Stalin полностью

Soviet propaganda turned on a dime. Nearly half of all expressly antifascist Soviet films (a mere thirteen in total since 1928) had appeared between late 1938 and early 1939, and all of those depicted Germany as the aggressive country—none better than Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein’s first completed film in more than a decade.¹⁷⁷ With a score by Prokofyev and USSR People’s Artist Nikolai Cherkasov in the main role, the patriotic epic portrayed the Teutonic Knights’ thirteenth-century invasion of Great Novgorod, their capture of Pskov (owing to a traitor), and their eventual defeat by Prince Alexander, who rallies the common people in a decisive “Battle on the Ice,” set to stirring music. Nevsky had premiered on December 1, 1938, and in April 1939 the head of the state cinematography committee reported that 23 million people had seen it.¹⁷⁸ “It came out not bad, it seems,” Stalin had written on the screenplay, but after the Pact was signed, he had the film pulled.¹⁷⁹

Many Communists and foreign fellow travelers who had explained away the monstrous terror, often in the name of antifascism, now broke with the cause. “Everybody else in the world, the Social Democrats, the liberals, the conservatives, had their opinions, but we, the Marxist-Leninists, we had a scientific world outlook,” recalled Wolfgang Leonhard, a German Communist studying in Moscow in the second half of the 1930s. “We knew the fundamental answer to the riddle of the past, present, and future, for all nations and for all countries.”¹⁸⁰ But a deal with the Nazis crystallized Leonhard’s gathering doubts: “The mighty workers’ movement in Central Europe was in ruins; Hitler’s tanks dominated Europe; Lenin’s comrades-in-arms during the Russian Revolution had all been shot as spies; the Spanish Republic had been abandoned by the European democracies, its revolutionary movement stabbed in the back by Soviet agents; and finally Stalin had concluded a pact with Hitler.”¹⁸¹ Even many who wanted to remain loyal struggled to do so. “It was actually shameful, and we weren’t able to overcome this feeling of shame for a long time,” said the German Communist Ruth von Mayenburg, who traveled in secret from Moscow to Nazi Germany on life-risking missions. “One had to mobilize one’s Marxist concept of imperialism, of international struggles, of everything, in order to deceive oneself about this matter of conscience.”¹⁸²

Here, again, we see the core of Communism’s extraordinary power: its rootedness in beliefs and personal biographies, which, however, also made for its extreme vulnerability. To be sure, for those loyalists less preoccupied with Communist dogma, the Pact spurred elaborate great-power fantasies. “Perhaps we have preserved the last word,” Vishnevsky, the playwright who headed the military commission of the writers’ union, wrote in his diary after reading the announcement of the Pact in the newspaper. “In the event of war, we’ll enter last. And—it is utterly possible—we shall strike that very Germany.” Three days later, he wrote, “1) We win time; we shall observe the military prowess of countries in reality; 2) we’ll acquire experience, of much greater value than in Spain and China.” He went on to suggest the possibility of using the Pact to smash Japan for good and obtain advantageous proposals from France and Britain, and he concluded that “Germany could not be trusted: it has violated many agreements.” He foresaw an expansion of Soviet interests in the Carpathians and Balkans and on the Black Sea, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. “It is difficult to guess how the game will turn out,” he wrote in his diary. “But one thing is clear: the world will be reshaped. . . . This is a new chapter in the history of the party and the country. The USSR has begun an activist global policy.”¹⁸³