Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (55 page)

^43
Pravda
, 04.08.48, p. 2; 05.08.48, pp. 2–3.
^44
Pravda
, 12.08.48, p. 1.

^45
Ogon¨ek
, 1949: 11 (03.49), pp. 14–16.
^46
Pravda
, 03.06.48, p. 1.

176
Being Soviet

‘ready to give all the victories of science to the people’.
^{47
As Ilf and}
Petrov had commented a decade before, ‘technology in the hands of capitalism is a knife in the hands of a madman’.
^{48
Even where capitalist}
science currently outstripped socialist production, it was spiritually inferior, and the successes of Soviet science were repeatedly celebrated, particularly in areas of American excellence such as automobile con- struction.
^{49
With such outstanding domestic products, there was no}
need to rely on technology or research from outside.

At the same time as the acceleration of the campaign against bour-
geois science, the Soviet state was deepening the campaign against the cultural media of their wartime Allies. The number of copies of
Amerika
and
Britanskii Soiuznik
on public sale was cut back from 14,000 to 7,000 in August 1946 and then to 4,000 in December.
^{50
By late 1947}

the journals had been squeezed to the point that they were hardly
available beyond the confines of the Metropol and National Hotels.
^{51
In February 1948}
Ogon¨ek
carried an article entitled ‘What to dance?’ that stressed the importance of ‘national dances’ and criticized ‘swing’ and ‘boogie woogie’ as ‘absolutely unacceptable’. They could ‘hardly be counted as dancing at all’.
^{52
Meanwhile in May 1947 the Central}
Committee issued a decision criticizing the ongoing sale of capitalist ‘boulevard’ literature in Leningrad.
⁵³

In early 1948 the assault on bourgeois culture was brought home to
the Soviet artistic elites. In February the Central Committee issued a formal statement against the Soviet composer Muradeli’s opera,
The Great Friendship
. The opera was ‘inexpressibly bad’ and composed in the ‘spirit of the contemporary modernist bourgeois music of England and America’. The same ‘formalist’ perversions were notable in the works of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Shebalin, Popov, and Miaskovsky.
^{54
As with the scientific campaigns, formalists were}

^47
Pravda
, 04.03.50, p. 6;
Krokodil
, 30.09.1951, p. 16. See: Borisov et al.,
Rossiia i
Zapad: formirovanie vneshnepoliticheskix stereotipov v soznanii rosiiskogo obshchestva pervoi polovini XX Veka (Moscow, 1998), 142.

^{48
Ilf and Petrov,}
Little Golden America
.

^49
Ogon¨ek
, 1947: 26 (06.47), pp. 4–5; 1951: 17 (03.51), p. 17.

^{50
RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 436, ll. 6–17, 40–2. See also: Pechatnov, ‘The Rise and}
Fall of
Britanskii Soiuznik:
A Case Study in Soviet Response to British Propaganda in the Mid-1940s’,
The Historical Journal
, 41.1 (1989), 293–301.

^{51
RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 539, ll. 92–3.}

^52
Ogon¨ek
, 02.1948: 6.

^{53
RGASPI f. 17, op. 132, d. 317, l. 4.}

^54
Pravda
, 11.01.48, p. 1. See: Werth,
Russia: The Post-War Years,
350–79.

Subversive Styles? 1945–53
177

subsequently discovered in other branches of the Soviet creative
media.
^{55
Music, like science, reflected the system within which it}
originated. Bourgeois culture was a ‘weapon in the hands of the agita- tors for war . . . ’ to spread racism, violence, despair, and individual- ism.
^{56
It had no place inside the USSR and its achievements paled in}
comparison to the ‘monumental productions’ of Soviet art.
⁵⁷

The consequences of this turn against Western art was most visible
within the jazz community. Glenn Miller style swing was played through- out the USSR in the early post-war months. However, in November 1946 Eddie Rosner, the jazziest of the leading figures and a Polish citizen until 1939, was sent to the Gulag. By 1947
Evening Moscow
was com- plaining that the city had become a ‘hotbed of all kinds of tangos, blues, one-steps and fox-trots’.
^{58
The decision against Muradeli’s opera in 1948}
heralded what even the official Soviet history terms the ‘complex period’ for Soviet jazz music. In 1949 the saxophone was banned, and those groups that continued performing, such as Utesov’s, purged the jazzy tunes from their repertoires.
^{59
As the primary embodiment of capitalist}
music, jazz was the primary victim of the post-war shift towards the celebration of only domestically produced art and science.

The attack on capitalist influence was brought home to the wider
population in 1948–9 via a vocal attack on ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ or ‘kowtowing before foreign imports’. The campaign reached fever pitch in January 1949 with
Pravda
’s report ‘About the Anti-Patriotic Group of Theatre Critics’. Iu. Iuzovskii, A. Gurvich, A. Borshagovskii, and others had betrayed their ‘responsibility before the people’ and becoming ‘followers of bourgeois aesthetics’. Their worship of all things capitalist was demonstrated by their cynical commentary on the Soviet theatre which had done nothing to inspire ‘a healthy feeling of love towards the Motherland’.
^{60
Over the coming months ‘obsequious}
worshippers’ of bourgeois culture were exposed in all branches of the arts.
^{61
Cosmopolitanism was the antithesis of Soviet patriotism. It failed}

^{55
e.g., Writers Union:}
Pravda
, 20.04.48, p. 3.
^56
Pravda
, 05.11.48, p. 1.

^57
Pravda
, 21.07.48, p. 3.

^58
Starr,
Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union 1917–1980
(Oxford, 1983), 208–14; Parks,
Culture, Conflict and Coexistence: American-Soviet Cultural Rela-
tions, 1917–1958 (London, 1983), 119.

^59
Uvarova,
Russkaia sovetskaia Estrada 1930–1945: Ocherki istorii
(Moscow, 1977),

331–6.

^60
Pravda
, 29.01.49, p. 2.

^61
Krokodil
, 28.02.1949, p. 11; RGASPI f. 17, op. 132, d. 205, ll. 18–28;
Pravda
,

03.03.49, p. 3.

178
Being Soviet

to recognize that distinct nations had distinct characteristics and
threatened to make the Soviet people passive in the face of capitalist aggression.
^{62
All Soviet citizens from the greatest artist to the humblest}
worker needed to be on their guard against the bacillus of servility to the West.

Between January and April 1949 there were forty–two articles about
the ‘anti-cosmopolitan campaign’ in
Literaturnaya Gazeta
and nine major pieces in
Pravda
.
^{63
The campaign’s volume decreased from}
April onwards only to return in an even more frenzied state in 1953 with the arrest of the Kremlin Doctors, who were accused of attempting

to kill the Soviet leadership. The early version of the campaign had
thinly veiled, though unacknowledged, anti-Semitic overtones; a signifi- cant number of the critics and artists singled out were Jewish. However, any pretence about the campaign’s anti-Semitic character evaporated in 1953. The Kremlin doctors’ Jewish origins was made clear for all to see. As Stalin allegedly explained to the Party Presidium, ‘Jewish nationalists believe that their nation has been saved by the United States . . . They believe they are obliged to the Americans. Among the doctors there are many Jewish nationalists.’
⁶⁴

The logic that drove this series of attacks—the
Zhdanovshchina
against frivolous culture, the K.R. and Michurinist campaigns against worshipping foreign science and the anti-cosmopolitan campaign against kowtowing before all things Western—has been a topic of fierce debate. These shifts in policy, in particular the
Zhdanovschina
, were initially interpreted as products of the competition at the highest level of Kremlin politics.
^{65
However, that view is now largely discredited by}
recent research showing that the campaigns fell hardest against key figures within Zhdadnov’s support base.
⁶⁶

A second, and more fruitful, interpretation regards the cultural
and scientific campaigns as an attempt to ‘put the genie back in the bottle’ and regain control over Soviet society after the war.
^67
The

^62
Ogon¨ek
, 04.1949: 17, pp. 22–3.
^63
Fateev,
Obraz vraga
, 111.

^{64
Gorlizki and Khlevniuk,}
Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953

(Oxford, 2004), 155–6.

^65
Dunmore,
Soviet Politics, 1945–53
(London, 1984), 15–16; Hahn,
Postwar Soviet
Politics (London, 1982), 67–82.

^{66
Gorlizki and Khlevniuk,}
Cold Peace
, 32–8.

^{67
R. Stites, ‘Soviet Russian Wartime Culture: Freedom and Control, Spontaneity}
and Consciousness’, in Thurston and Bonwetsch,
The People’s War
, 181–2. See also Werth,
Russia: Post-War Years,
197.

Subversive Styles? 1945–53
179

intelligentsia’s pro-Westernism is the most commonly cited ‘genie’ to
be rebottled.
^{68
However, other scholars have suggested that, at least}
from 1948–9 onwards, the campaigns were targeted at a much wider audience.
^{69
The sheer volume of effort invested into the Michurinist}
campaign or the attack on cosmopolitanism indicates that they were intended to shape the thinking and actions of the Soviet community at large.