The Icon and the Axe

Stalin had many roots in the Russian past. His addiction to mass armies overbalanced with artillery follows a long tradition leading back to Ivan the Terrible; his xenophobic and disciplinarian conception of education is reminiscent of Magnitsky, Nicholas I, and Pobedonostsev; his passion for material innovation and war-supporting technology echoes Peter the Great and a number of nineteenth-century Russian industrialists. But Stalinism in the full sense of the word seems to have its deepest roots in two earlier periods of Russian history: the nihilistic 1860's and the pre-Petrine era. First of all, Stalinism appears as a conscious throwback to the militant materialism of the i86o's. Insofar as there was a positive content to Stalinist culture, it was rooted in the ascetic dedication to progress of the materialistic sixties rather than the idealistic spirit of the populist age. Stalin and some of his close associates-Molotov, Khrushchev, and Mikoyan-were like Chernyshevsky and so many other men of the sixties largely educated by priests, and had merely changed catechisms in midstream. Stalin's belief in physiological and environmental determinism-evidenced in his canonization of Pavlov and Lysenko-reflects the polemic prejudices of Pisarev more than the complex theories of Engels, let alone the thoughts of prac-

ticing scientists. His suspicion of all artistic activity without immediate social utility reflects the crude aesthetic theory of the sixties more than that of Marx.

All of the enforced artistic styles of the Stalin era-the photographic posters, the symphonies of socialism, the propagandistic novels, and the staccato civic poetry-appear as distorted vulgarizations of the predominant styles of the 1860's: the realism of the "wanderers," the programmatic music of the "mighty handful," the novels of social criticism, and the poems of Nekrasov. This artificial resurrection of long-absent styles brought a forced end to the innovations in form so characteristic of art in the silver age. Whole areas of expression were blighted: lyric poetry, satirical prose, experimental theater, and modern painting and music.

Art was, henceforth, to be subject not just to party censorship but to the mysterious requirements of "socialist realism." This doctrine called for two mutually exclusive qualities: revolutionary enthusiasm and objective depiction of reality. It was, in fact, a formula for keeping writers in a state of continuing uncertainty as to what was required of them: an invaluable device for humiliating the intellectuals by encouraging the debilitating phenomena of anticipatory self-censorship. It seems appropriate that the phrase was first used by a leading figure in the secret police rather than a literary personality.48 Publicly pronounced in 1934 at the first congress of the Union of Writers by Andrew Zhdanov, Stalin's aide-de-camp on the cultural front, the doctrine was given a measure of respectability by the presence of Maxim Gorky as presiding figurehead at the congress. Gorky was one of the few figures of stature who could be held up as an exemplar of the new doctrine. He had a simple background, genuine socialist convictions, and a natural realistic style developed in a series of epic novels and short stories about Russian society of the late imperial period.

Socialist realism no less than the Revolution itself was to "dispose of its children."49 Gorky died under still-mysterious circumstances two years later in the midst of the terror which swept away imaginative storytellers like Pil'niak and Babel, lyric poets like Mandel'shtam, theatrical innovators like Meierhold, as well as the inclination toward experimentalism in such gifted young artists as Shostakovich.

The often chromatic and grotesque extension of verismo opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which Shostakovich fashioned from Leskov's bleak novella, was denounced after two years of performances and forcibly shut in 1936. Thenceforth, after nearly two years of silence, he turned almost exclusively to instrumental music, breaking the promise of distinctive national music drama that was implicit in his first opera, The Nose of 1930, which (Uke the preparatory work of Musorgsky) was based on a text by