Soviet Culture's Lost Neo-Zhdanovite Future

 

Andrei Zhdanov (1896-1948)

In 1979, with the Soviet gerontocracy having entered what is today regarded as its debility and dotage, it was clear that a changing of the guard was inevitable. At that time, however, the new direction that government and culture would take in the 1980s was not at all a predetermined outcome. In 1979, political scientist and recipient of Ford Foundation largesse Dina Spechler published her speculative misgivings about a resurgent “Zhdanovism” in a paper published through the Soviet and East European Research Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “On March 10, 1976, […] three Soviet newspapers carried lengthy, highly laudatory articles on former Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov,” Spechler observes with concern:

Zhdanov, it will be recalled, was the chief exponent and probable architect both of Stalin’s foreign policy and of his domestic cultural and ideological policies after World War II. […] These three articles were followed two days later by a Pravda account of a meeting held to commemorate the birthday, and shortly afterward by an essay in Kommunist, the Party’s theoretical journal, warmly endorsing Zhdanov’s ideas and noting their current validity. [1]

The favorable attention paid to Zhdanov marked a departure from the previous neglect of this Stalinist figure, and to “understand the significance of these [Zhdanovite] paeans we need first [to] recall the person, policies and outlook to which they allude,” she explains [2]:

Zhdanov’s hard-line international policies had their necessary accompaniment in the domestic sphere. Zhdanov undertook to make Soviet artistic and intellectual productions effective weapons in the cold war whose advent he heralded. Art, literature, and philosophy had to be mobilized to counter the intensifying threat of ideological subversion from the West and to prepare the Soviet population for the prolonged material sacrifices which the coming struggle would require. In a series of Central Committee resolutions and in speeches elaborating them, Zhdanov launched in August, 1946, a campaign to purify Soviet culture of what he described as alien and pernicious “cosmopolitan” (i.e., Western) influences. He excoriated the apoliticism, ideological indifference, and pessimism which he said he found in many works of the postwar period and which he felt would be dangerously damaging to Soviet morale in a period of confrontation with the enemy camp. He denounced the notion of art for art’s sake which, he claimed, was becoming increasingly popular in the USSR. [3]

Among Zhdanov’s criteria for cultural production were Communist Party loyalty, ideological purity, optimism, and educational and moralizing content:

Literary productions, both fictional and non-fictional, were infused with a militant patriotism, usually Soviet, but occasionally Russian. Works by Soviet artists which presented unflattering, and hence “unpatriotic” portraits of the Soviet people were castigated. What were needed, reviewers declared, were examples of Soviet people “of the new type”, “in all the magnificence of their human dignity.” Novyi mir’s contributors labored to provide such examples. Fictional characters were fiercely proud of the Soviet Union and passionately eager to serve it, even if this entailed extreme sacrifice on their part. […]

Soviet, even Russian, patriotism was one thing; minority or “bourgeois” nationalism [such as Zionism] something very different indeed. One must be “deeply hostile” to all manifestations of this reactionary ideology, readers were told. Novyi mir contained outright attacks on Soviet citizens who allegedly upheld this ideology. They should be “routed out of Soviet reality,” one article declared. [4]

“Again and again it was emphasized that the Soviet Union must be cleansed of the taint of bourgeois culture, which corrupted the masses and undermined socialist society,” Spechler relates:

All bourgeois ideas were bankrupt, the reader was told, and had nothing to offer mankind. This was true in the sphere of art, but more importantly in that of politics. Unlike the truly humane philosophy of socialism, “bourgeois humanism” was mere rhetoric, employed by the bourgeoisie “to hide the sores of capitalism, embellish imperialism, and impart a moral justification to the struggle against the exploited masses.” [5]

Inset: Dina Spechler

The liberalization of Soviet culture after Stalin was made possible by “the configuration of political forces under Khrushchev and Khrushchev’s strategy for consolidating and expanding his personal power,” Spechler suggests:

Zhdanovism was a strong, but somewhat discredited, force when Khrushchev began his struggle for ascendancy. Many in the Party apparatus and the political elite generally were, if not intrinsically opposed to it, fearful of its consequences abroad and at home. Khrushchev therefore thought he could obtain substantial support not only for a foreign policy of increasing East-West intercourse and accommodating more autonomy in Eastern Europe and the Communist Movement, but also for a domestic policy based on disassociating himself and his regime from the methods of rule employed by Stalin. Reduction of rigid controls on social and intellectual life and rejection of mass terror as a means to enforce them seemed to be a promising basis for a bid for power. Liberalism in the arts – tolerance, even encouragement, of opposition to cultural Zhdanovism – was thus one element in a larger strategy.

By 1964 the political prudence of such a course for any aspirant to power had become dubious. By this time there had begun to develop a widespread sense in Soviet political circles that there was as much harm as benefit to be gained from the repudiation of Zhdanovism. The Soviet position in Eastern Europe and the Communist Movement had weakened considerably over the previous decade. Many believed that the end of isolation had only created widespread restlessness for more Western goods and more exposure to subversive Western ideas and culture. Renunciation of terror and reduction of internal controls had generated what Party apparatchiki and military leaders regarded as an unhealthy decline in discipline and patriotism, and an especially unhealthy independence of spirit among youth and intellectuals. [6]

“Dissident, career-seeking and degenerate elements were told that the time of ‘genuine freedom’ had come for them, and this ‘freedom’ was brought about by Nikita Khrushchev and his group. This is how the ground was prepared for the destruction of socialism in the Soviet Union, for the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the establishment of a state of the ‘entire people’,” writes Albania’s Enver Hoxha with sarcasm in his memoir With Stalin, published the same year as Spechler’s paper [7]. “Many Soviet communists were deceived by the demagogy of the Khrushchevite revisionist group and thought that after Stalin’s death the Soviet Union would become a real paradise, as the revisionist traitors started to trumpet,” he continues.

They declared with great pomp that in 1980 communism would be established in the Soviet Union!! But what happened? The opposite, and it could not be otherwise. The revisionists seized power not to make the Soviet Union prosper, but to turn it back into a capitalist country, as they did […] [8]

Elements in the CPSU shared Hoxha’s apprehensions about the new liberalism in the Soviet Union. “Officially discredited after Stalin’s death, Zhdanovism began to make a comeback during the years of Khrushchev’s rule,” Spechler recounts:

It emerged as a potent political force after the latter’s downfall, and by the mid-1970s had gained a substantial number of adherents in the upper levels of the Party. Like their mentor, these neo-Zhdanovites perceive the United States and the capitalist world as a whole as an implacable adversary, whose economic and military might pose a serious threat to the USSR. [9]

            The neo-Zhdanovites “seem to have received the backing of and may even be led by Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, for whom Kommunist generally serves as a mouthpiece,” Spechler adds:

Moreover, the change in the treatment of Zhdanov between 1966 and 1976 indicated that the exponents of these views have become much more influential than they were when the Brezhnev regime first came to power. Indeed, this new affirmation of Zhdanov’s ideas confirms the assertion of the dissident Soviet historian Roy Medvedev, that a neo-Stalinist faction which initially surfaced after Khrushchev’s removal in 1964 was, by the early 1970s, beginning to exert increasingly effective pressure on the Party leadership. [10]

Mikhail Suslov (1902-1982)

Spechler asserts that “there was sufficient support for a shift back toward Zhdanovism that Brezhnev found it politically expedient, if not also intrinsically desirable, to reach an accommodation with the growing neo-Zhdanovite forces.” [11] Suslov finally died in January of 1982, with Brezhnev following him in November, and the neo-Zhdanovite ascendancy that Spechler had feared failed to materialize. After a few more embarrassing years of Soviet gerontocracy, the Politburo unanimously elected the comparatively youthful reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, with the outcome of the processes Khrushchev had initiated during the 1950s unfolding much as Hoxha had indicated.

A mere ten years after Spechler published her paper, Time would publish a special issue on “The New USSR”, spotlighting the political irreverence and sexualization of the culture transpiring under Gorbachev. “If the short-lived liberalization that followed the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 was known as ‘the thaw’, the cultural revolution set in motion by Mikhail Gorbachev has proved to be nothing less than a spring flood,” Time’s John Kohan exulted. Kohan enthused about the new attention being paid in Russia to Jewish authors like Eugenia Ginzburg and Vasily Grossman [12], and the magazine’s resident critic, William A. Henry III, also hailed the appearance in Moscow of a stage production of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground featuring full-frontal nudity; a drag staging of Genet’s The Maids involving “aggressive gender bending, laced with homoeroticism”; and a play called Stars in the Morning Sky, “a lament of the cleanup campaign that swept prostitutes, drunks and the deranged off the streets just before visitors arrived for the 1980 Olympics.” [13] Also featured in Time’s “New USSR” issue is the story of a Soviet actress who appeared in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. “What is more astonishing, however, is that Natalia Negoda’s appearance in the May issue of the magazine was arranged by Sovexportfilm, a state cinema organization,” observed Howard G. Chua-Eoan [14].

Two years later, a still more sordid manifestation of Russians’ new “freedom” would be profiled in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s. “Soviet strippers tell a tale of deception,” Paul Kaihla’s article begins. He quotes an eighteen-year-old girl, Illyana Kovaleva, and her “narrative of a strange arrangement in which a Toronto-based network attracted as many as 20 Soviet women between the ages of 18 and 25 to Canada with promises of modelling careers.” Kaihla continues:

Once in the country, the women said, they were kept prisoners by two men, driven around southern Ontario in a van and forced to work as strippers in bars where they were billed as “The Russian Connection” and “Gorby’s Girls”. Said Kovaleva in an interview conducted in Russian with Maclean’s: “I was beaten several times, and they always carried guns, which they threatened us with. It was absolute humiliation, but we had no choice.” Kovaleva’s release from that life came after a Russian-speaking bar patron befriended two of the Soviet dancers and called police to the Pro Café, a strip club in Concord, Ont., north of Toronto, on March 31. Officers arrested 11 dancers and two men. The women were released after a two-day detention, but officers charged Ilya Tarnovsky, 30, Michael Zekser, 36, and their eight-month-old company – Inter Continental Agency – with 11 counts each of violating the Immigration Act. [15]

Ironically, just two months before the Maclean’s “Gorby’s Girls” piece appeared, the Indianapolis Jewish Post published a helpful item from columnist David L. Gold about surname meanings, noting that Zekser is “clearly from Yiddish and refer[s] to coins”. [16] Kaihla continues:

For her part, Kovaleva said that a Soviet woman recruited her and some of the other women by holding a beauty contest in Leningrad, and then obtained visitors’ visas for them from the Canadian Embassy in Moscow. After flying to Montreal, the women were driven to a house in a north Toronto suburb where their escorts took their passports and money. She said that the two men told them that if they tried to escape or get help, Canadian authorities would not let them return home. Kovaleva and her friends said that they had earned up to $300 a day stripping, but added that they had to turn the money over to the men – and received nothing for their labors.

The women also said that the men frequently boasted about the extent of their organization. Said Elizabeth, 18: “They were always telling us that they were not just small-time businessmen, but part of a very well-organized Mafia.” For many Soviets, those threats evoke fears of well-entrenched criminal organizations in their country, such as the 70-year-old “Odessa [Jewish] Mafia.” And since the 1970s – according to several members of Toronto’s Russian community – Soviet criminals in Canada have been importing young women to work as prostitutes, selling Canadian work permits to Soviet newcomers and smuggling works of art and jewelry for sale at underground auctions. [17]

Maclean's (April 15, 1991)

Time, too, covered the story in a meager paragraph: “Immigration officials, who charged the club owners with hiring illegal workers” – Time was still referring to people as “illegal” in 1991 – “are investigating reports that many other Soviet women may have been imported to Canada through similar scams.” [18]

Historians characterize the years of Andrei Zhdanov’s power under Stalin as rigid, oppressive, and tedious, with the later Brezhnev period, meanwhile, having become synonymous with a general “stagnation”; but, if the demolition of the Soviet Union and its aftermath under Gorbachev and Yeltsin illustrate anything, it is that there are much worse fates than boredom.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Spechler, Dina. Zhdanovism, Eurocommunism, and Cultural Reaction in the USSR. Jerusalem: Soviet and East European Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1979, p. 2.

[2] Ibid., p. 3.

[3] Ibid., pp. 4-5.

[4] Ibid., pp. 26-27.

[5] Ibid., p. 26.

[6] Ibid., pp. 33-34.

[7] Hoxha, Enver. With Stalin: Memoirs. Tirana: The “8 Nentori” Publishing House, 1979, pp. 30-31.

[8] Ibid., p. 37.

[9] Spechler, Dina. Zhdanovism, Eurocommunism, and Cultural Reaction in the USSR. Jerusalem: Soviet and East European Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1979, p. 35.

[10] Ibid., p. 7.

[11] Ibid., p. 34.

[12] Kohan, John. “Freedom Waiting for Vision”. Time (April 10, 1989), pp. 108-109.

[13] Henry, William A. “Voices from the Inner Depths”. Time (April 10, 1989), pp. 112-115.

[14] Chua-Eoan, Howard G. “I Am Curious – Red”. Time (April 10, 1989), p. 107.

[15] Kaihla, Paul. “Gorby’s Girls”. Maclean’s (April 15, 1991), p. 16.

[16] Gold, David L. “Your Name”. Jewish Post (February 13, 1991), p. 26.

[17] Kaihla, Paul. “Gorby’s Girls”. Maclean’s (April 15, 1991), p. 16.

[18] Ellis, David. “Grapevine”. Time (April 15, 1991), p. 17.