This was the propitious background against which Vipper, who had emigrated to Latvia in the early 1920s, returned to Moscow in May 1941. Upon arrival he sent Stalin a telegram expressing fulsome thanks for helping him and his family’s joyful return to the land of socialism and pledging eternal loyalty to the country’s ‘great leader’.182 He was given a post at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History but was then evacuated to Tashkent, where he joined Bakhrushin and other historians. In 1942 he published a second edition of his Ivan Grozny. By Soviet standards it was a very small print run (15,000), possibly because of wartime paper shortages, but the book was well received. A third edition (5,000 copies) was published in 1944 and in 1947 it was issued in English.183
Apart from the mandatory quotation of Lenin and Stalin, the main addition to the book’s wartime editions was a new chapter called ‘The Struggle Against Treason’, in which Vipper clarified that the traitors Ivan had put to death were real, not imagined, enemies of the state.184
Bakhrushin developed his textbook chapter into a book and I. I. Smirnov published a short ‘scholarly-popular’ study of Ivan Groznyi in 1944.185 In 1947 Bakhrushin wrote, ‘In the light of new research, Ivan the Terrible appears as a majestic and powerful figure, as one of the greatest statesmen in Russian history.’186
While there are no signs of these books in Stalin’s archive, he would certainly have been sent copies and he would surely have read Pravda’s report of Vipper’s lecture to an audience in Moscow’s Kolonnyi Zal (Hall of Columns) in September 1943.
TASS reported that Vipper’s lecture on one of the most significant figures in Russian history had been a great success, noting that Ivan IV had created a powerful Muscovy state that played a crucial role in the gathering of the Russian lands and in developing close cultural, political and economic links with western Europe. The cause closest to Ivan’s heart, however, was the Livonian War (1558–83), which, according to Vipper, was a war for the restoration of ancient Russian rights. Vipper also dealt with the common complaint that Ivan was a cruel tyrant. To understand his harsh actions, people needed to appreciate the depth of domestic opposition to his efforts to create a centralised state – opponents who had allied themselves with foreign enemies.
The comparisons with Stalin’s time were self-evident and Vipper had no need to spell them out. He did, however, conclude with one explicit parallel between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries: then, as now, there were Germans who believed the Russians were incapable of defending themselves and underestimated the deep patriotism of the Russian people.187
A fortnight later, Vipper was elected a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and appointed to its Institute of History. In 1944 he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and in 1945 the Order of Lenin.
The aesthetic rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible proved to be more problematic than the historical. There were three parts to Tolstoy’s projected play, the first of which dealt with the formation of Ivan’s character, the second with affairs of state and the third with his ‘inglorious end’.188 He started work in autumn 1941 and had finished part one by the following spring. Printed copies of the script for the first part started to circulate, including one that found its way to Stalin’s desk. It was quite short and Stalin made a few inconsequential marks, indicating that he had read it.189 There was talk of Tolstoy being awarded a second Stalin Prize but the party leadership didn’t like the portrayal of Ivan. At the end of April 1942 the Moscow party boss, Alexander Shcherbakov, who was also chief of the Soviet Information Buro, wrote to Stalin recommending prohibition of the play in its current form.190 Shcherbakov also composed a longer version of his note, laying out detailed criticism of Tolstoy’s work. Stalin’s direct input into this critique remains unknown but it can be taken as read that it reflected his views as well.
‘Ivan IV was an outstanding political figure of sixteenth-century Russia,’ wrote Shcherbakov. ‘He completed the establishment of a centralised Russian state . . . successfully crushing the resistance of representatives of the feudal order.’ Tolstoy’s ‘confused play’ had numerous historical inaccuracies and had failed ‘to rehabilitate the image of Ivan IV’. The main flaw was not showing Ivan as a major, talented political actor, the gatherer of the Russian state and an implacable foe of the feudal fragmentation of Rus’ and of the reactionary boyars.191
Undeterred by this criticism, Tolstoy rewrote part one and continued working on part two, utilising Vipper’s book, among others. He sent both parts to Stalin for review but does not seem to have received any response, though they were published in the November–December 1943 issue of the magazine Oktyabr’.192 Part one premiered in Moscow’s Malyi Teatr (Little Theatre) in October 1944 but the production was not considered a success so it was restaged, to great acclaim, in May 1945.193 Part two was performed by the Moscow Arts Theatre in June 1946. The final part of the trilogy – on Ivan’s last years – remained unwritten, it seems.
Part one made it into print again in November 1944, when Stalin took a more active interest and marked a few passages from Ivan’s longer lines of dialogue, the most interesting being this:
They want to live in the old way, each sitting in a fiefdom with their own army, just like under the Tatar yoke. . . . They have no thought or responsibility for the Russian land. . . . Enemies of our state is what they are, and if we agreed to live the old way, Lithuania, Poland, Germans, Crimean Tatars and the Sultan would rush across the frontier and tear apart our bodies and souls. That is what the princes and boyars want – to destroy the Russian kingdom.194
Tolstoy, who died in February 1945, did not live to see part two of his play performed or to collect his second, posthumously awarded, Stalin Prize in 1946.
Averell Harriman, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, said Tolstoy once told him that to understand Stalin’s Kremlin you had to understand Ivan’s reign. Harriman clarified that Tolstoy did not mean Stalin was like Ivan the Terrible, rather that to appreciate Stalin’s Russia you needed to know something about Russia’s past. Harriman, who spent a lot of time with Stalin during the war, saw no traces of a court like that of Ivan IV. In his view, Stalin was a popular war leader; he was the one who held the country together: ‘So I’d like to emphasise my great admiration for Stalin the national leader in an emergency – one of the historic occasions where one man made so much difference. This in no sense minimises my revulsion against his cruelties; but I have to give you the constructive side as well as the other.’195
Sergei Eisenstein’s film commission also ran into political trouble. At first, all went well. Stalin approved Eisenstein’s screenplay, commenting that ‘it did not work out badly. Com. Eisenstein has coped with his assignment. Ivan the Terrible, as a progressive force for his era, and the Oprichnina as his logical instrument, did not come out badly. The screenplay should be put into production as quickly as possible.’196 Part one of Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible premiered in January 1945, and in 1946 he, too, was awarded a Stalin Prize.197