Such journals needed staff changes and more appropriate editorial policies. They had opened their pages to writers like the humorist and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, who liked to poke fun at everyday foibles. Also singled out for censure was the poet Anna Akhmatova. Neither she nor Zoshchenko was an oppositional writer; nevertheless, both were viewed as sending mixed messages, and it was now deemed a political mistake to give them a forum, which would only result in “ideological disarray and disorder.” An August 14 resolution of the Organization Bureau (Orgburo) stated that the supervising personnel and editors had “forgotten Leninism’s thesis that our journals, whether scholarly or artistic, cannot be apolitical.” The state and party simply could not permit youth to be educated “in a spirit of indifference to Soviet policy.”12 More Central Committee actions followed, played up in the press, like an August 26 report about a resolution aimed at the theater and another on September 4 directed at the movies. The whole range of creative artists was attacked for its “servility and slavishness before Western culture.” Even children’s magazines were not overlooked.13
A book of poems by Akhmatova awaiting distribution was immediately destroyed (though copies survived), and in September she and Zoshchenko were dropped from the Union of Soviet Writers. That meant the end of their writer’s ration cards and the near impossibility of getting anything published. She had been attacked earlier by Stalin and arrested in 1937, as was her son, who was swallowed up in the camps for years. Her revenge is her poetry, especially Requiem, written between 1935 and 1961 in response to her son’s incarceration and disappearance. It is an act of witness and one of the most moving condemnations of dictatorship in all of literature. The poem shows the agony of those left wondering about their loved ones—sent away “without right of correspondence.” Sometimes that phrase was a euphemism for execution, but no one knew for sure. The relatives and friends on the outside went on searching. This aspect of the terror was often overlooked, but it went on tormenting people for years.14
The Kremlin Boss took to holding his own hearings—or interrogations—of the country’s cultural elite. In early 1947 he hauled in Sergei Eisenstein, famous for directing the movie Ivan the Terrible. During the war Stalin had thought that he found a kindred spirit in that tsar, the most brutal in all Russian history. Even during the leanest days of the struggle, he decided that he wanted a big film made about his historical soul mate, and he named Eisenstein to make it.15 The dictator personally approved what was to be a three-part epic. He commissioned the work, edited the screenplay, and did not quibble about its expensive production in 1943, complete with music by the renowned Alexander Prokofiev. When the first part of the trilogy was shown in 1944, it earned the dictator’s rave reviews. His disappointment was all the greater after the war, however, when he previewed part two, saying it was “some kind of nightmare!”16
Late in the evening on February 26, 1947, Eisenstein and leading man Nikolai Cherkasov were called to the Kremlin, where Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov took turns grilling them. The two outsiders agreed between themselves beforehand that their only hope was not to argue back. Stalin’s first criticism was that the film showed Ivan to be “indecisive, like Hamlet. Everyone suggests to him what should be done, but he cannot make a decision.” The Master was surprisingly old-fashioned, saying that the movie “did not show historical figures correctly in their period. So, for instance, in the first part, it is wrong that Ivan the Terrible spent so long kissing his wife. That was not tolerated in those times.”17
Judging from indications in this conversation, Stalin had come to see in the tsar something akin to an alter ego. For example, he admitted to Eisenstein: “Ivan was very cruel. You can show that he was cruel, but you have to show why it was necessary to be cruel.” One of Ivan’s mistakes, as depicted in the movie, was his inability to have done with his enemies. He “would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God interfered with him there. He should have been even more decisive.” Was that how Stalin saw himself and wanted to be characterized, as a ruler who was cruel but also just? As a real reformer more determined than the “best” of the tsars? As one who was decisive because he knew he was dispensing justice?
The aged dictator asked Eisenstein several times how his film was going to end. Being only too aware of how little time he might have left in life, he agonized about it and told the director not to rush. He subtly hinted that another moviemaker had taken eleven years to complete a project. One difficulty was that the second part of Ivan’s reign degenerated and ended in military defeats and weakness. So the latter part of the movie was bound to disappoint, unless the director could be coaxed into adjusting the script.18
In the end Eisenstein adopted delaying tactics. He said, although not to the dictator: “I do not have the right to distort historical truth or to retreat from my creative credo.” He died within the year of natural causes at the age of fifty, and his uncut movie miraculously appeared in Soviet theaters a decade later.19
One of Stalin’s final comments to Eisenstein indicates that his anti-Western mood was in full bloom. Ivan, he said, “was more a national tsar, more prudent, he never allowed foreign influence into Russia, whereas Peter [the Great] opened the gates to Europe and let in too many foreigners.”20 He disliked Peter for starting Russians’ tradition of measuring themselves against the West and feeling that they were “minors, inadequate, not quite one-hundred percent.”21 In Stalin’s playbook, Europe stood for the doomed path of capitalism and bourgeois greed, whereas Russian nationalism uniquely signified the triumph of the proletariat and the force for good in the world.22
Running concurrently with the Stalinist campaign in movies and literature were others, including one that began in April 1947 against the publication of pornographic and fascist materials. That was used as a pretext to weed out libraries and use censorship more extensively. Further hints, instructions, and reprimands were soon doled out against philosophers, historians, poets, novelists, and musicians.23
In January 1948 the country’s leading musical composers, including Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, were subjected to three days of hearings before the Central Committee. They were eventually condemned with a resolution published in Pravda that denounced their transgression: they had lost their organic ties to the people and wrongfully written music and operas meant to appeal to the modern bourgeois taste in Europe and America.24
The new society could have no “modern” music, with its atonalities and dissonances, only work that “strikes a chord in the human spirit.” Zhdanov insisted that Soviet composers had to reflect their society and protect it “against penetration by elements of bourgeois decay.” In a memorable address, he said, without blinking an eye, that the USSR had become “the true custodian of the musical culture of mankind just as she is in all other fields.” Composers had to be on the alert that “alien bourgeois influences from abroad” would try to muster “what remains of the capitalist outlook in the minds of some Soviet intellectuals in frivolous and crazy attempts to replace the treasures of Soviet musical culture by the pitiful tatters of modern bourgeois art.”25