Still, the Soviet leaders were able to formulate it in such a way that even the most ordinary people could overcome it. And the hard ones that got into all sorts of dispensers had to penetrate just enough to tremble. Moreover, the reason for the next campaign is not as important as these most refined formulations. Thus, anyone who needs it immediately understands from where and with what force the wind is blowing. Here, it seems, the roles were given to the writer-humorist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova. But the decision, which was mainly devoted to them, was personally led by Comrade Stalin.
It was adopted on August 14, 1946, published a week later in the newspaper Pravda. His name was about the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad”. And preparations began in April, when Stalin instructed the Central Committee Secretary Zhdanov to strengthen the work of agitation and propaganda. The conspiracy version says that the ideological campaign that started was part of the intra-party struggle between, on the one hand, the “Leningradists”, including Zhdanov, and a group led by Malenkov and Beria (and probably has some justification). the other.
After the death of Zhdanov in 1948 (Suslov took his place as the main ideologue for decades), it ended with the complete defeat of the “Leningraders”. More than 2,000 people were suppressed in just one “Leningrad case”, many high-ranking officials were shot, including many who had moved from Leningrad to other cities to work. Later, in the USSR, among the advanced (in the direction of free thought) historians of the CPSU there was a theory that the most “progressive” and “reformist” group was subsequently defeated in Leningrad (after the blockade). was not even inclined to harsher repressions), after which all the spirit of “freedom” was expelled from the local party organization until the end of the existence of the USSR. Only the future chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers, Alexei Kosygin, survived, and in this rank he will indeed act as a very brave reformer by Soviet standards. So the version is interesting, but we will not develop it here. In order not to disturb the “Petersburg”.
The real reason for the struggle against “kneeling before the West” (evaluate the phrase anyway), which began exactly with the aforementioned decision, was, in my view, simpler. The Cold War had already begun. In the last months of the Great Patriotic War, Soviet soldiers visited Eastern Europe and reached Germany. And we saw how people lived there.
During the war, as it turned out, ordinary hard workers and peasants in the USSR lived, to put it mildly, no worse than before the war. The Soviet leadership might suspect that all this might have had almost the same impact on society, after having seen enough of Europe during foreign expeditions, as it did after the war of 1812, when some officers were Decembrists. Constitution, blah blah blah, you know. Freedom, equality, fraternity and other anti-regime bullshit.
It seems to me that the Soviet leadership somewhat exaggerated the danger of imported free thought, but was used to being proactive.
In addition, during the Cold War, the enemy must be clearly defined on the ideological front. The enemy is the West. And even more specifically, America, which for the first time became enemy number one at the time.
Soviet leaders are used to being in the deep echelons and funding any ideological campaign. We started with the unfortunate Zoshchenko, who was deeply Soviet to the bone. Unlike Akhmatova, who coexisted humiliatingly with the Soviet regime. This was followed by other angry decisions – “On the repertoire of drama theaters and measures to improve it”; “About the movie“ Big Life ”etc.
“Zoshchenko has long been writing empty, meaningless and vulgar things, preaching rotten lack of ideas, vulgarity and apolitical, calculated to confuse our youth and poison their consciousness… He portrays the Soviet order and the Soviet people in the form of an ugly caricature. slanderously represents the Soviet people as primitive, uncultured, stupid, narrow-minded with tastes and traditions.
Or here Akhmatova – “a typical representative of empty, unprincipled poetry, alien to our people. His poems, filled with the spirit of pessimism and decadence, expressing the delights of old parlor poetry, frozen in positions of bourgeois-aristocratic aestheticism and decadence – unwilling to keep up with their people, “art for art”, undermining the cause of educating our youth and is intolerable in Soviet literature. How perfect the syllable!
And in general, in the magazine Zvezda, “Works began to appear, unusual for the Soviet people, developing the spirit of service to the modern bourgeois culture of the West.” Numerous examples follow. After all, the leader was not lazy to personally look at all this. The Leningrad magazine was also accused of bowing to “everything foreign”.
Thank God, neither Zoshchenko nor Akhmatova were imprisoned, which Stalin did not particularly like. The first was given a summer residence, and the second even a personal car. Both later gained mostly translations.
The purges went through all the journals in the entire field of culture and art in general.
And already in 1947, a full-fledged nationwide campaign began to combat “the cow-worship of the West” (Zhdanov threw the term back in 1946) and the “rootless cosmopolitans”, which were later specifically designated as Jews. Diplomatic relations with the newly established Israel were severed in 1948.
The second term was also introduced by Zhdanov – at a meeting of figures of Soviet music in January 1948, shortly before his death, it was supposed to be party music, after all, not anyway. “Where national art flourishes, internationalism is born. To forget this fact … means to lose face, to become a rootless cosmopolitan, ”said Zhdanov. Since then, all Western art has been almost completely banned for ten years.
But as you know, there are no eternal prohibitions. And we fought the West in “waves” and we continue. Moreover, the previous struggle was replaced, as a rule, by “catching modernization” imported from the same West. Let’s see how it goes this time.
After all, the Cold War could not continue in domestic politics. It was inevitable. A little later, McCarthyism was inevitable in America for the same reason.
The campaign to combat “cow worship” embraced all public life.
The cause of scientists as traitors to the homeland was deliberately loudly resonated (how predictable, right: very smart people are always under attack). In addition, the Soviet authorities initially granted official permission to conduct joint research with the Americans in the field of cancer control. A scientist named Parin was sent to the United States, who, again by order of the relevant ministry, delivered to his American colleagues the text of the work and ampoules containing an antitumor drug discovered by Soviet scientists. However, upon returning to the USSR, he was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in prison for treason. A few others went with him.
Usually, at the beginning of each campaign, a “guidance article” was given (usually in Pravda) on the theses to guide the party workers and those in charge. Such writings were carefully read with a pencil in hand. And when an article titled “On a patriotic group of theater critics” was published in the main party newspaper, immediately “the last bourgeois aestheticism, which has lost its responsibilities to the public; they are carriers of rootless cosmopolitanism, deeply repugnant to the Soviet man, hostile to him; They hinder the development of Soviet literature, hinder its progress. They have no sense of national Soviet pride.”
In other posts, similar posts-repeats pile dropped. Meetings of “creative teams”, sometimes pathetically called “courts of honor” – for discussion and reprimand if necessary and who has something to say.
It is especially worth noting that many prominent figures of culture and art stubbornly participate in such campaigns and stigmatize their colleagues at the behest of the party. They crushed and exposed ideological enemies – juicy, angry, as if from the heart. And they supported and approved the party’s directives with the most sincere words, spitting with delight. The “heavy weapons” were all sorts of order-bearers, Heroes of Socialist Labor, with whom the youth were called to earn their living. And many did, breaking records of unscrupulousness. More precisely, “party spirit and ideology”, “devotion to ideals”.
Cosmopolitanism and slavery were fought wherever possible. In the natural sciences and the humanities, in philosophy and literature.
Of course, in history: it was necessary to correct the affairs of bygone days, to bring them in line with the new reality: it was desired, necessary – to stop the view of the Crimean War as liberation and just – it was unjust, like all wars. In general, Catherine II. Like the foreign campaigns of the Russian army in 1813-1815, they were ordered to stop comparing them with the campaigns of the Red Army to liberate Europe from fascism.
Scientists were forbidden to publish in foreign scientific journals, most of which were withdrawn from the open funds of libraries, moved only with special permission and to specialized stores, where only scientific work was allowed. But it was possible to plagiarize a lot, without any shame. Copyright sent away. It’s all servitude. Almost no one noticed how, behind the Iron Curtain, venerable masters, including venerable masters, tear film highlights, musical melodies and much more. Including science. Didn’t the current “copy-paste” thesis tradition also originate from here?
We even started the sport. They renamed handball “handball”, splitting French wrestling into classical, “freestyle American”, freestyle wrestling and sambo. They couldn’t go to football, they didn’t have time. Maybe in vain, otherwise we would have achieved dizzying success in this sport.
Maybe just a few orbs skipped crazy campaigns. Among them is physics, despite the abundance of Jews in the ranks of leading scientists in this field. His role in the creation of nuclear weapons in the eyes of the Soviet leadership was enormous.
But as for any Soviet creative intellectual, then his inner core, that is, his spine, was not broken? Probably even earlier, at the time of the Great Terror. Or was it always spineless, created in this form by the Great October Revolution?
Yes, in general, it remained so.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.
Source: Gazeta
