In this situation the scientists were – most of them, at least – in a better position. Their institutes also received improved funding, which was even more generous than for the arts. The new situation came at a price, for starting in the early 1930s the scientific institutes were required to come up with five-year plans like those in the economy. In part, this move was to increase their usefulness to industry, but for that aim the ultimate means was the creation of a large network of specialized institutes for different branches of technology, while basic research remained in the hands of the older institutes. Gradually all basic research was centralized under the Academy of Sciences during the cultural revolution, was brought under party control, and then subordinated directly to the central government, bypassing the various People’s Commissariats. The Academy also had to leave its Leningrad headquarters for Moscow, which now acquired a new battery of scientific institutes to rival those of Leningrad. Thus in 1934 the Soviet government took advantage of the visit of the physicist Piotr Kapitsa from England to force him to remain in the country, and then set up the Moscow Institute of Problems of Physics under his leadership. The Soviet Union now had two world-class research institutes in physics. The scientists were also less often than writers and artists the object of ideological campaigns after the end of the cultural revolution. Abram Ioffe was the object of heavy criticism in 1935, but the charges were only that his Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute did not do enough to provide industry with new technology. The decade was in many ways the great age of Soviet physics. Some six Nobel prizes eventually went to Soviet physicists and chemists, all of them for discoveries made in the Leningrad and Moscow institutes during the 1930s. Biology was a different story. Throughout the decade Lysenko maintained a continuous assault on his opponents, spearheaded by his ideological spokesman, Isaak Prezent. The campaign culminated with Lysenko’s promotion to the leadership of the Agricultural Academy, but the party did not proclaim his doctrines to be the sole truth, and classical genetics survived, if under something of a cloud, until 1948.
The terror of 1937–38 hit the arts hard but not evenly. Musicians and composers seem to have suffered relatively little. Among the critics connected with the party, like Leopold Averbakh and his Proletarians, almost all perished. Surprisingly the writers from that group did much better, though many of them, even Sholokhov, lived those years in daily fear. Stalin did not carry out a mass purge of writers, but he and his agents did arrest and imprison many of them. For whatever reason, many of the most famous victims were arrested at the very end of the terror, Osip Mandelstam in 1938, followed by Isaac Babel, and later Meyerhold. Mandelstam died in prison, while Babel and Meyerhold were shot. At the same time, Pasternak spent the years of the terror working on translations from Shakespeare in his Peredelkino dacha, and Bulgakov continued at the Moscow Art Theater, dying of kidney failure in 1940. The sciences endured similar trials. On the whole the physicists escaped lightly: the few party members among them perished, and a few non-party scientists were arrested, Lev Landau among them. He spent months in prison only to be released without explanation. Kapitsa had interceded for him and Kapitsa’s institute survived intact. Biology was a different story. A denunciation from Lysenko’s spokesman Prezent led to the arrest of Nikolai Vavilov, the Soviet Union’s greatest biologist. He died in prison, as did several other important geneticists. The eve of the war was a dark time, both in the USSR and Europe. Stalin had decided by 1938 that the Soviet Union needed a fundamental ideological schooling, the beginning of a new and even more intrusive policy in culture. The basis of the new ideological campaign was to be the Short Course of the History the Communist Party, with its chapter on Marxism from the pen of Stalin himself. Yet the approaching war overshadowed even ideological efforts. The Soviet film industry’s annual plans stressed the “defense theme” and epics from the history of the revolution and Civil War. Movies on “socialist construction” and “friendship of peoples” were few in number and did not have big budgets.
When the war actually came, it created an entirely new situation, and Stalin had to quickly adjust. The preservation of cultural institutions was a priority. As the Germans advanced, orders came to evacuate cultural institutions as well as factories. Science research institutes, ballet companies, and writers were evacuated to the east. Eisenstein went to Alma-ata, and Shostakovich went to Kuibyshev on the Volga. The purpose was both to conserve the personnel of Soviet culture and to preserve some sense of normalcy during the war. Intellectuals joined the war effort with famous results such as the Leningrad symphony of Shostakovich, first performed in the besieged city. The physicists lobbied Stalin on behalf of an atomic bomb, as well as devoting their energies to more conventional weapons in factories and research institutes. For many engineers their war work took place as prisoners in NKVD laboratories, the most famous prisoners being the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and the later rocket designer Sergei Korolev. The war also created ideological problems for the party leadership. To mobilize as many people as possible meant including sectors of the population whom the official ideology had not reached or had even repelled. The answer was nationalism. After Stalin’s early pronouncements about the virtues of the German working class ceased, the official line began to stress Russian heroes and Russian accomplishments. Historians dusted off manuscripts on Peter the Great or Kutuzov, hitherto unpublishable. Eisenstein made one of his classic films on the life of tsar Ivan the Terrible, a film designed to glorify the tsar’s conquests and portray him as fighting for the unity of the land. Even Marxism had to be rethought: in 1943 the leading party journals declared that formerly there had been far too much emphasis on Hegel as the background to Marxism and he needed to be deemphasized. The result was an inaccurate history of the thought of Marx, but it made Marxism seem less German. For much of the intelligentsia, the new line on culture meant more breathing space, and many of them hoped that it would continue after the war. They were to be disappointed. Even as the fighting raged there were incidents: Mikhail Zoshchenko, a popular satirical writer, found his introspective autobiographical novel Before Sunrise banned after the first chapters were published in a leading literary magazine.
The return to orthodoxy came swiftly after the war, and the years from the victory until Stalin’s death were the darkest and dreariest in the history of Soviet culture. The first signal was the attack mounted in 1946 by Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s closest collaborators, on Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. Stalin himself regularly read the literary journals, and the judgments were ultimately his. Zoshchenko’s work was trite and lacking in ideas, Zhdanov said, and the novella written during the war was “disgusting” and had no relationship to the conflict with Hitler. Akhmatova’s poetry was pessimistic, oriented toward the past, and was a relic of a decadent aristocratic salon culture. Soviet literature was supposed to educate the reader and make the reader a fully conscious member of a socialist society who did not dwell on problems and shortcomings or on the details of individual psychology. It was also not to imitate Western literature, and indeed Stalin did not want too much Western literature translated: “Why do this?” he asked at one of the dressings-down for the writers. “It gives the impression that we Soviet people are second class, and the foreigners are the only first class people.” The result was a long series of dull chronicles of Soviet life, fantastic in their sanitized depiction of everyday life. Even Stalin realized that they were dull, but continued to blame the writers for their lack of talent and mastery of their art.