Stalin полностью

In parallel, Vladimir Petrov’s film Peter the First, adapted from the popular novel by Aleksei Tolstoy, had premiered on September 1, 1937, the opening day of school.¹⁹³ It showed the tsar forging his new capital and cadres ruthlessly, decisively. “The epoch of Peter I was one of the greatest pages in the history of the Russian people,” Tolstoy told workers at the Skorokhod factory (September 11). “The boyars’ dark, uncultured Rus, with their backward technology and patriarchal beards, would have fallen to foreign invaders in no time. A revolution was necessary within the very life of the country, in order to lift Russia up to the level of the cultured European countries. Peter was able to accomplish this, and the Russian people were able to defend their independence.”¹⁹⁴ One Soviet inhabitant proudly recorded in her diary, “The content and superb execution of our films arouse admiration even abroad. If you take such films as Chapayev [and] Peter the First . . . you simply forget that you’re sitting in a movie theater, and not actually participating in what you are seeing.”¹⁹⁵

Stalin, like Peter (albeit without the extensive travels), had come to understand Europe as both a treasure trove of know-how and technology to be copied and a political and geopolitical threat to be kept at bay to protect Russia’s non-Western identity and nondemocratic system. His recorded comments on Peter had been intermittent (1926, 1928, 1931), but all had emphasized the class nature of the tsar’s rule. Now, too, incorporation of Peter in the Soviet pantheon did not vitiate the Marxist stance or class critique.¹⁹⁶ More broadly, Stalin did not reintroduce ritualized processionals accompanied by clergy. Instead of landed gentry and bureaucrats, the USSR had only functionaries; instead of peasant households and self-organized communes, it had statist collectives; instead of the Orthodox Church, Marxism-Leninism. Stalin did not elevate his children to be tsareviches. When he caught his son Vasily attempting to trade on his lineage, he exploded, “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no, not even me!”¹⁹⁷ In sum, notwithstanding superficial resemblances—a one-man autocracy, an overweening state, a functionary ethos, an obsession with security, a forced modernization drive—anyone who had lived under both systems, not only peasants and the pious, knew the differences.¹⁹⁸

The Soviet Union even lacked a requirement to study Russian, and most non-Russian schoolchildren were illiterate in the language. When the enlightenment commissar of the Russian republic suggested a far-reaching Russification of schooling, Stalin objected, insisting that Russian become only a subject, not the medium of all instruction, to the detriment of vernacular languages.¹⁹⁹ Still, a state imperative was felt. “There is one language in which all citizens of the USSR can more or less express themselves—that is Russian,” Stalin remarked at a Central Committee plenum (October 12, 1937). “So we concluded that it should be obligatory. It would be good if all citizens drafted into the army could express themselves in Russian just a little, so that if some division or other was transferred, say an Uzbek one to Samara, it could converse with the populace.”²⁰⁰

LOOSE-TONGUED SELF-PORTRAIT

On November 6, 1937, the eve of the revolution’s twentieth anniversary, at the Bolshoi, which was resplendent in red velvet and gold trim and sported an expensive new curtain, Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October premiered. This was the first feature film with Stalin as a lead character, played by Semyon Goldstab, a Jewish actor from Ukraine. The film depicted a likable, grandfatherly Lenin (played by Boris Shchukin) who relied on Stalin, while Kamenev and Zinoviev, Trotsky, the Mensheviks, and SRs were shown to be objects of Lenin’s hatred and treasonous opponents of the seizure of power. After the showing, Stalin would have Romm reshoot the scenes involving the storming of the Winter Palace and the arrest of the Provisional Government by Antonov-Ovseyenko (who had recently returned from Spain and himself been arrested).²⁰¹ The film’s message, like the press accounts of the anniversary, was that Stalin was Lenin’s equal.