The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia (Studies in Russian and East European History)

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

Maureen Perrie

Studies in Russian and East European History and Society General Editors: R. W. Davies, Emeritus Professor of Soviet Economic Studies, and E. A. Rees, Reader in Soviet History, both at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham Recent titles include: Lynne Attwood CREATING THE NEW SOVIET WOMAN John Barber and Mark Harrison (editors) THE SOVIET DEFENCE-INDUSTRY COMPLEX FROM STALIN TO KHRUSHCHEV Vincent Barnett KONDRATIEV AND THE DYNAMICS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT R. W. Davies SOVIET HISTORY IN THE YELTSIN ERA Linda Edmondson (editor) GENDER IN RUSSIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE James Hughes STALINISM IN A RUSSIAN PROVINCE ‹

Melanie Ilic WOMEN WORKERS IN THE SOVIET INTERWAR ECONOMY WOMEN IN THE STALIN ERA Peter Kirkow RUSSIA’S PROVINCES Stephen Lovell, Alena Ledeneva and Andrei Rogachevskii (editors) BRIBERY AND BLAT IN RUSSIA Maureen Perrie THE CULT OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE IN STALIN’S RUSSIA E. A. Rees (editor) DECISION-MAKING IN THE STALINIST COMMAND ECONOMY Lennart Samuelson PLANS FOR STALIN’S WAR MACHINE Tukhachevskii and Military-Economic Planning, 1925–1941 Vera Tolz RUSSIAN ACADEMICIANS AND THE REVOLUTION

Studies in Russian and East European History and Society Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71239–0 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia Maureen Perrie Professor of Russian History Centre for Russian and East European Studies University of Birmingham

© Maureen Perrie 2001 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2001 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–65684–9 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Perrie, Maureen, 1946– The cult of Ivan the terrible in Stalin’s Russia / Maureen Perrie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–65684–9 1. Ivan IV, Czar of Russia, 1530–1584—Cult. 2. Historiography– –Soviet Union. 3. Russia—History—Historiography. 4. Propaganda, Soviet. I. Title. DK269.5 .P47 2000 947’.043’092—dc21 2001032718 10 10

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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In memory of my father-in-law WILLIAM PERRIE 1918–1997

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations, Acronyms and Russian Terms Note on Transliteration and Personal Names

ix xi xiii xv

Introduction

1

Prologue – Pre-Stalinization: Images of Ivan IV before 1934

5

Part I

The Stalinization of Russian History

1 History in the Service of Patriotism, 1934–45 From Hitler’s accession to the Nazi–Soviet Pact, 1934–9 The Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939–41 The ‘Great Fatherland War’, 1941–5 The ‘Tatar yoke’ and the threat from the East

25 25 37 39 41

2 Three Case Studies in Historical Analogy Peter the Great Alexander Nevskii Minin and Pozharskii

45 45 55 60

Part II

The Stalinization of Ivan the Terrible

3 The First Steps, 1934–39 Mikhail Bulgakov’s Ivan Vasil’evich The new history textbooks B. G. Verkhoven’ 4 Wartime and Postwar Historiography, 1940–53 The official rehabilitation campaign The Livonian War The return of Vipper The Pokrovskyist revival The Zhdanovshchina

73 73 78 81 85 85 89 92 99 102

viii

Contents

Part III

Three Artistic Representations of Ivan

5 V. I. Kostylev’s Novel Moscow on Campaign Volumes Two and Three

109 110 122

6 A. N. Tolstoi’s Play The first version of the play (1941–2) The two-part play of 1943–4 Ivan Groznyi on the stage, 1944–6

127 127 137 144

7 S. M. Eisenstein’s Film The initial stages, 1941–2 The ‘literary screenplay’, 1943–4 The film, 1944–7

149 149 153 163

Epilogue – De-Stalinization: Images of Ivan IV since 1953

179

Conclusion

192

Chronology of Events in Pre-Revolutionary Russian History

197

Notes

198

Bibliography

233

Index

245

Illustrations The young tsar Ivan the Terrible as epic warrior-hero Tsar and people in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible: Part One

ix

111 138 167

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Acknowledgements In the writing of this book I have accumulated a number of debts. Some of the material it contains was first presented to various seminars and conferences: the ‘SIPS’ seminar at CREES, University of Birmingham, and the CREES Annual Conference at Cumberland Lodge; a conference on Russian Nationalism at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University of London; seminars at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and at the London School of Economics; and the Annual Conference of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution at the University of Durham. I am most grateful to participants in all of these meetings for their helpful suggestions and constructive criticisms. I would particularly like to thank Bob Davies and Arfon Rees for their encouragement and interest, and for reading and commenting on the entire draft typescript. I owe a special debt of gratitude to David Brandenberger, who not only provided a detailed and informed critique of the manuscript, but was also very generous in sharing material, references and ideas. I have greatly benefitted, too, from discussions with Russian colleagues: M. E. Bychkova, A. L. Khoroshkevich and A. P. Pavlov were particularly helpful and hospitable. Much of the research for the book was conducted during two research trips to Moscow. The first visit, in 1996, was funded by the School of Social Sciences, University of Birmingham; the second, in 1999, was undertaken under the auspices of the British Academy’s East Europe Exchanges scheme. I am grateful to Lyudmila Selivanova for her valuable services in 1996; and to Lyudmila Kolodnikova and her staff at the Institute of Russian History for their help in 1999. I should also like to thank all the librarians and archivists who provided me with assistance in Moscow; and, closer to home, the staffs of the Alexander Baykov and Main University Libraries in Birmingham, and the British Library and SSEES Library in London. Last but not least I should like to express my gratitude to family, friends and colleagues for their constant support and encouragement. In particular, I have to thank my husband, Bill, for his tolerance not only of my regular absences and occasional unsociability, but also of the frequent bouts of computer-induced panic which accompanied the writing of this book. xi

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List of Abbreviations, Acronyms and Russian Terms Agitprop

Arkhiv RAN boyar (Russian boyarin, pl. boyare)

byliny dvoryanstvo

Ezhovshchina glasnost’ Glavrepertkom Groznyi

GUPKhF Kinokomitet kulak MID MKhAT Mosfil’m muzhik narodnost’ OGPU

the propaganda and agitation department of the Central Committee (Upravlenie propagandy i agitatsii) Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences the highest rank of member of the tsar’s council (‘boyar duma’); a member of the aristocratic clans whose members were eligible for boyar status epic folksongs nobility (literally, ‘courtiers’); usually those who held land in return for military service (cf. pomeshchiki) the ‘Great Terror’ of 1937–8 (from its architect, N. I. Ezhov). ‘openness’: the reform period in the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev, c. 1987–91 Main Repertory Committee (the theatrical censorship) ‘terrible’, more accurately ‘dread’, ‘aweinspiring’ – conventional epithet for Tsar Ivan IV Main Administration for the Production of Feature Films Cinematography Committee rich peasant US National Archives and Records Administration, Military Intelligence Division Moscow Arts Theatre Moscow Film Studios peasant ‘folksiness’, sometimes nationalism, populism (from narod, ‘the people’, nation) the security police, 1923–34 (subsequently NKVD) xiii

xiv

List of Abbreviations

oprichnina

pomeshchik (pl. pomeshchiki) Proletcult RAPP RDS RGALI RGASPI

RSFSR smenovekhovtsy tsar (Russian tsar’)

votchinnik (pl. votchinniki) zemshchina Zhdanovshchina

territory under the direct control of the tsar, 1565–72 (cf. zemshchina); by extension, the tsar’s bodyguard (oprichniki) and the reign of terror which they implemented noble who held his landed estate ( pomest’e) in return for military service (cf. votchinnik) ‘Proletarian Culture’ – an early Soviet cultural organization Russian Association of Proletarian Writers US National Archives and Record Service, Records of the Department of State Russian State Archive of Literature and Art Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (the Central Party Archive, formerly RTsKhIDNI) Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic members of the ‘Change of Landmarks’ (Smena vekh) émigré group. from 1547, the official title of the Russian ruler (previously grand prince); cf. tsaritsa (tsar’s wife); tsarevich (tsar’s son); tsarevna (tsar’s daughter) noble who owned a hereditary landed estate (votchina); cf. pomeshchik territory controlled by the boyars in the period of the oprichnina (q.v.). campaign to establish ideological orthodoxy, c. 1946–8 (from its instigator, A. A. Zhdanov)

Note on Transliteration and Personal Names Transliteration from Russian follows the simplified form of the British Standard (BS 2979: 1958). Some Russian first names have been anglicized (e.g. Alexander, Peter), and some surnames are given in their accepted western form (e.g. Eisenstein rather than Eizenshtein). Personal names and placenames from Ukrainian and Belorussian areas appear in transliterated Russified forms.

xv

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Introduction

This book is the product of an interaction between my long-standing interest in the historical figure of Ivan the Terrible, on the one hand, and the more recent appearance of Russian and western studies of Stalin which draw an analogy between the Soviet leader and the first tsar, on the other. Several years ago I published a book on the image of Ivan the Terrible in Russian folklore.1 This had started life as a study of popular monarchism in the sixteenth century;2 problems of sources and methodology, however, meant that it included broader discussion of Russian and Soviet scholarship relating to the complex and controversial figure of Ivan Groznyi, and I became particularly fascinated by the way in which he had been treated in the Stalin period. The book’s conclusion briefly explored the intriguing parallels between Groznyi and Stalin; and speculated about the ways in which they might have influenced the attitudes of Soviet scholars towards the tsar. The manuscript of that book was finalized in 1985, and it was published in 1987. In the next couple of years, I was amazed to discover that the whole issue of parallels between Stalin and Ivan Groznyi was being given wide prominence in the Soviet Union, in the ‘second wave’ of de-Stalinization which characterized the early stages of glasnost’ under Mikhail Gorbachev.3 In 1988, for example, Moscow News published a detailed transcript of Stalin’s conversation with the director Sergei Eisenstein, in February 1947, concerning the banning of the second part of his Ivan the Terrible film. (The content of the meeting had previously been known only in a shorter version published in the memoirs of the actor Nikolai Cherkasov in 1953.) It was in this conversation that Stalin made his famous remark that Tsar Ivan was ‘a great and wise ruler’; he noted that Ivan had made the mistake of failing to ‘knife through’ five feudal families whose liquidation would have prevented the Time of Troubles of the early seventeenth century, and also complained that the tsar had wasted too much time repenting of his sins and praying for the souls of his victims. These comments were given much prominence in the reformist Soviet press. By the 1980s Soviet historical orthodoxy provided a 1

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

generally negative evaluation of Ivan; the first wave of de-Stalinization, under Nikita Khrushchev, had reversed the positive assessments of Groznyi which predominated in late Stalinist historiography. In the glasnost’ era it was taken as self-evident proof of Stalin’s monstrous character that he could have admired such a tyrant as Ivan Groznyi, and could even have regarded him as insufficiently resolute. An important event in the de-Stalinization campaign of the late 1980s was the publication of Anatolii Rybakov’s novel, Children of the Arbat. Rybakov presented a fictionalized Stalin of the mid-1930s who was a great admirer of both Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and who consciously modelled himself on these two tsarist predecessors. The novelist put into the mouth of his fictional Stalin of 1934 the remarks about Ivan which the real Stalin had made to Eisenstein in 1947, and suggested that the Great Purges of 1936–8 were intentionally based by Stalin on Ivan’s reign of terror in the period of the oprichnina (1565–72). In an article published in 1992, in a Festschrift for Moshe Lewin, I used Rybakov’s novel as a peg on which to hang a review of Stalinist historiography of the reigns of both Ivan and Peter, and a comparison of the popular images of all three rulers. In relation to Ivan, I expressed considerable scepticism as to whether he had served as a role model for the Great Terror, and I pointed out that it was highly questionable to attribute to Stalin in 1934 views which he was recorded as expressing only in 1947.4 By the time that my article appeared in print, the distinguished American political scientist Robert Tucker had published the longawaited second part of his biography of Stalin. Much to my surprise, Tucker too put forward the view that Stalin had consciously modelled his policies on those of Ivan and Peter: the industrialization of the First Five-Year Plan, according to Tucker, was based on Peter’s attempts to force Russia to break through the constraints of her economic backwardness, and the purges were modelled on Ivan’s oprichnina terror.5 In the same year, an article by the German scholar Bernd Uhlenbruch intriguingly situated the emergence of the Ivan Groznyi ‘cult’ in the context of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states in 1940.6 In view of the unexpected topicality of the issue, I returned to it for a conference paper which examined some literary and artistic representations of Ivan as well as historical studies of the tsar.7 Subsequently I decided to take advantage of the opening of Russian archives for the Soviet period in order to investigate the topic

Introduction Prologue

3

further; that research has resulted in the present study, which includes archival materials collected during research visits to Moscow in 1996 and 1999. This book offers rather more than simply a review of Russian twentieth-century historiography of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Although much is still unclear, archival sources provide insights into the mechanisms of official policy towards historical and cultural production in the Stalin period. The main theme which emerged from the research, however, was that of historical analogy. The image of Ivan the Terrible – largely a negative one in the early 1930s – was reconstructed thereafter in order to provide a legitimation for Stalin and his policies through the creation of a positive historical parallel and precedent. The planned rehabilitation of Ivan, however, was never entirely successful even in Stalin’s lifetime; after his death, the historical reputations of both rulers went into a parallel decline. The approach which I have adopted involves a combination of overviews and case studies. The ‘Prologue’ establishes the background and context, by examining depictions of Ivan Groznyi before 1934; it devotes particular attention to the 1922 biography of the tsar by R. Yu. Vipper. The main body of the text is divided into three parts. The first of these considers Stalinist representations of tsarist history in general, arguing that the ‘great retreat’ in historiography of 1934 onwards was oriented primarily towards making history serve the cause of patriotism. An overview of the period 1934–45 (Chapter 1) is followed by a chapter which contains three case studies of historical figures whose images were promoted for patriotic purposes in the late 1930s: Peter the Great, Alexander Nevskii, and Minin and Pozharskii. Parts II and III are devoted exclusively to Ivan Groznyi. Chapter 3 provides an overview of his representation from 1934 to 1939, focusing on Mikhail Bulgakov’s banned play of 1936 and the history textbooks of the late 1930s. The fourth chapter, which covers the period 1940–53, deals with the historical parallels which were drawn between Ivan’s Livonian War and the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states, and discusses the second and third editions of Vipper’s biography of the tsar. Chapters 5 to 7 provide case studies of three artistic treatments of Ivan: V. I. Kostylev’s novel, A. N. Tolstoi’s play; and S. M. Eisenstein’s film. (These case studies are linked to those in Chapter 2, since Kostylev, Tolstoi and Eisenstein had previously worked on the images of Minin, Peter the Great and Alexander Nevskii respectively.) An ‘Epilogue’ examines the

4

The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

development of Ivan’s image after the death of Stalin, concentrating on the two main periods of ‘de-Stalinization’ under Khrushchev and Gorbachev. The title of the book is drawn from the first of these periods, when the phrase, ‘the cult of Ivan IV’, was used, by analogy with ‘the cult of the individual’ – the euphemism employed to criticize Stalin – to denounce the ‘idealization’ of the tsar and to imply the existence of a negative parallel between the two rulers.

Prologue

5

Prologue Pre-Stalinization: Images of Ivan IV before 1934

Ivan IV (1530–84) is probably the most controversial figure in Russian history. The enduring popular image of the tsar, both in Russia and in the West, is that of a cruel tyrant, but his conventional epithet Groznyi, traditionally translated as ‘Terrible’, has connotations in Russian which are better reflected in English by terms such as ‘awe-inspiring’, ‘formidable’ or ‘dread’. Present-day historians’ images of Ivan range from the statesmanlike ruler, pursuing the maximization of his power by ruthless but rational means; through the crazed despot with no coherent political aims or strategy, randomly eradicating real and imaginary enemies; to the mere figurehead for a court oligarchy which operated behind a facade of autocracy. To some extent these conflicting interpretations reflect the incomplete and problematic character of sixteenth-century sources, but they also derive from divergent understandings of the nature of the Muscovite political system. The facts of Ivan’s biography may be briefly summarized. He succeeded to the throne at the age of three, and his childhood witnessed a power struggle among competing boyar clans at court. In 1547 he was crowned with the new imperial title of ‘tsar’; in the same year he married Anastasiya Romanova, the daughter of one of his boyars. The decade of the 1550s saw the Russian conquest of the Tatar khanates of Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ on the Volga, and a series of administrative and judicial reforms which were implemented under the guidance of the tsar’s closest advisers, Aleksei Adashev and the priest Sil’vestr. Ivan embarked upon the Livonian War (1558–83) in the hope of acquiring a foothold on the Baltic, but after a number of initial gains his armies became bogged down in protracted and costly campaigning. The defection to Lithuania in 1564 of Prince Andrei Kurbskii, a military commander who was one of Ivan’s closest associates, constituted a major personal and political blow to the tsar. In 1565 – in the most perplexing move of his reign – Ivan created the oprichnina, a part of the country which was directly 5

6

The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

under his own control, leaving the rest (the zemshchina) to his council of boyars (aristocratic counsellors). The territory of the oprichnina was administered by the oprichniki, the tsar’s personal bodyguard, who launched a campaign of terror against the inhabitants of the zemshchina. The term ‘oprichnina’ then came to refer to the oprichniki and their methods as well as to the territory they controlled. The worst atrocity committed by the oprichniki was the massacre of the people of Novgorod in 1570, an act which was apparently motivated by the tsar’s suspicion that the city had treasonous links with Poland. The oprichnina was abolished in 1572, after its failure to prevent the burning of Moscow by the Crimean khan in the previous year. Ivan’s last years witnessed Russia’s defeat in the Livonian War, and the death of his eldest son, Ivan Ivanovich, as the result by a blow struck in anger by the tsar.

Nineteenth-century representations of Ivan Modern Russian historiography dates from N. M. Karamzin’s History of the Russian State; and it was Karamzin (1766–1826) who provided the earliest and most influential nineteenth-century account of Ivan’s reign. For Karamzin, Ivan was the ‘tormentor’ of his people. But Karamzin qualified this characterization in two ways. First of all, he noted that the negative aspects of Ivan’s rule manifested themselves particularly after 1560, when his first wife, Anastasiya, died; and secondly, even after the dreadful change in his behaviour in 1560, Ivan retained some of the features of his earlier greatness. Karamzin’s concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ periods in Ivan’s reign, and of a mixture of good and evil in his character which persisted until the end of his life, influenced Russian historical and artistic depictions of the tsar throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, although varying emphases were placed on the balance of positive and negative characteristics.1 Among later historians, the negative aspects of Ivan’s reign were stressed most strongly by N. I. Kostomarov (1817–85) and V. O. Klyuchevskii (1841–1911). While Kostomarov explained Ivan’s terror primarily in terms of the tsar’s character, morally damaged from childhood,2 Klyuchevskii interpreted it within a broader historical framework. He situated Ivan’s reign in the ‘third period’ of Russian history (1462–1613), which saw the development of Muscovite Rus’ as a national Great-Russian state.3 Klyuchevskii regarded the oprichnina primarily as a police force whose political purpose was to guarantee

Prologue

7

the tsar’s personal safety by eradicating boyar sedition. It arose from a growing conflict between the ruler and his boyars, or rather from a fundamental contradiction in the political system of the Muscovite state, namely that, ‘It was an absolute monarchy, but with an aristocratic government’. There were two possible ways out of this contradiction, according to Klyuchevskii: the tsar could have replaced the boyars with the service nobility (dvoryanstvo, pomeshchiki) as a more flexible ruling class; or he could have divided the old elite by selecting the most reliable boyars as his advisers. But the first was only a long-term option, and the second he ‘could not or would not’ implement.4 Instead, Ivan turned on individuals, while leaving the boyars as a class in charge of the zemshchina. The oprichnina was thus a pointless exercise because, ‘prompted by a conflict whose cause was a system and not individuals, it was directed against individuals, and not against the system’. It was largely ‘the fruit of the tsar’s excessively fearful imagination’, since the boyars did not and could not pose a real political threat. And in any case, the victims of the oprichnina terror were ‘not only boyars, and not even primarily boyars’. Ivan’s irrational actions stemmed not from political calculation, but from his own troubled personality.5 The tsar was not a competent statesman, and although he set out to reform the state, he ended up by bringing it to the verge of destruction. He could be compared to Samson, who brought down the temple on his own head while trying to destroy his enemies.6 Karamzin had held Ivan up as a contrast to the more enlightened rulers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ‘Russia . . . endured the destroyer for 24 years’, he wrote, ‘in order to have in better times Peter the Great and Catherine II’ – and, by implication, Karamzin’s own patron, Alexander I (although ‘History does not like to name the living’, he added piously).7 For the devout monarchist Karamzin, the study of despots such as Ivan had a valuable educative function. ‘The life of a tyrant is a misfortune for humanity, but his History is always useful, both for Sovereigns and for peoples,’ he wrote. And he rejoiced that he lived in an enlightened autocratic system in which a historian could hold such a ruler up to shame, ‘so that there will be no more like him in the future!’8 For many nineteenth-century writers, however, Ivan did not so much serve as a dreadful warning to subsequent rulers; rather, he provided a parallel to contemporary autocrats. This was particularly

8

The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

true of A. K. Tolstoi (1817–75), the author of a number of literary works set in the sixteenth century. In the postscript to his novel, Prince Serebryanyi, begun in the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55) and first published in 1862, Tolstoi wrote explicitly about the elements of continuity between Ivan’s reign and the present day (‘May God help us . . . to wipe from our hearts the last traces of that frightful time, whose influence, like a hereditary disease, has subsequently long affected our lives from generation to generation!’).9 Tolstoi’s heroes were those who, although they did not openly rebel, at least preserved their moral integrity in an era of tyranny, and suffered for their principled stance. In a passage which read increasingly like an allegory of Nicholaevan Russia, Tolstoi wrote: Let us . . . speak well of those who . . . stood up firmly for goodness, because it is difficult not to fall at a time when all concepts are distorted, when baseness is described as virtue, treason is enshrined in law, and honour itself and human dignity are considered to be a criminal dereliction of duty!10 A much more positive evaluation of Ivan was provided by historians of the ‘statist’ or ‘juridical’ school, the best known of whom is S. M. Solov’ev (1820–79).11 Solov’ev placed Ivan’s reign in the context of the development of a new autocratic statism in opposition to the older clan principle. The oprichnina saw a final settling of accounts between these two systems, and Ivan’s character made him capable of resolving the problems of the age.12 But although he provided a statist interpretation of the terror, Solov’ev insisted that a historical explanation of Ivan’s actions must not be confused with their moral justification: there was no evidence that the tsar had tried to overcome his evil tendencies. Nor should his deeds be justified with references to the low moral standards of his day: Ivan ought to have provided leadership and guidance, but instead he debased the tone even further with his tortures and executions, and sowed the seeds of the Time of Troubles (the civil war of the early seventeenth century). But if historians could not justify Groznyi, Solov’ev conceded, they might nonetheless pity him, in so far as he was a victim of boyars such as the Shuiskiis who set him a bad example in his childhood.13 Solov’ev’s interpretation of the oprichnina was developed further by S. F. Platonov (1860–1933), who first addressed the problem in his influential book on the Time of Troubles.14 In Platonov’s conception,

Prologue

9

the Troubles had their origins in a profound political and social crisis in the second half of the sixteenth century. The political crisis consisted in a conflict between the tsar and his boyars concerning the extent to which the latter could influence policy and decisionmaking. Platonov placed the oprichnina in the context of this conflict: the lands taken into the oprichnina were those of the hereditary princes, who were thereby deprived not only of the servitors who were directly dependent on them, but also of the revenues which their estates had yielded. Having examined the nature and extent of the territory incorporated into the oprichnina, Platonov concluded that the policy was directed not just against individuals, as Klyuchevskii had argued, but against the old aristocratic system as a whole, and that in this respect it was the instrument of a major state reform, and not merely a police measure. As for the terrorist methods which were directed against Ivan’s ‘real and imaginary enemies’, they were ‘the dirty froth which seethed on the surface of the life of the oprichnina, concealing the everyday work which was taking place in its depths’.15 The extensive reorganization of landholding which occurred led to the virtually universal establishment of the service principle (land tenure conditional on military service), which facilitated the defence needs of the state. But it also contributed to the symptoms of the second – social – crisis which Platonov identified in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The growth of small-scale service landholding led to increased exploitation of the peasant population of the new service estates, to the flight of the peasants from these estates, and hence to the introduction of measures of enserfment designed to limit peasant mobility. 16

M. N. Pokrovskii If Platonov gave a new economic emphasis to the oprichnina, with his stress on Groznyi’s land mobilization policies directed against the old titled aristocracy and in favour of the new service class, the Marxist historian M. N. Pokrovskii (1868–1932) went even further, reducing the oprichnina to a class struggle between the service landholders and the boyars. Pokrovskii’s Russian History from Earliest Times (1910–13) was a work of synthesis rather than of original research, as he acknowledged in the Preface to the first edition. But it was also a work of reinterpretation (‘we have had to re-work from a materialist point of view material collected by idealist historians’).17

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

Although he entitled his chapter on the sixteenth century, ‘Groznyi’, Pokrovskii rejected any idea that the tsar’s personality could have played a role in his policy-making; the oprichnina marked the culmination of a long-term process which pervaded the reigns of three tsars with such different characters as Ivan Groznyi, Fedor Ivanovich and Boris Godunov. 18 The first half of the sixteenth century, Pokrovskii argued, had witnessed an ‘agrarian revolution’ (perevorot). Feudal estates had ceased to be part of a natural economy and had begun to participate in market relations; this was part of the broader development of a bourgeois economy, one of the symptoms of which was the use of freely-hired labourers on landed estates. In this process, the smallto medium-sized estates which characterized the service nobility proved to be more efficient than the large hereditary estates (votchiny) of the boyars. Thus, ‘by expropriating the rich boyar-votchinnik in favour of the small landed noble, the oprichnina followed the line of natural economic development, and did not oppose it. This was the first condition of its success’.19 The broad coalition of boyars, service nobles and townspeople which, according to Pokrovskii, had characterized the early period of Ivan’s reign, broke down over the Livonian War, especially after 1558, when only the service nobles wanted to continue to fight in the hope of obtaining new fertile lands. When their hopes were disappointed, they cast covetous eyes on the large estates of the boyars, and staged a coup d’état in December 1564, in alliance with the townspeople, in order to wrest state power from the boyars.20 This coup established a ‘new class regime, for which the personal power of the tsar was only an instrument’. 21 The new regime ruled by terrorist methods, but this was in the spirit of the age, and ‘even in more cultured epochs, revolutionary governments ruled with the aid of terror’. 22 The political victory of the service nobles marked the triumph of the more monetized type of feudal estate which in the first half of the sixteenth century had been ‘progressive’ by comparison with the natural system, and the oprichnina itself was a ‘progressive’ force, the creation of which was a premature attempt to create a Petrine-style autocracy.23 But paradoxically, as Pokrovskii himself acknowledged, the service landholding system found itself in crisis by the end of the century as a result of the predatory exploitation of the peasants by their masters, and the seventeenth century witnessed a ‘feudal reaction’ with the revival of large-scale hereditary landownership.24

Prologue

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Pokrovskii’s book went through eight editions, the last six of which were published in the Soviet period. The eighth edition appeared in 1933–4,25 after the historian’s death (in 1932) and just before the beginning of the campaign against him. In the 1920s, however, Pokrovskii was the dominant figure in Soviet historiography. 26 In 1920 he published a shorter (but still substantial) account of Russian history, based on a course of lectures he had delivered at the Sverdlov Communist University in 1919. Russian History in its Most Concise Version was a more obviously popular work than its predecessor, and its author hoped that it might be used as a textbook.27 Early Russian history was, however, dealt with very briefly: the material which had been presented in the 73-page chapter on ‘Groznyi’ in Russian History from Earliest Times was summarized in less than ten pages of the later work, in a chapter entitled ‘The Disintegration of Muscovite Feudalism: Commodity Economy and Serfdom’.28 The oprichnina, Pokrovskii explained, was a new kind of rule created by the service nobles and merchantry; it took the form of a dictatorship and involved the strengthening of the tsar’s power. But Ivan himself was still a very shadowy figure; the existence of the terror did not mean ‘that Ivan personally was a very cruel man nor that he personally had much significance in the coup. The conflict was not between individual people, but between classes’.29 Thus for Pokrovskii the tsar was an instrument of the classes whose struggle determined the course of history, whereas Platonov had presented the boyars and service nobles as the objects of policy decisions taken by the tsar as personification of the state. Pokrovskii himself was later to admit that he had underestimated the autonomy of the political system,30 and his rejection of the role of the state, as well as his downplaying of the significance of individual historical actors, was to form part of the indictment of his ‘economic materialism’ in the late 1930s.31 In the early Soviet period, in spite of having received the imprimatur of an accolade from Lenin,32 Pokrovskii’s interpretation of Russian history did not yet have monopoly significance. Within three years of the publication of Russian History in its Most Concise Version, two very different popularizing accounts of the reign of Ivan the Terrible were to appear.

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

Vipper and Platonov In the 1940s, the name of R. Yu. Vipper (1859–1954) was to become synonymous with Stalinist historiography of the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Before the revolution Vipper had a high reputation as a serious and prolific scholar, but he was not a specialist in Russian history: his doctoral dissertation had been on church and state in sixteenth-century Geneva. In the late tsarist period he had taught world history at Moscow University, and had written a number of textbooks on the ancient and medieval periods. He was also fascinated by the philosophy of history, on which he wrote several essays.33 A liberal and an atheist, Vipper had been a critic of the autocratic system, and in 1917 he welcomed the February revolution and the Provisional Government. Although hostile to the Bolshevik revolution, he initially remained in Russia, and in 1922 published a short biography of Ivan the Terrible.34 Vipper’s book provided such a positive assessment of the tsar that Platonov was to describe it as ‘not only an apologia for Groznyi, but his apotheosis’.35 Platonov rightly identified Vipper’s main innovation in the study of Ivan IV to be his stress on the international context and significance of Ivan’s reign.36 The sixteenth century, according to Vipper, was the critical turning-point in the age-old struggle between the Asiatic nomads and the Europeans, a struggle in which Muscovy played a major role. Muscovy’s success in defeating the Tatars derived in part from its imitation of Asiatic methods of rule, notably in creating a ‘military monarchy’ based on the pomest’e system, in which landholding was conditional on military service.37 Vipper’s book also contained other noteworthy features, on which Platonov did not, however, comment. Vipper presented a picture of Ivan and some of his western contemporaries, such as Christian II of Denmark, as ‘monarchs who loved the ordinary people’ and pursued anti-aristocratic populist policies. Such rulers were criticized by the ‘monarchomach’ ideologists of the nobility as despots and tyrants, and these critics’ views of monarchism as ‘caesarism’ had been inherited by revolutionaries of modern times. In the West, Christian II was condemned as a demagogue and was overthrown by his nobles; in the semi-Asiatic countries of Eastern Europe, however, the prospects for a ‘democratic monarchy’ were greater, although in Muscovy too the higher ranks of the aristocracy tried to restrict the monarchy in their favour, and met with a response similar to that of the tyrant-despot Christian II.38 A consequence of the strength

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of the nobility, Vipper pointed out, was the introduction of serfdom, which occurred earliest in those countries where the nobility was strongest and hence best able to impose its will on the ruler: ‘while serfdom was consistently introduced as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century into the Carpathian and Baltic lands which possessed a constitutional order, the Muscovite state, ruled autocratically, remained free of it until the end of the century.’39 As far as the oprichnina was concerned, Vipper stressed that it was a military reform, introduced in the context of a new and difficult phase in the Livonian War. The continued influence of the apanage princes, with their private armies of military slaves, contributed to the indiscipline and heterogeneity of the Muscovite forces. The power of the old hereditary aristocracy, too, prevented the promotion of able men from more humble social backgrounds.40 The oprichnina was designed to remedy these deficiencies. In many ways it was a logical extension of the military monarchy which Groznyi’s grandfather Ivan III had developed in the context of the ‘struggle with the steppe’. The oprichnina, however, was introduced against the background of a war in the west, and the resistance it encountered caused it to assume terrorist forms.41 In order to justify his positive treatment of Ivan’s reign, Vipper needed to engage with and refute the tsar’s posthumous reputation as a tyrant. In his final chapter, he traced the development of Groznyi’s image from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, criticizing Ivan’s opponents for their failure to appreciate that his major internal reforms were undertaken – like those of Peter the Great – against the background of a foreign war. He laid the main blame for Ivan’s negative reputation on the 1591 treatise by the English diplomat Giles Fletcher, who had depicted Muscovy as a barbarous Asiatic land. Fletcher – according to Vipper – had presented Ivan as a Prince of whom Machiavelli would have been proud, who set the new men against the old aristocrats as part of a fiendish policy of ‘divide and rule’, and who encouraged his officials to exploit the people for similar reasons. Fletcher’s liberalism had much in common with that of the monarchomachs of the sixteenth century who condemned unlimited monarchy and praised parliamentarism – a programme which in practice reflected their own aristocratic self-interest. Their ideas had influenced the liberals of the nineteenth century, ‘when Russia again experienced a blind fascination with English structures and English fashions’. Fletcher’s writings appealed to those ‘who turned away from Russian “barbarism” and based all their thoughts

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

and desires in Western Europe’. It was a particular irony, Vipper concluded, that the Anglophile Groznyi’s posthumous reputation had been so badly damaged by ‘a representative of that very nation to which he was most deferential’.42 Why did Vipper direct his attention to Ivan the Terrible at this time? The Russian historian D. M. Volodikhin has suggested that Vipper’s treatment of Ivan was a case study of ‘new idealism’, the philosophy of history which he had developed from 1917 under the impact of the First World War and the revolution. In his new approach, Vipper stressed historical events, personalities and ideas at the expense of the more structural features which had characterized the predominantly social-history approach of his earlier work.43 Although it is undoubtedly true that Vipper’s treatment of Ivan is very much in the spirit of ‘new idealism’, the historian’s adoption of this methodological approach does not in itself explain why he should have chosen Ivan Groznyi for his case study. Various suggestions have been made as to why Vipper turned to sixteenth-century Muscovy for his theme during the Russian Civil War. Volodikhin suggests that the catastrophic extremism of the first quarter of the twentieth century in Russia raised echoes of the sixteenth century,44 and a number of other commentators have suggested that Vipper chose Ivan Groznyi as the subject of his only excursion into Russian history because of the parallels that he perceived between the late sixteenth century and his own time. Sharply differing views have, however, been expressed concerning the substance of these parallels. The religious philosopher G. P. Fedotov accused Vipper of glorifying tyranny as a response to the revolution, as a reaction to the tragic fate of Russia after the fall of the monarchy in 1917: Vipper wrote his book under the agonising impression of the destruction of the Russian empire and, in elevating Groznyi, he vented his anger against the liberal and humane people of the last century who had grown cold towards the idea of ‘terrible’ power. Like Machiavelli, Vipper in his patriotic anguish sought a tyrant – and consoled himself retrospectively, finding a refuge in the Moscow of Groznyi from the Moscow of 1917.45 A similar case was to be made against Vipper from the opposite end of the political spectrum, by S. M. Dubrovskii in his attempted

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rehabilitation of Pokrovskii’s approach to history in the immediate post-Stalin period. Equating Vipper’s position with that of early twentieth-century monarchists who ‘began to dream about such a tsar as Ivan IV who could suppress the revolution, with his savage barbaric methods of punishing his opponents’, and in particular with that of the Empress Alexandra when she called on Nicholas II in 1916 to ‘Be Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Emperor Paul – crush them all’, Dubrovskii wrote: ‘Vipper wanted to present Ivan IV as the model of a “real tsar” who could save the ruling classes from revolution.’46 Dubrovskii was undoubtedly correct to note that Vipper was thinking of a comparison between Ivan and Nicholas II, but the main point of Vipper’s comparison concerned the ability of a ruler to survive military defeat. It does not require too much imagination to see the contrast implied in the following passage, relating to Russia’s defeat in the Livonian War: The Muscovite state escaped the doom that threatened it, as also did the dynasty; the power of the tsar remained intact, and the social classes remained calm. Ivan IV died in the full possession of an enormous empire . . . The consequences of the war began to manifest themselves only under his successors, who did not have his authority or charm . . . 47 ‘What saved the Muscovite military monarchy from imminent catastrophe?’ Vipper asked. ‘Why did revolution not follow on the heels of war?’ His answers included: ‘the political rationality and efficiency of the institutions, the skill of the dynasty, which was able to stand above classes and hold them in strict subordination and order, and the enormous scale of Muscovy’s military resources.’ Thus it was not just terror that guaranteed the survival of Ivan’s regime, in Vipper’s view, but the entire Muscovite system, as yet undamaged by ‘blind faith in foreign models, as was to be the case later in the seventeenth century’.48 This last phrase provides the key to Vipper’s fascination with the reign of Ivan IV. In the early years of the twentieth century the historian had become increasingly disillusioned with the concept of ‘progress’, and the outbreak of the First World War, followed by the advent of revolution and civil war in Russia, had confirmed his forebodings. Western civilization in general, Vipper believed, and industrial society in particular, had undergone a major crisis in 1914.

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

In relation to Russia, the European catastrophe meant that it was necessary to search for the roots of her national culture, which Vipper found in the old Muscovite state of Ivan III and Ivan IV. 49 For Vipper the century from the 1460s to the 1560s was a golden age of Russian history, to which he looked back with nostalgia from the perspective of 1922, in the aftermath of world war, revolution and civil war. There are elements of neo-Slavophilism in this perception but, unlike the mainstream Slavophiles, for whom the pre-Petrine seventeenth century was the apogee of Muscovy, Vipper regarded the seventeenth century as a period when the pernicious effects of westernization had already begun to corrupt the older, more homogeneous Russian culture. In addition, neither the Orthodox religion nor the peasant commune played any part in Vipper’s idealization of early Muscovy; rather, it was the state structure of the ‘military monarchy’ that excited his admiration.50 Finally, in view of Vipper’s statism and anti-westernism, we should ask whether there are any elements in his work which may be regarded as ‘Eurasianist’ or ‘National Bolshevik’, thereby prefiguring its Stalinized revisions of 1942 and 1944. The Eurasianist echoes are fairly clear, in Vipper’s stress on the Asiatic (Tatar) influences on the Muscovite ‘military monarchy’ and his generally positive assessment of ancient oriental states such as Babylon.51 It is less clear, however, whether Vipper saw any parallel between the ‘democratic monarchy’ of Ivan IV and the early Bolshevik regime. He uses the intriguing phrase ‘autocratic-communist’ (samoderzhavnokommunisticheskie) in relation to the chronicle account of Ivan’s 1556 reforms of service landholding, which he describes as ‘social experiments’ on the part of the Muscovite ruler: in his landholding reforms, Ivan had been concerned to defend the rank-and-file military servitors against abuses by their superiors; he equalized the size of the landed estates that were distributed in return for military service, and allocated surplus land to the have-nots, thereby bringing service into line with rewards.52 Vipper’s phrase ‘autocratic-communist’ was picked up by the historian I. I. Polosin in the introduction to his 1925 translation of Heinrich von Staden’s contemporary account of Ivan’s Russia. Drawing a parallel between the ‘revolution’ (revolyutsiya) of the sixteenth century and that of 1917 onwards, Polosin asserted that ‘the merciless whirlwind and profundity of the social revolution of the sixteenth century have more than once served as the topics of monographic research in the revolutionary years of the present day’.53 And, he continued:

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It is not accidental that the historian of the European West and the Asiatic East, Professor R. Yu. Vipper, was attracted to the history of sixteenth-century Muscovy. The author steeps his brilliant study of the diplomacy and social policy of Tsar Ivan in the stirring atmosphere of the last decade, and in his general assessments of the military-autocratic communism of the Muscovite tsar he reflects the mighty influence of contemporary reality.54 Polosin’s use of the striking phrase, ‘military-autocratic communism’ (voenno-samoderzhavnyi kommunizm), with its echoes of ‘war communism’ (voennyi kommunizm), took Vipper’s implicit analogy further than Vipper himself had done,55 and was consistent with Polosin’s own assessment of the land-redistribution policy of the oprichnina period as ‘a true social revolution’ and an ‘agrarian revolution’.56 Vipper’s interpretation may be summarized as follows: the Russian autocracy from the time of Ivan III was a popular monarchy, opposed only by sections of the boyar aristocracy for their own selfish reasons. Ivan IV was, however, able to combat their opposition through the policies of the oprichnina, so that his defeat in the Livonian War – unlike Nicholas II’s failure in the First World War – did not result in revolution. Ivan survived where Nicholas fell, not only because of his willingness to use harsh measures against his opponents (this was the side of the argument that Dubrovskii emphasized when he accused Vipper of counter-revolutionary monarchism), but also because of the democratic and socially egalitarian nature of his regime (it was in this respect that an implicit analogy with the Bolsheviks has been discerned). Ironically, in order to tailor the later editions of the book to the requirements of wartime Stalinism, it was the former (‘monarchist’) aspects which Vipper was to develop further, while the latter (‘democratic’) considerations were toned down. In his review of the historiography of the reign of Ivan IV, S. F. Platonov suggested that the recent publication of Vipper’s adulatory study of Groznyi indicated that the pendulum of assessments of Ivan had swung too far in the opposite direction from the previous negative evaluations, so that ‘the next task for researchers is to find an exact balance between the polarities of subjective assessments’. Platonov hastened to add that his own brief account ‘in no way lays claim to this role of super-arbiter in judgements about

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

Groznyi’. Rather, ‘its aim was to convey that “image” of Groznyi which has been formed in the author’s mind as a result of his acquaintance with the most typical historical material of the epoch in question’.57 Platonov was later to write: My characterisation [of Groznyi’s reign] should be compared with Prof. R. Yu. Vipper’s remarkable study, which appeared a year before my characterization . . . But I take Groznyi in his local, national significance and attempt to establish the real verifiable features of his personality and activity, in so far as these are revealed by the sum of reliable sources.58 Thus Platonov’s short study of Ivan may be seen in part as a specialist’s response to Vipper’s more amateur excursion into sixteenth-century Russian history. Platonov’s book provided a popularizing summary of the interpretation of the oprichnina which he had provided in his monograph on the Time of Troubles, and placed it in the broader context of the political history of Ivan’s reign. In the oprichnina period, Platonov explained, Ivan treated his internal enemies in the way that the Muscovite grand princes had previously treated their external foes: that is, he deported them from their home territory and imported loyal subjects to replace them. Ivan removed the princes, whom he suspected of treason, from their hereditary lands and relocated them to distant parts, and he moved on to the princes’ former lands petty servicemen who were allocated small portions of these estates which the tsar had incorporated into the territory under his direct control, i.e. the oprichnina.59 Although the aims of the oprichnina were quite clear to Platonov, he admitted that it was not so obvious why Groznyi had acted when he did, nor why his rational policy of land reallocation should have been accompanied by so many brutal executions. He had to allow for psychological factors: Ivan’s impatience with his former advisers such as Adashev and Sil’vestr deprived him of ‘spiritual equilibrium’, and his mood was darkened by the death of his first wife, Anastasiya, in 1560. The tsar’s mistrust of his counsellors spilled over into suspicion of the boyars and princes as a whole. Prince Andrei Kurbskii’s flight to Lithuania in 1564 was the last straw, leading to the introduction of the oprichnina. 60 The violence and cruelty which accompanied the process of land reorganization reflected Ivan’s moral degeneration, but the aims of the policy were implemented effectively.

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These aims could, however, have been achieved by other, less complex methods. The means which Groznyi had used to achieve his aim, Platonov conceded, were inappropriate, and brought with them unforeseen and undesirable consequences.61

The ‘cultural revolution’ From the mid-1920s until the late 1930s, little attention was paid by Soviet historians to the reign of Ivan IV. If in 1925 Polosin could still write enthusiastically about the oprichnina as a revolution and about Ivan’s reign as military-autocratic communism, then by the later 1920s the climate of ideological dogmatism meant that historians who wrote positive assessments of tsars were liable to be suspected of monarchist sympathies. In addition, during the period of the ‘cultural revolution’ (1928–31) several of the leading specialists on the sixteenth century – including Platonov, S. V. Bakhrushin and P. A. Sadikov – were arrested in connection with the so-called ‘Academy affair’ of 1929–30.62 This in its turn was part of a broader campaign against ‘bourgeois specialists’, which for historians meant a tightening of Party control and the imposition of Marxist interpretations of the kind favoured by Pokrovskii. The article on ‘Ivan IV’ in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1933, by M. V. Nechkina, presented Ivan’s reign, and the oprichnina in particular, as a class struggle between the service landholders and the boyars who owned hereditary estates. Not surprisingly, Nechkina’s interpretation was similar to Pokrovskii’s, 63 although she did not describe the oprichnina as either progressive or revolutionary. She also placed more emphasis on Ivan’s own role,64 noting that the tsar had personally participated in executions and torture. In line with Pokrovskii’s negative depiction of tsarist Russia’s imperialism, she presented Ivan’s foreign policy as ‘characterized by a system of major feudal-colonial seizures and an aspiration to possess the Baltic coast, which was necessary for trade with W[estern] Europe’. The Russian conquest of Kazan’ had led to ‘a very cruel colonial war’, with mass uprisings by the local indigenous nationalities.65 In the brief historiographical essay appended to her article, Nechkina claimed that many pre-revolutionary historians had admired Groznyi as a strong autocrat who defended the ruling classes against the revolutionary movement. After the October Revolution, this interpretation had been adopted by the counter-revolutionary intelligentsia in order to idealize the old regime. Nechkina identified Vipper and Platonov as examples of this trend:

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

Prof[essor] R. Yu. Vipper, who emigrated in 1924, creates in his book Ivan Groznyi (1922) the counter-revolutionary apotheosis of I[van] IV as an autocratic dictator, concealing in the ‘historicity’ of his theme a direct appeal to fight against Bolshevism. Counterrevolutionary tendencies also permeate the study by S. F. Platonov with the same title (1923), which develops the interpretation of I[van] IV provided earlier by the same author in his Essays on the History of the Troubles in the Muscovite State in the SixteenthSeventeenth Centuries. ‘A Marxist analysis of the activity of I[van] IV was first provided by M. N. Pokrovskii in his Russian History from Earliest Times,’ she concluded.66 Few would have guessed that, within a year of the publication of Nechkina’s article, a campaign to discredit Pokrovskii was to begin. Of the five ‘non-Marxist’ works listed in her bibliography, Klyuchevskii’s Course of Russian History and Platonov’s study of the Time of Troubles were reissued in 1937, and in 1942 a new edition of Vipper’s Ivan Groznyi was published to general acclaim.67 In conclusion, we should note that – contrary to later assertions in the Stalin period – the image of Ivan the Terrible in ‘noble-bourgeois’ historiography was not an exclusively negative one: representations of the tsar varied widely, from Karamzin’s ‘tormentor’ to Vipper’s ‘apotheosis’. Nor was Pokrovskii’s Marxist view of Ivan’s reign as negative as was later alleged: he regarded the oprichnina as a progressive phenomenon which marked the victory of the economically efficient service nobility over the hereditary owners of large estates. In the late tsarist period, Ivan’s image was not the exclusive preserve of academic historiography. In conditions of censorship which required the use of ‘Aesopian language’, it also served a wider publicistic purpose as an allegorical contrast to, or comparison with, contemporary rulers. If for Karamzin Ivan was the antipode of more recent enlightened autocrats, A. K. Tolstoi saw him as the tyrannical analogue of Nicholas I. The search for ‘contemporary relevance’ in the sixteenth century continued into the early Soviet period. For Vipper, Ivan was the model of a strong and popular ruler, the antithesis of the weak Nicholas II. And historians such as Polosin saw the land reforms of the oprichnina as a ‘social revolution’ with similarities to that of the Bolsheviks. Although in the period of the

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cultural revolution the positive images of Ivan Groznyi projected by Vipper and Platonov were condemned as pro-monarchist and hence counter-revolutionary, they were nevertheless available to Soviet historians when the new oprichnina of 1936–8 required its apologists. Such an apologia was to prove necessary in order to counter the persistence of the older image of Ivan as a crazed tyrant persecuting imaginary enemies – an image which provided an even more subversively appropriate analogy to I. V. Stalin in the twentieth century than it had to Nicholas I in the nineteenth.

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Part I The Stalinization of Russian History

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1 History in the Service of Patriotism, 1934–45

From Hitler’s accession to the Nazi–Soviet Pact, 1934–9 The ‘great retreat’ Following the predominance of Pokrovskii’s views during the period of the ‘cultural revolution’, a sea change occurred in approaches to Russian history in the USSR from the middle of the 1930s. In May 1934 the teaching of history in Soviet schools was officially criticized for its schematic character; instead of ‘abstract sociological schemes’, pupils were now to be presented with dates and facts, and familiarized with important historical events and figures. New textbooks were to be commissioned that would reflect this changed approach to history.1 The project for rewriting the history textbooks soon ran into difficulties.2 In January 1936 the drafts were officially criticized, and it was announced that a competition was to be held to produce more acceptable new works to replace them.3 The deficiencies of Soviet history teaching were now explicitly blamed on the influence of Pokrovskii and his ‘school’.4 Pokrovskii was criticized in particular for his presentation of history as ‘politics projected into the past’: he had allegedly failed to recognize that many policies and institutions which were reactionary by the standards of present-day politics had been ‘progressive’ in their own time.5 This particular criticism of Pokrovskii, like many others directed against him, was not entirely fair, but it was to pave the way for the ‘rehabilitation’ of tsars such as Ivan the Terrible as ‘progressive’ figures. More generally, the campaign against Pokrovskii cleared the ground for the introduction of a more statist and patriotic approach to Russian history. 25

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

In January 1936 it was also revealed that in August 1934 Stalin, Zhdanov and Kirov had written critical observations (zamechaniya) about the outline of a proposed new textbook on the ‘History of the USSR’, and these comments were now belatedly published. The ‘Observations’ of the three Party leaders were subsequently to be quoted and cited extensively. Among their other strictures on the draft textbook, they criticized its authors for failing to site Russian history within the context of the history of the other peoples of the USSR, and for failing to place the history of the Soviet peoples within the context of both European and world history. The textbook’s authors had not stressed either the counter-revolutionary role of tsarist foreign policy from the reign of Catherine the Great to the 1850s and beyond (‘tsarism as the international gendarme’), nor the annexationist and colonizing role of Russian tsarism in relation to the non-Russian peoples of the Empire (‘tsarism as the prison of peoples’). Furthermore, by omitting to explain the reasons for the national-liberation movements of the oppressed peoples of the tsarist empire, they had failed to show how the October Revolution had freed these peoples from national oppression.6 The ‘Observations’ of the three Party leaders greatly muddied the waters of Soviet history writing, and they have been subject to various interpretations. 7 Certainly the leadership was sending out very confused signals. The ‘Observations’ provided a paradigm of MarxistLeninist ideological correctness (i.e. internationalism and multinationalism) at the same time as a shift was taking place towards a much more Russian-nationalist approach to history. In contrast to the ‘Observations’ themselves, the articles in the central press which accompanied and followed the official statements of January 1936 stressed the progressive significance of pre-revolutionary figures such as Ivan Kalita and other Muscovite princes who had carried out the ‘gathering of the Russian lands’ and the creation of the ‘Russian national state’; the positive significance of Minin and Pozharskii’s struggle for the liberation of Russia from the Swedes and Poles in the early seventeenth century; and the progressive role of the transformations wrought by Peter the Great in his struggle against ‘Asiatic barbarism’.8 The launch of the attack on Pokrovskii was followed by the republication in 1937 of V. O. Klyuchevskii’s Course of Russian History. The Introduction to the reprint, by N. Rubinshtein, stressed the significance of Klyuchevskii as a leading representative of prerevolutionary Russian ‘bourgeois’ historiography. Klyuchevskii –

History in the Service of Patriotism 1934–45

27

Rubinshtein asserted – had had a major influence on subsequent historians, including Pokrovskii, whose Russian History from Earliest Times was ‘an innovative antithesis to Klyuchevskii’s Course’. But Pokrovskii’s deficiencies as a Marxist had prevented him from fully overcoming Klyuchevskii’s bourgeois concepts and freeing himself from their influence. The Party resolution of 26 January 1936 had set Soviet historians the task of overcoming the anti-Marxist views of the Pokrovskii school. ‘The assimilation of the historical legacy of the past,’ Rubinshtein asserted, ‘is one of the basic elements in implementing that directive. Klyuchevskii is one of the most talented representatives of the bourgeois historical legacy which we must organically rework in the process of creating our Marxist-Leninist historical science.’9 Not all historians, however, were happy with what must have seemed like the rehabilitation of bourgeois historiography. At a meeting of the Academic Council of the recently founded Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences in October 1938, voices were raised against the anti-Pokrovskii campaign, and it was suggested that bourgeois historians such as Solov’ev and Klyuchevskii should be criticized instead.10 But the attack on Pokrovskii continued, culminating in the publication in 1939–40 of two volumes of essays denouncing him as ‘anti-Marxist’.11 What lay behind the change of direction in policy towards history in the mid-1930s? A number of answers have been offered to this question. Some see it as part of a broader policy shift, the ‘great retreat’ identified by Nicholas Timasheff that included greater conservatism in social and cultural policy, and a move towards stabilization after the ultra-leftism of the First Five-Year Plan period.12 In relation to history in particular, it has been suggested that Stalin favoured a return to the ‘great man’ approach in order to guarantee his own place in the history textbooks. 13 The émigrée Menshevik literary critic Vera Aleksandrova – in a Marxist analysis not dissimilar to Trotsky’s in The Revolution Betrayed – suggested that the search for heroes among the state centralizers of the Russian past reflected the interests of the new stratum of Soviet technical and administrative personnel, who served a system in which the idea of the state was more important than that of socialism.14 In similar vein, recent scholars have stressed the importance of ‘statebuilding’ for the emergence of a ‘national-Bolshevik’ tendency in

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

Soviet historiography,15 while some have argued that the return to more ‘traditional’ approaches to history reflected a new emphasis on Russian nationalism, or even Great-Russian chauvinism and xenophobia.16 Although internal domestic factors, such as the need for stability after the upheavals of 1928–32, undoubtedly played a role, it nevertheless seems likely that the international context was most important for the policies of the mid-1930s onwards.17 It was only in 1934 that the Soviet leadership began to realize the implications of Hitler’s accession to power in Germany.18 Now the USSR faced a real danger of war – as opposed to the largely synthetic ‘war scare’ of 1927 – and concern with defence needs, at the level of ideology and morale as well as the construction of an economic and military infrastructure, undoubtedly influenced policy. This was particularly evident in the case of history, where there was a danger that the older internationalism might undermine the willingness of the Soviet population to defend the socialist state.19 Pokrovskii’s critique of the methods which had been used to build the multinational tsarist empire also threatened to complicate relations between the Russians and the other peoples of the USSR, thereby weakening the Soviet Union.20 Pokrovskii’s attitude to the state was considered to be particularly damaging. His critics linked his denigration of the historical role of the state with his failure to recognize the significance of the Soviet state.21 The new statist emphasis of Party propaganda from the mid-1930s reflected foreign as well as domestic concerns: the Soviet Constitution of 1936 not only affirmed the socialist state, but also asserted that all of its citizens had a ‘sacred duty’ to defend their fatherland.22 And at the Eighteenth Party Congress in 1939, Stalin explicitly asserted the necessity of the state as long as the danger of a foreign military attack persisted.23 Two years earlier, Stalin had stressed continuity between the tsarist and Soviet states when he told a private gathering of Party leaders that the Russian tsars had done ‘one good thing’: they had put together an enormous state which the Bolsheviks had inherited.24 And although Stalin still depicted pre-revolutionary Russia as a state of landowners and capitalists, the basis had been laid for the drawing of analogies between the defence of the tsarist state and that of its Soviet successor. At the same time, the concepts of patriotism and statism came to serve as ideologically correct proxies for the still somewhat suspect category of Russian nationalism.

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From 1934 a new stress on ‘Soviet patriotism’ began to appear in the press, and this soon came to be associated with an emphasis on the need for a knowledge of history, especially among schoolchildren. An editorial in Pravda in March 1936, commenting on the announcement of the competition for a new primary-school textbook, linked knowledge of the past with commitment to the future communist society. The current generation of primary-school pupils, the author pointed out, had grown up under Soviet power, and had not experienced either the horrors of capitalism nor the heroic struggles of the revolution and Civil War: they needed to know about the past in order to appreciate the socialist present and aspire to the communist future. It was for this reason that the Party attached so much significance to the teaching of history in schools. At this point the article shifted gear cleverly, from class to patria. An assertion that the victorious proletariat needed to know the history of its revolution was followed by the statement that: ‘To love one’s great, free native land means also to know it, to take an interest in its past, to take pride in its bright heroic pages and to hate its oppressors and tormentors’.25 A similar switch of emphasis was made in another Pravda editorial, in May 1936, which argued that national characteristics were formed in the course of the class struggle. The Soviet people retained characteristics of the various nations it comprised, but, contrary to the slanders of bourgeois historians and publicists, the Russians were not characterized by passivity and fatalism, the Ukrainians by lightheartedness and indolence, nor the Caucasian and Asian peoples by nonchalance and lethargy – peoples with such negative national characteristics could not have produced a heroic revolutionary proletariat. 26 Not only history textbooks but also depictions of the glorious past in works of literature and art were to play their part in creating the new spirit of patriotism. By 1936 most of the main features of Stalinist cultural policy were already in place: the doctrine of socialist realism had been enshrined at the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934; ‘formalism’ was the subject of harsh attacks in 1936; and the restoration of a canon of classical pre-revolutionary Russian literary and artistic figures had begun, which would culminate in the extravagant commemoration of the centenary of Pushkin’s death in 1937.27 In relation to historical genres of literature, however, the more relevant prescriptions were those relating to the revival of the concept of narodnost’, with its dual signification of nationalism

30

The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

and folksiness.28 In the latter meaning it was associated with the revival of folklorism (and the emergence of Soviet neo-folklore, or ‘fakelore’, featuring new epic songs about Stalin).29 Soviet historical plays and novels were liberally sprinkled with folksongs and proverbs, which were evidently intended to provide a sense of period authenticity, and the presence of folk-motifs in nineteenth-century artistic works was seen as evidence of their national character. The revision of history writing and the bid to produce a satisfactory textbook for primary schools led to a campaign for the creation of effective new works of historical literature and art (novels, plays, films), in which the aesthetics of socialist realism were expected to play a part. The official statement announcing the competition for the new USSR history textbook had stated that: ‘The textbook must be concrete and historically truthful. At the same time its exposition must be clear, interesting, artistic and completely accessible for pupils of the ages indicated.’30 A Pravda editorial of March 1936, commenting on the competition, suggested that the requirements for ‘concreteness and historical truthfulness’ were relevant to Party propaganda and to artistic literature as well as to professional history. Conversely, the history textbook had to meet the criteria which the Party laid down for Soviet literature and art, namely ‘accessibility for the broadest masses’. It was for this reason that the exposition was to be ‘clear, interesting, artistic’; the textbook had to provide entertaining and enjoyable reading for schoolchildren. ‘Concrete’ history, the article continued, involved the use of images, and for that reason the announcement of the competition was addressed not just to professional historians, but also to writers and artists. The author recalled that Charles Dickens had written a history of England for children, and that H. G. Wells was the author of a history of the world: ‘The historical value of these works does not rise above the level of bourgeois historiography, but the language of these books is exceptional.’ Famous Russian writers too had produced histories: Pushkin had written a History of Pugachev, and Leo Tolstoi had composed textbooks for the peasant children who attended the school on his Yasnaya Polyana estate. It was hoped that the competition would attract ‘the best masters of word and pencil, scholars and pedagogues’. And the article concluded by expressing the hope (or threat) that: ‘The appropriate conclusions will be drawn from it by our artistic literature in the field of the historical novel, where there has accumulated no little confusion, distortion and outright falsification.’31

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At least one major literary figure anticipated the appeal to ‘artistic’ writers to enter the textbook competition. Mikhail Bulgakov, on reading the press announcement on 4 March, underlined the words ‘clear, interesting, artistic’ (as well as ‘prize’ and ‘100 000 roubles’), and declared that he was going to write a textbook. He began work on it the very next day, and produced some chapters, including one on Pugachev, before eventually abandoning the project.32 The Epic Warriors affair In the light of the Party’s references to historical artistic genres in connection with the launching of the textbook competition, it is perhaps not surprising that a major ‘scandal’ which affected the literary world in 1936 concerned a work with a historical setting: Dem’yan Bednyi’s comic opera, The Epic Warriors (Bogatyri), at the Kamernyi Theatre.33 The piece involved a new libretto which the ‘proletarian poet’ Bednyi had written for Borodin’s nineteenth-century opera about the legendary warrior-heroes of the medieval folk-epics, the byliny. Bednyi presented Prince Vladimir of Kiev and his retinue of warriors as boastful, cowardly drunkards, while the real heroes of the piece were a troop of bandits.34 The premiere was a disaster: Molotov, the guest of honour, walked out in protest after the first act, exclaiming, ‘Disgraceful! The warriors were wonderful people.’35 On 14 November Pravda published a damning resolution of the government Committee for Artistic Affairs: In view of the fact that Dem’yan Bednyi’s comic opera, The Epic Warriors, produced under the directorship of A.Ya. Tairov at the Kamernyi Theatre to music by Borodin, a) is an attempt to glorify the bandits of Kievan Rus’ as a positive revolutionary element, which contradicts history and is thoroughly false in its political tendency; b) groundlessly blackens the warrior-heroes of the Russian folkepic, whereas in the folk imagination the major warriors embody the heroic features of the Russian people; [and] c) provides an anti-historical and mocking depiction of the conversion of Rus’, which was in reality a positive stage in the history of the Russian people, because it facilitated the rapprochement of the Slavonic peoples with peoples of a higher culture: the Committee of Artistic Affairs of the Soviet government has resolved: To remove the play The Epic Warriors from the repertoire, as alien to Soviet art.36

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The next day, Pravda published a vituperative article by P. M. Kerzhentsev, chairman of the Committee for Artistic Affairs, which elaborated on the resolution and paved the way for a broader campaign against Bednyi’s libretto and the harmful ideas contained within it.37 According to rumours rife among the intelligentsia, the opera was banned because Stalin was told that its depiction of Prince Vladimir and his drunken retinue was an allegorical allusion to the Party leadership.38 Such an interpretation was strengthened by the fact that the new ‘folk’-epics about Stalin were based on the original byliny. Because of this, as Leonid Maksimenkov has pointed out, ‘any criticism, or especially any mockery of the semi-sacred texts of the byliny could be interpreted as an indirect attack on the image of Stalin and his entourage’.39 There were numerous other ideological grounds for suppressing the work. Dem’yan Bednyi had not only provided a negative and mocking depiction of the heroes of the great Russian epics,40 but he had also glorified bandits as revolutionary elements (this was an old Bakuninist heresy, as Kerzhentsev pointed out, describing Bednyi’s favourable treatment of the bandits as his ‘vilest error’).41 But some believed that it was the burlesque presentation of the Russians’ acceptance of Christianity as a drunken prank which was found especially objectionable. ‘[It’s] being taken off “For its mockery of the baptism of Rus’” in particular,’ Elena Bulgakova noted in her diary.42 The progressive significance of the introduction of Christianity into Rus’ was soon to become a basic dogma of the new Soviet historiography. The Jury’s report on the primary-school history textbook competition criticized the authors of the unsuccessful entries for their failure to understand that ‘along with Christianity the Slavs obtained literacy and several elements of the superior Byzantine culture’.43 And the historian S. V. Bakhrushin produced a scholarly article on the progressive significance of the conversion of Rus’, in which he specifically referred both to the Resolution of the Committee for Artistic Affairs and to Kerzhentsev’s article.44 The positive character of the conversion was a tenet to which both Stalin and Molotov remained attached: in their conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov in February 1947 Molotov referred to the banning of The Epic Warriors for its mockery of the adoption of Christianity, citing it as an example of what happened to works that did not present historical events in their ‘correct conceptualization’, and Stalin explained that the conversion of Rus’ was progressive ‘because it marked the Russian state’s

History in the Service of Patriotism 1934–45

33

shift towards a rapprochement with the West, rather than its orientation toward the East’.45 The Epic Warriors affair neatly illustrates the ways in which the ‘great retreat’ in historiography turned the conventions of the ‘cultural revolution’ on their head. Dem’yan Bednyi had not realized that the line was changing, and that the ‘baptism of Rus’’ and its agent, Prince Vladimir, were historically progressive. Not only was Bednyi’s mockingly negative depiction of Vladimir and his retinue now regarded as a Pokrovskyist deviation, but in conditions of heavyhanded censorship which could be circumvented only by ‘Aesopian’ methods, the unflattering presentation of a ruler and his entourage ran the risk of being read as an allegorical criticism of Stalin and the Party leadership. Stalin was to remain suspicious of subversive intentions on Bednyi’s part: in December 1937 he banned the publication in Pravda of an anti-fascist work by the poet, on the grounds that it could be read as an anti-Soviet allegory.46 History and foreign policy From 1936 onwards, although lip-service continued to be paid to the Party leaders’ 1934 formulae of ‘tsarism as the international gendarme’ and ‘tsarism as the prison of peoples’, there was a real shift towards a stronger endorsement of Great-Russian national identity, both in relation to a legitimation of the foreign policy of tsarism and in relation to a reinterpretation of what the ‘Observations’ had described as the ‘annexationist-colonisatorist role of Russian tsarism’.47 The concept of ‘tsarism as the prison of peoples’ was officially modified as early as August 1937, when the results of the competition for the new primary-school history textbook were announced. The Jury’s report criticized the texts submitted for failing to give a positive assessment of the role of Bogdan Khmel’nitskii in the struggle of Ukraine against Polish and Turkish occupation, and it stated that Russia’s acquisition of Ukraine in the seventeenth century, like that of Georgia at the end of the eighteenth, had to be seen not as an ‘absolute evil’, but as a ‘lesser evil’ than the alternatives of conquest by Poland and Turkey, and by Persia and Turkey, respectively.48 In relation to foreign policy, similar shifts were taking place. The Jury’s report had criticized the authors of the textbooks for failing to give a correctly positive assessment of the role of Alexander Nevskii in halting the eastward movement of the ‘German occupiers’ in the Battle on the Ice of 1242,49 thereby dropping a clear hint about

34

The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

a contemporary analogy that would soon be taken up both by professional historians and by creative artists. Shortly after the announcement of the results of the textbook competition in August 1937, Pravda stated that ‘in response to demand from its readers’ it was beginning to publish a series of articles on the history of ‘our native land’. The series began with an article about Alexander Nevskii’s defeat of the knights of the Livonian Order, which stressed parallels with the Nazis.50 And although the ‘Observations’ of 1934 had stated that tsarist foreign policy was reactionary from the reign of Catherine the Great onwards (i.e. from the late eighteenth century), only a few days after publishing the article about Alexander Nevskii, Pravda began its celebration of the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Borodino (which fell on 7 September). This commemoration included articles about Kutuzov, illustrated with portraits of the ‘great general’; another theme in the commemorations was the way in which Borodino had been celebrated not only in Russian folklore but also in the works of the greatest writers and poets of the Russian people: Pushkin, Lermontov and – of course – Leo Tolstoi.51 Thus within the space of a few days we can see the beginnings of what was to become a definite pattern in Soviet patriotic popularization of history: the marking of events which provided analogies with specific contemporary relevance (such as the Battle on the Ice), and also anniversaries (such as that of 1812) which had a more general patriotic resonance. Observant contemporaries noticed what was going on. A report from the US Military Attaché in Moscow, of 15 September 1937, entitled ‘Nationalism in the Soviet Union’, drew attention to many current manifestations of this phenomenon, including not only the celebration of 1812, but also the release of the feature film Peter I, in which ‘Czar Peter is shown as the heroic defender of his country against the invading forces from the west’. The report also noted that in the new school history textbooks, ‘Historical events which involved defense against invading Poles, and Germans are especially stressed’.52 And a report to Washington from the US Chargé d’Affaires in Riga, dated 10 November 1937, enclosed a translation of the findings of the Jury in the history textbook competition, and drew attention to the contemporary relevance of some of the issues highlighted in the Jury’s report: the depiction of the historical role of the Orthodox church; the extension of Russian rule over Georgia and Ukraine; and the defeat of the German knights in the midthirteenth century.53

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35

In May 1938 the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences, reacting to government pressure on the academic community to respond to the current needs of the country, accepted that its tasks should include the depiction of the past struggles of all the Soviet peoples, and of the Russian people in particular, for the defence of their country against external enemies. And although Academician Grekov, the Director of the Institute, added that, of course, class struggle should also have an honoured place in the plan, it was clear that the defence theme was seen as the most relevant and topical issue facing the historians.54 Much of the popularization of history in the late 1930s, however, was done not so much by historical as by artistic works – novels, plays, operas and films. Film was of course the most prestigious – and most expensive – mass art-form of the period, and the choice of topics for historical feature-films of the late 1930s gives a clear indication of the priorities of the Party leadership. Petrov’s two-part film Peter I appeared in 1937–9, with a screenplay by A. N. Tolstoi, the author of a multivolume novel and a series of plays about Peter the Great. Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevskii, made and released in 1938, was an obvious parable of anti-German militarism. And the liberation of Moscow from the Poles in 1611–12 featured in Pudovkin’s film Minin and Pozharskii, as well as in the opera Ivan Susanin (both 1939). (These works will be discussed in the next chapter.) It is evident, therefore, that official interest in the depiction of historical events and figures in literary and artistic productions focused on those cases where some kind of parallel could be found to contemporary Soviet foreign-policy concerns, whether it be the anti-Polonism of Minin and Pozharskii or the anti-Germanism of Alexander Nevskii and Peter I (the Swedes being regarded as honorary Germans for these purposes).55 The choice of early Russian history for so many of these parallels may have been influenced by the fact that the 1934 ‘Observations’ had specified that tsarist foreign policy was reactionary from the reign of Catherine the Great onwards. But, as we have already noted in relation to the commemoration of the Borodino anniversary in 1937, some later events were chosen for the drawing of more general patriotic lessons. Bakhterev and Razumovskii’s play, Commander Suvorov, was staged in 1939,56 and the ‘anti-Pokrovskii’ collection of 1939 found analogies to the contemporary threat of fascist invasion in the Napoleonic campaign of 1812, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 and the First World War. 57 Thus by the late 1930s there had been a tacit departure from the

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

‘Observations’ of 1934 not only in relation to the precept of ‘tsarism as the prison of peoples’ but also in relation to that of ‘tsarism as the international gendarme’. It is difficult to judge how far the campaign to inculcate patriotism through the use of historical examples succeeded in inspiring and motivating the Soviet people,58 but there is an intriguing piece of evidence that the switch to traditional history and Russian nationalism was noted in Berlin, and may even have contributed to the willingness of the Germans to conclude the non-aggression pact of August 1939. In July 1939 J. Schnurre of the Economic Policy Department of the German government told two Soviet officials in Berlin that: The amalgamation of Bolshevism with the national history of Russia, which found expression in the glorification of great Russian men and deeds (celebration of the Battle of Poltava, Peter the Great, the Battle on Lake Peipus, Alexander Nevskii) had indeed in some measure changed the international face of Bolshevism as we saw it, particularly since Stalin had postponed world revolution to the Greek Calends. In this state of affairs we saw possibilities today which we had not seen earlier, provided that no attempt whatsoever were made to conduct Communist propaganda in any form in Germany. 59 Meanwhile, in the USSR itself, some Party activists who retained an allegiance to the older internationalism were horrified by the fact that ‘socialist patriotism’ had become virtually identical with ‘racist nationalism’. In a letter to Stalin of January 1939, the theatre critic V. I. Blyum complained about literary figures who in their search for heroes and for historical ‘analogies’ had ended up producing crude anti-Polish and anti-German propaganda. When summoned to explain himself to Agitprop, Blyum cited the films Alexander Nevskii and Peter I, as well as the opera Ivan Susanin and A. Korneichuk’s play Bogdan Khmel’nitskii, as examples of works which distorted history in the interests of topicality. In a report to Zhdanov, Blyum’s interrogator complained that he had failed to appreciate the significance of the ‘experience of the struggle of the Russian people for their independence against external military invasions of the country’. 60 Of course, not all Soviet historical works of the late 1930s were devoted to glorious military defence efforts in the tsarist past. Older favourites continued to feature, such as Razin and Pugachev, the

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37

leaders of popular revolts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who were the heroes of films released in 1939 and 1937 respectively. Films about the Civil War, in the tradition of the phenomenally successful Chapaev (1934), included We are from Kronstadt (1936) and Shchors (1939). And some ‘internationalist’ anniversaries were still commemorated, such as that of the Paris Commune. Nevertheless, the shift of emphasis in the mid-1930s was striking, not least because attitudes towards pre-revolutionary Russian history were so different from those which had predominated earlier, in the period of the ‘cultural revolution’ in particular. The main theme of patriotic historical propaganda in the late 1930s was the need for military defence, and many of the episodes from pre-revolutionary Russian history which were chosen for popularization in historical and artistic works reflected the theme of heroic resistance to enemy invaders. During the period of the Nazi– Soviet pact of 1939–41, by contrast, it became more necessary to find historical precedents to justify and legitimize the Soviet Union’s newly expansionist foreign policy.

The Nazi–Soviet Pact, 1939–41 The changed international situation after the conclusion of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in August 1939 was reflected in the withdrawal of Alexander Nevskii from the screen.61 Works about the Napoleonic Wars began to appear. Plays such as V. Solov’ev’s 1812 (1939) and Field Marshal Kutuzov (1940) may have been commissioned before the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact, but their anti-French theme acquired greater relevance after 1939, as did N. Kruzhkov’s play, Admiral Nakhimov (1941), about the Crimean War. The anti-Polish sentiments of the works about the early seventeenth century continued to be relevant – and, indeed, became even more so after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland (‘Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia’) in September 1939. On 24 September – exactly a week after the Red Army had crossed the Polish border – Pravda published a review by the historian M. V. Nechkina of a new edition of Academician Grekov’s book on Kievan Rus’. Nechkina pointed out that Kievan Rus’ had been the cradle of the Great-Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian peoples, and that the political history of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia was closely tied in with the political history of Kievan Rus’.62 A few days later, the History and Philosophy Division of the Academy of Sciences met for a special

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The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia

session devoted to the ‘Historical Destinies of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia’. V. I. Picheta read a paper explaining that these territories had been part of the Kievan state from ancient times. After the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century, they had become detached from north-eastern Russia, and had recognized the power of the Lithuanian prince, but their language, feudal system, culture and military technology remained Russian (russkie). They had resisted all subsequent attempts at Polonization, and had continued to look eastwards for their liberation. To fervent applause, Picheta concluded that it was for that reason that ‘our blood brothers’ had welcomed the Red Army as their liberator from oppression by the Polish nobles.63 Thus the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland was justified by references both to the common legacy of Kievan Rus’ for the three East Slav peoples and to the ethnic ties that bound them. The Academy historians planned new research on the annexed territories. On 10 October 1939 the Academic Council of the Institute of History decided to withdraw (as ‘inappropriate’) a planned collection on the history of the First World War, but agreed to publish a collection on the history of Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine.64 At the end of October the General Assembly of the History and Philosophy Division heard a paper by Grekov on ‘The Most Ancient Destinies of Western Ukraine’. The Assembly resolved to conduct archaeological investigations in Western Ukraine jointly with the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and to speed up publication of a new edition of Russkaya pravda, ‘the law under which Western Ukraine, along with the entire Kievan state, lived in the tenth to thirteenth centuries’.65 The following year, after the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states and of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in June 1940, the autumn two-day General Assembly of the History and Philosophy Division was largely devoted to the ‘new Soviet republics’. Grekov presented a paper on ‘The Most Ancient Destinies of the Slavs in the Carpathian Regions’ and Zdeneˇk Nejedly´ (a refugee Czech historian) spoke on ‘The Struggle of the Ukrainians of Bukovina for their National Independence’. Other papers were read on the history of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.66 Politicians too invoked long-standing historical precedents for Soviet interests in the Baltic. In their private discussions with Latvian and Lithuanian statesmen in 1939 and 1940, Soviet leaders referred to the efforts of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great to obtain a Baltic outlet.67 In March 1941 the novelist V. I. Kostylev, in an article in Izvestiya, explicitly presented Ivan the Terrible’s

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39

Livonian War as a precedent for Peter the Great’s interest in the Baltic, and implicitly for Stalin’s annexation of the Baltic states. 68 As we shall see, Kostylev’s article and other works about the Livonian War stressed the fact that the Baltic lands had formed part of ancient (Kievan) Rus’ which Ivan Groznyi was determined to recover. There was a clear analogy here with Stalin’s regaining of territory that had formed part of the Tsarist Empire in 1914 and this evidently had some resonance in 1940/41. A delegate to a conference on political agitation in January 1941 asserted that when discussing the three new Baltic republics he explained to his audiences ‘that these are buffer states, and that they used to be the tsarist provinces of Liflyand, Kurlyand and Estlyand’.69

The ‘Great Fatherland War’, 1941–570 With the German invasion of June 1941, the ‘defence’ theme again became more relevant. Even before that date, some of the more far-sighted Soviet leaders, anticipating an enemy attack, had called for the preparation of propagandistic historical works for defence purposes. The effectiveness of artistic works about Russian history was stressed in a report to Zhdanov from A. Zaporozhets, the head of political propaganda of the Red Army, in January 1941. Zaporozhets complained about the shortage of historical-patriotic propaganda to raise the morale of the troops. He called for more theatrical works such as Ivan Susanin, Suvorov and Field Marshal Kutuzov, and he suggested that films should be made on such themes as 1812 and the defence of Sevastopol’ during the Crimean War.71 Even earlier than this, in a speech in May 1940, L. Z. Mekhlis, Zaporozhets’ predecessor as chief of the Red Army’s political directorate, had evoked the tsarist generals Suvorov, Kutuzov and Bagration as military heroes who should feature in patriotic propaganda directed towards the troops.72 The Nazi invasion triggered a great outburst of propaganda about historical precedents, most of them already familiar from the late 1930s. Yaroslavskii’s Pravda article of 23 June 1941 cited Alexander Nevskii, Kutuzov and Bagration.73 Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevskii returned to cinema screens on the second day of the war, and in July 1941 the film was advertised by a poster in which Nevskii and a German knight cast shadows in the form of a Red Army soldier and a Nazi stormtrooper respectively. Throughout the war, the film was constantly shown at the front.74

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The Academic Council of the Institute of History, at its session of 27 June 1941, agreed to publish a number of popular pamphlets on topical defence themes.75 These included the history of previous ‘fatherland wars’ – a category which included not only the First World War and the Napoleonic War but also Ivan the Terrible’s Livonian War.76 The Baltic theme remained relevant, but the emphasis was changed from Russian claims to the area towards an exposé of German oppression of the Baltic peoples in the Middle Ages. The titles of the pamphlets commissioned were: German Aggression in the Baltic, The Peoples of the Baltic 700 Years Ago under the Yoke of German Invaders, and The Baltic under the Yoke of Germanic Interventionists.77 On 23 September 1941 the History and Philosophy Division held a session on ‘The History of the Struggle of the Slav Peoples against German Aggression, and Issues concerning the Common Culture of the Slavs’.78 (In April 1942, however, Agitprop received a complaint that the Institute’s plan devoted too much attention to the history of Central Asia (the Institute of History had been evacuated to Tashkent in the autumn of 1941) and was not paying enough heed to the struggles of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian peoples against Fascism.)79 On 7 November 1941 (the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution), when the Germans were only forty miles from Moscow, Stalin made the famous speech in Red Square in which he identified Russian heroes who should serve as a source of inspiration for the Soviet armed forces in the present crisis. The ‘great ancestors’ whom he invoked were Alexander Nevskii and Dmitrii Donskoi, Minin and Pozharskii, Suvorov and Kutuzov.80 The military orders of Suvorov, Kutuzov and Alexander Nevskii were introduced in July 1942,81 and these heroic figures were to be constantly evoked throughout the most critical period of the Soviet–German war. By 1944, as the tide turned in favour of the Soviets and the Red Army swept westwards, the defence theme had become less relevant. In February 1944 Bakhterov and Razumovskii, the authors of the successful 1939 play, Commander Suvorov, wrote to Stalin to complain that the Central Theatre of the Red Army had turned down their new play about General Brusilov, on the grounds that ‘since the end of the war was near, a military theme, especially in its historical aspect, was no longer topical’.82 The theme of territorial expansion, which had been so relevant in 1939–41, again came to the fore. The Baltic question, in particular, became pertinent once more. As the Red Army reoccupied Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia,

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41

a book by the historian M. N. Tikhomirov about the Battle on the Ice was withdrawn from the press for presenting too negative a picture of Russian expansion on the Baltic in the thirteenth century.83 With the military successes of the Red Army, new historical parallels were added to the repertoire. In 1944 an article in the Party journal Bol’shevik drew the attention of Soviet creative writers to some previously neglected themes which were ‘not without interest to-day’: ‘the struggle of Russia for the freedom of the Slavs, Russians on the Mediterranean, the struggle of Russia against German intrigues in the nineteenth century, Russians in the Far East!’84

The ‘Tatar yoke’ and the threat from the East All the historical analogies to contemporary Soviet foreign-policy concerns which we have considered above related to threats from the West, but in the 1930s the USSR also faced a danger from Japan in the Far East. The Tatar invasion of the thirteenth century served as an appropriate parallel for the current ‘Asiatic threat’. Such a comparison may have been implied in the 1936 attack on Dem’yan Bednyi’s Epic Warriors by Kerzhentsev, who stressed that the heroes of the byliny had fought against invaders from the east: ‘The names of the epic warriors’ enemies (Mamai, Tugarin, Batur-Batyi etc.) show that we are dealing with the struggle of the Russian people against the Tatar invasion and the attacks of other Asiatic peoples on our country.’85 Like Stalin in the 1930s, the early Russian princes had faced the prospect of fighting on two fronts, in the east and in the west,86 and the struggle against the ‘Tatar yoke’ served as a fruitful source of historical analogies to present-day concerns. The original screenplay for Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevskii mined this vein: entitled Rus’, it included episodes depicting the prince’s journey to the Tatar horde to pay homage to the khan, and his death on the return journey; this was followed by an epilogue featuring Dmitrii Donskoi, the victor over the Tatars at the battle of Kulikovo in 1380.87 Just as the Teutonic knights were depicted in the film as proto-Nazis, so the Tatars appeared as proxies for the Japanese, currently occupying the Soviet Far East.88 The concluding Tatar episodes were, however, omitted from the actual film: Stalin himself removed them from the screenplay, saying, ‘Such a good prince cannot die!’89 In the film the Tatar theme was retained only briefly, in the opening scenes. But Eisenstein evidently still intended it to provide an analogy to the current threat in the Far East: his biographer

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tells us that the director kept in a special envelope letters from both the German and Japanese embassies requesting tickets for screenings of the film in December 1938.90 Even after the abridgement of the Tatar scenes, Alexander Nevskii could be interpreted as a general ‘defence’ movie, with an antiJapanese as well as anti-German resonance. In his memoirs the actor Nikolai Cherkasov (who played the title role) describes how during the filming of Nevskii in the summer of 1938 news had arrived of the incursion of the ‘Japanese fascists’ at Lake Khasan: ‘“See how our historical theme is directly linked to the present day,” I exclaimed involuntarily, reading aloud the TASS communiqué.’ Cherkasov goes on to reflect on the parallel between the Russians’ defeat of the interventionist forces in the Middle Ages and the current events in the Far East, and describes (with patriotic piety) how the news of the battle of Lake Khasan had inspired the film crew to even greater endeavours.91 The theme of the ‘Tatar yoke’ began to appear in other works of the late 1930s onwards, for example in Shaporin’s cantata, composed to the text of Alexander Blok’s verse-cycle On the Field of Kulikovo (1908). The cantata was praised in Pravda as ‘a patriotic poem about the heroic struggle of the people for their independence and freedom’, with clear relevance for the present day.92 The 560th anniversary of the Battle of Kulikovo was marked (albeit somewhat modestly) by the laying of flowers at a monument on the site (near Tula), and by the dispatch of 60 party agitators to local collective farms to talk ‘about the heroic past of the Russian people and about the awesome events of 1380’.93 Sergei Borodin’s novel Dmitrii Donskoi was written before the conclusion of the Soviet–Japanese non-aggression pact in April 1941, but by the time that it was published generalized ‘defence’ analogies could be drawn between the ‘Tatar yoke’ and the German occupation. Reviewing the novel in Pravda, the historian Anna Pankratova noted that Donskoi’s achievement ‘inspires Soviet warriors in their great liberation struggle against the German-Fascist enslavers’.94 The novel was awarded a Stalin prize. 95 Commenting on this in his memoirs, the writer Konstantin Simonov observed that in Stalin’s eyes it had great contemporary significance: ‘The novel Dmitrii Donskoi describes the beginning of the end of the Tatar yoke, how it is possible to defeat those who have previously considered themselves unconquerable.’96 After Stalin’s inclusion of Dmitrii Donskoi among the ‘great ancestors’ listed in his Red Square

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speech of November 1941, a number of popular historical works appeared about the prince.97 Just as in the original screenplay for Alexander Nevskii the Tatars of the Horde were to have represented the Japanese, so were the Kazan’ Tatars in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. Part One. But the analogy rather misfired, since even a member of the Artistic Council of the Committee for Cinematographic Affairs commented in puzzlement, at a preview of the film, that ‘Kazan’ is our Autonomous Tatar SSR, a fraternal republic’.98 Aleksei Tolstoi, by contrast, in his two-part play about Ivan presented the conquest of the Volga khanates as the regaining of part of the patrimony of Kievan Rus’. In the second play, The Difficult Years, Ivan tells the Assembly of the Land: ‘We have brought under our rule the khanates of the Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ Tatars, who formerly tormented us under their yoke, and thereby we have restored the ancient frontiers of the principality of our ancestor Svyatoslav.’99 But Eisenstein’s film – perhaps because of the implicit analogy with the Japanese – failed to avoid creating the impression that he was celebrating Russia’s conquest of Kazan’ as a brutal colonial victory. In his conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov in February 1947, Stalin said that ‘having shaken off the Tatar yoke, Ivan the Terrible hastened to unite Russia in order to have a stronghold against all possible incursions by the Tatars. Astrakhan’ was subjugated but could have attacked Moscow at any moment. The Crimean Tatars could also have done so.’100 But by this time, the ‘threat from the East’ had acquired a rather different form. Stalin ‘said a few unkind words about the East. (Evidently Iran, Turkey, China – they had all betrayed us one after the other . . .)’, Eisenstein told Vsevolod Vishnevskii after the Kremlin meeting.101 The ‘great retreat’ of the mid-1930s had led to the incorporation of pre-revolutionary history into the campaign to promote Soviet patriotism in the face of the military threat from Germany and Japan. The popularization of Russian history took the form of press commemoration of the anniversaries of important battles, and also of the production of artistic works about major historical events and their heroes. In the choice of topics for celebration, the identification of historical analogies to current events played a major part. In the late 1930s the ‘defence’ theme was uppermost, and the favourite parables concerned heroic Russian resistance to foreign

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invaders. During the period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939–41, it became more important to provide historical legitimation for Soviet expansion westward by illustrating older Russian claims to the lands which were annexed. The German invasion in 1941 revived the ‘defence’ theme with a greater urgency than before, while the victories of the Red Army from 1944 onwards required the justification of Russian expansion into territories even further afield than those occupied in 1939–40.

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2 Three Case Studies in Historical Analogy

Following the overview of Soviet representations of pre-revolutionary Russian history in Chapter 1, the present chapter offers three case studies: Peter the Great, Alexander Nevskii, and Minin and Pozharskii. Not only are these historical figures important in themselves as inspirational heroes of Soviet patriotic propaganda, but they also served as the subjects of a play, a film and a novel by A. N. Tolstoi, S. M. Eisenstein and V. I. Kostylev respectively, each of whom was to go on to produce a work of the same genre on the image of Ivan the Terrible. The case studies provide an assessment of Soviet historians’ approaches to their protagonists, before focusing on their treatment by Tolstoi, Eisenstein and Kostylev. In each case, a brief biography of the artist precedes an analysis of his work.

Peter the Great In the previous chapter we examined the parallels between the Soviet present and the tsarist past which were drawn from the mid-1930s onwards in the realm of foreign policy. But there was one notable Russian historical figure with whom analogies had been suggested from an earlier date, initially in relation to domestic policy rather than foreign policy. Stalin’s first recorded reference to Peter the Great occurred (alongside his only officially recorded reference to Ivan the Terrible) in the context of the Party debates about industrialization in the late 1920s. In a speech on the economy in 1926, Stalin drew a distinction between the type of industrialization which was proposed for the Soviet Union and the development of manufacturing in general. To illustrate this distinction, he observed that Ivan the Terrible could 45

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not be regarded as an ‘industrializer’, although the rudiments of manufacturing had emerged during his reign. Not even Peter the Great, in Stalin’s view, deserved to be called Russia’s ‘first industrializer’: a true industrialization policy involved the development of heavy industry, production of the means of production, and especially machine-building, in order to guarantee not only economic growth but also economic independence.1 Two years later, however, Stalin was willing to concede that a parallel did exist between the Bolsheviks’ attempt to overcome backwardness and the economic policy of Peter the Great: ‘When Peter the Great, having to deal with more developed countries in the West, feverishly constructed factories and mills to supply the army and strengthen the defence of the country, this was a unique attempt to break the constraints of backwardness.’2 He hastened to add, however, that none of the dominant classes of pre-revolutionary Russia had been capable of overcoming economic backwardness: this task could be correctly identified and resolved only by the dictatorship of the proletariat in the course of socialist construction.3 It was perhaps Stalin’s own comparison between Soviet and Petrine industrialization that led the German writer Emil Ludwig, in an interview with the Soviet leader in December 1931, to ask whether he saw any similarity between himself and Peter the Great, and whether he considered himself to be continuing Peter’s policies. By this time, of course, the industrializing achievements of the First Five-Year Plan made the comparison even more topical than it had been in the late 1920s. But Stalin’s reply was categorical: ‘Not in any way. Historical parallels are always risky, and this particular parallel is meaningless.’4 Ludwig was not satisfied: ‘But surely Peter the Great did a great deal for the development of his country, and to bring Western culture to Russia?’5 Stalin in his response stressed the upper-class character of the national state which Peter had created, and distinguished it from the internationalism of the workers’ state which he himself served: Yes, of course, Peter the Great did a lot for the elevation of the landowning class and the development of the embryonic merchant class. Peter did very much for the creation and strengthening of the national state of landowners and traders. One must also say that the elevation of the class of landowners, and the assistance he gave to the embryonic class of traders and the strengthening of the national state of these classes took place at

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the expense of the enserfed peasantry, who were flayed thrice over by them.6 ‘As for me’, Stalin continued modestly, ‘I am only the pupil of Lenin and the aim of my life is to be his worthy pupil.’ His own task, Stalin said, was to elevate another class, the working class, and to strengthen not a ‘national’ state but an international one – the socialist state and hence the international labour movement. ‘You see,’ he concluded, ‘that your parallel is inappropriate.’ ‘As for Lenin and Peter the Great,’ Stalin added, ‘then the latter was a drop of sea-water, while Lenin was an entire ocean.’7 Ludwig persisted, however, asking Stalin whether his recognition of the role of historical figures did not contradict Marxism. Stalin responded with an exposition of his perception of the Marxist position: that individuals could and did make history, in so far as they correctly understood the circumstances in which they found themselves and how to change these circumstances. Ludwig remained unconvinced, observing that his professors in Germany had taught him that Marxism denied the role of heroes. These professors, Stalin retorted (prefiguring the attack on Pokrovskii a few years later) were not true Marxists, but vulgarizers of Marxism.8 Robert Tucker has commented on this interview: Ludwig was singularly naive if he expected a man who instinctively parried any attempt at probing his inner thoughts to give a candidly revealing answer to the question about Peter. That was not Stalin’s way. He did see a parallel between Peter’s role in history and his own, but he said it by indirection, for instance in his Central Committee speech of November 1928.9 Tucker’s assessment is probably correct, but Stalin’s explicit denial in 1931 of the existence of a historical parallel between himself and Peter the Great was to pose a problem for subsequent Soviet historians, writers and artists. The Party resolutions on history of May 1934 did not specifically refer to Peter the Great, although Stalin’s interview with Emil Ludwig was cited in a Pravda editorial as evidence of ‘how true Marxists understand the role of the individual in history’.10 Nor was Peter mentioned in the Party leaders’ ‘Observations’ of August 1934.11 In the press comments which accompanied and followed the official denunciation of Pokrovskii in January 1936, however, the Petrine

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reforms were among the topics singled out for attention. Bukharin accused Pokrovskii of ‘fear of giving true recognition to the relatively progressive historical activity of Peter the Great (in contrast to Marx and Engels, who recognized the positive significance of the Petrine reforms, which destroyed “barbarism”)’.12 The primaryschool textbooks submitted for the competition announced in 1936 were criticized for containing errors in their interpretation of the Petrine epoch. The Jury’s report complained that, ‘some authors idealize even such reactionary movements as for example the musketeers’ rebellion which was directed against Peter’s attempts to civilize contemporary Russia’. 13 In her introductory article to the first of the two ‘anti-Pokrovskii’ volumes of 1939–40, A. M. Pankratova contrasted Stalin’s views on the role of the individual in history with Pokrovskii’s. Like the author of the Pravda editorial of 16 May 1934, she cited Stalin’s interview with Emil Ludwig, presenting it as an example of the ‘profound and concrete nature’ of Comrade Stalin’s views of the historical role of individuals. She quoted Stalin’s comments to Ludwig about Peter the Great, describing them as ‘a model of concrete historical analysis and assessment of historical figures’, and as a ‘scholarly, concrete and profound Marxist-Leninist evaluation’.14 By way of contrast, she cited Pokrovskii’s view of Peter in his Russian History in its Most Concise Version: Peter, designated ‘the Great’ by sycophantic historians, shut his wife in a convent in order to marry Catherine, who had previously been the maidservant of a certain pastor (a Lutheran priest) in Estonia. He tortured his son Aleksei with his own hands, and then ordered him to be secretly executed in a dungeon in the Peter-Paul fortress. We have already noted how he suppressed rebellions. He died (in 1725) from the consequences of syphilis, after infecting his second wife as well.15 ‘Thus,’ Pankratova concluded, ‘Pokrovskii did not give a MarxistLeninist evaluation of Peter’s character, and did not demonstrate his progressive role, as Lenin and Stalin did.’16 In the article devoted to Peter in the second volume of the collection, B. B. Kafengauz also criticized Pokrovskii for his negative depiction of the great tsar. Citing Stalin’s interview with Ludwig, Kafengauz identified Peter as one of those individuals who could change history because they understood it correctly.17 Pokrovskii

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had been wrong to criticize Peter’s industrialization policy; unlike Comrade Stalin (in his speech of 1928), Pokrovskii had failed to give due recognition to Peter’s attempt to overcome Russia’s chronic economic backwardness. 18 And where Stalin in his interview with Ludwig had drawn attention to the exploitation of the peasantry in the Petrine state, Pokrovskii had virtually ignored the plight of the peasants and their anti-feudal protests.19 In his report on the primary-school textbook of 1937 the US Military Attaché singled out its treatment of Peter among those tsars whose ‘constructive qualities’ and ‘services in defending the Russian people’ were recognized: ‘Peter the First is described as an intelligent and active czar, and his reign is admitted to have been distinguished by its constructive character.’20 Nevertheless, the textbook did not provide an entirely positive picture of Peter, displaying the influence of Stalin’s criticisms of the tsar in his interview with Emil Ludwig: Under Peter Russia made significant advances, but it remained a country where everything was based on the oppression of the serfs and on arbitrary tsarist rule. The strengthening of the Russian Empire under Peter I was achieved at the expense of the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers, at the expense of the destitution of the people. Peter I did very much for the creation and consolidation of the state of the landowners and merchants.21 In the new History of the USSR textbook for university students, published in 1939, Peter was given a generally favourable assessment. The chapter by V. I. Lebedev on ‘The Military-Bureaucratic Empire of Peter I’ stressed the tsar’s active nature and inquiring mind, and described him as ‘the most talented and energetic representative of the ruling class of his time’22 But Peter’s character was not entirely idealized. He was described as ‘abrupt and coarse’; he ‘combined the talent of an organizer, strategist and diplomat with the brutality of a crude serfowner’.23 The textbook’s positive assessment of Peter was, however, criticized by Pankratova, who in her review in Pravda sarcastically wondered why the masses had rebelled against the ‘tsar-carpenter’, with his ‘calloused hands’, who was depicted as guilty only of ‘overstraining’ the capacities of the people.24 The secondary-school textbook, which Pankratova herself had edited, placed rather more emphasis on negative aspects of Peter’s reign, and – citing Stalin’s interview with Emil Ludwig – concluded that the main beneficiaries of Peter’s reforms, carried

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out at the expense of the peasants, were the nobles and merchants.25 In his discussion of the presentation of Peter the Great in Stalinist historiography, Nicholas Riasanovsky argues that Pokrovskii’s hostile image of Peter was replaced by a ‘bipolar’ one.26 The negative pole, based on Stalin’s 1931 statement to Emil Ludwig about the peasants being flayed thrice over, was critical of the Petrine state as exploitative, and regarded even its economic gains as class-bound, as Stalin had done in his 1928 speech to the Central Committee. But a more positive assessment of Peter’s foreign and domestic policy also became prominent, and individual historians and writers struck different balances between the negative and positive poles.27 But if the negative pole of the new Petrine image continued to be buttressed with quotations from Stalin’s pronouncements of 1928 and 1931, the question obviously arises as to where the more positive approach originated. Riasanovsky did not answer this other than with general references to the changed situation in the mid-1930s, with the ‘construction or reconstruction of society’, the ‘emphasis on the role of the state and centralized leadership in the late 1930s’, and the subsequent ‘great rise of patriotism during the Second World War’.28 But Robert Tucker has more recently insisted that Stalin himself was the inspiration for Peter’s new presentation to the Soviet people, ‘no longer as the premature industrial capitalist and syphilitic sadist of Pokrovsky’s textbook, but as an heroically striving fighter against backwardness and tragically frustrated Russian state-builder’. ‘The instrument of this transformation,’ Tucker continues, ‘was Alexis Tolstoi’.29 A. N. Tolstoi and Peter the First Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi was born in 1882, the son of Count Nikolai Aleksandrovich Tolstoi, a landowner and former cavalry officer who could claim distant kinship with Lev Nikolaevich (Leo) Tolstoi, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He was also related to Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoi, who had written the historical novel Prince Serebryanyi and the trilogy of plays The Death of Ivan the Terrible, Tsar Fedor Ioannovich and Boris Godunov.30 Aleksei Nikolaevich’s mother, Aleksandra Leont’evna Turgeneva, was a minor literary figure, best known for her children’s stories. In May 1882, while pregnant with Aleksei, her fifth child, she left her husband and children to live with her lover, Aleksei Apollonovich Bostrom, an impoverished landowner who was a liberal activist in local government. Bostrom brought the boy up as his own child,

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which led some to suspect that he was his natural father. Count Tolstoi, however, acknowledged paternity, and when he died in 1900 his will made generous provision for the 18-year-old son he had never seen. From 1901 to 1906 Aleksei Nikolaevich studied in St Petersburg at the Technological Institute: he began to dabble in literary activity and became involved in Social-Democratic student politics during the 1905 revolution. From 1907 he devoted himself full-time to literature, associating with the fashionable circles of the symbolists and ‘decadents’ both in Russia and in the emigration. During the First World War he served as a war correspondent for the liberal newspaper Russkie vedomosti; in 1917 he welcomed the February revolution and supported the efforts of the Provisional Government to establish democracy in Russia. He rejected the October revolution, and was appalled by the outbreak of the Civil War. In September 1918 Tolstoi left Moscow for White territory in the south of Russia, and at the beginning of 1919 he joined the White emigration from Odessa. Tolstoi lived in Paris from 1919 to 1921 before moving to Germany. In the spring of 1923 he visited Russia, and in the summer of that year he and his family returned permanently. Tolstoi’s decision to come back to Russia was influenced by the ideas of the White émigrés known as the ‘Change of Landmarks’ group (smenovekhovtsy), who saw the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921 as a sign that the Bolsheviks had abandoned their more extreme socialist experiments and who sought reconciliation with the Soviet regime as the only realistic embodiment of a revived Russian statehood. In April 1922 Tolstoi published in the Berlin émigré newspaper Nakanune an ‘Open Letter’ to N. V. Chaikovskii, a leader of the White emigration in France, who had criticized Tolstoi for his smenovekhovtsy sympathies. In his ‘Letter’ Tolstoi justified his position and asserted his desire to return to Russia in order to help to rebuild the shattered ship of state. The ‘Letter’ was reprinted in the Soviet newspaper Izvestiya, thereby paving the way for Tolstoi’s acceptance back in his homeland. By the end of the 1930s he had become one of the most famous – and certainly the most notoriously wealthy and privileged – of Soviet writers. The main literary work of Tolstoi’s career was his trilogy, The Road to Calvary (Khozhdenie po mukam), which described the fates of a group of Russian intellectuals before, during and after the revolution. The first volume, Sisters (Sestry), was written in 1919–21,

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during his period in emigration. Tolstoi did not begin work on the second part until 1927. Entitled The Year 1918 (Vosemnadtsatyi god), it dealt with the period of the Civil War, and it was first published in serial form in the literary journal Novyi mir (New World) in 1927. The third novel in the sequence, A Cloudy Morning (Khmuroe utro), was begun in 1928, but the author abandoned it at the end of that year in order to write a play about Peter the Great. He did not resume work on A Cloudy Morning until 1939;31 it was completed on the night of the German invasion of Russia, 21–22 June 1941.32 Aleksei Tolstoi had been interested in the Petrine period since 1917, when he wrote three short stories on the subject. One of these, entitled Peter’s Day (Den’ Petra), served as the basis of On the Rack (Na dybe), his play of 1928. Two further versions of the play were written in 1934 and 1938; a two-part film, based on the play, was released in 1937–9. In 1929 Tolstoi began work on the first part of a projected multi-volume novel about Peter, which was still incomplete at the time of his death in 1945, the first three volumes (which take Peter’s life up to 1704) having been published in 1929/30, 1933/4 and 1944/5.33 Tolstoi’s early treatment of Peter the Great was extremely hostile, influenced by D. S. Merezhkovskii’s novel Peter and Aleksei (1905). (It is possible that Tolstoi’s denigration of Peter may have been inspired by the same kind of anti-westernism as inspired Vipper’s adulation of Ivan the Terrible.) Nicholas Riasanovsky identifies two subsequent stages in Tolstoi’s depiction of Peter. From the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, he presented the tsar in a more nuanced and sympathetic light. The second phase, which lasted from the late 1930s to Tolstoi’s death in 1945, provided an almost entirely positive image of Peter. To this period belonged the screenplay of the film, the third part of the novel and the third version of the play. 34 Stalin’s personal influence on Tolstoi’s depiction of the tsar began in 1929, when he attended a preview of On the Rack and approved the play, regretting only that ‘Peter was not drawn heroically enough’.35 Tolstoi himself recalled that, ‘The production of the first version of Peter in MKhAT II met with a hostile reception from RAPP, and it was saved by Comrade Stalin, who back then in 1929 gave a correct historical assessment of the Petrine epoch.’36 Preliminary assessments of the play had been contradictory. When it was still in rehearsal some cultural figures had regarded it as

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pro-monarchist and hence counter-revolutionary, while others interpreted Tolstoi’s depiction of the tsar as a negative one, and viewed the play as an allegorical critique of the First Five-Year Plan. Stalin’s intervention encouraged the theatre critics to rebuke Tolstoi for providing too hostile a portrayal of Peter. 37 In 1934 Tolstoi duly produced a new version of the play with a more positive depiction of the tsar, but even this was criticized by Kerzhentsev in 1937 (in the aftermath of the Epic Warriors affair) for ‘depicting Peter as a drunken syphilitic’ and for exaggerating his debauchery and dissipation.38 Kerzhentsev’s criticisms may have reflected those of Stalin himself. According to the memoirs of the painter Yurii Annenkov, Tolstoi told him – in a Paris nightclub in 1937 – about the travails of revising the play: When I was writing it, you see, the ‘father of the peoples’ was reviewing the history of Russia. Unbeknown to me, Peter the Great had become a ‘proletarian tsar’ and the prototype of our Joseph! I rewrote it again, in conformity with the revelations of the Party, and now I’m writing a third and hopefully final version of the thing, since the second version also didn’t satisfy our Joseph.39 Thus although Stalin, in his 1931 interview with Emil Ludwig, had explicitly rejected the idea of a historical parallel between himself and Peter, Annenkov’s memoirs suggest that by the mid-1930s it was a fairly open secret that a positive analogy had to be drawn between Peter and Stalin. And the broader comparison between the Petrine era and the Stalinist ‘revolution from above’ could be made publicly. Tolstoi wrote in Literaturnaya gazeta in 1933 that: ‘The beginning of my work on the novel coincided with the beginning of the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan. Work on Peter was for me primarily an entry into history through the present, interpreted in a Marxist way.’40 The parallels were obvious to contemporaries. In relation to Part One of the film version of Tolstoi’s play, released in 1937, the US Military Attaché reported: ‘[Peter] is made to refer frequently to the great projects of construction, canalization, and public improvement which are only now being realized according to the plans of the present government . . . All references to the defense of Russia and to Peter’s projects for reconstruction are received with applause by Soviet audiences.’41 Thus by 1937 the military-defence theme was providing an appropriate analogy,

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in addition to – and obviously related to – that of economic development. Tolstoi was to write that: ‘In spite of the difference in aims, the Petrine epoch and our epoch are interlinked through a certain turbulent strength, and through explosions of human energy and will directed at liberation from foreign dependency.’42 In the third and final version of the play (1938) and in the second part of the film (released in 1939), the theme of treason and its connection with foreign designs on Russia was prominent, exemplified in Tolstoi’s treatment of Peter’s relations with his son Aleksei, who is condemned to death as a traitor by the Senate.43 The new stress on this theme was not accidental. In September 1937 – at the height of the Great Terror – Kerzhentsev suggested to Mikhail Bulgakov that in the libretto which he was writing about Peter, ‘It wouldn’t be a bad idea to show from time to time the role of foreign powers (espionage, for example, attempts to utilize Aleksei).’44 In relation to the 1938 version of Tolstoi’s play, Spencer E. Roberts comments that: ‘Writing this version on the eve of World War II, at the height of the anti-German propaganda campaign, Tolstoi makes every possible effort to draw an analogy between the political situation supposedly prevailing in Peter’s time (partly as a result of Alexei’s plea for intervention) and the expected invasion in 1938.’45 According to the Soviet editor of Tolstoi’s works, this last variant of the play showed, more clearly than the previous versions, ‘Peter’s patriotic aspirations, his great talent as a commander and organizer’. It reflected more fully ‘the heroics of the people’s struggle for the national independence of the Russian state’, and introduced for the first time ‘the theme of foreign interference in Russia’s affairs’. 46 The Baltic theme was stressed in the play, and – even more prominently – in Part Two of the film, which concluded with a great set-piece naval battle. Thus by the late 1930s parallels between Peter’s Russia and Stalin’s USSR were quite acceptable, and were even unofficially encouraged by Stalin himself; comparisons were made in relation both to domestic policy and – even before the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states – to foreign policy. The domestic analogies were drawn in relation to economic development in particular, but the theme of treason, which linked internal and external affairs, was also stressed.

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Alexander Nevskii The image of Alexander Nevskii as a patriotic national hero first came to public prominence in the report of the Jury on the competition for primary-school textbooks, published in August 1937. In its review of the ‘remnants of anti-historical, non-Marxist views’47 in the competition entries, the Jury drew attention to the fact that: The majority of authors, as a rule, do not give a correct historical assessment of the Battle on Lake Chud between the Novgorodians and the German knights, which halted the eastward movement of the German occupiers (the bandit-like Teutonic Order – the ‘cur-knights’, as Karl Marx called them) – who carried out colonization by means of the mass extermination and looting of the subjugated peoples. The absence of a Marxist evaluation of this particular event in the history of the USSR is the more impermissible because we have a specific evaluation of it by Marx: ‘1242. Alexander Nevskii acts against the German knights, and routs them on the ice of Lake Chud, so that the scoundrels were definitively driven back from the Russian border’.48 When the US Chargé d’Affaires in Riga sent a translation of the Jury’s report to Washington, he included its ‘emphasis on the defeat of the German knights of the sword at Lake Chudskoe in the middle of the Thirteenth Century’ in his list of points that were ‘not without interest, in the light of present-day Kremlin policy’. And a footnote to the report informed the Secretary of State that Lake Chudskoe was ‘[n]ear the present Estonian–Soviet border’.49 The Pravda review of the prize-winning Shestakov textbook approvingly quoted the author’s account of the battle: The German knights fell on the Novgorod lands with a strong army, destroyed the towns and threatened Novgorod with destruction. Prince Alexander Nevskii assembled his troops and met the Germans in a decisive battle on the ice of Lake Chud. The fight was a very stubborn one – the ice was red with blood. In this Battle on the Ice the Germans were unable to withstand the charge of the brave Novgorod warriors, and they fled. Alexander Nevskii pursued the enemy to the very borders of his lands. Thus the Novgorodians decisively repulsed the enemy and defended their land from the German oppressors.50

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Shortly after the publication of the textbook, the series of articles in Pravda ‘On the History of our Native Land’ began with a piece about the Battle on the Ice. This was decked out not only with references to the medieval Novgorod chronicle, but also to Marx’s Chronological Extracts (Khronologicheskie vypiski), in which he had made unflattering references to the German knights. The author drew explicit comparisons with the present day. He began the article by noting that ‘The German fascists dream of the seizure of other peoples’ lands’, and that they claimed that Germany had ‘historical rights’ to the Baltic coast, including Novgorod. He ended by reminding his readers of Nazi racial theories in which the Slavs were an inferior race destined to work as slave-labourers for the Aryans, and of Hitler’s expressed desire to expand eastwards at the expense of Russia, ‘following the route once taken by our knightly Orders’. The Nazis had evidently forgotten the ‘lessons of history’ taught by the Russians to the ‘cur-knights’, the author observed. ‘Well, so much the worse for the instigators of a new war!’ he concluded.51 A popular pamphlet by A. Kozachenko on the Battle on the Ice, published in 1938 with a massive print-run of 250 000 copies, drew similar lessons from medieval history. The final chapter continued the story of Russian–German relations on the Baltic up to the present day, engaging in crudely jingoistic fashion with ‘fascist’ historiography on the topic. The German press, the author noted, had described the Knights’ defeat of the Russians at Izborsk in 1501 as having ‘historic significance’, but in 1502 the ‘brave’ knights had had to flee, suffering from dysentery.52 The German invasion of February 1918 (‘assisted by the traitors and betrayers Trotsky, Bukharin and Ukrainian and other bourgeois nationalists’) had been repulsed by the Red Army, but now the German Fascists were preparing a new war against the USSR, and Hitler had written that he wanted to gain territory by marching ‘along the same route that the Knights of our Orders once trod’. ‘It is evident,’ Kozachenko observed, ‘that the lessons of history have been fundamentally forgotten by the German Fascists, if they do not remember how the German cur-knights fled back down this road, after their defeat by the Russian people.’53 In May 1937 Sergei Eisenstein was first approached about the possibility of directing a film about Alexander Nevskii. By the end of June it was agreed that the project would go ahead, with the screenplay to be written jointly by Eisenstein and P. A. Pavlenko.54

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S. M. Eisenstein and Alexander Nevskii Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was born in Riga in 1898 in a middleclass family: his father, of German-Jewish origin, was the city architect; his mother belonged to a Russian merchant family from St Petersburg.55 After her divorce in 1909 she returned to the capital with her son. On the outbreak of Civil War in 1918, Eisenstein enrolled in the Red Army; after his demobilization in 1920 he became a stage designer for the Proletcult. He studied with the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and became closely involved with the vibrant artistic and cultural avant-garde of the early Soviet period. His first film, The Strike, was made in 1924; it was followed by other revolutionary subjects: The Battleship Potemkin in 1926 and October (1927) which marked the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. After the release of The Old and the New (1929), which dealt with the collectivization of agriculture, Eisenstein travelled abroad, visiting the United States and Mexico; on his return in 1932 he found that the shift to a greater conservatism in Soviet art exposed him to charges of ‘formalism’. In the 1930s Eisenstein’s career ran into major problems. In 1934 he began work on Bezhin Meadow, based on the story of Pavlik Morozov, a Young Pioneer who was killed by relatives for denouncing his father as a kulak. In 1937, however, Eisenstein was heavily criticized for his approach to the topic, and the project was abandoned. Alexander Nevskii provided him with the opportunity to rehabilitate himself.56 According to his biographer, Yurenev, – and according to Eisenstein himself – the director was very enthusiastic about this historical theme, with its patriotic message and contemporary relevance. 57 Mikhail Romm, however, claims that Eisenstein was not particularly attracted to the figure of Nevskii, and accepted the commission primarily in order to redeem himself after the suppression of Bezhin Meadow. Romm states that Eisenstein was offered the choice of directing either Alexander Nevskii or a film about Ivan Susanin: ‘This was the time of patriotic films’, he adds wryly. Romm told Eisenstein that his own preference would have been Susanin: ‘there, after all, there is material, there is a topic, the epoch is familiar to us, many documents have been preserved.’ But Eisenstein preferred the Nevskii option precisely because there was so little source material for the period: ‘Whatever you do, it will all be correct: it’s impossible to refute you!’58 Eisenstein and Pavlenko faced a shortage not only of

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primary but also of secondary literature. Soviet historians were slower than the cinematographers in responding to the hints in the Party press, and the scriptwriters had to resort to pre-revolutionary authorities such as Karamzin and Klyuchevskii. Kozachenko’s pamphlet, the first popular study of the Battle on the Ice, did not appear until late 1938.59 In practice, the shortage of source material did not prevent the professional historians from criticizing the screenplay. At a meeting organized at Mosfil’m on 9 February 1938 a number of historians, including Yu. V. Got’e and N. P. Gratsianskii, expressed reservations about various aspects of the proposed film.60 Eisenstein did not, however, choose to accept all the advice he was offered: he insisted on retaining scenes of German atrocities in Pskov, in spite of the objections of Got’e and Gratsianskii – on the grounds of historical inaccuracy – to such a negative portrayal of the knights.61 The harshest criticism of the screenplay came from the historian M. N. Tikhomirov, who in a wickedly sarcastic article in the journal Istorik-Marksist condemned it for its historical inaccuracies and anachronisms.62 Criticizing the inclusion of the legendary epic hero Vasilii Buslaev, Tikhomirov commented that ‘the authors could have found real historical characters, if their source had been the chronicles, and not the libretto of the opera Sadko and distant memories of byliny which they had read in childhood’.63 And he mocked the depiction of a Polovtsian merchant who had brought a bear to Novgorod ‘from the forestless steppe, since there was evidently a great shortage of such beasts in the forested north’.64 Tikhomirov’s more serious criticisms concerned the representation of Alexander Nevskii himself and the Russian people whom he led into battle. The historian complained that Pavlenko and Eisenstein had depicted thirteenth-century Rus’ as having a lower economic and cultural level than it had in reality, especially in comparison to that of the German knights, so that the Russians’ victory in the Battle on the Ice had to be presented as the result of a ‘miracle’ rather than of their ‘courage and love for their native land’. ‘This screenplay is unworthy of the great historical past of the Russian people,’ Tikhomirov concluded, ominously.65 In relation to the Stalinized image of Peter the Great we noted that analogies were drawn between the past and the present in relation to both foreign and domestic policy, with the theme of treason linking the two. The parallel between Nevskii’s foreign policy and that of Stalin, whose words of defiance of the Nazis were echoed

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by Alexander at the end of the film, was of course an obvious one.66 Treason – a theme ‘so widespread in the pre-war years’, as Yurenev observes – was more prominent in the Rus’ screenplay than in the film itself,67 partly because of the removal of the scenes set in the Tatar Horde. In one of these episodes in the screenplay the Russian princelings were shown plotting against Alexander at the khan’s court, thereby demonstrating ‘that danger threatened Rus’ from two sides: from the Tatars and from the Germans, and also from internal traitors, thinking not about the Motherland but about their appanage intrigues’.68 In the film, however, treason is depicted primarily through the figure of Tverdila Ivankovich, who betrays the Russians to the knights, and is punished in the finale by being handed over by Alexander to the people of Pskov for vengeance.69 In the literary screenplay the prince was depicted as close to his people. Alexander describes himself as a ‘bast-shoemaker prince’ (knyaz’-lapotnik) and the Novgorod warrior Gavrilo comments that Nevskii lives like a peasant (smerd) in his home in Pereyaslavl’ – his wife Bryachislavna fetches water and makes cabbage soup herself.70 These examples were criticized by Tikhomirov as attempts by the authors to endow Alexander with ‘democratic features’ which he did not possess in his historical reality as a ‘Russian feudal lord of the thirteenth century’.71 Some of these details were removed from the film itself,72 although the opening scene of Alexander working as a fisherman, which Tikhomirov had criticized as ‘bogus and thoroughly improbable’,73 was retained, and in an article in Izvestiya in July 1938 Eisenstein stressed Nevskii’s close bond with the ‘Russian muzhiks’ as a source of his strength and success.74 The accusation which Tikhomirov levied against Pavlenko and Eisenstein’s Nevskii was later to be echoed in criticisms of the representation of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and others as ‘people’s tsars’. The anachronistic ‘democratisation’ of Russian rulers of the past was a by-product of the new patriotism which, with its stress on nation and state in place of the earlier focus on class, implied the existence of a sense of national unity and solidarity, encompassing both leaders and led. It reminded the émigrée Vera Aleksandrova of the old Slavophile ‘idea of a popular monarchy’,75 and it also implied a parallel with the Soviet leader’s relationship with his people.76 Alexander Nevskii was shot very quickly in the summer of 1938, with the scenes of the Battle of Lake Chud being filmed on artificial ice at the Mosfil’m studios at Potylikha in temperatures which reached 35 degrees.77 The filming was completed ahead of schedule in time

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for the anniversary of the October revolution: members of the Central Committee and the government previewed it over the holiday period.78 The critic Viktor Shklovskii refers to a nocturnal telephone call from the Kremlin requesting an advance copy of the film for Stalin to view, followed by a second, congratulatory call. 79 Alexander Nevskii was advertised in Pravda on 29 November as: ‘A patriotic film about the greatness, might and renown of the Russian people, their love for their native land, the glory of Russian arms, and their selfless courage in the struggle against the invaders of the Russian land.’80 The film met with an enthusiastic reception from critics and audiences alike.81 Pravda noted that the theme of the film reminded the Soviet viewer ‘of the sorry fate of all those who covet the property of others, who violate the honour and independence of our fatherland’, and quoted with approval Nevskii’s concluding words, as he frees the captured German knights: ‘Go and tell everyone in foreign lands that Rus’ is still alive. They are welcome to visit us without fear. But those who come to us with the sword will perish by the sword.’82

Minin and Pozharskii During the anti-Pokrovskii campaign, the draft history textbooks were criticized for their treatment of the Time of Troubles of the early seventeenth century. In an article in Pravda in January 1936, V. Bystryanskii complained that the textbooks had presented the First and Second False Dmitriis as revolutionary leaders of peasant uprisings rather than as adventurers and puppets of the reactionary Polish nobility. Conversely, they had depicted Minin and Pozharskii as counter-revolutionary figures rather than as leaders of a national-liberation movement against foreign interventionists. This ‘leftist internationalism’, Bystryanskii insisted, was anti-Marxist: communists should not reject a positive assessment of the past history of their country.83 The lessons to be drawn from this example are clear. Minin and Pozharskii, although they belonged to the merchant class and the nobility respectively, were now to be seen as national heroes because of their role in liberating Russia from Polish and Swedish occupation, while the False Dmitriis, although they led peasant revolts, were villains because they accepted military aid from the Poles. National interest, therefore, took precedence over class interest, and at a time when Poland was being presented as a potential military

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threat to the USSR, the Soviet people were to be reminded of the traumas of the Polish invasion of the early seventeenth century.84 Stalin himself had commented in 1935, in relation to one draft textbook which presented Minin and Pozharskii as counterrevolutionaries, ‘What, so the Poles and Swedes were revolutionaries? Ha, ha! Idiotic!’85 The danger that foreign invaders might make use of popular grievances for their own ends evidently gave the Soviet leadership cause for concern.86 Patriotism was now presented as a supra-class phenomenon, on a higher ideological plane than the mere economic self-interest which, according to the Pokrovskyist school, had motivated peasant resistance to the marauding Napoleonic army of 1812.87 Subsequent historical works on the Time of Troubles elaborated on this new interpretation. The first volume of the anti-Pokrovskii collection, published in 1939, included a long article criticizing Pokrovskii’s approach to the Polish intervention of the early seventeenth century. Far from representing the interests of merchant capital and noble landholding, Minin and Pozharskii were now described as heroic leaders of the entire Russian people in their defence of the motherland.88 No new academic monograph on the Time of Troubles appeared, but S. F. Platonov’s classic pre-revolutionary history was republished in 1937,89 and P. G. Lyubomirov’s Study of the History of the Nizhnii Novgorod Militia of 1611–13 was reissued in 1939. The publisher’s preface to the latter criticized historians of the Pokrovskii school for neglecting the ‘struggle of the Great-Russian people, who defended their national independence in the militia of 1611–13’, and praised Lyubomirov for stressing the role of the mass popular movement in the national struggle against intervention.90 A number of popular works on the period were subsequently published, particularly during the war,91 following Stalin’s references to Minin and Pozharskii in his Red Square speech of November 1941. After the German invasion, of course, the specifically antiPolish sentiments of the earlier representations of Minin and Pozharskii were less topical (the Poles having now become fellowSlav victims of Nazi aggression), but the patriotic sentiments of national defence and national liberation remained relevant at a more generalized level. As we have already noted, the most effective representations of historical figures for national-patriotic purposes came not so much in history writing as in artistic representations of historical themes.

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In relation to the national-liberation movement of 1612–13, the most important artistic works were the revival of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar under the title Ivan Susanin, and a number of works devoted to Minin and Pozharskii, especially Kostylev’s novel Kuz’ma Minin and Pudovkin’s film, Minin and Pozharskii. The references in the central press in 1936 to Minin and Pozharskii were quickly taken up by leading cultural figures. Elena Bulgakova recorded in her diary for 16 June 1936 that the Leningrad composer B. V. Asaf’ev had suggested that her husband write the libretto for a Minin and Pozharskii opera, for which Asaf’ev would provide the music.92 A contract was signed next day, and Bulgakov completed the libretto within a month. In spite of the fact that the idea for the new opera evidently had Stalin’s personal approval, it soon encountered problems: Bulgakov’s libretto depicted the Poles too favourably. But a greater difficulty soon emerged: the Bol’shoi’s planned revival of A Life for the Tsar meant that there was no room in the company’s repertoire for two operas which dealt with the same period of Russian history. Negotiations concerning a revision of the Minin and Pozharskii libretto continued for some time, but in the end the project was abandoned.93 By deciding to deal with the ‘national-liberation’ theme of 1611–13 through a revival of the nineteenth-century Glinka opera rather than by putting on a new Minin and Pozharskii by Asaf’ev and Bulgakov, the Bol’shoi was making a choice that provided an additional resonance to its treatment of a Muscovite theme. It reflected a broader tendency in Soviet cultural policy of the late 1930s which attached great significance to that part of the canon of classical pre-revolutionary literature and art which was regarded as ‘national’ (narodnyi) in spirit. Glinka’s opera, with its extensive use of folk melodies, fitted well into this new official canon. Many of the reviews of the Bol’shoi production devoted as much attention to Glinka’s musical genius as they did to the production itself or its patriotic theme.94 Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836) had formed part of a nationalistic cult of Minin and Pozharskii and the defeat of the Poles at the end of the Time of Troubles that flourished in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War, and especially in the heyday of ‘official nationality’ in the reign of Nicholas I.95 Ivan Susanin, the hero of the opera, is a peasant on a Romanov family estate near Kostroma when Michael Romanov is elected tsar in 1613. Susanin saves his young master from a detachment of Polish troops by leading them

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into a deep forest, and is killed by the Poles when they learn of his deception. Glinka had originally named his opera Ivan Susanin (the title of an earlier (1815) opera on the same topic by Katterino Kavos), but this was changed at the suggestion of Tsar Nicholas himself. The new Soviet production, it was claimed, not only restored Glinka’s own title, but also removed much of the ‘hurrah-monarchism’ that had been introduced by the nineteenth-century librettist Baron Rozen. Susanin now saves not Michael Romanov but Moscow itself.96 In essence, the revisions shifted the notion of patriotism from devotion to the person of the tsar which was the theme of Rozen’s libretto,97 to devotion to the Russian motherland.98 The patriotism and heroism of the Russian – and specifically Great-Russian – people was stressed in press discussion of the new production. The chief producer of the Bol’shoi Theatre wrote in Pravda that Susanin was a collective image of a Russian patriot, who combined the best features of the Great-Russian nation: modesty, moral purity, strength and stubborn dedication to the achievement of their aims.99 The Bol’shoi revival of A Life for the Tsar was originally intended to be staged for the twentieth anniversary of the October revolution,100 but this turned out to be too optimistic a timetable, and the new version of the opera did not receive its premiere until February 1939.101 Ivan Susanin was treated by the central Soviet press as an exceptionally high-profile cultural event. Pravda gave it an extraordinary amount of coverage. The premiere was preceded by two articles explaining the patriotic significance of the new production,102 and the premiere itself, which was attended by Kalinin, Voroshilov and Litvinov,103 received an enthusiastic review.104 Stalin was in the audience for the first time on 6 March and, on his personal suggestion,105 the finale was reworked to introduce Minin and Pozharskii on horseback.106 On 2 April Stalin attended the first performance with this new Epilogue,107 which was the subject of fulsome coverage in Pravda on the following two days.108 Ivan Susanin continued to feature on the pages of Pravda over the next few years. In January 1940 the newspaper displayed a photograph of a performance of the opera by the Sverdlov opera theatre, and in May 1940 it reviewed the Leningrad Kirov production when it was staged at the Bol’shoi. In August 1940 Pravda unusually carried a review of a ‘routine’ performance of the Bol’shoi production; in April 1941 it reported its hundredth performance; and in May 1942 the composer Dmitrii Shostakovich reviewed a Bol’shoi performance in Kuibyshev, where the company had been

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evacuated after the German invasion. Shostakovich drew attention to the appearance during the war of hundreds of ‘new Susanins’, such as the Soviet martyr-patriot Zoya Kosmodem’yanskaya.109 Before this, Stalin prizes had been awarded to both the Bol’shoi and the Kirov productions of the opera in March 1941.110 Minin and Pozharskii were the subject of a film by Pudovkin which was released in 1939 and won a Stalin prize in 1941.111 The Pravda review of Minin and Pozharskii in October 1939 stressed the topicality of its theme: At the present time, when the entire Soviet land is joyfully experiencing the liberation of the fraternal peoples of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia from the Polish yoke, our attention naturally turns to historical parallels and comparisons, turns to the events of the seventeenth century, when the Polish intervention was repulsed by the Russian people.112 The review went on to stress that the Russian nation was the real hero of the film, and that it showed the courage of seventeenthcentury Russians in defending their motherland from the Polish nobility.113 V. I. Kostylev and Kuz’ma Minin Valentin Ivanovich Kostylev was born in Moscow in 1884, into the family of a petty official. 114 The boy, who was basically self-taught in Russian literature, began to write verse at the age of eleven or twelve. Influenced by the style of Maksim Gor’kii, he met writers at the editorial office of the newspaper Kur’er. His first short story was published in 1903 and was followed by about 30 other stories in 1903–4. A serious illness around 1907 disrupted his incipient literary career, and he did not resume writing until early in 1910. His first story on a historical theme was written in 1912 to mark the centenary of the Russian defeat of Napoleon, but most of his work in these years was in the ‘realist’ tradition of Gor’kii. In 1913 he sent one of his short stories to Gor’kii in Italy, but received an unfavourable response which may have contributed to his abandonment of literary efforts during the First World War.115 Until 1917 Kostylev worked as a railway clerk.116 Soon after the October revolution he began to contribute to Soviet newspapers. At the end of 1918 he moved to Nizhnii Novgorod province on the Volga, and spent four years in a village, serving as a political

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propagandist at a timber mill. From 1922 he lived in the city of Nizhnii Novgorod, where he worked on the local newspaper, Nizhegorodskaya kommuna, and published short stories and plays in other local publications.117 Here he came into contact with A. A. Zhdanov, who was the regional Party organizer in Nizhnii from 1924 to 1934:118 Zhdanov may have subsequently served as Kostylev’s patron. It was not until 1935 that Kostylev published his first large-scale work. Entitled The Forest Storm (Khvoinoi shtorm), it was a novel about the establishment of Soviet power in a backward Volga village, a centre of Old Belief, in the face of opposition from kulak ‘enemies of the people’.119 After The Forest Storm Kostylev turned to historical novels. The first of these, entitled Pitirim, dealt with the eponymous bishop who had implemented the church reforms of Peter the Great on the Volga; it was based on a chronicle that Kostylev had discovered in 1928 in the Nizhnii Novgorod provincial archive. In the course of his work on Pitirim, Kostylev corresponded with A. N. Tolstoi, who was at that time engaged on his mammoth novel about Peter. Kostylev informed Tolstoi about Pitirim, and about the nineteenth-century writer P. I. Mel’nikovPecherskii’s plan to write a novel about him.120 Pitirim was published (in Nizhnii) in 1936, and it was followed in 1937 by a sequel, The Priests (Zhretsy), set in the reign of Peter’s daughter, Elizabeth. Where Pitirim had dealt with the struggle of the Orthodox Church against the schismatic Old Believers, The Priests showed the Church’s conflict with the pagan Mordvinians of the Volga region, who resisted conversion to Orthodoxy.121 Pitirim and The Priests had been intended as the first two parts of an anti-religious trilogy to be entitled Man and Gods (Chelovek i bogi), but Kostylev did not complete the work.122 According to his biographer, ‘Other, more topical and more interesting historical themes soon attracted the writer’s attention.’123 The first of these topical themes was that of Minin and Pozharskii. We have no reason to believe that Kostylev’s novel was officially commissioned, but the interest in local Volga themes demonstrated in his earlier literary works, 124 together with his manifest opportunism, made this an obvious choice of topic. His biographer Darkov tells us that Kostylev’s first historical novel, Pitirim, had been influenced by the Pokrovskii school of historiography and had taken a critical attitude towards Peter the Great.125 The defeat of the Pokrovskii school, Darkov asserts, had a positive influence on Kostylev’s work, inspiring him to conduct research for his novel on Minin at a time

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when the international situation was leading to the development of the ‘defence theme’ in Soviet literature. Darkov claims that Kostylev’s Kuz’ma Minin was the first Soviet historical novel to tackle the theme of national liberation against foreign aggressors: it was soon followed by S. Borodin’s Dmitrii Donskoi (1941), V. Yan’s ChingisKhan (1941) and others.126 Kostylev appears to have begun work on Kuz’ma Minin in 1936 or 1937; it was published in the literary journal Novyi mir, and as a separate volume, in 1939.127 The novel was clearly successful in capturing the spirit of the age. In February 1940 it was awarded the annual Maksim Gor’kii prize by the Executive Committee of the Gor’kii regional Soviet,128 and a year later a favourable review of the novel – by a certain N. Kochin from Gor’kii – appeared in the central press.129 Probably the most noteworthy feature of the novel is its stress on the role of the ordinary people in the national-liberation campaign. This is symbolized by the title, which singles out Minin alone as its eponymous hero; as the novel’s reviewer in Izvestiya was to point out approvingly, Kostylev depicts Minin as socially closer to the peasantry than to the rich merchantry and hence as a true popular hero.130 In addition, Kostylev is at pains to present the multinational character of the patriotic Muscovite people, as the reviewer again noted appreciatively:131 the Nizhnii Novgorod militia is shown to include representatives of all of the peoples of the mid-Volga region – not only Russians, but also Tatars, Mordvinians, Chuvash, Cheremis and Votyaks.132 The young Russian hero Gavrilka is eager to master the languages of his fellow-militiamen, and starts to learn words from them,133 until Minin tells him that this is unnecessary: ‘We understand one another anyway. We are all marching as one. Multi-ethnicity [raznoplemennost’] is no obstacle. We all have the same soul.’134 The multi-ethnicity of the liberation army extends to Ukrainians and cossacks, whom Kostylev presents as fellow-victims of the Polish nobility. In Part One of the novel the fugitive Ukrainian cossack Zinovii comes to Moscow as a volunteer to fight alongside the Russians against the Poles. He tells the Russian lads he meets (who have no difficulty in understanding his Ukrainian speech) that many Ukrainians have decided to flee to Muscovy ‘to their co-religionists’, and his tale of persecution is sympathetically received by the Russians.135 Later, Minin welcomes ‘fraternal’ Ukrainian cossacks into the new militia when he forms it at Nizhnii.136 On the basis of these passages,

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Kostylev’s biographer praised him for showing in the novel that the Ukrainian people had aspired to unity with the Great-Russian nation long before the Pereyaslavl’ Union.137 The patriotism of the ordinary people is stressed throughout the novel, and it is contrasted with the treachery and defections to the Poles of many boyars and nobles. Muscovite patriotism is presented as particularly characteristic of the lower classes, regardless of their ethnicity. At one point a detachment of Russian nobles under Ivan Birkin deserts from the militia, but the Tatars remain loyal, and Minin observes: ‘The Kazan’ Tatars care for the state more than the Kazan’ nobles do.’138 Earlier, Pozharskii has told the Tatars that they have a common interest with the Russians, Chuvash and Mordvinians in defending the ‘Muscovite state’ and the ‘Russian land’ against the depredations of the Polish nobles.139 The class nature of the interventionists is consistently stressed: Minin even persuades Pozharskii to accept some ethnic Poles and Lithuanians into the militia. ‘I think that the Polish people are of the same blood as we are,’ Minin says. ‘The Polish nobles [ pany] are our enemies, the squirearchy [shlyakhta], not the Polish people.’140 The only exception to this worthy multinationalism comes in the Russians’ attitude to an offer of assistance from foreign mercenaries, some of whom (including the French soldier of fortune Jacques Margeret) had previously fought for the Poles, while others (including the ‘voracious and perfidious’ English) are suspected of having designs of their own on Russian territory. The mercenaries’ offer is rejected on the grounds that their assistance is not needed, but Minin and Pozharskii send a detachment of troops to Archangel to prevent any occupation of the White Sea coast by foreign troops.141 Even after the German invasion of the USSR rendered the novel’s specifically anti-Polish sentiments outmoded, its patriotic theme continued to make it popular during the Nazi–Soviet war.142 In 1941 Kostylev co-authored a dramatized version of the novel that ran successfully during the war in the Gor’kii Theatre of Drama; Darkov tells us that the play ‘modernized’ the enemy, ‘endowing them with the features of Hitlerite cut-throats’.143 In 1941–2 Kostylev wrote a number of essays about Minin which were published in large editions by the military and other propaganda agencies. 144 The contemporary parallels that Soviet readers were supposed to draw from Kostylev’s novel are fairly obvious. Multi-ethnic Muscovy was a prototype of the multinational Soviet Union, in which all of the people had a common interest in defending their territory against

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foreign invaders. But while the ‘defence’ theme was paramount, the potential for a future expansionist foreign policy was indicated through the representation of the Ukrainians as fellow-victims of Polish noble oppression and as co-religionists of the Russians. Kostylev was to deal with similar themes in his next novel, about Ivan the Terrible. Our first case study in this chapter, that of Peter the Great, presented a historical analogy which related primarily to domestic policy. After his negative depiction of Peter in 1917, Aleksei Tolstoi returned to the Petrine theme in 1928–9. The ambiguity of Tolstoi’s treatment of the topic reflected a real dilemma: a negative (‘Pokrovskyist’) depiction of the tsar could be read as an allegory critical of Stalin himself and of the human cost of industrial development in the First Five-Year Plan, while a positive representation might appear pro-monarchist and counter-revolutionary. The problem was resolved by Stalin’s complaint that Peter was not presented heroically enough, and it subsequently transpired that an implicit parallel with the present day was acceptable in a literary work, if not in works of history or journalism. The Petrine topic was developed further in the later 1930s to illustrate the ‘military-defence’ issue, and the interrelationship of foreign and domestic policy was shown through the theme of treason, exemplified by the presentation of Tsarevich Aleksei not only as an opponent of Peter’s modernizing reforms but also as a hireling of hostile foreign powers. The other two case studies, of Alexander Nevskii and of Minin and Pozharskii, involved contemporary parallels primarily in the field of foreign policy, invoking the spectres of German and Polish aggression respectively. Kostylev’s novel also drew parallels between the multi-ethnic character of early seventeenth-century Muscovy and that of the USSR, and stressed the common interests of Russians and Ukrainians in resisting Polish oppression. In Minin, Kostylev had a genuinely popular hero; the setting of the novel in the interregnum of 1610–13 conveniently absolved its author from the need to depict a ruler and his relationship with the people. The presentation of Alexander Nevskii and Peter the Great as popular heroes was to prove more controversial. One consequence of the new Soviet stress on patriotism was the need to evoke a sense of pride in the achievements of the past, particularly in those events which most clearly demonstrated national unity (notably, military

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campaigns) rather than divisions (class conflicts, revolts and rebellions). The unity of leader and led, ruler and people, was an integral part of this picture. Where divisions did exist, they were shown to reflect hostile foreign influences – hence the stress on treason, which conveniently resonated with the charges against the defendants in the show trials of 1936–8. These themes were subsequently to be illustrated even more graphically through the figure of Ivan the Terrible.

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The First Steps, 1934–39

Part II The Stalinization of Ivan the Terrible

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3 The First Steps, 1934–39

The beginning of the ‘great retreat’ in historiography did not immediately produce any renewal of interest in Ivan Groznyi. The professional historians returned to the topic only when it was unavoidable, with the rewriting of textbooks in the late 1930s. The first incident in intellectual and cultural policy which related to Ivan was the strange case of a play by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s Ivan Vasil’evich Bulgakov’s works had been regarded as controversial throughout the 1920s, and by the summer of 1929 all of his plays were banned. In 1929 he had been working on The Cabal of Hypocrites (Kabala svyatosh), a play about Molière. The play’s prohibition by Glavrepertkom provoked the author to write a letter ‘To the Government of the USSR’ on 28 March 1930. After a telephone call from Stalin in April 1930, Bulgakov was allowed to work as a director at the Moscow Arts Theatre (MKhAT), but his plays were still not performed. Towards the end of 1931, however, his fortunes improved:1 The Cabal of Hypocrites was approved by Glavrepertkom on 3 October 1931, under the title of Molière, and soon afterwards MKhAT agreed to stage it.2 In early 1932, as a result of Stalin’s personal intervention, The Days of the Turbins, which had been banned along with Bulgakov’s other works in 1929, was allowed to return to the stage at MKhAT.3 But the Molière project encountered further difficulties. A biography of Molière which Bulgakov had written in 1932–3 for the series ‘Lives of Remarkable People’, was rejected in April 1933, apparently because it contained too many ‘hints’ about contemporary Soviet reality. 4 The same fate was subsequently to befall the Molière play, 73

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and also Bulgakov’s play about Pushkin (The Last Days), both for similar reasons: namely, that Bulgakov’s accounts of famous writers’ troubled relationships with rulers who sought to control them provided too close an analogy to the Soviet situation.5 In connection with Molière, Kerzhentsev complained to Stalin that Bulgakov ‘wants to evoke for the spectator an analogy between the position of the writer under the dictatorship of the proletariat and under the “arbitrary tyranny” of Louis XIV’.6 In 1933–4 Bulgakov wrote a science-fiction play entitled Bliss (Blazhenstvo), which dealt with the theme of time-travel. When the play was completed, however, the scenes set in the future were considered unsuccessful and even dangerous (anti-Utopian visions of the future were somewhat risky at this time), but it was felt that the episodes set in the past, in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, were quite harmless, and could be developed into an effective comedy for the Satire Theatre.7 ‘They’ve all . . . fallen in love with Ivan Groznyi,’ Bulgakov noted wryly. 8 The play, now entitled Ivan Vasil’evich, was completed by October 1935, and when Bulgakov read it to colleagues the theme provoked great merriment.9 The hero of Ivan Vasil’evich is an inventor, Timofeev, who is found at the beginning of the first act working in his apartment on a powerful new radio receiver. The communal radio loudspeaker in the hallway suddenly breaks into crackly life with the strains of Rimskii-Korsakov’s opera The Maid of Pskov, which is set in the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Timofeev resents the interruption to his concentration (‘I’m fed up with Ioann and his bells!’) and is appalled by the quality of the sound.10 Nevertheless, he falls asleep, and the rest of the play subsequently turns out to be a dream sequence. As a result of a mishap with a time-machine designed by Timofeev, Ivan the Terrible arrives in the inventor’s apartment, while two figures from the present day appear in Groznyi’s palace. One of these Soviet time-travellers is Ivan Vasil’evich Bunsha, the manager (upravdom) of Timofeev’s apartment block, a self-important minor official whose name and patronymic, of course, are identical with those of the Terrible Tsar; the other is Zhorzh Miloslavskii, a clever thief who has broken into the apartment of Timofeev’s next-door neighbour, Shpak. The plot subsequently develops as a comedy of imposture and mistaken identity. Bunsha plays the part of the tsar – very badly at first, the situation being saved on various occasions thanks only to Miloslavskii’s quick wits. But Bunsha soon grows into his royal role, shouting at the tsar’s Secretary and flirting

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outrageously with the tsaritsa.11 Back in the twentieth century, Timofeev’s actress wife, Zinaida, initially mistakes the real tsar for an actor in costume, but when she realizes what has happened, she persuades Ivan to change out of his royal attire into a modern suit – in which he looks uncommonly like his namesake, Bunsha, for whom he is subsequently mistaken by residents of the apartment block.12 Zinaida is planning to act in a film about Boris Godunov, and this, like the radio broadcast of The Maid of Pskov, serves to establish a ‘time-link’ between the era of Ivan Groznyi and Stalin’s Russia.13 In addition, Miloslavskii’s serendipitous discovery in Shpak’s apartment of A. K. Tolstoi’s poem ‘Prince Mikhailo Repnin’ not only provides him with handy sixteenth-century phrases to use in Ivan’s palace, but also supplies the pretext for the timetravellers’ choice of Muscovy as their destination: ‘Would you like to see old Moscow?’ Timofeev asks Miloslavskii, as the latter recites Tolstoi’s line, ‘Unceasingly feasts Ivan Vasil’ich Groznyi’. 14 Ivan himself is depicted in the play as a complex and contradictory character. On the one hand, he is hot-tempered and willing to resort to harsh and violent punishments: he threatens to impale Zinaida’s lover, the film director Yakin, for cuckolding Timofeev, and beats him up when Yakin tries to hire him for his next production. But the tsar is also shown to be impulsively generous: he offers Shpak compensation for his robbery, and grants Yakin an estate when he agrees to marry Zinaida.15 Sixteenth-century Russia turns out to be a harsh environment, and Bulgakov derives black humour from his twentieth-century characters’ expressions of indignation on hearing about its cruel practices: ‘That is a typical excess,’ Miloslavskii exclaims, when told that thieves are hanged by the rib in Muscovy.16 But the writer does not depict the full horror of the oprichnina, and the oprichniki themselves appear only briefly in the play: Miloslavskii sends them off to fight the Crimean khan.17 Glavrepertkom was worried about possible subversion in Bulgakov’s play, but reported to the Satire Theatre’s management that their five-person team had been unable to find anything suspicious in it. They did wonder, however, ‘Whether it might not be possible for Ivan Groznyi to say that things are better now than they were then?’18 Glavrepertkom remained unhappy. Bulgakova noted that one member of the Committee, V. M. Mlechin, had been unable to decide whether to approve the work: ‘At first he had looked for a harmful idea in the play. Having failed to find one, he was disturbed by the thought that it had no ideas in it at all.’19 This was a typical

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‘Catch-22’ situation in the censorship’s perennial search for ‘subtexts’ in literary and academic works. The historian Natan Eidel’man tells of a similar (possibly apocryphal) case: . . . a well-known playwright, who a few years ago wrote a play about Russian life in the eighteenth century, was subjected to harsh interrogation by the ‘relevant authorities’: what was the author hinting at, what was he implying? When he replied that there was no allusion, it was simply a historical subject, a historical situation, the officials were clearly disappointed, and they wanted to forbid the play because a higher purpose [sverkhzadacha] was lacking – just as they would have banned it if they had noticed that it contained one.20 In spite of continuing reservations on the part of the authorities, Ivan Vasil’evich was approved, subject to minor amendments, at the end of October 1935, and it went into rehearsal in November.21 At the beginning of 1936, however, the official attack on ‘formalism’ began, with the onslaught on Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth on 28 January and his ballet The Bright Stream on 6 February. Soon it was Bulgakov’s turn, with Pravda’s denunciation of Molière on 9 March. 22 ‘When he read it,’ Elena Sergeevna noted in her diary, ‘M[ikhail] A[fanas’evich] said, ‘That’s the end of Molière, and the end of Ivan Vasil’evich.’23 Molière was removed from the MKhAT repertoire that very day, but rehearsals of Ivan Vasil’evich continued. The Satire Theatre suggested some amendments to the play, the director, N. M. Gorchakov, even proposing the introduction of a Young Pioneer girl as a positive character. ‘M. A. categorically refused,’ Elena noted indignantly. ‘How could he take such a cheap step!’24 A dress rehearsal was held on 11 May, but – contrary to custom – without an audience. Bulgakova was dissatisfied with the production: ‘Gorchakov for some reason was afraid that the role of Miloslavskii (a brilliant thief, as M. A. had conceived him) was too attractive, and had asked [the actor P. N.] Pol’ to make up as a kind of pink piglet with funny ears . . . Yes, Gorchakov is weak, a weak director. And a coward into the bargain.’25 Two days later, the main dress rehearsal was held, again without an audience. Apart from immediate members of the Bulgakov family, the only people present were Ya. O. Boyarskii, the deputy director of MKhAT, and A. I. Angarov, the deputy head of the ‘culture and enlightenment’ section of the Party Central Committee:

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. . . and at the end of the play, Furer came into the auditorium, still in his overcoat and holding his cap and briefcase, – it seems he’s from the Moscow Party Committee. Immediately after the performance the play was banned. Gorchakov reported that Furer had said straight away, ‘I don’t advise you to put it on’.26 Elena Bulgakova’s account of the fate of Bliss/Ivan Vasil’evich in 1934–6 suggests that the suppression of the play was very much a by-product of the developing campaign against formalism and the renewed witch-hunt against ‘bourgeois’ intellectuals, rather than a specific response to Bulgakov’s treatment of Ivan Groznyi. As late as September 1934, Groznyi and his sixteenth-century Muscovy were evidently seen as ‘safer’ topics than a science-fiction future, and even in 1935 Glavrepertkom seemed more concerned about the play’s insufficiently rosy depiction of the Soviet present than about any incorrect representation of the figure of Ivan the Terrible. The decision to ban the play appears to have been taken at a relatively low level. There is no evidence that Stalin was personally involved: Bulgakova, who was always concerned to note evidence – even if only rumours – of Stalin’s interest in her husband’s career, is on this occasion silent. Bulgakov’s Ivan Vasil’evich is a fairly light-hearted piece,27 which primarily satirizes aspects of contemporary Soviet life. Nevertheless, its depiction of Ivan the Terrible may have provided some real grounds for official concern. As in the case of The Epic Warriors a few months later, the comic genre itself may have seemed inappropriate for the treatment of a historical topic at a time when the glorious Russian past was being harnessed to the cause of Soviet patriotism. It is undoubtedly also possible that Bulgakov was implying a parallel not just between Ivan Vasil’evich Groznyi and Ivan Vasil’evich Bunsha, but also between Groznyi and Stalin. Certainly the play has been interpreted in this way: a Russian writer recently referred to ‘the equals-sign placed by M. A. Bulgakov between the “house-managers” [domupravami] of Russia in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries’.28 The medievalist Ya. S. Lur’e also found elements of political allegory in the work, observing that its depiction of executions and torture ‘could have evoked very unpleasant associations’.29 There is evidence that some of Stalin’s critics were already comparing him to Groznyi. According to Isaac Deutscher, the oppositionists

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of the early 1930s referred to Stalin ‘as the Genghiz Khan of the Politbureau, the Asiatic, the new Ivan the Terrible’.30 In 1933 the future historian of Soviet Russia, E. H. Carr – then working in the British Foreign Office – compared the OGPU with the oprichnina.31 And Sarah Davies cites a letter to Zhdanov from workers of the Kirov plant in Leningrad in 1935, which criticized the Bolsheviks as ‘oppressors of everyone except their oprichniki’.32 As Stalin’s terror got into its stride, from the summer of 1936 onwards, the potential for analogy with Ivan’s oprichnina became greater, and so too did the need to avoid suspicion of subversive intent. It is thus not too surprising that historians came to depict the earlier terror not as the persecution of innocent victims by a paranoid tyrant but rather, in a manner consistent with the official presentation of the events of 1936–8, as the necessary eradication of despicable spies and traitors implicated in complex webs of conspiracy with foreign enemies of the state.

The new history textbooks Ivan the Terrible did not feature particularly prominently in the historiographical debates of the late 1930s.33 He was not mentioned in any of the key directives on history of 1934–7. In relation to the Muscovite period, the ‘Observations’ of 1934 complained only that the textbook synopsis had ‘lumped together: feudalism and the pre-feudal period, when the peasants were not yet enserfed; [and also lumped together] the autocratic state system and the feudal system, when Russia was fragmented into a multitude of independent semi-states’.34 The 1936 commentaries on the ‘Observations’, admittedly, noted that the textbooks’ authors had failed to realize that the Muscovite princes who acted as ‘gatherers of the lands’, creating a centralized state in place of feudal fragmentation, had played a positive and progressive role.35 But Ivan IV was not specifically mentioned. Nor did the 1937 report of the Jury on the primary-school textbook competition allude to Ivan’s reign, its comments on pre-revolutionary Russian history jumping from Kievan Rus’ to the annexation of Ukraine in the seventeenth century.36 Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, the new primary-school textbook of 1937 did not provide a significant ‘rehabilitation’ of Ivan37 – certainly not in comparison with its new positive image of Peter the Great, on which many contemporary observers remarked.38

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The Pravda review of the Shestakov textbook summarized its treatment of Ivan’s reign as follows: The process of extending the Muscovite state continues under Tsar Ivan IV. Ivan IV conquers the khanates of Kazan’ and Astrakhan’. Many Volga peoples fall under the power of Muscovy, and the Circassian and Kabardinian princes submit to her. Ermak conquers the lands of the Siberian peoples. Thus the Muscovite tsardom grows into one of the most important states in Europe and at the same time the national Russian state becomes multi-national. The oppression of the subjugated peoples is accompanied by an intensification of the yoke of serfdom. The peasants are forbidden to leave their owners even on St George’s Day. 39 The review did not mention the textbook’s treatment of the oprichnina. Shestakov had presented this as a means of strengthening the state by destroying the privileges of the boyars, whose treason had contributed to Russia’s defeats in the Livonian War. But he recognized that the peasants too suffered from the ‘plunder and violence’ of the oprichniki, which caused many of them to flee to the southern frontiers of Russia.40 The textbook for students in higher education, which appeared in 1939, provided a more explicitly favourable assessment of Ivan. S. V. Bakhrushin’s chapter on the sixteenth century stressed the contribution of Ivan’s domestic and foreign policy to the strengthening and consolidation of the centralized autocratic state. Bakhrushin’s summary of Ivan’s character stressed his positive features: No-one denies the great and strong intellect of Ivan IV . . . He was well educated for his day . . . and possessed literary talent . . . He was an outstanding strategist and a capable leader of military actions. Ivan the Terrible correctly understood the requirements of domestic and foreign policy and marched unswervingly towards his goal. In his aspiration to consolidate strong central power and in his plans with regard to the Baltic littoral he demonstrated his far-sightedness, and in this respect his activity was positive.41

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The textbook employed some of the methods of rehabilitation of Ivan that were to be used in subsequent years. Bakhrushin resorted to justification by analogy: the tsar was no worse than contemporary monarchs in Western Europe such as Louis XI of France, ‘who with no less cruelty carried out the liquidation of the remnants of feudal fragmentation’.42 And Ivan’s folk image was a positive one: ‘Folk songs retained a memory of Ivan IV as a dread but just tsar, and his name is linked with the notion of a brilliant epoch of the greatness of the Russian state.’43 Bakhrushin did not avoid the issue of Ivan’s use of terror, referring to his ‘great natural cruelty’ and noting that he ‘undoubtedly had some pathological features’,44 but the tsar’s cruelty could in many cases, Bakhrushin argued, be justified as a legitimate response to the treason of the boyars: ‘Ivan Groznyi recognized the necessity of creating a strong state and did not hesitate to take harsh measures.’45 Bakhrushin’s rehabilitation of Ivan was not without its critics, however. In February 1940, Nechkina’s review of the textbook in Pravda censured its authors for presenting tsars such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great in a positive way, reminiscent of the approach of bourgeois historians. The reviewer feared that readers might be puzzled as to why the masses had revolted against good rulers such as ‘the dread but just Tsar Ivan IV’ and others. It was ‘strange’ to find such passages in a Soviet book, she commented.46 But Bakhrushin was apparently unrepentant: Yaroslavskii and Polikarpov complained to the Central Committee secretaries in April 1941 that during a discussion of the higher education textbook in the Institute of History, he had declared that ‘If Pravda reviews are going to be discussed here, I shall leave the meeting’.47 The textbook for secondary schools, edited by Pankratova, was published in 1940. The chapter on the reign of Ivan IV, like that in the higher education textbook, was written by Bakhrushin.48 The summary of the tsar’s character was similar, but with a somewhat more negative emphasis, perhaps reflecting the editor’s own lack of sympathy with the revisionist approach (Pankratova had been a pupil of Pokrovskii). The textbook referred to the ‘dark sides’ of Ivan’s personality, and commented on the epithet ‘Terrible’: Ivan IV went down in history with the name of Groznyi. Contemporaries were particularly struck by his cruelty, which manifested itself from his childhood years, and developed in the course of his embittered struggle against the insubordinate boyars.

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This struggle also developed in him a pathological suspiciousness. Unstable and irascible, Ivan IV did not always take into account the consequences of his actions. In a fit of rage he killed his eldest son, Tsarevich Ivan, by striking him with his staff.49 The review of this textbook in the Party journal Bol’shevik criticized it for paying insufficient attention to ‘outstanding individuals’ in general, and in particular for failing to provide enough detail about Ivan Groznyi’s ‘progressive role in the creation of the centralized Russian state and the struggle against the boyars’. As for the executions to which noble and bourgeois historians had paid so much attention, these ‘were a common phenomenon in medieval feudal states’.50

B. G. Verkhoven’ An important role in the process of ‘revisioning’ Ivan Groznyi was played by B. G. Verkhoven’, a Reader (dotsent) at Moscow University, who in October 1937 delivered two lectures on ‘The Expansion of the Russian State’ as part of a course on Russian history taught at the Party School for Propagandists. Verkhoven’’s lectures were subsequently published in 1938 in a short pamphlet with limited circulation. This was liberally sprinkled with references to folkloric, literary and theatrical works about the tsar, including the historical song about Ivan and his son, Lermontov’s poem, The Merchant Kalashnikov, A. K. Tolstoi’s ballad Vas’ka Shibanov and RimskiiKorsakov’s operas A Bride for the Tsar and The Maid of Pskov.51 These references were presumably included for pedagogic reasons, but they also reflect the extent to which older artistic representations of Ivan were assumed to be part of the common cultural heritage even of students of the Higher Party School in 1937. Verkhoven’’s interpretation of the oprichnina provided the standard (‘Platonovite’) picture of a conflict between the service nobility and the boyar aristocracy, in which the tsar relied on the former in the interests of the centralization of his autocratic power.52 Addressing the allegations of ‘some bourgeois historians’ that Groznyi was pathologically suspicious, Verkhoven’ asserted that ‘treason had in reality insinuated itself among the boyars’ (although the only ‘evidence’ he cited was that of a folksong, ‘which correctly states that treason sits alongside the tsar’). In spite of Pokrovskii’s doubts on the subject, ‘treason really existed, and the most merciless punishment for traitors was

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necessary,’ Verkhoven’ asserted.53 But Verkhoven’ conceded that the oprichnina also had its reverse side, in its effect on the peasants, who fled from the estates of the disgraced boyars and fell victim to the service nobles of the oprichnina, who exploited them to a greater extent than their former masters. The consequent devastation of the countryside had contributed to Russia’s defeat in the Livonian War.54 A revised version of Verkhoven’’s pamphlet was published in 1939, with a massive print-run of 100 000 copies. This second edition, entitled Russia in the Reign of Ivan the Terrible, was very similar to the first, although it omitted most of the references to artistic works. It also added a few (unacknowledged) borrowings from the Shestakov textbook,55 and included a topical attack on Pokrovskii, whose ‘antiLeninist interpretations were utilized by the enemies of the people as a smoke-screen in their attempt to drag their counter-revolutionary distortion of fundamental problems of USSR history into historical literature’.56 In a report on the manuscript, the eminent historian Yu. V. Got’e commented that it was an ‘interesting and well written study of the condition of the Muscovite state in the sixteenth century’. He added: Some of the ideas of the author, who is inclined to justify Ivan in all respects and to see him as a militant patriot, are undoubtedly new, and may perhaps seem somewhat bold, but it seems to me that this is a matter of the author’s interpretation and explanation of the source-materials.57 The published reviews of Russia in the Reign of Ivan the Terrible, however, suggest that Verkhoven’’s apologia for Ivan was not generally accepted. I. Budovnits’ review in Pravda focused on the factual errors contained in the pamphlet, the ‘primitive’ nature of the author’s interpretations, and his ‘vulgar’ criticisms of older historians,58 while Got’e also concentrated primarily on factual errors without seriously engaging with Verkhoven’’s explanations.59 By 1939 the new more positive representation of Ivan had percolated through into general propagandistic and journalistic works. A Pravda review of an exhibition of Russian Historical Art at the Tret’yakov Gallery (itself part of the ‘patriotism’ campaign of the late 1930s) criticized some of the nineteenth-century depictions of

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Ivan (those of Litovchenko, Nevrev and Sedov in the 1870s to 1880s) for providing a negative picture of the tsar: ‘The complex activity of Ivan IV, who struggled against the boyars, who captured Ryazan’, Astrakhan’ and Kazan’, who subjugated Siberia, remains in shadow. Nearly all the works by these artists depict only the despotism of Groznyi, his cruelty and unrestrained malice.’ Only Antokol’skii, Repin and Vasnetsov – in the reviewer’s opinion – provided more complex and realistic images of Ivan.60 The news of Ivan’s rehabilitation was even conveyed at the 18th Party Congress in March 1939. V. I. Boitsov, the delegate from the Orel region, reported that the Party organization in Ordzhonikidzegrad had expelled a certain Comrade Pirogov for stating in a discussion group that Ivan Groznyi was a clever tsar: ‘The organization began to think, “How can this be? Ivan Groznyi was a tsar, and now he’s clever; all tsars were idiots, including Ivan Groznyi, and if Pirogov praises him, he should be expelled from the Party.” ’ This example of provincial ignorance was met with laughter by the Congress delegates, and Boitsov concluded his anecdote by assuring them that ‘The City Committee of the Party quickly corrected this mistake and fully explained to the Party organization why their decision was wrong’.61 Presumably the Party propagandists had explained to their comrades in Ordzhonikidzegrad that Groznyi’s state-building activity was ‘historically progressive’, and that valid criticisms of latter-day tsars such as Nicholas II should not be ‘projected into the past’ in order to tar all their predecessors with the ‘reactionary’ brush. But it is not surprising that confusion had arisen among the Party rank and file when even the professional historians displayed signs of uncertainty. Their task was made more difficult by the fact that Pokrovskii himself had regarded the oprichnina as a progressive phenomenon, so that in criticizing his views on Groznyi it was necessary to concentrate on his dismissal of the importance of the individual in history, and his underplaying of the role of the autocratic state.62 Is there any evidence that Stalin personally played a role in the emergence of a generally positive image of Ivan Groznyi by the end of the 1930s? Robert Tucker has argued that Ivan served as a role model for Stalin in his planning of the Great Purge from as early as 1934, the year in which he ‘decreed the rewriting of Russian history in such a way as to glorify Grozny as a past great Russian revolutionary from above’.63 Tucker’s arguments for Stalin’s personal direction of the rehabilitation of Groznyi from 1934 onwards are

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intriguing, but largely circumstantial and anecdotal.64 Nor does the evidence support his claim that Stalin derived a positive image of Ivan from reading Vipper’s 1922 biography.65 And although there are obvious parallels between Ivan’s oprichnina terror and the Great Purges of 1936–8, there is no unambiguous evidence that the latter were consciously modelled on the former. 66 While the rehabilitation of Ivan in the late 1930s may be seen as part of the broader patriotic campaign to praise the progressive activity of great state-builders of the Russian past, the specific apologias for the oprichnina were undoubtedly influenced by the experience of the show trials and purges of 1936–8. There is, however, no evidence at this date of a deliberate campaign, inspired ‘from above’ to legitimize the Great Terror through the drawing of parallels between Stalin and Ivan the Terrible; it seems more likely that the justification of the oprichnina was improvised ‘from below’, by individual historians. Many of the new textbooks of the late 1930s, as we have seen, stressed the fact that there were real conspiracies against the tsar. The issue was evidently a sensitive one, reflected even in the reissuing of older works. In the 1937 edition of Klyuchevskii’s Course, the editorial commentary questioned the author’s statement that ‘contemporaries do not mention conspiracies or attempts on the part of the boyars’, claiming that Schlichting’s recently published account indicated the existence of a major plot against Ivan at the end of 1560.67 ‘Proof’ that there was a real threat of treason was evidently considered sufficient to vindicate the terror. But if historians in the late 1930s sought merely to avoid suspicion of subversive analogies, a more active rehabilitation of the tsar was soon to be initiated. Overt justification of the oprichnina could serve to refute actual or potential criticisms of Stalin by opponents who sought to discredit him by invoking negative images of the tsar. Such parallels were very much in the air during the purges. The Soviet official Boris Steiger, for example, suggested to the British ambassador Lord Chilston that, in order to understand the ‘Trial of the Seventeen’ in 1937, it might be worth recalling the example of the boyars under Ivan the Terrible.68 It must have been clear to the Party leadership that if Stalin were to be described as a ‘latter-day Ivan the Terrible’, this had to be a compliment rather than a condemnation.69 Soon Stalin was to intervene personally to promote the rehabilitation of the tsar.

4 Wartime and Postwar Historiography, 1940–53

The official rehabilitation campaign An official campaign to promote a positive image of Ivan the Terrible was launched in the winter of 1940–1, with the commissioning of a play from Aleksei Tolstoi and a film from Sergei Eisenstein. Significantly, the main instruments of Ivan’s rehabilitation were to be literary and artistic works rather than historical studies.1 In this choice, Stalin may have been influenced by the success of earlier patriotic plays and films on historical themes: Zhdanov told Eisenstein that ‘the images of Alexander Nevskii and Peter had been resolved in the cinema, but Groznyi had had no luck’. 2 And Aleksei Tolstoi’s ‘Peter’ play was obviously the model for his ‘Ivan’ commission. Even before these commissions were issued, the idea of writing new works about Ivan appears to have occurred spontaneously to various cultural figures. Aleksei Tolstoi developed an interest in the earlier tsar when writing about Peter the Great in the mid-1930s, 3 and V. I. Kostylev conceived the plan for a novel about Ivan Groznyi at the end of 1938, at the time when he was working on Kuz’ma Minin. 4 The idea of an opera about Ivan Groznyi was in the air at around the same date. Elena Bulgakova recorded in her diary on 7 April 1939, ‘Today at the Bol’shoi Samosud said in front of M. A., Mordvinov and Melik that he was taking measures for Tolstoi and Shostakovich to write an opera about Ivan Groznyi.’5 Early in 1941 Samosud evidently raised the issue directly with Shostakovich, who turned it down on the grounds that the composer V. V. Shcherbachev was already writing an opera on the subject to a libretto by V. Ya. Shishkov (apparently for the Kirov Opera in Leningrad).6 In May 1941 it was announced in Pravda that the Bol’shoi was preparing 85

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an opera entitled Ivan Groznyi with music by M. Koval’ and a libretto by O. Brik.7 These proposals, all emanating from the cultural intelligentsia itself, coincided with initiatives from the Party leadership. At about the same time as the Tolstoi play and Eisenstein film were commissioned, the Central Committee secretary Shcherbakov, evidently on Stalin’s suggestion, proposed to the composer Tikhon Khrennikov that he should write an opera about Ivan.8 All of the operatic projects were abandoned because of the German invasion.9 ‘Fortunately for me,’ Khrennikov wrote, ‘no-one ever renewed a conversation with me on this theme, and other events of much greater scale and significance overshadowed it.’ 10 The Tolstoi play and the Eisenstein film were commissioned following the issuing of instructions (ukazaniya) from the Central Committee ‘on the restoration of the true historical image of Ivan IV in Russian history’. ‘The image of Ivan IV in historical scholarship and artistic literature’, it was asserted in a subsequent memorandum, ‘has been seriously distorted by reactionary noble and bourgeois historiography, and also by related publicistic and artistic literature.’11 We do not have the text of the instructions (if indeed they ever existed in written form – it seems more likely that they were Stalin’s own informal directives to the Central Committee secretaries), 12 but the reminiscences of Tikhon Khrennikov provide an intriguing account of Stalin’s views on Groznyi at that time. Khrennikov describes the conversation in which the idea of an ‘Ivan’ opera was raised with him. ‘I have just come from Iosif Vissarionovich,’ Shcherbakov said: We were talking about Groznyi. Comrade Stalin attaches very great significance to this theme. He interprets it differently from how it has been interpreted up until now: in spite of the fact that Tsar Ivan has been considered to be terrible, and that nickname has even become firmly attached to him, Comrade Stalin considers that he was insufficiently terrible. Insufficiently because, on the one hand, he avenged himself on his enemies but, on the other hand, he then repented afterwards and begged forgiveness from God. And when he was in a state of penitence, his opponents again gathered their strength against him and acted anew. Groznyi had to struggle against them again, and so on. So that it’s necessary to conduct an incessant and merciless struggle against one’s opponents and to destroy them, if they interfere with the development of the state. That’s Comrade Stalin’s position.13

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Other memoirs attribute similar views to Stalin. A common theme in all of these sources is Stalin’s criticism of Ivan for his failure to act sufficiently ruthlessly against his enemies. For the Soviet leader, it seems, Ivan was not so much a hero and role model as a precursor from whose errors lessons had to be learned. And the main lesson was that excessive squeamishness on the part of a ruler could damage the state. Anastas Mikoyan recalls that ‘Stalin said that Ivan Groznyi killed too few boyars, that he should have killed them all, and then he would have created a truly united and strong Russian state even earlier’.14 According to the writer Andrei Sinyavskii: In the archive of Aleksei Tolstoi, who wrote a dilogy about Groznyi which praised this tsar, there is the transcript of a telephone conversation with Stalin. Stalin personally rang Tolstoi, approved this piece, and in relation to the personality of Ivan Groznyi said that the tsar had one shortcoming. When executing the boyars, between executions he for some reason suffered pangs of conscience and repented of his cruelty.15 These sentiments are very similar to those which Stalin later expressed in his conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov in 1947. According to Cherkasov’s memoirs: Referring to Ivan Groznyi’s errors, Iosif Vissarionovich observed that one of his mistakes was that he did not succeed in liquidating the five remaining feudal families, and did not prosecute the struggle against the feudal lords to the end, – if he had done this, then there would not have been a Time of Troubles in Russia . . . And then Iosif Vissarionovich added humorously that ‘here Ivan was hindered by God’: Groznyi liquidates one family of feudal lords, and then repents for a whole year and prays for forgiveness of his ‘sin’, while he should have been acting even more decisively!16 The historian V. B. Kobrin has suggested that Stalin’s otherwise puzzling reference to five feudal families surviving the oprichnina may have been derived from A. K. Tolstoi’s play, Tsar Fedor Ioannovich, in which one of the characters states that Tsar Ivan, on his deathbed, had bequeathed Russia to ‘five boyars’. 17 It is possible that Stalin’s image of Ivan’s over-indulgence in repentance was derived from the same play. In one scene Tsar Fedor, on leaving the Archangel

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Cathedral in the Kremlin after a requiem mass for his father, prays: Father tsar! With how much repentance, Penitence and torment, did you expiate Your sins!18 And in the same prayer Fedor continues, still addressing his late father: You knew how to rule! Instruct me! Inspire in me a small part of your strength, And teach me how to be a tsar! 19 It may be that this passage influenced Stalin’s doodle of the word ‘Teacher’ on the back cover of A. N. Tolstoi’s 1942 play about Ivan.20 If Stalin’s own image of Ivan was indeed derived from a literary source, this may help to explain why he chose artistic rather than historical works as his instrument for the ‘rehabilitation’ of Ivan in 1941. There was of course an inherent danger in the commissioning of works about Ivan which were intended to provide a justification for Stalin’s terror. A negative image of the tsar was deeply rooted in the historical imagination of the Russian intelligentsia, and attempts to draw positive parallels between Ivan and Stalin were likely to be counter-productive. This was certainly their effect on Boris Pasternak, who learned of the official rehabilitation of Ivan at an early stage. He wrote to Ol’ga Freidenburg on 4 February 1941: You say that I am behaving splendidly, but I am on the brink of despair. As you know, the atmosphere has thickened again. Our Benefactor seems to think that we have been too sentimental and it’s time to come to our senses. Peter I is no longer the appropriate parallel. The new admiration, openly confessed, is for Groznyi, the oprichnina, cruelty. These are the topics on which new operas, plays and film-scripts are being written. No kidding.21 The task of the ‘restoration of the true historical image of Ivan IV’ was thus problematic from the outset, and it was to bring much grief to both Tolstoi and Eisenstein.

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The Livonian War If Stalin’s own thoughts about Ivan, as conveyed to Khrennikov by Shcherbakov, concerned an implicit comparison between the oprichnina and the Ezhovshchina, the timing of the commissions to Tolstoi and Eisenstein may have been inspired by a different parallel, that between Ivan’s Livonian War and Stalin’s annexation of the Baltic states in 1940. The regaining of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, which had become independent states after the First World War, reminded Soviet leaders of the history of Russian expansion in the area. Molotov told the Lithuanian prime minister, Vincas . . Kreve -Mickievicˇius in June 1940 that for reasons of state Russian tsars from Ivan the Terrible onwards had sought to reach the Baltic Sea.22 Stalin himself was more subtle. According to one source, ‘When the Lithuanian foreign minister came to Moscow in 1940 to sign the treaty that put an end to his nation’s independence, Stalin took him walking along the corridors of the Kremlin late at night and said, “Here Ivan the Terrible used to walk”.’23 The first public indication of the new assessment of Ivan Groznyi occurred in an article in Izvestiya in March 1941. Entitled, ‘Literary Notes’, it was written by V. I. Kostylev, the author of Kuz’ma Minin, who announced that he was currently working on a new novel entitled Moscow on Campaign which dealt with the epoch of Ivan Groznyi.24 Kostylev’s article was published on the very day that Aleksei Tolstoi announced that he was planning to write a play about Ivan.25 The timing was presumably not coincidental. The new commissions to Tolstoi and Eisenstein became public knowledge in the aftermath of the announcement on 16 March 1941 of their receipt of Stalin prizes for the novel Peter I and the film Alexander Nevskii respectively.26 It seems likely that Kostylev, whose work on his novel was much more advanced than that of Tolstoi or Eisenstein on their commissions, was entrusted with the task of initiating Ivan’s formal rehabilitation, possibly as a substitute for Tolstoi. 27 Judging by their subsequent problems, Tolstoi and Eisenstein were given less guidance on the new image of Ivan than was offered to Khrennikov by Shcherbakov. We do not know whether Kostylev was given any specific instructions at all.28 But his article, like the novel on which it was based, was very much in line with previous propaganda campaigns based on historical topics: it provided a precedent and hence legitimation for current Soviet foreign policy. Kostylev’s article displayed many features of what was subsequently

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to become a familiar ‘Stalinized’ treatment of Ivan. Some of these had already been displayed in the textbooks of the late 1930s. The author asserted, for example, that no pre-revolutionary writers had given due recognition to the ‘passionate, energetic and indomitable activity of Tsar Ivan, who achieved significant successes in the strengthening of the Muscovite state, both through victorious wars and through his outstanding diplomatic abilities’. Ivan had unified and centralized Russia, and he had introduced various administrative reforms that benefited the peasantry. The consolidation of the state had enabled it to survive the Time of Troubles. Kostylev did not pay much attention to the institution of the oprichnina and the reign of terror that accompanied it. He conceded that the tsar could be very cruel when anyone stood in his way. But in these respects Ivan was a child of his age. The history of other sixteenth-century European countries – Spain, England, France, Italy and Sweden – provided plenty of examples of violence. In Renaissance Italy executions took place on the basis of jealousy, hatred and dissipation, whereas Ivan’s executions reflected political terror directed towards traitors and the idle rich. Prerevolutionary liberal historians had distorted the term oprichnina by using it in a negative sense, whereas ‘in reality the oprichnina was created as a counterweight to the overbearing aristocracy, rather than to the people’. 29 Kostylev accepted that the policy had some negative consequences: Ivan based himself on the small and middle nobility ‘at the expense of pressure on the peasantry’. But on balance, he asserted, Ivan’s policies benefited the peasants, and they, in their turn, were devoted to the tsar. The energy of the ordinary people was channelled towards the defence of the young centralized state; they played an active role in the construction of fortresses and armaments; they served willingly in the army, especially during the Livonian War, and displayed great heroism against the enemy. Not only Russians, but also Tatars, Mari, Chuvash and Mordvinians fought in Ivan’s wars, and even the Caucasian mountaineers came as volunteers to serve the tsar in Livonia. The multinational army was harmonious and fought selflessly and courageously. Kostylev’s primary attention was devoted not so much to Ivan’s domestic policy, however, as to his foreign policy, and specifically to the Livonian War. The article opened with a quotation from a letter from Ivan to the Swedish king, insisting on the tsar’s commitment to obtaining Livonia for Russia. ‘We shall not cease to strive for the Livonian lands, until God grants us it,’ Ivan had written.

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‘In these words,’ Kostylev commented, ‘the whole man is revealed: stubborn and recalcitrant where the essential interests of the Russian state are concerned.’ And Kostylev quoted Marx’s comments on Ivan which presented him as a forerunner of Peter the Great: ‘He was persistent in his attempts against Livonia: their conscious aim was to give Russia an exit to the Baltic Sea and open the way to communication with Europe. That is the reason why Peter admired him so much!’ 30 Ivan’s contemporary critics (Sil’vestr, Adashev and Kurbskii), whose negative depictions of the tsar had so influenced later historians, were opponents of the Livonian War and resisted Ivan’s desire to reach the Baltic. They refused to see Ivan as a wise statesman, skilled diplomat and fine general. Ivan’s main motive in embarking on the Livonian War was presented in Kostylev’s article as the desire to regain for Russia the Baltic lands that had formerly belonged to her from time immemorial: towns with old Russian names, such as Yur’ev (Derpt), Kolyvan’ (Revel’), Novyi gorod (Neuhausen) and Rugodiv (Narva). Kostylev recognized that the inhabitants of these lands in the sixteenth century were predominantly non-Russian, but even the Livonian chroniclers had reported that when the Muscovite forces entered Livonia they were joined by hordes of friendly Letts, Estonians, Livonians and Finns. There were some significant omissions in Kostylev’s references to the Livonian War. Although he noted that Ivan’s aspirations to reach the Baltic were ‘at first crowned with complete success’, he did not point out that all the initial gains were surrendered when the war eventually ended in defeat. And he did not draw attention to the German nationality of the Russians’ first opponents, the Livonian knights. In his somewhat confused references to the broader international context of the war, he did, however, allude to the ‘vile policy of Poland, that had seized whole provinces from the German Empire’, and he noted that at an assembly of the German princes of the Empire in 1560 there were some ‘ardent supporters of rapprochement between Germany and Russia’. This selectivity can of course be explained in terms of the international situation in Europe at the time when Kostylev was writing, while the Nazi– Soviet pact was still in operation. Other works which appeared at this period also stressed the Livonian War and the topical relevance of the Baltic question. 31 An essay by Evgenii Khazin, published in May 1941, focused on the Livonian War at the expense of other aspects of Ivan’s reign.32 And an article by

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Got’e on the Baltic question in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries concluded that, in spite of Ivan’s failure to retain his gains on the Baltic: In reality Peter provided a long-lasting resolution of the Baltic question, and implemented Ivan’s plan. But the Baltic question was resolved in the interests of the peoples of the Baltic, who had not been free of submission to foreigners since the thirteenth century, only by the events of 1940, which united the free peoples of the eastern littoral of the Baltic Sea with the fraternal USSR. 33 The German invasion rendered the Baltic theme less topical until the Red Army’s reoccupation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in 1944, but a number of historical and artistic works about the Livonian War continued to appear throughout the war.34

The return of Vipper The most striking symptom of the extent of the turnaround in Soviet attitudes towards Ivan was the publication of a second edition of R. Yu. Vipper’s biography of the tsar in 1942. In 1923 – the year after the publication of the first edition – Vipper had decided to emigrate from Russia, to take up a post at the Latvian National University in Riga.35 After the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940 he returned to Moscow and (at the age of 81) became a Senior Fellow in the Institute of History.36 According to Volodikhin, a delegation headed by Emel’yan Yaroslavskii was sent to Riga to persuade Vipper to return, assuring him that he would not suffer for his criticisms of the Soviet system.37 The deal may have included a promise that Vipper would be elected as a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences: his name appeared on a list of officially approved candidates drawn up before he left Riga. 38 Vipper’s views on Ivan Groznyi had already been ‘rehabilitated’ by the time of his return to Russia. In the article on Ivan published in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1933, as we have seen, M. V. Nechkina had described Vipper’s book as the ‘counter-revolutionary apotheosis of Ivan IV as an autocratic dictator’ and ‘a direct appeal to fight against Bolshevism’.39 In 1939, however, the Encyclopedia’s anonymous article on the oprichnina praised Vipper – along with Platonov, whose views had also been denounced as counter-revolutionary in 1933 – for interpreting it correctly.40

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Following the German invasion of the USSR, Vipper was evacuated to Tashkent along with other members of the Institute of History. There he lived in the same apartment block as the historians S. B. Veselovskii and S. V. Bakhrushin,41 both of whom were eminent specialists on sixteenth-century Russia. The subject of Ivan Groznyi was a popular one among the evacuees in Tashkent. In March 1942 they discussed Aleksei Tolstoi’s play about the tsar; on 7 June 1942 Vipper addressed a session of the Institute of History on Staden’s account of Ivan’s reign; and on 17 June 1942 S. V. Bakhrushin and I. I. Smirnov also read papers on Ivan.42 Bakhrushin’s book about the tsar – a revised and expanded version of his chapter in the higher education textbook of 1939 – was published in 1942; 43 Smirnov’s short ‘scholarly-popular’ study would appear in 1944.44 It was in Tashkent that the second (revised) edition of Vipper’s book on Ivan was published.45 In his ‘Preface’ (dated 15 May 1942) Vipper claimed that his decision to reissue the book had been prompted by ‘the persistent advice and persuasion of my friends and pupils’. Although he had considered it necessary to familiarize himself with the new literature which had appeared in the intervening twenty years, Vipper added, he had been gratified to discover that ‘the basic propositions of my original work remained unshaken and have, I think, received renewed confirmation as a result of the researches of highly authoritative scholars in the past two decades’.46 Not surprisingly, the wartime editions of Vipper’s book included a handful of references to Marx47 and Stalin.48 The implicit comparison with Nicholas II was omitted: instead of enquiring, ‘What saved the Muscovite military monarchy from imminent catastrophe, why did revolution not follow on the heels of war?’,49 Vipper was now content merely to ask, ‘What saved the Muscovite military monarchy from catastrophe?’ But he offered a similar answer: ‘the political rationality and efficiency of the institutions, the skill of the dynasty, which was able to keep the social classes in strict subordination, the enormous scale of Muscovy’s military and financial resources.’ 50 Although some favourable references to the Asiatic nature of the Muscovite monarchy remained,51 Vipper toned down or omitted his references to Ivan as a populist or democratic monarch. 52 The main changes introduced into the second and third editions of the book involved the addition of new material. A section (Chapter 4, section 8) was added on Ivan Fedorov, the first Russian printer, the 350th anniversary of whose death had been marked in 1933, 53

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and a new section on enserfment was provided at the end of the chapter on ‘Ivan IV and Stephen Bathory’. The most significant amendment in the wartime editions, however, was the introduction of a new chapter entitled ‘The Struggle against Treason’. In his discussion of the oprichnina terror in the first edition of his book, Vipper had referred to ‘real or imaginary traitors’,54 leaving the question open as to whether the victims of the terror were or were not guilty of the treason of which they were accused. In the later editions, however, Vipper provided a detailed justification of the most intensive period of terror in 1568–72. He claimed that new sources which had become available since 1922 conclusively demonstrated that Ivan faced real threats in 1567–70. In 1567 a group of boyars headed by I. P. Fedorov-Chelyadnin had plotted to kill the tsar and hand over Novgorod and the surrounding lands to the Polish king, and in 1571 the raid by the Crimean khan against Moscow was supported not only by Russian traitors but also by the Poles and the Turks. The khan’s aim, according to Vipper, was not just to loot, but actually to conquer the Muscovite state.55 Vipper thus provided a ‘patriotic’ justification for the terror of 1568–72: the accused were traitors who aimed not only to limit the powers of the autocrat by removing Ivan as tsar, but also to destroy the territorial integrity and independence of Russia.56 The struggles against internal and external enemies were interrelated parts of a single crusade and patriotism could be invoked as a justification and legitimation for both. The new chapter in Vipper’s book was a version of the paper which he had presented to the seminar in Tashkent in June 1942. 57 The published report of the seminar stated that all four participants in the discussion – Yu. V. Got’e, V. I. Picheta, S. V. Bakhrushin and B. I. Syromyatnikov – had ‘unanimously acknowledged the great merits of the paper, which opened up new ways of investigating the times of Ivan Groznyi’.58 In fact, as G. D. Burdei has noted,59 the unpublished archival transcript of the discussion shows that at least two of the participants had considerable reservations about Vipper’s approach. Picheta criticized Vipper’s ‘idealization’ of Ivan, and questioned whether ‘all the terror which Groznyi implemented was determined by circumstances of treason, and whether Groznyi did not bring into the terror certain elements of personal irritation and dissatisfaction as a result of that neurosis which was characteristic of him’.60 And Syromyatnikov pointed out that the conspiracy of 1567 to which Vipper attached such significance occurred three

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years after the introduction of the oprichnina; he wondered whether there was a sufficiently real danger to justify the measures taken by Ivan. 61 Vipper himself, addressing the accusation of idealization in his response to the debate, admitted, somewhat disarmingly, that both his 1922 and 1942 works had been written ‘with a specific polemical aim’. He had wanted to oppose hostile views of Groznyi, but – he conceded – he might have gone to the opposite extreme, especially in ignoring Ivan’s excesses.62 Such criticisms of the terror, however, were confined to the academic seminar room. The 1942 edition of Vipper’s Ivan Groznyi was well reviewed, 63 and its publication helped to secure for its author the coveted status of Academician. In his reference supporting Vipper’s nomination in May 1943, B. D. Grekov, the Director of the Institute of History, wrote: The appearance in 1943 [sic] during the Great Fatherland War of the second edition of Ivan Groznyi constitutes a real event . . . This work by R. Yu. VIPPER is permeated with a feeling of authentic patriotism and pride in the Russian people and the builders of the Russian state. Ivan Groznyi – one of the outstanding builders of the Russian state, and the forerunner of Peter the Great – is presented against the general background of the universal history of the sixteenth century . . . And alongside this universal-historical perspective R. Yu. VIPPER’s book is permeated with the idea of patriotism and faith in the Russian people, their cultural-political capabilities, energy and attachment to their native land. This also makes R. Yu. VIPPER’s book particularly valuable precisely in these days of great trials of the historic strength and creative capacities of our people. 64 Grekov did not choose to stress either the Livonian War or Groznyi’s ‘struggle against treason’, but these were to feature prominently in subsequent popularized versions of Vipper’s work. In the summer of 1943 most of the historians returned from Central Asia, and on 17 September 1943 Vipper gave a public lecture about Ivan in the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions (Dom Soyuzov) in Moscow.65 In the lecture the contemporary relevance of the theme was stressed to a greater extent than in the book. Vipper began by emphasizing the need in wartime for the Russian people to examine the precursors of the great events of the present. The sixteenth century was full of these: the conquest of Kazan’ and Astrakhan’;

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Russian expansion on the Volga and to the Urals and Siberia; the wars against the Crimean Tatars; and the Livonian War – ‘the bloodiest and most prolonged in European history’ – with its aim of opening a window to Europe. 66 This colossal growth of the Muscovite state had occurred under Ivan Groznyi. Historians had tended to focus narrowly on Ivan’s domestic policy, but it was important to note the impression that he had made on foreign contemporaries. Observers such as Richard Chancellor had commented on the virtues of the service state, but Chancellor had not understood the cause of its evolution, which had been provided only by Stalin.67 Vipper had – he continued – adduced much material about the formation of the service state in a book that he had written over twenty years earlier. He now realized that his work had established a new historical interpretation of the epoch of Ivan Groznyi. The formation of the Muscovite state was the greatest event in world history: its overland expansion into Siberia had developed in parallel with the related phenomenon of Western European overseas expansion to the East and West Indies.68 Ivan Groznyi was, however, a more talented statesman than his European contemporaries; he was the last in a line of great Russian leaders: Alexander Nevskii, Dmitrii Donskoi and Ivan III. His success as a military leader was based on his patriotic feeling, which he shared with the ordinary people. Groznyi was not only the last of the founders of the Muscovite state, but also the first to lay the basis of the Russia of the future, and especially of its links with Europe: the Livonian War was the great cause of his life.69 Ivan was also a great diplomat, and his diplomacy was inspired by the idea of the reunification of all the Russian lands (an idea which Vipper described as ‘greatpower patriotic’ [derzhavno-patrioticheskaya mysl’]): 70 ‘The subjection of Livonia in Groznyi’s eyes was not a war of aggression, . . . but only the returning to the Russian people of the ancient patrimony of their fathers and grandfathers [“otchiny” i “dediny”].’ 71 After 1566, however – Vipper acknowledged – Ivan’s career went downhill, and this fact had influenced posthumous judgements of him.72 In relation to the various accusations made against the tsar – concerning his cruelty, the oprichnina and the punitive raid on Novgorod – Vipper drew the attention of his audience to the evidence of Staden and Schlichting, first published in Russian in the Soviet period, which proved the existence of conspiracy and treason in 1567. Thus the executions of 1567–71 ‘were not political terror – they were a struggle against treason’.73 Ivan was not excessively suspicious

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– on the contrary, he was too trusting, and ignored the danger posed by the reactionary opposition.74 The struggle against treason contributed to the failure of the Livonian War, and had an effect on the tsar’s nerves and personality.75 Vipper concluded his lecture by noting that Ivan Groznyi had created in the Muscovite state a prototype of the multinational USSR. The theme of the lecture was a topical one while the Red Army was fighting to defend the state that had been created by their forefathers. And as further evidence of its topicality he referred to Staden’s plan for the conquest of Russia, which had recently been republished by the Germans and enjoyed great success among the fascists: ‘The malicious myth, revived with their help, about the inability of the Russian people to defend their native land, has been refuted by the Fatherland War, and scattered to the winds by the heroic warriors of the Red Army.’76 Two days after its delivery, Pravda published a report of the lecture, which, it said, had met with ‘great success’.77 A Pravda report always serves as a useful indication of the ‘spin’ that the Party leadership sought to place on an event. It began by noting that Vipper had stressed Ivan’s contribution to creating and strengthening the Muscovite state, a point which was buttressed with references to Stalin’s views on the role of the ‘requirements of self-defence’ in the process of centralization of the state, and on the role of the Great-Russian people in the gathering of the Russian lands. In his policies designed for the consolidation of the state, Ivan was a ‘great ancestor’ of Peter the Great. The Livonian War had not been aggressive: its aim had been only to return Russia’s age-old lands. Groznyi’s ‘military, political, administrative and diplomatic genius, based on the patriotism and military talents of the Russian people, aroused astonishment in Western Europe’. In the second part of his lecture, Pravda continued, Vipper had adduced material that refuted the representation of Groznyi as a ‘senselessly cruel tyrant’. Tsar Ivan had had to cope with boyar plots based on secret agreements with Russia’s external enemies: Against such traitors to the Motherland the great Russian patriot Ivan Groznyi did indeed fight cruelly, implacably, passionately. This struggle against treason was closely linked with the defence of his state power and of his country, with the defence of the national interests of the Russian people.

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The report ended with Vipper’s account of Staden’s claims that the Russian people were incapable of self-defence (an account which was received ‘with particular interest’ by the audience), and quoted the lecturer’s concluding observations: Now this myth has been shattered by the uncrushable might of the Soviet state, and by the heroic struggle of the peoples of the USSR, in the front ranks of whom there fights the Great-Russian people, trained by centuries of liberation struggle, militarily gifted and overflowing with a feeling of profound patriotism. Less than two weeks after the publication of this account of his lecture, Pravda was able to report that Vipper had been elected as an Academician. 78 It is fairly clear – especially from the abbreviated version of Vipper’s book provided in his 1943 lecture, and from the condensed summary of the lecture published in Pravda – that Vipper intended Groznyi’s actions to be seen as precursors of Stalin’s. The precedents existed not only in foreign policy, with Ivan’s attempt to regain the ‘ancestral’ Livonian lands of the Grand Princes of Kievan Rus’ prefiguring Stalin’s bid to regain the Baltic provinces of the tsarist Empire, but also in domestic policy. The terror of the oprichnina foreshadowed that of the Great Purges, and both found a patriotic justification as the eradication of traitors who threatened to destroy the Motherland. By 1943 these themes – albeit with slightly varying emphases – were already familiar in Stalinist treatments of Groznyi, and they were soon to be elaborated further. Vipper’s work was unusual, however, in that it was a revised version of an earlier text which predated the Soviet historiographical tradition of the mid-1930s onwards. Vipper’s view of sixteenth-century Muscovy, expressed in his 1922 volume, was an original and idiosyncratic vision, but one with recognizable affinities, as we have seen, to contemporary ideologies such as neo-Slavophilism, Eurasianism and even the National Bolshevism of the ‘Changing Landmarks’ group. If in the early 1920s some intellectuals had welcomed the revolution in so far as it turned Russia away from the decadent West in order to recover her true Eurasian roots, then by the 1930s deeper analogies could be drawn between Ivan’s Russia and Stalin’s USSR: both were centralized ‘service states’ whose economies were dominated by military concerns. We do not know whether Vipper himself, by the time of his return to

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his homeland in 1941, had come to perceive Soviet Russia as ‘Muscovy Redux’, but his passionate evocation of the early Russian state clearly found a resonance in the wartime USSR. The revisions of the 1922 text made it more topical and relevant, by pointing up specific contemporary parallels, but they did not radically alter the overall tenor of the work.79 Vipper’s depiction of Ivan’s reign as the golden age of indigenous Russian statehood, still largely untainted by western influences, had served to console him for the disasters of 1914–21; in 1942, when Russia was once more facing catastrophe, the achievements of sixteenth-century Muscovy could again be presented as a source of national pride. In spite of their Stalinist apologetics, the wartime versions of Vipper’s Ivan Groznyi retained enough of the first edition’s idiosyncratic Slavophile-Eurasianist features to imbue their ‘Soviet patriotism’ with an unusual degree of intellectual depth and emotional intensity.

The Pokrovskyist revival The year 1943 marked the high-water mark of the idealization of Ivan: in 1944, when the military tide had turned decisively in favour of the USSR, the ‘Marxist’ historians raised their voices again to question the nationalist and patriotic tone of the predominant historiography.80 In May 1944, on the pretext of marking the tenth anniversary of the Resolution of 16 May 1934 on the teaching of history, the historian A. M. Pankratova wrote to the Central Committee to draw attention to what she considered to be ‘inadequacies’ in the Soviet historical profession. 81 Pankratova complained, in particular, about the rehabilitation of bourgeois historiography and the rejection of Marxist-Leninist positions. 82 She went on to criticize the current tendency to present monarchs such as Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and even Alexander I as ‘people’s tsars’. Eisenstein’s screenplay and Aleksei Tolstoi’s play about Groznyi, she claimed, were particularly guilty of a supra-class depiction of rulers. ‘This idealization’, Pankratova observed, ‘stems from the fact that the authors in their historical or historical-artistic works, contrary to the precepts of Marxist theory, present the historical process as the activity of individual tsars and commanders, without showing and analysing the role of the popular masses and various social classes.’ 83 Partly as a result of Pankratova’s intercession with Zhdanov, the Central Committee organized a series of meetings on Russian history that took place in Moscow between May and July 1944. Before these

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meetings, some of Pankratova’s critics in the Party leadership mobilized to prepare a document of their own, accusing her and her co-authors of the history textbooks of the late 1930s of painting too negative a picture of tsarist Russia. Pankratova and her associates were criticized as Pokrovskyists, while at the other extreme Yakovlev, Tarle, Grekov and others were accused of ‘great-power chauvinism’.84 The influence of Pokrovskii was detected in the USSR history textbook for secondary schools, edited by Pankratova, and in its higher education equivalent. Among the examples of outstanding figures who had been denigrated in Pankratova’s textbook was Ivan Groznyi; here the authors of the memorandum quoted the references to Ivan’s cruelty and ‘pathological suspiciousness’. 85 Objections were also made to similar passages in Bakhrushin’s chapter on Ivan in the higher education textbook, including the sentences: ‘The psychiatrist Kovalenskii came to the conclusion that Ivan IV suffered from psychopathological perversions’; and ‘The depravity and drunkenness to which he was unrestrainedly devoted aged him prematurely, and he died well short of the fullness of his years’. 86 At the meetings themselves, a wide range of views was expressed.87 On the one hand the philosopher Kh. G. Adzhemyan praised the constructive state-building role of rulers and generals such as Dmitrii Donskoi, Alexander Nevskii, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Suvorov, and condemned the destructive anti-statist actions of such erstwhile heroes of Soviet historiography as Bolotnikov, Razin, Pugachev, Radishchev and the Decembrists.88 Popular support for heroic rulers of the past, Adzhemyan asserted, provided parallels to the union of leader and people in the Soviet Union at the present time.89 Bakhrushin, in turn, defended the post-Pokrovskii depiction of Ivan IV as ‘a great statesman who smashes the remains of feudal fragmentation and lays the basis for the further development of the absolutist state’.90 On the other hand N. L. Rubinshtein criticized the idealization of some of the darkest aspects of tsarism – citing as an example of this the positive depiction of Ivan the Terrible and the oprichnina in Aleksei Tolstoi’s play and in the screenplay for Eisenstein’s film.91 Even K. V. Bazilevich, who had written the relevant chapter in the anti-Pokrovskii volume of 1939, felt that the rehabilitation of Ivan had gone too far. Ivan’s image now lacked any contextualization, he said, so that the first tsar was now praised in terms virtually indistinguishable from those applied to Peter the Great. Popularizing and artistic works of historical literature, he claimed, were particularly guilty in this respect. 92

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After the historians’ meetings, Zhdanov was entrusted with the task of preparing official directives on history. Various drafts were produced, but no agreed final version was ever published.93 Zhdanov tried to steer a middle course, identifying two distinct types of ‘errors’ current among Soviet historians. The first of these was a bourgeois deviation, whose adherents (Zhdanov named Adzhemyan, Yakovlev and Tarle) had revived a great-power nationalist ideology, justifying the colonial-annexationist policies of tsarism and defending the expansion of the Russian state. The opposite deviation was a Pokrovskyist one. Historians influenced by the Pokrovskii school depicted all of tsarist Russian history in the blackest terms, failing to recognize that some phenomena which were reactionary by twentieth-century standards had been ‘progressive’ at certain periods in the past.94 Among the phenomena which Zhdanov cited as ‘progressive for their time’ was the reign of Ivan IV. The Pokrovskyist historians, he claimed, had not distanced themselves sufficiently from the views of nineteenth-century noblemen such as Karamzin and A. K. Tolstoi. A true Marxist assessment of Ivan needed to take into account the ‘concrete historical circumstances’ of his time. The requirements of economic development and of military defence demanded the strengthening of centralized state power. Groznyi’s attempts to overcome feudal fragmentation had provoked opposition and treason on the part of the boyars, but with the support of the small service nobles the tsar had succeeded in consolidating his absolute power. The Pokrovskyist approach to history as ‘politics projected into the past’ had led to a view of Ivan as a reactionary and oppressive figure: ‘Yet, however repugnant Groznyi’s techniques and means – his numerous executions and tortures – might seem to us and to our contemporaries, Groznyi’s activity was progressive, because it struck a blow against feudal reaction, facilitated the acceleration of the historical process and turned Russia into a mighty centralized power.’ 95 Zhdanov’s description of Ivan’s methods as ‘repugnant’ by twentieth-century standards was of course grossly hypocritical, coming as it did from a member of Stalin’s closest entourage who shared responsibility for the purges, but perhaps as a partial concession to neo-Pokrovskyists such as Pankratova and Rubinshtein, he signally failed to provide the standard defences of the oprichnina terror – as reflecting the spirit of the age or as a legitimate response to treason – which had characterized the apologias of Vipper, Bakhrushin and others.

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The conflict between the two schools of thought remained largely unresolved in the closing years of the war. Pankratova suffered most when she was removed from her post as Deputy Director of the Institute of History because of her breach of Party discipline in circulating conference materials.96 Some may have hoped that the victorious end of the war against Germany would diminish the need for ‘patriotic’ propaganda and strengthen the position of the ‘Pokrovskyist’ historians, but the subsequent development of the Cold War perpetuated Russian nationalism, adding a bizarre antiwestern twist to pre-existing ideological tendencies.

The Zhdanovshchina The advent of the Cold War brought with it the mass campaign known as the Zhdanovshchina, with its notorious attacks on ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ and ‘kowtowing to foreigners’. The onset of the Zhdanovshchina was marked by the publication of a number of Central Committee resolutions: on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad on 14 August 1946; ‘On the Repertoire of Dramatic Theatres’ of 26 August; and ‘On the Film, A Great Life [Bol’shaya zhizn’]’ of 4 September. The last of these criticized Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible, Part Two for its erroneous presentation of the tsar as a Hamlet-type figure, and of the oprichniki as a gang of degenerates resembling the Ku-Klux-Klan. 97 Echoes of the official chauvinism which marked the Zhdanovshchina can be found in Stalin’s comments about Ivan in his conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov in February 1947. Stalin compared Ivan’s attitude to foreigners favourably with Peter the Great’s. Peter ‘was too liberal in relation to foreigners, opened the gates too wide and let foreign influence into the country, having allowed Russia to become Germanized’. Ivan, by contrast, ‘was a more national, more prudent tsar’: ‘Ivan the Terrible’s wisdom was that he championed the national point of view and did not let foreigners into his country, safeguarding it against penetration by foreign influences.’98 Stalin’s personal views on the reign of Ivan IV were first made public only in condensed form in Cherkasov’s memoirs (1953), but the reference to the oprichnina as a ‘progressive force’, and to Ivan Groznyi himself as a man ‘with a strong will and character’ in the Central Committee resolution of 4 September 1946 made the official line clear.99 The effects of the Zhdanovshchina on scholarship relating to the

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reign of Ivan Groznyi can be seen most clearly in the fate of the historian S. B. Veselovskii. Veselovskii had begun to take a particular interest in sixteenth-century history in the late 1930s; during the war he was very critical of the literary images of Ivan Groznyi presented by V. I. Kostylev and A. N. Tolstoi. In 1946 Veselovskii published a learned article which criticized Platonov’s interpretation of the oprichnina as a major state reform, and reasserted Klyuchevskii’s view of it as meaningless terror directed against individuals rather than against the social structure. 100 It was evidently Veselovskii’s great academic eminence (he had been a Corresponding Member of the Academy since 1929) and the fact that the article was a scholarly rather than a popular piece of work that enabled it to be published. In November 1946 Veselovskii was elected a full Academician. His testimonial from the Expert Commission of the History and Philosophy Division described him as ‘a major specialist on USSR history, especially in relation to the history of the economy, class relations and state structure of Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, and Grekov, in response to a question about the relative merits of Veselovskii and Bakhrushin, replied that the Commission had concluded that ‘no-one can now compete with Stepan Borisovich Veselovskii’.101 In the event, the candidacy of the more conformist Bakhrushin was rejected, indicating that the Division’s judgements were still governed primarily by academic rather than ideological criteria, even at this late date. But the clouds were gathering over the Institute of History. In 1947 Veselovskii’s major work on feudal landholding was published, but with a controversial anonymous Preface whose criticisms of the work amounted to an acknowledgement that Veselovskii’s was not an orthodox Marxist-Leninist approach to the subject.102 In September 1948 an article in Literaturnaya gazeta condemned the Institute for, among other things, allowing Veselovskii’s book to be published. 103 A review by I. I. Smirnov in Voprosy istorii, entitled ‘From the Position of Bourgeois Historiography’, not only attacked Veselovskii himself for his non-Marxist approach but also criticized the anonymous authors of the Preface – and by extension the entire Institute of History – for having justified the publication of such a defective work. 104 When the Academic Council of the Institute met in October 1948 to discuss these criticisms, Bakhrushin led the attack on Veselovskii, equating his views with those of Solov’ev and Klyuchevskii, and admitting that the Division’s policy of allowing his book to be published with the critical preface did indeed amount

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to the ‘conciliationism’ of which it had been accused. Bakhrushin also acknowledged that the publication of Veselovskii’s 1946 article on the oprichnina in Voprosy istorii had been a mistake, since the article had ‘provoked great bewilderment among young students’. 105 By 1949, in the context of the ‘struggle against bourgeois cosmopolitanism’, Veselovskii was accused not only of reviving the ‘bourgeois-objectivist’ views of Klyuchevskii in his 1946 article on the oprichnina, but also of being ‘anti-patriotic’ for referring to the works of western scholars in his book on feudal landholding.106 It may have been an unspoken concern of Veselovskii’s critics that in condemning the oprichnina as a senseless policy which undermined the military strength of the state, he was indirectly attacking Stalin. That such parallels were commonplace at this time is illustrated by anecdotes recounted later by two eminent specialists on the sixteenth century. S. O. Shmidt recalled in an interview in 1988 that when he had applied for membership of the Party in 1945, the suspicion of the local secretary was aroused by the fact that the historian was writing his dissertation about Adashev. Surely Adashev had been ‘against Groznyi’, the secretary had observed, and his brother was executed for treason? Shmidt saved the situation only by citing Marx’s favourable comments about Adashev.107 The Leningrad historian D. N. Al’shits told an even more bizarre tale. Al’shits had written his dissertation on the amendments to the illustrated chronicle of Ivan’s reign, and had argued that these alterations had been made by the tsar himself. His findings were published in the journal Istoricheskie zapiski in 1947 and 1948. 108 Forty years later, Al’shits wrote: Pieces published in 1947–8 which showed that Groznyi had consciously and persistently replaced, in an historical work created on his own instructions, the true history of his reign with his own variant of it; that he had explained events tendentiously; that he had ‘executed’ and ‘pardoned’ his former henchmen on the pages of the chronicle according to his own whim, determined by his attitude towards them at the time of the editing of the chronicle – this could not in those years have failed to attract the attention of the appropriate authorities . . . In my articles they perceived hints, made on the basis of sixteenth-century materials, to the circumstances of the creation of the Short Course on the History of the Communist Party which, as was well known, had been compiled and edited with the active

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personal participation of Stalin, and which contained accusations of all mortal sins against his former comrades.109 These examples indicate the extent to which Ivan Groznyi had become identified with Stalin by the late 1940s, so that criticisms of Groznyi, however mild, might be read as an allegorical attack on the Soviet leader. At the end of 1949, when the worst excesses of the Zhdanovshchina had passed, Voprosy istorii, the official journal of the Institute of History, launched a debate on the periodization of Russian history. The debate ran for over a year, enabling many of the issues which had arisen at the historians’ conference of 1944 to be re-aired in a public scholarly arena.110 The question of the criteria which should be employed in determining historical periodization raised the issue of the relative weight to be attached to economic base rather than political superstructure, and the positions adopted by the participants at the two extremes of the ideological spectrum were criticized by their opponents as ‘Pokrovskyist’ and ‘bourgeois’ respectively. Eventually an editorial summary of the debate concluded that there was general agreement that the existing ‘statist’ principle of periodization was in need of reconsideration: it had been adopted in the course of the campaign against Pokrovskii, and had marked a considerable advance at that time, but it no longer reflected contemporary needs. Current textbooks contained elements of periodization ‘by centuries’ and ‘by tsars’, failing to take into account ‘the latest achievements of Soviet historical science’.111 The article also warned against the danger of going to the opposite extreme and periodizing on the basis of purely economic criteria (this amounted to the Pokrovskyist heresy of ‘economic materialism’),112 but on balance the outcome of the debate strengthened the position of those who wanted to see more emphasis on the role of the ‘masses’ rather than ‘great men’ in history. Further progress in that direction, however, would have to await Stalin’s death and the launching of an attack on the ‘cult of the individual’.

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Part III Three Artistic Representations of Ivan

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5 V. I. Kostylev’s Novel

The earliest of the three artistic representations of Ivan which we shall consider in this section of the book was produced by V. I. Kostylev, the author of Kuz’ma Minin. According to his biographer, Kostylev had decided to write a novel about Ivan Groznyi while he was still working on Minin. In December 1938 the newspaper Gor’kovskaya kommuna reported that Kostylev had told the aviator V. P. Chkalov of this intention, when Chkalov was visiting the town of Gor’kii.1 As in the case of Minin, there is no evidence that Kostylev received an official commission to write his Groznyi trilogy. In many ways, the idea of writing about Tsar Ivan could have arisen naturally out of the Minin theme; as Darkov has pointed out,2 the earlier novel already incorporates the ‘correct’ new image of Ivan Groznyi, when various characters describe the tsar as the enemy of the boyars’ treason.3 A link between Ivan the Terrible’s oprichnina and the events of the early seventeenth century had been made in S. F. Platonov’s classic pre-revolutionary study of the Time of Troubles; the Preface to the 1937 edition pointed out that in Platonov’s conception there was a ‘logical connection between the theme of the Troubles themselves and the theme of the struggle of Ivan Groznyi with the boyars – the oprichnina as an “introduction” to the history of the Troubles’.4 In 1947 Stalin himself was to tell Eisenstein and Cherkasov that the Time of Troubles could have been avoided if Tsar Ivan had been more ruthless in exterminating boyar clans.5 But in the late 1930s, as we have seen, foreign policy considerations seem to have been uppermost in the choice of ‘great ancestors’ for veneration: and Ivan’s confrontation with the Germanic knights made him – along with Alexander Nevskii and Peter the Great – a particularly topical choice of hero. It was the theme 109

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of the Livonian War which was to dominate Kostylev’s treatment of Ivan’s reign. Kostylev began work on his novel at the end of 1939,6 by which time the Baltic theme had superseded anti-Germanism as the main aspect of the topical relevance of the Livonian War. The novel was a ‘patriotic’ work about the national military effort devoted to Russia’s search for a Baltic port. On 1 March 1940 Kostylev wrote to Aleksei Tolstoi, ‘I am working on a new novel, Moscow on Campaign [Moskva v pokhode] (from the epoch of Ivan IV). It is a novel about the people; the background is the Livonian War, and the capture of Narva.’7 A year later, the work was completed. On 19 March 1941 Kostylev wrote again to Tolstoi, ‘. . . I have finished a big novel about Ivan IV – Moscow on Campaign.’8 On the same day, Kostylev’s article about Ivan was published in Izvestiya.

Moscow on Campaign Moscow on Campaign, already described as the first volume of a trilogy entitled Ivan Groznyi, was serialized in the Moscow literary journal Oktyabr’ in 1942, and first published in book form in the author’s home town of Gor’kii in 1943.9 The novel is set in the period 1557– 60: that is, in the first two years of the Livonian War and in the year leading up to it. The three main characters are drawn from the lowest strata of Muscovite society. At the beginning of the novel the principal hero, Andrei Chokhov, is a slave on the Volga estate of the boyar Nikita Borisovich Kolychev. Andrei criticizes his master for drowning a witch, and Kolychev imprisons him. Andrei’s friend, Gerasim Timofeev, helps him to escape, and the two young men set off for Moscow, planning to denounce Kolychev to the tsar. In woods near the Volga they meet a Mordvinian girl, Okhima, who is hiding from the local governor (namestnik) who had made her his concubine, and she accompanies them on their mission. When they eventually reach Moscow and are brought before the tsar, Ivan allocates Andrei to work as a cannon-maker,10 and dispatches Gerasim to serve as a frontier guard with the military commander Prince M. I. Vorotynskii,11 while Okhima is sent to work with Ivan Fedorov, the first Russian printer. Thus the three main characters are placed in key areas that were identified in the new Soviet historiography as important locations of progressive policy initiatives on Ivan’s part.12 Subsequently the early campaigns of the Livonian War are depicted

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The young tsar. Frontispiece illustration, by M. V. Seregin, from V. I. Kostylev’s novel, Ivan Groznyi, vol. I (Moscow, 1948).

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through the experiences of Gerasim and Andrei. Gerasim, serving as a border guard on the Livonian frontier, falls in love with Parasha, the daughter of a musketeer from Pskov. At an early stage in their courtship, Parasha is captured by the Livonians and witnesses the war from within the walls of the fortresses of Narva and Tol’sburg before she is freed and reunited with Gerasim. Andrei sets off on campaign with the Russian army: when the Russians cross the Livonian frontier, he goes with Shig-Alei’s detachment to attack Derpt, and subsequently meets up with Gerasim in Ivangorod, whence they both participate in the storming of Narva. Later Andrei takes part in the capture of Derpt, and is a member of the deputation that is sent to Moscow to report the victories to the tsar. Kostylev’s novel makes a number of points about the Livonian War that had not been stressed in its author’s Izvestiya article, published in March 1941, while the Nazi–Soviet Pact was still in operation. In the novel, borrowing the device which had been employed so effectively in Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevskii, Kostylev depicts the Livonian Knights as proto-Nazis. In a conversation with Vorotynskii, Ivan cites the behaviour of the Knights as a reason for the war. They had destroyed Orthodox churches in Riga, Yur’ev and Revel’, harassed the Russian inhabitants of Livonia, and hampered trade relations between Muscovy and the West.13 During the war itself, the Russian heroes befriend representatives of the Baltic peoples who tell them of their sufferings at the hands of the Knights – thereby explaining why the Latvians and Estonians welcomed the Russians as liberators.14 The Russian invaders, by contrast, treat the indigenous Baltic peoples kindly, on Ivan’s personal instructions,15 and reap their reward when the ordinary townspeople of Narva rise up against their German oppressors.16 Russians, too, are treated badly by the Livonians; Parasha, abducted by the Knights, witnesses terrible atrocities committed against Russian prisoners in Tol’sburg.17 Anti-German sentiments, therefore, play a major part in the creation of the patriotic mood of the novel. But, as in Kostylev’s Kuz’ma Minin, the patriotism that inspires the Muscovite forces in Moscow on Campaign is depicted primarily as an allegiance to the multinational tsarist state. When the Muscovite army sets off for Livonia, Andrei notes the heterogeneous composition of the troops (even the commander-in-chief, Shig-Alei, is a Tatar). The ‘pagans’ all have different names for their gods, yet they act in concert with the Russians and help one another out. Andrei is curious about the languages of the non-Russian peoples, and he learns the word for

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‘land’ in Chuvash, Cheremis, Tatar and Votyak: ‘“Amazing!”, thought Andreika, “They even have different words for the land, but they are all going together to defend it.”’18 Although the Mordvinian heroine, Okhima, has been baptized on the tsar’s orders, she continues to worship her own god, Cham-Pas.19 The religious tolerance of the Muscovites is contrasted with the Protestant fervour of the Livonian knights, who attempt forcible conversions of their Orthodox prisoners and try to impose their religion on the pagan Estonians.20 In spite of this stress on the multinational character of the Muscovite state, however, a strong sense of specifically Russian patriotism is also evoked in the novel. The principal heroes are ordinary Russians, and they are shown to be motivated by love of their motherland.21 Even the Orthodox religion is presented as a symbol of national identity. Parasha, imprisoned in Narva, resists an attempt by a Lutheran pastor to convert her: The girl sighed with relief. She did not know how to pray, and did not understand anything that was said or sung in church, but her native faith, the faith of the Russian people, was dear to her. To betray your faith was to betray your mother country, to betray your land. This Parasha would not do, even if she were threatened with death.22 The historical Ivan Groznyi had justified his claims to the Baltic lands as a bid to regain the patrimony of the Grand Princes of Kiev, and these claims are stressed in the novel. The tsar’s adviser Aleksei Adashev, in negotiations with Livonian envoys in 1554, describes Livonia as the ‘ancient patrimony of the grand princes’.23 Ivan himself tells Prince Vorotynskii that ‘The Livonian lands have been Russian from time immemorial’,24 and in conversation with the governor of Narva the tsar not only lays claim to the Livonian towns with formerly Russian names, but also describes the Finnish lands which he had recently wrested from the Swedes (Karelia and Ingria) as ‘our ancient patrimonial lands’ which have ‘belonged to us from olden days’.25 The contemporary lessons that its readers were supposed to draw from Kostylev’s novel are fairly obvious. Multinational Muscovy is depicted as the prototype of an idealized Soviet Union, in which all the different ethnic groups live together in harmony and fight together for the interests of the state. The foreign policy of the state is legitimately directed towards the regaining of territories that

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formerly constituted the patrimony of its rulers. The majority of the inhabitants of these lands are not Slavs, but since so many non-Russians are already living happily within the existing borders of the multinational state, the Baltic peoples have little to fear from their incorporation. Compared with the persecution that they had suffered at the hands of the Germans, their annexation was actually a form of liberation for the indigenous inhabitants of Livonia. (The intended parallel here with the situation in 1940 was of course entirely spurious, since the Baltic states had been independent since 1918.) By the time that the novel was published in 1942, however, the international situation had changed drastically and justification of the Soviet claim to the Baltic republics was no longer so topical. This may be why the earliest official reception of Moscow on Campaign, rather surprisingly in the light of the emphasis within the novel itself, focused on its depiction of Russian domestic affairs, and in particular on the image of Ivan. The first review of Kostylev’s novel appeared in the weekly arts paper Literatura i iskusstvo on 15 May 1943.26 The reviewer was Sergei Borodin, whose own historical novel Dmitrii Donskoi, published in 1941, had been awarded a Stalin prize.27 Borodin began by asserting his positive assessment of the historical Ivan Groznyi. In a complex political situation which demanded radical changes in both domestic and foreign policy, he wrote, the tsar had ‘managed to organize and correctly dispose of the forces of the people so that Russian power was not only not shaken but grew significantly in the sixteenth century’. Kostylev’s novel, the reviewer conceded, correctly depicted Ivan as ‘a progressive statesman, the transformer of the life of the country, firm in the achievement of his aims, farsighted and bold’. But there were a number of weaknesses in Kostylev’s novel, which Borodin proceeded to catalogue. Andrei Chokhov, Borodin complained, was depicted in a somewhat contradictory manner, improbably evolving from the rebellious slave of the early chapters into a hardworking and deferential figure in the main body of the novel. The reviewer criticized Kostylev for inconsistencies in his use of archaic language and for the clumsy way in which he sometimes incorporated original documents of the period into his narrative. These objections were undoubtedly valid. But the majority of Borodin’s criticisms were badly misjudged and unfair, as later reviewers were to point out.

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Borodin complained that Kostylev distorted Ivan’s image by making a naive attempt to ‘democratize’ the tsar. Some of his examples of this tendency were trivial. Contemporary sources – Borodin claimed – had described Ivan’s appearance as striking, but Kostylev presented the tsar as having commonplace features. On their first meeting with him, the two heroes find Ivan’s face ‘simple, very ordinary. Andreika and Gerasim could have found many such “Ivans” in the villages and hamlets of the Bogoyavlenskii estate.’28 Kostylev had presented Ivan as direct in his manner, accessible for conversation with peasants, artillerymen, visiting German merchants and various others. But Borodin contended that Kostylev was wrong to attribute such populism (narodnost’) to the tsar, and thereby to ‘simplify’ him. Kostylev had shown Ivan to dress plainly, implying that this reflected a simple and modest personality, whereas in fact the tsar’s choice of unadorned clothing, in contrast to the elaborate dress of his courtiers, reflected his regal self-confidence and pride.29 In reality, Borodin asserted, Groznyi was a complex, haughty and highly educated man whose image should not be distorted by this kind of attempt to democratize him. Borodin was implicitly accusing Kostylev of depicting Groznyi as a ‘people’s tsar’, closer to the peasants than to the upper classes. Kostylev, the reviewer complained, had distorted and ‘simplified’ Groznyi by presenting him as concerned for the everyday interests of the ordinary people, whereas in fact Ivan’s concern for his subjects had taken the form, not of advocating their interests, but of promoting the welfare of the state.30 In relation to the upper classes, Borodin accused his fellow-novelist of presenting Ivan as isolated in his plans and in his actions: ‘we see an endless succession of Groznyi’s attachments; he drops people, he is alone against everyone.’ But in reality, Borodin asserted, Ivan was supported by very broad strata of feudal society.31 Some of Borodin’s other criticisms of Kostylev drew attention to anachronisms and ‘modernizations’ in the novel.32 The attitudes of various characters were shown as too similar to those of the present day: ‘they freely discuss political events’, for example. Okhima, Borodin complained, was depicted ‘almost like a contemporary girl who has come from a collective farm in Ryazan’ to work in a factory in Moscow’.33 And Andrei ‘converses with the tsar simply, just like an outstanding combine operative with the head of the district agricultural department’. This example in fact provides a clue to Borodin’s real (but unspoken) concern about Kostylev’s novel: that

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its ‘modernizations’ indicated that the novel could be read as a parable of life in Stalin’s Russia. What Andrei’s conversations with the tsar really resembled, of course, was the way in which leading collective farmworkers were received by Stalin.34 Borodin must have realized that Kostylev’s modest, simple, populist and ‘democratic’ Ivan Groznyi was intended as a historical analogue of the General Secretary. The German scholar Bernd Uhlenbruch was later to note the parallel between Kostylev’s depiction of Ivan and official Soviet representations of Stalin: Kostylev in his novel . . . clearly hinted at codes of presentation of Stalin: the fashion cult built around the modestly dressed Grozny, the art of communication, the blissful-sounding way of dealing with subordinates, the idyllic conversations, in which Grozny wisely gave advice and history later proved him to be correct, must have reminded the reader of the official iconology surrounding the presentation of Stalin and of the rhetorical form of Stalinist panegyric.35 The analogy was undoubtedly an intentional one, and undoubtedly, too, Kostylev intended it to be supportive rather than critical of the Soviet leader. But Borodin evidently felt that such analogies were problematic, and preferred to play safe by censuring Kostylev for his anachronistic democratization of the tsar. Borodin’s review failed to acknowledge that the Livonian War and the Baltic question comprised the main focus of the novel, and he approached it instead as if it purported to provide a complete overview of Ivan’s reign.36 He criticized Kostylev for mentioning the Kazan’ campaign only briefly, and Astrakhan’ and the Crimea only in passing. ‘The Livonian campaign is described in more detail, but there is not even one significant battle-scene,’ he complained. By 1943, of course, the Baltic states had been lost to Germany, and Borodin may have felt that it was tactless to refer to the novel’s main theme of Russia’s allegedly historic rights to territory on the Baltic. The reviewer’s most bizarre criticism of the novel, however, was that it slandered the Russian people as savages. Indignantly, Borodin quoted the following passage: The monk was gaunt, cowed, and covered in blackheads from prolonged lack of washing; his nails were long and dirty, like those of an animal, and he spoke with a stammer, so that you

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could not immediately make out what he wanted to say. Therefore the boyars who clustered around him – sweaty, corpulent and breathing heavily – tried impatiently to catch his every word.37 Here both the monk and the boyars are depicted as savages, Borodin declared. This type of depiction of the Russian people had previously characterized certain ‘writers of a Western orientation’. But Kostylev should have avoided such a slander on ‘a people who created not only an outstanding culture and art, but who in their everyday life loved baths at a time when they did not yet exist in Europe, and loved their white linen clothes’. This accusation is extraordinary, not simply for its absurd defence of Russian cleanliness, but also because the offending passage was quoted entirely out of context. As Kostylev was quick to point out in his rejoinder,38 the monk in question was a Lithuanian spy, and the boyars were traitors: the novelist was certainly guilty of using the crude literary device of making his characters’ outer features reflect their inner qualities,39 but he was hardly guilty of the type of ‘westernizer’ slander on the Russian people of which Borodin accused him. Kostylev’s response to Borodin’s review was published in the August/ September 1943 number of the journal Oktyabr’. Kostylev began by defending his novel against Borodin’s charge that he had democratized and simplified Ivan’s image. With some justification, Kostylev pointed out that he had always shown how in his dealings with the humble heroes the tsar was aware of his regal dignity. On his first meeting with Andrei and Gerasim, Ivan had ordered them to be beaten for running away from their master; in a later episode, when Andrei publicly worsted the boyar Telyat’ev, the tsar had sentenced him to another beating, to teach him to respect his social superiors. And when Andrei fell at the tsar’s feet with a petition during Ivan’s visit to the Cannon Yard, Ivan had him punished for his insolence. ‘To the best of my ability,’ Kostylev wrote, ‘I showed that Ivan Groznyi was inspired in his turbulent activity by the grandest state interests and therefore struggled mercilessly against the boyars. The people sympathized with this struggle, and this is clearly reflected in the popular song tradition of the byliny.’40 In response to Borodin’s accusation that he had presented Ivan as an isolated figure, Kostylev protested that he had shown the tsar surrounded by devoted aides: the commanders Petr Shuiskii, Buturlin, Danilo Adashev, Kurakin, Morozov, Zabolotskii and others. Gryaznoi and Aleksei Basmanov were also presented as Ivan’s willing assistants,

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as was M. I. Vorotynskii, the founder of the frontier-guard service. The novel also showed Ivan to be served by talented diplomats, such as Aleksei Adashev, I. M. Viskovatyi, the Shchelkalov brothers, Nepeya and other officials of the Ambassadorial Chancellery. A considerable amount of attention was paid to Metropolitan Makarii as a close associate of the tsar, and to Ivan’s friendly working relations with his wife’s brothers, the Zakharin-Yur’evs. In addition, Ivan enjoyed the support of the border guards, the musketeers and the Tatar cavalry: without the backing of such loyal subjects he would never have won such splendid victories in Livonia.41 Other reviewers were more sympathetic to Kostylev’s novel than Borodin had been. A generally favourable review by R. Yu. Vipper was published in July 1943,42 and a positive review (of the Gor’kii edition of 1943) by the historian A. Yakovlev, a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, appeared in Literatura i iskusstvo in March 1944 (it was unusual for a periodical to review the same work twice). Vipper made some perceptive comments on the artistic merits of the work. He noted that it had poetic and quasi-theatrical features, and that the characters appeared fully formed from the beginning (a tactful way of drawing attention to the somewhat static nature of Kostylev’s characterization and plot-structuring).43 The young Tsar Ivan was shown as very mature and wise for his age, with nothing in his character that either betrayed the traumas of his childhood or foreshadowed the future psychological crisis which preceded the introduction of the oprichnina (this was no doubt a diplomatic way of saying that Ivan was idealized). Vipper also drew attention to the stereotyped nature of Kostylev’s depiction of entire social and national groups. And although the reviewer rightly noted the importance of the novel’s setting in the opening years of the Livonian War – a crucial turning point in Muscovite history and in Ivan’s career as a statesman – he nevertheless criticized Kostylev for ‘modernization’ when he anachronistically made Ivan refer, in his conversation with the monk Vassian Patrikeev, to Slavonic tribes, Letts, Estonians, Polabian Slavs and Livonians.44 Thus while hinting at the topicality of Kostylev’s Baltic theme, Vipper at the same time somewhat perversely criticized him for anachronistic usage of the very terminology that had enabled the contemporary analogy to be made in the first place.

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Yakovlev’s review, by contrast, drew an explicit parallel with the present day. Commenting that ‘Ivan Groznyi’s struggle for Livonia, for the ancient Russian lands and for an exit to the sea corresponded to the historic demands of the Russian state and the Russian people,’ and noting that ‘the representatives of the Baltic peoples oppressed by the Germans – the Estonians and Letts’ were sympathetically portrayed in the novel, Yakovlev added that ‘V. Kostylev’s novel will be read with particular attention in our days – the days of victorious struggle against the German invaders, the descendants of the vile Livonian knights’.45 It appears that, faced with the squabble between the two historical novelists – Kostylev and Borodin – the authorities had sought the views of professional historians. The opinion of one of those consulted, however – the historian S. B. Veselovskii – remained unpublished until 1973.46 It is not difficult to understand why. Veselovskii poured scorn on Borodin’s assertion that Ivan ‘managed to organize and correctly dispose of the forces of the people so that Russian power was not only not shaken but grew significantly in the sixteenth century’, and he rejected the assumption, shared by Kostylev and Borodin, that the historical Ivan was ‘a progressive statesman, the transformer of the life of the country, firm in the achievement of his aims, farsighted and bold’.47 Veselovskii derided Kostylev’s literary achievement and historical knowledge, criticizing him in particular for depicting Ivan’s ‘democratism’ in promoting ‘low-born’ servicemen at the expense of the older class of hereditary landowners.48 He also mocked Kostylev’s ‘modernization’ of Ivan’s personality, particularly evident in the novelist’s depiction of the tsar’s relationship with his first wife, Anastasiya. Contrary to all the historical evidence, Veselovskii noted sardonically, Kostylev’s Ivan is ‘a splendid family man, a touchingly tender father who treats his wife as an equal, and initiates her into all his state plans . . .’49 Veselovskii concluded with a savage indictment of popular historical novelists: Recently a number of works on historical themes have appeared in the press, whose authors, exceeding the limits of their competence, have undertaken the popularisation of historical knowledge and even the propaganda of their ideas, without taking into account all the achievements of scholarship, and manifesting the pretension to reconsider virtually all our historiography.50

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He continued, in a powerful and heartfelt plea for historians to resist demands to make their work topical: Such devastating raids on scholarship bear witness to our lack of culture, our failure to understand that not for nothing have many hundreds of decent people over the last 200 years worked to collect concrete materials about our country’s past. Historians cannot and must not leave such phenomena unchallenged. Historians, like all scholars, must be responsive to contemporary demands, but at the same time their ideal should still be that which was set for himself more than two thousand years ago by the greatest historian of the ancient world, Thucydides: to write so that one’s work should be ‘the acquisition of eternity’. True historians have worked thus to the best of their ability, and if they believe in their calling they should find the time and the strength to fight against the disrespectful and uncultured attitude of literary figures to their work.51 Not all historians shared Veselovskii’s distaste for Kostylev’s appropriation of history in the interests of ‘relevance’. In December 1944 Moscow on Campaign received the accolade of an enthusiastic review in Pravda by the historian N. Derzhavin.52 Writing at the time when the Red Army had just reoccupied the Baltic republics, Academician Derzhavin stressed that the novel dealt with the early period of the Livonian War, and he quoted Marx’s comments about Ivan’s aim of obtaining an outlet to the Baltic. The novel described ‘the great movement of the Russian state towards its age-old maritime frontiers, in the region which had been forcibly torn away by the landowner “cur-knights” from the Russian land and had suffered under the yoke of Teutonism, of national and economic oppression, and of colonial exploitation’.53 Derzhavin noted that Kostylev’s depiction of Ivan as a great statesman and patriot corresponded to his role as the initiator of the Livonian War, and added: Ivan IV knew how to conduct himself with all the dignity of the sovereign of a great country but, when it was necessary, also with all the captivating simplicity of a tsar who knows his people. He was a strict but just judge of arbitrary boyar rule. It is not surprising that it was this feature of Groznyi that entered popular awareness.

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Implicitly defending Kostylev against Borodin’s accusations, Derzhavin continued: ‘The writer incorporated folk opinion of Ivan IV into his image – and this is correct, especially since the author does not fall into the trap of a false and unnecessary democratization of Ivan IV, his deliberate depiction as a muzhik or peasant tsar.’ Praising such features of the novel as its accurate evocation of the period, based on the author’s thoughtful use of primary sources, Derzhavin noted that ‘this aspect of V. Kostylev’s work, unfortunately, has not been recognized by some critics’. And he proceeded to attack Borodin’s review directly for approaching the novel as if it were a fictionalized biography of the tsar, in which the people appeared only as a background element. Borodin – the historian complained – had failed to acknowledge that the novel provided a correct assessment of the important theme of ‘the attitude of the people to Ivan IV’s great statist cause’. Derzhavin went on to exonerate Kostylev explicitly from Borodin’s three main charges against him: of depicting Ivan as isolated; of simplifying him by presenting him as the defender of the everyday interests of the ordinary people; and of slandering the Russian people as savages. Borodin’s claim that Kostylev had denigrated the ordinary people was, Derzhavin asserted, absurd: the novel depicted the Russian people ‘with love and warmth’. The only real accusation that could be upheld against Kostylev’s novel, in Derzhavin’s view, related to its modernization of the psychology of the characters and to a degree of unevenness in their language and mode of thought. But the reviewer concluded that, in general, Kostylev’s novel occupied a significant place among Soviet historical novels; its readers would look forward to the prompt appearance of the following parts of the intended trilogy. This episode shows that Soviet historical novelists were expected to tread a fine line, bringing out the present-day relevance of heroic patriotic achievements in the past, while at the same time avoiding ‘modernization’. The ‘simplification’ and ‘democratization’ of the image of a ruler were necessary in order to point up an analogy with the unity of leader and led in the present, but this could give rise to accusations of idealization of monarchs as ‘people’s tsars’. But more generalized analogies were, it seems, perfectly acceptable. One reviewer of Kostylev’s novel provided a clear statement of the parallels which could be drawn between Ivan’s domestic policies and those of the Bolsheviks when he wrote:

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In our time an interest in the personality of one of the greatest statesmen of Russia, who set himself the aim of breaking down outdated social relations, and of removing from power an archaic social group that yearned for the past and prevented the creation and consolidation of the Russian national state – is completely natural and appropriate.54

Volumes Two and Three The second and third volumes of Kostylev’s novel did not appear until after the end of the war. In June 1944 the author contributed an article to the popular magazine Ogonek in which he reported that Moscow on Campaign had now been published as a separate volume both in Gor’kii and in Moscow; the second volume of the trilogy, The Sea (More), had just gone to press; and he was currently working on the third volume, provisionally entitled Dream and Reality (Mechta i byl’). Having drawn attention to the importance of Ivan’s reign for the development of the Russian centralized state and Russian national consciousness, Kostylev commented that he was particularly interested in Ivan’s struggle for an outlet to the Baltic. The Sea was devoted to the period of the ‘Narva sailing’, when for 23 years Ivan’s Russia had had a ‘window to Europe’, long before the reign of Peter the Great.55 Kostylev’s The Sea was published in 1945.56 It is set in the years 1563–7; thus three years have elapsed since the end of the previous volume. Boyar plots against Ivan continue; Kurbskii defects to Poland; Ivan introduces the oprichnina, and in the closing episodes of the novel he begins to act against the suspected conspirators. The theme of the struggle against internal treason, and the link between the traitor-boyars and Ivan’s foreign foes, is more fully developed in this volume than in its predecessor. Kostylev stresses throughout that it is only the boyars who oppose the tsar: the ordinary people support Ivan’s campaign against treason. Similarly, the people are truly patriotic; they understand and support the continuation of the Livonian War while the boyars oppose it from motives of narrow self-interest. Malyuta Skuratov, the head of the oprichnina, is depicted as a generally positive character, who carries out torture and executions from the highest of patriotic motives, sacrificing his hope of personal salvation for the sake of the greater good of the motherland. ‘I myself fear God’s punishment,’ he tells Boris Godunov, ‘but I have a human heart, a Russian heart, and I

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want to live without surrendering our land into the hands of the enemy. It is sinful to be led by traitors. Everything would perish then!’57 The parallels with Stalin’s terror, and with its patriotic justification, are obvious here, and in general the link between Stalin and Ivan is more noticeable in this volume than in its predecessor. Stalin’s invocation in November 1941 of ‘the courageous image of our great ancestors’, including Alexander Nevskii and Dmitrii Donskoi, is echoed by Ivan’s canonization of Alexander Nevskii, to whose icon he prays before departing for Aleksandrova Sloboda in December 1564.58 And when Ivan sets out on campaign in 1567, he reflects that: The dust of Dmitrii Donskoi, Ivan Kalita, Ivan III and Vasilii Ivanovich was the unshakeable foundation of tsarist power. And he, Tsar Ivan Vasil’evich, was, like his ancestors, called upon by God himself to strengthen this power even more firmly, to raise the power of Moscow to an even higher level. Would that his dust be worthy to rest in the same vaults, alongside the graves of his ancestors.59 As far as the international context of the events of this second volume was concerned, contemporary parallels were not so obvious as in Moscow on Campaign. After 1560 the Russians were fighting not only the Livonian Knights, but also the three Baltic powers: Poland, Denmark and Sweden. The opportunities for crude antiGerman point-scoring were therefore fewer, although Kostylev provides harsh caricatures of German inhabitants of the foreign quarter of Moscow – Staden, Schlichting, Taube and Kruse (all historical figures, who wrote memoirs critical of Ivan). A major new theme in this volume – which had obvious parallels to the situation of the USSR in 1941–5 – was Ivan’s English alliance. Although the first English voyagers had come to Muscovy via the White Sea as early as 1553, the opening of the Baltic route after Ivan’s capture of Narva increased trade links between Russia and England. Andrei Chokhov sails with the new Russian fleet from Narva to London, where he learns of the cruel executions of innocent people which had occurred under Henry VIII and his daughter, ‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor – and he wonders why Tsar Ivan suffers such a uniquely negative reputation among foreigners when bloodshed is so common in all the states of contemporary Europe.60 Subsequently Andrei realizes that Europeans fear the new-found power of Russia and deliberately blacken the image of the tsar by exaggerating his cruelty

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and inhumanity.61 When the Russian fleet eventually returns safely to Narva, the tsar rejoices and feels vindicated: ‘Ivan Vasil’evich greeted this news with great joy. This was what he had striven for with such persistence! It was for this that he had taken upon himself the burden of war, of malice, of slander; for this had he sacrificed the friendship and respect of many worthy people.’62 The final volume of Kostylev’s trilogy, The Stronghold on the Neva (Nevskaya tverdynya), was published in 1947. More than ten years have passed since the end of the previous volume (the author thereby sparing himself the task of having to describe such unedifying events in his hero’s reign as the punitive raid on Novgorod in 1570, the subsequent mass executions in Moscow and the burning of the capital by the Crimean Tatars in 1571). As the Livonian War enters its final phase Ivan, prematurely aged, now faces the energetic Polish king, Stephen Bathory.63 Narva is lost to the Swedes and Bathory threatens Pskov. Peace with Poland is concluded in 1582 and Ivan is obliged to surrender all his gains in Livonia. There are a few consolations: the White Sea route is developed as an alternative to the Baltic with the fortification of Archangel, and Ermak’s cossacks conquer Siberia. The Russian troops defend Pskov bravely against the Poles and the English alliance is still strong. As he waits for death, Ivan is tormented by doubts about his executions but convinces himself that he had had no alternative: ‘And if he had pardoned the traitors, what then? Would there not have been great damage to the Christian faith; would this not have caused the state to collapse; and would the Russian land then have been able to resist her enemies?’64 The fates of the ‘humble heroes’ are happier. The main character in The Stronghold on the Neva is Ignatii Khvostov, a mysterious youth (he turns out to be the long-lost son of the boyar Nikita Kolychev from Volume One) who is adopted by Boris Godunov’s kinsman Nikita Godunov, and falls in love with Nikita’s daughter Anna. Ignatii travels to Rome and Venice with a Russian embassy: this journey enables him to witness the worldly decadence of the Vatican and the horrors of the Inquisition, and to conclude that the terror in Renaissance (proto-Fascist?) Italy is much worse than that in Russia (this echoes the anti-Catholic theme in postwar Soviet propaganda). There are allusions to other sixteenth-century events which had twentieth-century analogies. After his killing of his son Ivan, the

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tsar sends large sums of money to all the Orthodox patriarchs to pay for masses for the tsarevich’s soul: He remembered the Belgrade Metropolitanate, and, following the example of his grandfather Ivan III, sent it money too. While doing so, he recalled the words of a certain Italian, who had written that ‘all the people of Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, the Morea and Greece bow down to the name of the Grand Prince of Muscovy’.65 By 1947, of course, not only was the Soviet Union dominating the Balkans, but the Red Army had also ‘liberated’ Poland. Ignatii, captured at the siege of Pskov, discusses the Livonian War with a Lithuanian miller, who tells him that the ordinary people of PolandLithuania had not wanted to fight the Russians: ‘We and you are of the same blood . . . Even before [the election of] King Stephen [Bathory], our people wanted your tsar to become our king. I don’t know why it didn’t happen.’66 Eventually Ignatii escapes, returns to Moscow and marries his sweetheart Anna Godunova. Wedding bells ring too for Mit’ka, the son of Andrei and Okhima, who is betrothed to Gerasim and Parasha’s daughter Natasha. The main narrative of the novel concludes in 1586, with Andrei, Gerasim and their families admiring Andrei’s newly completed cannon in the Kremlin and attending a service to mark the opening of the new White Sea trade route through Archangel. The macro-political narrative reaches its true happy ending only in the novel’s Epilogue, set in the reign of Peter the Great. Peter, aboard his flagship, the Ingermanlandiya, heads a Russian fleet of 20 vessels which sail out of St Petersburg (the ‘stronghold on the Neva’ of the novel’s title) into the Baltic, and he recalls Ivan’s brave struggle for an outlet to the sea. ‘Not in vain did Our forefather Tsar Ivan Vasil’evich do battle here for so many long years,’ Peter muses, as he chooses a site for a new Baltic port.67 Peter’s commendation thus provides an apotheosis for Ivan, as it had for Minin in Kostylev’s earlier novel, which concluded with a scene in which Peter, on a visit to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1695, had ordered Kuz’ma’s neglected grave to be restored and inscribed with the words, ‘Here lies the saviour of Russia’.68 The Epilogue of the final volume, and its title, emphasize the primacy of the Baltic theme in the author’s own concept of his trilogy. The downbeat third volume, with its Petrine Epilogue, indicates that Kostylev was now – in the postwar

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period – less concerned with drawing a direct parallel between Ivan and Stalin in the realm of foreign policy: Ivan is presented not so much as an analogue, but rather as a precursor – one of a succession of Russian rulers whose aspiration for the Baltic was achieved only by Peter and, by implication, taken even further by Stalin, with the Red Army’s triumphal westward drive of 1944–5. In April 1948 it was announced that Kostylev had been awarded a Stalin prize (second class) for his Ivan Groznyi trilogy;69 commenting on the award, the writer Konstantin Simonov described the novel as ‘the first attempt in our prose literature to provide a broad picture of the epoch of Ivan Groznyi, a serious major work which has already gained the deserved attention of readers’.70 The award of the Stalin Prize was greeted in Literaturnaya gazeta by a review of the entire trilogy, entitled ‘The Truth about Ivan Groznyi’. The reviewer praised Kostylev for magisterially presenting Tsar Ivan as a great statesman, refuting the slanders that his enemies had inflicted on his memory, without yielding to the temptation to idealize his hero.71 Kostylev enjoyed considerable official approbation in the last years of his life. In March 1944, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, he had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for ‘outstanding services in the field of artistic literature’,72 and soon afterwards he received medals ‘For Valorous Labour in the Great Fatherland War of 1941–5’ and ‘For the Defence of Moscow’.73 During the war, in addition to his efforts on the Ivan Groznyi trilogy, Kostylev had engaged in prolific patriotic journalism, contributing articles to the central and local press on ‘great ancestors’ whose efforts in the defence of Russia should serve as models for participants in the contemporary war effort.74 He joined the Communist Party in 1944, headed the local branch of the Writers’ Union in Gor’kii, and was elected as a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR.75 After completing Ivan Groznyi, Kostylev finished the draft of a novel about the revolutionary struggle of the Sormovo workers of Nizhnii Novgorod. At the time of his death in 1950 he was collecting material for another big historical novel, In the Balkans, about the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8 and the liberation of Bulgaria.76 An opportunist to the last, Kostylev was preparing to contribute his share to the neo-PanSlavism that served to legitimize the incorporation of so much of Eastern and Central Europe, after 1945, into the Soviet bloc.

6 A. N. Tolstoi’s Play

The first version of the play (1941–2) In December 1940 A. N. Tolstoi was commissioned to write a play about Ivan the Terrible, and signed a contract to that effect with the Committee for Artistic Affairs.1 The commissioning of new plays from Tolstoi and a number of other playwrights was reported in Izvestiya at the beginning of January 1941, but the specific subject of the play was not revealed.2 The news, however, soon leaked out into the theatrical world. On 8 February the actor V. A. Blyumental’Tamarin wrote to Tolstoi, disingenuously proposing that the latter write a play about Ivan Groznyi, in which Blyumental’-Tamarin would star. Blyumental’-Tamarin’s antennae were clearly well-tuned not only to news of his own profession, but also to the latest Party line on sixteenth-century history. He had been studying the figure of Ivan Groznyi for many years – he told Tolstoi – and was dissatisfied with Ivan’s depiction in such classics of the pre-revolutionary repertoire as A. K. Tolstoi’s Death of Ioann Groznyi and A. N. Ostrovskii’s Vasilisa Melent’eva. ‘Groznyi is not only a psychologically disturbed tyrant . . . but an innovator, the forerunner of Peter’, he assured the writer. ‘I have a few ideas, and if we could meet for a friendly chat, I could tell you about them.’3 The subject of Tolstoi’s new play was publicly revealed by the author himself at a meeting held at the Moscow Writers’ Club on 19 March to celebrate the Stalin Prizes which had just been announced. Tolstoi had been awarded a first-class prize for his novel Peter I; in his speech he promised to react to the prize by creating new works. His plans were to finish the novel A Cloudy Morning (the third part of his trilogy, The Road to Calvary) by May 1941; to 127

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write a play about Ivan Groznyi by the autumn; and thereafter to begin work on the third volume of Peter I, with a view to finishing it in 1942. 4 Soon afterwards Blyumental’-Tamarin wrote to Tolstoi, expressing his delight and amazement (‘That’s intuition for you!’) on learning that he was writing about Groznyi and again suggesting a meeting to discuss the play.5 Tolstoi’s contract to write the play reflected ‘interests of state’ in the winter of 1940–1. As we have seen, Shcherbakov’s memo to Stalin of 28 April 1942 recalled that Tolstoi’s play had been commissioned as a result of instructions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party concerning ‘the need for the restoration of a true historical image of Ivan IV in Russian history’.6 It was clearly not coincidental that Tolstoi was chosen to write a play which rehabilitated Ivan. His historical works of the 1930s on Peter the Great served as a precedent for the Groznyi theme. And there is some evidence that Tolstoi himself had become interested in Ivan while working on Peter. On 31 January 1935 V. D. Bonch-Bruevich, the director of the Literary Museum, wrote to Maksim Gor’kii about a recent visit he had paid to Tolstoi, who was then recovering from a heart attack: ‘He is devoting a great amount of time to the history of Ioann Groznyi; he is collecting material – books and portraits – and says that in his view Peter has his roots in Ioann Groznyi and that for him Ioann Groznyi is even more interesting than Peter, more colourful and more varied.’7 Tolstoi himself sardonically anticipated the rehabilitation of Ivan Groznyi when he told Annenkov in Paris in 1937 in connection with the revision of his play about Peter the Great: ‘I can already see before me all the Ivan Groznyis and other Rasputin types rehabilitated, having become Marxists and been glorified.’8 The writer continued to take an interest in Groznyi. In 1938, when visiting Bakhchisarai in the Crimea, Tolstoi consulted documents in the local museum relating to Ivan’s diplomatic relations with the Crimean khan, and acquired information about the imprisonment of Ivan’s envoy Vasilii Gryaznoi and his ransoming by Boris Godunov.9 Gryaznoi’s release from Tatar captivity was subsequently to feature in the second part of Tolstoi’s ‘dramatic tale’ about Ivan. Tolstoi’s contract for the Ivan Groznyi play required him to deliver it by September 1941. In the light of his other commitments, this was always going to be a tight schedule, as the author himself recognized. The German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, to which Tolstoi responded with a prolific outpouring of patriotic

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journalism, delayed his plans further. Before the invasion, it seems, he had only begun to collect material for the play,10 and some of that material informed his publicist writings of the summer of 1941. In an article first published in Krasnaya zvezda on 3 August, Tolstoi wrote: When Ivan Groznyi planned to form a single Russian state out of principalities which were independent or subordinate to Moscow, the people understood this and supported him in his cruel struggle against the princes and boyars, in his unprecedently daring military reform – the oprichnina – and in his bloody wars for the ancient Russian patrimonial lands. Ivan Groznyi’s lengthy struggle, victorious at first, ended in military defeat, but the Russian state had been created and it stretched far and wide, to the Caspian Sea, and to Lake Baikal. The land had become one, and the fatherland was united.11 Tolstoi did not begin to write the play in earnest until October 1941, by which time – with the enemy advancing on Moscow – he was living at Zimenki, near Gor’kii, on the Volga. Somewhat bombastically, Tolstoi was to write in 1944: I believed in our victory even in the most difficult days of October–November 1941. It was then . . . that I began my dramatic tale, Ivan Groznyi. It was my response to the humiliations to which the Germans were subjecting my homeland. I summoned out of non-existence into life a great passionate Russian soul – Ivan Groznyi – in order to fortify my ‘outraged conscience’.12 Only the first three scenes of the play were written at Zimenki before Tolstoi – along with many other members of the Moscow intelligentsia – was evacuated further east, to Tashkent, in November 1941. There the work was completed in February 1942.13 The first version of Tolstoi’s play comprised nine scenes and covered – very loosely – the events of the period 1553–69.14 The first scene dealt with Ivan’s illness in 1553 and the reluctance of the boyars to swear allegiance to the tsar’s infant son. In the next scene the question of the Livonian War was raised: the boyars were opposed to it, but the holy fool ( yurodivyi) Vasilii the Blessed (the eponymous patron saint of St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square) offered Ivan money for the war on behalf of the people of Moscow. The

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third scene introduced Ivan’s new bride, the Circassian princess Mar’ya Temryukovna (in reality Ivan’s first wife, Anastasiya, died in 1560, two years after the outbreak of the Livonian War and the tsar remarried in 1561, but Tolstoi’s Groznyi is already a widower at the beginning of the play.) The fourth scene was set in the courtyard of a baronial mansion near Revel’, during the early stages of the Livonian War. Prince Andrei Kurbskii appeared, engaged in single combat with Philip Bell, the Landmarshal of the Livonian Knights. Kurbskii took Bell prisoner, and treated him with great chivalry. When Bell tried to persuade Kurbskii to defect, the latter angrily refused, although it was clear that he was tempted, and had indeed already been contacted by the Polish king, Sigismund. Two traitor-boyars – Obolenskii and Repnin – arrived from Moscow to induce Kurbskii to turn his army against Ivan; Prince Andrei again refused, but the scene ended with him abandoning the siege of Revel’. (This scene was subsequently to be identified as problematic, and removed, apparently because it depicted Kurbskii in an insufficiently negative light.) The remaining scenes returned to Russia. Kurbskii had now gone over to the Poles and the boyar plot gathered force. Princess Efrosin’ya Staritskaya hired a German to assassinate the tsar as he addressed the crowd on Red Square, but the arrow killed Vasilii the Blessed instead. The tsar introduced the oprichnina and retired to his new capital at Aleksandrova Sloboda, where the final three scenes took place. Ivan had decided to betroth Efrosin’ya’s granddaughter, Mar’ya, to the Danish prince Magnus, but Efrosin’ya took advantage of her invitation to the palace in order to poison Mar’ya Temryukovna. The play ended with Ivan standing grief-stricken beside his wife’s coffin and vowing to eradicate his enemies. On completing the manuscript of his play, Tolstoi read it aloud to various gatherings in Tashkent, including an open meeting of the evacuated Institute of History. Eyewitness accounts of these occasions agree that Tolstoi was a brilliant performer of his work, skilfully adopting the role of each character in turn.15 On 12 March he read the play to a group of literary and theatrical figures in the town,16 an event which was reported with great enthusiasm in the weekly arts paper Literatura i iskusstvo.17 ‘The audience listened with bated breath to the music of the Russian language of the sixteenth century, so brilliantly resurrected by the author,’ wrote the paper’s

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correspondent. All felt – the article continued – that the ‘real, true’ Ivan Groznyi had risen before them. Tolstoi had presented Ivan correctly, both as a ruler and as a man. The boyars did not understand his aims and tried to thwart him; victory in the Livonian War was within his grasp until Kurbskii turned traitor. Tolstoi had shown that Ivan was perhaps insufficiently resolute in his struggle against his enemies; it was only when he stood over the coffin of his beloved wife that he realized the depth of their perfidy and decided to act against them.18 The reporter noted that among those present at the reading were the theatre director S. Mikhoels and the historian B. D. Grekov: Mikhoels had made a speech praising the play for its use of language and for its compositional unity reminiscent of Shakespearian drama, and Academician Grekov had asserted that ‘the interpretation of the image of Ivan Groznyi in A. N. Tolstoi’s play corresponds to the conclusions of leading historical thought’.19 The next number of Literatura i iskusstvo published extracts from the second scene of the play, in which Ivan decides to defy the boyars by preparing for war against Livonia.20 On reading these extracts Sergei Eisenstein commented sourly in his diary on 2 April: ‘It seems to me that it’s written with his left foot.’ But Eisenstein, struggling in Alma-Ata with his film about Ivan, was not the most objective critic of the work of a man whom he regarded as his ‘rival’.21 In Tashkent, all seemed to be going well for Tolstoi’s new play; at this point many, including the author himself, may have confidently expected it to feature in the next list of Stalin Prizes which was to be announced in April. There is evidence, however, that the critical response to the play in Tashkent had not been as unanimously enthusiastic as the report in Literatura i iskusstvo implied. Mikhoels, whose reference to the Shakespearian qualities of the play was quoted in the paper’s account, had apparently made criticisms which were not reported. The writer Kornei Chukovskii, who was present at the reading on 12 March, wrote a fulsome letter of praise to Tolstoi on 25 March, in which he observed that he did not ‘agree with Mikhoels that the section of the play in which Kurbskii is depicted does not fit into the play’.22 Even harsher criticisms were made by S. B. Veselovskii. The historian S. O. Shmidt, then a student at the Central Asian University in Tashkent, attended Tolstoi’s reading of the play to the Institute of History. Many years later, he recalled that ‘Veselovskii’s critique stood out among the adulatory or politely vague speeches . . .

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Standing at the rostrum . . . Veselovskii turned to the written text. He made many observations, both of a general character and particularly about historical inaccuracies and absurdities . . .’23 Veselovskii himself was to write that, after the reading of the play several historians pointed out to A. N. Tolstoi the undesirability of using historical names so freely, to which Tolstoi protested, ‘Isn’t it all the same to you?’ I in my speech replied that it was a matter of complete indifference to me what names were used by the author of a novel or play about Vampuka the African bride, but for me as for other historians it was not a matter of indifference how the author of an artistic work on historical themes dealt with historical names.24 Tolstoi responded with studied unconcern to Veselovskii’s criticisms, claiming that as an artist rather than a historian he was justified in permitting some inaccuracies in factual detail and in chronology. 25 Veselovskii’s wife, in a letter of 15 June 1942, described Tolstoi’s reaction to the historian’s criticisms: he did not engage with Veselovskii, but simply brushed his remarks aside and hid behind general phrases. Tolstoi gave the impression, she added, that ‘the play was already approved and there was now no point in breaking lances – not so crude, but that was very much the meaning’.26 But if Tolstoi really thought that the play was ‘already approved’, he was soon to be disillusioned. Not only did his Ivan Groznyi fail to win a Stalin Prize, but at the end of May an article on contemporary Soviet drama in Literatura i iskusstvo included a damning attack on the play. Tolstoi’s play had already been nominated for a Stalin Prize by the time that he gave his readings in Tashkent. The committee responsible for awarding the prizes for art and literature for 1941, chaired by the theatre director V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, met in Tbilisi in February 1942.27 Nemirovich-Danchenko later offered Tolstoi a summary of the comments on the play which he himself had made in the Prize Committee. It contained many wonderful scenes, Nemirovich-Danchenko had said, but it was uneven in quality: ‘After one, two, three sparkling scenes there follows a very weak one [the scene with Kurbskii and Bell – MP], and the next one [the scene in which Ivan receives Kurbskii’s letter] is also weak.’ The author had become too distracted by subplots at the expense of the basic narrative. The main theme should have been:

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What is Groznyi fighting against? and who are those whom he condemns, who don’t understand his political plans and hamper him in his profound actions? This what and who aren’t taken seriously, and are even largely angled in a comic way, which our actors will emphasise even further – thus Groznyi’s cruelty remains unjustified. This was Nemirovich-Danchenko’s main criticism of the play, and although it was expressed somewhat cryptically, he seemed to feel that Tolstoi had not adequately demonstrated the seriousness of the threat posed by boyar treason. Nevertheless, he assured Tolstoi that all ten members of the committee had voted for the play to be awarded a first-class prize. A possible obstacle, however, was the fact that it was a 1942 work.28 The list of Stalin Prize winners for 1941 was issued on 11 April 1942, with no mention of Tolstoi’s name.29 An undated memo to Stalin from the Central Committee secretaries Andreev, Shcherbakov and Voznesenskii on amendments to the Committee’s proposed list of prizes for literature and art noted that although Tolstoi’s play was ‘written in a very good literary language’, it had the disadvantage that ‘the role of Ivan Groznyi as the organizer of the Russian state and the gatherer of the “Russian land” was shown insufficiently clearly’. In addition, the memorandum continued, the play was unpublished and hence ‘unknown to the reader’. But the writers added helpfully that Tolstoi’s A Cloudy Morning had been published in 1941, and consideration might be given to awarding Tolstoi a Stalin Prize for that novel.30 On 28 April Shcherbakov wrote to Stalin to report that the Committee’s recommendation had been rejected not only on technical grounds (the play was unpublished, it had not yet been shown in the theatre, the Soviet public was unfamiliar with it and the critics had not had their say), but also for substantive reasons: ‘the play distorts the historical image of one of the most important Russian statesmen – Ivan IV.’ Far from restoring Ivan’s reputation after its misrepresentation by noble and bourgeois historiography, Shcherbakov continued, Tolstoi’s Ivan Groznyi would merely add to the confusion of historians and writers about sixteenth-century Russia. Productions of the play in Soviet theatres should therefore be forbidden, as should its publication in the press.31 A fuller version of this memorandum provides detailed criticisms of the play.32 It catalogues the defects of Tolstoi’s depiction of Tsar

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Ivan. The author had not only failed to rehabilitate the tsar, but had distorted his image, neglecting to show him as a great statesman fighting against the reactionary boyars for the creation of a single Russian state. The play did not depict Ivan’s cruelty towards the boyars, which was necessary to break their opposition towards his reforms. Nor did it show the ordinary people, other than simplistically through the figure of Vasilii the Blessed. The oprichnina was not depicted as the force on which Ivan based himself. The Livonian War was presented incorrectly: there was no mention of the destruction of the Livonian Knights by the Russian troops; the depiction of the war ended with Kurbskii’s treason and the retreat of the Russian army; Groznyi’s own participation in the war was not shown, and his attitude towards the war and towards Kurbskii’s treason was portrayed only in a scene in Mar’ya Temryukovna’s bedroom.33 Official displeasure with the play was made public in an article in Literatura i iskusstvo on 30 May, which encapsulated the criticisms made in the internal Party memoranda. The author summarized the new ‘correct’ interpretation of Ivan’s role as state-builder, talented general, brilliant diplomat and enlightened reformer, before ominously declaring that Tolstoi’s play ‘distorts the historical character of this outstanding Russian figure’. Ivan – the critic complained – was shown mainly in the context of his personal life. His role in the ‘gathering’ of the Russian lands and in the creation of the centralized state was not reflected in the play, and his extensive reforms were also ignored. His struggle against the boyars was reduced to internal court squabbles, and the role of the oprichnina as Ivan’s base of support was not really shown. The play did touch on the Livonian War, but the rout of Livonia by Russian troops was not depicted. ‘Undoubtedly,’ the article concluded, ‘A. N. Tolstoi’s play does not resolve the task of the historical rehabilitation of Ivan Groznyi.’34 The author of this article, M. B. Khrapchenko, was the chairman of the Committee for Artistic Affairs, the body which had commissioned the play from Tolstoi in December 1940. It seems likely that the main purpose of Khrapchenko’s article was to alert other writers who were currently working on their Groznyi commissions – and the prospective reviewers and critics of their efforts – to the nature of the ‘correct’ interpretation that they were expected to provide. At this time, Kostylev’s novel was about to appear in Oktyabr’, Eisenstein was writing his screenplay in Alma-Ata, Nemirovich-

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Danchenko had already seen a draft of V. A. Solov’ev’s play, The Great Sovereign,35 and Il’ya Sel’vinskii was working on his verse-drama, The Livonian War.36 The public condemnation of Tolstoi’s play evidently did not represent only Khrapchenko’s personal view. In a book published in 1956, V. R. Shcherbina wrote: In the first edition of the dramatic tale Ivan Groznyi the main motive of the struggle between tsar and boyars is the idea of autocratic power [samovlastie]. I. V. Stalin after reading [it] advised the author to give a broader illumination of Groznyi’s state-building activity and of the meaning of his introduction of the oprichnina.37 It is not clear when Stalin first read Tolstoi’s play. His personal archive contains a copy of the first edition which was signed for the press on 16 April 1942.38 But, as we have seen, Stalin was briefed by Shcherbakov and others, probably in March, on the rejection of the play for a Stalin Prize and he may have read a draft or proof copy at around that time. It is certainly unlikely that such a hostile attack as Khrapchenko’s, on a writer of Tolstoi’s stature, could have been published without authorization at the very highest level. The decision to halt the forthcoming production of the play at the Malyi Theatre seems to have been taken in May, probably at the same time as Khrapchenko’s article appeared in Literatura i iskusstvo. In his letter to Tolstoi of early June 1942 NemirovichDanchenko told the writer that he had learned the news (in a telephone call from Khrapchenko) with mixed feelings. As director of the Moscow Arts Theatre (MKhAT) he was not entirely heartbroken to hear that the play’s forthcoming production at the rival Malyi Theatre had been halted.39 At the time of his first reading of Ivan Groznyi for the Stalin Prize Committee, Nemirovich-Danchenko had wanted to have the play exclusively for MKhAT, with N. P. Khmelev in the title role.40 Subsequently, he had considered staging the play in MKhAT simultaneously with its production by the Malyi. But now that the Malyi production had been halted ‘for the time being’, Tolstoi was freed from his agreement with the theatre, and Nemirovich-Danchenko formally invited him to offer it to MKhAT, assuring him that he could take as long as he liked over the reworking of the play. Khrapchenko knew that he was writing to Tolstoi – Nemirovich-Danchenko added – and approved of his

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proposal.41 Nemirovich-Danchenko seems genuinely to have seen official disapproval of the play as a blessing in disguise. On 4 June 1942 he wrote to his associate I. M. Moskvin that the banning of Ivan Groznyi had created an opportunity for MKhAT to engage in ‘detailed, prolonged work on the play with the author, and for constant contacts (and perhaps arguments) with the leaders of our policy, with the aim of achieving a remarkable spectacle’. Tolstoi had enormous talent, Nemirovich-Danchenko added, but ‘he always lacks wisdom – so perhaps we could help him in this respect’.42 Tolstoi’s own feelings about the banning of his play are not recorded but, initially at least, he may have been almost as relaxed about it as Nemirovich-Danchenko. Certainly, when he was awarded a Stalin Prize in March 1943 for his trilogy The Road to Calvary, he wrote to Stalin presenting him with the prize money of 100 000 roubles in order to build a tank – and asked Stalin’s permission for the tank to be called Groznyi! (The tank was duly built and served against the Germans.)43 Tolstoi’s apparent lack of concern was not of course without foundation: he had survived similar criticisms of his Peter I; he was one of the most famous of Soviet writers, a Stalin Prize laureate and, through his patriotic journalism, a valuable contributor to the war effort. He could afford to be philosophical about the criticism of his Ivan Groznyi and set about revising it. The history of the first version of Tolstoi’s play illustrates the unpredictability and uncertainty of the Groznyi rehabilitation campaign. In spite of his experience with the image of Peter the Great, Tolstoi had failed to understand what was required of him (as had the audiences at the first readings of the play in Tashkent). There is no evidence that Stalin suspected the work of constituting a subversive allegory (nor is it likely that Tolstoi himself had any intention of writing one), but the play had not gone far enough in depicting Ivan heroically, as a state-builder and gatherer of the Russian lands, a great military commander and a ruthless eradicator of treason. Tolstoi may have heard the whispers that Stalin regarded Groznyi as ‘insufficiently terrible’ and naively sought to illustrate this defect, failing to appreciate that what was actually required was a representation not of the ‘real’ tsar with his ‘weaknesses’, but of a heroic analogue of Stalin. The published and unpublished criticisms of Tolstoi’s play undoubtedly hint at its failure to reflect Stalin’s own self-image, historicized and projected onto the figure of Ivan Groznyi.

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The two-part play of 1943–4 Tolstoi’s reworking of Ivan Groznyi proved to be a prolonged operation. Initially he seems to have hoped to produce a revised version of the play for the Malyi Theatre. On 8 July 1942, however, he sent a telegram to the director of the theatre, I. Ya. Sudakov: ‘Revisions are leading nowhere. In November there will be a new play.’ 44 The new play, it turned out, was to be a trilogy. The second part was promised to MKhAT, and Tolstoi began work on it in January 1943, soon after his return to Moscow from Tashkent at the end of November 1942. But in April 1943, on completing the second play, the author decided that enough was enough. The last years of Ivan’s life were too dreadful to write about in wartime, Tolstoi told the playwright B. Romashov: for the moment there would be no Part Three.45 The second play, entitled The Difficult Years, dealt with such major events of Ivan’s reign as the Assembly of the Land of 1566 and the punitive raid on Novgorod in 1570; it ended with the burning of Moscow by the Tatars in 1571. The settings ranged from the Moscow Kremlin to the headquarters of the Polish King Sigismund Augustus, from Novgorod to the Russian camp in Livonia, and the court of the Crimean khan at Bakhchisarai. Ivan was shown in many roles: as a clever politician manipulating the Assembly into supporting the continuation of the war; as a skilful diplomat in his dealings with the Lithuanian envoy Voropai; as the besotted lover of Prince Afanasii Vyazemskii’s wife Anna; as the dashing commander of his troops; as the protector of Russian merchants in Novgorod and Moscow; and last but not least as the tough-minded ruler who was not afraid to act harshly against proven traitors. The interrelationship between internal opposition and foreign enemies was stressed throughout; the boyars were shown to be in league not only with King Sigismund but also with the Crimean khan Devlet Girei, and it was as a result of Prince Ivan Mstislavskii’s treason that Moscow was burned by the Tatars in the final scene. Ivan’s harshness against traitors was therefore justified in patriotic terms, even though the tsar himself refused to justify his actions from a moral point of view.46 Although The Difficult Years was designed to meet the criticisms that had been directed against the original play, it ran up against various obstacles. Tolstoi was unable to obtain a decision on whether the work could be staged. Having made fruitless attempts to recruit support from Shcherbakov, Egolin, Aleksandrov and Molotov,47 Tolstoi

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Ivan the Terrible as epic warrior-hero (bogatyr’). Frontispiece illustration, by P. P. Sokolov-Skal’, from A. N. Tolstoi’s play, Ivan Groznyi (Moscow, 1945).

wrote to Stalin on 2 June 1943, complaining that the play was ‘lying immobile’; Shcherbakov had not answered his appeal for help, and the Committee for Artistic Affairs had taken no decision. Mean-

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while the Malyi Theatre (sic) was impatient to put the play on: it could do so by the end of November or December (if permission were granted quickly). Tolstoi pleaded with Stalin (‘if you can find the time’) to read the copy of the play that he had sent him. The writer stressed that this play was a self-sufficient piece which could be staged independently of the first part. It was, Tolstoi concluded, ‘the most difficult and the most precious work in my entire literary career’.48 Tolstoi’s arguments in favour of his play are interesting, if only as an indication of the sort of case that the writer, as an experienced Kremlin courtier, clearly thought was most likely to influence Stalin at that particular time. The arguments were primarily patriotic, and specifically Russian-nationalist, ones. Tolstoi wrote that he had begun work on the play (i.e. on the first part, now entitled The Eagle and his Mate) in October 1941, at a difficult time when it had been necessary to transform the history of Russian culture ‘as a weapon of struggle’. The experience of the Soviet period and of the war had shown that the Russian people (‘virtually the only European people to have had sovereign occupation of their land for two millennia’) had a mighty national culture. The specific features of Russian-ness included the idea of the greatness of the Russian state, aspirations to goodness and to moral perfection, boldness in social transformations, and gentleness combined with courage and stubbornness. All of these qualities were particularly evident in sixteenth-century Russians: ‘And the most outstanding character of that period was Ivan Groznyi. In him were concentrated all the distinctive features of the Russian character; from him, as from a spring, flow the streams and broad rivers of Russian literature.’ ‘What can the Germans offer in the sixteenth century?’, Tolstoi demanded rhetorically, before providing his own scornful answer: ‘the classic burgher, Martin Luther’. His first play, Tolstoi continued, had been an experimental attempt to understand Groznyi and establish his character: ‘In it I slipped into the sixteenth century as through a narrow gap, in order to listen to the voices and glimpse the real images of the people of that time.’ The second play, by contrast, was about Groznyi’s deeds. Tolstoi had tried to understand their meaning and to explicate their causes, lost or distorted by the historians of the nineteenth century.49 We do not know when or how Stalin responded to Tolstoi’s letter of 2 June, but he does seem to have expressed an interest in the affair, since on 16 October 1943 the author wrote to him again,

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enclosing revised texts of both plays, on which he had indicated the most significant changes with red pencil. In the first play – Tolstoi told Stalin – he had removed the fourth scene (Kurbskii at Revel’) and had replaced it with two new scenes depicting Groznyi’s capture of Polotsk and Kurbskii’s flight to Lithuania. In the second play he had rewritten the scene with Sigismund Augustus and the final scene of Groznyi before Moscow. In addition, ‘the entire text of both plays has been polished up in respect to both style and meaning’. The Arts Theatre (MKhAT) and the Malyi were impatiently awaiting decisions on the plays: ‘Dear Iosif Vissarionovich,’ Tolstoi concluded, ‘give your blessing for this work to begin.’50 As Stalin does not seem to have responded to this appeal, Tolstoi wrote to him again on 24 November, enclosing yet another version of the first play with an additional scene depicting the conspiracy of Kurbskii’s princely accomplices in Moscow. This scene, Tolstoi wrote, was designed to make the plot-line about Groznyi’s opponents – the feudal lords and Kurbskii – more ‘concrete’. The original fourth scene (Kurbskii at Revel’) was now replaced by three new scenes (Polotsk, the Moscow conspiracy and Kurbskii’s flight). In the rest of the play, ‘to correspond with the new scenes, the plotline of Groznyi’s absolutism is strengthened and sharpened up’. As a result of these revisions, the author felt that the play had gained ‘both in terms of its historical veracity and in the strengthening of Groznyi’s own role’. Again Tolstoi concluded by begging Stalin to help to get the plays approved (‘if you agree with my amendments’) since the theatres were anxious to start work on their productions.51 This time Stalin evidently did intervene since in the spring of 1944 the two parts of the play were published in the literary journal Oktyabr’. 52 The Eagle and his Mate also appeared as a separate publication, with a limited print-run of 100 copies, signed for the press on 6 February 1944.53 The published text of The Eagle was the eleven-scene version that Tolstoi had sent to Stalin in November 1943. According to the annotator of the text of the play in Tolstoi’s Complete Works (who may have been familiar with Tolstoi’s letter to Stalin of 24 November 1943), these changes were conditioned by the author’s desire to delineate more clearly the forces that opposed Groznyi in his struggle, to reveal more sharply and concretely the complexion of the boyar party hostile to Ivan. The plot-line of Kurbskii is thereby drawn with much greater sharpness. Now he appears

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before us at the very moment of committing treason. Before that we are shown a group of plotters, Tsar Ivan’s enemies, secretly gathered at Princess Staritskaya’s house, demanding from Metropolitan Filipp that he ‘destroy’ the sacred oath that restricts their actions. As for the scene in Polotsk (Tsar Ivan’s entry into the conquered town) it was necessary to the author, amongst other reasons, in order to create a climax in the movement of the play, in the development of Tsar Ivan’s image as a statesman and general. In this scene the author showed the first positive result of Tsar Ivan’s state policy.54 The Polotsk scene, at the end of which Ivan himself appears in full armour to receive the surrender of the town, also met the criticism of the original play that it did not depict Russian victories in the war nor Ivan’s participation in it. The text of the two-part play published in Oktyabr’ received favourable reviews. In Literatura i iskusstvo V. Pertsov criticized only ‘a certain idealization of the relations between the tsar and the people’.55 In the Party journal Bol’shevik, D. Zaslavskii’s overall assessment of the play was a positive one, and he concluded that it was ‘not accidental’ that such a work should have been produced during the ‘Great Fatherland War’ when, ‘just as four hundred years ago, German invaders blocked the path of development of the Russian people’.56 On 15 June a meeting of the ‘artistic-historical’ sector of the Union of Writers discussed the play and gave it a very favourable evaluation. ‘Almost all the speakers,’ according to the report in Literatura i iskusstvo, ‘said that the image of Groznyi as a statesman, general and diplomat was depicted by the author with integrity and conviction’.57 The play was nominated for a Stalin Prize, much to the indignation of I. G. Bol’shakov, the Chairman of the Committee for Cinematographic Affairs, who wrote to Shcherbakov in March 1944 pointing out that ‘Tolstoi began work on his play at almost the same time as Comrade Eisenstein began his work on the screenplay Ivan Groznyi. Although they had both finished work on their respective pieces at the end of 1942 [sic]’, Bol’shakov continued, ‘Tolstoi’s play was scrapped for interpreting Groznyi’s image incorrectly, while Eisenstein’s screenplay was approved by Comrade STALIN’. ‘Thus,’ he continued, ‘the priority in the development of such an

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important theme as Ivan Groznyi belongs to Soviet cinematography, and therefore it would be unjust to award a Stalin prize to Tolstoi now.’ Eisenstein’s film would be released and Tolstoi’s play would be staged in 1944, and it would be fairer to postpone the adjudication until the following year. 58 In fact the Stalin Prize process was delayed by the war. Only in January 1946 was it announced that the script of Tolstoi’s play as a whole had gained a first-class prize for dramaturgy in the awards for 1943–4.59 Literaturnaya gazeta marked the award with a ritualistically enthusiastic review by Alexander Drozdov, who drew explicit parallels between the military threat from Germany that the USSR had survived in 1941–2 and the mortal danger from the Crimean khan that had faced Groznyi’s Moscow in 1571.60 In the course of 1945 S. B. Veselovskii composed a review of the published text of the two-part play. 61 Veselovskii’s criticisms were scathing, but – as in the case of his oral critique of the original text read by Tolstoi in Tashkent in 1942 – they were mainly concerned with the historical inaccuracies and improbabilities in the play. Veselovskii insisted that he did not object in principle to the use of imagination and speculation by literary writers. He compared the account of Kurbskii’s flight to Lithuania in A. K. Tolstoi’s historical poem Vasilii Shibanov with that in A. N. Tolstoi’s play, and concluded that although the earlier Tolstoi had departed somewhat from the primary sources, he nevertheless ‘provided vivid and very true-to-life images of the distant past’, whereas Aleksei Nikolaevich treats historical truth with impermissible ‘freedom’ and, without motive and without any necessity, he composes something which did not happen, and which could not have happened; as a result his tale is crammed full not of living people, but of puppets labelled with historical names.62 Many published reviews gave high praise to the final scene of Part Two, in which Ivan reacts with great coolness and composure to the burning of Moscow by the Tatars,63 but Veselovskii was particularly caustic about the contradictions and inconsistencies of this scene, and he condemned as pretentious and meaningless its final words when the tsar muses: ‘It is burning, the Third Rome is burning . . . It is said: a fourth there will not be . . . It burns, but is not

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consumed, an imperishable blaze and an inextinguishable fire . . . This is the truth of Russia, the motherland of all humanity . . .’64 And, Veselovskii concluded: For everyone who knows the glorious literary career of A. N. Tolstoi, his dramatic tale about Ivan Groznyi represents an enigma: either he decided that as a celebrated writer, ‘all was permitted’ him; or at the end of his career he had lost all respect for the reader and wrote his swansong in the belief that for the Soviet reader ‘it didn’t matter’, as long as it was entertaining.65 S. O. Shmidt, who published Veselovskii’s review for the first time in 1989,66 also raised the question of why Tolstoi had provided such a pot-pourri of events and dates in the play, and such a mixture of styles. Shmidt speculated (albeit somewhat obliquely) that the departures from historical accuracy might have been a deliberate indication on the author’s part that the play was as much about Stalin as about Groznyi, and that the features which Veselovskii had described as enigmatic reflected Tolstoi’s attempt to answer certain questions: ‘how to evaluate (or to justify, convincing oneself) a cruel ruler who assumes that he embodies in himself the state and the aspirations of the people; how to explain the attitude of contemporaries (both his close associates and the broad strata) to such a sovereign.’67 Writing in 1988–9, during the ‘second wave’ of deStalinization under Gorbachev, Shmidt noted that the problem of the harsh ruler was of concern to the Soviet people, ‘now that the fatal consequences of the cult of Stalin’s personality are obvious’. But participants in the events of the Stalin era had also thought about this, Shmidt added, although they had rarely dared to speak about it, even among people they trusted, let alone write about it directly.68 Shmidt’s claim that contemporaries had interpreted Tolstoi’s Ivan Groznyi as a parable about Stalin is confirmed by the American scholar Spencer E. Roberts, who was in Russia in the immediately postwar years. ‘To one who saw both The Eagle and its Mate and The Difficult Years in Moscow’, Roberts wrote, ‘Tolstoi’s subtext was blatantly evident’: Perhaps present-day life is harsh; perhaps you wonder why your leaders are stern – at times even heartless; for the answer, simply watch our stage for depiction of an earlier period in your history – a perfect analogy. Comrade Stalin also must take drastic,

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unpleasant measures at times, but his acts are not purely arbitrary; they are designed for your ultimate good and the welfare of your country. 69 The view of Shmidt and Roberts, that Tolstoi’s implicit parallel between Stalin and Groznyi was intended as a justification of the Soviet leader, is shared by the German scholar Bernd Uhlenbruch, who argues that the ‘historical description of the Grozny epoch’ in artistic works was ‘a self-description of the Stalin culture’ and that the ‘revision of Grozny’s image’ was ‘a large-scale, targeted selfstylization of Stalin’.70 In relation to Tolstoi’s play, Uhlenbruch sees specific parallels even in the presentation of relatively minor details such as Kurbskii’s defection to the Poles, Kurbskii serving as a prototype for Trotsky.71 While this particular analogy may be overstated, in some parts of the play there are clear references to contemporary parallels, most obviously, of course, in relation to Russia’s allegedly ancient rights to the Baltic lands,72 and in the negative depiction of Germans. And it is possible that Tolstoi’s choice of the Circassian princess Mar’ya Temryukovna as the royal wife who falls victim to boyar poison (rather than the more historically correct Anastasiya, as in the Eisenstein film) may have been intended as a piece of flattery of Stalin, recalling the long tradition of friendly relations between Russia and the Caucasian peoples. (According to Anastas Mikoyan, Stalin believed that Mar’ya Temryukovna was actually a Georgian, since ‘in old Russia Georgians were called Circassians [cherkeshenkami]’.) 73 In general, however, the parallel between Stalin and Groznyi was drawn more broadly, in the author’s depiction of the ‘necessities’ of state that ‘require’ a strong ruler to act harshly against both external and internal enemies. (Significantly, the criticisms of the first version of the play had focused on their inadequate treatment of these themes.) The problem of the interpretation of this image was to face the various theatre directors who had to realize the play on the stage.

Ivan Groznyi on the stage, 1944–6 By early 1944 rehearsals were under way for the production of The Eagle and his Mate at the Malyi Theatre. A report in Literatura i iskusstvo in September 1944 claimed that the company had been working on the play for ten months. It reported the words of the director, Sudakov: ‘We want to create a monumental spectacle, with

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ideological profundity: highly patriotic, historically and artistically truthful.’ The premiere, the report stated, was due to take place on 27 September.74 In spite of this optimistic pronouncement, it seems that artistic problems led to the postponement of the premiere. On 1 October Tolstoi’s friend, the writer V. Ya. Shishkov, wrote to him about a preview that he had seen. In spite of his assurance that ‘the play is, in general, very good’, Shishkov clearly had a number of reservations about the production: the scene with the tsaritsa’s coffin in the last act was ‘gloom-ridden, seemingly not entirely natural’. The actors did not seem at ease with their roles: ‘there’s a lot of over-acting, and too little real life, and hence excessive flashiness.’75 Tolstoi was already seriously ill with the lung cancer that was to kill him within a few months, but he was able to be present at the premiere when it was eventually held on 18 October.76 It was not a critical success. On 27 October Pravda published a long and devastatingly hostile review of the production.77 The reviewer, L. Il’ichev, was careful to criticize Sudakov’s production rather than the text of the play which had already been officially approved. The script published in Oktyabr’, Il’ichev began, had provided a new and correct image of Ivan Groznyi. Its readers had looked forward to seeing the play on the stage, but the production by the Malyi did not justify their expectations. Sudakov had not matched up to his responsible task: his approach had been neither honest nor serious. N. Solov’ev, the actor who played the role of Ivan, in general did well; the occasional weaknesses in his performance, such as his ‘false tone of primitive declamation’ and oversimplification of Ivan’s image, reflected the bad influence of the director. At the end of the play, when Ivan was made to brandish his sword as he rallied the oprichniki, he appeared as a ‘kind of operetta hero’. A major problem with the production – in addition to the shortcomings in its presentation of the main hero – was that Sudakov played too much of it for laughs, depicting the boyars, in particular, in a comic manner. Groznyi’s strength of character, Il’ichev complained, was not evident if his enemies appeared to be merely court jesters. But the critic was surely being disingenuous when he blamed this feature exclusively on Sudakov’s production. Tolstoi’s text – even in its revised form – had provided a basis for such an interpretation, with its often satirical representation of the tsar’s opponents. (Recall Nemirovich-Danchenko’s comments, on first reading the script, that the boyars were presented in a comic vein, ‘which our actors will emphasize even further’.)

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Pravda’s most damaging criticism of the production concerned its lack of ‘realism’. Il’ichev attacked the staging of the final scene of the play, in which the tsaritsa’s coffin was represented by ‘an incomprehensible unwieldy structure, covered in black material’. The audience, he asserted, were disconcerted by ‘such pretentious devices [vykrutasy] in the manner of Meyerhold, brought on to the stage of the Malyi Theatre by I. Sudakov in defiance of artistic realism’. If one bears in mind that Meyerhold had been arrested in 1939 after public criticism for ‘formalism’ (it was revealed much later that he had been executed soon afterwards), Sudakov had real grounds to fear for his life.78 The review concluded ominously that the director could have created a good play if he had demonstrated an ‘understanding of true realism in art . . . The Malyi Theatre’s performance of Ivan Groznyi in I. Sudakov’s production cannot satisfy the Soviet viewer. In order to create a truly worthwhile play, much more very serious work on it is required.’ In the event, Sudakov does not seem to have suffered a worse fate than removal from his job.79 He was replaced by P. Sadovskii, who reworked the play considerably, reducing the number of scenes from eleven to eight. 80 On 8 February 1945 Tolstoi’s wife Lyudmila Il’inichna attended a dress rehearsal of the play. She clearly did not like the production, and on 10 February she composed a letter to Khrapchenko in her husband’s name, criticizing the director’s changes to the final scene.81 By this stage Tolstoi himself was too ill to care about the play. Lyudmila Il’inichna’s diary entry for 9 February reads: ‘When I told Alesha a bit about the performance, he said, “Don’t bother me”. He himself didn’t ask about the rehearsal at all. Later he said, “What a strange fate for the play – out there it’s being performed, but I’m already indifferent . . .”’ Two days later she recorded: ‘I told him about the performance and showed him the letter to Khrapchenko that I had composed, and Alesha signed it in a very shaky, weak hand.’82 The premiere of the new production took place on 3 March 1945, just over a week after the author’s death.83 The reviews in the central press did not appear until 30 May, perhaps indicating some hesitation on the part of officialdom. This time, however, Pravda was entirely satisfied with the production. ‘At last Soviet viewers are seeing a play about Ivan Groznyi that entirely corresponds to their expectations,’ S. Golubov’s review began. The Malyi’s production of the previous autumn, he reminded his readers, had disappointed and displeased the audience, but the new directorial

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team had successfully resolved the problems. The reduction in the number of scenes provided a greater unity to the structure of the play and speeded up the action, bringing considerable gains in dramatic effectiveness. The crudely comic boyars of the original production had been removed. And the reworking of the final scene – to which Tolstoi’s wife had objected so strongly – was praised by Golubov for being ‘solemn in a new way, filled with profound content and free from phantasmagoric devices in bad taste, such as the tsaritsa’s monstrous sarcophagus’. Solov’ev’s performance in the role of Ivan was generally successful, although some operatic declamatory mannerisms remained. Tolstoi’s play, the reviewer concluded, was ‘not a narrative about the personal fate of Tsar Ivan. It is something much more – a story about the fate of Russia. Here the wills of many strong personalities clash in conflict, but the will of the strongest and cleverest prevails.’ 84 The second play in the dilogy, The Difficult Years, was due to open at MKhAT in November 1945, with N. P. Khmelev in the main role. On 1 November 1945, however, Khmelev collapsed during a dress rehearsal and died in the theatre, still wearing his costume and make-up as Ivan Groznyi. 85 (S. O. Shmidt speculates that Khmelev’s death may have been caused by the stress of preparing for a role which he interpreted as an allegory about Stalin.)86 The play was withdrawn from the theatre’s winter repertoire, and received its premiere only on 20 June 1946, with M. P. Bolduman as Ivan.87 The production received a hostile review in Literaturnaya gazeta. The critic B. Emel’yanov accused the directors, A. Popov and M. Knebel’, of weakening the tragic element in Tolstoi’s depiction of Ivan. Instead of showing Groznyi as a tsar whose tragedy lay in the fact that his ideas were many years ahead of his time, the production presented him as someone who accomplished both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ deeds, and tried to justify him by weighing them in the balance. This had been achieved by taking liberties with Tolstoi’s script, removing some of the episodes in which Ivan seemed to be depicted in too negative a light. ‘Why did the theatre depict Groznyi as restrained and mild?’, Emel’yanov demanded: surely he was right to punish traitors? and surely their punishment was provoked by state necessity? Tolstoi’s own image of Ivan – the reviewer insisted – was more complex and tragic: his hero recognized the necessity of terror as the means to the end of a strong and united

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Russia; he accepted moral responsibility for it, and he was shown to suffer accordingly. The review concluded by noting regretfully that Tolstoi’s play had not yet ‘found its full realization on the stage’.88 In spite of these criticisms, however, both parts of the play came to form part of the staple repertoire of the late-Stalinist theatre. The editors of the 1960 edition of Tolstoi’s works tell us that the play was performed in Novosibirsk, Kazan’, Gor’kii, Riga, Chelyabinsk, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Saratov ‘and many other cities of the Soviet Union’.89 Spencer E. Roberts, who saw both plays in Moscow in the postwar period, provides us with a rare piece of evidence: an informed Westerner’s assessment of the aesthetic merits of the productions. In Roberts’ view, they represented ‘the highwater mark of Soviet historical drama from an artistic point of view’. ‘Of some 350 plays which the author of this book saw in the USSR a few years back,’ he continues, ‘Ivan Groznyi, Parts I and II, unequivocally stood out as a mountain on a plain of mediocrity, as far as the plays of the Soviet period were concerned.’ In it, Russian history (seen through rosy glasses, but dramatically presented) and early Muscovite life are set in a strikingly colorful atmosphere and acted by three-dimensional characters. The staging of The Eagle and its Mate in the Malyi and The Difficult Years in the MXAT, despite the multitude of technical dificulties which Tolstoi placed in the director’s way, was a theatrical triumph. Costumes, painstakingly reproduced from museum pieces and executed in magnificently rich cloth, innumerable complex, full-stage, heavy settings on which no expense was spared, and brilliant acting (a bit melodramatic at times, yes, but then that is part of the Russian style) all united to make a production of which the Soviets could be truly proud.90 The author adds that, ‘Once the “cult of personality” was denounced by Khrushchev, the plays were quietly dropped from the repertoire.’91

7 S. M. Eisenstein’s Film

The initial stages, 1941–2 A film about Ivan Groznyi was commissioned from Eisenstein in January 1941.1 As we have already noted, the decision to make this film was taken by the Committee for Artistic Affairs at the same time as it decided to commission a play from Aleksei Tolstoi.2 The request was transmitted to the director by Zhdanov.3 Eisenstein seems to have been in no doubt, however, who his true patron was: in a draft letter to Stalin of 20 January 1944, the director referred to ‘making the film Ivan the Terrible according to your instructions [po Vashim ukazaniyam] which I received from Comrade Zhdanov’.4 There are various accounts – all seemingly speculative or based on anecdotal evidence – of the content of the directives which Zhdanov transmitted to Eisenstein. According to one contemporary, Zhdanov had stressed that history was a lesson, and that the aim of the film was to provide an analogy with the present day. 5 Levin writes that Zhdanov’s words were no secret: ‘It was necessary to justify Ivan Groznyi, to show that blood had not been spilt in vain.’6 Eisenstein himself records that his first notes for the film were made on 21 January 1941, at a memorial meeting held at the Bol’shoi Theatre on the anniversary of Lenin’s death.7 Within a few days the director had made his first draft outline of the screenplay. It comprised five main headings: (I) Ivan’s childhood; (II) his marriage, coronation as tsar and conquest of Kazan’; (III) his feigned death, Kurbskii’s treason, the introduction of the oprichnina and Metropolitan Filipp’s challenge; (IV) the punitive raid on Novgorod and the Livonian War; and finally (V) ‘The sea, 1576’.8 Apart from the fact that it included ‘friendship with Kurbskii’ in the first section 149

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and a reference to ‘500 virgins’ (i.e. the ‘bride-show’ for Ivan’s choice of a wife) in relation to his marriage, this outline corresponded in its essence to the structure of the ‘literary screenplay’ which was eventually to be published in early 1944. At first Eisenstein worked quickly on the screenplay and by 26 February he already had a rough draft comprising 51 scenes, culminating in the death of Malyuta Skuratov during the Russians’ capture of the Livonian fortress of Vessenshtein.9 A revised draft of 31 March identified the section concerned with Ivan’s childhood as a ‘Prologue’ and began the main film with the bride-show. From 1–8 April Eisenstein worked feverishly on the screenplay at his dacha at Kratovo, outside Moscow. Now the film was to be in two parts, the first of which ended with Anastasiya’s funeral. The second part began with Ivan’s departure from Moscow for Aleksandrova Sloboda, and ended with him standing on the shores of the Baltic Sea. The typescript of this draft, dated 1 May 1941, was still circulating in the Mosfil’m studios and the Kinokomitet when the Germans invaded on 22 June.10 Eisenstein’s first version of the screenplay, therefore, was written in a fairly detailed form before the German invasion, i.e. in the period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact after the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states in the summer of 1940. The prominence of the Baltic theme is evident in the very first outline of January 1941, with its culminating episodes of ‘Livonia’ and ‘The Sea’. Eisenstein’s own commentary on this outline included the words, ‘it is necessary to finish with Livonia and the exit to the sea’.11 The version of May 1941 contained all the basic ‘Baltic’ themes that were to remain in the published screenplay of 1944: in the Prologue the boy-prince Ivan stakes his claim to the Baltic ports, ‘built by our grandfathers’; later, during the Livonian War, the tsar reproaches the German mercenary Staden for looting from Lettish peasants, telling him that ‘We have come not as conquerors but to our own age-old lands.’ In the final scene Ivan carries the wounded Malyuta to the shore, so that he can see the sea before he dies, and the script ends with Ivan’s words: ‘We stand on the seas. And stand we shall!’12 Even at this stage, however, Eisenstein’s comments on the film suggest that he was at least as concerned with Russian domestic politics, and with Ivan’s own personality, as with justifying Russia’s age-old rights to the Baltic lands. His earliest notes refer to the oprichnina as a mechanism for the promotion of ‘new men’ from the lower classes, and he describes Ivan’s tragedy as residing in his

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tormenting doubts as to whether he had chosen the correct path.13 In a letter to the film director Esfir’ Shub of 13 March 1941, Vsevolod Vishnevskii wrote: Eizen is wandering around the studio . . . He says that he can’t get properly into the material on Groznyi . . . The theme is undoubtedly a grand one, Shakespearian . . . It needs to be resolved at the level of historical tragedy. But simply [showing] stirring battles around Livonian castles, we have to admit, is not really so new and fresh. We’ll hope that resolutions will be found.14 In an article for Izvestiya, published on 30 April 1941, Eisenstein paid relatively little attention to the Baltic issue (certainly much less than Kostylev had done in his article published in the same newspaper barely six weeks earlier). The director mentioned the Livonian War only indirectly. (‘The country’s legitimate desire for an exit to the Baltic Sea was presented in Europe as a new invasion by the Huns.’) Otherwise he was primarily concerned to identify and challenge the older ‘incorrect’ representations of the tsar, such as those provided by the artists Repin and Vasnetsov, and the sculptor Antokol’skii, whose negative depictions of Ivan were based on the accounts of ungrateful foreigners such as Staden, Taube and Kruse, or of the traitor Kurbskii. In reality, Eisenstein asserted – in line with the new historical orthodoxy – Ivan was a profoundly wise and far-sighted statesman, centuries ahead of his time, who devised new forms of state centralization and engaged in mortal combat with the boyars who stood for feudal fragmentation. The oprichniki, recruited from the depths of the ordinary people, provided Ivan with his base of support against the boyars, who betrayed their fatherland to foreign rulers.15 The German invasion of June 1941 caused Eisenstein to revise the treatment of the international situation in his screenplay. On 6 September he drafted a letter to Bol’shakov referring to changes required by the war,16 and he also prepared a document detailing the proposed amendments, including those connected with Ivan’s foreign policy. First of all, in relation to the Livonian theme, Eisenstein wrote, it was necessary to downplay the role of Poland and to strengthen the anti-German line, by stressing the role of the [Holy Roman] Emperor, the [Livonian] Knights and the Hanseatic League, and depicting German aggression against Russia and the blockade of the Baltic. Secondly, the theme of Ivan’s anglophilia should be

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introduced, and the links between Russia and England shown. Finally, a place should be found for the heroic defence of Russian towns such as Ryazan’, Pskov and Smolensk.17 These suggested changes make it clear that Eisenstein consciously regarded his screenplay as providing an analogy with current events: the Nazi invasion of the USSR had, of course, converted the Poles from potential enemies of Russia into fellow Slav victims of German aggression, and it also made Great Britain an ally rather than an enemy of the Soviet Union. Decisions on the proposed changes to the depiction of Groznyi’s foreign policy were delayed by the upheaval of Mosfil’m’s evacuation to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan on 14 October. 18 On 11 February 1942 Eisenstein wrote to Bol’shakov enclosing a revised version of the screenplay. He had done his best, he asserted, to incorporate all the directives that Bol’shakov had given him, but he still had a query. Should he retain the scene concerning the military alliance and assistance that England had provided for Groznyi during the Livonian War? He wanted Bol’shakov’s advice on this foreign-policy matter, and also enclosed a letter to Zhdanov on the same issue.19 In that letter Eisenstein reported to Zhdanov that he was now awaiting instructions on the completed screenplay: And in particular on one point on which I can receive a reply only through you. Should we keep or change in the screenplay the theme of Ivan Groznyi’s contacts with England, the military alliance with Elizabeth of England and references to the military assistance that England provided to Russia during the Livonian War? 20 Eventually, on 5 September 1942, Bol’shakov wrote to Eisenstein to inform him that the ‘director’s script’ had been officially approved, but that some further amendments were ‘recommended’. Any attempts to introduce the theme of military cooperation with the English were decisively rejected as ‘not corresponding to historical truth’. As Yurenev notes, ‘neither did they correspond to the current political moment: the English had not opened the second front’.21 Eisenstein’s reply, enclosing the amended script, stressed that ‘The theme of Russia’s relations with England has been corrected along the lines you indicated’. But he added – appealing to the authority of the historians Vipper, Forsten and Yurii Tolstoi – that Bol’shakov was wrong to deny that England had helped Russia in the Livonian

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War. Nevertheless, the scenes with Queen Elizabeth, and all the ‘English episodes’, had been omitted as ‘unnecessary’. 22 In fact, however, Eisenstein was able to publish the ‘literary screenplay’, which had been completed in December 1941,23 in a version that still included the English episodes.24 It appeared in the issue of the literary journal Novyi mir dated October/November 1943. Because of wartime delays, this double number – with a press-run of 30 000 copies – was signed for the press only on 29 January 1944.25

The ‘literary screenplay’, 1943–4 Like the early drafts, the final version of the literary screenplay was firmly structured around foreign-policy issues, and especially the Baltic question. The following discussion focuses on this dimension of the text, dealing more briefly with other aspects which will be considered in greater detail in relation to the film itself. The screenplay begins with scenes of thunderclouds and flashes of lightning (the Russian word groza, from which the adjective Groznyi is derived, means ‘thunderstorm’ as well as ‘terror’). As the thunder crashes, voices are heard singing about the threat of boyar treason and the need to save the Russian land from its enemies. The orchestral music of the ‘Groznyi’ theme is heard, and the following words appear on the screen: In the century when Europe experienced Charles V and Philip II, Catherine de Medici and the Duke of Alba, Henry VIII and Bloody Mary, the fires of the Inquisition and St Bartholomew’s Night – there ascended the throne of the grand princes of Muscovy a man who became the first tsar and autocrat of all Rus’ – Tsar Ivan Vasil’evich Groznyi.26 The music breaks off abruptly, and the ‘Prologue’ begins. Its first scene depicts the death of Ivan’s widowed mother, Elena Glinskaya, in front of her terrified eight-year-old son. Elena has been poisoned by the boyars, who also murder her lover, Prince Telepnev-Obolenskii. The next scene is set five years later, in an audience-chamber in the palace. Two boyars, Bel’skii and Shuiskii, wrangle over the rival bids of the Hanseatic League and the Livonian Knights to act as agents for Russia’s Baltic trade. It is clear that the boyars are being bribed by their respective clients. The young Grand Prince is unable to intervene, and he obviously resents his powerlessness. In the

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next scene Ivan begs his old nurse to sing his favourite song ‘about the ocean’ as she helps to undress him after the audience. The boy listens attentively to the words of the song: Ocean-Sea, Sea of deepest blue, Sea of deepest blue, Glorious sea . . . The Russian rivers run toward you. Towns stand on your shores . . . There stand our ancient towns, Captured by a dark foe . . . Ocean-Sea, Sea of deepest blue, Sea of deepest blue, Russian sea . . . 27 The boyars enter, still squabbling over whether to pay the Hanseatic League or the Livonian Order. Ivan interrupts them: ‘We don’t have to pay anyone! The coastal towns were built by our grandfathers. Therefore these lands are our age-old inheritance. They ought to belong to Moscow!’ Shuiskii and Bel’skii do not deny that the Baltic towns were originally Russian, but they express no interest in regaining them. ‘No-one wants to give us back the coastal towns,’ Shuiskii laughs, while Bel’skii observes that ‘What’s fallen off the cart is lost for good.’ ‘If they don’t give them back willingly, we’ll take them by force!’ Ivan retorts. And on being asked by Bel’skii where he will obtain such force, the boy angrily accuses the boyars of having squandered all Russia’s resources. The scene ends with Ivan ordering the arrest of Shuiskii, who has insulted Elena Glinskaya and cast doubt on her son’s paternity. Shuiskii is then killed by overzealous kennel-lads, and the youthful Grand Prince vows to ‘rule by myself . . . without the boyars. I shall be a tsar!’28 From the outset, therefore, the Prologue establishes the Baltic theme as a key element in the film – alongside, and interrelated with, the theme of boyar perfidy and avarice. Eisenstein assigns the folk-style song about the ‘Ocean-Sea’ to Ivan’s old nurse, thereby providing Russia’s claims to the coastal towns with a popular mandate, while the boyars are shown not only to be indifferent to Russian rights to the Baltic, but also to have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

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The main film begins with Ivan’s coronation, at which he outrages the foreign guests by assuming the imperial title of ‘tsar’. Ivan makes a speech, in which he defends his adoption of the new title in terms of the need to put an end to the plural authority of boyar rule. He addresses the boyars and clergy, stressing the need for unity and strength, and then turns abruptly to the foreign envoys: ‘For only a realm that is united, strong and integrated internally can also be powerful externally.’ He continues, to the distant strains of the song about the ‘Ocean-Sea’: ‘What is our fatherland but a body cut off at the elbows and knees? The upper reaches of our rivers – the Volga, the Dvina and the Volkhov – are under our rule, but their outflow to the sea is in foreign hands.’ The refrain about the Ocean-Sea becomes louder, as Ivan declares: ‘ . . . The coastal lands of our fathers and grandfathers – on the Baltic – have been cut off from our land.’ The foreign guests stir uneasily, and the new tsar continues, ‘ . . . And so this day we are also being crowned as the owner of those lands which now find themselves – for the time being – under other rulers!’29 The song about ‘the sea, the deep-blue Russian sea’, echoes high in the cupola of the Uspenskii cathedral, as Ivan concludes by proclaiming Moscow to be the Third Rome. The foreigners exclaim: ‘The Pope won’t permit it!’; ‘The Emperor won’t agree!’; ‘Europe won’t recognize him!’ But the wily old Livonian envoy whispers to his secretary, ‘If he’s strong enough, everyone will recognize him.’ Looking around for a potential member of Ivan’s entourage to subvert, the Livonian’s eye alights on Prince Andrei Kurbskii, who is gazing with barely concealed jealousy at Ivan’s fiancee Anastasiya.30 Ivan’s wedding feast is interrupted by the arrival of Tatar envoys from Kazan’, who announce an end to their treaty of friendship with Russia and proclaim the khan’s declaration of war. Ivan immediately calls for a campaign against Kazan’. The army sets off with its heavy cannon, and the siege of the Volga fortress ends in a Russian victory and the blowing up of the Tatar capital.31 After his return from Kazan’, Ivan sets a trap for the boyars by feigning illness and testing their loyalty by requiring them to swear allegiance to his infant son Dmitrii.32 The tsar’s aunt, Evfrosin’ya Staritskaya, tries to persuade them to take the oath to her son Vladimir instead. Ivan suddenly recovers, and rewards Kurbskii for his apparent loyalty by putting him in charge of a new military campaign. ‘We’ve finished with Kazan’, with the East,’ the tsar declares, ‘and you – Kurbskii – will lead the Russian forces . . . to the West! To

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Livonia! To the sea!’ And again the strains of the nurse’s song about the ‘Ocean-Sea’ are heard.33 The boyars are unhappy about Ivan’s policy of persecuting aristocrats of ancient lineage and promoting social upstarts. Turuntai-Pronskii threatens to flee to Lithuania. Bishop Pimen of Novgorod suggests that they take advantage of Kurbskii’s absence on campaign in order to weaken Ivan, and Evfrosin’ya volunteers to estrange Anastasiya from the tsar. In the next scene Ivan is shown in a fit of anger. The Livonian Knights and the Hanseatic Merchants have detained English military supplies designed for Moscow: ‘Again they have left my cannon without lead, without wax, without tin, without qualified experts!’ He shouts aloud that he must have the Baltic coastal towns; the sight of silver emblems representing Riga, Narva and Revel’, and bearing the crests of Sweden and Livonia, drives him into a further paroxysm of rage, in which the emblem of Revel’ falls to the ground and breaks. Ivan addresses its fragments: ‘You shall again be called by your Russian name of Kolyvan’!’ He briefs his envoy to England, Osip Nepeya: ‘You see, Nepeya, how necessary this military alliance is to me.’ Ivan gives Nepeya an elaborate chess set to take as a present to Queen Elizabeth (telling him to ‘explain everything to her with these pieces’), but makes it clear that Russia is not a supplicant: ‘Remind her that Tsar Ivan grants privileges to whomsoever he wishes. Those whom he does not like, he does not allow to enter his state. But for those he loves, he will open the way to the East.’34 After this, things begin to go badly for Ivan. Anastasiya is ill; a messenger from the southern fortress of Ryazan’ reports that the boyars want to surrender it to the Crimean khan; news arrives that Kurbskii has been defeated at Nevel’; and finally Evfrosin’ya succeeds in poisoning Anastasiya. The next scene switches to the court of Sigismund II Augustus of Poland. Kurbskii has defected and kneels before the king. He reports that all the boyars in Moscow are ready to come over to Lithuania, and that the Russian defeat at Nevel’ was the signal for a rising against Ivan. The tsar’s troops are far away on the southern frontier; Ivan has been weakened by the blockade of the Baltic and can be taken ‘with bare hands’. The Russian throne, Kurbskii continues, will be vacant for a new tsar, ‘a friend of Poland’ (he clearly means himself). Sigismund declares a crusade of all Christian rulers against Moscow. 35 Back in Moscow, Ivan is mourning the death of Anastasiya, while Malyuta Skuratov presents a report on boyars who have fled to

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Livonia or Lithuania. The list culminates in the shocking news of Kurbskii’s defection to King Sigismund. After a phase of self-doubt, Ivan vows revenge on the boyars. He decides to surround himself with ‘new men’, and departs from Moscow for Aleksandrova Sloboda to await a call from the people for his return. At Aleksandrova the tsar forms his new bodyguard of oprichniki. Osip Nepeya appears and reports that English ships have reached the White Sea. A delegation from Moscow arrives in the form of a long procession; the tsar and the oprichniki mount their horses and set off for the capital.36 In terms of foreign policy issues, therefore, Part One of the scenario continues the Baltic theme established in the Prologue, while also introducing the Tatar theme through the depiction of the successful Kazan’ campaign. With the ‘threat from the East’ overcome, the narrative returns to the Livonian issue, which is increasingly intertwined with the question of boyar treason. The titles of Part Two appear accompanied by the tune of the song about the Ocean-Sea. The legend reads, ‘IN THE YEAR 1565 ON THE THIRD DAY OF FEBRUARY THE TSAR RETURNED’. The following seven scenes are exclusively concerned with court politics. (These scenes, together with some episodes omitted from Part One – parts of the Prologue, and the scene at Sigismund’s court – were to form the entire banned Part Two of the film.) Ivan confronts the boyars with the oprichnina, appoints his old friend Filipp Kolychev as Metropolitan of Moscow and then promptly executes three of Filipp’s kinsmen as traitors. Filipp denounces Ivan as a tyrant; Evfrosin’ya devises a plot to have Ivan assassinated and put Vladimir on the throne; the conspirators attempt to implement the plot as the tsar leads the oprichniki to the cathedral, but the assassin does not realize that Ivan has persuaded Vladimir to dress in his royal robes and kills him instead of the real tsar. 37 In the remaining scenes the foreign policy theme returns, again interwoven with the theme of internal treason. (These scenes were eventually intended for Part Three of the film, which remained incomplete and has survived only in fragments.) The scene which immediately follows the death of Vladimir Staritskii is set in the Lithuanian castle of Vol’mar, where Kurbskii is dictating a letter to Ivan, denouncing him as a tyrant. A messenger arrives from Evfrosin’ya to tell Kurbskii that the cities of Pskov and Novgorod are about to revolt. If Ivan attempts to move against Novgorod,

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that will be a signal for the whole country to rise against him and go over to Lithuania. Kurbskii sends the German mercenary Heinrich Staden to Russia to infiltrate the oprichniki as a spy. The subsequent scenes deal with Ivan’s punitive raid on Novgorod and its aftermath: forewarned of the conspiracy against him, the tsar cruelly eradicates treason in the city. Finally, seeking to entrap his enemies, Ivan forges a letter in the name of the traitor Evstafii, telling Kurbskii that the border-guards have been bribed and the Russian frontiers are open for a Polish invasion. King Sigismund, however, is suspicious, and fears that Ivan’s alliance with Queen Elizabeth will lead to an attack on Poland from the rear.38 The scene shifts to Windsor Castle, where Elizabeth is giving a secret audience to a German envoy. He tries to persuade the queen to promise that England will either remain neutral or will assist the Germans in the campaign of the Polish–German alliance against Russia. Eventually Elizabeth makes an ambiguous response: ‘ENGLAND’S REGIMENTS WILL BE IN RUSSIA.’ After the envoy departs, the queen observes that, ‘As always, the Germans are prepared to pay with the skin of a bear they’ve not yet killed. This time – a Russian one!’ 39 The next scene returns to Russia, where Ivan’s eradication of treason continues. A messenger arrives to announce a Livonian invasion. Ivan realizes that Kurbskii has fallen into his trap, and the Russian troops set off for the Baltic coast to the sound of the song about the Ocean-Sea. The remainder of the screenplay depicts the victorious Russian campaign in Livonia. The German envoy to London comes to Kurbskii’s camp to report that England has betrayed them – Queen Elizabeth is supporting the Russians. Kurbskii nevertheless orders the invasion to begin, only to find that, contrary to his expectations, the Russian borders are defended. Kurbskii flees as Malyuta enters his camp. Ivan appears on horseback at the head of his troops, declaring, ‘Like our great ancestor, Prince Alexander Nevskii, we shall mercilessly drive the Germans from our land!’ Continuing their hot pursuit of the enemy, the Russians enter the castle of Vol’mar, but find that the inhabitants have fled. Ivan exclaims, ‘The German towns are not prepared to engage in the fight that they themselves opted for, but are bowing down their proud heads!’ Some local Lettish peasants enter, with the oprichnik Heinrich Staden, whom they accuse of looting and burning their property. The tsar orders them to be given grain, adding, ‘Let them till the Russian land that is ours now and for evermore!’ Ivan finishes

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dictating a letter to Kurbskii, triumphally concluding it with the words: ‘Written in our ancestral Livonian lands in the town of Vol’mar, 1577’.40 The screenplay reaches its climax with the siege of Vessenshtein. In the Great Hall of the fortress, the commander, Kaspar fonOl’denbok, tells Kurbskii and the Knights that they cannot continue to resist the Russians: ‘Our own slaves – the Estonians, the Latvians and the Letts – are fighting on his side . . . From region to region they welcome the Muscovite barbarian. And acknowledge him as their legitimate tsar . . .’41 Kurbskii flees, but the Knights remain, dancing with their ladies as the Russian cannon roar outside. Meanwhile Ol’denbok lights the fuses of some gunpowder barrels in the cellars. The castle blows up as Malyuta leads the Russian assault and he is mortally wounded by falling masonry. As the tsar bends over him, Malyuta whispers, ‘My only regret is that I shan’t see the sea . . .’ ‘You shall see it!’ Ivan exclaims, and carries Malyuta towards the shore. From the sand dunes Malyuta gazes on the Baltic and dies content. Ivan advances to the waves, which calm down at his approach. ‘And the waves lap the feet of the Autocrat of All the Russias. “Now and for evermore,” Ivan proclaims, “the seas will be obedient to Russian might”.’ He returns to his victorious troops, and declares, ‘WE STAND ON THE SEAS, AND STAND WE SHALL!’ The closing titles come up to the refrain of Ocean-Sea! Sea of deepest blue, Sea of deepest blue, Russian sea!42 The literary screenplay shows Eisenstein’s overall concept of the foreign-policy theme much more clearly than the incomplete film was to do. Foreign-policy issues determine the basic structure of the script with its marked symmetry: the campaign in the east, depicted in Part One, is mirrored by the campaign in the west in Part Two. In both cases, a scene at court is interrupted by news of a foreign threat: the cry, ‘TO KAZAN’!’ in Part One is echoed by, ‘TO LIVONIA!’ in Part Two.43 The blowing up of Kazan’ by the Russian troops in Part One – in which Malyuta Skuratov plays a major part as a sapper – is paralleled by the Knights blowing up their own fortress of Vessenshtein (where Malyuta meets his death) in Part Two. The Livonian theme is particularly prominent, and

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the song of the ‘Ocean-Sea’ is a leitmotiv of the entire screenplay, from its first appearance in the Prologue to the grand climax at the end, when Ivan achieves his life’s ambition of reaching the Baltic.44 Eisenstein’s concern to amend his script in order to accommodate the changed international situation after the German invasion in June 1941 provides clear evidence that the film was consciously intended to provide an analogy to contemporary events. As in the original (literary) screenplay for Alexander Nevskii, Russia is shown to face enemies both in the east and in the west, and Groznyi (like Stalin, but unlike Nevskii) succeeds in dealing with his Asiatic foe before he has to face his western opponent (Eisenstein chooses not to depict the burning of Moscow by the Crimean khan in 1571). The Baltic theme provided the most obvious parallel to contemporary events, and Eisenstein’s approach to it has much in common with Kostylev’s treatment of the same issue in Moscow on Campaign. The assertion of Russia’s ancient rights to the Baltic ports; the depiction of the Baltic peoples welcoming the Russian invaders as liberators; the stress on Russia’s benevolence towards the indigenous population – all of this is familiar from Kostylev’s novel, although Eisenstein’s film deals with a later stage of the Livonian War. The English theme, as we have seen, was one that gave Eisenstein considerable cause for concern. The literary screenplay briefly mentions the arrival of English ships at the White Sea (prefiguring the Arctic convoys of 1942), but it devotes rather more attention to the question of the English alliance and to the deliberate ambiguity of Elizabeth’s position (presumably an allusion to Soviet suspicions about the motives that lay behind Britain’s apparent reluctance to open the second front in the Second World War). As far as the depiction of the enemy is concerned, even after the German invasion of the USSR, Poland continued to be presented as the main adversary of Ivan’s Russia (the attempts to implement Eisenstein’s aim of ‘showing Germany behind Poland’ amount only to the clumsy device of presenting a German agent disguised as a jester at Sigismund’s court).45 In Part Two of the actual film (to which the scene of Kurbskii’s swearing of allegiance to Sigismund was transferred), the Polish king makes a bombastic speech (fuller than that in the literary screenplay) about the need for a crusade against the Russian barbarians. This was clearly intended as an ironic parallel to Hitler’s pretensions – which by 1945, of course, had been revealed as hollow.

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Like other Soviet works on historical subjects, Eisenstein’s screenplay demonstrated a link between external and internal enemies. This theme is introduced in the Prologue, when the rival bidders for the Baltic trade monopoly – the Livonian Knights and the Hanseatic merchants – have evidently bribed their competing boyar advocates. The connection between internal unity and external strength is spelt out clearly by Ivan at his coronation, as a prelude to his assertion of his claim to the Baltic lands. Thereafter, as his measures against them begin to take effect, the boyars’ opposition is shown to assume the form first of simple flight to Lithuania (Turuntai-Pronskii), then of overt treason (Kurbskii). By Part Two of the screenplay it is obvious that Evfrosin’ya and the boyars are involved in a conspiracy with King Sigismund, and that uprisings in Novgorod and Pskov are timed to coincide with an invasion by the Livonians, backed by Poland-Lithuania. The notion of the interrelationship of internal and external threats was present in Eisenstein’s mind from the very outset: his earliest notes of January 1941 include the statement that ‘A state that is strong internally is the basis for a strong international state’.46 And in an article published in July 1942, he described Ivan’s ‘cruelty and sometimes even mercilessness’ as necessary for the creation of ‘one of the strongest and most powerful states in the world’: For today, during the Great Fatherland War, it is particularly evident to anyone that those who betray their fatherland are deserving of death, that those who go over to the side of the enemies of their motherland are deserving of harsh punishment, and that it is necessary to be merciless to those who open the frontiers of their native land to the enemy. 47 Eisenstein’s screenplay was approved by Stalin personally on 13 September 1943. In a note to Bol’shakov, he wrote: The scenario has turned out to be not bad. Comrade Eisenstein has proved himself equal to the task. Ivan Groznyi as a progressive force for his time, and the oprichnina as his expedient instrument, have come out not badly. The scenario should be put into effect as soon as possible.48 Stalin’s approval indicates that he detected nothing problematic in the literary screenplay. 49 Others were not so sure. Some of the historians consulted in the spring of 1942 were worried that there

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were too many executions.50 And Aleksei Tolstoi was to complain in the Stalin Prize Committee in March 1944 that Eisenstein’s literary scenario failed to provide the required revision of the older picture of Ivan and his era, which had been ‘consciously darkened and distorted’.51 In reality the screenplay provides an effective justification for Ivan, with Eisenstein even implying (as had Vipper before him) that, far from being pathologically suspicious, Ivan was if anything too trusting. The tsar is shown to have frequent doubts about the extent of the treason which surrounds him. But whenever he has qualms about the correctness of his actions, something happens which demonstrates that the danger which he faces is even greater than he had realized. This is illustrated in three major episodes. In Part One Ivan, standing over the coffin of Anastasiya, questions whether what he is doing is right. But at that moment the Basmanovs enter and report Kurbskii’s flight to Poland, whereupon the tsar recovers his sense of purpose and decides to form the oprichnina.52 In Part Two, after he has agreed to allow Malyuta to ‘hunt down’ Metropolitan Filipp, Ivan again experiences doubts: ‘What right do you have to judge, Tsar Ivan?’ he asks himself; ‘By what right do you raise the avenging sword?’ But in the very next scene Fedor Basmanov persuades the tsar that Anastasiya had been poisoned by Evfrosin’ya Staritskaya, thereby justifying the executions of the Kolychevs which follow.53 And finally, in the scene of the ‘Last Judgment’, Ivan vainly seeks a sign of vindication from the ‘heavenly tsar’ after his punitive expedition to Novgorod. He turns to his confessor, Evstafii, listing all the victims of the terror, including the Kolychevs. From Evstafii’s reaction, the tsar suspects that his confessor is himself a Kolychev who has concealed his true identity, and that he was the traitor who had tried to warn Novgorod of its impending doom. Evstafii admits the entire conspiracy and the scene ends with Ivan in a state of high excitement, planning his revenge.54 Thus although the tsar experiences pangs of conscience and suffers moral and spiritual agonies concerning the state-terrorist means which he is employing in order to achieve his ‘progressive’ aims, his doubts about the necessity of his actions are shown to be unfounded. The conspiracy which surrounds him is real and widespread, involving his closest and most trusted associates. The terror is justified pragmatically (even if its moral and spiritual dimensions are left unresolved) and Ivan quickly overcomes his doubts in order to avenge himself on his enemies.

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The film, 1944–7 Part One Even after the approval of the script, filming did not begin until April 1943.55 After many delays Part One was completed in AlmaAta in July 1944. Eisenstein cut and edited the film in Moscow, Prokof’ev provided the music in September, and it was agreed that a few frames should be added or reshot. Meanwhile, however, the management of the film industry was becoming increasingly impatient with these new delays: the film had to be completed and approved by the end of the year or serious financial penalties would ensue.56 The deadlines were met. The film was viewed by the Artistic Council of the Committee for Cinematography on 7 December,57 and by the Artistic Council of Mosfil’m on 10 December. Minor editorial changes were made as a result of these showings, and the film was officially approved by the Committee on 31 December. 58 The most important decision, however, was made on 26 December, after a viewing by Stalin in the Kremlin.59 On 16 January 1945 the film went on release in Moscow, and within a few days it was also being shown in the provinces and at the front.60 The main difference between the film in the form in which it was released and the earlier concept reflected in the literary screenplay was the omission of the Prologue. This decision was taken by GUPKhF at a very late stage (in November 1944), partly for technical reasons, and partly because, in the words of Yurenev, ‘The editors and I. G. Bol’shakov, not without foundation, considered it too gloomy, even pathological, and persuaded Eisenstein that a film about the poet of Russian statehood, the conqueror of Kazan’, should more appropriately begin with the ceremonial procedure of coronation.’61 At the preview by the Artistic Council on 7 December, a last-ditch attempt was made to restore the Prologue. I. A. Savchenko argued that the Prologue was important to show what Groznyi was fighting against,62 and a minority opinion to the general ‘Conclusion’ to the Council’s deliberations, published on 21 December, advocated restoring the Prologue in an abbreviated form.63 In the absence of the Prologue, the opening titles of the film were changed. But whereas GUPKhF had recommended that the scene of Ivan’s coronation should be preceded by ‘an introductory set of titles explaining the historical situation at the time of Ivan’s coronation’,64 the titles to the completed film in fact provided a broader – and highly positive – assessment of the significance of Ivan’s reign:

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This film is about the man who first united our country in the sixteenth century; about the Prince of Muscovy who created a single mighty state from various divided and self-seeking principalities; about the commander who enhanced the military renown of our Motherland in the East and in the West; about a ruler who, in order to fulfil these great tasks, was the first to assume the title of ‘Tsar of All the Russias’. The removal of the Prologue and the scene of Kurbskii at Sigismund’s court meant that the Livonian theme was greatly reduced compared with the literary scenario, and the main foreign policy interest centred on the Kazan’ campaign. As far as domestic policy was concerned, the main theme was that of the tsar’s relationship with various social groups. One feature of the literary screenplay which had proved controversial, and which was significantly modified in the film itself, was the depiction of Ivan’s relationship with the Russian people. The question of the social base of Groznyi’s support had concerned the director and his ideological minders from an early stage. In September 1941 Eisenstein referred to the need to play down the theme of Ivan’s isolation, by showing that as the tsar became estranged from associates such as Kurbskii and Filipp, he acquired a new entourage of representatives of the people.65 The Moscow authorities too were worried about these issues. In June 1942 comments from GUPKhF stressed the need to show the tsar’s base of support more clearly. The director’s task was made harder, however, by another comment, which stated that it was ‘anti-historical’ and ‘untrue’ to depict Ivan as close to the people, and condemned this image of the tsar as ‘modernization’ (osovremenivanie).66 In September 1942, when Bol’shakov finally approved the ‘director’s screenplay’, he was still concerned with these problems.67 Eisenstein in response noted that it was not possible to increase the role of the representatives of the people without contributing to the false ‘democratism’ of Ivan’s image. 68 The disputes around the tsar’s relationship with the people focused on the figures of Foma and Erema (characters who were based on a pair of comic doubles – similar to Tweedledum and Tweedledee – in Russian popular literature). In the literary screenplay they are brothers with the surname Chokhov, who are described as cannon-

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makers.69 They first appear in the scene of the popular rising during Ivan’s wedding where they are quickly won round to supporting the tsar. They are seen next in the armaments workshops, preparing for the Kazan’ campaign, and giving Ivan an enthusiastic reception when he pays a royal visit to their cannon-foundry. During the siege of Kazan’ they turn up again, toiling in the mine-workings. They later reappear, older and bearded, as artillery captains in the Livonian campaign; they play a role in the siege of Vessenshtein, and form part of Ivan’s admiring audience in the final scene in which the tsar announces to the troops that the Russians ‘stand on the seas’.70 Eisenstein had at one time planned to extend the role of the Chokhovs even further, by introducing an episode in which they baited a boyar with dogs on the tsar’s orders. In relation to this scene M. V. Nechkina warned Eisenstein’s assistant L. A. Indenbom, when he visited Tashkent in search of historical advice in March 1942, that Groznyi should not be depicted as a ‘people’s tsar’. The scene was first changed to substitute Malyuta Skuratov for Ivan – in order to avoid ‘possible arguments about Ivan’s populism (narodnost’ )’ – as Eisenstein informed Indenbom in 1942, and then omitted altogether, on Bol’shakov’s instructions in September 1943.71 In the film itself the role of Foma and Erema is purely residual (they make only a fleeting appearance as a fair-haired and a darkhaired lad in the riot scene in Part One). In spite of Eisenstein’s attempts to avoid the heresy of the ‘democratization’ of Ivan, he was still criticized from a predictable quarter. In her letter to the Central Committee of 12 May 1944, Anna Pankratova cited the screenplay as an example of the ‘sharply expressed tendency to a supra-class and idealized representation of Russian tsars’ which she deplored: In Eisenstein’s cine-scenario . . . this genuinely talented organiser of the Russian national state is depicted also as a people’s tsar, relying in his struggle with the boyars on the popular masses, and Malyuta is presented as a selfless and altruistic patriot.72 The elimination of the characters Foma and Erema left the oprichniki as the main ‘base of support’ for Ivan in the film. The key figure here is Malyuta Skuratov, the future head of the oprichnina. In keeping with his belief, recorded in his earliest notes for the film, that the oprichnina represented a channel for the ‘promotion of the lower

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orders – new men, a new type’,73 Eisenstein depicted Malyuta – contrary to historical fact – as a man of the people. He makes his first appearance in the scenes of the popular uprising fomented by the Staritskiis during Ivan’s wedding, when the young tsar wins his loyalty by gently mocking his superstitious credulity. Malyuta subsequently takes part in the Kazan’ campaign and serves as a sapper in the mining of the fortress. His suspicion of boyar treason is shown at an early stage: during the siege, in the scene in which Ivan rebukes Kurbskii for his cruel treatment of Tatar prisoners, Malyuta senses Kurbskii’s resentment of the tsar, while Ivan is still willing to give his old friend the benefit of the doubt. At Kazan’ Ivan first meets two other future leaders of the oprichnina, Aleksei Basmanov and his son Fedor. They too are shown as having a lower social status than they had in reality, and they too are enemies of the boyars. The elder Basmanov, depicted as an artillery captain, comes to the tsar’s attention by commenting – a propos the incident involving Kurbskii – ‘boyar hatred is worse than Tatar arrows’, and advising the tsar to ‘fear not the arrows, but the princes and boyars’. The future roles of Malyuta and the Basmanovs as leading figures in the oprichnina are foreshadowed here. The oprichniki themselves hardly appear in Part One of the film. This marked a major departure from Eisenstein’s original concept. In the literary screenplay the final episode at Aleksandrova Sloboda includes a powerful scene which depicts the oath-taking of the oprichniki,74 but the filmed version of this scene, with its bloodthirsty language, evidently caused the authorities problems similar to those which were subsequently to be created by the notorious dance of the oprichniki in Part Two. In November 1944 GUPKhF ordered that the oath-taking scene be preceded with a caption ‘explaining the social and historical essence of the oprichnina’.75 At the preview by the Artistic Council on 7 December I. A. Pyr’ev criticized the scene and demanded its removal: ‘It seems like a petty conspiracy around this great statesman,’ he complained, and he compared the oprichnina to a Freemasonry.76 The oath-taking was cut from the final version of the film, in which the only reference to the oprichnina comes in a brief scene on Red Square, where an oprichnik announces the formation of Ivan’s new bodyguard and invites potential recruits to come to the tsar at Aleksandrova. With the removal of the oprichniki, the representation of the ordinary people in the film was reduced even further. The citizens of Moscow appear in the scene of the revolt stirred up by the Staritskiis

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Tsar and people. Ivan (N. K. Cherkasov) watches the procession of Muscovites to Aleksandrova Sloboda, begging him to return to the capital, in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible: Part One. From N. K. Cherkasov, Zapiski sovetskogo aktera (Moscow, 1953).

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during Ivan’s coronation, and – in the guise of soldiers – during the siege of Kazan’. In the final scene, they comprise the long snaking procession which comes to Aleksandrova Sloboda in order to persuade Ivan to renounce his abdication. In the absence of any meaningful depiction of the oprichnina or of the tsar’s relationship with the people, the main plot of the film is concerned with Ivan’s struggle against the traitor-boyars at court, represented by the Staritskiis and Kurbskii. The key event here is Ivan’s feigned illness, an episode which is more fully developed in the film than in the literary screenplay, with new scenes involving confrontations between Kurbskii and Evfrosin’ya and between Kurbskii and Anastasiya. The tsar’s miraculous recovery pushes Kurbskii and Evfrosin’ya towards participation in the broader conspiracy against Ivan which provides the main plot of Part Two of the film. The key public assessment of the film was provided by the writer and critic Vsevolod Vishnevskii.77 On 28 January 1945 Pravda published his enthusiastic review of Ivan Groznyi: Part One. Curiously, however, Vishnevskii’s review is as much about his own perception of Groznyi as it is about Eisenstein’s. Vishnevskii emphasized certain themes, such as Ivan’s struggle against boyar opposition for a centralized, unified state, to a greater extent than Eisenstein did, adducing quotations from the tsar’s writings that were not included in the film. Vishnevskii particularly stressed Eisenstein’s depiction of ‘Groznyi’s struggle with external enemies’. Here he mentioned not only the conquest of Kazan’ (the only military achievement of Ivan’s reign to be shown directly in the film), but also the Crimean Tatars’ attack on Tula, the capture of Astrakhan’, expansion into the Caucasus and beyond the Urals into Siberia. ‘The film,’ Vishnevskii continued, ‘ . . . shows the significance of the Livonian War as a historically necessary war for the return to Russia of her basic routes to the West.’ And he went on to explain how ‘Russians had stood on the Baltic coast alongside the Estonians and Latvians well before the appearance of the Livonian Order in the thirteenth century’; how the appearance of the Germans and the ‘Prussian-Lithuanians’ had posed a major threat to Russian interests; and how in the reign of Ivan Groznyi the Germans had blockaded the Baltic to prevent the importation of Western specialists into Russia. ‘The film relates,’ Vishnevskii wrote, ‘how Groznyi’s genius thwarted the intentions of his enemies, established friendly links with England by the northern

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route – through Archangel – and thereafter there followed links with Holland as well, which were consolidated 150 years later by Peter the First.’78 (In the film itself this amounts to only a few seconds’ footage in the tsar’s two brief conversations with Osip Nepeya.) Yurenev, drawing attention to Vishnevskii’s stress on the Livonian War, comments that the reviewer, ‘sensitive to the political atmosphere, praised the first part in advance for what was to come in the second, as if reminding Eisenstein of what was expected of him.’79 It was also no doubt not irrelevant that by January 1945 the Red Army had reoccupied most of the territory of the Baltic states lost to Germany in 1941. On 29 March 1945 the Stalin Prize Committee met in plenary session to discuss the next round of prizes for literature and art. Mikhoels reported that Ivan the Terrible: Part One had been regarded as controversial within the cinema section of the Prize Committee,80 and at the plenum itself the film was criticized for its historical inaccuracy, its ‘formalism’, and its appeal to the head rather than the heart of the viewer.81 Bol’shakov, however, stoutly advocated its claim to be a major event, and he was strongly supported by the director M. E. Chiaureli, who stated that he and his fellow cinematographers regarded it as a great work from an artistic point of view, even though it was very different from ‘Tsar Fedor Ioannovich at MKhAT’.82 Moskvin tried to compromise by suggesting that they postpone a decision until they had seen Parts Two and Three, but Bol’shakov insisted that Part One was a complete work in itself, adding enigmatically (and – as it turned out – prophetically) that there might not be a Part Two. 83 In the event, because of wartime exigencies, decisions about the Stalin Prizes were delayed. The Committee met rarely, and fierce debates continued.84 Eventually, however, the prizes for 1943 and 1944 were announced on 26 January 1946. Ivan the Terrible: Part One was awarded a first-class prize, which Eisenstein as director shared with the actors Cherkasov and Birman (Evfrosin’ya Staritskaya), the cameramen Moskvin and Tisse, and the composer Prokof’ev. 85 On 2 February a celebratory banquet was held at the Moscow ‘House of Cinema’. Eisenstein was in good spirits, but while dancing energetically he suddenly collapsed with a heart attack. He was rushed to the Kremlin Hospital, and because of his illness was unable to be present at the fateful session of the Grand Artistic Council of the Cinema Committee that met to discuss the second part of his film on 7 February 1946.86

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Part Two At the time of the premiere of Part One in January 1945 it had still to be decided whether the continuation of the film was to involve one more part (as originally intended) or two. Eisenstein managed to convince the studio management that two more parts were necessary, but Bol’shakov was anxious to capitalize on the success of Part One by having the film completed as soon as possible. Eventually the director persuaded Bol’shakov to his point of view, and in a radio broadcast on 6 April 1945 Eisenstein spoke clearly of a three-part film. 87 Part Two would end with the death of Vladimir Staritskii; the remaining material, including the tsar’s punitive raid on Novgorod and the victorious Livonian campaign, would be postponed to Part Three. By the autumn of 1945 the filming for Part Two had been completed at Alma-Ata, and the editing process began in Moscow. As with Part One in 1944, Eisenstein was under pressure to finish the film by the end of the year.88 He succeeded in completing the editing in December, and the work was submitted to the management of Mosfil’m by the end of the month. In January 1946 the Moscow newspapers carried announcements about the imminent release of the film.89 As a result of a relatively late amendment,90 Part Two – now subtitled The Boyar Plot – began with a recapitulation of the main events of Part One. The film proper opened with the scene of Kurbskii at Sigismund’s court, which had originally been intended for Part One. The scene was, however, considerably expanded compared with the version in the literary screenplay. Kurbskii refers to information that has reached him from the Kolychevs about the maturing of the boyar plot against Ivan; but Sigismund makes it clear that it is in Poland’s interests to promote a weak replacement for Ivan – Vladimir Staritskii – rather than Kurbskii. The main function of the scene, as Yurenev has pointed out, is ‘to link the Russian boyars with the foreign interventionists and to demonstrate the historical necessity of the oprichnina and other anti-boyar actions by Groznyi’.91 The next scene is set in Moscow. Ivan returns from Aleksandrova Sloboda with the oprichniki to confront the boyars. He condemns them as traitors and announces the creation of the oprichnina. Filipp Kolychev denounces the oprichnina as the work of the devil. It is at this point that Eisenstein introduces, in the form of flash-backs, scenes originally intended for the Prologue to Part One: the boyars’

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murder of Ivan’s mother, and the episode with the envoys from the Hanseatic merchants and the Livonian Knights (but without the song about the ‘Ocean-Sea’). Having allowed Ivan to provide a justification for his persecution of the boyars, and demonstrating a motive in terms of the tsar’s childhood experiences, Eisenstein returns to the confrontation between Ivan and Filipp, and the plot develops as in the literary screenplay: Filipp denounces Ivan through the pageant of the Fiery Furnace, Filipp is arrested, and Evfrosin’ya and Bishop Pimen of Novgorod conspire to have Ivan assassinated. From this point onwards Ivan has no further doubts: Fedor Basmanov has persuaded him that Evfrosin’ya was responsible for the poisoning of Anastasiya; Filipp has publicly denounced him in the cathedral and Ivan declares, ‘I SHALL BE TERRIBLE!’ He triumphantly turns the tables on his enemies by engineering the substitution of Vladimir for himself as the victim of Evfrosin’ya’s assassin. Well before Part Two was viewed by the Artistic Council in February 1946, misgivings had been expressed about the way in which the film was developing. Viktor Shklovskii’s report on the director’s screenplay, dated 2 June 1942, had particularly criticized the scenes of the feast of the oprichniki and the murder of Vladimir Staritskii; but Eisenstein had retorted: ‘He’s used to superficial screenplays of the Minin type.’92 In March 1943 G. Aleksandrov, the head of Agitprop, had reported to the Central Committee secretaries that the script for Ivan the Terrible: Part Two needed to be amended. One of its faults was its failure to show the economic reasons for Ivan’s policy of centralization: it ought to show not only the need for unification in the face of external danger, but also how the merchants and traders supported the tsar. It was also necessary to show that Ivan was ‘insufficiently consistent’ in his struggle against the boyars.93 Some time later, Eisenstein received a letter from the film critic Lyudmila Pogozheva, who, after previewing some of the footage, expressed her fears that the decision to divide the film into three parts rather than two left the second part with the most ‘psychological’ and gloomy material. The accent had moved away from the statist themes covered in Part One, and Part Two dealt with Ivan’s internal spiritual drama. The formation of the oprichnina and the conflict with the boyar opposition were presented within the framework of the tsar’s personal struggle, and their impact on the

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fate of the people was not shown. The Novgorod campaign, the defeat of Kurbskii and the conquest of Livonia would have crowned Groznyi’s image – but now the depiction of these events had been postponed indefinitely, and Ivan’s biography broke off with material that somewhat debased his image compared with the way in which he was presented in Part One. She wished that Eisenstein could find something for Part Two that would restore the balance in the presentation of the image of the tsar which had been so correctly treated in Part One.94 Fears became widespread that the director’s decision to split the film into three parts rather than two would have a detrimental effect on Ivan’s depiction in Part Two. In 1962 Eisenstein’s widow, Pera Atasheva, told interviewers that in the summer of 1945 she had tried to persuade him to complete the film in two parts rather than three: ‘Old chap, why have you postponed the finale to the third part? Why are you bothering with this boyar plot? Uncle Joe won’t forgive this! – after all, this is the year of victory, and he’s the victor. Put everything that’s left into one part, bring your Ivan to the sea shore as soon as possible – and then you too will be the victor!’ Eisenstein’s reply was cold and abrupt and signalled a disagreement.95 As the film neared completion, apprehensions were felt at the highest levels within the film industry. Mikhail Romm recalls in his memoirs that in late 1945 he was among a group of film directors summoned to the Ministry of Cinematography by worried officials for a preview.96 Eventually, on 7 February 1946, the film was taken to the Artistic Council, where criticisms similar to Pogozheva’s were expressed.97 Pyr’ev’s comments were perhaps the most damning – that the film presented Ivan and the oprichniki as alien and ‘nonRussian’. He compared Eisenstein’s Ivan to the Grand Inquisitor, and his oprichniki to Jesuits and even to ‘sixteenth-century Fascists’. The boyars, by contrast, were depicted as good bearded Russian types, and it was not at all clear why they were supposed to be villains in league with foreigners.98 Most speakers agreed that they would have had fewer reservations if the film had been divided into two parts rather than three: then the Novgorod campaign and the Livonian War, culminating in Ivan’s victorious breakthrough to

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the Baltic, would have brought the plot to a successful resolution and justified the executions.99 After much inconclusive discussion, it was agreed to form a commission to draft proposals in relation to Parts Two and Three.100 The same day Bol’shakov sent a telegram to Eisenstein in the Kremlin hospital, giving him an expurgated account of the meeting, and telling him simply that the Council had praised the artistic qualities of the film, but had set up a commission to formulate proposals concerning the presentation of ‘Groznyi’s progressive statesmanship’.101 It is not entirely clear when Stalin first viewed the film. Yurenev was unable to find the commission’s proposals in the archives available to him, and in relation to developments between the meeting of the Artistic Council on 7 February 1946 and the publication of the Central Committee resolution of 4 September, ‘On the film, A Great Life’, he states only: ‘In August Bol’shakov at last showed Part Two to I. V. Stalin. And the latter was extremely displeased.’102 Kozlov, however – citing an unpublished memoir by Bol’shakov – states that Bol’shakov showed Part Two in the Kremlin on 2 March 1946: At the end of the film Stalin’s immediate reaction was, ‘This is not a film, but some kind of nightmare!’ ‘A bad detective story’, commented Beriya. Both were extremely irritated by the depiction of the oprichniki: Beriya compared the scene of the feast and dancing to the orgies of the flagellants [khlysty], while Stalin drew analogies with the Ku-Klux-Klan . . . Beriya: ‘And Ivan Groznyi is shown as a pathetic neurasthenic.’ Stalin: ‘Ivan Groznyi is shown as a man lacking in will and in character – sort of like Hamlet.’103 On 15 August a session of the Artistic Council met to consider its response to the banning of a number of films. M. K. Kalatozov, the Deputy Minister of Cinematography, reported that the Council’s poor judgement in relation to four films – Ivan the Terrible: Part Two, Admiral Nakhimov, Simple Folk and A Great Life – was considered so serious that it had been discussed at a session of the Central Committee in the presence of Stalin, Zhdanov and other top leaders.104 The main criticism had been directed against A Great Life, but Ivan the Terrible: Part Two and Nakhimov had been condemned for their falsification of history. In Ivan the Terrible: Part Two Eisenstein had failed to recognize that viewers of historical films wanted them to depict the truth about their people. He had shown the oprichnina as a gang of bandits, although it was well

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known that it was in fact a progressive force on which Ivan Groznyi based himself in uniting the Russian state into a single whole. Ivan was presented not as a statesman with a strong will who could strengthen and direct the history of the Russian state along new and progressive lines, but as a hysterical person lacking willpower and doubting everything, like Hamlet. Eisenstein’s formalist conception was to blame: he saw only superficiality and not the essence and content of processes as they occurred.105 Pyr’ev, who chaired the session, tried to lessen the Council’s responsibility by reminding his audience that they had made many criticisms of Eisenstein’s film:106 but the Council was required to grovel, and at a subsequent meeting on 19 August it approved a resolution acknowledging its errors and pledging to do better in the future.107 The scandal broke publicly with the issuing of the Central Committee resolution of 4 September. It was mainly concerned with A Great Life, but it also contained criticism of Admiral Nakhimov and Simple Folk, as well as of Ivan the Terrible: Part Two. In relation to Eisenstein’s film, it made points similar to Kalatozov’s comments to the Artistic Council: Eisenstein ‘had revealed ignorance in his depiction of historical facts, presenting the progressive force of the oprichniki as a gang of degenerates on the lines of the American Ku-Klux-Klan, and Ivan Groznyi – a man with a strong will and character – as weak in character and lacking in willpower, something on the lines of Hamlet’.108 Eisenstein decided to try to save his film. He and Cherkasov wrote to Stalin, acknowledging the errors that had been attributed to them, and asking permission to revise the work. The root of the problem, Eisenstein now conceded, lay in their decision to divide the second part of the film into two, ‘artificially separating the history of the boyar plot from the victorious Livonian War, which crowned Ivan’s historical achievement’. They proposed to rework the film, condensing the material in the existing Part Two ‘by the omission of secondary and erroneous scenes, and in the additional shooting, to replace these condensations, of the fundamental scenes of the Livonian War and the successes of Groznyi’s foreign policy in his struggle against the hostile foreign environment’.109 On 24 February 1947, in response to their letter, Eisenstein and Cherkasov were invited to a late-night meeting at the Kremlin with Stalin, at which Zhdanov and Molotov were also present.110 The conversation is mainly notable for providing us with a record of Stalin’s views about the historical Ivan: as far as practical consequences

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are concerned, it was agreed that Eisenstein should rework the film along the lines proposed in the letter, i.e. that the material in the present Part Two should be condensed, and the film expanded by the addition of scenes depicting the Livonian War. The revised Part Two would end, as in the published screenplay, with Ivan’s victorious breakthrough to the Baltic. Cherkasov described the final scene, in which the tsar stood on the shore and pronounced the words, ‘We stand on the sea, and stand we shall!’ – to which Stalin (presumably thinking of his own gains in Eastern Europe in 1945), replied, ‘And so it turned out – and even a bit better!’111 Stalin’s specific criticisms repeated points made in earlier official responses to the film (which had, of course, been based on the Party leader’s own initial reaction). He criticized Eisenstein’s depiction of the oprichnina as ‘like the Ku-Klux-Klan’ (adding that ‘the oprichniki during their dances look like cannibals and remind one of some kind of Phoenicians and Babylonians’), whereas in reality it was ‘a royal troop . . ., a progressive army’. Ivan was shown as ‘irresolute, like Hamlet. Everyone tells him what to do, he himself does not make decisions.’ In reality he was a ‘great and wise ruler’, in a much higher class than Louis XI. Zhdanov added that Eisenstein’s Ivan looked ‘like a neurasthenic’, while Molotov complained about the film’s stress ‘on psychologism, on inner psychological contradictions and personal emotions’.112 It was Molotov who first raised the issue of the film’s depiction of ‘repressions’: ‘You can show conspiracies and repressions, but not exclusively.’ At this point Stalin made his comment that ‘Ivan the Terrible was very ruthless. One can show that he was ruthless. But you must show why it was necessary to be ruthless.’ Stalin too was clearly not disturbed by the depiction of executions in the film: Cherkasov asked specific questions about Staritskii’s assassination and about an episode, apparently intended for Part Three, in which Malyuta strangled Filipp, and the actor was assured by Stalin that these scenes could be retained. In relation to this point Molotov added helpfully that, ‘repressive measures can and must be shown, but we must show why they were implemented, and for what purpose. For this we must show more state activities – not only scenes in basements and enclosed places but general state activities.’113 Stalin’s opinions were of course self-contradictory. On the one hand, he claimed that the historical tsar was insufficiently resolute. Yet he criticized Eisenstein for presenting his Ivan as irresolute, and this had also been the main criticism made in earlier official

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statements about the failings of the film. (In fact, the only episode in Part Two in which Ivan is shown as ‘irresolute’ is his brief bout of self-doubt after Malyuta offers to hunt down the Kolychevs on the tsar’s behalf.) Stalin, however, wanted to see Groznyi depicted on the screen as a ‘great and wise ruler’, a ‘man with a strong will and character’ – in other words, as a reflection of himself. The other major criticism made by Stalin was that the film had not adequately demonstrated why Ivan’s ruthlessness was necessary. Again, this is not entirely fair: as we have seen, Eisenstein was careful to provide ‘evidence’ of the existence of a wide-ranging conspiracy against the tsar. But by 1946, it seems, it was no longer sufficient to demonstrate that the repressions were motivated by real (rather than imaginary) conspiracies. The Party leaders’ comments indicated that the emphasis ought now to be on the results of the terror: Ivan’s executions had to be shown to be vindicated by his breakthrough to the Baltic, just as victory over Nazi Germany could now be presented as a justification of Stalin’s purges. By postponing the Baltic apotheosis to Part Three, Eisenstein had focused his film on the mechanism of terror itself, and on the personal psychology of the ruler who employed it. Molotov’s criticisms, in particular, targeted this aspect of the director’s representation of Ivan. Most subsequent interpretations of the film have read it as a subversive parable, and this was the view of many informed contemporaries. The writer and critic Viktor Shklovskii, for example, suggested that the film was scrapped largely because of the impact of the feast of the oprichniki. In this scene, Shklovskii argued, the tsar is depicted as ‘formidable [grozen], cunning [khiter] and not hysterical’.114 According to the director Mikhail Romm, the film was banned because it was interpreted as an attack on the Stalin cult, as a study of the tragedy of tyranny. It contained no crude historical parallels – Romm wrote – but the references to the contemporary situation could be sensed throughout the film, in the subtext of almost every episode.115 The sinister atmosphere of murder, suspicion and betrayal disturbed those who first saw it, but they could not put the real reasons for their concern into words.116 Romm describes the occasion when a group of cinematographers was invited to a preview of the film at the Ministry. The directors watched the film, and shared the officials’ concern about the ‘too dreadful allusions [nameki]’ it contained:

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But Eisenstein behaved with bold cheerfulness. He asked us, ‘What’s the matter? What’s the problem? What do you mean? Tell me straight.’ But no-one dared to say directly that in Ivan Groznyi could be felt a sharp reference to Stalin, in Malyuta Skuratov a reference to Beriya, in the oprichniki a reference to his henchmen. And there was much more that we felt but couldn’t say. But in Eisenstein’s boldness, in the gleam in his eyes, in his defiant sceptical smile, we felt that he was acting consciously, that he had decided to go for broke. This was awful.117 The authors of a recent article have cast doubt on the conventional view that Eisenstein’s film was ‘an aesopian expression of dissent’, claiming that much of the evidence for the image of Eisenstein as a ‘dissident and martyr’ is ‘circumstantial or derived from memoirs written long after Eisenstein’s death’.118 Certainly the views of Shklovskii and Romm were published some years after the event, in the context of the de-Stalinization campaign of 1956 onwards, but the recently published diary of the critic Vsevolod Vishnevskii shows that they reflect some informed contemporary reactions. In May 1946 Vishnevskii recorded the account of the film which the director Dovzhenko had given him. It contained ‘hints and parallels with the present day’, Dovzhenko had said: ‘Either Eisenstein is naive, or – I don’t know. But such a film about such a Russia, the Kremlin – could serve as fantastic agitation against us.’ Vishnevskii went off to re-read the screenplay of Part Two: ‘Yes, it’s a gloomy “palace” affair,’ he concluded. ‘It should have been compressed, and the Livonian War made stronger (Part Three) . . . Eisenstein has badly miscalculated.’119 In September 1946, when the director V. Stroeva told Vishnevskii that Ivan the Terrible: Part Two was a masterpiece, and that it would have been a big hit in the West, he retorted that, ‘it would be “Secrets of the Kremlin”, parallels etc.’120 As for Eisenstein’s own intentions, we can only speculate: his reported comments and reactions are cryptic and contradictory.121 Possibly the strongest evidence in favour of the ‘subversive analogy’ interpretation is contained within the film itself. In the pageant of the Fiery Furnace, Metropolitan Filipp presents the biblical tyrant Nebuchadnezzar as an analogue of Ivan; similarly, Eisenstein may have intended the film to criticize Stalin through the figure of Groznyi.122 Certainly in Part Two the tsar’s image is less positive

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than in Part One and in the literary screenplay taken as a whole. The viewer’s sympathies are engaged on the side of Groznyi’s main critic, the attractive figure of Metropolitan Filipp, and of Ivan’s childlike victim Vladimir Staritskii, so that the tsar’s eventual triumph over his enemies seems like a hollow victory. But great art – and the film is undoubtedly an artistic success, totally dwarfing the other pieces of wartime Soviet ‘Ivaniana’ – by definition deals with ambiguity and complexity, and it was part of Eisenstein’s genius that, while providing an intellectual justification for state terror, he also showed the emotional toll which it exacted on the victor as well as on the victim. Technically, of course, Ivan Part Two was not ‘banned’: Eisenstein was given permission to revise it, and there is evidence that initially at least he returned to work on it with enthusiasm. But even before his death in February 1948, it seems that the director had abandoned hope that the film could be successfully reworked.123 After Stalin’s death the unrevised version of Ivan the Terrible: Part Two was shown again, at first to select groups of viewers. It was publicly released in the Soviet Union and abroad in 1958, to general acclaim.

Epilogue De-Stalinization: Images of Ivan IV since 1953 The Khrushchev era The ‘de-Stalinization’ of Groznyi began almost immediately after Stalin’s death in March 1953. At this time, criticisms of Stalin’s ‘cult of the individual’ were made primarily to boost the claims of collective leadership within the Party.1 The term appeared in a Pravda editorial in June 1953 which also stressed that the people rather than heroes were the makers of history,2 and this theme was promptly taken up by historians. An editorial in the journal Voprosy istorii criticized ‘bourgeois’ historiography for its stress on ‘great men’, and complained that the role of the people had been neglected in the writing of history: military commanders did not, after all, win wars without a contribution from the masses. History textbooks had exaggerated the role of Ivan III and Ivan IV at the expense of the socio-economic history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they had not shown the role played by the people in the creation of the centralized Russian state. A new crime – ‘personification’ – was detected in the history syllabuses of higher educational institutions, exemplified in the use of such terms as ‘The domestic policy of Ivan IV’ or ‘The noble empire of Catherine II’.3 Soon afterwards, similar points were made by the editors of a posthumous publication of S. V. Bakhrushin’s works. The preface to the second volume, published in 1954, criticized Bakhrushin for exaggerating the significance of Ivan Groznyi as an individual, and for creating the impression that certain phenomena had occurred as the result of the influence of his personality, rather than of objective historical development.4 The main event in the ‘de-Stalinization’ of Groznyi, however, occurred shortly after Khrushchev’s famous ‘secret speech’ at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, in which Stalin was directly condemned for his ‘cult of the individual’. A two-day session was convened on 14–15 May at the Institute of History in Moscow to discuss a paper by S. M. Dubrovskii.5 Dubrovskii’s leading 179

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role in the debate is somewhat surprising, since he was not a specialist on Muscovite history, his main work having been on the Stolypin reforms of 1906–14. He did, however, have the moral authority to attack Stalinist historiography as he had only recently returned to the Institute after a twenty-year period in the camps.6 A week earlier, at a meeting of the Party activists of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Pankratova had criticized the influence of the ‘cult of the individual’ on the writing of history, especially that of pre-revolutionary Russia. She recited a litany of complaints about Stalinist historiography: its ‘embellishment’ (podkrashivanie), ‘personification’ and idealization of the past, and its suppression of the darker aspects of tsarism.7 As an example of these problems, she cited the treatment of the reign of Ivan Groznyi by well-known historians such as Vipper, Bakhrushin and Smirnov. The idealization of the tsar, Pankratova complained, had recently become widespread both in academic works and in artistic literature: The errors of Ivan Groznyi, and his role as a tsar who conducted his policies with unusual cruelty, etc. were completely ignored. At the same time it so happened that Ivan Groznyi was confirmed as a people’s tsar, and Malyuta Skuratov as his democratic armour-bearer. That was in all our literature.8 This had happened particularly blatantly, Pankratova asserted, after Stalin’s conversation with Eisenstein, and she quoted the famous passage from Cherkasov’s memoirs about the progressive role of Groznyi and of the oprichnina.9 Some of these points were to be repeated by Dubrovskii in his paper at the Institute of History, suggesting his collusion with Pankratova in raising the issue. Dubrovskii criticized Soviet historians for their serious departure from Marxism in stressing the role of individual princes, tsars and generals.10 They had justified the monstrous behaviour of Ivan IV in terms of the supposedly progressive significance of his policies. He had even been presented as a ‘people’s tsar’, when in fact he was the tsar of the serf-owning landowners. Ivan and his supporters were usually depicted as representatives of progressive forces, fighting for the centralization of the state, whereas his opponents were seen as forces of reaction. But – Dubrovskii argued – there was no possibility of restoring feudal fragmentation in the second half of

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the sixteenth century: a centralized state had already been formed and consolidated by the end of the fifteenth century. Objectively the main policy task of the sixteenth century was not centralization but, rather, the development of serfdom and the establishment of a dictatorship of serf-owners, either in the form of the unlimited power of Ivan and his oprichniki, or of a limited monarchy. Dubrovskii argued that progressive alternatives to an unlimited tsarist autocracy did exist in the sixteenth century: for example, a monarchy restricted by parliament, as in England. The oprichnina had been directed not only against the boyars but also against the peasants, who had fled the boyar estates as a result of the violence of the oprichniki, who had ‘cleared’ the land in preparation for enserfment. Dubrovskii went on to discuss Ivan’s foreign policy. His annexation of the Volga and his attempt to obtain an outlet to the Baltic were undoubtedly progressive, but it should not be forgotten that tsarism oppressed both the Russians and other peoples. Atrocities had occurred during the conquest of Kazan’ and during the Livonian War. Moreover, the creation of the ‘cult of Ivan IV’ had been facilitated by the historians’ uncritical attitude towards their sources. For example, Ivan’s correspondence with Kurbskii, and his diplomatic correspondence, were attributed to the tsar personally, and served as the basis for assertions about his high level of education, whereas in reality these materials were probably written for him by others.11 A large proportion of the paper was devoted to attacking the views of Vipper, Bakhrushin and Smirnov, whose wartime biographies of Ivan, Dubrovskii alleged, had idealized him as a political and military leader, and as a diplomat. They had ignored the negative aspects of Ivan’s policies, and had obscured the true social nature of the Russian centralized state behind generalities about its progressive character.12 Criticism of these three historians occupied the major part of the version of Dubrovskii’s paper which was published as an article in Voprosy istorii.13 Dubrovskii focused particularly on Vipper, attacking him for presenting autocracy – in the manner of the pre-revolutionary juridical-statist school – as a supra-class institution which subordinated the nobility and enserfed the peasantry.14 In Dubrovskii’s own view, by contrast, the autocracy was a dictatorship of the landowning serfowners, based on extreme violence towards the masses, especially the peasants.15 The wartime editions of Vipper’s book, Dubrovskii argued, had not only repeated the positive assessment of Ivan provided in the first edition, but had raised the tsar ‘on to an even higher pedestal’ and provided

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an even more favourable evaluation of the oprichnina.16 Dubrovskii criticized Vipper for failing to ask whether Ivan’s accusations of treason were not just pretexts for attacks on his opponents. Undoubtedly treason really existed, Dubrovskii acknowledged, but the entire population of Novgorod, including the children, could hardly have been traitors as the tsar had alleged.17 Dubrovskii went on to criticize Bakhrushin and Smirnov for displaying many of the same faults as Vipper (he did concede, however, that Smirnov had correctly linked the oprichnina with serfdom, even though he had presented serfdom primarily as a juridical rather than an economic institution).18 Dubrovskii reserved his particular scorn for the three historians’ attempts to depict Ivan as a ‘people’s tsar’19 enjoying the support of the peasantry. Vipper had spoken of Ivan’s ‘great popularity’ and of the ‘strong love of the people towards him’,20 while Bakhrushin and Smirnov had made selective and tendentious use of folklore in order to illustrate their specious claims that the people had a positive view of the tsar. 21 Dubrovskii concluded by stating that he had focused on the books by Vipper, Bakhrushin and Smirnov because they had most clearly demonstrated erroneous views of Ivan IV. But similar views had been expressed in many other Soviet historical works which praised Ivan. In addition, ‘an idealised image of Ivan IV was created in a number of works of literature and art’. This idealization of Ivan, Dubrovskii continued, had been helped by Stalin’s comments about him. And – like Pankratova at the previous week’s meeting of Academy activists – he cited a lengthy extract from Stalin’s 1947 conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov, as recounted in the latter’s memoirs. Stalin’s views, Dubrovskii said, could ‘in no way be recognised as Marxist’. And he ended with a plea for historians to recognize the role of the people as the true makers of history, and to acknowledge that Ivan IV was not a ‘people’s tsar’, but the ‘tsar of the landowning serfowners’ who exploited and oppressed the masses.22 Of the three historians whose work had been specifically attacked in Dubrovskii’s paper, only Smirnov was still alive in 1956 (Bakhrushin having died in 1950 and Vipper in 1954), and it fell to him to respond to the criticisms.23 He began by agreeing that some historians had interpreted the role of certain historical figures incorrectly, rejecting a class approach and depicting them as ‘heroes of the entire people’ (vsenarodnye geroi). But it was wrong, he insisted, to

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see the cult of the individual in all works devoted to historical figures. Such an approach would mean swinging from one extreme to the other, ‘from an anti-Marxist cult of the individual to an anarchist rejection of the role of leaders’. 24 Smirnov went on to criticize Dubrovskii’s suggestion that Englishstyle parliamentarism was a realistic option in sixteenth-century Russia, a means by which the country could have avoided the necessity of violence. Dubrovskii had forgotten that absolutism was a logical stage in the development of feudalism, and that it played a progressive role in the process of liquidating feudal fragmentation. Smirnov rejected Dubrovskii’s view that fragmentation had already been overcome by the end of the fifteenth century. The sixteenth century represented an important stage in the process of the creation and strengthening of the centralized state, and the oprichnina terror was a form of struggle against the princes and boyars, ‘not the senseless destruction by Ivan IV and the oprichniki of representatives of all strata of society’. The bloodshed which accompanied the creation of the absolutist state was not a peculiarity of Russian history but a common feature of this historical period, with parallels elsewhere in Europe. The carnage of the oprichnina should not obscure its progressive significance as a form of struggle for the consolidation of the centralized state.25 Dubrovskii – Smirnov continued – had failed to understand the interrelationship between that aspect of the oprichnina which was directed against the boyars and that which reflected policy towards the peasantry. It was true that the consolidation of the centralized state, as a dictatorship of the serfowning landowners, strengthened the class position of the feudal lords and prepared the way for serfdom. But Ivan’s struggle against feudal fragmentation enjoyed the support of the masses of the people, whose interests were served by the suppression of internecine feudal strife. In conclusion, Smirnov rejected the claim that his book reflected a cult of Ivan as an individual: such a cult could, however, be found ‘in literary works and in the cinema’.26 After Smirnov’s presentation there followed, in the words of the summary account, ‘a lively discussion’.27 The 16 speakers divided fairly evenly between supporters of Dubrovskii and those of Smirnov. The debate was a serious and responsible one, with few personalized attacks, although two participants (Zimin and Korolyuk) hinted indirectly at Dubrovskii’s lack of specialist expertise on the sixteenth century. Most speakers criticized the negative effects on Soviet

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historiography in general, and on the study of Ivan IV in particular, of the ‘cult of the individual’, although some asserted that Dubrovskii himself had overstated the significance of Ivan’s role, albeit by stressing his negative influence rather than his positive one. In response to Smirnov’s claim that the ‘cult of Ivan IV as an individual’ was reflected only in literature and cinema (to which Zimin added popular history), some speakers (Linkov, S. A. Pokrovskii, Cherepnin) insisted that it was to be found in academic history as well, while Pashuto argued that the professional historians bore some responsibility for what had happened in literature, cinema and art, because ‘historians provide the basis for the illumination of historical themes’.28 On the more substantive issues which Dubrovskii and Smirnov had raised, there was general agreement that the oprichnina had contributed to peasant enserfment by promoting the interests of the service nobility at the expense of the hereditary landowners, but there was little support for Dubrovskii’s view that the oprichnina paved the way for serfdom by ‘clearing’ boyar lands of peasants. Opinion was more divided on Dubrovskii’s suggestion that alternative paths of political development existed in the sixteenth century: the possibilities of some kind of parliamentarism were supported by Shmidt and Porshnev, while A. M. Sakharov, Korolyuk and Koretskii rejected them, Korolyuk asserting categorically that because of the nature of the serf economy ‘there could be no other form of progressive state organization for sixteenth-century Russia than strong tsarist power’.29 Finally, after Dubrovskii had replied to the debate by dismissing the arguments of his critics, L. V. Cherepnin attempted to sum up. While commending Dubrovskii’s ‘initiative’ in having raised such an important issue, Cherepnin noted that he had not ‘provided an adequate scholarly basis for the propositions he advanced’. Two main sets of issues required further research: the development of serfdom and the related questions of the role of labour rents and service landholding; and Russian socio-economic development in connection with the formation of the centralized Russian state.30 In spite of the radical nature of the criticisms of Stalinist historiography made by Dubrovskii and other participants in the debate, there was no real attempt to draw a direct parallel between Stalin and Ivan Groznyi. Admittedly such an analogy was implicit in the use of the term, ‘cult of Ivan IV’, since the ‘cult of the individual’ was by then the standard euphemistic accusation against Stalin.

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But the only specific mention of Stalin had come in Dubrovskii’s article in Voprosy istorii, when he cited the conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov as an example of Stalin’s views on the tsar which had ‘contributed to the idealization of Ivan IV as an individual’.31 Dubrovskii was to be much more explicit in a 1965 review of Veselovskii’s and Zimin’s studies of the oprichnina. In this review Dubrovskii repeated many of his 1956 criticisms of Vipper’s 1922 account, but added: The October revolution threw into the rubbish-bin of history the last autocrat and the entire system of semi-serfdom along with tsarist generals and officials. Tsars ‘went out of fashion’. However, it so happened that the ‘fashion for tsars’ revived, as it were, in the period of the flowering of the cult of the individual. Stalin sought historical justification for his policy of repressions and found it in the distant middle ages, in the bloody oprichnina in particular. Ivan Groznyi was exalted beyond all measure by him.32 Dubrovskii went on to claim that ‘Stalin gave his directives [ustanovki] concerning Ivan IV to historians, literary figures and representatives of the arts repeatedly from the middle of the thirties’. And he proceeded to cite, as an example of these directives, Cherkasov’s account of the famous 1947 conversation, adding: ‘It is quite natural that in the light of such directives concerning Ivan IV, apologetics for the “great sovereign” should have become extremely intensified in the period of the cult of the individual.’33 As we have seen, there is no clear evidence dating from before 1940 that Stalin played a personal role in the ‘rehabilitation’ of Ivan Groznyi; claims of his earlier involvement, backed by the ‘evidence’ of his 1947 conversation with Eisenstein, seem to originate in the period of ‘de-Stalinization’ under Khrushchev. At first, the ‘de-Stalinization’ of Ivan IV proceeded fairly cautiously after 1956. In 1963, however, a collection of previously unpublished works on the oprichnina by S. B. Veselovskii (who had died in 1952) was issued by a special commission established in 1957 to act as the Academician’s literary executors.34 Veselovskii’s views, as we have already noted, ran counter to the standard late-Stalinist interpretation of the oprichnina, and his review of the historiography included

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a devastating critique of Platonov’s work for its inaccurate factual basis.35 His attacks on contemporary images of Ivan, however (the essay was written in 1944–5), focused not on the unholy trinity of historians – Vipper, Bakhrushin and Smirnov – who were to be criticized by Dubrovskii, but rather on the writers V. I. Kostylev and A. N. Tolstoi and the critics who had praised their works.36 From the 1960s, a new generation of Soviet historians began to publish serious scholarly studies of the period which departed significantly from the Stalinist formulae, without swinging to the opposite extreme of Dubrovskii’s somewhat crude and economically reductionist Marxism.37 In the two decades between the overthrow of Khrushchev in 1964 and the coming to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, the Stalinist image of Ivan Groznyi was largely abandoned, a negative portrayal of the tsar serving partly as an allegorical criticism of Stalin at a time when it was more difficult than it had been earlier to disparage the dictator directly. So effective was this new revision of Ivan’s image that in the era of glasnost’ it was to be possible for democrats to discredit Stalin simply by reminding the Soviet public of his admiration for Groznyi.

Glasnost’ It was not until the ‘second wave’ of de-Stalinization, under Gorbachev in the late 1980s, that the subject of Ivan Groznyi again came to the fore in the Soviet press. One of the first harbingers of glasnost’ was the publication of Anatolii Rybakov’s novel, Children of the Arbat (Deti Arbata), begun in the 1960s, which was serialized in the journal Druzhba narodov in 1987. In the novel Rybakov depicted Stalin as admiring Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, and modelling himself on them. Rybakov’s Stalin plans in 1934 to have history rewritten in order to counter Pokrovskii’s disparagement of the role of the individual, aiming thereby to have his own role as Leader (vozhd’) more fully appreciated.38 Supreme power, Stalin reflects, ‘must be royally [tsarstvenno] majestic; it is only such power that the people will worship and obey; only it can instil in them trepidation and respect’. That was why both Caesar and Napoleon ended up making themselves emperors.39 The view of Ivan which Rybakov attributed to Stalin in 1934 was based on Stalin’s conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov. Like his historical prototype in 1947, Rybakov’s Stalin asserts in 1934 that Ivan was a great statesman who had expanded Russia’s

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boundaries, established a monopoly on foreign trade, and introduced into Russian politics the principle that everything must be subordinated to the interests of the state. The boyars had opposed the creation of a mighty centralized state, and therefore: Groznyi’s mistake was not that he executed the boyars, but that he executed too few of them, that he did not entirely destroy the four [sic] great boyar clans. The ancients were more far-sighted in this respect, they destroyed their enemies unto the third and fourth generation, cleanly and permanently.40 But there is a further aspect of Ivan and Peter which attracts Rybakov’s Stalin: both had a popular reputation as ‘good tsars’, which Stalin believes to have been created by – rather than in spite of – their persecution of the boyars. Stalin tells the Old Bolshevik Budyagin (a fictional character in the novel): We must stand aside and give way to personnel from the ordinary people. At the head of the state the people wants to see its own sons, and not new upstarts, new nobles. The Russian people does not like nobles. The history of the Russian people is a history of struggle against the nobility. The Russian people loved Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, that is precisely those tsars who destroyed boyars and nobles. All peasant movements from Bolotnikov to Pugachev were movements for the good tsar and against the nobles.41 And Budyagin interprets Stalin’s words as follows: ‘old cadres like Budyagin are the new nobles. It is they whom the people no longer want.’42 Thus Rybakov’s Stalin not only plans his purges in order to rid himself of rivals and establish himself as a true Leader in the mould of Ivan and Peter, but he also hopes thereby to gain the love of his people as a ‘good tsar’ who destroys his boyars. There is, however, no evidence that the real Stalin thought of Ivan and Peter as ‘good tsars’: the words attributed to him by Rybakov are based on his conversation with Emil Ludwig, in which he said, ‘ . . . speaking of Razin and Pugachev, you should never forget that they were tsarists: they acted against the landowners, but for the “good tsar”. Indeed, that was their slogan.’43

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Shortly after the serialization of Children of the Arbat in 1987 there appeared an article in the journal Znanie-sila by the historian V. B. Kobrin, on the ‘posthumous fate of Ivan Groznyi’.44 Kobrin, a respected specialist on the sixteenth century, had published a monograph, Power and Property in Medieval Russia, in 1985, and popularized versions of his main conclusions had appeared in Znanie-sila earlier in 1987.45 Kobrin began his article on Ivan by referring to the recent republication in Minsk of Kostylev’s three-volume novel on Ivan Groznyi, with a print-run of 300 000 copies. Kobrin recalled that Kostylev’s novel had been a ‘bestseller’ of the 1940s and had won a Stalin prize in 1948. He informed his readers that in a newspaper article of March 1941 Kostylev had ‘rejected as slander tales of Groznyi’s cruelty and evaluated him as an outstanding statesman’.46 The novel, too, Kobrin asserted, was permeated with the same idea. But Kostylev had not been alone: the plays by A. N. Tolstoi, V. A. Solov’ev and I. L. Sel’vinskii had also presented a positive image of the tsar. Eisenstein had tried to provide a justification of terror in his film, but Stalin had disliked Part Two, and in his conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov Stalin had expressed his own views of Ivan, which Kobrin proceeded to cite at some length (from Cherkasov’s memoirs). ‘It is not surprising,’ he commented, ‘that in such circumstances Ivan Groznyi’s statesmanlike wisdom was praised not only by literary figures but also by historians.’47 Kobrin then reviewed Soviet historiography relating to Ivan. He began by noting that justifications of Ivan’s cruelty had been made in pre-revolutionary Russia, notably by Platonov, and he rehearsed the story of Vipper’s Ivan Groznyi, from its denunciation as counterrevolutionary by Nechkina in 1933 to its reissue in 1942 and 1944. Even such eminent scholars as Bakhrushin and Smirnov, Kobrin lamented, had lent themselves to the task of praising Groznyi – only S. B. Veselovskii had refused to go down that path.48 Kobrin then went on to provide his own assessment of Ivan: he argued that although the oprichnina was not directed against boyar landownership, it did promote centralization by destroying some remaining aspects of feudal fragmentation – the apanage lands of the Staritskiis, the Orthodox Church and Novgorod. Kobrin’s discussion of the oprichnina was accompanied by reflections that were as relevant to an assessment of the Stalin era as to that of Ivan Groznyi. He dismissed the view that historians ought not to pass moral judgements on their subjects. Rejection of moral judgements

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amounted to the advocacy of the precept that ‘the end justifies the means’, although it was well known that ends were affected by the choice of means. And alternative means to the end of state centralization had been available in the sixteenth century: namely, the more gradualist reform path initiated by the government of Sil’vestr and Adashev in the 1550s. The terrorist methods which Groznyi subsequently used had left a lasting imprint on Russia’s social and political structure, with the institutions of serfdom and autocracy acquiring particularly harsh and despotic forms. ‘It is not possible for a tyrant and an executioner’, Kobrin concluded, ‘to be a motiveforce of progress.’49 Clearly Kobrin intended this aphorism to apply not only to the sixteenth century. As R. W. Davies commented in his study of Soviet historiography under Gorbachev: The author did not mention the Soviet experience, but he was obviously suggesting that Silvester and the reforms of the 1550s were analogous to Bukharin and the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, while Ivan and his later policies were analogous to Stalin and the repressive policies of the 1930s.50 Kobrin continued to write popular pieces about Ivan Groznyi. He contributed a commentary to the version of Stalin’s conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov which was published in Moscow News in 1988,51 and in 1989 he published a short popular biography of Ivan.52 In the Conclusion to this book, Kobrin raised the question of parallels between Groznyi and Stalin. He recognized that those who had written and read about Ivan had often ‘seen behind him another political figure, one of our own time’, but that the need for Aesopian language, ‘allusions’ and ‘making obscene gestures with your hand in your pocket’ had now passed with the advent of glasnost’.53 Nevertheless, he argued, interest in Groznyi had not abated, since study of his reign helped us to understand the ‘mechanisms of despotism’ – despotism being a political phenomenon that had common features in all of the socio-economic formations in which it appeared. The ‘cult of Ivan Groznyi’ under Stalin had helped to create ‘a distorted set of values’ in which the end justified the means and ‘a moralistic approach to a historical figure was regarded as the naive survival of pre-scientific thinking’.54 But Groznyi had been only one example of the Stalinist tendency to glorify strong personalities – tsars, princes and generals – all of whom, Kobrin observed sarcastically, ‘fought for the interests of the entire people, based

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themselves on the masses, who were devoted to them and enraptured by them, and unmasked the evil machinations of repulsive foreigners and traitors and faint-hearts from the “elite”’.55 This tendency, Kobrin argued, was designed to ‘galvanize the naive-monarchist prejudices of the masses’, to convince them that the happiness of the nation depended primarily on the leadership of a strong and wise statesman. Stalin himself had inspired parallels with Ivan by personally promoting the tsar as a model for imitation.56 Kobrin concluded by identifying ‘general features of the mechanism of personal power’ which could be discovered on the basis of the example of Ivan Groznyi.57 There followed a splendid example of the use of Aesopian language, an account ostensibly of Ivan’s reign, but clearly intended to be read as an analysis of Stalinism – in this case, of course, not as a means of avoiding censorship, but as an intellectual exercise, demonstrating the typical features of despotism. All of the specific examples which illustrate Kobrin’s generalizations are taken from the reign of Ivan Groznyi, but the readers are implicitly invited to supply their own examples from the Stalin era. Kobrin’s first ‘mechanism’ was the use of terror, which was deliberately arbitrary in order to create an atmosphere of fear. 58 The dictator’s main aim is to secure his personal power, and this does not always correspond to the interests of the state: ‘ . . . the interests of the regime of personal power, which operates only by terrorist or at least by command-administrative methods . . . are in conflict with the interests of the country.’59 But sometimes, when the country faces mortal danger, the dictator has to alleviate his despotism and appoint talented individuals who had previously been in real or threatened disgrace: ‘A clear example of this is the appointment of Prince Mikhail Ivanovich Vorotynskii as commander-in-chief in 1572, and his execution when there was no longer any direct and immediate need for an outstanding general.’60 (Any informed Soviet reader would have substituted Marshal Zhukov for Vorotynskii in this sentence, 1941 for 1572 and ‘demotion’ for ‘execution’.) The second ‘mechanism’ of despotism which Kobrin identified was demagogy. The ruler assures the masses that his anger is directed not against them, but only against the elite.61 The execution of some of Ivan’s (Stalin’s) own henchmen, such as the Basmanovs and Vyazemskii (Yagoda and Ezhov) led the masses to blame the terror on the tsar’s ‘evil counsellors’.62 Finally, in a concluding paragraph which could be read as a genuinely contemporary allegory, Kobrin noted that although terror normally ended with the death

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of the dictator, the consequences of his demagogy remained: in folklore Malyuta Skuratov (Beriya) is seen as the personification of terror, while Ivan (Stalin) himself appears as a ‘hot-tempered, credulous but in the last resort just ruler’.63 The topical lesson was clear: no ‘naive monarchist illusions’ about Stalin should be allowed to influence the new more open politics of the late 1980s.

Postscript (1998–9) Less than ten years after the publication of Kobrin’s study, the pendulum swung back again. In the introduction to his 1998 republication of Vipper and Platonov’s adulatory accounts of 1922–3, D. M. Volodikhin criticized Kobrin for his moral absolutism and for his depiction of Ivan as an analogue of Stalin (‘a half-crazed maniac, a tyrant who destroyed his own state in a burst of unrestrained fury, a blood-sucker who annihilated his own subjects’). At a time when strong state power was being heavily criticized, Ivan Groznyi had served as a symbol of Russian statism, and Kobrin had created a portrait of the first tsar which was ‘very much in keeping with the signs of the times’. The analogy with Stalin, Volodikhin complained, had damaged Ivan Groznyi, whose historical reputation had, as a result, ‘significantly fallen in the estimation of educated people’.64 Another defence of Ivan against criticisms by glasnost’-era liberals was made by B. N. Florya in the conclusion to his 1999 biography of Groznyi. Without naming Kobrin specifically, Florya chided ‘democrats’ who blamed Ivan for directing Russia along a path of development which differed from that of Western European countries such as England and France. Because of peculiarities of her socio-economic structures, Florya argued, Russia could never have acquired the characteristics of a western ‘society of estates’ (soslovnoe obshchestvo); without Ivan, Russia’s development would more likely have resembled that of Central Europe. He compared Russia with Poland, where a powerful nobility and weak monarchy had undermined the state and rendered it incapable of resisting its absolutist neighbours. Florya hastened to add that, ‘All this in no way means that the pretensions of democratic publicists in relation to Tsar Ivan are completely unfounded, and that his historical role deserves only a positive evaluation.’65 Nevertheless, writing at a time when the Russian political system was characterized by powerful ‘oligarchs’ and a weak President, Florya seemed to be hinting at a historical justification for ‘strong rule’.

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Conclusion Explanations of the ‘great retreat’ in Soviet historiography in the mid-1930s have tended to focus on concepts of Russian nationalism and Soviet state-building. While not refuting such ideas, the evidence examined in this study suggests that the major concern of the leadership in its directives on history from 1934 onwards was the pragmatic task of the promotion of patriotism in conditions of increasing international tension which led to a preoccupation with the need to raise popular morale for the purposes of military defence. Patriotism required the construction of a sense of common identity and common heritage – a task in which history was called upon to play an important role in the creation of feelings of national unity. Pokrovskyist history, with its stress on class struggle and proletarian internationalism, was perceived as likely to undermine rather than promote patriotism. The main pedagogical task of the new ideological initiative was the commissioning of new history textbooks, but the effects of that project would necessarily be long-term; for more immediate agitational and propaganda purposes, the leadership seized every opportunity to identify historical precedents and parallels to current foreign-policy developments, and to promote them both in the central press and in popular historical and artistic works. At a time when Germany and Poland represented the main potential enemies of the USSR in the west, appropriate historical analogies were found in Alexander Nevskii’s campaign against the Teutonic Knights, Minin and Pozharskii’s liberation of Moscow from the Poles, and the wars of Peter the Great, while the struggle of medieval Rus’ against the ‘Tatar yoke’ served as a parable of the threat from Japan in the east. The stress on patriotism involved a reversion to older approaches to history, which emphasized the role of individual ‘great men’ as national heroes. In order to counter the largely negative picture of the Russian past presented by Pokrovskii, many historical phenomena which appeared reactionary by present-day Soviet standards were now deemed to have been ‘progressive for their time’, thereby paving the way for the rehabilitation of the domestic as well as the foreign policies of many pre-revolutionary rulers. The most fundamentally relevant of all ‘progressive’ policies of the past was 192

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state-building, conceived as the development and consolidation of the power of the state, as well as its territorial expansion. It is not surprising, therefore, that Peter the Great was identified as an early candidate for rehabilitation. The case studies in this volume have, however, drawn attention to an aspect of the rehabilitation process which has hitherto been largely overlooked – namely, the Russian tradition of subversive historical analogy in conditions of censorship. Historians and writers faced the danger that the negative depictions of pre-revolutionary rulers required by Pokrovskyist orthodoxy might be received as allegorical criticisms of present-day leaders. Stalin’s assertion that Peter the Great was not depicted heroically enough in Aleksei Tolstoi’s 1929 play was made at a time when some had read the work as a concealed attack on the policies of the First Five-Year Plan; from then onwards, in spite of Stalin’s pronouncements to Emil Ludwig about the class nature of the Petrine state, it was evident that Peter had to be presented as a generally positive prototype of the Soviet leader. The same process applied in relation to Ivan the Terrible. The prohibition of Mikhail Bulgakov’s innocuous play in 1936 illustrated the sensitivity of the censorship to the depiction of a Russian ruler as a whimsical despot, especially at a time when unflattering parallels were already being drawn between Stalin and Groznyi. The rehabilitation of Ivan Groznyi proceeded somewhat more slowly than that of Peter the Great. After the banning of Bulgakov’s play, no historians were rash enough to raise their heads above the parapet by volunteering to tackle the theme of Tsar Ivan. The commissioning of new textbooks, however, made Ivan’s image impossible to ignore. In order to avoid suspicion of subversive analogies, Soviet historians evidently felt that they had to provide a generally positive picture of the tsar. By the late 1930s the vogue for ‘topical’ artistic works on historical themes had led to apparently spontaneous proposals ‘from below’ for studies of the tsar. Kostylev’s Kuz’ma Minin led him to Ivan, but the analogy which attracted the novelist was that between the Livonian War and the contemporary Baltic issue. Direct intervention ‘from above’ came only at the end of 1940, with the commissioning of Tolstoi’s play and Eisenstein’s film. The timing of these commissions suggests that it was the annexation of the Baltic states which reminded Stalin of Ivan, but his reported statements about the tsar focused not so much on the Livonian War as on the oprichnina.

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Stalin’s Great Purges provided a contemporary analogy to Ivan’s oprichnina which was patently evident to all historically literate observers. We have, however, found no evidence to support the speculation of Rybakov and Tucker that Stalin’s terror was consciously modelled on that of Ivan (although such a hypothesis is of course by its very nature impossible to refute); the uncanny similarity between the two episodes is perhaps most appropriately attributed to the universal ‘mechanisms of despotism’ identified by V. B. Kobrin. The history of Stalin’s personal engagement with the representation of Ivan Groznyi indicates a fundamental dualism in his approach. On the one hand, in relation to the historical tsar, Stalin more than once expressed the view that he was ‘insufficiently terrible’ or ‘insufficiently decisive’ in his persecution of his enemies. Yet he criticized Eisenstein for presenting Ivan as too irresolute, and the first version of Tolstoi’s play evidently met with his disapproval for similar reasons. If for Stalin personally the historical Ivan was not so much a role-model as a precursor from whose errors lessons could be learned, the Ivan he wanted to see on stage and screen was an analogue of his own self-image as a heroic and far-sighted ruler. The history of Tolstoi’s play illustrates the evolution of Ivan’s image, under Stalin’s tutelage, from the insufficiently vigilant eradicator of boyar treason to the inspired prophet of the Third Rome. Some Party leaders apparently felt, however, that they needed to explain and justify the official promotion of a positive image of Ivan. The Shcherbakov memorandum suggested that the object of the exercise was to combat the distortions of ‘noble and bourgeois’ writers. The rehabilitation was therefore presented as an exercise in correcting the old historiography by bringing out the ‘progressive’ features of Ivan’s policies. It was also implied that negative representations of the tsar were politically motivated constructs of the class enemy. In reality, of course, many nineteenth-century liberals and revolutionaries had presented Ivan in a negative manner partly as an analogue of contemporary tsars, while some conservative ‘noble and bourgeois’ historians had provided justificatory accounts of Ivan’s policies which served as models for the Stalinized image of the tsar. Vipper’s 1922 biography, as we have seen, required relatively few revisions to adapt it to the conditions of 1942. The new ‘Struggle with Treason’ chapter in the second edition of Vipper’s biography of Ivan was justified by the author as the incorporation of the results of newly available source material (the accounts of Staden and Schlichting), but in reality, of course, it developed

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an implicit comparison between the oprichnina and the Great Terror of 1936–8. Vipper defended the latter by insisting that the former was a legitimate, if belated, response to a real web of treasonous conspiracies against the tsar. Albeit somewhat unfairly, Eisenstein was subsequently to be criticized by Stalin and Molotov for failing to show why Ivan’s ‘repressions’ were necessary. The two Party leaders evidently assumed without question that the end justified the means, and that the existence of treason necessitated the use of ‘harsh measures’ to eradicate it. By the end of the Second World War, of course, Stalin’s repression of alleged traitors could also appear to have been justified by the successful military outcome: Eisenstein’s failure to show an analogous justification for Groznyi’s terror undoubtedly contributed to the banning of his Ivan the Terrible: Part Two. More significantly, the film was seen by many – no doubt including Stalin himself – as a subversive parable of the Purges. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Groznyi’s rehabilitation was his depiction as a ‘people’s tsar’. It was maintained that Ivan was presented in this way in folklore, and that Soviet historians were simply restoring a popular sixteenth-century image of the tsar which had been obscured by subsequent ‘noble-bourgeois’ historiography, and there is some foundation for this claim. It is also possible to see the ‘people’s tsar’ image as part of the analogy with Stalin (or at least with Stalin’s officially constructed populist persona), but in reality the situation is rather more complex. Vipper’s presentation of Groznyi as a ‘democratic monarch’, after all, preceded Stalin’s accession to power; conversely, some Soviet writers attributed the characteristics of a ‘people’s ruler’ not only to Ivan, but also to historical figures as diverse as Alexander Nevskii, Peter the Great and Alexander I. The image of the ‘people’s tsar’ may perhaps best be explained as a by-product of the new patriotic stress on nation rather than class, with its emphasis on national unity, including the unity of the leader and the led. The resulting picture of the solidarity of ruler and people making common cause against foreign enemies did of course have resonances in Soviet propaganda campaigns of the late 1930s and 1940s. But it also bore a marked similarity to older Slavophile monarchist notions of the ‘union of tsar and people’, and it is not surprising that the image of the ‘people’s tsar’ was so heavily criticized by Marxist historians of the Pokrovskyist ‘school’. This study has shown that – pace the view of Robert Tucker that Stalin could ‘decree’ the rewriting of Russian history in order to

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create his own favoured image of Ivan – the process of ‘rehabilitating’ the tsar proceeded slowly and haltingly, with input ‘from below’ as well as ‘from above’. Stalin appears to have intervened personally only in the cases of the Tolstoi play and the Eisenstein film; in other instances, disparate and often contradictory opinions were expressed, as demonstrated most strikingly by the reviews of the first volume of Kostylev’s novel. There were no published directives on the details of Ivan’s rehabilitation, only generalized instructions on his new progressive reputation which lent themselves to a variety of interpretations. And dissenting voices were never entirely silenced: covert Pokrovskyists such as Pankratova resisted the rehabilitation throughout the Stalin period, as did Veselovskii, albeit from a very different ideological position. After Stalin’s death, negative images of Ivan again came to the fore, and Stalin’s admiration for the tsar was used in the campaigns to discredit him, both in the 1950s and in the 1980s. The analogy persisted, but its polarity was reversed, with Stalin becoming ‘Iosif Groznyi’. More recently, the converse point has been made: that the comparison with Stalin has damaged the historical reputation of Ivan IV. So intertwined have the reputations of the two rulers become that it is difficult to see how any future ‘rehabilitation’ of Ivan can avoid being received as an attempted apologia for Stalin or as a justification for a latter-day strongman. For as long as debates persist about the merits of centralized state power in Russia, and about the necessity of harsh measures for maintaining such power, the image of Ivan the Terrible will continue to provoke controversy above and beyond the narrow confines of the historical profession.

Chronology of Events in Pre-Revolutionary Russian History 10th–12th cc. 980–1015 988 13th–14th cc. 1242 1380 1462–1505

Early (‘Kievan’) Rus’ Rule of Vladimir of Kiev Conversion of Rus’ to Christianity Mongol (Tatar) overlordship Alexander Nevskii defeats Teutonic Knights in ‘Battle on the Ice’ Dmitrii Donskoi defeats Tatars at Battle of Kulikovo Reign of Grand Prince Ivan III

1533–84 1547 1552 1557 1558–83 1560 1564 1565–72 1570 1571 1581 1582

Reign of Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) Ivan’s coronation as first tsar Conquest of Kazan’ Conquest of Astrakhan’ Livonian War Death of Tsaritsa Anastasiya Prince Kurbskii’s defection to Lithuania oprichnina Punitive raid on Novgorod Crimean Tatars burn Moscow Death of Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich Ermak’s cossacks conquer Siberia

1584–98 1598–1605 c.1603–13 1606–7 1612 1613–45 1645–76 1648–9 1654 1669–71 1682–1725 1762–96 1773–4 1801–25 1805–15 1812 1825–55 1854–6 1894–1917 1904–5 1914–17

Reign of Fedor Ivanovich Reign of Boris Godunov Time of Troubles Bolotnikov rising Minin and Pozharskii liberate Moscow from the Poles Reign of Michael Romanov Reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich Revolt of Bogdan Khmel’nitskii in Ukraine Treaty of Pereyaslavl’ between Russia and Ukraine Revolt of Sten’ka Razin Reign of Peter I (‘the Great’) Reign of Catherine II (‘the Great’) Pugachev revolt Reign of Alexander I Napoleonic Wars Battle of Borodino Reign of Nicholas I Crimean War Reign of Nicholas II Russo-Japanese War First World War 197

Notes Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Perrie, The Image of Ivan the Terrible. An early essay on this theme was Perrie, ‘The Popular Image’. This period is discussed in greater detail in the ‘Epilogue’ below. Perrie, ‘The Tsar, the Emperor, the Leader’. Tucker, Stalin in Power. Uhlenbruch, ‘The Annexation of History’. Published as Perrie, ‘Nationalism and History’.

Prologue – Pre-Stalinization: Images of Ivan IV before 1934 1 Karamzin, Istoriya, kn. 2, tom 8; kn. 3, tom 9. 2 Kostomarov, ‘Tsar’ Ivan Vasil’evich Groznyi’. 3 Klyuchevskii, Kurs, ch. 2, p. 111. This volume was first published in 1906, but the entire Course was based on lectures delivered from the 1870s. 4 Ibid., pp. 190–3. 5 Ibid., pp. 195–8. 6 Ibid., pp. 211–12. 7 Karamzin, Istoriya, kn. 3, tom 9, col. 258. 8 Ibid., col. 259. 9 Tolstoi, Knyaz’ Serebryanyi, pp. 325–6. 10 Ibid., p. 326. Tolstoi’s heroes from the reign of Ivan IV included the fictional Prince Serebryanyi and the historical figures of Vasilii Shibanov and Prince Mikhailo Repnin, both of whom were the subjects of his verse ballads written in the 1840s as well as appearing in minor roles in Prince Serebryanyi. See also his ballad, ‘Staritskii voevoda’ (1858), and his mock history of Russia in verse, ‘Istoriya gosudarstva Rossiiskogo’ (1868). Ivan also appears as a major character in Tolstoi’s Death of Ivan the Terrible (1866), the first play in a dramatic trilogy devoted primarily to the career of Boris Godunov (the most successful was the second play, Tsar Fedor Ioannovich). Ivan’s complex love-life provided fertile soil for melodramatic opera librettos: see Tchaikovsky’s The Oprichnik (based on a play of 1834 by I. Lazhechnikov), and Rimskii-Korsakov’s A Bride for the Tsar and The Maid of Pskov (based on plays by L. A. Mei of 1849 and 1859 respectively). Other literary works set in the reign of Ivan the Terrible include A. N. Ostrovskii’s play, Vasilisa Melent’eva (1867), and the novel Kudeyar (1882) by the historian N. I. Kostomarov. Ivan was also the subject of a monumental seated statue by the sculptor M. M. Antokol’skii (1871) and of paintings by Il’ya Repin (1885 – of 198

Notes to pp. 8–13

11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38

39

199

the tsar clutching the bloody corpse of the son he had murdered) and Viktor Vasnetsov (1897). Solov’ev, Istoriya Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, tom 6 (first published 1856), in his Sochineniya, kn. 3. An earlier defence of Ivan from the statist perspective was provided by K. D. Kavelin (1818–85). Solov’ev, Sochineniya, kn. 3, p. 684. Ibid., pp. 688–90. Platonov, Ocherki (first published 1899). See also the lecture on ‘The Period of Ivan Groznyi’ in his Lektsii, pp. 199–212 (Platonov’s Lectures went through ten editions between 1899 and 1917). Platonov, Ocherki, p. 115. Ibid., pp. 121–36. Pokrovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, kn. 1, p. 75. Emphasis in the original. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p. 273. Pokrovskii’s interpretation of the oprichnina as the victory of the service nobility over the hereditary landowners was heavily based on Platonov’s Ocherki. Pokrovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, kn. 1, pp. 300–7. Ibid., p. 313. Emphasis in the original. Ibid., p. 315. Ibid., pp. 317, 304. Ibid., pp. 317–449. Ibid., p. 649. On Pokrovskii’s career in the Soviet period, see Enteen, The Soviet ScholarBureaucrat; Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis. Pokrovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, kn. 3, p. 611. Ibid., pp. 50–61. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 563 (an article published in 1931). Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii, pp. 53–7. Pokrovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, kn. 3, pp. [3–4]. For Vipper’s biographical details, see Graham, ‘R. Iu. Vipper’; Safronov, Istoricheskoe mirovozzrenie; Volodikhin, ‘Ochen’ staryi akademik’. For Vipper’s own – heavily self-censored – autobiography, written at the time of his nomination as an Academician in May 1943, see Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 68, ll. 4–4ob. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922]. This first edition has recently been reprinted, together with Platonov’s popular study of the following year, with an introductory essay by D. M. Volodikhin: Volodikhin (ed.), Ivan Groznyi. Page references below to the first edition are from this 1998 reprint, cited as: Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98]. Platonov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 24. Ibid., pp. 23–4. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98], pp. 103–31. Ibid., pp. 112–13; cf. also pp. 134–7, 158–60 and p. 178, where he refers to the ‘populist character of the Muscovite military monarchy’. For earlier uses of terms similar to ‘democratic monarchy’, see Klyuchevskii, Kurs, ch. 2, p. 424; Platonov, Ocherki, pp. 95, 97. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98], p. 113; cf. also pp. 109–11.

200 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56

57

58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65

Notes to pp. 13–19 Ibid., pp. 151–2. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., pp. 209–11. Volodikhin, ‘Ochen’ staryi akademik’, pp. 53–68; Volodikhin, ‘Epokha Ivana Groznogo’, p. 8. Volodikhin, ‘Epokha Ivana Groznogo’, p. 4. G. P. Fedotov, Svyatoi Filipp mitropolit Moskovskii, Paris, 1928, pp. 106–7, cited in Volodikhin, ‘Ochen’ staryi akademik’, p. 70. Dubrovskii, ‘Protiv idealizatsii’, p. 121; cf. Dubrovskii, ‘Eshche raz’, pp. 211–12. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98], p. 201. There is an implicit polemic here with Platonov, who had identified the origins of the Time of Troubles of the early seventeenth century in the social and political crises of Ivan’s reign: Platonov, Ocherki; see also Platonov, Ivan Groznyi. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98], p. 201. Safronov, Istoricheskoe mirovozzrenie, pp. 132–55; Volodikhin, ‘Ochen’ staryi akademik’, pp. 36–52, 81–92; Volodikhin, ‘Kritika teorii progressa’. On quasi-Slavophile elements in Vipper’s thought, see Volodikhin, ‘Ochen’ staryi akademik’, p. 87. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98], p. 138. Ibid., p. 139. Shtaden, O Moskve Ivana Groznogo, p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Among later historians, S. M. Kashtanov and A. L. Khoroshkevich have followed Polosin in finding ‘a kind of analogy between Ivan IV and the communists’ in Vipper’s book, an interpretation which is, however, firmly rejected by Volodikhin: Kashtanov, ‘Kniga o russkom voiske’, p. 90; Khoroshkevich, ‘Oprichnina’, pp. 86–7; cf. Volodikhin, ‘Ochen’ staryi akademik’, pp. 79–80. Shtaden, O Moskve Ivana Groznogo, p. 40. For Polosin’s use of similar terminology in a lecture delivered in 1921, see his Sotsial’no-politicheskaya istoriya, pp. 51, 54; L. V. Cherepnin states in his Introduction that Ivan’s land redistribution policy was quite widely interpreted as a ‘revolution’ in the 1920s: ibid., p. 14. As we have seen, Pokrovskii used the term ‘perevorot’ for the agrarian ‘revolution’ of the sixteenth century. Platonov, Ivan Groznyi, p. 24. There is an English translation, with an introductory essay by Richard Hellie: Platonov, Ivan the Terrible. See also Volodikhin (ed.), Ivan Groznyi. Akademicheskoe delo, vyp. 1, pp. 285–6. Platonov, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 120–3. Ibid., pp. 123–30. Ibid., pp. 132–3. Platonov died in exile in Samara in 1933. The documentary collection Akademicheskoe delo, vyp. 1, is devoted in its entirety to the trumpedup case against him. Nechkina was a pupil of Pokrovskii. Possibly reflecting the influence of Stalin’s interview with Emil Ludwig in 1931, which stressed the role of the individual in history. Nechkina, ‘Ivan IV’.

Notes to pp. 20–8

201

66 Ibid., col. 329 (emphasis in the original). 67 The other non-Marxist accounts she cited were those of Karamzin and Solov’ev.

Chapter 1

History in the Service of Patriotism, 1934–45

1 Pravda, 16.5.34, p. 1. On the background to this resolution, see Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, pp. 874–6; Dubrovskii and Brandenberger, ‘“Grazhdanskoi istorii u nas net”’; Brandenberger, The ‘Short Course’ to Modernity, ch. 2. See also Artizov, ‘V ugodu vzglyadam vozhdya’. 2 Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, pp. 876–80. 3 Pravda, 27.1.36, p. 2. The details of the competition for a new primaryschool textbook on USSR history were announced in Pravda, 4.3.36, p. 1. 4 Pravda, 27.1.36, p. 2. See also Brandenberger, ‘Who Killed Pokrovskii?’ 5 See, for example, Izvestiya, 27.1.36, pp. 3–4. 6 Istorik–Marksist, kn. 1(53), 1936, pp. 5–6. 7 See Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, p. 887, n.36. 8 Izvestiya, 27.1.36, p. 4; Pravda, 1.2.36, pp. 2–3; Istorik-Marksist, kn. 1(53), 1936, p. 12. 9 Klyuchevskii, Kurs, ch. 1, pp. XVII–XVIII. See also Pravda, 15.8.37, p. 4. 10 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 11, ll. 14–18. 11 Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii; Protiv antimarksistskoi kontseptsii. 12 Timasheff, The Great Retreat. 13 Rybakov, Deti Arbata, pp. 240–3; Kobrin, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 162–3. 14 Aleksandrova, Literatura i zhizn’, pp. 429–30; Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed. 15 Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’; Brandenberger, The ‘Short Course’ to Modernity, ch. 3. 16 Timasheff, The Great Retreat, ch. 7; Tucker, Stalin in Power, pp. 568–72 and passim. 17 This was the view of the US Military Attaché in his report on ‘Nationalism in the Soviet Union’ of 15.9.37: MID, 2657-D-1052, ff. 2–3. 18 A number of articles criticizing German fascist historiography were published, e.g. Lukin, ‘K voprosu o fashizatsii’. A collection repudiating fascist theories of history was prepared by the Institute of History at the same time as the ones attacking Pokrovskii: Protiv fashistskoi fal’sifikatsii. 19 The Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov argues in his memoirs that utilitarianism – the need for all-out mobilization for the struggle against Nazism – governed the anti-Pokrovskii turn in history in 1936: Simonov, Glazami, pp. 183–4. 20 Tolz, ‘Conflicting “Homeland Myths”’, pp. 270–1. 21 See, for example, Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii, pp. 55–7. 22 Articles 1, 133. 23 XVIII s”ezd, pp. 32–6.

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28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42 43

44

45 46 47 48

Notes to pp. 28–33 Lobanov (ed.), Stalin, p. 655. Pravda, 7.3.36, p. 1. Pravda, 22.5.36, p. 1. On cultural policy in the mid-1930s see, for example, Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, especially pp. 183–215, and Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki. Perrie, ‘Moulding Collective Identities’. Miller, Folklore for Stalin. The rehabilitation of folklore had been signalled by Maksim Gor’kii at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Pravda, 4.3.36, p. 1. Pravda, 7.3.36, p. 1. Bulgakova, Dnevnik, pp. 116, 336–7. Extracts from his draft have been published: Bulgakov, ‘“Kurs istorii SSSR”’; Lur’e and Paneyakh, ‘Rabota’. For detailed accounts of this episode, see Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, pp. 130–7; Dubrovskii, ‘Kak Dem’yan Bednyi’; Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, pp. 212–22. For Bednyi’s own view of his work, published before the premiere of the play, see Pravda, 24.10.36, p. 4. Dubrovskii, ‘Kak Dem’yan Bednyi’, p. 144. Pravda, 14.11.36, p. 3. The text of the resolution was drafted by the Politbyuro: see Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, pp. 220–1. Pravda, 15.11.36, p. 3. See also the version of Kerzhentsev’s speech at a meeting of Moscow theatrical workers on 23.11.36, published in Protiv fal’sifikatsii narodnogo proshlogo, pp. 16–81, which also drew broader lessons concerning the patriotic tasks of historical plays. Dubrovskii, ‘Kak Dem’yan Bednyi’, p. 148. Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, pp. 212–13. Maksim Gor’kii, as Kerzhentsev pointed out, had at the 1934 Writers’ Congress identified the bylina characters Mikula Selyaninovich, Svyatogor and Vasilisa Premudraya alongside Hercules, Prometheus and Doctor Faustus as folklore heroes of world cultural significance: Pravda, 15.11.36, p. 3. Pravda, 15.11.36, p. 3. Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 124. Istorik-Marksist, kn. 3(61), 1937, p. 140. Zhdanov was making these points in relation to the draft textbooks as early as December 1936: see Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, p. 878. Bakhrushin, ‘K voprosu o kreshchenii’. According to his biographer, the publication of this article, and a more popular piece on the same subject in Izvestiya in 1938, played a major part in Bakhrushin’s rehabilitation after his return from exile following his implication in the ‘Academy affair’ of 1930: he was elected a Corresponding Member of the Academy in 1939 (Dubrovskii, S. V. Bakhrushin, pp. 86–9). Mar’yamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor, p. 86. Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, pp. 194–5. Istorik-Marksist, kn. 1(53), 1936, p. 5. Istorik-Marksist, kn. 3(61), 1937, pp. 140–1. The ‘lesser evil’ concept seems to have originated with Zhdanov: Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, p. 878.

Notes to pp. 33–40

203

49 Istorik-Marksist, kn. 3(61), 1937, p. 141. 50 Pravda, 27.8.37, p. 4; see also the stress on Nevskii in an article on the new textbook: Pravda, 25.8.37, p. 2. 51 Pravda, 2.9.37 – 8.9.37. 52 MID, 2657-D-1052, f. 2. 53 RDS, 861.42/151, ff. 2–3. 54 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 7, ll. 4–11. 55 The US Military Attaché’s report, however, commented that ‘Swedish residents of Moscow are far from satisfied at the unheroic representations of the armies of Charles XII which appear in the film’ (MID, 2657-D-1052, f. 2). Fear of Swedish sensitivity about Peter the Great was to lead Yaroslavskii to turn down an article about the battle of Poltava submitted to Istoricheskii zhurnal in 1943: ‘The main reason [for rejecting it] is the international situation,’ he wrote. ‘The enemy is frightening [neutral] Sweden with the spectre of Bolshevism. At this time we do not need to bring out an article that re-opens the Swedes’ wounds’ (RGASPI, f. 89, op. 7, d. 40, l. 42). 56 Pravda, 10.6.39, p. 6. 57 Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii, pp. 302, 492–4, 517. 58 Interesting, if necessarily somewhat fragmentary evidence of the reception of the campaign is provided in Brandenberger, ‘Soviet Social Mentalité’. 59 Documents, Series D, vol. 6, no. 729, p. 1008. The 230th anniversary of Poltava had been celebrated on 8 July 1939: see Pravda, 2.7.39, p. 4; 8.7.39, p. 2. 60 Brandenberger and Petrone, eds, ‘“Vse cherty rasovogo natsionalizma . . .”’. 61 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 183. 62 Pravda, 24.9.39, p. 4. 63 Pravda, 30.9.39, p. 6. See also 2.10.39, p. 6. 64 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 16, ll. 36–9; d. 26, ll. 26–31. 65 Pravda, 27.10.39, p. 6. 66 Pravda, 26.9.40, p. 1; 27.9.40, p. 2. The stenograms of the sessions of 25–26 September 1940 are in Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1/399a (1–40g.), d. 23–6. The session of the Academic Council of the Institute of History on 8 October 1940 discussed the incorporation into its plan of topical subjects such as the history of Poland, the history of the Slav peoples, and that of the ‘peoples newly united with us’: Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 43, ll. 22–26ob. 67 Dallin, ‘The Baltic States’, p. 108. 68 Izvestiya, 19.3.41, p. 4. 69 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 16, l. 23. 70 For a detailed study of the impact of the Soviet–German war on the historical profession, see Burdei, Istorik i voina. 71 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 28, ll. 10–11. 72 Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, pp. 881–2. 73 Pravda, 23.6.41, p. 4. 74 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 173; Cherkasov, Zapiski, p. 130. 75 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 45, l. 42; d. 52, ll. 12–22. 76 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 52, l. 12.

204 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92 93 94 95 96

97 98

99 100

101

Notes to pp. 40–3 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 52, l. 15. Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 53, l. 2. RGASPI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 15, ll. 2–3 (from Gorodetskii and Rubinshtein). Stalin, Sochineniya, vol. 2[15], p. 35. In a report to the Moscow Soviet on the previous day, Stalin had listed a whole pleiad of famous Russians – Plekhanov and Lenin, Belinskii and Chernyshevskii, Pushkin and Tolstoi, Glinka and Tchaikovsky, Gor’kii and Chekhov, Sechenov and Pavlov, Repin and Surikov, Suvorov and Kutuzov – in whom, he said, the nation so harshly denigrated by the Nazis could take pride: ibid., p. 24. Pravda, 30.7.42, p. 1. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 297, l. 11. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 212, ll. 175–6. Tikhonov, ‘Otechestvennaya voina’, p. 34. See also RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 278, ll. 11–12. Pravda, 15.11.36, p. 3. This point was made in the article about Nevskii published in Pravda, 27.8.37, p. 4. Pavlenko, ‘Rus’’. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 139. Ibid., p. 148. See also Cherkasov, Zapiski, p. 128; Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, p. 148. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 173. Cherkasov, Zapiski, pp. 126–7. For the drawing of a similar parallel between the Russians’ defeat of German aggression in the thirteenth century and that of the Japanese in the twentieth, see Eizenshtein, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, t. 1, p. 164. Pravda, 21.11.39, p. 4. Pravda, 12.8.40, p. 4; 9.9.40, p. 1. Pravda, 2.5.42, p. 4. Literatura i iskusstvo, 15.4.42, p. 1. Simonov, Glazami, p. 185. On Yan’s novel Chingiz-khan, which won a first-class Stalin prize at the same time, Simonov comments that ‘it warned about what happens to peoples who are unable to resist invasion and are subdued by the victors’ (ibid.). On these novels, see Petrov, Sovetskii istoricheskii roman, pp. 81–4, 86–7. For example, Yakovlev, ‘Dmitrii Donskoi’; Bakhrushin, Dmitrii Donskoi. RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 956, l. 41. Later, the Japanese theme was dealt with more directly in works about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, such as A. N. Stepanov’s novel Port Arthur of 1941: see Petrov, Sovetskii istoricheskii roman, pp. 301–6. Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, p. 679. Mar’yamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor, p. 86. Stalin’s remarks somewhat exaggerated the Tatar threat in Ivan’s reign, as V. B. Kobrin pointed out: ‘Stalin and the Tsar’. Vishnevskii, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, p. 73.

Notes to pp. 46–50

Chapter 2

205

Three Case Studies in Historical Analogy

1 Stalin, Sochineniya, t. 8, pp. 120–1. 2 Stalin, Sochineniya, t. 11, pp. 248–9. (Speech to enlarged Central Committee plenum, November 1928.) 3 Ibid., p. 249. 4 Stalin, Sochineniya, t. 13, p. 104. The interview was first published in the Party journal Bol’shevik in April 1932. Some previously unpublished excerpts appeared in 1998: Leushin (ed.), ‘“Schitayu nizhe svoego dostoinstva”’. Ludwig was keen to pursue the question of historical analogies, referring later in the interview to ‘thousands of people who regard you as part cruel tsar, part noble bandit’, and asking Stalin about ‘bandit’ elements in his own biography and about his attitude to Stepan Razin: Stalin, Sochineniya, t. 13, p. 112; Leushin (ed.), ‘“Schitayu nizhe svoego dostoinstva”’, p. 217. 5 Stalin, Sochineniya, t. 13, p. 104. 6 Ibid., p. 105. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., pp. 105–6. 9 Tucker, Stalin in Power, p. 114. 10 Pravda, 16.5.34, p. 1. In an address on history teaching to the Politbyuro in March 1934, Stalin criticized the textbooks for failing to give adequate recognition to Peter as an individual: see Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, p. 874. 11 Istorik-Marksist, kn. 1(53) 1936, pp. 5–6. 12 Izvestiya, 27.1.36, p. 4. See also the criticisms of the draft textbooks for their failure to recognize the progressive role of Peter’s reforms: Pravda, 1.2.36, pp. 2–3; Istorik-Marksist, kn. 1(53), 1936, p. 12. 13 Istorik-Marksist, kn. 3(61), 1937, p. 141. See also Konstantinov, ‘Dorevolyutsionnaya istoriya’, p. 237. 14 Protiv istoricheskoi, p. 54. 15 Ibid., pp. 54–5. For the passage cited, see Pokrovskii, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, kn. 3, pp. 112–13. 16 Protiv istoricheskoi, p. 55. 17 Protiv antimarksistskoi, pp. 172–5. 18 Ibid., pp. 155–60, 174. 19 Ibid., pp. 165–7, 175. 20 MID, 2657-D-1052, f. 2. 21 Kratkii kurs, p. 66. 22 Istoriya SSSR, t. 1, p. 643. 23 Ibid., pp. 643, 644. 24 Pravda, 12.2.40, p. 4. Pankratova was later (1944) to criticize Soviet historians such as B. I. Syromyatnikov for depicting Peter as a ‘people’s tsar’: RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 971, l. 4. 25 Istoriya SSSR [ch. 2], pp. 35–6. 26 Riasanovsky, The Image, pp. 255–82. 27 Ibid., pp. 256–7. 28 Ibid., p. 256. 29 Tucker, Stalin in Power, p. 114.

206

Notes to pp. 50–4

30 For a biography of A. N. Tolstoi, see Krestinskii, A. N. Tolstoi; a genealogical table is included in Bystrova, ‘Rod Tolstykh’, p. 161. 31 Krestinskii, A. N. Tolstoi, pp. 254–7. 32 Ibid., p. 274. 33 On Tolstoi’s work on the Petrine theme, see Krestinskii, A. N. Tolstoi, passim; Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, pp. 97–126; Riasanovsky, The Image, pp. 250, 280–2; Tucker, Stalin in Power, pp. 114–18. 34 Riasanovsky, The Image, pp. 250, 280–2. 35 Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, pp. 104–5; Tucker, Stalin in Power, p. 116. 36 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 1, p. 87. Stalin also, according to Tolstoi, personally intervened to defend his novel about Peter from attacks by RAPPists, Trotskyists and Pokrovskyists; and took an interest in the making of the film: ‘Iosif Vissarionovich attentively familiarised himself with our plans, approved them, and gave directions on which we based our work’ (Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 13, pp. 534–5). The RAPPists (members of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) were zealots of the cultural revolution, who would have shared Pokrovskii’s negative Marxist assessment of Peter. 37 Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, pp. 103–5. 38 Protiv fal’sifikatsii, pp. 22–3. For similar criticisms of the play by Vishnevskii (in 1936), see Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, p. 148. 39 Annenkov, Dnevnik, t. 2, p. 149. 40 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, p. 784. On the relevance and topicality of the Petrine era for the First Five-year Plan period, see Aleksandrova, ‘Sovetskaya sovremennost’’, pp. 279–81. Aleksandrova comments (p. 281) that Tolstoi’s novel, Peter the First, ‘became bedside reading for the promotees [vydvizhentsy] of the Five-Year Plan’: it assured them that they had predecessors, and that ‘just as they were progressive for their time, so are you for our epoch’. 41 MID, 2657-D-1052, f. 2. See also the review of the film in Pravda, 26.6.37, p. 6, which stresses both Peter’s westernization and his commitment to military defence. The attaché’s reference to the ‘unprecedented popularity’ of the film is borne out by the audience figure of 23 million: Pravda, 12.1.39, p. 4. 42 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, p. 785 (an undated archival reference). 43 The reviews of the film in Pravda commented approvingly on Peter’s statesmanship in allowing his son to be executed: Pravda, 31.12.38, p. 6; 12.1.39, p. 6. Nicholas Riasanovsky notes that in the third version of the play Aleksei was transformed from the ‘poignant tragic protagonist’ of earlier versions into ‘a conspiratorial collaborator of foreign enemies who deserved death’: Riasanovsky, The Image, p. 282. On the changed depiction of Aleksei, see also Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, pp. 113–14. 44 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 375. 45 Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, p. 113. Aleksei’s role as the agent of a conspiracy backed by Russia’s foreign enemies was also stressed in the higher education textbook: see Istoriya SSSR, t. 1, pp. 644–5. 46 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, pp. 770–1. For the text of this version of the play, Petr Pervyi, see ibid., pp. 473–537.

Notes to pp. 55–9

207

47 Istorik-Marksist, kn. 3(61), 1937, p. 140. 48 Ibid., p. 141. The quotation is from Marx’s Khronologicheskie vypiski, which had been published in Bol’shevik, 1936, No. 24. 49 RDS, 861.42/151, ff. 2–3 (10 Nov. 1937). 50 Pravda, 25.8.37, p. 2. Emphasis in the original. 51 Pravda, 27.8.37, p. 4. 52 Kozachenko, Ledovoe poboishche, pp. 52–3. 53 Ibid., pp. 54–5. 54 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 131–4. 55 There is an enormous literature on Eisenstein and his work. For a short biographical essay in English, see Taylor (ed.), The Eisenstein Reader, pp. 1–28; Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, is an authoritative two-volume study in Russian. 56 On the Bezhin Meadow affair and the Politbyuro decision to allow Eisenstein to redeem himself, see Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, pp. 241–53. 57 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 134–6. See also Eizenshtein, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, t. 1, pp. 160–4, 172–5. 58 Romm, Besedy o kino, p. 89. Eisenstein’s attraction to the Nevskii theme because of – rather than in spite of – the lack of source materials is confirmed by Cherkasov’s wife: Cherkasova, ‘Cherkasov i Eizenshtein’, p. 323. On the image of Nevskii, see also Cherkasov, Zapiski, pp. 124–6. 59 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 134–7. 60 Ibid., pp. 144–5. 61 Ibid., p. 163. 62 Tikhomirov, ‘Izdevka nad istoriei’. 63 Ibid., pp. 93–4. 64 Ibid., p. 94. 65 Ibid., p. 96. 66 See the quotation from Stalin which marked the ending of Kozachenko’s pamphlet: Ledovoe poboishche, p. [56]. An explicit parallel was to be drawn by Eisenstein in an article in Izvestiya in July 1938 which ‘trailed’ his film: Taylor (ed.), The Eisenstein Reader, p. 144. 67 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 164. 68 Ibid., p. 138. 69 The theme of treason was also stressed in Eisenstein’s article on Nevskii in Izvestiya in July 1938; Richard Taylor notes that in the film Tverdila ‘represents the figure of the traitor, saboteur or wrecker, who featured so largely in the propaganda campaigns that accompanied the show trials and the purges of the 1930s’: Taylor (ed.), The Eisenstein Reader, pp. 141, 202 (n. 6). 70 Pavlenko, ‘Rus’’, pp. 113, 117. 71 Tikhomirov, ‘Izdevka nad istoriei’, pp. 94–5. 72 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 146. 73 Tikhomirov, ‘Izdevka nad istoriei’, p. 94. 74 Taylor (ed.), The Eisenstein Reader, p. 142. 75 Aleksandrova, Literatura i zhizn’, p. 430; Aleksandrova, ‘Sovetskaya sovremennost’’, pp. 283–4. Emphasis in the originals. (Her reference to Nevskii is to the 1937 poem, ‘Ledovoe poboishche’, by Simonov.)

208

Notes to pp. 59–63

76 At the historians’ conference of 1944, Kh. G. Adzhemyan was to identify Alexander Nevskii along with Dmitrii Donskoi, Ivan III, Ivan IV and Peter I as rulers who enjoyed the support of the people and thereby provided a precedent for the union of the leader and people during the war: ‘Stenogramma soveshchaniya’, no. 9, pp. 53–4. 77 Cherkasov, Zapiski, p. 126. 78 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 159. 79 Shklovskii, Eizenshtein, p. 249. 80 Pravda, 29.11.38, p. 6. 81 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 171–2. 82 Pravda, 4.12.38, p. 4. 83 Pravda, 1.2.36, pp. 2–3. A similar point about the Time of Troubles was made by P. Drozdov in Istorik-Marksist, kn. 1(53), 1936, p. 12. 84 There was also the more recent parallel of the Polish–Soviet War of 1920. 85 Artizov, ‘V ugodu vzglyadam vozhdya’, p. 128. 86 Cf. Aleksandrova, ‘Sovetskaya sovremennost’’, p. 285: ‘At critical moments of history apprehensions have always arisen in ruling circles: how would the populace whom they oppressed behave, would it not take advantage of the war in order to settle old scores with them? These apprehensions, it seems were not alien to the elites of Soviet society . . .’ 87 Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii, p. 294. Pankratova criticized Pokrovskii for being ‘anti-historical’ in describing the role of Minin and Pozharskii as self-interested, ‘like that of the bourgeoisie of all periods’: ibid., p. 67. 88 Ibid., pp. 233–4. 89 Platonov, Ocherki. 90 Lyubomirov, Ocherk, pp. 3–4. The work had first appeared in journal form in 1913–14, and as a separate edition in 1917. 91 For example, Kozachenko, Razgrom pol’skoi interventsii; Smirnov, Minin i Pozharskii; Danilevskii, Dimitrii Pozharskii; Bakhrushin, Minin i Pozharskii. On wartime treatments of the Minin and Pozharskii theme, in relation to the campaign for the creation of ‘national militias’, see Burdei, Istorik i voina, pp. 105–15. 92 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 120. Bulgakov’s correspondence with Asaf’ev about their collaboration on the opera is published in Bulgakov, Pis’ma, pp. 392–418. 93 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, pp. 121, 125, 138, 144, 171, 178, 372–3. 94 Two films about Glinka were made in the postwar period: Glinka (1946/7) and Composer Glinka (1952) – a fact which, in Konstantin Simonov’s opinion, was ‘not unconnected with the restoration of Ivan Susanin to the stage’: Glazami, p. 190. 95 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1, pp. 379–404. 96 Pravda, 7.2.39, p. 6; 16.2.39, p. 6. 97 Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1, p. 392. 98 Additional anti-Polish sentiment was introduced into the new version of the opera: Bujic, ‘Anti-Polish Propaganda’. 99 Pravda, 7.2.39, p. 6. 100 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 157.

Notes to pp. 63–5

209

101 A special performance of Ivan Susanin was, however, put on for workers in industrial cooperatives to mark the 22nd anniversary of the revolution: Pravda, 20.10.39, p. 6. 102 Pravda, 7.2.39, p. 6; 16.2.39, p. 6. 103 Pravda, 22.2.39, p. 4; Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 242. 104 Pravda, 22.2.39, p. 4. 105 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, pp. 245, 246–7. Stalin was evidently a great admirer of Minin and Pozharskii. In his conversation with Eisenstein and Cherkasov in February 1947, he claimed that he had personally insisted that the statue of the two patriotic heroes (erected in the reign of Alexander I) be retained after the remodelling of Red Square in the 1930s: Mar’yamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor, p. 86. 106 The first version had displayed three ‘panneaux’, depicting the Battle on the Ice, the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow and the Kremlin with the monument to Minin and Pozharskii on Red Square: Pravda, 7.2.39, p. 6. 107 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 250. 108 Pravda, 3.4.39, p. 4; 4.4.39, p. 4. 109 Pravda, 28.1.40, p. 4; 17.5.40, p. 6; 14.8.40, p. 6; 15.4.41, p. 6; 19.5.42, p. 4. 110 Pravda, 16.3.41, pp. 1–2. 111 Ibid. The other historical films to be similarly rewarded were the twopart Peter I of 1937–9; Suvorov (1940) and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevskii (1938). 112 Pravda, 23.10.39, p. 4. The ‘parallel’, of course, was hardly an exact one, since it was the Russians who were the invaders in 1939. 113 Ibid. The screenplay of the film was published separately: Shklovskii, Minin i Pozharskii. 114 For detailed biographical information on Kostylev, see Darkov, V. I. Kostylev; see also his obituary in Pravda, 31.8.50, p. 4; and the entries in the Bol’shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 2nd edn (1953) and 3rd edn (1973). There is also biographical information in his nomination for the Order of the Red Banner of Labour in 1944: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 234, l. 26; see also his own literary autobiography in ibid., ll. 50–3. 115 Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, pp. 4–23. 116 Ibid., p. 5. 117 Ibid., pp. 23–4: Nizhnii Novgorod was renamed Gor’kii after the writer’s death in 1937, and the newspaper became Gor’kovskaya kommuna. 118 See Kostylev’s obituary tribute to Zhdanov: Literaturnaya gazeta, 4.9.48, p. 3. 119 Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, pp. 28–31. This novel was subsequently revised and republished, under the title A Happy Encounter (Schastlivaya vstrecha) in Gor’kii in 1943 and in Moscow in 1947: ibid., p. 32. 120 Ibid., pp. 45–6. 121 Ibid., p. 55. 122 Ibid., pp. 46, 62. 123 Ibid., p. 62. 124 In addition to the works already mentioned, Kostylev had published a

210

125 126 127

128 129 130 131 132 133

134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

142 143 144

Notes to pp. 65–74 short story in 1937, entitled The Master’s Little Joke (Barskaya zateya), set in the reign of Paul I, and also based on local sources: ibid., p. 59. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., pp. 65–6. Abridged versions were also published by the military publishers Voennoe izdatel’stvo and by the children’s publisher Detizdat: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 234, l. 51. Pravda, 18.2.40, p. 6; Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, p. 78. Izvestiya, 5.2.41, p. 4. Ibid. For comment on this feature of the novel, see also Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, p. 74; cf. Kostylev, Kuz’ma Minin, pp. 231–5. Kostylev, Kuz’ma Minin, p. 188, etc. Kostylev was to use the same device in his later Ivan Groznyi trilogy, when Andrei the cannon-maker tries to learn words in the languages of the multi-ethnic Muscovite army in the Livonian War: see Moskva v pokhode, p. 210. Kostylev, Kuz’ma Minin, pp. 231, 235. Ibid., pp. 77–8. Ibid., p. 163. Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, p. 75. Kostylev, Kuz’ma Minin, p. 268. This was quoted approvingly in the Izvestiya review of the novel. Kostylev, Kuz’ma Minin, pp. 236–7. Ibid., pp. 195–6. Ibid., pp. 290–2. An analogy is probably intended here with French and British intervention on the White Sea during the Russian Civil War. See Kostylev’s letter of 16.5.41 to the Gor’kii Party secretary: ‘“Eta kniga tozhe dlya fronta!”’, pp. 205, 208. Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, pp. 78–9. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 234, l. 52.

Chapter 3

The First Steps, 1934–39

1 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, pp. 19–21; Curtis, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, pp. 72–3, 103–14; Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, pp. 81–94. 2 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 23. 3 Ibid., pp. 23–4. The Days of the Turbins was based on Bulgakov’s novel, The White Guard. 4 Curtis, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, pp. 147–8, 158–9. See also Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 337. 5 Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, pp. 130–1; Curtis, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, pp. 72, 230; Bulgakova, Dnevnik, pp. 116–18, 367–8; Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, pp. 182–96. 6 Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, p. 191. 7 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, pp. 56, 71–2, 345; Curtis, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, p. 150.

Notes to pp. 74 –8

211

8 In a letter to P. A. Popov, dated 28.4.34: Bulgakov, Pis’ma, p. 287. 9 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, pp. 104–5. Excerpts from some relevant entries in Bulgakova’s diary can be found in English translation in Curtis, Manuscripts Don’t Burn. 10 Bulgakov, Ivan Vasil’evich, pp. 9–10. 11 Ibid., pp. 54, 62–3. 12 Ibid., pp. 34–47. 13 Compare the ‘time-link’ with first-century Jerusalem in Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita, which is created both by Woland’s narrative reminiscence at Patriarch’s Ponds and by the Master’s novel about Pontius Pilate. 14 Bulgakov, Ivan Vasil’evich, p. 24. 15 Ibid., pp. 30, 35, 37, 40. Ya. S. Lur’e notes that in this respect Bulgakov’s Groznyi resembles the tsar’s image in folksongs: Lur’e, ‘Ivan Groznyi’, p. 321. 16 Bulgakov, Ivan Vasil’evich, p. 60. See also pp. 29, 30, 56. 17 Ibid., pp. 53–4. 18 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 106. 19 Ibid., p. 107. 20 Eidel’man, ‘Revolyutsiya sverkhu’, p. 22. 21 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, pp. 108–9. 22 Pravda, 9.3.36, p. 3. The reasons given in the Pravda article for the banning of the play were not the real ones: cf. Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, pp. 130–1; Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, pp. 187–91. 23 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 116. See also Curtis, Manuscripts Don’t Burn, p. 233. 24 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 118. 25 Ibid., p. 120. 26 Ibid., p. 120. The text of the play was first published in 1964 in Munich, from a manuscript smuggled out of the Soviet Union (Bulgakov, Ivan Vasil’evich, p. 6). It was first published in the USSR in 1965 (Bulgakov, Dramy i komedii, pp. 413–74), and first performed there in 1966. The play served as the basis for the 1971 Soviet film, Ivan Vasil’evich Changes his Profession. 27 In June 1940 the critic Yu. Yuzovskii, recommending its inclusion in a proposed posthumous publication of Bulgakov’s plays, described it as a ‘cheerful, witty joke’: Kirilenko, ‘Teatral’noe nasledie’, pp. 135, 146. 28 Nikitin, ‘O pol’ze’, p. 3. 29 Lur’e, ‘Ivan Groznyi’, p. 320. 30 Deutscher adds that ‘The grumblings and epithets were immediately reported to Stalin, who had his ears everywhere’: Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 349–50. 31 Davies, ‘Carr’s Changing Views’, pp. 99–100. 32 Davies, Popular Opinion, p. 135. Before the revolution, the term oprichnik had been part of the socialists’ vocabulary of abuse directed against the contemporary tsarist government. See, for example, the pamphlet about Minister of the Interior D. S. Sipyagin, published in 1902 by the St Petersburg ‘Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class’: Tsarskii oprichnik. 33 For a thorough review of Stalinist historiography on Ivan, see Khoroshkevich, ‘Oprichnina’. 34 Istorik-Marksist, kn. 1(53), 1936, p. 5.

212

Notes to pp. 78–82

35 Ibid., p. 12; see also Pravda, 1.2.36, pp. 3–4. 36 Istorik-Marksist, kn. 3(61), 1937, pp. 140–1. 37 Robert Tucker describes Shestakov’s Ivan Groznyi as a ‘hero of Russian history’: Tucker, Stalin in Power, pp. 281, 481. Brandenberger and Dubrovsky see the Shestakov textbook as marking the beginning of Ivan’s ‘rehabilitation’, although they concede that it ‘proceeded somewhat more cautiously’ than that of other state-builders such as Peter (‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, p. 881). 38 The US Military Attaché’s report of 15.9.37 singled out only Peter as an example of the tsars whose ‘constructive qualities’ were recognized in the new textbooks (MID, 2657-D-1052, f. 2). The émigré liberal historian P. N. Milyukov, while noting the Shestakov textbook’s praise of Peter, commented that ‘. . . the textbook cannot even bring itself to praise the Muscovite princes for their “gathering” of Russia. The “tsar-autocrat” Ivan IV, “who abolished boyar privileges” is also mentioned very coolly.’ (Milyukov, ‘Velichie i padenie Pokrovskogo’, p. 125.) 39 Pravda, 25.8.37, p. 2. Ivan’s reign is covered in a chapter entitled ‘The Expansion of the Russian State’: Kratkii kurs, pp. 37–42. See also the English edition: Shestakov (ed.), A Short History, pp. 46–52. 40 Kratkii kurs, pp. 40–1. 41 Istoriya SSSR, t. 1, p. 390. 42 Ibid., pp. 389–90. 43 Ibid., p. 390. This element of the trope goes back to Gor’kii’s statement, at the First Congress of Writers in 1934, that folklore ‘has its own opinion of the activity of Louis XI and Ivan the Terrible, and that opinion differs sharply from the evaluations of history written by specialists who are not very interested in the question of what precisely the struggle of monarchs against feudal lords meant for the lives of the toiling people’. (Gor’kii, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 27, p. 312.) 44 Istoriya SSSR, t. 1, pp. 389–90. These and other derogatory phrases about Ivan were later to be quoted by critics of the textbook. 45 Ibid., p. 390. 46 Pravda, 12.2.40, p. 4. 47 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 25, l. 119. 48 Istoriya SSSR, [ch. 1], pp. 127–48. 49 Ibid., p. 140. This passage was later to be criticized for its negative depiction of Ivan. 50 Bol’shevik, 1941, no. 2, p. 88. The Pravda review of the textbook (19.11.40, p. 4) did not comment on its treatment of Ivan IV. 51 Verkhoven’, Rasshirenie, pp. 34, 36–40, passim. 52 Ibid., p. 35. Platonov’s Ocherki had been republished in 1937. 53 Verkhoven’, Rasshirenie, p. 37. 54 Ibid., pp. 39–40. 55 Verkhoven’, Rossiya, pp. 41, 47; cf. Kratkii kurs, pp. 40, 41. 56 Verkhoven’, Rossiya, p. 48. 57 Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1a–40g., d. 9, l. 18. 58 Pravda, 17.10.39, p. 4. 59 Got’e, ‘Plokhaya kniga’. For the curious episode in which Got’e was obliged to apologize for having published this hostile review when he

Notes to pp. 83–4

60

61 62

63 64

65

66 67

68 69

213

had earlier provided the publisher with a favourable report on the work, see Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1a–40g., d. 6, ll. 24, 28; d. 9, ll. 15–18. Pravda, 31.3.39, p. 6. The Vasnetsov portrait was reproduced in the Shestakov textbook (Kratkii kurs, p. 37) to replace Repin’s painting of Ivan’s murder of his son, which Stalin had vetoed: see Platt and Brandenberger, ‘Terribly Romantic’, p. 637. XVIII s”ezd, p. 563. Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii, pp. 147–59. Refutation of Pokrovskii’s views on Ivan occupied only these 12 pages of the 517-page volume, in a chapter by K. Bazilevich on ‘“Merchant Capitalism” and the Genesis of the Muscovite Autocracy’ (pp. 140–78). Tucker, Stalin in Power, p. 279. Ibid., pp. 276–82, 482–6. Archival evidence of Stalin’s editorial activity on the Shestakov textbook reveals only that he vetoed the use of Repin’s picture of Ivan and his murdered son as an illustration; Zhdanov played a more active role in revising the text: Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”’, p. 881; Platt and Brandenberger, ‘Terribly Romantic’, pp. 637–8; cf. Konstantinov, ‘Dorevolyutsionnaya istoriya’, p. 231. Tucker asserts that there was a copy of Vipper’s book in Stalin’s library: Stalin in Power, pp. 52, 276. Tucker’s source for this statement is Volkogonov’s Triumph and Tragedy, which he cites in the abridged version published in the journal Oktyabr’ in 1988. This version states that Stalin had read Vipper’s Essays on the Roman Empire and Ivan the Terrible: Dmitrii Volkogonov, ‘Triumf i tragediya’, no. 12, p. 65. The fuller book version of 1989, however, states that Stalin had read Vipper’s Essays on the Roman Empire and Aleksei Tolstoi’s Ivan the Terrible: Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediya, kn. 1, ch. 2, p. 121 (my emphasis – M. P.). The catalogue of Stalin’s library confirms this latter version, listing only three works by Vipper – Istoriya Gretsii v klassicheskuyu epokhu (Moscow, 1916), Drevnyaya Evropa i Vostok (Moscow, 1923) and Ocherki rimskoi imperii (Moscow, 1908) – and only two works entitled Ivan Groznyi – the 1942 and 1944 editions of A. N. Tolstoi’s play: RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 36–8 and d. 350–51. If Stalin had a model, it was more likely to have been Hitler’s purge of Röhm and the SA in the summer of 1934: cf. Mikoyan, Tak bylo, pp. 534–5. Klyuchevskii, Kurs, ch. 2, p. 430 (note to p. 196). The commentary was compiled by Yu. V. Got’e. Cf. Shlikhting, Novoe izvestie. Similar use of Schlikhting’s evidence was later to be made by Vipper. Tucker, Stalin in Power, p. 408. This explanation for the rehabilitation of Ivan is suggested by Uhlenbruch (‘The Annexation of History’, p. 270): He [i.e. Stalin – M. P.] was forced to justify his actions historically, because historical parallels could be used against him by his opponents. The outstanding achievement of Stalin’s cultural politics was due to the fact that he was later able to turn criticism into affirmation, and reverse criticism founded in historical parallels to that of his own self-stylization.

214

Notes to pp. 85–9

Chapter 4

Wartime and Postwar Historiography, 1940–53

1 There is, however, some evidence of pressure on the historians to write about Groznyi. See B. D. Grekov’s letter to I. I. Smirnov of 18 May 1941: Gorskaya, Boris Dmitrievich Grekov, p. 124. 2 Vishnevskii, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, p. 66. The conversation apparently took place in January 1941. 3 Krestinskii, A. N. Tolstoi, p. 221. 4 Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, pp. 87–8. 5 Bulgakova, Dnevnik, p. 252. 6 Samosud, Stat’i, p. 179 (letter of Shostakovich to Samosud, dated 13 April 1941). See also Khentova, Shostakovich, t. 1, p. 435. 7 Pravda, 22.5.41, p. 4. 8 Khrennikov, Tak eto bylo, p. 110. 9 See, for example, Samosud, Stat’i, p. 196, n. 115. 10 Khrennikov, Tak eto bylo, p. 110. 11 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 123, ll. 161–9 (dated 3.12.42); d. 297, ll. 130–40 (dated 31.12.44). The first and last folios of the latter version were published in 1991: see ‘Istoriya – oruzhie bor’by’. Here the author was named as A. Shcherbakov, and the date was given as 28 April 1942. On the Central Committee intervention in the ‘rehabilitation’ of Ivan, see Platt and Brandenberger, ‘Terribly Romantic’, pp. 638–9. 12 For a similar case, in which mention of a ‘Central Committee instruction’ referred to an oral directive from Stalin to Zhdanov, see Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, pp. 106–10. 13 Khrennikov, Tak eto bylo, p. 110. 14 Mikoyan, Tak bylo, p. 534. Mikoyan presents this as part of Stalin’s retrospective justification for the terror of 1937–8. 15 Sinyavskii, ‘Stalin – geroi i khudozhnik’, p. 119. Stalin did not approve the text of Tolstoi’s plays until 1944. The relevant section of A. N. Tolstoi’s archive in the Institute of World Literature in Moscow was closed to scholars while I was researching this book. 16 Cherkasov, Zapiski, p. 380. See also Eisenstein’s version of this conversation: Mar’yamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor, pp. 85–6. 17 Kobrin, ‘Stalin and the Tsar’; cf. Kobrin, Ivan Groznyi, p. 9 (in which he correctly names the character as Prince I. P. Shuiskii: cf. Tolstoi, P’esy, p. 160). Tsar Fedor Ioannovich had been revived at MKhAT in the 1935/6 season (ibid., p. 553). 18 Tolstoi, P’esy, p. 235. 19 Ibid., p. 235. 20 RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 350. For speculation about the significance of this word, see Radzinsky, Stalin, pp. 454–5; see also Robert Harris’s novel, Archangel, pp. 155–6. 21 Pasternak, Perepiska, p. 187. 22 Dallin, ‘The Baltic States’, p. 108. 23 Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War, pp. 15–16. 24 Izvestiya, 19.3.41, p. 4. Kostylev’s article was subsequently to be identified as marking the beginning of a radical new assessment of Ivan Groznyi in Soviet historiography: Lur’e, ‘Perepiska Ivana Groznogo’,

Notes to pp. 89–92

25

26 27

28

29

30

31

32 33

34

35

36 37

215

pp. 216–17. Uhlenbruch (‘The Annexation of History’, pp. 268–70) was the first scholar to suggest that a key reason for the commissioning of Kostylev’s article was the need to provide a historical legitimation of the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states, which was also a major theme of his novel about Ivan. Tolstoi’s announcement was made at a gathering held at the Moscow Writers’ Club to mark the awards of the Stalin prizes: Pravda, 20.3.41, p. 1. Pravda, 16.3.41, p. 2. Eisenstein published an article on his forthcoming film about Groznyi in Izvestiya on 30.4.41. Kostylev had been in correspondence with Tolstoi and informed him of his progress on his novel: Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, pp. 79, 88. Ya. S. Lur’e’s assertion that Kostylev’s article was ‘evidently inspired by Stalin’ is valid in so far as the article was consistent with the Central Committee instructions of the winter of 1940/41: Lur’e, ‘Ivan Groznyi’, p. 321. Like the Central Committee instructions, Kostylev’s article blamed the creation of a negative image of Ivan exclusively on pre-revolutionary historians and writers. Their failure to mention Pokrovskii may have been a tacit recognition that he had regarded the oprichnina as a ‘progressive’ phenomenon. Emphasis in the original. This quotation is from an instalment of Marx’s Khronologicheskie vypiski on Russian history, first published in the journal Proletarskaya revolyutsiya in 1940, ahead of their scheduled publication in Volume 8 of the Arkhiv Marksa i Engel’sa (which in fact was delayed by the war and appeared only in 1948). Some of these notes, including the passage about the Livonian War, were published in Pravda, 9.1.41, p. 4. The timing was presumably not accidental. For earlier publications on the Livonian War see, for example: Novikov, ‘Bor’ba Rossii’; Verkhoven’, ‘Livonskaya voina’; Tel’pukhovskii, ‘Bor’ba russkogo naroda’. Khazin, ‘Ivan Groznyi’. Got’e, ‘Baltiiskii vopros’, p. 95. The issue of the journal in which the article appeared was signed for the press on 14 June 1941, exactly a week before the German invasion. Bakhrushin, ‘Razgrom nemetskogo ordena’; Bakhrushin, Razgrom livonskogo ordena; Shchekotov, ‘Vzyatie Kokengauzena’ [on the painting by P. P. Sokolov-Skal’]. Sokolov-Skal’ also produced a painting entitled ‘Ivan Groznyi in Livonia’: Literatura i iskusstvo, 14.8.43, p. 2. See also the verse drama by Il’ya Sel’vinskii, ‘Livonskaya voina’. The historian’s personal archive includes a copy of his request, dated 22 September 1923, for a three-month research visit to Riga to use archival materials relating to sixteenth-century Muscovite foreign policy, especially the Livonian War: Arkhiv RAN, f. 1562, op.1, d. 82. For a discussion of the reasons for Vipper’s decision to return to Moscow, see Volodikhin, ‘Ochen’ staryi akademik’, pp. 17–18. Volodikhin, ‘Ochen’ staryi akademik’, p. 18; cf. Volodikhin, ‘Kritika teorii progressa’, pp. 154, 162 n.3.

216 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55

Notes to pp. 92–4 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 25, ll. 95–6, 109. Nechkina, ‘Ivan IV’, col. 329. ‘Oprichina’. Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, p. 298. For a report on these seminars, see Predtechenskii, ‘V Institute istorii’. The proposed publication of the papers in a collection, together with articles by other authors (Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1a–42g., d. 3, l. 16) does not seem to have come about. On 25 September 1942 I. I. Polosin delivered a paper on ‘Debates about the oprichnina in the Polish Sejms of the Sixteenth Century’ to the History of State and Law Division of the Institute of Law of the Academy in Tashkent: the paper was subsequently published in Voprosy istorii in 1945 (Polosin, ‘Spory ob “oprichnine”’), and in his Sotsial’no-politicheskaya istoriya, pp. 156–81. Bakhrushin, Ivan Groznyi. Smirnov, Ivan Groznyi. It had a print-run of 15 000 copies. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1942, p. 3. The third edition, published in Moscow in 1944 (with a print-run of 5000 copies), is described in Vipper’s Preface as ‘a slightly revised reproduction of the second edition’: Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, p. [3]. A comparison shows a few additions in the 1944 edition: 1944 edn, p. 17, cf. 1942 edn, p. 20 (paragraph on the meaning of the epithet groznyi); 1944 edn, p. 45, cf. 1942 edn, p. 53 (sentences on the aims of the Livonian War); 1944 edn, p. 106, cf. 1942 edn, p. 126 (sentences on Moscow’s superiority to Western Europe). Some critical comments about Ivan’s character were removed from the 1944 edition: e.g. 1944 edn, p. 55, cf. 1942 edn, p. 65; 1944 edn, p. 58, cf. 1942 edn, pp. 68, 69; 1944 edn, p. 79, cf. 1942 edn, p. 95; 1944 edn, p. 146, cf. 1942 edn, p. 173. Future references are to the 1944 edition, on which the English translation of 1947 (Wipper, Ivan Grozny) is based. Translations below are my own. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, p. 7. Ibid., pp. 65, 106, 154. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98], p. 201. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, pp. 141–2. The 1922 edition had read: ‘ . . . the skill of the dynasty, which was able to stand above classes and hold them in strict subordination and order . . .’: Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98], p. 201. For example, Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, pp. 18–20. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98], pp. 112–13, cf. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, pp. 16–17. Tikhomirov, Pervyi pechatnik; Ivan Fedorov pervopechatnik. See also Bas, Ivan Fedorov, and Pervopechatnik Ivan Fedorov. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi [1922/98], pp. 151, 168. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, ch. 5. Vipper bases his claims largely on a somewhat tendentious reading of the testimony of two German contemporaries, Heinrich Staden and Albert Schlichting, who are not generally regarded as reliable witnesses. Staden’s account had been published in Russian in 1925 (Shtaden, O Moskve), Schlichting’s in 1934 (Shlikhting, Novoe izvestie).

Notes to pp. 94–6

217

56 E. M. Yaroslavskii commented, in February 1943: ‘Vipper does not deny terror . . . He only questions whether the terrorist character of [Groznyi’s] measures should conceal from the historian their social significance and statist-transformatory meaning’: RGASPI, f. 89, op. 7, d. 40, l. 51 (emphasis in the original). Vipper had personally sent Yaroslavskii a copy of his book: RGASPI, f. 89, op. 1, d. 106 (Yaroslavskii’s letter of thanks, 8 Jan. 1943). 57 See the transcript in Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 59, ll .3–16ob; and the synopsis in Predtechenskii, ‘V Institute istorii’, p. 137. 58 Predtechenskii, ‘V Institute istorii’, p. 137. 59 Burdei, Istorik i voina, p. 187. 60 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 59, ll. 18–19. 61 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 59, l. 23. 62 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 59, ll. 24ob, 26. 63 Nechkina, who had condemned the first edition as counter-revolutionary in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1933, wrote an enthusiastic review of the second edition, which she described as a ‘significantly expanded and reworked’ version: Arkhiv RAN, f. 1562, op. 1, d. 124 (a cutting from Pravda Vostoka (Tashkent), [13] Jan. 1943). The 1942 edition was reviewed by S. Pokrovskii in Istoricheskii zhurnal, 1943, no. 3/4, pp. 90–5 (the review also covers V. Snegirev, Ivan Tretii i ego vremya (1942) and Bakhrushin’s Ivan Groznyi (1942)). The reviewer focused on Vipper’s depiction of Ivan’s foreign policy, praising the author for presenting the tsar in the context of world history: ‘This comparative historical characterization enables Prof. Vipper to show Groznyi as a very great statesman, standing out to good advantage amongst contemporary West European sovereigns’ (p. 94). 64 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 68, l. 6ob. Emphasis and capitalization in the original. 65 Published ‘Na pravakh rukopisi’ as: Vipper, Ivan Groznyi. Stenogramma. Vipper repeated the lecture from October to December 1943 in a number of other locations: Burdei, Istorik i voina, p. 237. A revised version of the text of the lecture was subsequently published as an aid for ‘cultural-enlightenment’ lecturers, with a print-run of 10 000. The short bibliography attached to the pamphlet included ‘artistic works, extracts from which may be used in a lecture by way of illustrative material’: those listed were Kostylev’s novel, A. N. Tolstoi’s play, and Eisenstein’s screenplay (Vipper, Ivan IV, reverse title page and p. [32]). 66 Vipper, Ivan Groznyi. Stenogramma, pp. 3–4. 67 Ibid., p. 10. 68 Ibid., p. 11. 69 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 70 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 71 Ibid., p. 14. This appears to have been Vipper’s first use of the phrase ‘otchina i dedina’, which was also cited in the Pravda report of his lecture. It appeared in the third edition of the book: see Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, p. 45, but not in the second edition: cf. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1942, p. 53. It was a phrase which was clearly approved ‘on high’, and perhaps originated there. I. I. Smirnov’s memorialist tells

218

72 73 74

75 76

77 78

79

80 81 82 83 84

85 86

87

88

89 90

Notes to pp. 96–100 us that in the chapter on the Livonian War in Smirnov’s 1944 book on Groznyi the following sentence appeared, which was not present in the manuscript: ‘In this affair he was also governed by a political aim – to return to the Russian people their “otchina” and “dedina”’: Valk, ‘Ivan Ivanovich Smirnov’, p. 27, n.4. The westward advance of the Red Army in 1943–4, of course, made the Baltic theme topical again. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi. Stenogramma, pp. 15–16. Ibid., p. 17. Emphasis in the original. Ibid., pp. 17–18. Cf. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, p. 92, where Vipper also notes that Ivan’s mistake was that he was insufficiently persistent in his struggle against his opponents – a criticism which is very similar to the view attributed to Stalin by Shcherbakov and others. Vipper, Ivan Groznyi. Stenogramma, p. 18. Ibid., p. 20. This had also been the concluding point made in his book: Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, pp. 154–6. For discussion of Staden’s plan of conquest, see Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, pp. 122–7. Pravda, 19.9.43, p. 2. (An anonymous report, but with a TASS byline.) Pravda, 30.9.43, p. 2. The German invasion appears to have prevented the implementation of the 1941 proposal of Vipper’s candidacy as a Corresponding Member of the Academy. For materials relating to his nomination as an Academician in May 1943, see Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 65, ll. 24–5; d. 68, ll. 3–6ob. For the conclusions of the ‘expert commission’ in September 1943, see Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1a–43g., d. 24, l. 10. Here I disagree strongly with Volodikhin, who claims that the work had undergone so many changes in its wartime versions that it was practically a ‘different book’ from the first edition: Volodikhin, ‘Ochen’ staryi akademik’, p. 72. On this episode, see also Konstantinov, ‘Nesostoyavshayasya rasprava’; Brandenberger, The ‘Short Course’ to Modernity, pp. 185–203. RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 971, ll. 1–10. RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 971, l. 2ob. RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 971, ll. 4–4ob. ‘Novye dokumenty’. The document was dated 18 May 1944; its authors were G. F. Aleksandrov, the head of Agitprop; his deputy, P. N. Fedoseev; and P. N. Pospelov, editor of Pravda. ‘Novye dokumenty’, p. 195, citing Istoriya SSSR [ch. 1], p. 140. ‘Novye dokumenty’, p. 195, citing Istoriya SSSR, t. 1, pp. 389–90. These sentences were removed from the second edition of 1947: cf. Istoriya SSSR, t. 1, 2nd edn, pp. 343–4. For the full proceedings of these meetings, see ‘Stenogramma soveshchaniya’. For a somewhat tendentious summary, see ‘Pis’ma Anny Mikhailovny Pankratovoi’. ‘Stenogramma soveshchaniya’, no. 2, p. 61. Adzhemyan’s views had been criticized in Pankratova’s letter to the Central Committee and in the memorandum of Aleksandrov, Pospelov and Fedoseev: RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 971, ll. 5ob-6; ‘Novye dokumenty’, pp. 202–3. ‘Stenogramma soveshchaniya’, no. 9, pp. 53–4. ‘Stenogramma soveshchaniya’, no. 3, p. 83.

Notes to pp. 100–10

219

91 Ibid., p. 96. 92 ‘Stenogramma soveshchaniya’, no. 5/6, p. 79. 93 ‘Novye dokumenty’, pp. 189–90; ‘Stenogramma soveshchaniya’, no. 2, pp. 51–2. 94 RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 797, ll. 13–34. This is an early draft, dated July 1944. For later revisions, dated August and September 1944, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 222. The various drafts of this document, and their interrelationship, are discussed in Brandenberger and Dubrovskii, ‘Itogovyi partiinyi dokument’. 95 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 222, ll. 28f (para. 18). 96 Konstantinov, ‘Nesostoyavshayasya rasprava’, pp. 267–8. 97 O partiinoi, pp. 575–6. 98 Mar’yamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor, pp. 85, 91. For the effects of the Zhdanovshchina on the study of the reign of Peter the Great, see, for example, Prostovolosova and Stanislavskii, Istoriya kafedry, pp. 21–38. 99 The resolution was cited even in scholarly works about Ivan’s reign, for example in the editorial introduction to the posthumous publication of P. A. Sadikov’s essays on the oprichnina: Sadikov, Ocherki, p. 1. 100 Veselovskii, ‘Uchrezhdenie Oprichnogo dvora’. 101 Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1/1953 (1–46g), d. 40, ll. 7–7ob, 28–28ob; d. 47, ll. 9–19. Veselovskii had been unsuccessfully nominated by the Economics and Law Division in 1943: Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1a–43g, d. 24, ll. 18, 21–2. 102 Veselovskii, Feodal’noe zemlevladenie, t. 1, pp. 1–4. 103 Krotov, ‘Primirenchestvo i samouspokoennost’’. 104 Smirnov, ‘S pozitsii burzhuaznoi istoriografii’, p. 124. For a discussion of this affair, see Kobrin and Aver’yanov, S. B. Veselovskii, pp. 26–9. 105 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 192, ll. 2–6; see also d. 193, ll. 16, 70; d. 194, ll. 102–8. There is a brief report in Voprosy istorii, 1948, no. 12, pp. 172–3; see also the editorial in the same number, pp. 3–12. 106 Arkhiv RAN, f. 1577, op. 2, d. 208, ll. 2–3 (Pashuto). 107 Leksin, ‘“Khochetsya dumat’”’, p. 74. 108 Al’shits, ‘Ivan Groznyi’; Al’shits, ‘Proiskhozhdenie’. 109 Al’shits, Nachalo samoderzhaviya, p. 218. 110 Voprosy istorii, 1949, no. 11 to 1951, no. 3, passim. 111 ‘Ob itogakh’, p. 54. See also Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1–51g, d. 195, l. 12. 112 ‘Ob itogakh’, p. 54. The waters were muddied by Stalin’s 1950 pronouncements on linguistics, which allowed a greater degree of autonomy for superstructural phenomena.

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6

V. I. Kostylev’s Novel

Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, p. 87. Ibid., p. 88. See, for example, Kostylev, Kuz’ma Minin, pp. 26, 56, 135, 323–4. Platonov, Ocherki, p. iv. Mar’yamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor, p. 85. Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, p. 88.

220 7 8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30

31

Notes to pp. 110–15 Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 88. On the book’s publication history, see RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 234, l. 52. There was a historic cannon-maker named Andrei Chokhov, whose name appears on the three oldest surviving Russian cannon (1586–90), including the famous ‘tsar’-pushka’ (currently on view in the Kremlin). The novel was dedicated to ‘Dear Vasilii Gavrilovich Grabin and all Soviet masters of artillery- and armaments-making’ (Oktyabr’, 1942, no. 5–6, p. 20). On the significance of the dedication as evidence of the intended contemporary relevance of the novel, see Aleksandrova, Literatura i zhizn’, p. 431, and Loseff, On the Beneficence of Censorship, p. 255, n.13. V. G. Grabin (1900–80) was an eminent Soviet artillery designer. Soviet frontier guards were popular heroes in the 1930s: cf. Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, p. 165, and Stites, Russian Popular Culture, p. 88. Kostylev had referred in his Izvestiya article to the introduction of frontier guards as one of Ivan’s progressive reforms. For a reference to the history of Russian artillery-making, see, for example, Pravda, 28.4.39, p. 4. Kostylev, Ivan Groznyi, kn. 1, p. 87. See also the discussion of the background to the war, pp. 117–35. Ibid., pp. 258–9. Ibid., p. 263. Ibid., pp. 291–4. Ibid., pp. 324–7. Ibid., p. 210. Kostylev had used a similar device in Kuz’ma Minin (pp. 231–5). Kostylev, Ivan Groznyi, kn. 1, pp. 106–16. Ibid., p. 329. See, for example, ibid., pp. 157–8. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., pp. 123–4. Borodin, ‘“Ivan Groznyi”’. It was favourably reviewed by Pankratova in Pravda, 2.5.42, p. 4. By the 1948 edition of the novel, this passage had been changed and Ivan’s face has become less ordinary: ‘His small beard, sharp sidelong glance and aquiline nose made his face extraordinary’: Kostylev, Ivan Groznyi, kn. 1, p. 68; cf. Oktyabr’, 1942, no. 5–6, p. 45. Kostylev in his response claimed with some justification that he always showed Ivan dressed appropriately for the situation in which he found himself: Kostylev, ‘Pis’mo’, p. 262. A similar criticism of Kostylev for ‘modernizing’ Groznyi by making him too simple, democratic and accessible was later made within the context of a more generally sympathetic review by I. Yampol’skii (Zvezda, 1945, no. 1, pp. 146–7). Accusations of depicting the ‘isolation’ of rulers were common in criticisms of artistic images of tsars (cf. Eisenstein’s Groznyi) – possibly because it implied a ‘supra-class’ position.

Notes to pp. 115–22

221

32 In his rejoinder to the review, Kostylev rightly pointed out that some of Borodin’s specific accusations of errors and anachronisms were unjustified: Kostylev, ‘Pis’mo’, pp. 262–3. 33 Vera Aleksandrova singled out Okhima as an example of the way in which Kostylev’s sixteenth-century characters are depicted as prototypes of Stalinist ‘promotees’, a device which made the period ‘very redolent of contemporary Soviet reality’: Aleksandrova, Literatura i zhizn’, p. 431. 34 For discussion of this feature of the ‘Potemkin village’ world of Soviet press coverage of the countryside, see Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, pp. 262–85. 35 Uhlenbruch, ‘The Annexation of History’, pp. 272–3. 36 Kostylev in his response rightly pointed out that the novel covers only the period 1558–60: Kostylev, ‘Pis’mo’, p. 262. 37 Cf. Kostylev, Ivan Groznyi, kn.1, p. 191. 38 Kostylev, ‘Pis’mo’, p. 262. 39 For sarcastic comments on Kostylev’s regular use of this primitive device, see Veselovskii, ‘Po povodu trilogii’, p. 365. 40 Kostylev, ‘Pis’mo’, p. 261. 41 Ibid., p. 263. 42 Istoricheskii zhurnal, 1943, no. 7, pp. 85–6. 43 For a generally fair critique of the literary qualities of the trilogy, see Petrov, Sovetskii istoricheskii roman, pp. 322–33. 44 Cf. Kostylev, Ivan Groznyi, kn.1, p. 54. 45 Yakovlev, ‘Kniga ob Ivane Groznom’. 46 Veselovskii, ‘Po povodu trilogii’, pp. 354–76. The manuscript was dated 7.8.43: in the report itself (pp. 354–5) Veselovskii stated that the directorate of the Institute of History and the editorial board of Literatura i iskusstvo had asked his opinion. Veselovskii’s annual report to the Academy on his activities in 1943 says that he had written a long report on Kostylev’s novel, ‘commissioned by the directorate of the Institute of History’: Burdei, Istorik i voina, p. 244. 47 Veselovskii, ‘Po povodu trilogii’, pp. 355, 360–1. 48 Ibid., pp. 363, 369–70. Kostylev’s account was based on the standard ‘Platonovite’ interpretation of Ivan’s policies, which Veselovskii rejected. 49 Ibid., p. 373. 50 Ibid., p. 376. 51 Ibid. 52 Pravda, 11.12.44, p. 4. The review was of the 1944 Goslitizdat edition. Veselovskii scornfully refuted Derzhavin’s claim that ‘It is only comparatively recently that the events of the period of Ivan IV’s reign have received a correct and objective assessment in our historical scholarship’: Veselovskii, Issledovaniya, pp. 36–7. 53 The parallel between the Livonian War and the ‘liberation’ of the Baltic states in 1944 was actually closer than that with the annexation of these states in 1940. 54 Zvezda, 1945, no. 1, p. 146. 55 Kostylev, ‘Moya rabota’, p. 11. 56 Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, p. 145. For a review of chapters published in the Gor’kii journal Volzhskii al’manakh in 1945, see Novyi mir, 1946, no. 4–5, pp. 189–90.

222 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70

71 72 73 74 75 76

Notes to pp. 123–8 Kostylev, Ivan Groznyi, kn. 2, p. 451. Ibid., pp. 52, 370–1. Ibid., pp. 544–5. Ibid., pp. 384–5. Ibid., p. 431. Ibid., p. 462. This last period of Ivan’s life is also that dealt with in V. Solov’ev’s play, Velikii gosudar’ (1944). Kostylev, Ivan Groznyi, kn. 3, p. 373. Ibid., p. 250. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., p. 404. Kostylev, Kuz’ma Minin, p. 343. Pravda, 2.4.48, p. 1. In 1944 Kostylev had been unsuccessfully recommended for a Stalin prize ‘for long service to literature’: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 233, l. 25; d. 234, l. 39. Pravda, 2.4.48, pp. 1, 2. In his memoirs, Simonov speculates that Kostylev’s award reflected Stalin’s recognition of the resonance of the two epochs of ‘gathering of the Russian lands’: Simonov, Glazami, p. 186. Zlobin, ‘Pravda ob Ivane Groznom’. Pravda, 15.3.44, p. 3. See also RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 234, l. 26. Pravda, 31.8.50, p. 4. Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, pp. 136–7. Ibid., pp. 136, 141; Pravda, 31.8.50, p. 4. Darkov, V. I. Kostylev, p. 144.

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5 6

A. N. Tolstoi’s Play

Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, p. 779. Izvestiya, 9.1.41, p. 4. Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, no. 501, p. 321. Pravda, 20.3.41, p. 3. Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, no. 504, p. 324. ‘Istoriya – oruzhie bor’by’; cf. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 123, ll. 161, 165. The editor of the published version comments: ‘The play Ivan Groznyi was written by A. N. Tolstoi to a special commission from the Committee for Artistic Affairs. But there is reason to believe that I. V. Stalin had a direct influence on the origins of this work. It was evidently for that reason that the writer appealed to him in his letters requesting him to familiarize himself with the play and permit its production.’ 7 Krestinskii, A. N. Tolstoi, p. 221. Krestinskii speculates (p. 283) that Tolstoi’s interest in Groznyi may have arisen even earlier than the mid1930s. 8 Annenkov, Dnevnik moikh vstrech, t. 2, p. 149. Annenkov added: ‘If subsequently Tolstoi did write a Stalinised Ivan Groznyi, he didn’t ever get round to Rasputin, since the latter was not crowned by “our dear Joseph”’ (ibid., p. 150). 9 Krestinskii, A. N. Tolstoi, p. 283.

Notes to pp. 129–34

223

10 Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, p. 325. 11 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 14, pp. 113–14. See also the similar references to Ivan in a piece published in Pravda on 7 November 1941 (the anniversary of the Revolution): ibid., p. 162. 12 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 1, pp. 89–90. 13 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii t. 9, p. 780. 14 Tolstoi, Ivan Groznyi, 1942. 15 Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, pp. 296, 298. 16 Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, p. 335. 17 Literatura i iskusstvo, 14.3.42, p. 4. 18 The article’s description of Tolstoi’s Ivan as ‘insufficiently resolute’ and ‘insufficiently harsh towards his enemies’ is similar to the view of the historical tsar attributed to Stalin by Shcherbakov in Khrennikov’s memoirs, and may indicate the author’s familiarity with Stalin’s attitude towards the tsar. 19 For a rather less flattering view of Tolstoi’s play, expressed by Grekov in a private letter to the historian M. N. Tikhomirov, see Gorskaya, Boris Dmitrievich Grekov, p. 166, n.20. 20 Literatura i iskusstvo, 21.3.42, p. 3. 21 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 224. 22 Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, no. 514, pp. 333–4. 23 Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, p. 297. Many of Veselovskii’s criticisms of this first version of the play are incorporated into his review, written in 1945, of the final two-part version: Veselovskii, ‘O dramaticheskoi povesti’. 24 Veselovskii, ‘O dramaticheskoi povesti’, p. 306; see also Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, p. 297. 25 Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, p. 297. 26 Ibid., p. 298. 27 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Izbrannye pis’ma, t. 2, p. 680. 28 Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, no. 516, pp. 338–9. Letter dated early June 1942. Emphasis in the original. 29 Literatura i iskusstvo, 15.4.42, p. 1. 30 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 233, l. 10. The novel did not receive a prize either, though the trilogy, The Road to Calvary, was awarded a Stalin Prize the following year. 31 ‘Istoriya – oruzhie bor’by’. 32 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 123, ll. 161–9 (dated 3.12.42, but probably written earlier, since it calls for the cessation of preparations for its production at the Malyi Theatre, which happened in May 1942). There is a longer version, dated 31.12.44, but possibly preceding the previous version: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 297, ll. 130–40 (in the same file as the typescript of Il’ichev’s Pravda review of the Malyi production in October 1944). Shcherbakov made notes on the chronology of Ivan’s reign similar to those in the longer version of the memorandum: compare RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 297, l. 137 with RGASPI, f. 88, op. 1, d. 928, ll. 17–18. On the interrelationship of these texts, see also Platt and Brandenberger, ‘Terribly Romantic’, p. 639, n.19. 33 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 123, ll. 165–8. 34 Khrapchenko, ‘Sovremennaya sovetskaya dramaturgiya’.

224

Notes to pp. 135–42

35 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Izbrannye pis’ma, t. 2, no. 586, p. 525. 36 The second edition of R. Yu. Vipper’s historical biography of Ivan appeared in Tashkent in 1942, and S. V. Bakhrushin’s popular account was published in Moscow in the same year. Bakhrushin’s personal archive contains a handwritten version of the section of Khrapchenko’s article devoted to Tolstoi’s play: Arkhiv RAN, f. 624, op. 1/1453, d. 600. 37 Shcherbina, A. N. Tolstoi, p. 481. See also Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, p. 301. 38 RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 350. 39 Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, no. 516, pp. 337–9. 40 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Izbrannye pis’ma, t. 2, no. 586, p. 525. See also no. 588, p. 530; no. 591, p. 538. 41 Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, no. 516, pp. 337–9. 42 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Izbrannye pis’ma, t. 2, no. 596, pp. 549–50. 43 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 14, pp. 291, 415. 44 Krestinskii, A. N. Tolstoi, p. 289. 45 Ibid., pp. 289–90. 46 See, for example, his conversations with Malyuta and Anna: Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, pp. 721, 735. 47 Chukovskii, Dnevnik, p. 164; RGASPI, f. 269, op. 1, d. 8 (draft letter to Molotov). 48 ‘Istoriya – oruzhie bor’by’: published from ‘the archive of the leader of the peoples’. There is a draft autograph version of the letter in RGASPI, f. 269, op. 1, d. 4. 49 ‘Istoriya – oruzhie bor’by’. In an interview for the journal Smena in February 1944, Tolstoi made a similar distinction, describing the first play as an ‘experimental study of Groznyi1, his character and the people of his age’, whereas the second part ‘reveals the character of Ivan’s reign, the meaning and causal connections of his actions’. (Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 14, pp. 378–9, 426.) 50 ‘Istoriya – oruzhie bor’by’. The omitted fourth scene of Kurbskii at Revel’ was included as an Appendix to the relevant volume of Tolstoi’s Complete Works, published in Stalin’s lifetime: Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 10, pp. 654–60. 51 ‘Istoriya – oruzhie bor’by’. 52 No. 11/12 for 1943, which because of wartime publishing delays did not appear until March 1944: Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, p. 785. 53 Tolstoi, Ivan Groznyi, 1944. There is a copy of this edition, with additions and amendments to the first edition marked in red pencil in the margin, in Stalin’s personal library: RGASPI, f. 558, op. 3, d. 351. 54 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 10, p. 700. Emphasis in the original. For discussion of these and other more minor changes to the play, see also Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, pp. 781–3. 55 Literatura i iskusstvo, 22.4.44, p. 3. In her letter to the Central Committee of 12 May 1944 Pankratova made a similar point – that Tolstoi’s play demonstrated a ‘tendency to idealise the relations of the tsar and the Russian people’: RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 971, l. 4ob. 56 Bol’shevik, 1944, no. 10/11, pp. 86–93. 57 Literatura i iskusstvo, 17.6.44, p. 4. 58 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 234, l. 30.

Notes to pp. 142–8

225

59 Literaturnaya gazeta, 27.1.46, p. 1. The same list of awards included a first-class prize for Eisenstein’s film, Ivan the Terrible: Part One. 60 Literaturnaya gazeta, 2.2.46, p. 4. 61 Veselovskii, ‘O dramaticheskoi povesti’. The review was begun in the spring and finished in August 1945: Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, p. 299. Tolstoi had died in February 1945. 62 Veselovskii, ‘O dramaticheskoi povesti’, p. 311. 63 See, for example, Bol’shevik, 1944, no. 10/11, p. 93. 64 Veselovskii, ‘O dramaticheskoi povesti’, pp. 311–13. This scene was clearly intended as a parallel to the German threat to Moscow in late 1941. 65 Ibid., p. 313. 66 A. L. Khoroshkevich (‘Oprichnina’, p. 91) notes that A. A. Zimin was unable to publish Veselovskii’s review of Tolstoi’s play even during the ‘thaw’ of the 1960s. Zimin published Veselovskii’s review of Kostylev’s novel in 1973, but presumably Tolstoi’s reputation made him more immune to criticism than Kostylev. 67 Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, pp. 302–4. See also the interview given by Shmidt in 1988, in which he said that ‘Aleksei Tolstoi clearly wrote his two plays with Stalin in mind’: Leksin, ‘“Khochetsya dumat’”’, p. 77. 68 Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, p. 304. 69 Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, p. 149. 70 Uhlenbruch, ‘The Annexation of History’, p. 273. 71 Ibid., pp. 273–4. 72 For example, Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, pp. 659, 679. 73 Mikoyan, Tak bylo, p. 534. 74 Literatura i iskusstvo, 16.9.44, p. 4. 75 Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, no. 544, pp. 377–8. 76 Ibid., p. 379, n.2. 77 Pravda, 27.10.44, p. 3. On 25 October Shcherbakov had sent Stalin an advance copy of the text of the review: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 297, ll. 109–16. 78 On Meyerhold see, for example, Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki, pp. 270–82. 79 Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, p. 149. 80 Pravda, 30.5.45, p. 3. 81 Tolstoi, Perepiska, t. 2, no. 549, pp. 384–5. 82 Ibid., p. 385. 83 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 10, p. 705; Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, p. 789. 84 Pravda, 30.5.45, p. 3. Published at a time when the Red Army had reoccupied the Baltic states, the reviewer’s introductory summary of Ivan’s reign placed considerable emphasis on the issue of the Livonian War. On the same day a favourable review of the new production appeared in Izvestiya: 30.5.45, p. 3. 85 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, p. 789. 86 Shmidt, ‘Otzyv’, p. 304. 87 Tolstoi, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, t. 10, p. 705; Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, p. 789. 88 Literaturnaya gazeta, 3.8.46, p. 2.

226

Notes to pp. 148–53

89 Tolstoi, Sobranie sochinenii, t. 9, p. 789. 90 Roberts, Soviet Historical Drama, p. 150. 91 Ibid.

Chapter 7

S. M. Eisenstein’s Film

1 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 192–3. 2 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 123, l. 165. 3 In a letter to Zhdanov of 11.2.42, Eisenstein wrote, ‘At last the work you entrusted me with has been executed: the screenplay about Ivan Groznyi is completed.’ (RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 664, l. 2). 4 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 657, l. 3; the letter is published by Yurenev (Sergei Eizenshtein, t.2, pp. 234–5). On Stalin’s role in commissioning the film, see also Mar’yamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor, pp. 69–71. 5 Eizenshtein v vospominaniyakh, p. 399 (cf. Yuzovskii, ‘Eizenshtein!’, p. 42). 6 Levin, ‘Istoricheskaya tragediya’, p. 84. See also the speculations in Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 210–11. 7 Eizenshtein, Izbrannye proizvedeniya, t. 1, p. 197. 8 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 530, l. 1. 9 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 531, ll. 1–53. 10 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 216–18. 11 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 530, l. 2. 12 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 537, ll. 8–9, 76, 80–2. 13 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 530, ll. 1, 3. 14 Shub, Zhizn’ moya, pp. 195–6. 15 Izvestiya, 30.4.41, p. 3. 16 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 644, l. 1: see also Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, p. 145. 17 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 644, l. 5; the document is reproduced in Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, pp. 146–7. Yurenev (Sergei Eizenshtein, t.2, p. 223) misdates it 11.2.42; while Roshal’ (p. 146) suggests the late autumn or early winter of 1941. But an earlier date seems likely, cf. Eisenstein’s diary entries for 8.9.41: ‘I want to introduce a besieged town – Pskov and Bathory’; a note that the first English ship to reach Russia by the White Sea route did so under Groznyi; the comment, ‘show Germany behind Poland’; and a comparison of Poland in Groznyi’s reign with that of Sikorski: RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 1167, ll. 24–5. 18 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 221. 19 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 644, l. 8. 20 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 664, l. 2. 21 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 231. See also Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, pp. 151–2. 22 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 644, l. 15. Emphasis in the original. 23 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 223. 24 Cf. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 1583, l. 2; d. 644, l. 23; Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, p. 154. 25 Eizenshtein, ‘Ivan Groznyi’. The text of the screenplay ‘accepted by the Committee for Cinematographic Affairs of SNK SSSR’ was pub-

Notes to pp. 153–62

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51

52 53

227

lished by Goskinoizdat as a separate volume in the summer of 1944, having been signed for the press on 10 April. The print-run was 5,000 copies, and the text was illustrated with advance stills from the film (Eizenshtein, Ivan Groznyi). My discussion is based on the Novyi mir text, the first published version of the screenplay. The text published in Eisenstein’s Izbrannye proizvedeniya, t. 6, pp. 197–420, is a version used by the director during filming. It corresponds neither to the texts published in 1944 (e.g. it omits the English scene, which is, however, supplied as an Appendix, pp. 456–9) nor to a transcript of the film itself. Eizenshtein, ‘Ivan Groznyi’, p. 62. Ibid., pp. 63–4. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., pp. 66–7. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., pp. 70–3. The falseness of Ivan’s illness is clearer in the film itself than in the literary screenplay. On the ‘trap’ element, see Tsukerman, ‘Dvoinaya “myshelovka”’, p. 96. Eizenshtein, ‘Ivan Groznyi’, pp. 74–6. Ibid., pp. 76–7. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., pp. 78–82. Ibid., pp. 82–93. Ibid., pp. 93–9. Ibid., pp. 99–101. Ibid., pp. 101–5. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., pp. 71, 103. This theme is absent from the film music, but appears in the oratorio version. Eizenshtein, ‘Ivan Groznyi’, pp. 99–100. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 530, l. 2. Emphasis in the original. Literatura i iskusstvo, 4.7.42, p. 3. Kozlov, ‘Ten’ Groznogo’, p. 31. Mar’yamov (Kremlevskii tsenzor, p. 70) reproduces the handwritten note. A Russian critic has recently argued (somewhat unconvincingly) that the screenplay was potentially – and intentionally – subversive in its depiction of ‘the tragedy of autocracy and the horrors of tyranny’, and that Eisenstein was horrified by Stalin’s failure to realize this: Kozlov, ‘Ten’ Groznogo’, p. 32. Ibid., p. 26. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 2033, l. 1. Tolstoi, whose own first play about Ivan had been criticized for failing to provide an adequate rehabilitation of the tsar, was of course hardly an objective judge of Eisenstein’s effort. Eizenshtein, ‘Ivan Groznyi’, pp. 78–80. Ibid., pp. 83–5.

228 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

Notes to pp. 162–70 Ibid., pp. 96–9. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 233. Ibid., pp. 236–7. The transcript of this meeting is in RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 956; some extracts have been published by Levin, ‘Istoricheskaya tragediya’, pp. 84–7. Excerpts from the transcript were sent to Zhdanov by Aleksandrov on 25 December 1944: RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 291, ll. 184–92. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 237. Vishnevskii, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, p. 65. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 237. Ibid., p. 258. RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 956, l. 31. RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 956, l. 51. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 648, l. 7. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 644, ll. 3–4; this part of the document is reproduced by Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, p. 146. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 648, ll. 3–3ob. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 231. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 644, l. 15. Cf. Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, pp. 152–3. That is, they are Eisenstein’s version of Andrei Chokhov in Kostylev’s novel. Il’ya Sel’vinskii’s 1944 play, Livonskaya voina, also has Andrei Chokhov as a character. Eizenshtein, ‘Ivan Groznyi’, pp. 67, 70, 71, 72–3, 104, 105, 108. [Eizenshtein], ‘“Ivan Groznyi”. Neizvestnye stranitsy stsenariya’, pp. 246–7. RGASPI, f. 77, op. 1, d. 971, ll. 4–4ob. (Emphasis in the original.) RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 530, l. 1. Eizenshtein, ‘Ivan Groznyi’, pp. 80–1. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 648, l. 7. RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 956, l. 13. The review had been sent to the Central Committee for approval: Vishnevskii, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, p. 67. Pravda, 28.1.45, p. 3. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 248. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 2033, l. 3. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 2033, ll. 4–8; similar criticisms had been made within the Artistic Council of the Committee on Cinematography in December 1944: RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 956, ll. 4, 40–1. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 2033, ll. 3–4, 10–11. RGALI, f. 1923, op. 2, d. 2033, ll. 11, 12. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 276. Literaturnaya gazeta, 27.1.46, p. 1. Kozlov (‘Ten’ Groznogo’, p. 37) states that the prize was awarded to Ivan Groznyi on Stalin’s personal insistence. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 276. Ibid., pp. 253–4. Ibid., p. 254. Ibid, pp. 275–6. Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 254.

Notes to pp. 170–7

229

91 Ibid., p. 256. 92 Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, p. 151. Shklovskii had written the screenplay for Minin and Pozharskii. 93 RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 213, ll. 7–8, 10–11. 94 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 648, ll. 5–5ob. 95 Kozlov, ‘Ten’ Groznogo’, p. 37. 96 Romm, Besedy, p. 91. 97 RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 1277, ll. 1–28; Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 276–9; Levin, ‘Istoricheskaya tragediya’, pp. 87–91. 98 RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 1277, ll. 7–7ob. These comments already reflect the chauvinism that was to characterize the postwar Zhdanovshchina. 99 RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 1277, ll. 3, 9ob, 12, 21, 24, 26. 100 RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 1277, l. 28. 101 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 279; Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, p. 164. 102 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, p. 280. 103 Kozlov, ‘Ten’ Groznogo’, p. 38. 104 RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 1339, l. 3. Kozlov (‘Ten’ Groznogo’, p. 39) says that this was a session of the Party Orgbyuro on 9 August, chaired by Zhdanov, and with Stalin present – the session that also considered the question of the Leningrad literary journals. 105 RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 1339, ll. 3, 5–6. 106 RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 1339, ll. 15–16. 107 RGALI, f. 2456, op. 1, d. 1341, ll. 1–10. 108 O partiinoi, pp. 575–6. For the repercussions in the Ministry of Cinematography see Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 280–1; and RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 467, ll. 143–7. 109 RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 657, ll. 1–2 (undated typescript). For an undated handwritten draft letter to Zhdanov, along similar lines, see RGALI, f. 1923, op. 1, d. 664, ll. 3–4ob. See also Roshal’, ‘“Ya uzhe ne mal’chik”’, p. 166. Cherkasov stated in his memoirs that he agreed to share the responsibility for the faults of the film although he was in no way to blame: Cherkasov, Zapiski, p. 138. 110 An account of this meeting was published in Cherkasov’s memoirs: Cherkasov, Zapiski, pp. 379–81. A more complete version appeared in Moscow News in 1988: no. 32, pp. 8–9. Mar’yamov (Kremlevskii tsenzor, pp. 84–92) provides the fullest text. 111 Mar’yamov, Kremlevskii tsenzor, p. 90. 112 Ibid., pp. 84–5, 92. 113 Ibid., pp. 85, 89, 90. 114 Shklovskii, Eizenshtein, p. 284. 115 Romm, Besedy, p. 91. Some have identified specific historical parallels, for example between the assassination of Vladimir Staritskii and the murder of Kirov: Uhlenbruch, ‘The Annexation of History’, p. 280. 116 Romm, Besedy, p. 91. On this problem, see Levin, ‘Istoricheskaya tragediya’, p. 92. 117 Romm, Besedy, p. 91. 118 Platt and Brandenberger, ‘Terribly Romantic’, p. 654. 119 Vishnevskii, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, p. 67.

230

Notes to pp. 177–81

120 Ibid., p. 72. Vishnevskii did not himself view the film until March 1947 and was very critical of it (p. 74). 121 See, for example, Kozlov, ‘Ten’ Groznogo’, pp. 34, 35, 41–2. 122 Tsukerman, ‘Dvoinaya “myshelovka”’. 123 Yurenev, Sergei Eizenshtein, t. 2, pp. 282–4.

Epilogue – De-Stalinization: Images of Ivan IV since 1953 1 Zubkova, Russia after the War, pp. 178–82. The phrase was taken from an 1877 letter to the German socialist Wilhelm Blos in which Marx expressed his distaste for the attribution of particular authority to individual communist leaders. 2 Pravda, 10.6.53, p. 2. 3 ‘O nekotorykh’, p. 7. This was the first number of the journal to appear under the general editorship of Pankratova. 4 Bakhrushin, Nauchnye trudy, t. 2, p. 9. See also the editorial footnotes to pp. 256, 319, 320. 5 For a summary of the discussions, including Dubrovskii’s paper, see Kurmacheva, ‘Ob otsenke’. A version of the paper had appeared in the previous number of the journal: Dubrovskii, ‘Protiv idealizatsii’. See also Shevyakov, ‘K voprosu’. The session is discussed by Crummey, ‘Ivan the Terrible’, pp. 58–61; and Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy, pp. 306–9. 6 Nekrich, Forsake Fear, p. 117. Dubrovskii was one of the younger generation of Marxist historians associated with the Institute of Red Professors in the 1920s who had suffered in the purge of Pokrovskyists in the 1930s. For his views on the Asiatic mode of production, and the controversy which they provoked, see Dubrovskii, K voprosu; and Protiv mekhanisticheskikh tendentsii. See also Barber, Soviet Historians, passim. 7 Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1–56g., d. 487, ll. 38–9. 8 Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1–56g., d. 487, l. 39. 9 Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1–56g., d. 487, l. 40. Pankratova failed to note that Stalin’s ‘instruction’ (ukazanie) to Eisenstein and Cherkasov was given in 1947, while the works by Vipper, Bakhrushin and Smirnov had appeared in 1942–4. For the passage which she cited, see Cherkasov, Zapiski, p. 380. 10 Kurmacheva, ‘Ob otsenke’, p. 195. There is some evidence, including the title of Dubrovskii’s paper (‘On the Cult of the Individual in Certain Works on Questions of History (on the Evaluation of Ivan IV and Others)’), that he had originally planned a broader attack on Stalinist historiography. See Dmitriev, ‘Iz dnevnikov’, p. 169. 11 Kurmacheva, ‘Ob otsenke’, pp. 195–6. Dubrovskii’s scepticism about the authorship of works traditionally attributed to Ivan was shared by some other participants in the discussion; the theme was subsequently taken up by the Harvard historian Edward Keenan, sparking a major scholarly controversy which has not yet been entirely resolved. 12 Ibid., p. 196. 13 Dubrovskii, ‘Protiv idealizatsii’, pp. 121–7.

Notes to pp. 181–7

231

14 Ibid., pp. 121–5. 15 Ibid., pp. 122–3. In this respect, Dubrovskii’s approach marked a return to the Pokrovskyite historiographical tradition. Pokrovskii was soon to be rehabilitated, with Dubrovskii playing a leading role in this process: see Dubrovskii, ‘Akademik M. N. Pokrovskii’. 16 Dubrovskii, ‘Protiv idealizatsii’, p. 123. 17 Ibid., pp. 123–4. 18 Ibid., p. 127. Cf. Smirnov, Ivan Groznyi, ch. 7. 19 Dubrovskii, ‘Protiv idealizatsii’, p. 126. 20 Ibid., p. 125. These phrases were in fact cited by Vipper from the Pole Reinhold Heidenstein (1556–1620), whose writings are an important source for the history of the Livonian War: see Vipper, Ivan Groznyi, 1944, p. 128. 21 Dubrovskii, ‘Protiv idealizatsii’, p. 126. 22 Ibid., pp. 128–9. 23 According to S. N. Valk, Smirnov prepared a 39-page typescript of refutations of Dubrovskii’s paper: Valk, ‘Ivan Ivanovich Smirnov’, p. 35. 24 Kurmacheva, ‘Ob otsenke’, p. 196. For an accusation that Dubrovskii’s criticisms reflected a more general tendency to swing from one extreme to the other in the post-Stalin period, see Arkhiv RAN, f. 457, op. 1–56g., d. 489, l. 67. 25 Kurmacheva, ‘Ob otsenke’, pp. 196–7. 26 Ibid., p. 197. 27 Ibid., pp. 197–203. 28 Ibid., p. 202. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 203. 31 Dubrovskii, ‘Protiv idealizatsii’, p. 128. 32 Dubrovskii, ‘Eshche raz’, p. 212. 33 Ibid. 34 Veselovskii, Issledovaniya, p. 7. 35 Ibid., pp. 29–35. More recent research, however, suggests that Platonov’s interpretation has a stronger evidential basis than Veselovskii realized: see Pavlov, Gosudarev dvor. 36 Veselovskii, Issledovaniya, pp. 36–7. 37 See, in particular: Zimin, Reformy; Zimin, Oprichnina; Zimin and Khoroshkevich, Rossiya vremeni Ivana Groznogo; Skrynnikov, Nachalo oprichniny; Skrynnikov, Oprichnyi terror; Skrynnikov, Rossiya posle oprichniny; Skrynnikov, Ivan Groznyi; Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora; Nosov, Stanovlenie; Shmidt, Stanovlenie. For reviews of some of this literature, see: Crummey, ‘Ivan the Terrible’, pp. 64–70; Yanov, The Origins of Autocracy, pp. 311–18. 38 Rybakov, Deti Arbata, pp. 239–43; see also Perrie, ‘The Tsar, the Emperor, the Leader’. 39 Rybakov, Deti Arbata, p. 240. For an even darker version of this notion, based on the idea that power is based on cruelty, and that this is why the masses revered ‘dread’ tsars, see Kapustin, ‘Diagnoz: tiraniya’; Kapustin, ‘K fenomenologii vlasti’, pp. 374–87. 40 Rybakov, Deti Arbata, pp. 240–1. 41 Ibid., pp. 179–80.

232

Notes to pp. 187–91

42 Ibid., p. 180. 43 Stalin, Sochineniya, t. 13, p. 113. For discussion of parallels between the popular ‘good tsar’ image of Ivan Groznyi and that of Stalin, see Perrie, ‘The Tsar, The Emperor, the Leader’, pp. 90–6. See also Perrie, ‘Popular Monarchism’. 44 Kobrin, ‘Posmertnaya sud’ba’. 45 Kobrin, Vlast’ i sobstvennost’; Kobrin, ‘Boyare’; Kobrin, ‘O khodyachikh istinakh’. 46 Kobrin, ‘Posmertnaya sud’ba’, p. 54. 47 Ibid., p. 55. 48 Ibid. Veselovskii himself was to become a kind of ‘cult’ figure at this time, presented as the model of a courageous historian who had refused to conform to Stalinist norms. Znanie-sila devoted an article to him in its following number (Smirnov, ‘Priobretenie naveki’). S. O. Shmidt published Veselovskii’s review of Tolstoi’s play in 1989, and a short biography by Kobrin and Aver’yanov also appeared in 1989. See also Kobrin, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 11–12; Khoroshkevich, ‘Oprichnina’; and Bogdanov, ‘Ten’ Groznogo’. 49 Kobrin, ‘Posmertnaya sud’ba’, pp. 57–9. 50 Davies, Soviet History, p. 20. The issue of ‘alternatives’ to Stalinism was a topical one in 1987: see ibid., ch. 3. It was of course also a debate about alternatives to state socialism in the late 1980s. On alternative paths of Russian development in the sixteenth century, see also: Selyunin, ‘Istoki’, pp. 180–2; Eidel’man, ‘Revolyutsiya sverkhu’ v Rossii, pp. 34–48; and Pokrovskii, ‘V prostranstve’, pp. 13–17. All of these discussions rely heavily on Nosov, Stanovlenie. For an account which does not make much allowance for ‘alternatives’ to autocracy and serfdom, see Al’shits, Nachalo samoderzhaviya. 51 Kobrin, ‘Stalin and the Tsar’. 52 Kobrin, Ivan Groznyi. Kobrin died in 1990, shortly after the publication of this book. 53 Kobrin, Ivan Groznyi, p. 160. On analogies (svyaz’ vremen) see also Leksin, ‘“Khochetsya dumat’”’, pp. 74, 76–8; and on Aesopian language, Eidel’man, ‘Revolyutsiya sverkhu’ v Rossii, pp. 21–3. 54 Kobrin, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 161–2. 55 Ibid., p. 162. 56 Ibid., p. 163. 57 Ibid., p. 163. 58 This point is not entirely consistent with the interpretation of the oprichnina in Kobrin’s own scholarly works, where he attributes to it the rational aim of abolishing apanages. 59 Kobrin, Ivan Groznyi, p. 164. 60 Ibid., p. 165. 61 Ibid., pp. 163–5. 62 Ibid., p. 165. Names in brackets added by MP. 63 Ibid., p. 166. 64 Volodikhin, ‘Epokha Ivana Groznogo’, pp. 14–15. 65 Florya, Ivan Groznyi, pp. 395–6.

Bibliography Archives Arkhiv RAN fond fond fond fond

457 (Division of Historical Sciences) 624 (S. V. Bakhrushin) 1562 (R. Yu. Vipper) 1577 (Institute of History)

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Index ‘Academy affair’, 19, 202 Adashev, Aleksei, 5, 18, 91, 104, 113, 118, 189 Adashev, Danilo, 104, 117 Adzhemyan, Kh. G., 100, 101, 208, 218 ‘Aesopian language’, 20, 33, 177, 189, 190, 232 Agitprop, xiii, 36, 40, 171, 218 Aleksandrov, G. F., 137, 171, 218, 228 Aleksandrova, Vera, 27, 59, 221 Aleksei Petrovich, Tsarevich, 48, 52, 54, 68, 206 Alexander I, 7, 99, 195, 197, 209 Alexander Nevskii, 3, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41–2, 43, 45, 55–60, 68, 85, 89, 96, 100, 109, 112, 123, 158, 160, 192, 195, 197, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209 Alma-Ata, 131, 134, 152, 163, 170 Al⬘shits, D. N., 104 Anastasiya, Tsaritsa, 5, 6, 18, 118, 119, 130, 144, 150, 155, 156, 162, 168, 171, 197 Annenkov, Yurii, 53, 128 anniversaries, historical, 34, 35, 37, 40, 42, 43, 57, 60, 63, 203, 209, 223 Antokol⬘skii, M. M., 83, 151, 198 Archangel, 67, 124, 125, 169 Asaf⬘ev, B. V., 62, 208 Asia, Asiatic peoples, 12, 13, 16, 17, 26, 29, 40, 41–3, 78, 93, 95, 160, 230 see also Eurasianism; Tatars Astrakhan’, 5, 43, 79, 83, 95, 116, 168, 197 Bakhchisarai, 128, 137 Bakhrushin, S. V., 19, 32, 79–80, 93, 94, 100, 101, 103–4, 179,

180, 181, 182, 186, 188, 202, 217, 224, 230 Balkans, 125, 126 Baltic, 5, 13, 19, 38–9, 40, 41, 56, 79, 89, 91–2, 98, 110, 113, 116, 120, 122–6 passim, 144, 149, 150, 151, 153–61 passim, 165, 168, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 181 Baltic peoples, 40, 112, 114, 119, 160 see also Estonians; Finns; Latvians; Letts; Lithuanians; Livonians Baltic states, 2, 3, 38–9, 54, 89, 98, 114, 116, 120, 150, 169, 193, 215, 221, 225 see also Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania ‘Baltic theme’ in Soviet propaganda, 38–9, 40–1, 54, 56, 89, 91–2, 110, 116, 118, 125–6, 150, 151, 153–4, 157, 160, 168–9, 176, 193, 218 Basmanov, Aleksei, 117, 162, 166, 190 Basmanov, Fedor, 162, 166, 171, 190 Bathory, Stephen, King of Poland, 94, 124, 125, 226 Battle on the Ice (1242), 33, 34, 36, 41, 55, 56, 58, 59, 197, 209 Bazilevich, K. V., 100, 213 Bednyi, Dem⬘yan, 31–3, 41, 202 Belinskii, V. G., 204 Bell, Philip, 130, 132 Belorussia, Belorussians, 37–8, 40, 64 Bel⬘skii, boyar, 153, 154 Beriya, L. P., 173, 177, 191 Birman, S. G., 169 Blok, Alexander, 42 Blyum, V. I., 36

245

246

Index

Blyumental⬘-Tamarin, V. A., 127, 128 Bolotnikov, Ivan, 100, 187, 197 Bol⬘shakov, I. G., 141, 151, 152, 161, 163, 164, 165, 169, 170, 173 Bol⬘shoi Theatre, 62, 63, 64, 85, 149 Boris Godunov, 10, 50, 75, 122, 124, 128, 197, 198 Borodin, A. P., 31 Borodin, Sergei, 42, 66, 114–17, 118, 119, 121, 221 Borodino, Battle of (1812), 34, 35, 197 Bride for the Tsar, A, 81, 198 ‘bourgeois’ historiography, 19, 20, 26–7, 29, 80, 81, 86, 99, 101, 103–4, 105, 133, 179, 194, 195 Bukharin, N. I., 48, 56, 189 Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanas⬘evich, 3, 31, 54, 62, 73–7, 85, 193, 202, 208, 210, 211 Bulgakova, Elena Sergeevna, 32, 62, 75, 76, 77, 85, 211 Bulgaria, 125, 126 byliny, xiii, 31, 32, 41, 58, 117, 202 Catherine II (‘the Great’), 7, 26, 34, 35, 179, 197 Caucasus, 168 Caucasian peoples, 29, 90, 144 see also Circassians; Georgians; Kabardinians censorship, 20, 33, 76, 190, 193 see also Glavrepertkom Central Committee instructions (on Ivan’s image), 86, 88, 128, 214, 215 ‘Change of Landmarks’ group see smenovekhovtsy Chekhov, A. P., 204 Cheremis, 66, 113 Cherkasov, N. K., 1, 32, 42, 43, 87, 102, 109, 167, 169, 174, 175, 180, 182, 185, 186, 188, 189, 207, 209, 229, 230 Chernyshevskii, N., 204

Children of the Arbat, 2, 186–8 Chokhov, Andrei, 110–17 passim, 123, 125, 210, 220, 228 Chokhovs, Foma and Erema, 164–5 Chud (Peipus), Lake, 55, 59 see also Battle on the Ice Chuvash, 66, 67, 90, 113 Circassians, 79, 130, 144 Civil War, 14, 15, 16, 29, 37, 51, 52, 57, 210 Cloudy Morning, A, 52, 127, 133, 223 colonialism, 19, 26, 33, 43, 55, 101, 120, 181 Committee for Artistic Affairs, 31, 32, 127, 134, 138, 149, 222 Committee for Cinematographic Affairs, 43, 141, 150, 163, 169, 226, 228 cossacks, 66, 124, 197 Crimea, 116, 128 Crimean khan, 6, 75, 94, 128, 137, 142, 156, 160 Crimean Tatars, 43, 96, 124, 128, 137, 142, 168, 197 Crimean War, 37, 39, 197 ‘cult of the individual’, 4, 105, 143, 148, 176, 179, 180, 183, 184, 185, 230 ‘cult of Ivan IV’, 2, 4, 181, 183, 184, 189, 230 ‘cultural revolution’, 19–20, 21, 25, 33, 37, 206 Darkov, V. V., 65–6, 67, 109 ‘defence theme’, 28, 34–7, 39–40, 42, 43–4, 53, 61, 66, 68, 192, 206 ‘democratic monarchy’, 12, 16, 93, 195, 199 see also popular monarchy ‘democratization’ of rulers, 59, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 164, 165, 220 Denmark, 12, 123 Derpt (Yur’ev), 91, 112 Derzhavin, N., 120–1, 221 de-Stalinization, 1, 2, 4, 143, 177, 179–91

Index Difficult Years, The, 43, 137–40, 143, 147–8 Dmitrii Donskoi, 40, 41, 42–3, 66, 96, 100, 114, 123, 197, 208 Dmitrii Ivanovich, Tsarevich, 129, 155 Dubrovskii, S. M., 14–15, 17, 179–85, 186, 230, 231 dvoryanstvo, xiii, 7 see also service nobility Eagle and his Mate, The, 139, 140, 143, 144–7, 148 ‘economic materialism’, 11, 105 Efrosin⬘ya Staritskaya, Princess, 130, 141 see also Evfrosin’ya Egolin, A. M., 137 Eighteenth Party Congress (1939), 28, 83 Eisenstein, S. M., 1, 2, 32, 43, 57, 87, 102, 109, 131, 180, 182, 185, 186, 189, 194, 207, 209, 214, 215, 230 Alexander Nevskii, 3, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41–2, 43, 45, 56, 57–60, 85, 89, 112, 160, 207, 209 Ivan the Terrible, 1, 3, 43, 45, 85–7, 88, 89, 99, 100, 102, 131, 134, 141–2, 144, 149–78, 188, 193, 195, 196, 215, 217, 220, 225, 226–8, 230 Elena Glinskaya, Tsaritsa, 153, 154, 171 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 152, 153, 156, 158, 160 England, English people, 13–14, 30, 67, 90, 96, 123, 124, 151–2, 153, 156, 157, 158, 160, 168, 181, 183, 191, 210, 226, 227 enserfment of peasants, serfdom, 9, 10, 11, 13, 47, 49, 50, 78, 79, 82, 90, 94, 181, 182, 183, 184, 189, 232 Epic Warriors, The, 31–3, 41, 53, 77, 202 Ermak, 79, 124, 197

247

Estonia, 38, 39, 40, 48, 55, 89, 92 Estonians, 91, 112, 113, 118, 119, 159, 168 Eurasianism, 16, 98, 99 Evfrosin⬘ya Staritskaya, Princess, 155, 156, 157, 161, 162, 166, 168, 169, 171, 188 see also Efrosin⬘ya Evstafii, 158, 162 Ezhov, N. I., xiii, 190 Ezhovshchina, xiii, 89 see also Great Purges fascism, fascists, 33, 35, 40, 42, 56, 97, 124, 172, 201 see also Nazis ‘fatherland wars’, 40 see also ‘Great Fatherland War’ Fedor Ivanovich, Tsar, 10, 87–8, 197 see also Tsar Fedor Ioannovich Fedorov, Ivan, 93, 110 Field Marshal Kutuzov, 37, 39 Filipp Kolychev, Metropolitan, 141, 149, 157, 162, 164, 170, 171, 175, 177, 178 film, as means of patriotic propaganda, 35, 36, 37, 39 see also Eisenstein; and titles of individual films Finns, 91 Finnish lands, 113 First Five-Year Plan (1928–32), 2, 27, 46, 53, 68, 193, 206 First World War, 14, 15, 16, 17, 35, 38, 40, 51, 64, 89, 197 folklore, 30, 31, 32, 34, 62, 154, 202 Ivan IV in, 1, 80, 81, 121, 182, 191, 195, 211, 212 foreign policy, 26, 33–44, 45, 50, 54, 58, 68, 79, 89, 90, 98, 109, 113–14, 126, 151, 152, 153, 157, 159, 164, 174, 181, 192 ‘formalism’, 29, 57, 76, 77, 146, 169, 174 France, French people, 37, 51, 67, 90, 191, 210

248

Index

‘gathering of the Russian lands’, 26, 78, 97, 133, 134, 136, 212, 222 Georgia, 33, 34 Georgians, 144 Germany, Germans, 28, 33–6, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 51, 54, 55–60, 68, 91, 97, 102, 110, 112, 114, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123, 129, 130, 136, 139, 141, 142, 144, 150, 151, 152, 158, 160, 168, 169, 176, 192, 201, 204, 216, 225, 226 German invasion (1941), 39, 44, 52, 61, 64, 67, 86, 92, 93, 128–9, 150, 151, 152, 160, 215, 218 German knights, 34, 39, 55–6, 58, 59, 60, 109, 120 see also Livonian knights; Teutonic knights glasnost⬘, xiii, 1, 2, 186–91 Glavrepertkom, xiii, 73, 75, 77 Glinka, M. I., 62, 63, 204, 208 see also Ivan Susanin ‘good tsars’, 187, 232 Gorbachev, M. S., xiii, 1, 4, 143, 186, 189 Gorchakov, N. M., 76, 77 Gor⬘kii, 66, 67, 109, 110, 118, 122, 126, 129, 148, 209, 210, 221 see also Nizhnii Novgorod Gor⬘kii, Maksim, 64, 66, 128, 202, 204, 209, 212 Got⬘e, Yu. V., 58, 82, 92, 94, 212, 213 ‘great ancestors’, 40, 42, 109, 123, 126 ‘Great Fatherland War’, 39–41, 95, 97, 126, 141, 161 see also Second World War Great Life, A, 173 Central Committee resolution on, 102, 173, 174, 219 Great Purges, Great Terror, 2, 21, 54, 78, 83, 84, 89, 98, 101, 123, 176, 187, 189, 194, 195, 207, 214

‘great retreat’ in historiography, 3, 25–33, 43, 73, 192 Great Sovereign, The, 135, 188, 222 Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 19, 92, 217 Grekov, B. D., 35, 37, 38, 95, 100, 103, 131, 214, 223 Groznyi (epithet), xiii, 5, 80, 153, 216 see also Ivan IV Gryaznoi, Vasilii, 117, 128 GUPKhF, xiii, 163, 164, 166 Hamlet, 102, 173, 174, 175 Hanseatic League, Hanseatic merchants, 151, 153, 154, 156, 161, 171 Henry VIII, King of England, 123, 153 hereditary landowners (votchinniki), 9, 10, 13, 18, 19, 20, 119, 184, 199 higher-education textbook on Russian history, 49, 79–80, 93, 100, 206, 212 historians’ conference (meetings in 1944), 99–102, 105, 208, 218 history teaching, 25, 29, 179, 205 resolution on (16 May 1934), 25, 47, 99, 192, 201 history textbooks, 3, 11, 12, 25–7, 29, 30–1, 32, 33, 34, 48, 49, 55, 60, 61, 73, 78–81, 82, 84, 90, 93, 100, 105, 179, 192, 193, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 212, 213 Hitler, Adolf, 25, 28, 56, 67, 160, 213 ‘idealization’ of Ivan IV, 4, 94, 95, 99, 100, 118, 121, 126, 141, 165, 180, 181, 182, 185, 224 Il⬘ichev, L., 145–6, 223 individual in history, 11, 14, 47, 48, 81, 83, 99, 179, 180, 186, 189, 192, 200, 230 see also ‘cult of the individual’ Inquisition, 124, 153 Grand Inquisitor, 172

Index Iran, see Persia ‘isolation’ of Ivan IV, 115, 117, 121, 164, 220 Italy, 90, 124, 125 Ivan Ivanovich, Tsarevich, 6, 81, 124–5, 197, 199, 213 Ivan I Kalita, Grand Prince, 26, 123 Ivan III, Grand Prince, 13, 16, 17, 96, 123, 125, 179, 197, 208, 217 Ivan IV Groznyi (‘the Terrible’), Tsar, 1–21, 25, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45–6, 50, 52, 59, 68, 69, 71–197, 198, 199, 200, 204, 208, 211–32 passim Ivan Susanin, 35, 36, 39, 62, 63–4, 208, 209 Ivan Vasil⬘evich, 3, 73–7, 193, 211 Japan, Japanese, 35, 41–3, 160, 192, 197, 204 Kabardinians, 79 Kafengauz, B. B., 48 Kalatozov, M. K., 173, 174 Karamzin, N. M., 6, 7, 20, 58, 101, 201 Kavelin, K. D., 199 Kazan⬘, 5, 19, 43, 67, 79, 83, 95, 116, 148, 149, 155, 157, 159, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 181, 197 Kerzhentsev, P. M., 32, 41, 53, 54, 74, 202 Khazin, Evgenii, 91 Khmelev, N. P., 135, 147 Khmel⬘nitskii, Bogdan, 33, 36, 197 Khrapchenko, M. B., 134–5, 146, 224 Khrennikov, Tikhon, 86, 89, 223 Khrushchev, N. S., 2, 4, 148, 179, 185, 186 Kiev, 31, 113, 197 Kievan Rus⬘, see Rus⬘ Kinokomitet, xiii, 150 see also Committee for Cinematographic Affairs Kirov, S. M., 26, 229

249

Klyuchevskii, V. O., 6–7, 9, 20, 26–7, 58, 84, 103, 104 Kobrin, V. B., 87, 188–90, 191, 194, 204, 232 Kolychev, Nikita Borisovich, 110, 124 Kolychevs, boyars, 157, 162, 170, 176 see also Evstafii; Filipp Kolyvan⬘, 91, 156 see also Revel⬘ Korolyuk, V. D., 183, 184 Kostomarov, N. I., 6, 198 Kostylev, V. I., 45, 64–5, 126, 209–10, 215, 222 Ivan the Terrible, 3, 45, 68, 85, 103, 109–26, 134, 160, 186, 188, 193, 196, 210, 215, 217, 219–22, 225, 228 Kuz⬘ma Minin, 3, 45, 62, 64–8, 85, 89, 109, 112, 125, 193, 210, 220 ‘Literary Notes’ (Izvestiya article), 38–9, 89–91, 110, 112, 151, 188, 214–15, 220 Kozachenko, A. I., 56, 58, 207 Kruse, Elert, 123, 151 Ku-Klux-Klan, 102, 173, 174, 175 Kulikovo, Battle of (1380), 41, 42, 197 Kurbskii, Prince Andrei, 5, 18, 91, 122, 130, 131, 132, 134, 140, 142, 144, 149, 151, 155–62 passim, 164, 166, 168, 170, 172, 181, 197, 224 Kutuzov, M. I., 34, 37, 39, 40, 204 Latvia, 38, 40, 89, 92 Latvians, 38, 112, 159, 168 Lenin, V. I., 11, 47, 48, 82, 99, 103, 149, 204 Lermontov, M., 34, 81 Letts, 91, 118, 119, 150, 158, 159 Life for the Tsar, A, 62, 63 see also Ivan Susanin Lithuania, 5, 18, 38, 39, 40, 89, 92, 125, 140, 142, 156, 157, 158, 161, 168, 197 see also Poland; Poland-Lithuania Lithuanians, 38, 67, 89, 117, 125, 137, 168

250

Index

Livonia, 90, 91, 96, 98, 112, 113, 114, 118, 119, 124, 131, 134, 137, 150, 151, 156, 157, 158, 159, 164, 165, 170, 172, 215 Livonian knights, Livonian Order, 34, 91, 112, 113, 119, 120, 123, 130, 134, 151, 153, 154, 156, 159, 161, 168, 171 see also German knights; Teutonic knights Livonians, 91, 112, 113, 118, 155, 158, 161 Livonian War, 3, 5, 6, 10, 13, 15, 17, 39, 40, 79, 82, 89–92, 95, 96, 97, 110, 112, 116, 118, 120, 122, 124, 125, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 149, 150, 151, 152–3, 160, 168, 169, 172, 174, 175, 177, 181, 193, 197, 210, 215, 216, 218, 220, 221, 225, 228, 231 Louis XI, King of France, 80, 175, 212 Ludwig, Emil, 46–7, 48–9, 50, 53, 187, 193, 200, 205 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 13, 14 Maid of Pskov, The, 74, 75, 81, 198 Malyi Theatre, 135, 137, 139, 140, 144, 145, 146, 148, 223 Malyuta Skuratov, 122, 150, 156, 158, 159, 162, 165, 166, 175, 176, 177, 180, 191, 224 Mari, 90 Marx, Karl, 48, 55, 56, 91, 93, 104, 120, 207, 215, 230 Marxism, Marxist historiography, 9, 19, 20, 26, 27, 47, 48, 53, 55, 60, 99, 101, 103, 180, 182, 183, 186, 195, 201, 206, 230 Mar⬘ya Temryukovna, Tsaritsa, 130, 131, 134, 144, 145, 146, 147 Mary Tudor (‘Bloody Mary’), Queen of England, 123, 153 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 57, 146, 225 Michael Romanov, Tsar, 62, 63, 197 Mikhoels, S., 131, 169 Mikoyan, Anastas, 87, 144

‘military monarchy’, 12, 13, 15, 16, 93, 199 Milyukov, P. N., 212 Minin, K., 3, 26, 35, 40, 45, 60–8, 85, 89, 109, 112, 125, 171, 192, 193, 197, 208, 209, 210, 220, 229 Minin and Pozharskii (film), 35, 62, 64, 171, 209, 229 MKhAT, xiii, 52, 73, 76, 135, 136, 137, 140, 147, 148, 169, 214 ‘modernization’ of historical figures, 67, 115–16, 118, 119, 121, 164, 220 Molière, 73–4, 76 Molotov, V. M., 31, 32, 37, 89, 137, 174, 175, 176, 195, 224 Mongols, 38, 197 see also Tatars Mordvinians, 65, 66, 67, 90, 110, 113 Moscow on Campaign, 89, 110–22, 123, 160 Mosfil⬘m, xiii, 58, 59, 150, 152, 163, 170 Moskvin, A. N., 169 Moskvin, I. M., 136 multi-ethnicity, multinationalism, 26, 66, 67, 68, 79, 90, 97, 112–14, 210 Nakhimov, P. S., 37, 173, 174 Napoleon, 64, 186 Napoleonic Wars, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 61, 62, 197 narodnost⬘, xiii, 29–30, 62, 115, 165 Narva (Rugodiv), 91, 110, 112, 113, 122, 123, 124, 156 National Bolshevism, 16, 27, 98 nationalism, Russian, 26, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 99, 101, 102, 113, 122, 139, 192, 195, 201 see also patriotism national-liberation movement (1611–13), 60, 62, 66 Nazis, Nazism, 34, 39, 41, 56, 58, 61, 67, 112, 152, 176, 201, 204 Nazi–Soviet pact, 25, 36, 37–9, 44, 91, 112, 150

Index Nechkina, M. V., 19–20, 37, 80, 92, 165, 188, 200, 217 Nemirovich-Danchenko, V. I., 132–3, 134–5, 136, 145 Nepeya, Osip, 118, 156, 157, 169 Nevel⬘, 156 New Economic Policy, 51, 189 Nicholas I, 8, 20, 21, 62, 63, 197 Nicholas II, 15, 17, 20, 83, 93, 185, 197 Nizhnii Novgorod, 61, 64–6, 125, 126, 209 see also Gor’kii Nizhnii Novgorod militia, 61, 66, 67 Novgorod, 6, 55, 56, 58, 59, 94, 96, 124, 137, 149, 156, 157, 158, 161, 162, 170, 171, 172, 182, 188, 197 ‘Observations’ of Party leaders on history (1934), 26, 33, 34, 35, 36, 47, 78 OGPU, xiii, 78 On the Rack, 52–3, 68, 193 operas about Ivan IV, 85–6, 88, 198 see also titles of individual operas oprichnina, oprichniki, xiv, 2, 5–11 passim, 13, 17–21 passim, 75, 78, 79, 81–4 passim, 87, 88, 89–104 passim, 109, 118, 122, 129, 130, 134, 135, 145, 149, 150, 151, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165–8, 170–7 passim, 180, 181–6 passim, 188, 193–4, 195, 197, 199, 211, 215, 216, 219, 232 Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox Church, 16, 31, 32, 34, 65, 66, 68, 112, 113, 124, 125, 188, 197 Ostrovskii, A. N., 127, 198 Pankratova, A. M., 42, 48, 49, 80, 99–100, 101, 102, 165, 180, 182, 196, 205, 208, 218, 220, 224, 230 parallels, historical, 1, 3, 4, 7–8, 14–15, 16–17, 20–1, 28, 32–3, 34, 35, 36, 39, 41–4, 45–196 passim, 200, 204, 205, 207,

251

208, 209, 210, 213, 220, 221, 222, 225, 227, 229, 232 Pashuto, V. T., 184, 219 Pasternak, Boris, 88 patriotism, 3, 14, 25–44, 45, 50, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 66, 67, 68, 77, 82, 84, 85, 94–9, 102, 110, 112–13, 121, 122, 123, 126, 128–9, 136, 137, 139, 145, 165, 192, 195, 202, 209 see also nationalism Paul I, 15, 210 Pavlenko, P. A., 56, 57, 58, 59 Pavlov, I. P., 204 Peipus, Lake, 36 see also Chud; Battle on the Ice ‘people’s tsars’, 59, 99, 115, 121, 165, 180, 182, 195, 205 Pereyaslavl⬘ Union, 67, 197 Persia (Iran), 33, 43 ‘personality cult’, see ‘cult of the individual’ ‘personification’ in historiography, 179, 180 Peter I (‘the Great’), 2, 3, 7, 10, 13, 15, 16, 26, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 45–54, 58, 59, 65, 68, 78, 80, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 109, 122, 125–6, 127, 128, 136, 169, 186, 187, 192, 193, 195, 197, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 212, 219 Peter I (film), 34, 35, 36, 52, 53, 54, 85, 203, 206, 209 Petrov, V., 35 Picheta, V. I., 38, 94 Pimen, Bishop, 156, 171 Platonov, S. F., 8–9, 11, 12, 17–19, 20, 21, 61, 81, 92, 103, 109, 186, 188, 191, 199, 200, 212, 221, 231 Plekhanov, G. V., 204 Pogozheva, Lyudmila, 171, 172 Pokrovskii, M. N., 9–11, 15, 19, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 35, 47–9, 50, 60, 61, 80, 81, 82, 83, 100, 105, 186, 192, 199, 200, 201, 206, 208, 213, 215, 231

252

Index

‘Pokrovskii school’, ‘Pokrovskyism’, 25, 27, 33, 61, 65, 68, 99–102, 105, 192, 193, 195, 196, 206, 230, 231 Poland, Poles, 6, 26, 33–7 passim, 38, 60–61, 62–3, 64, 66, 67, 68, 91, 94, 122, 123, 124, 125, 130, 137, 144, 151, 152, 156, 158, 160, 162, 170, 191, 192, 197, 203, 208, 209, 216, 226 see also Lithuania; PolandLithuania Poland-Lithuania, 125, 161 Polish–Soviet War (1920), 208 Polosin, I. I., 16–17, 19, 20, 200, 216 Polotsk, 140, 141 Poltava, Battle of (1709), 36, 203 pomeshchiki, pomest’e system, xiv, 7, 12 see also service nobility popular monarchy, 17, 59, 93, 199 see also ‘democratic monarchy’ Pozharskii, Prince Dmitrii, 3, 26, 35, 40, 45, 60–8, 192, 197, 208, 209 primary-school history textbooks, 29, 30–1, 32, 33, 34, 48, 49, 55–6, 78–9, 82, 201, 203, 212, 213 ‘progressive’ historical phenomena, 10, 19, 20, 25, 32, 78, 81, 83, 101, 102, 110, 114, 119, 161, 162, 173, 174, 175, 180, 181, 183, 184, 189, 192, 194, 196, 205, 206, 215, 220 Prokof⬘ev, Sergei, 163, 169 Proletcult, xiv, 57 Pskov, 58, 59, 112, 124, 125, 152, 157, 161, 226 Pudovkin, V., 35, 62, 64 Pugachev, E. I., 30, 31, 36–7, 100, 187, 197 Pushkin, A. S., 29, 30, 34, 74, 204 Pyr⬘ev, I. A., 166, 172, 174 RAPP, xiv, 52, 206 Razin, S. T., 36–7, 100, 187, 197, 205 ‘rehabilitation’ of Ivan IV, 3, 25,

78–84, 85–8, 89, 100, 128, 134, 136, 144, 185, 193, 194, 195, 196, 212, 213, 214 Repin, Il⬘ya, 83, 151, 198, 204, 213 Revel⬘ (Kolyvan⬘), 91, 112, 130, 140, 156, 224 ‘revolution’ (of sixteenth century), 10, 16, 17, 19, 20, 200 revolution (of 1917), 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 26, 29, 40, 51, 57, 60, 63, 64, 98, 185, 209, 211, 223 Riasanovsky, Nicholas, 50, 52, 206 Riga, 34, 55, 57, 92, 112, 148, 156, 215 Rimskii-Korsakov, N. A., 74, 81, 198 Road to Calvary, The, 51–2, 127, 136, 223 Roberts, Spencer E., 54, 143, 144, 148 Romm, Mikhail, 57, 172, 176, 177 Rubinshtein, N. L., 26–7, 100, 101, 204 Rugodiv, 91 see also Narva Rus’, 6, 31, 32–3, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 58–60, 78, 98, 113, 192, 197 Rus⬘ (screenplay), 41, 43, 58–9, 160 Russo-Japanese War, 35, 197, 204 Ryazan⬘, 83, 115, 152, 156 Rybakov, Anatolii, 2, 186–7, 194 Sadikov, P. A., 19, 219 Samosud, S. A., 85, 214 Schlichting, Albert, 84, 96, 123, 194, 213, 216 Sea, The, 122–4 Sechenov, I. M., 204 secondary-school textbook on Russian history, 49, 80–1, 100, 212 second front, 152, 160 Second World War, 37–44, 50, 54, 61, 64, 67, 85–102, 122, 160, 195, 203, 208 see also ‘Great Fatherland War’ Sel⬘vinskii, Il⬘ya L., 135, 188, 215, 228

Index serfdom see enserfment service nobility (dvoryanstvo, pomeshchiki), 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 18, 19, 20, 81, 82, 90, 101, 119, 184, 199 ‘service state’, 96, 98 Shcherbakov, A. S., 86, 89, 128, 133, 135, 137, 138, 141, 194, 214, 218, 223, 225 Shestakov, A. V., 55, 79, 82, 212, 213 see also primary-school history textbooks Shishkov, V. Ya., 85, 145 Shklovskii, Viktor, 60, 171, 176, 177, 229 Shmidt, S. O., 104, 131, 143, 144, 147, 184, 225, 232 Shostakovich, Dmitrii, 63–4, 76, 85, 214 show trials (1936–8), 69, 84, 207 Shuiskiis, boyars, 8, 117, 153, 154, 214 Siberia, 79, 83, 96, 124, 129, 168, 197 Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland, 130, 137, 140, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 170 Sil’vestr, 5, 18, 91, 189 Simonov, Konstantin, 42, 126, 201, 204, 207, 208, 222 ‘simplification’ of Ivan IV, 115, 117, 121, 220 Slavophiles, Slavophilism, 16, 59, 98, 99, 195, 200 smenovekhovtsy, xiv, 51, 98 Smirnov, I. I., 93, 103, 180, 181, 182–4, 186, 188, 214, 217–18, 230, 231 socialist realism, 29, 30 Sokolov-Skal⬘, P. P., 138, 215 Solov⬘ev, N., 145, 147 Solov⬘ev, S. M., 8, 27, 103, 201 Solov⬘ev, V. A., 37, 135, 188, 222 Staden, Heinrich von, 16, 93, 96, 97, 98, 123, 150, 151, 158, 194, 216, 218 Stalin, I. V., 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23–105 passim, 116, 123, 126, 128, 133, 135, 136,

253

138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 147, 149, 160, 161, 163, 172–8 passim, 179, 184–91 passim, 193, 194, 195, 196, 200, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 211, 213, 214, 215, 218, 219, 222–32 passim speech to Central Committee (1928), 46, 47, 49, 50, 205 ‘great ancestors’ speech (1941), 40, 42–3, 61, 123 conversation with Eisenstein (1947), 1, 2, 32–3, 43, 87, 102, 109, 174–6, 180, 182, 185, 186, 188, 189, 195, 204, 209, 214, 229, 230 Stalin prizes, 42, 64, 89, 114, 126, 127, 131, 132–3, 135, 136, 141–2, 162, 169, 188, 204, 209, 215, 222, 223, 225, 228 Staritskiis, 166, 168, 188 see also Evfrosin’ya Staritskaya; Vladimir Staritskii state-building, state centralization, statism, 8, 9, 11, 16, 25, 27, 28, 46–7, 50, 51, 59, 78–81, 83, 84, 86–7, 90, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 105, 115, 117, 121, 122, 134, 135, 136, 139, 144, 151, 161, 163–4, 165, 168, 171, 173, 174, 175, 179, 180–1, 183, 184, 187, 189, 191, 192, 193, 196, 212 ‘statist’ (juridical) school of historiography, 8, 181, 199 Stronghold on the Neva, The, 124–6 Sudakov, I. Ya., 137, 144–5, 146 Surikov, V. I., 204 Susanin, Ivan, 35, 36, 39, 57, 62–4, 209 Suvorov, A. S., 35, 39, 40, 100, 204, 209 Sweden, Swedes, 26, 35, 60, 61, 90, 113, 123, 124, 156, 203 Syromyatnikov, B. I., 94–5, 205 Tarle, E. V., 100, 101 Tashkent, 40, 93, 94, 129, 130, 131, 132, 136, 137, 142, 165, 216, 217, 224

254

Index

Tatars, 12, 16, 41–3, 59, 66, 67, 90, 112, 113, 118, 192, 197, 204 Astrakhan⬘ Tatars, 5, 43 Crimean Tatars, 43, 96, 124, 128, 137, 142, 168, 197 Kazan’ Tatars, 5, 43, 67, 155, 157, 166 Volga Tatars, 5, 43, 66 Taube, Johann, 123, 151 Tchaikovsky, P. I., 198, 204 Teutonic knights, Teutonic Order, 41, 55, 192, 197 see also German knights; Livonian knights Third Rome, 142, 155, 194 Tikhomirov, M. N., 41, 58, 59, 223 Time of Troubles, 1, 8–9, 18, 20, 60–2, 87, 90, 109, 197, 200, 208 Tolstoi, Aleksei Konstantinovich, 8, 20, 50, 75, 81, 87, 101, 127, 142, 198 Tolstoi, Aleksei Nikolaevich, 35, 45, 50–2, 65, 85, 110, 162, 193, 206, 214, 215, 222, 225, 227 Ivan the Terrible, 3, 43, 45, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 93, 99, 100, 103, 127–48, 149, 186, 188, 193, 194, 196, 213, 214, 217, 222–5, 227, 232 Peter I (novel), 3, 35, 52, 53, 65, 89, 127, 128, 206 Peter I (play), 3, 35, 45, 50, 52–4, 68, 85, 128, 136, 206 Tolstoi, L. N., 30, 34, 50, 204 treason, traitors, 6, 8, 18, 54, 58–9, 67, 68, 69, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 90, 94–8 passim, 101, 104, 109, 117, 122, 123, 124, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 141, 147, 149, 151, 153, 157, 158, 161, 162, 166, 168, 170, 176, 182, 190, 194–5, 206, 207 Trotsky, L. D., 27, 56, 144 Trotskyists, 206 Tsar Fedor Ioannovich, 50, 87–8, 169, 198, 214

Tucker, Robert C., 2, 47, 50, 83–4, 194, 195, 212, 213 Turkey, Turks, 33, 43, 94, 126 Turuntai-Pronskii, boyar, 156, 161 Tverdila Ivankovich, 59, 207 Uhlenbruch, Bernd, 2, 116, 144, 213, 215 Ukraine, Ukrainians, 29, 33, 34, 37–8, 40, 56, 64, 66, 67, 68, 78, 197 Union of Soviet Writers, 126, 141 First Congress (1934), 29, 202, 212 Urals, 96, 168 Vasilii the Blessed, 129, 130, 134 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 83, 151, 199, 213 Verkhoven⬘, B. G., 81–2 Veselovskii, S. B., 93, 103–4, 119–20, 131–2, 142–3, 185–6, 188, 196, 219, 221, 223, 225, 231, 232 Vessenshtein, 150, 159, 165 Vipper, R. Yu., 3, 12–17, 18, 19–20, 21, 52, 84, 92–9, 101, 118, 152, 162, 180, 181–2, 185, 186, 188, 191, 194–5, 199, 200, 213, 215–18, 224, 230, 231 Vishnevskii, Vsevolod, 43, 151, 168–9, 177, 206, 230 Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, 31, 32, 33, 197 Vladimir Staritskii, Prince, 155, 157, 170, 171, 175, 178, 229 Volga, 5, 43, 64, 65, 66, 96, 110, 129, 155, 181 Volga peoples, 66, 79 see also Cheremis; Chuvash; Mari; Mordvinians; Tatars; Votyaks Vol⬘mar, 157, 158, 159 Volodikhin, D. M., 14, 92, 191, 200, 218 Vorotynskii, Prince M. I., 110, 112, 113, 118, 190 votchinniki, votchiny, xiv, 10 see also hereditary landowners

Index

255

Votyaks, 66, 113 Vyazemskii, Prince Afanasii, 137, 190

Yurenev, R. N., 41, 57, 59, 152, 163, 169, 170, 173 Yur⬘ev (Derpt), 91, 112

war communism, 17 White Sea, 67, 123, 124, 125, 157, 160, 210, 226

zemshchina, xiv, 6, 7 Zhdanov, A. A., xiv, 26, 36, 39, 65, 78, 85, 99, 101, 149, 152, 173, 174, 175, 202, 209, 213, 214, 226, 228, 229 Zhdanovshchina, xiv, 102–5, 219, 229 Zimin, A. A., 183, 184, 185, 225

Yakovlev, A. I., 100, 101, 118, 119 Yan, V., 66, 204 Yaroslavskii, E. M., 39, 80, 92, 203, 217