Kerzhentsev arrived just when a storm broke in music. During the entire previous year, only three long-playing records with Soviet music had been issued, and only one was symphonic: the score of Dmitry Shostakovich (b. 1906) for Hamlet.As for opera, Shcherbakov had written to Stalin, Andreyev, and Zhdanov (January 11, 1936) that Leningrad’s Maly Opera Theater was, “in essence, the sole theater that vigorously and systematically is working out the extremely important problem of the Soviet theater—namely, the creation of a contemporary musical spectacle.” He cited Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, by Shostakovich; Quiet Flows the Don, by Ivan Dzerzhinsky (b. 1909); and two works by Valery Zhelobinsky (b. 1913). Shcherbakov proposed that the Leningrad theater be renamed the State New Academy Opera Theater, and that its personnel receive state awards and pay raises to the level of the Kirov Ballet. Stalin redirected Shcherbakov’s letter to Kerzhentsev.272 The Leningrad theater was not renamed, but its ambitious conductor, Samuil Samosud, was anointed a “people’s artist” of the RSFSR and got approval to showcase his theater at a festival in Moscow. On opening night, much of Moscow’s creative intelligentsia showed for Quiet Flows the Don, based on the novel by Sholokhov. The opera—a patriotic glorification of the Don Cossacks’ immutable spirit and readiness to defend the motherland—proved a crowd-pleaser, with its lyrical and accessible music. After the final act, Stalin edged forward in the imperial box, making himself visible, and applauded demonstratively.
Stalin summoned Samosud to his box, and the discussion ended up lasting two hours; TASS distributed an account, heralding the advent of a Soviet opera repertoire. On January 17, 1936, Stalin ordered the director of the Bolshoi to stage its own production of Quiet Flows the Don, and the director decided to stage all the Samosud works, engaging Fyodor Lopukhov as principal dancer (he had danced the operas in Leningrad). The Bolshoi opened with Lady Macbeth, which was easier to mount than the other two. On January 26, Stalin and entourage attended. Unlike Quiet Flows the Don, Shostakovich’s music was subversive of operatic convention, with discord and hyper‐naturalistic portrayals of rape and murder. Stalin exited before the final curtain. This afforded Kerzhentsev a chance to establish his authority as the head of the new committee, at the expense of the existing culture power brokers, above all Shcherbakov. An unsigned denunciation, “A Muddle Instead of Music,” appeared in Pravda (January 28). (Kerzhentsev was the likely author, not Stalin, as rumored.)273 Only a short while before, Pravda had been over the top in praising the same opera. Even though Samosud had originated the production of the Shostakovich opera, the dictator had seen the Bolshoi version. He named him artistic director of the Bolshoi effective immediately.274
Shumyatsky, who remained head of Soviet cinema (and became Kerzhentsev’s second deputy), learned that Stalin viewed the Pravda article as “programmatic,” a demand “not for rebuses and riddles,” but music accessible to the masses, citing the “realistic music” of great Soviet films, especially Jolly Fellows, in which “all the songs are good, simple, melodic.”275 The “signal” got across. (“Don’t you read the papers?” a voice from the audience shouted at a speaker during a meeting of the Moscow Artists’ Union, referring to the denunciation of Shostakovich.)276 Shostakovich inveigled an audience with Kerzhentsev (February 7), and accepted “the majority” of the criticisms. Kerzhentsev advised the composer to travel around villages and acquaint himself with the folk music of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Georgia, as Rimsky-Korsakov had once done. Shostakovich promised to do so, while noting that composers would appreciate a meeting with Stalin.277 The press launched a vicious campaign against “formalists,” which targeted not only Shostakovich but also Eisenstein and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, leaders of the 1920s avant-garde. Kerzhentsev soon took the initiative to purge avant-garde works in museums.278
Bulgakov had two plays about to run: Molière (originally titled The Cabal of Hypocrites), at the Moscow Art Theater, which was to premiere on February 15, 1936, and Ivan Vasilevich, which was in final revisions for the Theater of Satire. Molière opened to a packed hall and wild applause.279 Behind the scenes, Kerzhentsev pointed out to Stalin and Molotov that Bulgakov had written Molière back when most of his works were banned and that, in the travails of a writer under the Sun King (Louis XIV), he intended to evoke what it was like when a playwright’s ideas “went against the political system and plays were prohibited.” He conceded the brilliance of the play, which “skillfully, in the lush netherbloom, carries poisonous drops,” and recommended killing it with damning reviews.280 Pravda ran just such a damning article (“external brilliance and false content”).281 Molière closed after seven successful performances. Ivan Vasilevich—a comedy mocking Ivan the Terrible—never opened, a blow to the writer but also, given Stalin’s views, a blessing.282 On February 19, after a month in his new post, Kerzhentsev wrote to Stalin and Molotov proposing a competition for a play and screenplay on 1917, promising to “show the role of Lenin and Stalin in the preparation and implementation of the October Revolution.” Stalin took a pencil and crossed out his own name.283
AMERICAN MIRROR
Being a great power meant looking into the American mirror. Shumyatsky had launched the idea of a Soviet Hollywood. A severe lack of factory capacity meant that Soviet film prints were in short supply—usually fewer than forty copies per film for the entire country—and he wanted a film industry capable of producing its own quality film stock, cameras, projectors, sound-recording machines, and lighting, all of which were expensive to import.284 He had headed an eight-person commission to Paris, London, Rochester (Eastman Kodak), and Los Angeles, whence he published stories about his film viewings and meetings, returning determined to found a Soviet Cinema City in the mild, sunlit climate on the Black Sea, permitting year-round work.285 At a Kremlin screening, he had gotten Stalin to approve the Hollywood idea. “Opponents cannot see farther than their own noses,” the dictator had intoned. “We need not only good pictures but also more of them, in quantity and in distribution. It becomes obnoxious when the same films remain in all the theaters for months on end.”286 At a follow-up screening, when Stalin saw Chapayev for the thirty-eighth time, the dictator said he had heard that Mussolini would build his Cinecittà outside Rome in just two years. But despite Stalin’s verbal support, the expensive Hollywood on the Black Sea never materialized.287
Opposition came not just from industrial and budget officials. Yechi’el-Leyb Faynzilberg, known as Ilya Ilf, and Yevgeny Katayev, known as Petrov, wrote a letter to Stalin opposing the Soviet Hollywood idea (February 26, 1936).288 Already household names for their satirical novels The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf, featuring the con man Ostap Bender, Ilf and Petrov had just returned from several months in the United States and would write One-Story America, which was about not only the “girls who are half naked, three-quarters naked, and nine-tenths naked [who] dance, or act,” but the real America—that of working people, a country of democracy if not of socialism. Their book related details of traveling in a Ford through twenty-five states with set pieces about skyscrapers, well-paved roads, vending machines, Mark Twain’s hometown, hunters, cowboys, boxers, farmers, Negroes, Indians—an unimaginable world for a Soviet audience.289