Even the most servile of Bolshevik poets, Efim Pridvorov ("the courtier"), who wrote under the name Bedny ("the poor"), was thrown out of court in 1936 for his Bogatyrs, which made the "vulgar Marxist" error of burlesquing these popular heroes of the early Russian epics. The following year saw a host of purely patriotic festivals: a Pushkin centenary, a 125th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino, and a revival of Glinka's Life for the Tsar (under the alternate title of Ivan Susanin). The growing fear first of Japan and then of Germany accelerated Stalin's tendency to rely on nationalistic rather than socialistic appeals. The general staff and many traditional army titles were reintroduced in the late thirties; the League of the Militant Godless was abolished shortly before the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and a limited concordat with the Patriarch of Moscow agreed upon shortly after. So traditionalist did Stalin seem to have become that many in the West were prepared to accept at face value the gesture of their wartime ally in abolishing the Communist International in 1943.
Yet for all these links with Russian tradition, the age of Stalin introduced industrial development and social changes that should not be compared lightly with anything that preceded it. His effort to destroy the free creative culture of Russia was more sweeping than that of his authoritarian ancestors, and was launched against a culture that had attained unprecedented variety, sophistication, and popular support. He enlisted in his campaign all the cynical manipulative techniques of modern mass advertising, lacquering over his atrocities with a veneer of misleading statistics and insincere constitutional guarantees.
Behind it all lay untold human suffering and degradation. The peasants' hopes-rekindled during the era of the New Economic Policy-for a better life and greater freedom from their traditional urban exploiters were dashed by Stalin's determination to collectivize. The burning of grain and slaughter of livestock by the protesting peasantry at the beginning of the thirties launched a chain reaction of unnatural death in the human realm. Peasants perished as kulak "class enemies," repopulated forced laborers, or victims of artificial starvation from bad planning or forcible grain collections. The "leftist" activists who perpetrated this horror in the countryside were the next to perish in the purges of the mid-thirties; and, then the executors were themselves executed to placate the masses and insure the safety of the supreme assassin.
Deaths were recorded not individually or by the thousands but by the millions. More than ten million cattle were slaughtered in the early stages of collectivization, perhaps five million peasants in the social upheaval of the thirties. Membership in the Party elite provided no refuge, for 55 out of its 71 Central Committee members and 60 of 68 alternate members disappeared between the Seventeenth Congress of the party in 1934 and its Eighteenth Congress in 1939. Indeed, all but a very few of those who had made the Revolution and launched the Soviet state were purged in the thirties. Then came Hitler and the terrible suffering of the war, in which twelve million Russians perished.
Always and umemittingly, Stalin suspected those flights of the imagination and experiments with form and idea which lay at the heart of creative culture. None was more suspect in Eastern Europe than the large Jewish community, with its intellectual traditions and international perspectives. Jewish Bolsheviks were deprived of their revolutionary names and sent to the anonymous death that was shortly to become the fate of the Jewish masses under the more systematic and distinctively racist totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. The final reprise on the totalitarian age was Stalin's effort to cut out "the ulcer of cosmopolitanism" by obliterating the
survivals of Yiddish culture and the new interest in Western Europe that appeared in Russia in the wake of World War II.
Stalin's most important contribution to world culture lay in his perfection of a new technique of governing through systematic alternation between terror and relaxation. This "artificial dialectic" required the building of a manipulable and "cast-iron" apparatus totally dependent on the dictator, and the determination to make "permanent purge" a calculated instrument of statecraft.58 The true homo sovieticus was the disciplined and secretive professional officer of the dictator's sprawling police and intelligence apparatus.59 Just as technicians in the infamous Special Section of the Ministry of the Interior found that one of the simplest ways to "break" a reluctant prisoner was by a blinking alternation of total light and total darkness, so the servants of Stalin sought to disorient and subdue the outside world with an incessant and bewildering alternation between smiles and scowls, amity and threat.
In the remote apex of this society stood the solitary dictator, regulating the ebb and flow of mood, ingeniously playing on the masochistic and xenophobic impulses of a populace long accustomed to collective suffering and feelings of inferiority. Whenever rewards were in order or respites to be granted, the Caligula of collectivism suddenly emerged smiling from inside the Kremlin. When terror was loose, even the victims tended to speak of it as the creation of an underling: Yezhovshchina in the thirties, Zhdanovshchina in the forties.
In his last years, Stalin kept about him such shadowy figures as Beria, a fellow Georgian and Yezhov's successor as head of the evergrowing police empire; Poskrebyshev, his private secretary; and Michael Suslov, a lean and ascetic former Old Believer who bore the name of the founder of the flagellant sect.
On Christmas eve of 1952, Suslov sounded the first note in a fresh campaign of denunciation that was both a throwback to the witch-hunting at the court of Ivan III and the apparent harbinger of a vast new purge. Suslov's denunciation of editors for insufficiently rigorous self-criticism over long-forgotten issues of economic development was followed by an announcement in Pravda that nine doctors had been charged with assassinating through mistreatment and poisoning a variety of leading Soviet figures, including Zhdanov. This campaign against the predominately Jewish "doctor-poisoners" who had allegedly infiltrated the Kremlin was apparently directed against Beria, as head of state security, and his close associate, Georgy Malenkov. As the most intelligent and powerful of Stalin's lieutenants, they were the logical candidates for victimization; and their careers were saved (though only temporarily) by the convenient death of Stalin himself
on March 5, 1953. The last time he was seen alive by a non-Communist observer, Stalin was doodling wolves in red ink; and the last officially announced medical treatment administered to him before death was bleeding with leeches.60
For nearly ten years, a mummified and faintly smiling Stalin lay alongside Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum. It was an awesome reminder of the carefully cultivated myth of infallibility-the idea that, however absurd Soviet policy may have seemed to those on the front lines, there was always an omniscient leader at the command post: a "magic citadel" within the Kremlin inviolable to assault from ordinary experience and common-sense doubts. As one student of the Stalin formula wrote: