Mom’s excited to be visiting Uncle Dima Babkin. He isn’t really her uncle; he’s her dad’s tall, bald naval boss. In his high-ceilinged apartment, he has a rosy-cheeked baby and twin girls a little older than Mom, and, always, a never-ending supply of sugary podushechki candies. When they arrive, the family is celebrating full-throttle. Bottles burst open with a loud popping of corks; toasts are drunk to Russia’s historic election and to the arrival of Uncle Dima’s elderly father from Moscow. “Vast is my country,” sing the children, dancing around the baby’s crib, which Uncle Dima’s wife has filled with sweet raisin rusks. Any minute Aunt Rita, Dima’s sister, will arrive with her famous cake called Napoleon.
Uncle Dima’s whole building is, in fact, celebrating Election Day; neighbors stream in and out, borrowing chairs, carrying treats.
“Aunt Rita? Napoleon?” scream the children constantly darting up to the door.
There is a short, harsh buzz of the doorbell—but instead of cake Mom sees three men in long coats by the entrance. How come they don’t bring tangerines or pirozhki, she wonders? Why haven’t they shaken the snow off their felt valenki boots before entering—as every polite Russian must do?
“We’re looking for Babkin!” barks one of the men.
“Which Babkin?” Uncle Dima’s wife asks with an uncertain smile. “Father or son?”
The men look confused for a moment. “Well… both—sure, why not?” they say, and they shrug. “Both.” They almost giggle.
The silence that follows, and the smile that’s turned strangely petrified on Uncle Dima’s wife’s face, reawakens the worm in Mom’s stomach. As if in slow motion, she watches Uncle Dima and his old father go off with the men. To her relief, the family’s babushka orders the children onto the balcony to see the salut. Outside, the black night erupts in glitter. Fiery thrills shoot through Mom’s body with each new soaring, thundering explosion of fireworks. Green! Red! Blue!—blooming in the sky like giant, sparkling, jubilant bouquets. But when she goes back inside she is startled to see Uncle Dima’s wife splayed out on the couch, panting. And the house is filled with the sweet-rotten odor of valerian drops. And silence—that dead, scary silence.
Arrests to the popping of corks, horror in the next room from happiness, fear emblazoned with fireworks and pageantry—this was the split reality, the collective schizophrenia of the 1930s. Venom-spitting news accounts of the show trials of “fascist dogs of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang” ran beside editorials gushing over crepe de chine dresses at “model department stores” and the “blizzards of confetti” at park carnivals.
People sang. Sometimes they sang on their way to the firing squad, chanting “O Vast Is My Country,” a tune used as a station signal for Radio Moscow even during my youth. Featured in Circus, a Hollywood-style musical comedy, “O Vast Is My Country” was composed to celebrate Stalin’s new 1936 constitution, heralded as “the world’s most democratic.” On paper it even restored voting rights to the formerly disenfranchised classes (kulaks, children of priests). Except now arrests were not so much class-based as guided by regional quotas affecting every stratum of the society.
Chronicles of Stalin’s terror have naturally shaped the narrative of the era. They dominate so completely, one can forgive Westerners for imagining the Soviet thirties as one vast gray prison camp, its numbed inhabitants cogs in the machinery of the State that promoted itself solely through murder, torture, and denunciation. This vision, however, doesn’t convey the totalizing scope of the Stalinist civilization. A hypnotic popular culture, the State’s buoyant consumer goods drive, and a never-ending barrage of public celebrations—all stoked a mesmerizing sense of building a Radiant Future en masse.
Those who didn’t perish or disappear into the gulags were often swallowed up in the spectacle of totalitarian joy. Milan Kundera describes it as “collective lyrical delirium.” Visiting Russia in 1936, André Gide couldn’t stop marveling at the children he saw, “radiant with health and happiness,” and the “joyous ardor” of park-goers.
When I think of the Stalinist State, which I knew only as a banished ghost, these are the images that come to my mind: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s description of her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, being led away to the sounds of a Hawaiian guitar in a neighbor’s apartment. Anna Akhmatova’s unbearably tragic poem “Requiem” (dedicated to the victims of purges) juxtaposed with the indomitable cheer of Volga-Volga, an infectiously kitsch celluloid musical comedy of the time. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of the voronki (black Mariahs), prison transports disguised as brightly painted comestibles trucks, their sides eventually featuring ads for Sovetskoye brand champagne with a laughing girl.
The frenzy of industrialization of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32) had bulldozed and gang-marched a rural society into something resembling modernity—even as officials suppressed details of the millions of deaths from famines brought on by collectivization. In 1931, more than four million peasant refugees flooded the overwhelmed cities. The state needed something to show for all the upheavals. And so in 1935 Stalin uttered one of his most famous pronouncements.
“Life has gotten better, comrades, life has gotten more cheerful,” he declared at the first conference of Stakhanovites, those celebrated over-fulfillers of socialist labor quotas, whose new movement emulated the uberminer Alexei Stakhanov, famed for hewing 102 tons of coal in one workshift. “And when life is happier, work is more effective,” Stalin added.
After the speech, reported one participant, the Leader of Progressive Mankind joined all in a song from the wildly popular screen farce Jolly Fellows, released weeks after Kirov’s murder. The Genius of Humanity liked music, and occasionally even edited song lyrics himself. He had personally instigated Soviet movie musical comedy by expounding to director Grigory Alexandrov—former assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in Hollywood—on the need for fun and cheer in the arts. The melodies and mirth that exploded onto Soviet screens in the late thirties were the socialist realist answer to Hollywood’s dream factory. Instead of Astaire and Rogers, dashing shepherds burst into song and gutsy girl weavers achieved fairy-tale Stakhanovite apotheoses. “Better than a month’s vacation,” pronounced Stalin after seeing Jolly Fellows, which was Alexandrov’s jazzy, madcap debut. The Leader saw the director’s 1938 musical Volga-Volga more than a hundred times. Never mind that the main cameraman had been arrested during filming and executed, and the screenwriter had written the lines in exile.
Quoted on posters and in the press and, of course, set to music, Stalin’s “life is happier” mantra established the tonality for the second half of the decade. It was more than just talk. In a fairly drastic redrawing of Bolshevik values, the State ditched the utopian asceticism of the twenties and encouraged a communist version of bourgeois life. The Radiant Future was arriving, citizens were told. Material rewards—offered for outstanding productivity and political loyalty—were the palpable proof. Promises of prosperity and abundance invaded public discourse so thoroughly, they shimmered like magical incantations in the collective psyche. Stakhanovite superworkers boasted in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia about how many rubles they earned. They stood beaming beside their new furniture sets and gramophones—rewards for “joyous socialist labor.” Anything capitalism could do for hardworking folk, went the message, socialism could do better—and happier.