A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

war) about whether Russia should attempt to spread communism throughout the world, or should
be content to try to make it work within its own borders. Trotsky thought the Party should work for
international communism; Stalin, more realistic, believed Russia should concentrate on its own
problems. Trotsky’s expulsion from the Party in 1927, and his subsequent banishment, was a
triumph for Stalin. Zinoviev and Kamenev also came under heavy criticism from the Party. Stalin
was now virtually the dictator of Russia.
In 1929, the year of Trotsky’s exile, Stalin decided to make the Party an instrument for the
‘revolutionary transformation of society’. What this meant, in effect, was that everyone of influence
was to swallow the Marxist dogmas about ‘collectivism’. (Stalin had already ended Lenin’s New
Economic Policy in the previous year.) There was to be no more backsliding towards capitalism or
individualism. According to Marx, the proletariat had to be allowed to take control, to become the
true leaders of the new society. The bronzed tractor driver should finish his day’s work and go to
the local Party meeting to learn about the teaching of Marx and Lenin, or to the local opera house to
see an opera about the revolution. Artists and intellectuals had to abandon personal problems and
begin to think in political terms. It was their job to educate the masses to recognise their own
destiny. Writers who brooded on the nature and destiny of man were wasting their time; when they
had achieved mystical union with the proletariat, they would suddenly understand human destiny.
In fact, Russian literature and art had been flourishing since the revolution. The first reaction to the
downfall of the tsar was euphoria; the intellectuals saw communism as the defender of freedom.
‘Modernism’ flourished in art and in the cinema (Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was the
sensation of 1925); the poetry of Mayakovsky and Essenin actually reached the masses; so did
Sholokov’s Tales of the Don and Babel’s Red Cavalry (the latter containing nightmare descriptions
of the cruelty of the civil war). In the theatre, Meyerhold’s productions created their own
revolution. The first symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich (1925) was soon being played all over the
world, while his satirical opera The Nose appealed to intellectuals and workers. But even at this
early stage, many writers expressed their reservations about communism and the ‘brave new world’
it was trying to force into existence. Olesha’s novel Envy dramatises the problem of the old
fashioned individualist who feels out of place in this society of commissars and ‘comrades’. It
seemed to take a critical attitude to the envious individualist; but the underlying feeling is a
profound distaste for ‘collectivism’. Zamyatin’s We is an astonishing anticipation of Orwell’s 1984,
about a future state in which all freedom has been crushed in the name of collectivism.
By 1930, Stalin had decided that it was time to put a stop to all this individualism, which was
basically a longing for the old bourgeois ideals. From now on, literature and art should be political:
its aim, to glorify the masses. Experiment must cease, because the masses could not understand
experimental works. ‘Revolutionary proletarian art’ was what was needed. Writers, who were
willing to glorify the masses, and write about factories and collective farms, became honoured
members of the Writer’s Union (RAPP); they were presented with country cottages where they
could work, and had financial security, since their works were produced in vast editions by the state
publishing house. Individualists such as Babel, Zamyatin and Olesha could be ignored and made to
feel their isolation. Mayakovsky, who had been made to join RAPP, committed suicide. Zamyatin
went abroad. Olesha dried up. Babel finally disappeared into a concentration camp. The same thing
happened to Meyerhold, and his wife was brutally murdered soon after his arrest. Shostakovich was
criticised for ‘formalism’, which meant that his work sounded too much like music and not enough
like propaganda; he felt obliged to withdraw his Fourth Symphony, his finest work up to that date.