Pádraig Murphy writes Book review on Moscow, 1937, by Karl Schlögel, translated by Rodney Livingstone.
On March 13th, 1988, one Nina Andreeva published an article in Sovetskaya Rossiya taking issue with Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika as unconscionable transgressions of received Soviet dogmas. It was not quite clear who Nina Andreeva represented. On the face of it, she was a Leningrad teacher outraged at the sacrileges against what until recently had been regarded as the Holy Grail of Soviet socialism. There was more than a suspicion that she was a stalking horse for more powerful established interests. Gorbachev had to react. He confronted the challenge in a number of meetings of the Central Committee. In the course of one he said: “It was another question when we did not know what was going on. But when we learned and continue to learn ever more, that is another question. Stalin was a criminal lacking all morality. Three million were sent to the camps, where they were left to rot. Whole roll-calls of the best were knocked out. And this is not taking into account collectivization, which killed still more millions. If we are to proceed on the logic of Nina Andreeva, we will come to a new 1937. Do you want this? You, members of the Central Committee? You have to think deeply of the fate of the country.” Gorbachev could depend on his listeners’ understanding that 1937 represented an unprecedented descent to the depths in the sorry chronicle of Stalinism.
By the mid-thirties there were already fifty-seven large cinemas in Moscow and hundreds of other places where films could be shown. The party was very well aware of the propaganda potential of the medium, and generous provision was made for cinemas in the general plan for the city. Naturally, the medium was not untouched by the omnipotent party hand. Sergei Eisenstein was forced to withdraw his film Bezhin Meadow, a dramatisation of the tale of Pavlik Morozov, an apparently apocryphal fable of an odious child who shopped his own father to the authorities and was then murdered by his family. Eisenstein went on to redeem himself in Stalin’s eyes by producing Aleksandr Nevskii, a panegyric of Russian greatness, the following year. The Soviet film industry was very productive, and not all this production was propagandistic. In music, the USSR could show some outstanding talents, and these were the years when David Oistrakh and Emil Gilels, subsequently to achieve world fame, came to public notice. After a lively debate, Pravda declared authoritatively that there was a place for proletarian Soviet dzhaz. Its main exponent was Leonid Utesov, who rose through the cabaret scene to become one of the most popular Soviet musicians. A typically “Soviet” form of light music was provided by Isaak Dunaevskii, prominent as the writer of the score for Soviet musicals such as The Jolly Fellows. The most famous Soviet musician at the time was of course Shostakovich. His opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, had been denounced by Pravda in January 1936 as “chaos instead of music”. He spent 1937 working on his Fifth Symphony, which was premiered in Leningrad to great acclaim in November of that year. Click link for full article;
http://www.drb.ie/essays/a-tearless-people
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