Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (54 page)

^21
Pravda
, 17.03.1948, p. 3. For a brief synopsis, see J. Steinbeck,
A. Russian Journal

(London, 2000), 105–6.

^{22
M. Gordey,}
Visa to Moscow
(London, 1952), 149–51.

^23
Pravda
, 11.01.1950, p. 1.

172
Being Soviet

The third line of attack focused on the soulless, economically driven
nature of capitalist society. As Iu. Zhukov explained after his trip to America, American workers are motivated by nothing other than money, hence their tendency to resort to gangsterism to improve their lot.
^{24
Capitalist citizens lived a life of gambling and sleeping pills in a}
desperate but empty struggle to strike it rich.
^{25
Everything was for sale}
in America, even the abilities of leading sportsmen such as Johnny Weismuller, an Olympic swimmer who performed in a number of
Tarzan
movies. His change of career was driven by the need to ‘get a

crust of bread for himself and his family’.
^{26
The principle of the dollar}

also underwrote journalism that was free only in the sense that the
editors could choose to work for whoever offered them more.
^27
The
financial motivation behind capitalist society was vividly expressed in Vadim Sobko’s 1949 play
Behind the Second Front
that depicted an American officer in wartime Britain working to stop the destruction of German armaments factories. When his British partner appeals to his patriotism, Sam Gibson retorts ‘the dollar, that’s my native country. And where it comes from I don’t really care.’
^{28
The 800th anniversary}
of Moscow, on the other hand, provided an opportunity to celebrate the city as the ‘centre of world culture and world civilization’.
^29
Denigra-
tion of the capitalist West reinforced the superiority of the civilization that Soviet citizens were labouring to build in the post-war USSR.

Capitalist science, technology and music

This shift in official attitudes towards capitalist civilization as a
whole transformed the status of capitalist-produced science and art in the post-war period. There were hints of a more negative attitude towards Anglo-American research and music towards the end of the war. However, on 9 May 1945 Leonid Utesov’s Jazz Orchestra performed to the vast crowds celebrating victory in Sverdlovsk Square in Moscow.
^{30
A month later in June 1945, the Jubilee of the Soviet}
Academy of Sciences provided a pretext to invite a large number of

^24
Ogon¨ek
, 06.1947: 22, pp. 22–3.
^25
Krokodil
, 30.09.1948, p. 3.

^26
Ogon¨ek
, 06.1948: 23, p. 29.
^27
Pravda
, 05.05.50, p. 4.

^{28
Hanfman, ‘American Villain’, 131–45.}

^29
Pravda
, 04.09.47, p. 2.

^{30
RGALI f. 3005, op. 1, d. 82, l. 250; Fateev,}
Obraz vraga
, 20–5.

Subversive Styles? 1945–53
173

foreign researchers to Moscow. When they arrived, their hosts were ‘so
anxious to give away their results that they copied out tables and sketched graphs to present to the guests’.
^{31
During the first post-war}
months the Soviet state continued to allow, with some caution, its scientists to enjoy contact with foreign researchers and its citizens to have access to foreign mass media. The Soviet press also continued to comment on overseas scientific successes, particularly in the medical field.
^{32
The prospects of foreign science and art seemed bright after the}
end of World War II.

However, the summer of 1946 brought the first significant indica-
tions that the value of capitalist culture was being re-evaluated. In July 1946
Ogon¨ek
carried a humorous story mocking a man who was inordinately proud of his foreign-made suit that he had brought back after the war. The suit turns out to be a disaster and falls apart.
^33
This
was followed up by an October article criticizing the interest in foreign fashion amongst Soviet women. The ‘external tinsel’ of these clothes often hid their ‘extremely wretched internal content!’
^{34
Soviet women}
should be more savvy. More importantly, the summer of 1946 saw the launch of the
Zhdanovschina
, named after the Soviet leader who led the campaign, which began with an attack on the superficial content of the literary journals
Leningrad
and
Zvezda
. Within weeks the attack had

broadened out to embrace theatre and film.
^{35
At this stage, the criticism}

was not directed explicitly at capitalist-produced culture per se, but the
assertion that ideology, rather than entertainment, was the primary means through which art must be assessed inevitably threatened the position of foreign media within the USSR.

Meanwhile, access to foreign scientific journals and conferences
began to be scaled back in the winter of 1946–7.
^{36
The shifting status}
of capitalist science was revealed in a serialized story that ran between January and May 1947 in
Ogon¨ek
. The story concerned a scientist called Stephen Popf, in an unspecified capitalist state, who discovered a new serum to make organisms grow faster. When Popf refused to sell the serum to a shady corporation who want to use it to breed a generation of fully grown, but mentally retarded, workers and soldiers he is beaten up

^31
Ashby,
Scientist in Russia
(NewYork, 1947), 135.
^32
Ogon¨ek
, 02.1946: 8, p. 29; 03.1946: 12, p. 33.
^33
Ogon¨ek
, 07.1946: 29, p. 38.

^34
Ogon¨ek
, 10.1946: 40, p. 30.

^35
Werth,
Russia: The Post-War Years
, 206–11.

^{36
RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 441, ll. 88–113; d. 551, ll. 82–7.}

174
Being Soviet

and thrown in jail. Eventually he is liberated after the local workers
strike on his behalf.
³⁷

Popf ’s tale provided a precursor to what was to come. In July 1947
the Central Committee circulated a letter to all Communist Parties concerning the misdeeds of two academics, Kliueva and Roskin.
^{38
Kliueva and Roskin had recently been propelled to stardom by their}
research to develop a cancer-fighting serum.
^{39
However, in May 1947}
they were found guilty at an Honour Court by their fellow academics for leaking their research to the Americans. The circular letter, two months later, called on local parties to root out individuals with the same ‘national self-disparaging’ spirit.
^{40
Science was not a global phe-}
nomenon which served the interests of humanity, but rather the inter- ests of particular states and political systems.

The K.R. (Kliueva and Roskin) discussions were held in secret, but by
early 1948, with the new diplomatic identity of the USSR established, the attack on bourgeois science became public. Stein’s 1948–9 play
Court of Honour
presented the evil American Professor Carter and his spying colleague Wood conspiring to steal a new anaesthetic from the ‘humanitarian’ Soviet scientist Dobrovortsev. This thinly veiled version of the K.R. story was rapidly translated onto the screen in a film that year.
^{41
Meanwhile, the papers began to call on academics to be ‘fully}
liberated from the survivals of bourgeois ideology, and remember about the class origins of science’.
⁴²

The competition between bourgeois and Soviet science was defini-
tively dramatized in the Lysenko Affair of August 1948. Lysenko’s domination of Soviet agrobiology had been under attack during the late war years. However, in August 1948, with the direct support of Stalin, he affirmed that there were ‘two worlds and two ideologies in Biology’ at the gathering of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences. His ‘Weissmanist and Mendel-Morganist’ rivals relied on ‘lying metaphys- ics and idealism’. Only the ‘Michurinist’, or materialist, position offered

^37
Ogon¨ek
01–05.1947: 1–20.

^{38
Krementsov,}
The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold
War (London, 2000), 126–9.

^39
Ogon¨ek
, 05.1946: 19, pp. 4–5.

^{40
V. D. Esakov and E. S. Levina,}
Delo KR: Sudy chesti v ideologii i praktike
poslevoennogo Stalinizma (Moscow, 2001), 251.

^{41
Hanfman, ‘American Villain’, 131–45; Kenez,}
Cinema and Soviet Society: From the
Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London, 2001), 201.

^42
Pravda
, 03.03.48, p. 2.

Subversive Styles? 1945–53
175

Fig. 5.2
‘Chatter Aids the Enemy!’ V. Koretskii, (1954). Capitalist enemies lurked malevolently inside the USSR during the early Cold War years.

the correct path for Soviet science.
^{43
On 12 August, secure in his fresh}
victory, Lysenko attacked his rivals, including Shmal’gauzen, Zhadovs-

kii, Zhebrak, and Dubinin in
Pravda
: they had held back Soviet science.
⁴⁴

The struggle against Michurinism was then extended into all
branches of the Soviet intellectual establishment with ‘Mendel-Morgan- ists’ discovered in psychology, geography, medicine, and so on. Mean- while the press explained that bourgeois science existed solely to serve the interests of the capitalist overlords. Mendelism and genetics provided the scientific underpinnings of racial ideology: they were directly connected to fascism, big business, and the Ku-Klux-Klan.
^{45
Capitalist science lacked true ‘spiritual value’ because it functioned to}
keep the workers in poverty and hunger.
^{46
It was as a Frankenstein-like}
perversion of the true science of the USSR, where researchers were