RUSSIA: Down with Marazm

An ideologically pure song for Soviet citizens goes:

Urals! Urals!

Iron ore, watth out! . . .

By the Party’s orders,

Pig iron must be got!

Last week it looked as if all Soviet composers might soon be setting similar gems to music. The Party’s witch-hunting Central Committee, in a fourth postwar decree aimed at keeping Soviet arts in tune with Soviet policy, rained brimstone on the foremost of Russian musicmakers.

Among the scorched was Sergei Prokofiev, whom many regard as the world’s greatest living composer, much of whose music, including his Fifth Symphony, has been heard in the U.S. Two more of world renown were Dmitri Shostakovich (Seventh Symphony), and Aram Khachaturian (whose Saber Dance is a current U.S. jukebox sensation).

The Fleeing Bronze Horses. Others, less widely known but no less vehemently damned, were Vissarion Shebalin, Gavriil Popov, Nikolai Myaskovsky and Vano Muradeli. Like the Soviet artists and writers condemned by the Committee in recent months, they were charged with falling for pernicious Western glitter. The verdict of the Committee, signed by the purge-master of arts, Andrei Zhdanov: “[Their works] smell strongly of the modern bourgeois music of Europe and America which reflect the marazm [wasting away] of bourgeois culture.”

The Soviet press dutifully tuned up on variations of the Zhdanov theme. Krokodil featured a cartoon showing the bronze horses atop the Bolshoi Theater’s portico fleeing in all directions from the strains of Muradeli’s opera, Great Friendship.

For Shostakovich it was a second fiery purification. In 1936, his clangorous Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk offended Stalin’s ever-pricked ears, and the Pravda denunciation that followed kept Shostakovich under a cloud for five years. But this time the guilty composers did not need to suffer so prolonged a darkness. The road to quick redemption had been charted by another great Soviet artist, Cinema Director Sergei Eisenstein. Several times damned for deviation (notably for Ivan the Terrible), he always recanted, begged forgiveness, and put a little more pig iron in his next picture.

The Malicious Childhood. Eisenstein developed a theory to explain these unfortunate deviations toward bourgeois art. They were, said he, tag ends of ideas and impressions left over from pre-revolutionary childhood. Eisenstein’s sage advice to Soviet artists: “We must master the Lenin-Stalin method of perception . . . to overcome all remnants or survivals of former notions which . . . are obstinately and maliciously attempting to infiltrate into our works as soon as our creative vigilance is weakened even for only a single moment.”

Prokofiev and Khachaturian promptly adopted the Eisenstein line, confessed, and promised to behave. Eisenstein could not help them further. The day before the Central Committee’s music decree was published, Eisenstein slipped out of the Committee’s control: he died.