Stalin

In the field of culture—unlike foreign affairs and nationalities—Stalin had long hesitated to make his instructions public. “What kind of a critic am I, the devil take me!” he had written in response to Gorky’s urgings in 1930.¹³¹ When Konstantin Stanislavsky sought approval for staging The Suicide, by Nikolai Erdman (b. 1900), Stalin had replied, “I am a dilettante in these matters.”¹³² The dictator began to work out how he would manage the artistic intelligentsia with the Kiev-born writer Mikhail Bulgakov (b. 1891), who in the 1920s serialized a novel depicting a family of Kiev White Guardists, the Turbins, during the civil war, which muddied the red-white, good-evil picture.

¹³³ Only two thirds of the work appeared before it helped prompt the journal’s closing, but it proved a sensation.¹³⁴ Bulgakov turned it into a play titled The Days of the Turbins. Directed by Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, it revived the fortunes of the Moscow Art Theater, which the pair had founded in 1898, premiering Chekhov’s The Seagull

. Muscovites queued day and night for Bulgakov’s portrayal of the tragedy that befell those who had joined the counterrevolution in Ukraine.¹³⁵

Bulgakov’s daring work had no Reds at all, and his portrayal of the Whites as human beings provoked slander that he was a White Guardist enabling “former people” who had lost loved ones and possessions to mourn. Party militants likened him to the “rightists.”¹³⁶ Stalin acquiesced to the outcries to ban Bulgakov’s play Flight, another civil war story, about a family that opted to emigrate rather than live under Bolshevism.

¹³⁷ But the dictator went to see Turbins, privately approved it, and publicly defended it.¹³⁸ At a meeting with irate pro-regime Ukrainian writers, Stalin pointed out that “it won’t do to write only about Communism. We have a population of 140 million, and there are only one and a half million Communists.” Bulgakov, Stalin allowed, was “alien,” “not ours,” for failing to depict exploitation properly, but he insisted that The Days of the Turbins

remained “useful” to the cause, whatever the author’s intent.¹³⁹ The furious polemics would not cease, however, and Stalin finally let the play be shuttered. Censors now prohibited even publication of Bulgakov’s works, and he wrote the first of several despairing letters to the authorities asking to be deported abroad with his wife, to no avail.¹⁴⁰

Bulgakov wrote again “to the government” on March 28, 1930, pointing out that he had unearthed 301 reviews of his work over a decade, three of which had been positive, and pleading again to be allowed to emigrate with his wife or, failing that, to be appointed as an assistant director at the Moscow Art Theater; failing that, as a supernumerary there or, failing that, as a stagehand.¹⁴¹ On April 18, one of Stalin’s top aides phoned the poet at his Moscow apartment, asking his wife, who answered, to summon him. Bulgakov thought the call a prank. (This happened to be Good Friday, a significant day for Bulgakov, son of a theologian.) Stalin came on the line. “We received your letter,” he stated. “And read it with the comrades. You will get a favorable answer to it. . . . Perhaps we really should permit you to travel abroad? What, have we irritated you so much?” Bulgakov: “I have thought a great deal recently about whether a Russian writer can live outside his homeland, and it seems to me he cannot.” Stalin: “You are correct.”¹⁴² What motivated Stalin to make his first phone call to a major non-party writer remains uncertain. But four days earlier, the greatest poet in the revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was mercilessly heckled at his public recitations, fatally shot himself in the heart. (“Seriously, there is nothing to be done,” he wrote in a suicide note, as if echoing Chernyshevsky. “Goodbye.”)¹⁴³