Stalin: A Biography полностью

In fact the flame of Stalin’s genuine aesthetic appreciation had not gone out. He displayed it especially when questions arose about the arts in his native Georgia. When Shalva Nutsubidze compiled and translated an anthology of Georgian poetry into Russian in the mid-1930s, Stalin could not resist taking a look at the typed draft. Back flowed his lifelong enthusiasm for poetry, and he pencilled proposed amendments in the margins.¹¹ Nutsubidze and Stalin made for an odd pair. Nutsubidze was a scholar who had refused to join the party; his very project to produce a Georgian literary anthology might have served as a pretext for arresting him. But the two men got on well and Nutsubidze appreciated Stalin’s suggestions as real improvements.¹² Stalin did not allow his assistance to be publicised. Nor did he give permanent approval to attempts to resuscitate his fame as a minor Georgian poet. Some of the early verses crept into print and this cannot have happened without his sanction. But second thoughts prevailed. The poems were not widely reprinted in his time in power and did not appear in his multi-volume Works published after the Second World War. Reasons of state prevailed over vanity. Stalin had probably concluded that the romantic poetry of his youth would disfigure his image as the Man of Steel. Presumably he also wanted to set the literary tone for the times. Culture was to be judged by the yardstick of current political requirements.

Literature, painting and architecture were arts more easily analysed in this reductive fashion than music. Stalin wanted two things at once. He desired culture for the ‘masses’; he also aimed to disseminate high culture. He wished the USSR’s attainments to outmatch any achieved abroad. Insisting on Russia’s centuries-old greatness, he assimilated Russian writers and composers of the nineteenth century — Pushkin, Tolstoi, Glinka and Chaikovski — to the socialist project after 1917. He had a private enthusiasm for Dostoevski, whom he judged a brilliant psychologist;¹³ but Dostoevski’s overt reactionary politics and mystical religious faith proved too much even for Stalin to approve republication of his works. The librettos of Glinka’s operas were rewritten and many of Pushkin’s and Tolstoi’s writings were banned. Even so, much of the pre-revolutionary artistic heritage with its conservative, liberal and apolitical elements was made available to the public. Stalin’s cultural programme was an unstable mixture. He could kill artists at will and yet his policies were incapable of producing great art unless he either deliberately or unconsciously overlooked, at least to some extent, what his artists were really doing.

Culture in general attracted his occasional — and unpredictable — interventions. Stalin’s aide Lev Mekhlis rang up Pravda cartoonist Boris Yefimov in 1937 and told him to come immediately to the Kremlin. Suspecting the worst, Yefimov feigned influenza. But ‘he’ — Stalin — was insisting; Yefimov could postpone the visit at most by a day. In fact Stalin simply wished to say that he thought Yefimov should cease drawing Japanese figures with protruding teeth. ‘Definitely,’ replied the cartoonist. ‘There won’t be any more teeth.’¹⁴ Stalin’s interventions were equally direct in film production. Boris Shumyatski, the People’s Commissar in charge of Soviet cinema until his arrest in 1938, understood that the General Secretary was the sole reviewer who had to be taken seriously.¹⁵ Stalin had screening facilities set up in his dachas outside Moscow and by the Black Sea. Films such as Lenin in October were among his favourites; but he liked audiences to be entertained as well as indoctrinated. He did not object to an escapist melodrama like Circus; and as propaganda came to stress patriotism, Stalin applauded the films Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevski directed by Sergei Eizenshtein. It was a favour which Eizenshtein both relished and feared: he knew that Stalin would pounce with fury upon any scenes he deemed to conflict with current official politics.