Yezhov praised Zakovsky, whose Leningrad Chekists were poring over prerevolutionary archives, address lists, and phone books, stringing together people like beads to form counterrevolutionary “organizations” of former nobles, merchants, factory owners, rentiers, old regime functionaries, priests, and family members.240 Zakovsky had been a Red Guard protecting Smolny during the October Revolution, and his Cheka service dated from its founding, in December 1917 (he was said to have been invited to join by Dzierżyński). He had completed just two years of schooling, yet he was credited with compiling the internal NKVD training textbook. He had reported to Yagoda on the more than 11,000 “former people” employed in the city’s party and government institutions.241 Yagoda, in a note to Stalin (February 26), objected to indiscriminate roundups of “formers,” unless they were proven counterrevolutionaries, because of the potential for a negative press campaign abroad, but Stalin brushed the memo aside (“to the archive”).242 Beginning on February 28, Zakovsky and his minions began “cleansing” the former people, the universities, and the border zones, requesting authorization for ever more arrests in “unmasked” conspiracies and boasting of preventing terrorist acts against the new Leningrad party boss, Zhdanov.243
FOREIGN MODELS
Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins had been returned to theaters, partly as a result of Gorky’s determination and political weight.244 By some accounts, Stalin saw it fifteen times.245 In 1935, he sent the fourteen-year-olds Vasily and Artyom to see it. Artyom recalled not comprehending the play, because it showed no Reds, only Whites, and the latter fought among themselves. Stalin explained that “between the Reds and the Whites there was a spectrum from almost Red to almost White, so that the people who fight in the play, some are very White, others a bit pink, but not Red. They could not get along, so they fought. Never think that you can divide people between purely Red and purely White. That is only leaders, the more literate, conscious people. The masses follow these or those, frequently confusing them, and do not go where they are supposed to go.”246
Stalin approved an International Film Festival in Moscow (February 21–March 2, 1935) and allowed the world-renowned Eisenstein to chair the jury. Captions under photographs of the Soviet participants read “director,” while Eisenstein’s read “Extraordinary World-Class Director,” but speakers pointedly asked why he had not made a film in six years, accusing him of silence about Soviet achievements.247 Walt Disney animations—Three Little Pigs, Peculiar Penguins—were featured (and, before the year was out, shown to the Soviet public).248 An American film about Mexico called Viva, Villa! was also screened, prompting the poet Alexander Bezymensky to accuse Jolly Fellows of having plagiarized its music from this film. This spurred renewed ideological attacks against mere laughter. “Jolly Fellows creates the impression that some bourgeois directors sneaked into the studios at night and secretly shot the film using a Soviet stage set,” a French critic remarked, as quoted in the Soviet press.249 Stalin ordered Mekhlis at Pravda to defend Shumyatsky, and the attack dog editorialized, without irony, that “both editors [of Izvestiya and Literary Newspaper] have apparently forgotten the elementary rules of decency essential to Soviet newspapers.”250
At the concluding ceremony in the Columned Hall of the House of Trade Unions, Leningrad Film took first prize, primarily for Chapayev; The Last Billionaire by the French-born René-Lucien Chomette, known as René Clair, took second; and Disney third.251 Clair’s film, a commercial flop in France, portrays a nearly bankrupt fictional European kingdom (“Casinaria”) that begs for help from the earth’s richest man (“Monsieur Banco”), who, upon arrival, is accidentally hit in the head and awakens a babbling imbecile. Casinaria soon becomes a dictatorship.252
