Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Yet his health was weak. [258] In late 1946, Zhdanov suffered heart trouble and had to rest in Sochi, reporting to Stalin on 5 January 1947, “Now I feel much better… I don’t want to end the course of treatment… I ask you to add 10 days to my holiday… Let me return the 25th… For which I’ll be enormously grateful. Greetings! Your Andrei Zhdanov.” Zhdanov never wanted to be the successor. During Stalin’s serious illnesses, he was terrified at the prospect, telling his son, “God forbid I outlive Stalin!” 2

Stalin and Zhdanov picked up where they had left off before the war, debating how to merge the patriotic Russianness of the war with the Bolshevism of the Revolution in order to eradicate foreign influence and restore morality, pride and discipline. Like two crabby professors, obsessed with the greatness of nineteenth-century culture and repulsed by the degeneracy of modern art and morals, the old seminarist and the scion of provincial intelligentsia reached back to their youths, devising a savage attack on modernism (“formalism”) and foreign influence on Russian culture (“cosmopolitanism”). Poring over poetry and literary journals late into the night, these two meticulous, ever-tinkering “intellectuals,” who shared that ravenous Bolshevik appetite for education, cooked up the crackdown on the cultural freedom of wartime.

Steeped in the classics, despising new-fangled art, Zhdanov embarked on a policy that would have been familiar to Tsars Alexander I and Nicholas I. Victory had blessed the marriage of Russianness and Bolshevism: Stalin saw the Russians as the binding element of the USSR, the “elder brother” of the Soviet peoples, his own new brand of Russian nationalism very different from its nineteenth-century ancestor. There would be no new freedoms, no foreign influences, but these impulses would be suppressed in an enforced celebration of Russianness.

The Leningrad journals were the natural place to start because they published the works of the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, whom Stalin had once read to his children, and the poetess Anna Akhmatova, whose passionate verses symbolized the indestructible dignity and sensitivity of humanity in terror and war. Zhdanov’s papers reveal in his own words what Stalin wanted: “I ask you to look this through,” Zhdanov asked the Master, “is it good for the media and what needs to be improved?”

“I read your report. I think it’s perfect,” Stalin replied in crayon. “You must hurry to publish it and then as a book. Greetings!” But “there are some corrections”—which expressed Stalin’s thinking: “if our youth had read Akhmatova and been educated in such an atmosphere, what would have happened in the Great Patriotic War? Our youth [has been] educated in the cheerful spirit able to win victory over Germany and Japan… This journal helps our enemies to destroy our youth.” [259] Zhdanov discussed the campaign with his son Yury, who had studied chemistry, taken a master’s degree in philosophy—and remained Stalin’s ideal young man and his dream son-in-law. Zhdanov explained that “after the war, with millions dead and the economy destroyed, we have to form a new concept of spiritual values to give a foundation to a devastated country, based on classical culture…” Zhdanov, raised on nineteenth-century “authors from Pushkin to Tolstoy, composers like Haydn and Mozart,” sought “an ideological basis in the classics.”

On 18 April, Zhdanov launched his cultural terror, known as the Zhdanovshchina , with an attack on the Leningrad journals. In August, the literary inquisitor travelled to Leningrad to demand: “How weak was the vigilance of those citizens in Leningrad, in the leadership of the journal Zvezda , for it to publish, in this journal, works… poisoned with the venom of zoological hostility to the Soviet leadership.” He castigated Akhmatova as this “half-nun, half-harlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer,” a grotesque distortion of her own verses. He followed this up with attacks on film-makers and musicians. At a notorious meeting with Shostakovich and others, “the Pianist” tinkled on the piano to demonstrate easily hummed people’s tunes, a vision as absurd as Joseph II admonishing Mozart for writing “too many notes.” Yury Zhdanov went to the theatre with his father and Stalin. When they talked to the actors afterwards, the cast boasted that their show had been acclaimed in Paris:

“Those French aren’t worth the soles of your shoes,” replied Stalin. “There’s nothing more important than Russian theatre.”

Bantering playfully, the omnipotent double act, Stalin and Zhdanov, held conversazione to guide writers and film directors. On the night of 14 May 1947, they received Stalin’s two favoured literary bureaucrats, the poet Simonov and the hack novelist Fadeev, the head of the Writers’ Union. Stalin first set the pay for writers. “They write one good book, build their dacha and stop working. We don’t begrudge them the money,” laughed Stalin, “but this can’t happen.” So he suggested setting up a commission.

“I’ll join!” declared Zhdanov, showing his independence.

“Very modest!” Stalin chuckled. As they discussed the commission, Zhdanov opposed Stalin thrice before being overruled, another example of how his favourite could still argue with him. Stalin teased Zhdanov fondly. When “the Pianist” said he had received a pitiful letter from some writer, Stalin joked: “Don’t believe pitiful letters, Comrade Zhdanov!”

Stalin asked the writers: “If that’s all, I’ve a question for you: what kind of themes are writers working on?” He launched into a lecture about “Soviet patriotism.” The people were proud but “our middle intelligentsia, doctors and professors don’t have patriotic education. They have unjustified admiration for foreign culture… This tradition comes from Peter… admiration of Germans, French, of foreigners, of assholes”—he laughed. “The spirit of self-abasement must be destroyed. You should write a novel on this theme.”

Stalin had a recent scandal in mind. A pair of medical professors specializing in cancer treatment had published their work in an American journal. Stalin and Zhdanov created “courts of honour,” another throw-back to the Tsarist officer class, to try the professors. (Zhdanov chaired the court.) Stalin set Simonov to write a play about the case. Zhdanov spent an entire hour giving literary criticism to Simonov before Stalin himself rewrote the play’s ending. [260] “I have fulfilled the orders according to Comrade Stalin’s instructions which I wrote down about the play,” Simonov wrote to Poskrebyshev on 9 February 1949, delivering the work for inspection.

In August, Bolshakov, the cinematic impresario, showed Stalin a new movie, Ivan the Terrible, Part Two . Knowing from MGB reports that Eisenstein compared The Terrible with Yezhov, Stalin rejected this “nightmare,” hating its lack of Russian pride, its portrayal of Ivan (and the length of his kisses, and beard). Eisenstein shrewdly appealed to Stalin. At 11 p.m. on 25 February 1947, Eisenstein and his scriptwriter arrived in the Little Corner where Stalin and Zhdanov gave them a master class on national Bolshevism, a most revealing tour d’horizon of history, terror and even sex. Stalin attacked the film for making the Tsar’s MGB, the Oprichnina , resemble the Ku Klux Klan. As for Ivan himself, “Your Tsar is indecisive—he resembles Hamlet,” said Stalin. “Tsar Ivan was a great wise ruler… wise… not to let foreigners into the country. Peter the Great’s also a great Tsar but treated foreigners too liberally… Catherine, more so. Was Alexander I’s Court Russian?… No, it was German…” Then Zhdanov gave his own view, with its interesting reflection on Stalin’s own nature: