terror became worse. For this reason some historians describe Zhdanov as a moderate. But the changes occurred not because of the different personalities who temporarily seemed to possess Stalin’s trust, for Stalin trusted no one. More likely, the changes occurred because of changed circumstances.

The best known and indeed perhaps the most significant of the staged events was in literature. The method here as elsewhere was to choose examples for attack, thereby defining the limits of the permissible and conveying in most concrete terms what was expected. The party chose two journals, Zvezda and Leningrad, and two prominent literary figures, the humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the great poet Anna Akhmatova, as object lessons. On August 15 1946, Zhdanov delivered a speech to the leadership of the Leningrad party organization, followed by a day-long discussion in which the various dignitaries echoed Zhdanov’s arguments and exercised self-criticism. Next day Zhdanov repeated his performance and participated in another meeting where he made more or less the same points to an organization of Leningrad writers. In his speeches he blamed the party leaders and writers for lack of vigilance. Party leaders and writers then heaped abuse on the unfortunate artists; in usual Soviet style, the leadership insisted on making everyone into an accomplice. One of the sad ironies of the situation was that within a few years all the leading figures of the Leningrad party organization who participated in this meeting themselves became victims of the so-called Leningrad affair.

Although this was more than an attack on two individual creative figures, and the intention was to redefine – that is, to further limit – the sphere of the permissible, the two figures were well chosen from the party’s point of view. Zoshchenko, a brilliant satirist, had been criticized during the war for his strange (in Soviet circumstances) autobiographical work, Before Sunrise – it was called self-indulgent, Freudian, apolitical. Akhmatova, perhaps the greatest living poet, had always been only barely tolerated. It is correct to say, and this is of course to their credit, that the two figures stood outside of the mainstream of Soviet literature. The journal Leningrad was closed down, and the editorial board of Zvezda was changed. Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were expelled from the Union of writers.

It would not have been necessary to spend so much time on only two people. That the intention of the party was greater than merely condemning two writers became clear two weeks later, when the party condemned the repertoire of theaters as apolitical and containing too many second-rate Western plays. Over the next months it was the turn of the filmmakers. Once again, the method was the same. A central committee resolution, published on September 4, made an example of a mediocre film called A Great Life, by director L. Lukov. At the same time works of such luminaries of Soviet cinema as Kozintsev, Trauberg, Pudovkin, and Eisenstein were attacked. It must be admitted that the Soviet treatment of intellectuals was egalitarian: the outstanding and the second-rate received the same abuse. A chief accusation against the artists was that they had paid “too much attention to personal problems” rather than to social issues. A Soviet artist was not to waste his time worrying about such personal matters as love, jealousy, or death. The other point made by the critics was that the artists painted too gloomy a picture of Soviet reality. Zoshchenko, in his story “The Adventures of an Ape”, gave the impression that it was better to live in a cage in the zoo than in a Soviet city; and Lukov in his film came close to giving a realistic picture of the difficult material conditions of the Soviet people immediately after the war. Soviet artists, in other words, were expected to widen further the gap between the world as depicted by them and reality. The socialist realist artist was to see the germs of the beautiful future in the less-than-perfect present; the distinction between the “is” and the “ought” was to be abolished.

The consequences for soviet art were devastating. The party microman-aged the writing of novels, and requirements changed all the time. Aleksandr Fadeev, for example, who wrote about the heroic exploits of a group of young people during the war in a way that corresponded to contemporary requirements, had to rewrite his novel, The Young Guard. The writer now had to show that in fact the Communist Party played a major role in the leadership of the partisan movement. Filmmaking was almost obliterated. While in the late 1920s about 120 films were made annually in Soviet studios, during the last years under Stalin the situation became so difficult that no more than four or five films were completed each year. These films were so uniform and so lacking in artistic interest that even contemporary observers pointed out that dialog could easily be moved from one film into another without the audience noticing. Because Soviet cinemas had so few new films to show, they continued to exhibit some of the successful films made two decades earlier and, absurdly, showed captured films – so-called trophy films – that were recut and equipped with new subtitles to make them suitable for Soviet audiences. Most of these were mindless musicals without political content.

Given the character of the Soviet state, one can understand why the regime considered it essential to control down to the smallest details literature and cinema, which by their very nature were likely to carry ideological messages. It is harder to understand why such control needed to be extended to branches of art which did not carry any ostensible ideological message, such as music. The Soviet regime, however, did not tolerate the notion that there was anything outside its competence, or indeed, that experts, artists, scholars in any field whatever had any autonomy beyond the reach of the regime. The central committee of the party claimed that it could decide better than musicians which was a good opera and which was not, what was good music and what was not. In February 1948 the object of attention was Muradeli’s The Great Friendship, by all accounts a dreadful work by a third-rate composer. The occasion was used for once again denouncing “formalist” music, that is, the kind of music that an average listener, leaving the concert hall, could not hum on his way home. The musicians were criticized for producing “anti-populist,” dissonant music without memorable melodies. Prokofiev and Shostakovich had the “honor” of being chosen as the primary representatives of formalism; neither international reputation nor past services to the regime protected an artist. For comparison, we should recall that the leaders of Nazi Germany also objected to modern “decadent” music; however, the boundaries were drawn even more narrowly in the Soviet Union. Richard Strauss, a favorite of the Nazis, composed music that could not have been performed at the height of Stalinism.

In the Stalinist conception, Soviet art, music, literature, and cinema were based on different principles and were superior to anything produced in the West. The Stalinists extended this idea even to the sciences. In their view there was a bourgeois, reactionary science and progressive, socialist science. According to their reasoning it was not the task of scientists to prove or disprove Marxist precepts, for their “truth” had been established, but conversely – the correctness of scientific propositions depended on whether they could be reconciled with the most simple-minded pronouncements of vulgar Marxism. Since members of the central committee by definition were better Marxists than let us say, physicists, the ultimate arbitrator of scientific work was the leadership of the Communist Party.

The social sciences suffered the most. The disciplines of sociology and political science did not exist, and the writing of modern history came to be so distorted that no worthwhile texts survive from this period. Stalin at the end of his life wrote a short pamphlet on economic issues and, oddly, took a special interest in linguistics. In his essay “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR” he made the rather unstartling observation that the laws of economics would continue to apply, and that the Soviet Union could go on building socialism even without the triumph of world revolution. In his essay on linguistics, he refuted the nonsensical theories associated with the linguist Nikolai Marr, according to which language, as part of the “superstructure,” would change under communism, and all people of the world would come to speak the same language, an amalgam of all languages. He proposed his own theory, just as nonsensical but more in tune with the spirit of the times: the language of socialism would be Russian.

Neither did the physical sciences escape. In Nazi Germany, Einstein’s relativity theory was attacked as “Jewish” science, in the Soviet Union it was dismissed as bourgeois science. Nor could Marxist science accept the idea that the path of movement of subatomic particles was unpredictable: “electrons could not possess free will,” announced the party secretaries. Despite the antiscientific and anti-intellectual pronouncements, Soviet physics, unlike biology, was not destroyed. In their every-day work the scientists could safely disregard the “theories” promulgated by the vulgar Marxists, because they were able to produce miracles – that is to say, nuclear weapons.

The situation was different in biology in general, and in genetics in particular. Soviet geneticists, who were among the most prominent scientists in their field in the 1920s, by the nature of their discipline could not produce miracles. As so often in the past, utopian solutions grew out of miserable realities. The Stalinists wanted to revamp backward, miserable agriculture, but were unwilling to pay the price of heavy investment. At a time when incremental solutions offered little comfort, many came to be attracted to the extraordinary, the supernatural. The path was open for a charlatan such as Trofim Lysenko.

The story of Lysenko is an important one, not only because of the great harm he did to Soviet agriculture and science, but also because his story is so revealing of the nature of the Stalinist regime. Lysenko first attracted some notice in the late 1920s. His achievement was “vernalization,” which meant that after soaking and chilling the seed – in order to “make them get used to the cold” – winter wheat was planted in the spring. This process was completely without scientific foundations and of course never produced verifiable results. Lysenko and his supporters based an enormous and entirely false superstructure on this half-baked idea. This was the time of “the great socialist transformation.” The Stalinists proudly proclaimed that there were no “fortresses that the Bolsheviks could not storm.” One of the fortresses that they stormed and demolished was genuine science. Lysenko managed to gain the approval of the authorities by clothing himself in Marxist garb, and was thus protected from normal scientific criticism. His “scientific theories,” such as the Lamarckian belief that acquired characteristics could be transmitted, raised an issue central to Soviet science of the 1940s: the repudiation of the notion that there are any scientific principles independent of the nature of society.

By the mid 1930s Lysenko had accumulated enough power to destroy his opponents, and used his power mercilessly. One of the greatest Soviet scientists and Lysenko’s main opponent, Nikolai I. Vavilov, fell victim of the purges. But the apogee of Lysenko’s success and power came in the postwar world. At this point that debate on issues raised by Lysenko came to an end, and the topics of genes and heredity were placed beyond legitimate discussion. During the following years Lysenko’s followers’ nonsensical pronouncements could not be criticized. Soviet science now described genes as the creations of metaphysical, bourgeois, reactionary science. According to Lysenko and his followers, under unfavorable conditions wheat could metamorphose itself into weeds. Furthermore, if there were no genes, of course there could not be genetically caused illness, and Soviet medical science stopped looking for cures for those diseases.

During 1948 Zhdanov gradually lost some of his power; he died in August of that year, when his functions as chief ideologist were taken over by Mikhail Suslov. It is futile to try to guess the reasons for Zhdanov’s diminishing influence. Some have speculated that he paid the price for not having taken an energetic enough position in support of Lysenko; others saw the cause of his fall in the changed Soviet policy toward Tito. Zhdanov was one of the architects of the Cominform, an organization in which Yugoslavia was to play a major role. But there is no need to search for any particular cause: no one could retain Stalin’s favor for long. Being one of the oligarchs was both a dangerous and an uncertain position.

Although Zhdanov’s name came to symbolize the worst in the cultural policies of the regime, his death did not bring any improvement, but rather the contrary. In the Zhdanov era, people who were denounced lost their jobs and survived; after 1948 the terror became bloodier. This is not to imply, as some historians have done, that Zhdanov was a moderate in any meaningful sense; it is simply that the character of the Stalinist regime changed constantly. Most likely the deterioration was caused by Stalin’s ever-increasing paranoia. The trends already in motion now accelerated. In the severely limited public sphere, the same few topics were repeated time and again: (1) “vigilance,” fear of subversion from the West, (2) “anticosmopolitanism,” and (3) a vastly overblown Russian nationalism.

These themes were closely connected, and all were introduced into Soviet ideology before the end of the war. Nationalism, which became a strong component of Soviet ideology in the late 1930s, had become a guiding principle during the struggle against the Nazis. Millions of Soviet citizens at that time acquired some acquaintance with the West and saw that life in Europe was better and the standard of living higher. These experiences undermined the claim that the Soviet Union was the most advanced and progressive society on the face of the earth. Soviet propagandists dealt with the problem with a sleight of hand: they greatly exaggerated Soviet and past Russian achievements. The campaign that reached full flowering in 1948 and 1949 emphasized anti-Semitism, more or less implicitly; insisted on the superiority of everything Russian, projecting this superiority into the past; and called for vigilance concerning contacts with the West.

In the development of anti-Semitism, oddly, the war against Hitler was a contributing factor. The leaders probably feared that Hitler’s identification of Bolsheviks with Jews could be successful and had to be combated. Perhaps the Soviet leaders were influenced by Nazi propaganda. Whether Stalin in his early career successfully hid his anti-Semitism, or whether this prejudice developed later is unclear, but it is evident that gradually he removed almost all Jews from positions of power and influence. He very much objected to his daughter Svetlana marrying a Jew, and Svetlana later reported that her father made the crudest anti-Semitic remarks. The creation of Israel was a major factor contributing to the anti-Semitic policies of late Stalinism. It was not so much that a pro-Arab policy was considered superior, but rather that the creation of a Jewish state presented the danger of divided loyalties among Jews. Given the ambitions of a totalitarian state, such divided loyalties could not be tolerated; Jews could not be trusted.

During the last years of Stalin, anti-Semitism reached murderous proportions. Most of those who participated in the state-sponsored Jewish antifascist committee, which had the task of collecting money abroad during the war, were killed. The “doctors’ plot,” devised by Stalin during the last months of his life, was directed against doctors, almost all of them Jewish, who were accused of attempting to murder high government functionaries. The government more or less openly discriminated against Jews, and many, though not all, were removed from scientific and educational institutions. Jews ceased to play significant roles in the party or in administration. The country was a hairbreadth away from the revival of pogroms, this time organized by the government.

“Rootless cosmopolitan” was frequently used as a synonym for Jew, but the vast and brutal anticosmopolitan campaign also had other goals: by overstating past Russian achievements it aimed to compensate for the Russian feeling of inferiority and backwardness, particularly among the millions who during the war came into contact with Europe. Claiming credit for past achievements reached ludicrous extremes. According to Soviet publicists, all major scientific achievements of the nineteenth century were made by Russians. Russian philosophy of the nineteenth century had to be described as the most “advanced.” Marx and Engels became honorary Russians. Such nonsense could be propagated because there was no one who could have pointed out the emptiness of the pretensions. According to the newly formulated ideology of the Stalinist publicists, the tsarist state was not to be blamed for suppressing small nations, or even for being the protector of the rich against the poor, but above all for being an incompetent defender of the national interest. Who would have dared to point out that the Bolsheviks in 1904 and 1905, during the war against Japan, hoped for the victory of the enemy?

In order to prevent or at least limit subversive influences, the regime went to extraordinary lengths to prevent contacts with the outside world. Of course, no ordinary citizen could travel abroad, and no one was allowed to marry a foreign national. A film critic who wrote with admiration about the films of Charlie Chaplin (whose films at the time could not be shown in the U.S. because he was suspected of communist sympathies) was denounced for groveling before the West. The notion that science knew no borders was described as a reactionary, anti-Soviet idea. Soviet scientists, who in the different atmosphere of the war had published with official permission in Western scientific journals, were now punished and had to exercise self-criticism. Needless to say, it was not Western but Soviet science that suffered as a consequence.

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