348. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 310 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 978, l. 55); Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva A. M. Gor’kogo, IV: 599. Gorky had requested in his will to be buried next to his son. Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices, 276.
349. MacNeal, Stalin, 206; Tucker, Stalin in Power, 364.
350. Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices, 274.
351. The most authoritative study of Gorky’s death, by the then head of IMLI, inclined towards natural causes, without ruling out foul play: Barakhov, “M. Gor’kii,” 191. Gorky had returned to Moscow from his dacha in Tesseli, Crimea, on May 26, 1936. Malraux had visited Gorky at Tesseli March 7–10, in the company of Koltsov, who wrote of Gorky: “He was not well.” Babel, also present, found Gorky alone and depressed. Letopis’ zhizni i tvorchestva A. M. Gor’kogo, IV: 575–6, 586–93, 600–1; Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices, 269. Koltsov had conveyed a request from Malraux to see Stalin; Stalin chose not to grant an audience. Maksimenkov, Bol’shaia tsenzura, 411–2 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 754, l. 77–77ob.).
352. Kuskova, “Na rubezhe dvuh epoch.” Carr, in an obituary in the Spectator (June 26, 1936), wrote that “posterity will not place Gorky with Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy.” See also Schroeder, Mit der Menschheit auf Du und Du, 83–5; and Trotsky, Portraits, 160–3 (July 9, 1936). That same day, Gide lunched with Babel and Eisenstein in Babel’s Moscow apartment. Gide praised the USSR to the skies, but after he left, according to an informant for the NKVD, Babel said, “Do not believe the rapture. He is cunning, like the devil . . . Upon return to France he could conjure up some devilish piece.” Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 316–8 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 3, d. 65, l. 225–8: July 5, 1936). Mikhail Apletin, the head of all-Union society of foreign cultural ties, noted of Gide, “he’s not a simple writer like Rolland.” Clark, Moscow, 140 (RGALI, f. 631, op. 14, d. 5, l. 18).
353. Kotkin, “Modern Times.”
354. Vastly increased organization of society by the state under Stalin was one of the main reasons for the marked increase in his state’s capacity. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Hannah Arendt’s characterization of the Nazi and Soviet regimes as almost condemned “to organize everyone and everything within its framework and to set and keep them in motion” was apt. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 361, 326. Barrington Moore noted the coincidence in Soviet politics of heavy coercion and grass-roots activism. Moore, Soviet Politics, 403. See also Gelb, “Mass Politics under Stalin.”
355. Kasza, Conscription Society. See also Straus, Factory and Community. Generally, in U.S. social science, the effective organization of society has been viewed in terms of self-organization (nonstate), for example in the influential work of Robert Putnam, but as Sheri Berman points out, civic organizations served as an important vehicle for the spread and institutionalization of the Nazi movement, and did not cease to exist under the Nazis. Putnam, Bowling Alone; Sheri Berman, “Civil Society.” In his critique of the state’s utopian aspirations in so-called “high modernism,” which effectively places forced collectivization on the same plane as surveys of land use, James Scott writes about the failure of society to resist, rather than its thorough organization in state-led crusades. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 89.
356. Pre-1914 France had managed to get tsarist Russia to build strategic railroads to the border with imperial Germany in exchange for rolling over massive economic development loans. Rieber, “Persistent Factors,” 328.
357. Arnason, “Communism and Modernity.”
