The Icon and the Axe

The camps of the Stalin era seemed at times to contain more scholars than the universities; but the relative freedom of Solovetsk in the early days was not to be maintained in the thirties; and only the terrible northern cold was to remain a constant feature of Stalin's concentration-camp empire. It seems eerily appropriate that the last publications to appear from Solovetsk (in 1934-5, long after the monthly journal had ceased to appear) tell of discovering prehistoric relics on the archipelago and exploring the vast, uncharted labyrinths that had long fascinated visitors to the monastery.54

At the very time when the emaciated prisoners of Solovetsk were plunging down to chart its frozen catacombs, thousands of laborers under various forms of compulsion were plunging even deeper beneath Moscow itself to build the greatest of all monuments of the Stalin era: the Moscow subway. From all over the empire party officials flocked to the capital like the faceless priests of some prehistoric religion to place ornate stalactites and stalagmites from the local republics into this giant communal labyrinth. The cult of the underground party also began in earnest at this time. Traditional idealistic leaders of foreign Communist parties began to be replaced by

serpentine Stalinists: a cold-blooded species capable of fast, lizard-like movements in dark places and sudden chameleon-like changes of color.

Silenced prisoners in Solovetsk and authoritarian power in the Moscow Kremlin present a picture strangely reminiscent of ancient Muscovy. In some ways, the Stalin era calls to mind the compulsive Byzantine ritualism of those pre-Petrine times which had remained "contemporary" for so many Russians throughout the Romanov era. Icons, incense, and ringing bells were replaced by lithographs of Lenin, cheap perfume, and humming machines. The omnipresent prayers and calls to worship of Orthodoxy were replaced by the inescapable loudspeaker or radio with its hypnotic statistics and invocations to labor. The liturgy or "common work" of believers was replaced by the communal construction of scientific atheists. The role once played by the sending of priests and missionaries along with colonizing soldiers into the heathen interior of Russia was now assumed by "soldiers of the cultural army," who departed from mass rallies for "cultural relay races" into the countryside to see who could win the most converts for communism and collectivization in the shortest possible time.55

Something like the role of the holy fools and flagellants of Muscovy was played by frenzied "heroes of Socialist labor" ascetically dedicated to "overfulfilling their norms." Just as Ivan the Terrible canonized his favorite holy fool and built a cathedral later named for him, so Stalin canonized and built a national movement around Nicholas Stakhanov, a coal miner who in a fit of heroic masochism cut out 102 tons of coal (fourteen times his quota) in one shift. "Voluntary subscriptions to the state loan" replaced earlier tithes as a token of devotion to the new church; the "shock quarter" of the year replaced Lent as the periodic time of self-denial in the name of a higher cause. Like the zealous Old Believers, who sought to storm the gates of heaven by outdoing the Orthodox in their fanatical adherence to the letter of the old liturgy, the Stakhanovites sought to hasten the millennium by their "storming" (shturmovshchina) of production quotas. These were looked at in the way the Old Believers looked at sacred texts: as something not to be tampered with by bureaucratic innovators or scoffed at by Western sceptics, as a program of salvation if acted upon with urgency.

The Third Rome had been succeeded by a new Third International; and the ideal cultural expression in the latter as in the former was the believer's cry of hallelujah in response to the revealed word from Moscow. The term alliluishchik ("hallelujah singer") was in fact widely used in the Stalin era. Russia, which had overthrown a discredited monarchy, suddenly fell back on the most primitive aspect of the original

tsarist mystique: the idea that the batiushka, the father-deliverer in the Kremlin, would rescue his suffering children from malevolent local officials and lead them into the promised land.

Thus, Stalin was able to succeed Lenin as supreme dictator not only because he was a deft intriguer and organizer but also because he was closer than his rivals to the crude mentality of the average Russian. Unlike most other Bolshevik leaders-many of whom were of Jewish, Polish, or Baltic origin-Stalin had been educated only in the catechistic theology of Orthodoxy. At Lenin's funeral, when the other Bolshevik leaders were speaking in the involved rhetoric and glowing generalities of the intellectual community, Stalin spoke in terms more familiar to the masses with his litanylike exhortations: