Where the News Ends

...The selection of nstional heroes is also, no doubt, a matter of taste...

...But it throws a good deal of light on the ideals and character of the regime that engages in the process of selection...

...There is nothing discreditable to the Russian people In this retardation of Russia's cultural development, which was due to a variety of historical and geographical causes...

...M/hl.l...

...But crude misrepresentation of this kind is eminently cliaracteris-,., tic of the kind of "patriotism" that is the fruit not of individual reason and judgment, but of official order...

...Baamaaov aad Sknratov...

...Making due allowance for the lively competition which existed in this field, Ivan, by all the evidence of the historical records, was about the most cruel and bestial despot in the long line of Russian Tsars...

...Msay of his punishments were toe horrible ts be described, la lMt he hilled his cousin, Prince Vladimir...

...There is no consideration of the formidable blight which the unlimited autocracy instituted by Ivan, with its crushing of the independent aristocracy and the free cities, such as Novgorod and Pskov, placed upon phases of Russian political and cultural development in later generations and centuries...

...Nothing has been more superficially bizarre or more fundamentally realistic than the cult of Ivan the Terrible that has been part of the new officially sponsored creed of Russian nationalism in the Soviet Union...

...Belinsky, Kropot-kin, Plrkhanov, Martov, BrOshkovskaya, Vera Figner, would have been a social order just as different from Ivan the Terrible's autocracy as could well have been achieved...

...Both these latter committees are attached to the Council of People's Commissars, the Soviet Cabinet...

...iate the apartment of hia aon'a wife and treated her with brutal violence...

...Ts understand what is historically true and to relert in ariintic form the events of these yesrs—this is an honorable and enviable task for the Soviet artist...

...The judgment of Russia's liberal intelligentsia on Ivan was Hummed up by the playwright Aleksei Tolstoy (not to be copfused with the Soviet author of the same name), who composed a historical trilogy about the times of Ivan and once wrote: "I throw down my pen in indignation, not so much st the thought that Ivan the Terrible coald exist as st the thought thst a society could exist which wenld look on him without indignation...

...There is no fourteenth century Russisn Dsnte, no sixteenth century Russisn Bscon or Shskespcsre, no seventeenth century Russia Newton or Pascal, no eighteenth century Russian Goethe or Voltaire...

...Of Ivan's vengeances one of the most asvage wss hi* attack on Novgorod...

...replied Philip, and paid for hia courage with bin life...

...In 1S81 he bars...

...One hoiies that this cult of Ivan the Terrible will be shortlived...

...Rut in the sixteenth century, sad for two or three hundred yesrs after the sixteenth century, Ruasis wss fsr behind the leading countries of Europe in its cultursl and technical development...

...He wss courageously rebuked by the Metropolitan Philip, who frequently interceded for the victims . . . Ivsn sent to demand a blessing, when on his way te wreck the city of Nevgerod...

...Russia at the time of Ivan the Terrible," the reviewer declares, "possessed a great number of educated people...

...Another sentence in the review reflects the crude, halfbaked, ignorant nationalism that has now replaced the former crude, halfbaked and ignorant international-Ism as official Soviet dogma...

...Differ as they might on questions of theory and tactics, the common ideal of men and women like Herzett...

...The following passage, cited from A Hietory of Ruttia, by Sir Bernard Pares, which closely follows the work of that most gifted and brilliant of Russian historians, V. 0. Klyuchevsky, gives »ome idea of what kind of a person Ivan was and of now he maintained himself in power: "Ivan's wild orgy of terror became only wilder in hi* declining years...

...It would have been difficult to select as a "national hero" a figure more repugnant to the ideals of those great Russian fighters for freedom, of the .philosophers, artists and scientists of whom the Russian youth should be proud...

...Neither the review nor the novel, so far as one may judge its contents from the review, contains any suggestion that Ivan was a trifle excessive, even by the standards of sixteenth century Europe, on the homicidal side...

...The liquidated kulaks, the Poles who more recently have been starved and overworked in Soviet concentration camps are in a direct line of succession fro mllie massacred citizens of Novgorod, /van's way with Cousin Vladimtr, with kit son and with some af the chief agent* of hit own atroritiet forethadowt Staliii't way with Zinovitv, Kamtntv, Rykov, Bukhariu, Trottky and many other Old Bol»hevik$, and with mrh rhiefe of hit own political police as Yagoda and Yezhov...

...Whole families were thrown into the river, aad seen ia boats pushed them under...

...The innumerable cruelties of Ivan's reign count for nothing in the contemporary Soviet estimate of human and historical values...

...POr Literature and Art is not an expression of private, but of official, or semi-official opinion...

...such a society does exist, in the Soviet Union of the twentieth century...

...The next year marked the execution of two of the chief Opriehniha (Ot.l'l agent* of Ivaa'a time...

...The famous moving-picture producer Eisenstein has been reported at work on a film that will glorify the ruthless Tsar...

...and the wound proved fatal...

...these horrors lasted for five weeks...

...The sun of Russian humanistic culture waa all the brighter when it burst from behind the clouds of former darkness snd ignorance in the nineteenth century...

...It is described as the organ of the Union of Soviet Writers, of the Committee for Arts and the Committee for Moving-Picture production...

...This is all that matters, according to the viewpoint with which the Soviet youth is being indoctrinated...

...A PART from the fact that Philip seems to have been a man of far higher moral calibre than Stalin's stooge, Patriarch Sergius, the parallels with very recent events in Russian history are disconcertingly vivid...

...when his son protested Ivsn struck him with the pointed stick which he always carried with him...

...The power of Russia considerably increased...

...This statement is grotesquely false...

...There is no consideration of the exhaustion and impoverishment of the masses of the people because of Ivan's constant wars, although this exhaustion and impoverishment were certainly not the least of the causes of the Troubled Times, the epoch of anarchy, civil war and foreign intervention that followed soon after the death of Ivan and shook the Muscovite state to its foundations...

...It would hsve been true of the Russisn intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, (he period of Russia's great cultural awakening...

...Only the good are blessed...

...No disrespectful word about Ivan may be printed...

...Suspecting negotia liana with Poland, he marched on the city in January, I57t, ravaging all the country and killing right and left in the city...

...To Russian revolutionaries and liberals of tbe nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Ivan the Terrible would have been a personal symbol of all the evil they were fighting in the Tsarist system...

...A recent issue of the Moscow newspaper Literatura i /»/.»«!/ro (Literature and Art) which lies before me as 1 write contains a long review of a novel, Ivan the Terrible, published by an author named V. Kostilev...

...It was premature by three centuries...

...The circle of intellectuals—theologians, artists, translators, secretaries, officials in state service—was very wide, embracing different groups of the population and yielding to na^ European country in the sphere of its interests...

...The spirit of admiration and respect for Ivan with which the Soviet youth is being indoctrinated is summed up in the following sentences from the review: "Ivan the Terrible wss sble to orgsnixe and correctly dispose of the forces of the people so thst the power of Russia was not shaken, but considerably increased during the sixteenth century...