Communism's Culture Wars

...Something in Sholokhov’s plain-speaking, hard-drinking, womanizing traits appealed to Stalin, and he decided to spare him...

...When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, the news of the death of composer Sergei Prokofiev that same day went almost unnoticed...

...Lenin called Tolstoy, who died in 1910, “the mirror of the Russian Revolution,” but not long before his crippling stroke in 1923 he expelled 160 of the country’s most talented philosophers, calling them “active bourgeois ideologues...

...As in the case of his Shostakovich and Stalin (2004), Volkov is fascinated by the highly charged and dangerously close relationship between artists and the state under the Soviet regime...

...During his long and stagnant reign (1964-82), the socalled dissident movement continued to grow and the Western media increasingly publicized the plight of participants, making writers like Andrei Sinyavsky, Yuli Daniel, Brodsky, and Solzhenitsyn symbols abroad of Soviet artistic repression...

...Subjected to scurrilous attacks in the official Soviet press, Pasternak did not attend the awards ceremony in Stockholm...

...Then he quotes the final words of Sokurov’s visionary 2001 film made in a single take in the halls of the Hermitage: “We will sail forever and we will live forever...

...Stalin, by contrast, was a much more discriminating cultural consumer than has widely been perceived...

...Since Volkov spent half his life as a music student and critic in the USSR before moving to the epicenter of the Russian artistic diaspora in New York, The Magical Chorus also illustrates the often unexpected consequences of merging émigré and “mainland” culture following the collapse of Communism in 1991...

...The David-and-Goliath narratives involving two subsequent Russian winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, became a favorite subject in the Western media and similarly generated unfavorable external public opinion of the Kremlin leadership...

...Stalin was obsessed with prizes and awards, viewing them as tools for rewarding and punishing prominent cultural figures...

...But glasnost and the collapse of the USSR proved to be a mixed blessing for artists...

...He cultivated something approaching friendship with the writers Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Sholokhov, yet had “at least 600 published authors” arrested during the Great Terror—“almost a third of the members of the Union of Soviet Writers...

...A prodigious reader (allegedly 400 pages a day), Stalin considered himself a connoisseur of the arts and enjoyed exerting his influence in this arena...

...This led him to rash, showy gestures, like the 1958 campaign against Pasternak, that ultimately further damaged the Soviet regime’s image in the West...

...Only in 1965, when Sholokhov received the prize for Quiet Flows the Don, was an official Soviet writer finally recognized by the Swedish Academy...

...Like others, Volkov refuses to make a definitive judgment about Sholokhov’s long-rumored plagiarism, since his archives are missing...

...The author of six previous books on such Russian artistic icons as composer Dmitri Shostakovich, poets Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky, and choreographer George Balanchine, Volkov here adopts the role of wellinformed tour guide, stopping at each significant site along the way to deliver a neat, brief and accessible commentary...

...Gone were the days of guaranteed employment and subsidized cultural institutions...

...When it was given to the émigré Russian writer Ivan Bunin in 1933— rather than to Stalin’s candidate, Gorky—Stalin denounced it as “an unforgivable cultural humiliation for the entire country...

...Volkov refrains from offering any predictions about where Russian culture is now heading...

...Pasternak thus unwittingly became the first Soviet dissident artist...

...Some years later, artist Ilya Kabakov reflected: “Fear as a state of mind persisted in every second of our life, in every action, and like coffee and milk . . . there was not a word or deed that was not diluted by a certain dose of fear...

...In his dealings with artists, Stalin’s successor in the Kremlin, the ebullient and unpredictable Nikita S. Khrushchev, was crippled by what Volkov describes as the “inferiority complex of a poorly educated man...

...Sholokhov is presented however, in a rather sympathetic light, mainly on the strength of letters he wrote to Stalin (published in Russia in 1997) that boldly criticized the devastation caused by collectivization in the early 1930s, and later the brutal interrogation methods employed during the Great Terror...

...By the time Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power in early 1985, the stage was set for glasnost...

...Ten years later, Volkov notes, “after the official condemnation of the ‘cult of personality’ . . . there were jokes circulating that apparently Stalin was an insignificant political figure in the era of Prokofiev...

...To which Volkov adds: “Russia—anxious, brooding, enigmatic—is at a crossroads, choosing its way...

...The Stalin Prize was instituted in 1939, on the dictator’s 60th birthday, and carried a large cash award plus enormous prestige...

...Solzhenitsyn moved back to Russia in 1994, but before long he became a marginal and (to most) irrelevant figure, a “Russian King Lear...

...Volkov’s forte is his ability to create minibiographies that provide a strong sense of personality, complete with drinking and sexual habits...

...Despite Lenin’s enormous intellect and erudition, he found the Futurist art of the revolutionary era puzzling and deferred most cultural questions to Anatoly Lunacharsky, his genial and persuasive commissar of education...

...This humiliation deepened in 1958, when Boris Pasternak received the Nobel Prize just two years after the publication in the West of Doctor Zhivago, which was banned in Russia until 1988...

...This reached its height in 1962, when the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the journal Novy Mir marked the first time the previously banned topic of Stalin’s concentration camps appeared in a Soviet magazine...

...Leonid I. Brezhnev, a charmer who once dreamed of becoming an actor, brought a much quieter style to his dealings with Soviet artists...

...History, though, has a way of rearranging things...

...Of particular interest is Volkov’s extensive discussion of the behind-the-scenes scheming by Stalin and his associates over the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature...

...He concludes with a discussion of the work of two important filmmakers, Nikita Mikhalkov (Burnt by the Sun) and Aleksandr Sokurov (The Russian Ark...

...This was the “first unofficial funeral ceremony in Soviet history,” says Volkov, and represented “the birth of public opinion and the rudiments of civil society” in the USSR...

...Harlow Robinson is the Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History at Northeastern University, and author most recently of Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians...

...Pasternak’s death in 1960 was hardly reported in the Soviet press, but a large crowd gathered nonetheless at the funeral in the Peredelkino writers’ colony...

...The situation accelerated in the 1970s when emigration to the West was permitted “creating . . . an alternative paradigm of Russian culture...

...The “corrosive atmosphere of omnipresent fear, suspicion, uncertainty, and epidemic levels of informing and self-censorship” introduced by the purges, Volkov observes, “fatally poisoned the moral climate...

...As Volkov puts it: “When the Soviet regime fell, the totalitarian stick vanished completely, but so did the carrots...

...Drawing on an impressive variety of sources, Solomon Volkov takes us on a wideranging, gossip-spiked stroll through the thickets of Russia’s fierce culture wars in The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn (Knopf, 333 pp., $30.00...

...The real political debate had already moved from the official arena “to the kitchens of the intelligentsia,” and now it spread to Russia’s streets and into the media...

...Still, Khrushchev’s relatively short tenure at the top was called “the Thaw” because of a relaxation in censorship standards...

...But Volkov points out that Khrushchev also frightened and alienated numerous members of the cultural elite with his increasingly irrational and volatile behavior, such as his shouting matches with poets and artists...

...If his chronologically organized volume occasionally resembles a catalogue raisonné of Russian cultural celebrities without a clear central thesis, he can be mostly forgiven...

...For the literary/journalistic survey he has assembled contains so many insights, dramatic confrontations and insider reports that it rarely bores...

...For Stalin, culture was an essential part of the new Socialist society that was being built in the USSR, Volkov writes, “a huge hose for brainwashing his subjects...

...Boris N. Yeltsin, initially expected to be a champion of the liberated intelligentsia, devolved into a drunken embarrassment...