Fear and the Muse Kept Watch by Andy McSmith

Author:Andy McSmith [McSmith, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970799
Publisher: The New Press

9

Stalin’s Nights at the Opera

Even if they cut off both my hands and I have to hold my pen in my teeth, I shall go on writing music.

—DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

Even as Russia’s cultural community enjoyed an Indian summer of relative freedom in the year 1935—and the likes of Maxim Gorky and Nikolai Bukharin were trying to draw the intelligentsia into more active involvement in the regime in the hope of creating a loyal opposition that could rein in the dictatorship—others who were driven by ambition, fear, or stupidity were priming Stalin with flattery and lies that encouraged him to believe that he was infallible and that any real or imagined challenge to his authority was malicious. Before Mikhail Kalinin, nominal president of the USSR, set off for his annual vacation on the Black Sea, he consulted two fellow Politburo members, Lazar Kaganovich and Anastas Mikoyan, about what to say to Stalin when they met down south. “We told him to say that ‘the country and party are so well charged up with energy that although the chief marksman is resting, the army is still firing.’ For example, what has happened with the grain procurements this year is our completely unprecedented stupefying victory—the victory of Stalinism,” Kaganovich boasted to a colleague.1

One of those who joined Stalin on holiday was his fellow countryman Lavrenti Beria, the sinister new ruler of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan who in 1935 commissioned a history of the early years of Bolshevism in that region to glorify the young Stalin. Old Bolsheviks whose memories differed from what was now the official record were vilified, humiliated, and in some cases arrested. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, recalled how Beria “flattered my father with a shamelessness that was nothing if not Oriental . . . in a way that caused old friends, accustomed to looking on my father as an equal, to wince with embarrassment.”2

Trotsky’s former hanger-on Karl Radek, a talented, treacherous journalist anxious to work his way back into favor, wrote a conceit titled “The Architect of a Socialist Society.” While Kaganovich praised Stalin’s current achievements and Beria focused on reinventing his past, Radek cast flattery into the future by imagining a lecture delivered at an interplanetary symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution in which the speaker marveled at the grandeur of Stalin’s achievements: “Notwithstanding the great strides made by science in communist society, it cannot yet answer the problem of personality. It can only reveal the local conditions which nurtured the leader, who, like a pillar of fire, marched in front of mankind and lit up the way.”3

But the gold standard for slobbering sycophancy seems to belong to a forgotten poet named Aleksander Avdienko who reportedly said in a speech to the Seventh Congress of Soviets in January 1935:

Thank you, Stalin. Thank you because I am joyful. Thank you because I am well. No matter how old I become, I shall never forget. . . . Centuries will pass, and the generations still to come will regard us as

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