Unfortunately, Stalin did not like Eisenstein’s part two film and in March 1946 its screening was prohibited on grounds that it was historically and artistically flawed.198 Stalin considered the film ‘a vile thing’, and explained why at a meeting of the central committee’s Orgburo in August 1946:
The man got completely distracted from the history. He depicted the Oprichniki as rotten scoundrels, degenerates, something like the American Ku Klux Klan. Eisenstein didn’t realise that the troops of the Oprichnina were progressive troops. Ivan the Terrible relied on them to gather Russia into a single centralised state, against the feudal princes, who wanted to fragment and weaken it. Eisenstein has an old attitude toward the Oprichnina. The attitude of old historians towards the Oprichnina was crudely negative because they equated the repressions of Ivan the Terrible with the repressions of Nicholas II. . . . In our era there is a different view. . . . Eisenstein can’t help but know this because there is a literature to this effect, whereas he depicted degenerates of some kind. Ivan the Terrible was a man with a will and character, but in Eisenstein he’s a weak-willed Hamlet.199
As leading Soviet artists, writers and scientists often did when they came under such attack, Eisenstein petitioned for a meeting to plead his case. Because Stalin was on a prolonged holiday by the Black Sea, a meeting with Eisenstein did not take place until February 1947. Also present in Stalin’s Kremlin office were Molotov, Zhdanov and N. K. Cherkasov, the film’s lead actor.200 After the meeting, Eisenstein and Cherkasov reported the conversation to the writer Boris Agapov, and it is his notes that constitute the only known record of their conversation with Stalin.
Stalin’s opening gambit was to ask Eisenstein if he had studied history. More or less, was the reply. ‘More or less? I also know a bit about history,’ said Stalin. ‘You have misrepresented the Oprichnina. The Oprichnina was a King’s army . . . a regular army, a progressive army. You have depicted the Oprichniki as the Ku Klux Klan. Your Tsar comes across as indecisive like Hamlet. Everybody tells him what to do and he doesn’t take any decision himself.’ Ivan, Stalin continued,
was a great and wise ruler. . . . His wisdom was to take a national point of view and not allow foreigners into the country, protecting it from foreign influences. . . . Peter I was also a great ruler but he was too liberal towards foreigners, he opened the gates to foreign influences and permitted the Germanisation of Russia. Catherine allowed it even more. . . . Was the court of Alexander I a Russian court? Was the court of Nicholas I a Russian court? They were German courts.
Stalin made the same point again later in the conversation: ‘Ivan Groznyi was a more nationalist Tsar, more far-sighted. He did not allow foreign influence into the country. Unlike Peter, who opened the gate to Europe and allowed in too many foreigners.’
On Ivan’s cruelty, Stalin had this to say:
Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. One can show this cruelty but it is also necessary to show why he had to be so cruel. One of his mistakes was not to finish off the five big feudal families. If he had destroyed these five boyar families there would not have even been a Time of Troubles. . . . But when Ivan Groznyi executed someone he felt sorry and prayed for a long time. God hindered him in this matter. . . . It was necessary to be decisive.
At this point Molotov interjected that historical events needed to be shown in their correct light, using the negative example of Demyan Bedny’s comic operetta, The Bogatyrs (1936), which had made fun of Russia’s conversion to Christianity. Stalin agreed: ‘Of course, we aren’t very good Christians, but we can’t deny the progressive role of Christianity at a certain stage. This event had a major significance because it meant the Russian state turning around to close ranks with the West, instead of orienting itself towards the East. . . . We can’t just toss out history.’201
Eisenstein and Cherkasov were keen to get as much guidance as they could about how they should rework the film. They were given a few pointers but basically Stalin was happy to leave the matter in their artistic hands, insisting only that they be as historically accurate as possible. There was general agreement when Eisenstein suggested that it would be better not to hurry production of the film.202 In the event, Eisenstein, who had been ill for some time, died of a heart attack in February 1948. The film remained unrevised and was not released until five years after Stalin’s death.
Do his remarks to Eisenstein and Cherkasov reveal, as Robert Tucker argued, that Stalin saw himself as a latter-day Tsar and modelled his terror on that of Ivan’s? Hardly. Stalin had plenty of reasons of his own for conducting the purges. More plausible is Maureen Perrie’s suggestion that rather than driving the Great Terror, the historical parallel with Ivan the Terrible’s regime provided retrospective justification for the brutal repressions of the 1930s.203 For Stalin, history was a guide, not a straitjacket. More often than not, it was the present that framed his view of the past and determined the use-value of history.
SCIENCE & SOCIETY
The immediate context for Stalin’s stance on Ivan the Terrible was the Zhdanovshchina – the campaign against western capitalist cultural influences launched in summer 1946. Primarily a domestic campaign, it was prompted in part by Stalin’s disquiet at the postwar deterioration of diplomatic relations with the west and his growing frustration with what he saw as western obstruction of his efforts to secure the just rewards of that costly Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Stalin was determined to expand Soviet and communist influence in Europe, aiming to create a reliable bulwark of communist-controlled or influenced governments in central and eastern Europe to act as a barrier to future German aggression against the Soviet Union. Stalin thought he could achieve this while continuing to collaborate with Britain and the United States. Western political leaders had other ideas. In March 1946 Churchill declared that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Behind that screen, all the ‘ancient states’ of central and eastern Europe were succumbing to communist totalitarian control. A year later, US President Harry Truman called for a global defence of the ‘free world’ by the United States and requested funding from Congress ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’.
Party ideology chief Zhdanov fronted the anti-western cultural campaign but Stalin vetted and edited all his major statements on the matter, including this version of an August 1946 speech:
Some of our literary people have come to see themselves not as teachers but as pupils [and] . . . have slipped into a tone of servility and cringing before philistine foreign literature. Is such servility becoming of us Soviet patriots, who are building the Soviet system, which is a hundred times higher and better than any bourgeois system? Is it becoming of our vanguard Soviet literature . . . to cringe before the narrow-minded and philistine bourgeois literature of the west?204
When officials from the Soviet Writers’ Union went to see Stalin about some practical matters in May 1947, they found him preoccupied with the intelligentsia’s inadequate patriotic education: ‘if you take our middle intelligentsia – the scientific intelligentsia, professors and doctors – they don’t exactly have developed feelings of Soviet patriotism. They engage in an unjustified admiration of foreign culture. . . . This backward tradition began with Peter . . . there was much grovelling before foreigners, before shits.’205