The Icon and the Axe

Gogol. The unfinished fragment of a later, wartime effort to make an opera of Gogol's Gamblers and the post-Stalin revival of Lady Macbeth (revised and retitled Katerina Izmailova) offer tantalizing hints of what might have been. Nor was the full promise of Prokof'ev ever realized, perhaps the most technically gifted and versatile of all modern Russian composers. As a nine-year-old boy in the first year of the new century he roughed out his first complete opera score, The Giants; and his rapid development of a clean, "cubist" style combined with a love of rugged, often satirical themes seemed to herald the arrival of a creative giant whose return from emigration might in some way compensate for the permanent flight from the new order of Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and so many others. His protean powers shine through even the confining forms of expression forced on artists in the Stalin era: infant pedagogy {Peter and the Wolf) and heroic movie scores (Alexander Nevsky), and the reshaping of "safe" literary classics for the musical stage (the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the opera War and Peace). Denounced by Zhdanov and harassed by his lieutenants, this giant of Russian music died on March 4, 1953, just one day before Stalin, the man who had so crippled its development.

Zhdanov died under mysterious circumstances in 1948 after launching the purge of "homeless cosmopolitans" in the post-war era. Michael Zoshchenko, the last of the great satirists of the twenties, was silenced; the patriotic poet and widow of Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, was called "half-nun, half-harlot" for her apolitical lyricism; and a bewildered Communist historian of philosophy was reviled as a "toothless vegetarian" for paraphrasing Western thinkers without sufficient polemic ridicule.60 The search for distinctive proletarian art forms had, of course, been suppressed no less than the aristocratic experimentalism of the silver age. Stalin consistently favortJd a melodramatic art glorifying "heroes of socialist labor" and a pretentious architectural style variously characterized as sovnovrok ("new Soviet rococo") and-in a play on a line of Pushkin-"the empire style from the time of the plague."51

The peculiarities of Stalinist architecture lead us into a world very different from anything imagined by Lenin, let alone the materialists of the 1860's. The mammoth mosaics in the Moscow subway, the unnecessary spires and fantastic frills of civic buildings, the leaden chandeliers and dark foyers of reception chambers-all send the historical imagination back to the somber world of Ivan the Terrible. Indeed, the culture of the Stalin era seems more closely linked with ancient Muscovy than with even the rawest stages of St. Petersburg-based radicalism. One can, to be sure, find a certain bias in favor of bigness in the earlier period of rapid industrial development in the 1890's-evidenced in the preponderance of large factory complexes

and in the building of the Trans-Siberian railway. There are also hints of classical Oriental despotism in the spectacle of giant canals and ostentatious public buildings thrown up by forced labor. Plans for a canal strikingly similar to Stalin's famous White Sea Canal of the early thirties had been mooted late in the Muscovite era at the court of Alexis Mikhailovich.52 If this, the first major forced labor project of the Soviet era, had in some ways been anticipated in the Muscovite era, the site chosen in the twenties for the first of the new prison camp complexes of the USSR was one of the enduring symbols of Old Muscovy: the Solovetsk monastery. Ivan IV had been the first to use this bleak island monastery near the Arctic circle as a prison for ideological opponents, and the Soviet government-by evacuating the monks-was able to accommodate large numbers.

Quietly heroic testimony to some survival of Old Russian culture into the twenties is provided in the works published with the apparent consent of camp authorities by intellectuals incarcerated on the archipelago. In the monthly journal Solovetsk Islands, "an organ of the directorate of the Solovetsk Camps of ordinary designation OGPU," we read during the twenties of new discoveries of flora, fauna, and historical remains; of the founding of new museums; of 234 theatrical performances in a single year; and of a nineteen-kilometer ski race between inmates, Red Army guards, and the camp directorate. One article writes with obvious sympathy about Artemius, the first prisoner in Solovetsk under Ivan IV, as "a great seeker of truth and an agitator for freedom of thought."53