Stalin’s success in getting the creative intelligentsia in line had been uncanny. Every major cultural figure in the USSR in the 1930s had his or her own love affair with him. They exaggerated their own significance, and the attention he paid to them. The best ones, however, were correct: he did oversee them personally. Stalin tended not to imprison or execute those he considered the highest talents (Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Pasternak, even Andrei Platonov), and would accept a lightening of the sentences of those on whom punishment seemed unavoidable, such as with Mandelstam’s exile. Many cultural figures were lied to and coerced to conjure up a socialist paradise of joy and plenty.404 But blandishments and the prospect of a mass audience proved effective in recruitment as well. The prestigious names, like Tolstoy, who were neither Communist nor anti-Communist but cynics, were precisely whom Stalin had in mind when he insisted that art could best be categorized as loyal (or disloyal), that is, as Soviet (or anti-Soviet). The problem, however, was artistic quality. Blast furnaces and even collective farms turned out to be a lot easier than novels, poems, or plays, let alone symphonies or canvases.405 That said, much of the mass Soviet public—who wanted to believe in a brighter future—embraced socialist realism.406 As the opening line had it in a hit song, “Everything Higher: Aviation March,” by Pavel German and Ilya “Yuli” Khait, which would prove popular only in the 1930s: “We were born to turn fairy tale into reality.”
Yenukidze sent Stalin a long, upbeat account of Moscow affairs (September 5, 1934), beginning with the writers’ congress, which he predicted would have “gigantic consequences for the writers of all our republics and not less for the foreign proletarian and in general advanced writers.” He congratulated Stalin on his wisdom for having the speeches published and his advice to Toroshelidze concerning the report on Georgian literature, which Yenukidze, a fellow Georgian writing to Stalin in Russian, singled out for special praise. He touched on the removal of the ancient Kitaigorod walls in front of Old Square, where Stalin had kept his party office, and on reconstruction work inside the Kremlin, where Stalin had his now predominant office. Yenukidze was having the Kremlin walls repainted, the roofs fixed, and interior lawns replaced. He lauded construction of the metro, the liveliness of Moscow streets, the opening of the theater season, and the good weather, lamenting only the pending departure of his close friend Voroshilov for a holiday in Sochi. “The children arrived fine,” Yenukidze concluded in reference to Vasily and Svetlana. “I saw them three times. They are going to school. I’m ending, otherwise you will curse me for these prolix trivialities. Be healthy.”407
CHAPTER 4TERRORISM
Yesterday I was at the NKVD. . . . I understood that, in order to demonstrate my loyalty, I need to work harder for the NKVD. He said that if I work well, everything will remain a secret, but otherwise I could be deported from Moscow. I was given three main tasks in my work . . . the October Revolution celebrations and conversations. Is an assassination attempt against Stalin not being prepared . . . By the way, in front of him lay a file two fingers high all about me.
STALIN’S UNDERSTANDING OF WORLD markets remained amateurish, but he had a keen appreciation for technology. As of 1934, the Soviets possessed 3,500 tanks (T-26s, BTs, T-28s), as well as another 4,000 armored vehicles (T-27s). Fighter planes of Soviet make and mobile artillery were also coming off assembly lines in numbers. Even radios were beginning to spread widely in the armed forces (in 1930, there had been zero among the field units). Overall troop strength had grown from 586,000 in 1927 to nearly a million. The command staff was more educated, having completed courses at the many military academies.2 From August 30 to September 4, 1934, the Red Army conducted its annual fall maneuvers in Ukraine, which the Polish consul in Kiev interpreted as “a demonstration against foreign countries, particularly Japan.” The exercises went badly, though. Mechanization presented underappreciated organizational and logistical challenges, raising the stakes for Soviet diplomacy.3