The strength of communism and its originality come from the disinterested militants and sympathizers. . . . Their sympathy and faith will not become untenable while the remote inner citadel remains intact-that magic citadel within which evil is transformed to good, fact into myth, history into legend, and the steppes of Russia into paradise.61
Giant, omnipresent statues of Stalin had provided Russia with a new image of omnipotence: a macabre parody of the Byzantine Pantokrator. This divine image had stared down from the central domes of the original cathedrals of the holy wisdom to provide sanctifying power and some mystical foretaste of the splendors of heaven to those who gathered on feast days in these original centers of Russian civilization. So Stalin smiled down his assurances of holy wisdom and sanctifying authority to those who gathered on the new feast days for the pathetic foretaste of heaven on earth provided by a "park of culture and rest." This quasi-religious myth of Stalin with its many psychologically satisfying features could not be easily dispelled. When his body was finally removed from the mausoleum in Red Square late in 1961, an ancient woman who had known Lenin and spent seventeen years in prison under Stalin issued the call rather in the manner of a sectarian prophetess:
The only reason I survived is that Il'ich was in my heart, and I sought his advice, as it were. (Applause) Yesterday I asked Il'ich for advice, and it was as if he stood before me alive and said: "I do not like being next to Stalin, who inflicted so much harm on the Party." (Stormy prolonged applause.)62
The scene of ritual reburial is reminiscent of late Muscovite politicst with Khrushchev calling forth his sanctifying approval of the woman's, recommendation from the podium of the Twenty-second Party Congress as it bellowed forth its antiphonal responses of "Stormy, prolonged applause." One Soviet intellectual of the post-Stalin era has written:
Ah, if only we had been more intelligent; if only we had surrounded his death with miracles! We should have given it out on the radio that he was not dead but had gone up into heaven, whence he was still looking at us silently, over his mystical moustache. His relics would have cured paralytics and people possessed with devils. And children, before going to bed, would have been praying by their windows, with their eyes turned toward the bright stars of the celestial Kremlin.63
Perhaps the best synoptic view of Russian culture under Stalin is provided by the development of the cinema, an art medium with little history prior to the Soviet period. The innumerable movie theaters large and small that sprang up all over the USSR in the twenties and thirties were the new regime's equivalent to the churches of an earlier age. Within the theaters, the prescribed rituals of the new order-its chronicles of success and promises of bliss-were systematically and regularly presented to the silent masses, whose main image of a world beyond that of immediate physical necessity was now derived from a screen of moving pictures rather than a screen of stationary icons. Like Soviet industry, the cinema produced in the age of Stalin a great quantity of films, including some of real quality. Yet despite the many new techniques and skilled artists involved, the Stalinist cinema represents a regressive chapter in the history of Russian culture. At best, it offered little more than a pretentious extension of the most chauvinistic aspects of pre-Revolutionary culture; at worst it was a technological monstrosity seeking to cannibalize one of the world's most promising theatrical traditions.
Hopes were high when idealistic young revolutionaries first wandered into the deserted studios of the infant Russian film industry during the Revolutionary period. Here was an art medium closely linked to the liberating force of technology, uniquely suitable for spreading the good news of a new social order to all people. Here also was a relatively untouched world of artistic possibility: a cultural tabula rasa. For, since the first public movie theater had appeared in 1903, the Russian film industry had assumed no very distinctive character. It was an imitative, commercially oriented medium largely involved in producing never-never land sentimentality and melodramatic happy endings.
Placed under the commissariat of education by a Leninist decree of August, 1919, and faced with the emigration of almost all its artists and technicians, the Soviet film industry became a major center for on-the-job training in the arts and an arena for florid experimentation.
During the relatively relaxed period of the early twenties a variety of new styles appeared, and a vigorous discussion ensued about the nature of cinematic art and its relation to the new social order. The remarkable
"movie eye" (kinoko) group flourished briefly, with its fanatical dedication to documentary accuracy and precise chronology; a former architect and sculptor, Leo Kuleshov, pioneered in the use of open-air scenes, untrained actors, and monumental compositions; and scattered efforts were made to break down the flow of pictures into expressionistic or abstract forms.
But as in all fields of Soviet culture, the rise of Stalin to absolute power in the late twenties led to the adoption of a propagandists official style that brought an end to creative experiment. The new style was perhaps the best example of that blend of Revolutionary message and realistic form that came to be called socialist realism. At the same time, the subject matter of the cinema in the thirties and forties illustrates the increasing drift toward chauvinistic traditionalism in Stalinist Russia.
There were many influences behind the new Soviet film style. In a sense it was a return to the old tradition of the illustrated chronicle (litsevaia letopis') with which the heroic history of the Church Victorious had been popularized in the late Muscovy. It was also a continuation and vulgarization of the traditions of heroic historical painting and mammoth exhibitions that had been developed in the nineteenth century. To these traditions was added the dream of a new type of revolutionary mystery play originated during the exciting days of War Communism. Open-air mass theatrical pageants were improvised as thousands took part in a cycle which attempted to re-enact seven major popular revolutions in Russian history; eighty thousand took part in Maiakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe, and more than one hundred thousand in the ritual re-enactment of the storming of the Winter Palace. Michelet said that the French Revolution really began not with the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, but with the symbolic re-enactment of the event a year later. In like manner, one could say that the Russian Revolution-as a symbol of liberation-was born not in the turbulent events of November, 1917, but in these subsequent scenes of pictorial pageantry and mythic re-creation.
The key cinematic task of Lenin's heir was the transposition to the screen of this monumental myth. As the "movie trains" of Revolutionary days with their itinerant pictorial propaganda were replaced by stationary theaters, it became essential to have a codified version of the Revolutionary myth. This was provided by three major films, which were all produced in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup and comprise a kind of heroic trilogy: Pudovkin's Last Days of Petersburg, Eisenstein's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Bamet's Moscow in October. Together with the panoramic and equally fanciful picture of the Civil War provided by Alexis Tolstoy's Road to Calvary (which became a trilogy in the film version), these films dramatized for the Russian masses the mystery of the