Stalin полностью

As it happened, also on June 23, Semyon Kotko, an opera by Sergei Prokofyev, premiered at the Stanislavsky Opera Theater, in Moscow, following many postponements. It was based on a novella by Valentin Katayev, I Am the Son of the Working People, and marked Prokofyev’s first foray on a quintessential Soviet theme.⁵¹ The score was infused with folk song intonations. “That evening, when I first heard Semyon Kotko, I understood that Prokofyev was a great composer,” recalled the virtuoso pianist Svyatoslav Richter.⁵² When Prokofyev first composed the score, his friend Meyerhold, who also felt a need to demonstrate his allegiance to the regime, begged to be the one to stage it. After Meyerhold had vanished without trace and Sergei Eisenstein claimed to be otherwise occupied, the direction fell to an actress. In the story, Kotko (a tenor) returns, in 1918, from the Romanian front of the Great War to his village in Ukraine, where pillaging foreign interventionists are trying to restore the landlords; an embittered kulak, the father of Kotko’s teenage fiancée, Sofia (a soprano), forbids her from marrying a poor peasant. Thanks to heroic partisan warfare and the resolve of this “son of the working people,” Semyon and Sofia are reunited as anti-Soviet forces are driven away or executed. Stalin’s Pact with Hitler precluded using the novella’s portrayal of Germans as the villains, and so in the opera’s staging the Germans (as well as Austrians) mostly became Ukrainian nationalists.⁵³

A NEW UNION

Molotov had not only congratulated Schulenburg, but also stated—and here the congratulations look like a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down—that from June 14, 1940, the Red Army had sent substantial additional forces to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, where “changes of governments” were in process.⁵⁴ In the wee hours of June 15–16, Molotov summoned the envoys of Estonia (1:00 a.m.) and Latvia (1:10 a.m.) to inform them that, just as in Lithuania, the Red Army would soon be crossing their borders, and instructed them not to resist militarily but to await the formation of a new government.⁵⁵ In other words, the USSR was violating its recent pledges to respect the sovereignty of the three Baltic states. Of the three, Lithuania had the largest Communist party in early 1940—a mere 1,500 members, following Stalin’s mass terror.⁵⁶ “There are no Communists outside Russia,” he had told the Lithuanian foreign minister a few months before. “What you have in Latvia are Trotskyists: if they cause you trouble, shoot them.”⁵⁷ By summer 1940, Estonia had a mere 150 Communists, out of a country of 1.3 million. Latvia had a similar number.⁵⁸ But Stalin’s coercive, rapid-fire Sovietization did not rely on indigenous Communist movements. Rather, the operations followed the formula laid down by the Red Army’s thrust into eastern Poland in fall 1939.⁵⁹

In eastern Poland, the NKVD had deported more than 1 million of the 13.5 million residents to labor camps. (Interrogators called their truncheons “the Polish Constitution.”) Soviet operatives and local collaborators nationalized industry and redistributed some farmland, although an arduous collectivization was put off for the time being. To smoke out locals unreconciled to Soviet rule, the NKVD used provocateurs. The Polish officer in charge of the fledgling Polish underground turned Soviet informant.⁶⁰ But even with this formidable apparatus of coercion, the Soviet secret police had lacked the bureaucratic resources to themselves smash all existing institutions and associations. In a cunning type of revolution, however, the NKVD allowed free rein to criminal gangs and vigilante groups, which they glorified as citizen militias, and set up anonymous denunciation boxes and walk-in centers, leveraging the grievances built up in society. Who had been fired from a job and could now seek revenge? Who had lost a court case? Who had sold a cow for a price that in retrospect seemed too low? Who had been cuckolded? By bringing forth these denunciations and then acting upon them without verifying, the NKVD effectively allowed state power to be “privatized” by thousands of people looking for redress, survival, cover-up, or promotion. It was Poles themselves who undermined pre-Soviet social bonds, clearing the way for Communist monopoly.⁶¹ That was the essence of totalitarianism: people’s agency was elicited to destroy their own agency.