Soviet history, as cooked to taste by Stalin, took the form of a monstrous mixture of nationalism and Marxism. The history textbook was allowed to mention the coming of Christianity to Russia, but only because it represented "progress compared to pagan barbarism," and to assert that the monasteries had played "a progressive role in the first few centuries after Russia's conversion" because they taught people to read and write and served as "bases for colonization."64 The building of a strong Muscovite state and the drive to reach an outlet to the sea were also labeled progressive, as were certain grand dukes and tsars, through whom the laws of history operated, and if certain movements among the people hampered the "progressive" actions of the tsars, the former became "reactionary." The people were progressive when they supported a good tsar and, incidentally, usually did support him, especially against reactionary feudal lords. That was how orthodox Marxist schematism was ingeniously intertwined with schematic orthodox nationalism.
Aleksei Tolstoy apparently foresaw the changing attitude of the party, that is, Stalin, toward the Russian past. His novel Peter the Great first appeared in 1930, with a second part in 1934. The critics in RAPP denounced it as "ideologically alien." In 1931 Emil Ludwig asked Stalin, "Do you consider yourself a continuator of the work of Peter the Great?" Stalin answered categorically: "Not at all. Historical parallels are always risky. This one is absurd,"65 In 1937 Pravda showed the change of attitude: "Owing to the baneful influence of Pokrovsky, many of our historians have taken a terribly contemptuous approach to the figure of Tsar Peter I." That was wrong. "Peter was a great political figure and a great reformer for his time, an outstanding personality, colorful and picturesque." Pravda went on the explain that "the age of Peter I was one of the most progressive periods in Russian history."66
Another great progressive was born in 1937, Prince Alexander Nevsky. The resurrection of Saint Alexander, whose remains had at one time been scornfully ejected from the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Petrograd by the Bolshevik scientific atheists, had become necessary owing to foreign policy considerations. An enemy of the Germans, and a victor over them, was needed.
The first volume of the Small Soviet Encyclopedia, which was also the first Soviet encyclopedia, had taken a dim view of Alexander Nevsky.
As prince of Novgorod, he rendered valuable service to the capitalists of Novgorod, successfully holding onto the shores of the Gulf of Finland for their sake. In 1252 he obtained the yarlyk from the Golden Horde, making him a grand duke. Alexander skillfully smoothed over the conflicts between the Russian feudal lords and the Tatar khan and suppressed disturbances among the Russian population protesting the heavy tribute being paid to the Tatars.
All of this changed in 1937. Suddenly Alexander Nevsky was proclaimed a great patriot, a great warrior who had stopped the German Drang nach Osten, and a great statesman, who had tried to achieve centralization and the unification of the Russian principalities under "one strong arm." On Stalin's orders, Sergei Eisenstein made a film showing that the main enemy was the Germans. "We can wait to deal with the Mongols. There is an enemy more dangerous than the Tatar. ... Closer, more vicious. One you can't buy him off by paying tribute—the German."67 In 1937 when this screenplay was written by Eisenstein and Petr Pavlenko, and in 1938 when the film came out, these words sounded almost like an article from Pravda on foreign policy, with the Mongol (Japan) on one side and the German (Hitler) on the other. Nine months after the film's appearance, in August 1939, the foreign policy lineup had changed, the film had lost its topicality, and it was withdrawn from Soviet movie theaters. The German was no longer the enemy; he had been bought off with tribute.
Alexander Nevsky also had a message for the domestic political scene; it showed the harmful influence of the veche (the elected popular assembly in Novgorod) and the benefits of a single ruler toward whom the boundless devotion of the people is directed. Stalin personally revised the screenplay, editing out the scene of Alexander's death. He preferred the movie to end with Alexander's triumphal entry into Pskov. After all, "Such a good prince must not die!"68 In an Aleksei Tolstoy screenplay, another "good prince," Tsar Peter, is made to say: "I was very harsh with you, my children. Not for my own sake, but because Russia was so dear to me."
Aleksandr Dovzhenko, speaking in 1940 at a conference on the historical film, took note of one of its peculiar features:
In the films on Peter the Great, on Alexander Nevsky, on Minin and Po- zharsky, and on Bogdan Khmelnitsky... there is a kind of servile desire to bring history closer to our time and even to put lines in the heroes' mouths that are virtually taken from the current speeches of our leaders. The result is that Alexander Nevsky could be appointed secretary of the regional party committee in Pskov, and something along the same lines with Peter and the others.69
Dovzhenko's remarks, not published until 1964, were amazingly bold. He knew very well that Peter and Alexander Nevsky were speaking with the voice not of some regional secretary but of the general secretary of the Central Committee and that the general secretary had appointed himself the new Peter, the new Alexander Nevsky—and later, the new Ivan the Terrible.
Petr Pavlenko, Stalin's favorite scriptwriter, was working on a novel at the same time as the screenplay for Alexander Nevsky. It was about the coming war. In it he imaginatively portrayed how Stalin would parade through Moscow on the night the war began, and he described the scene in the same terms he had used for Alexander Nevsky's triumphal entry into Pskov.
The crowd roared. It chanted, "Stalin, Stalin, Stalin." It was a battle cry of strength and honor. 'Forward," it seemed to say. At the height of its aroused fury the crowd was calling for its leader, and at two o'clock in the morning he came from the Kremlin to the Bolshoi Theater to be with Moscow in its time of peril. ... His calm figure, dressed in a soldier's greatcoat buttoned to the neck, with a soldier's cap on his head, was modest enough to make you cry. There was nothing superfluous or accidental about his person. His face was stern. He strode along at a rapid pace, turning often to the members of the Politburo and the government who surrounded him to say something to them, holding his hand up all the while to the crowds of people.70
Four years later, when war actually broke out, Stalin did anything but come out to greet the people. He went into hiding at his dacha outside Moscow.
Films and novels about "history," promoting Stalin's current policies and his shifting, utilitarian conceptions of the past, of course had the purpose of inducing "the desired psychological state" in the citizenry, as a historian of Nazi films put it in reference to the analogous process in Germany. Soviet and Nazi movies strikingly resembled each other. The Nazi movie The Old King and the Young (1935) dramatized the conflict between the Prussian king, Frederick Wilhelm I, and his son, the future Frederick II, with the father demanding unconditional obedience as commander-in-chief of the army and head of state. This scenario was repeated almost word for word in the conflict between Peter the Great and Tsarevich Aleksei (in the screen version of Aleksei Tolstoy's Peter the Great). The only difference was that Peter saw he could not make a great ruler out of his son, and so killed him. "All of Hitler's actions became acceptable," writes a historian of the Nazi cinema, "because ever since the time of Frederick Wilhelm II people supposedly had said, 'The country will collapse if it is not guided by a strong will.'"71