Also on January 20, King George V died near midnight, at age eighty-three, after being administered a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine to put him out of his suffering and, according to his physician, to allow his death to feature in the morning rather than the afternoon papers.248 Stalin named Tukhachevsky, alongside Litvinov, to the Soviet delegation for the funeral, in Windsor Castle on January 28. Tukhachevsky traveled by train via Berlin, where he stopped off for a few hours, setting off a speculative frenzy about meetings with the German general staff. The Soviet press was silent about the stopover; Germany denied the rumors.249 Stalin does seem to have tried to contrive a meeting.250
Tukhachevsky had visited Germany nine times, but despite his respect for German military achievements, he distrusted that country.251 In Britain, where he spent not hours but thirteen days, he met French general Maurice Gamelin, also in London for the funeral, who hosted him at an embassy reception, where the Soviet commander met officers who had been interned with him in the German POW camp. Gamelin invited him to stop in Paris, where Tukhachevsky was afforded a lavish program of meetings and military inspections. In long hours with Gamelin, Tukhachevsky made plain his concern over the threat of German aggression.252 Maisky and Litvinov were urging Eden, newly named foreign secretary, to use the League of Nations and other instruments to halt the German danger before it came to war. Eden wrote in an internal memo that he told them he was “unable to imagine what else could be done,” and to Litvinov’s suggestion for a Soviet-British-French bloc against Germany, he responded, “I cannot imagine how that could be done.”253
“FRIENDSHIP OF PEOPLES”
On January 27, 1936, Stalin and his entourage received a sixty-seven-person delegation of milkmaids, artists, and functionaries from Buryat-Mongolia in the Russian republic. A report sent by the region’s leaders in advance noted that the autonomous republic had 82 percent collectivization and stood first in the Union among national republics in livestock per capita, with 3.36 cows, 3.91 sheep, 0.9 goat, and 0.23 pig held collectively per household. (The numbers for Kazakhstan were 0.84, 1.47, 6.9, and 0.09.)254 Pravda’s coverage of the Kremlin reception included a photograph of Stalin in Buryat robes, with a dagger in his sash. These receptions for national groups in traditional dress constituted a recent invention.255 Pravda had hit upon the slogan, enunciated at one such reception, of the “Friendship of Peoples.”256
In the Buryat-Mongolia coverage, there was also a photo of Stalin with Engelsina “Gelya” Markizova, a seven-year-old Buryat girl wearing a brand-new sailor’s outfit and beaming in his arms.257 Named for Engels (her brother was named Vladlen, after Vladimir Lenin), she was the daughter of a Buryat-Mongolia official and lived on Stalin Street in Ulan Ude. She had presented him with two bouquets that her mother, a student at the Moscow Institute of Medicine, had thought to purchase (one was supposed to be for Voroshilov). Stalin had picked her up, and she had wrapped her arms around his shoulders, creating an indelible image.258 Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, had recently appeared with him in a photograph in Pravda (he was shown looking down, cupping her head with his good arm, her bright face smiling).259 Stalin also permitted a photograph of Vasily and Svetlana together in Pioneer Pravda (which he instructed Svetlana to “treasure”).260 Thereafter, his two younger children faded from public view. But the images with children persisted, creating a sense of a paternal leader. The depictions of traditional dances and rural females—which had once conveyed the backwardness to be overcome—now signified supposed harmony in diversity, embodied by a happy father figure.261
Russians, too, constituted a nation, but their folklore was presented as imperial culture.262 Even as workers remained the vanguard class, Russians became the vanguard nation.263 “All the peoples, participants in the great socialist construction, can take pride in the results of their work,” Pravda editorialized (February 1, 1936). “But first among equals are the Russian people, the Russian workers, the Russian toilers, whose role throughout the whole Great Proletarian Socialist Revolution has been exceptionally large, from the first victories to the present day’s brilliant period of development.” Celebration of the expansion of the state from Muscovy allowed restoration of even Ivan the Terrible to a pedestal. Stalin’s leftist critics decried what they perceived as his abandonment of pure Marxism, a perception of retreat that Stalin’s rightist critics shared but welcomed.264 In fact, Stalin’s embrace of the imperial Russian inheritance was selective, showing little concern for churches, large numbers of which had been destroyed. (Kaganovich had dynamited Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the world’s largest Orthodox church, built in the nineteenth century to commemorate the victory over Napoleon.)265 The absence of private property, the leading role of the party, and the red flag with hammer and sickle amply reinforced the fact that this was a Communist regime. But Stalin’s willingness—and ability—to blend imperial Russian étatisme with Marxist-Leninist class approaches strengthened the socialist state.266
MUDDLE
Stalin revealed his theory of cultural oversight in a letter to Shcherbakov’s deputy, Vladimir Kirpichnikov, known as Stavsky. “Take a look at comrade Sobolev,” the dictator instructed. “He is, unquestionably, a major talent (judging by his book Capital Repairs). He is, as you see from his letter, capricious and uneven. . . . But these traits, in my view, could be found in any giant literary talent (perhaps with a few exceptions). It is not necessary to oblige him to write a second Capital Repairs. Such an obligation would lead to nothing. It is not necessary to oblige him to write about collective farms or Magnitostroi. It is impossible to write about such matters under obligation. Let him write what and when he wants. In a word, let him. And take care of him.”267 But apparatchiks capable of nurturing talent as well as loyalty were rare. Stories of poorly educated censors forbidding the music of someone named Schubert over the radio because he might be a “Trotskyite” were the least of it.268 The censor (glavlit) had obtained power over plays, films, ballets, broadcasts, and even circus acts, as well as literature, but it was often overwhelmed and had the NKVD and party commissions looking over its shoulder. Taking chances (saying yes) carried no upside; prohibition was the safest recourse, leading to round after round of supplication, paperwork, and foot dragging, unless someone with sufficient authority and confidence put an end to the runaround and said yes.269
Shcherbakov admitted to Stalin that, after fifteen months as secretary of the writers’ union, he was being criticized for not being sufficiently on top of things.270 But Stalin was besieged, and trying to preserve himself to oversee only the most outstanding cultural figures. Finally, on his initiative, the politburo approved the creation of an all-Union Committee for Artistic Affairs, placed not in the party apparatus but in the Council of People’s Commissars, with Platon Lebedev, known as Kerzhentsev (b. 1881), as chairman. The son of a physician–cum–tsarist Duma deputy, he had been educated at gymnasium and then Moscow University, was a prolific writer on topics ranging from the new science of time management to the Paris Commune, and an experienced functionary, whose most recent appointment had been as head of Soviet radio.271