Sholokhov and Tolstoi too had dealings with Stalin. Quiet Flows the Don by Sholokhov was one of the few good pieces of Soviet inter-war prose which did not assail the premises of communism. Set in the Cossack villages of south Russia and crammed with regional idioms, the novel was a saga of the Civil War. Its first edition contained episodes thought to be indulgent to the Whites. Sholokhov, after modifying the text as required, entered the classical canon of the regime. He also produced a sequel, The Virgin Soil Upturned, about the collectivisation campaign. This was aesthetically less impressive; it also strengthened the suspicion that he had purloined most of the chapters of Quiet Flows the Don from a deceased Cossack writer.7 Even so, Sholokhov was not a servile hack. He was horrified by what he witnessed in the countryside as the Cossacks were brutally herded into collective farms. Repeatedly he wrote to Stalin pointing this out. As famine grew in south Russia, the correspondence became heated on both sides.8 Sholokhov’s letters testify to his courage; Stalin’s engagement with him signals a recognition that loyalist intellectuals performed a useful function for him by raising difficult questions without ever threatening his political position. No politician got away with such impertinence.
Another writer who had Stalin’s ear was Alexei Tolstoi, the patriotic novelist and nephew of the nineteenth-century author. Tolstoi had come to think that the Bolsheviks had discharged the historic task of reuniting Russia, seeing off its external enemies and undertaking its overdue industrialisation. The novelist fed ideas to Stalin about the continuities between Imperial and communist patterns of rule. According to Tolstoi, it was the Party General Secretary’s duty to stand firm in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Ivan and Peter had used brutal methods in pursuit of the country’s interests. Tolstoi was knocking at an open door: Stalin, an eager student of Russian history, already saw the connections with the reigns of Ivan and Peter.9
He knew what he liked in the arts as well as in historical scholarship. At the theatre he had admired Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins since its première in 1926. This was a play about the shifting allegiances in Ukraine during the Civil War. Stalin’s devotion showed a willingness to understand the fighting in terms much less simplistic than in official history textbooks: Bulgakov depicted not only the Reds but also the Whites in sympathetic tones. At the ballet Stalin preferred Chaikovski’s Swan Lake to newer pieces of music and choreography. The significance of this is a matter of speculation. Perhaps he simply wanted to identify himself as an enthusiast for classical dance and anyway found nothing very attractive in Soviet choreography. It was the same with music. Although he began to attend symphonies and operas, few contemporary composers engaged his admiration. Poetry by living writers too was of small interest to him. The poet Vladimir Mayakovski, who committed suicide in 1930, was turned — like Gorki — into an artistic totem of the regime. Stalin paid only lip-service to his memory. (Lenin had claimed it was scandalous at a time of paper shortage to allocate resources for his poems.) The General Secretary had an enduring love for the Georgian poetical classics to the exclusion of Soviet contemporary verse.
Down the years he was mocked as someone without feeling for the arts. His enemies consoled themselves in defeat by drawing attention to his intellectual limitations. They went too far with their ridicule. Stalin also had himself to blame, for he had deliberately drawn the curtains over his educational level, poetical achievement and range of intellectual interests,10 and his verbal exchanges with most writers and painters usually turned on political questions.
