The Icon and the Axe

Unlike Pudovkin, Eisenstein experimented with non-realistic forms of cinematic art and incurred official rebukes for several of his efforts in the late twenties and early thirties. But like Pudovkin, he eventually followed the trend toward more conventional patriotic themes in the thirties. His Alexander Nevsky was a milestone in this genre, glorifying the famous monk-warrior so admired by Peter the Great. But whereas the famous cinematic eulogy of Peter the Great produced at the same time merely transposed onto the screen the pictorial images of nineteenth-century painters, Eisenstein's depiction of Peter's patron saint incorporated elements of grotesque hyperbole that suggested continued borrowings from the ex-pressionistic theater.

If Peter the Great, the builder of St. Petersburg and lover of technological innovation, was a natural hero for the early Stalin era, the dark figure of Ivan IV was in many ways a suitable hero for the later years of Stalin, with their macabre reversions to Muscovite ways. Thus, in the late thirties, Eisenstein turned to producing a large-scale life of Ivan the Terrible, assembling an extraordinary array of talent: the music of Prokof'ev, the acting of Cherkasov, the finest black-and-white and color photographers, and even the services of Pudovkin for a minor acting role.

Yet for all its promise, this work became yet another of those unfinished trilogies in which Russian cultural history abounds. The first part was filmed during the war, in the distant haven of Alma Ata, and was hailed with a variety of accolades, including the Stalin Prize First Class shortly after its release in January, 1945. The second part was, however, denounced

by the Central Committee in September, 1946. The eerie sounds and shadows of the first part became caricatures in the second, which alternated between black-and-white and color scenes in its depiction of boyar conspiracies. The atmosphere of hovering intrigue and impending assassination was all too close to real life, and the hypersensitive Stalin appears to have seen in the frank depiction of cruelty by Ivan and his oprichnina implied criticism of himself and his secret police. Thus, the second part of the trilogy was not publicly released until 1958-ten years after Eisenstein's death and five years after Stalin's. The third part was not completed; and Eisenstein died in the same condition of semi-disgrace that had been his lot in the early thirties.

The cinema in the early post-war years was devoted mainly to stereotyped ideological romances between collective farmers and party activists or to the attempt to hypnotize audiences with the omniscience of Stalin's leadership and the omnipotence of Soviet armed force in films like The Battle of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin. In this age of systematic photographic falsification, Soviet movies disintegrated literally as well as figuratively because of the repeated editorial splicing of films by the Soviet propaganda agencies that controlled their distribution. Small wonder that Eisenstein in his last years was contemplating shifting his efforts from the ill-fated Ivan IV to a proposed study of the life of Nero.67 There seemed no honorable calling left for the human spirit that did not risk martyrdom at the hands of the new Nero. Even Nicholas Virta, who had written the script for The Battle of Stalingrad, may have been hinting that calamity was at hand in his play of the late Stalin era that was published only in 1954, The Fall of Pompeii.

With Stalin as with Ivan, there was method in the madness. Like Ivan, Stalin vastly increased the power of the Russian state, and his authority over it.68 Whether by luck or by careful planning, Stalin in a quarter of a century lifted Russia from a position of being one of the least of the world's great powers to being one of its only two super-powers: from fifth or sixth to second place in industrial production. These were the criteria by which Stalin-and many others in the twentieth century-measured success; and in these terms Stalin was successful. Out of the raw strength and complex psychology of the Russian people, he fashioned an impressive political machine, which he handled with great skill and more flexibility than is sometimes remembered.89 Even in the area of culture he could point to such superficially imposing accomplishments as the virtual disappearance of illiteracy and gigantic editions of all kinds of literary classics.

The only official socialist realism likely to endure beyond the memory of the Stalin era is that of Michael Sholokhov's novels, which captured