The Thinking Reed

Stalinist art served a well-defined purpose — to create the ‘optimum’ moral and psychological climate for subjecting the masses to barracks-communism’. It had to embellish people’s lives in a society suffering from poverty, repression and war, to create a utopian counterpoise to reality, and thereby to help people find the peace of mind that was desired.134 This was an art of promises in a period of great promises. In a country which was moving further and further away from socialism it had, along with propaganda, to create the illusion of ‘socialist construction’. ‘Socialist realism’ was, in the strictest sense, opium for the people, sedating and stupefying them. Finally, this same art had to educate people for totalitarian collectivism. Architecture had a special role to play here. At a time when many families were huddled together in ‘communal’ flats, the state was building enormous edifices which were then thought beautiful. The function of this architecture was to make the citizens’ collective life more attractive than their individual lives. More than that: the poorer, harder, more squalid their individual lives were, the more attractive would their official, collective life become. This second life was no less real than the first, perhaps even more so. In Moscow they built a magnificent Metro, with stations like the halls of palaces, although their décor was excessively luxuriant in accordance with the taste of the nomenklatura. Soviet skyscrapers were built in the ‘Stalinist baroque’ style. The same purpose was served by organizing demonstrations on public holidays, bringing everyone together in a mood of celebration. The same sentiments had to be fostered by the theatre, films, painting and literature. It was an idea that spread from one work to another.

The utopian world of pseudo-art had its own laws and its own heroes. Characteristic of it was, as V. Kardin wrote later in the journal Teatr, ‘a cold pomposity’. One was shown ‘a significant conflict between a beardless worker-innovator and a grey-bearded conservative professor’. There appeared on the stage ‘intellectuals poisoned by the venom of grovelling [before Western achievements? — Trans.] and restored to new life through a talk with a wise housewife or a shrewd Party organizer. ’135

Constant lying and toadying corrupts people. Stalinist ‘socialist realism’ did not create a single significant work of art, nor did Stalinism create anything valuable in any other branch of culture. Bureaucratic totalitarianism and spiritual creativity proved incompatible. Stalinism, as one of the critics grouped around Novy Mir wrote later,

dried up the scholar as well as the writer. The system of literary prizes, the pre-determined analysis and evaluation of works, the impossibility of disputing the aesthetic standards laid down from ‘on high’, the dogmatism, the ostentation, the verbosity, all gradually destroyed the scholar’s personal, subjective approach to literature. And without this there can be neither love for art — one can love only in one’s own way and not otherwise — nor creative thinking about it: one can reveal only what is ‘one’s own’, it is impossible to ‘reveal’ another person’s ideas.136

One can, however, argue against this view. If things did not go too well as regards innovations in art, in science Stalin’s favourites ‘revealed’ a great deal which later had to be quietly ‘covered up’. ‘Pseudoscientific approaches became dominant,’ writes Zhores Medvedev, ‘or at least prominent, in soil science, silviculture, zoology, botany, evolution, agrochemistry and many other areas.’137 It was characteristic that theories which ran counter not only to scientific facts but even to simple logic became especially firmly established in just those branches of knowledge that were connected with agriculture, where they could do the greatest practical damage. There reigned in biology in those days the woefully renowned T. Lysenko, who was personally responsible for the persecution and death of a number of scientists and became notorious for the falsifying of experiments and other similar ‘exploits’.138 Towards the end of his career Lysenko was even intending to undertake, in the spirit of Zamyatin’s sombre prophecy, the improvement of the human race on the basis of scientific humanity.