Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (47 page)

The rhetorical bombardment was maintained beyond these set piece
events. On the infrequent occasions when Stalin spoke to the press after 1948, he almost always praised the world peace struggle.
^{77
The growth}
of the global peace movement, and the war mongering of the United States, was
Pravda
’s leading international news story between Septem- ber 1948 and the summer of 1949. They occupied over a third of a page of the paper every day and made up about a quarter of all international

^72
McKenna,
All the Views Fit to Print: Changing Images of the U.S. in Pravda Political
Cartoons, 1917–1991 (New York, 2001), 43–4.

^73
Pravda
, 19.09.47, p. 3; 28.09.47, p. 3.

^74
Pravda
, 18.05.48, p. 1; 21.05.48, p. 3.

^75
See:
Ogon¨ek
07.1948: 29, p. 12; 08.1948: 33, p. 12.

^76
Pravda,
29–31.08.48; 21–30.04.49;
Ogon¨ek
06.1949: 19, p. 7.

^77
Pravda,
29.10.48, p. 1; 02.04.52, p. 1.

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,

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Ato&oro

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"
TAKOrO :

Ynbl&KA HA rnAx
.

EnElll B PE'IAX
,

B
Mb1cn11x-.no)l(b
,
,

3A
cnMHOM-HO)I(
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^.

Fig. 4.1 'European Cooperation'.L Semenov (1952). Western 'collaboration'
masks 'deception in your thoughts and a knife behind your back!'

144
Being Soviet

news. Meanwhile American warmongering became a staple of the Soviet
screen. In Alexandrov’s
The Meeting at the Elbe
(1949), the American soldiers were depicted planning a new war against Russia before the last one was even over. Chiaureli’s
The Fall of Berlin
, presented to Stalin on his birthday in 1949, went even further, suggesting that Britain and Germany had cooperated against the USSR during World War II.
^78
In
the literary field, Ehrenburg’s
Ninth Wave
(1950) described the plotting of Scotland Yard and the Pentagon to undermine a peace congress in Sheffield.
^{79
Having abandoned the rhetoric of Great Power collabora-}
tion, the USSR had repostured itself as the stronghold of global security in a world threatened by capitalist expansionism.

The successful Soviet atom bomb test and the Chinese Revolution in
late 1949 shifted the geopolitical balance of power significantly in favour of the USSR.
^{80
The new-found strength of the Soviet Union}
resulted in a modification of the rhetoric of the ‘Struggle for Peace’. From then on the military might of the USSR, joined the vigour of the global peace movement as the guarantee of global stability. References to the USSR as the ‘stronghold’ (jg
Jl
jn
) of peace became more and more frequent.
^{81
Only Soviet strength was capable of holding back the}
warmongering aspirations of the capitalists and bringing security to all. This language of strength for peace enabled the USSR to reverse its anti- nuclear stance and declare the Soviet acquisition of the bomb as a ‘victory in the cause of peace’.
⁸²

The Soviet Union could not rest on its nuclear laurels, however.
The lecture organization,
Znanie
, had to rebuke a Moscow-based lectur- er in March 1950 for suggesting that now the USSR had a nuclear capacity it was already mighty enough.
^{83
Soviet citizens were repeatedly}
encouraged to work hard and raise productivity as a means of securing the future strength of the USSR. Their ‘ . . . primary duty in the Struggle for Peace consists of the further strengthening of the might of the Soviet state as a stronghold of peace in all the world.’
^{84
By the spring of 1950,}
heroic feats of production were routinely described as ‘on behalf of peace’

^{78
R. Taylor, ed.,}
Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany
(London,1998), 100–12.

^79
Kiparsky,
English and American Characters in Russian Fiction
(Berlin, 1964), 175–6.

^80
Brooks,
Thank You
, 217.

^{81
e.g., Pravda, 01.07.50, p. 1.}

^82
Pravda
, 16.01.50, p. 4;
Ogon¨ek
, 11.1949: 45, p. 31.

^{83
GARF f. R9547, op. 1, d. 313, l. 165. (My thanks to Mike Froggatt for pointing}
out this document to me).

^84
Pravda
, 30.06.50, p. 1.

Panics, Peace, and Pacifism 1945–53
145

even when there was no reference to peace in the rest of the article. The
idea that might would make the USSR inviolable from external attack had been a part of the rationale for the crash industrialization of the 1920s and 1930s. The Peace Campaigns, however, projected the concept of preventative strength into the global community for the first time. Soviet strength became the guarantee of global security. The Peace Campaigns were not a pacifist, anti-war campaign. They were a muscular and robust call to activism. The labour and boldness of Soviet citizens would reinforce the might of the Soviet state, and therefore the security of the international community.

From Stockholm to Stalin’s death: a moral state

The outbreak of the Korean War precipitated a further shift in both the
strategy and the language of the Soviet ‘Struggle for Peace in all the World’. In March 1950 the World Peace Congress launched its Stock- holm Declaration, a petition calling for a universal ban on atomic weapons. However, the population of the USSR were not given the opportunity to sign the document for three months until 19 June, six days before the outbreak of the Korean War.
^{85
The signature-gathering}
campaign, timed to coincide with the conflict in Asia, signalled a rise in the level of individual involvement in the ‘Struggle for Peace’. The Stockholm Petition was the first of three large-scale signature-gathering campaigns conducted in the last years of Stalin’s life. The Warsaw Appeal of 1951 called for a peace pact between the Great Powers and the Vienna Appeal of 1952 called for disarmament. Approximately 85,000 local peace commissions were established, to carry out these campaigns and collect signatures throughout the USSR.
^{86
Hundreds of}
thousands of meetings took place in collective farms, factories, homes, and city squares. The ‘Struggle for Peace’ was one of the great mobili- zation campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Soviet citizens were no longer simply observers, or even producers on behalf of peace: they were mobilized participants in the global campaign to ‘bind the hands’ of the agitators for war.

^{85
The period was also the high point of anti-Soviet mobilization in the USA, including}
the famous ‘Day Under Communism’ in Mosinee, Wisconsin, when the town practised being taken over by communists. See: R. M. Fried,
The Russians Are Coming! The Russians
Are Coming! Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (Oxford, 1998), 67–73.

^{86
GARF f. R9539, op. 1, d. 58, l. 6.}

146
Being Soviet

In between the periodic signature campaigns, when press coverage
reached blanket levels, the ‘Struggle for Peace’ remained a dominant theme within Soviet mass media. In 1951 the Arkhangel’sk
oblast’
lecture bureau read more lectures about peace than any other topic.
⁸⁷

By 1951, theatres were rejecting all new scripts on the topic of peace:
their repertoires were overloaded with the topic.
^{88
City libraries staged}
exhibitions connected to the campaign, and even the Church was drawn in: in May 1952 Patriarch Alexei gathered left-leaning religious leaders from around the world to pray for peace.
⁸⁹

The language, as well as the strategy, associated with the Peace
Campaigns shifted in mid 1950. Soviet might had not prevented war in Korea, and when the North Koreans confronted defeat later that year it was the Chinese, not the Soviets, who stepped in to help. The official press responded by emphasizing the moral, as well as physical, authority of the USSR. The evils of the American ‘intervention’ in Korea was the focus of outrage. Banner headlines screamed ‘Hands off Korea!’ and denounced the US government as ‘Enemies of Humanity’.
^{90
A particu-}
larly brutal cartoon in September 1950 depicted General MacCarthur holding the severed arm of a dead Korean child saying ‘This brings joy to my old eyes’.
^{91
This righteous indignation reached fever pitch in}
early 1952, with the publication of allegations that the USA had dropped plague fleas and other biological agents behind enemy lines.
^{92
The same era also saw the emergence of the American spy}
within popular fiction who, unlike the British spies who had dominated the pre-war genre, was a mean spirited and malevolent figure. Spy literature reached its peak of popularity in the 1960s in the work of Semenov, but the faceless, brainless, and violent American provocateur was already established in Stalin’s time.
^{93
The Korean War played a}
vital and enduring role in shaping both Soviet and American identities in the Cold War. The Soviets chose the moralized rhetoric of peace as their discursive weapon; the USA placed their reliance on liberty. As a

^{87
GAAO f. 4818, op. 1, d. 128, ll. 23–9.}

^{88
RGASPI f. 17, op. 132, d. 415, ll. 34–9, 77–9.}

^{89
Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii, henceforth RGANI f. 5, op.}
16, d. 640, l. 156; GARF f. 6991, op. 2, d. 90, ll. 4–62.

^90
Pravda
25.07.50, p. 4; 28.07.50, p. 3.

^91
Pravda,
21.09.50, p. 4.

^92
Ogon¨ek
, 04.1952: 15, pp. 10–11.

^93
Kiparsky,
English and American
, 68–9; Stites,
Russian Popular Culture: Entertain-
ment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, 1992), 120.