Denunciations from all over the country rained down on the authorities about aberrant “cosmopolitan” and anti-Soviet behavior in all the arts and sciences, including charges that even “many mathematicians” adored foreign “idols.” In late 1947 reports from Minister of State Security Viktor Abakumov stated that “antiforeign materials” had been found in international, especially American, scientific and technical journals. These had not been subject to censorship, and such exemptions were promptly withdrawn by order of the Politburo.37
In May, Stalin commissioned the noted writer Konstantin Simonov to compose a play that turned out to be Alien Shadow, about the two K-R scientists whose deeds exposed the submissiveness of the intelligentsia to the West. Actually it was Simonov who suggested in a meeting with Stalin that the affair would make an interesting play. Simonov’s own story reveals that the Soviet patronage system was a house with many rooms. He was troubled when a new book he had submitted was held up because the dictator had reservations about it. Simonov said in his memoirs that he was an “avid admirer” of Stalin, wanted desperately to please, and had agreed to do the script about the scientists. The dictator made “suggestions,” and Simonov liked and followed them in how the drama ended.
The political lesson of the play was to show the selfishness of the scientists and to emphasize the benevolence of the government in letting them continue their work. It was a propaganda success and won a Stalin Prize. Looking back years later, the author was not proud of how easily he had gone along with the campaign, which at times was ugly. Nevertheless, he was not entirely opposed to stamping out the spirit of cosmopolitanism and self-deprecation in the Soviet Union.38
Cosmopolitan became a term of abuse. Whereas once it had been praiseworthy to be called a citizen of the world, the term was now identified with “servility to the West,” that is, with abetting American imperialism and its long-term goal of imposing Anglo-American culture on the world.
The anticosmopolitanism campaign intensified during 1948 and peaked after publication in Pravda, on January 28, 1949, of a notorious article “on an anti-patriotic group of theater critics.” It pilloried Jews for not being sufficiently appreciative of (officially condoned) plays that were supposed to educate and elevate popular consciousness. “At a time when we are faced with acute problems,” the article complained, “and standing against rootless [besrodnii] cosmopolitanism, against manifestations of bourgeois influences alien to the people, these critics do not find anything better to do than to discredit the most progressive events in our literature.”39 All of them were eventually expelled from the party and the writers’ union, as were numerous other critics who happened also to be Jewish.
Although the anticosmopolitanism campaign did not end in mass executions, people were arrested, tortured, and shot. Mostly, however, the regime used “administrative” measures, and selected individuals lost their jobs. The entire campaign was part of the larger struggle to get the intellectual establishment back on track and firmly supportive of Soviet Communism. It also sealed off foreign contacts and influences, as the Stalinists created their version of the iron curtain.
As we will see in Chapter 20, Soviet anti-Semitism became more pronounced in the last years of Stalin’s life, and though he was the first to recognize the new Israeli state in 1948, he soon changed his mind and then fostered official anti-Semitism as never before.
STALIN AS IDEOLOGIST IN CHIEF OF INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM
Stalin’s postwar campaign on the ideological front brought him rich dividends. Millions, including most of the intelligentsia, came to admire his accomplishments and learning, even to associate him with their own ever-deeper love of country. Hence there emerged a pronounced and deeper Stalin worship.
Many thought that with the USSR’s hard-won victory in the war, their country had finally caught up with the West. They had been proud that the Red Army had stood in Berlin in May 1945, in advance of the Americans and the British. But then in August they had been shattered when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the USSR to be behind after all. Some people, feeling personally vulnerable again, took solace in Stalin’s calm equanimity and in the long silences in which he projected fearlessness before the Americans.
Russian historians go so far as to suggest that in the postwar period, the Soviet leadership formed a new compact with the country. The people stood together with the Kremlin, rolled up their sleeves, and sacrificed so that their country could achieve atomic parity. According to that view, in the eyes of the people, the first successful testing of the Soviet atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, vindicated Stalin and represented a moral triumph over the West.40
Although Marxism played down the role of the “great man” in history in favor of impersonal economic and social forces, Stalin knew it was politically useful for the people to be encouraged to see him as a “great man,” “father of the peoples,” and so on. As a good Marxist, his attitude was ambivalent about his own cult, but he thought it was necessary. And in his view, if something was necessary, it was also just.
The dictator edited a Short Biography, published in 1947, that sang his own praises. He went through it carefully to mark where the admiration needed brushing up. For example, he inserted the sentence: “Although he performed his task as leader of the party and the people with consummate skill and enjoyed the unreserved support of the entire Soviet people, Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation.” At another place he added: “Comrade Stalin’s genius enabled him to divine the enemy’s plans and defeat them. The battles in which Comrade Stalin directed the Soviet armies are brilliant examples of operational military skill.”
Stalin was also mythologized in a popular movie, The Unforgettable Year 1919. A perfect example of socialist realism, it shows the gallant Stalin, side by side with the revered Lenin, in the Russian Civil War. However, the epitome of the adulation showered on Stalin came on his official birthday in 1949. Plays were staged about episodes in his life, and so many gifts arrived from admirers at home and around the world that a special museum was created to display them all. For over a year Pravda, the country’s most important newspaper, under the headline “The Stream of Greetings,” carried long lists of individuals and organizations who conveyed their best wishes to the great man.41
Stalin was not just the head of government—he prided himself first and foremost as a theoretician, an ideologist. Already in 1924 he had delivered and published a series of lectures, Problems of Leninism. That slim volume, in which he distilled the lessons taught by Lenin, became a textbook for those in higher education. It sold more than seventeen million copies. He used the concept of the vanguard more than three dozen times, along with quotations and aphorisms, to make his key point that the relatively small group of Bolsheviks had captured and exercised power. Other countries should follow their example!42