Istanbul Institute of
Russian and Sovietic Studies
1st Appendix to our article “Understanding the prodigy of Sergei Eisenstein”
In 1925 The film Potemkin Battleship of Sergei Eisenstein + Grigory Alexandrov was only shown in Moscow in just one cinema and only for a week. People were not interested. The Bolshevik government did not support the film even though it was its own orders. The film was removed to storage. Then, with the intervention of Mayakovsky, the negatives were taken from the depot and sent to Berlin. The famous German director Piel Jutzi was commissioned to re-trim the 45 km long negatives to reform a viewable 1.7 km movie. With an international PR work, the film was shown in Berlin on December 17, 1926 with the participation of Hollywood celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Mary Pickford and embassies, consuls from various countries. In the days following this glaze in Berlin, the film was introduced as a masterpiece of art and Sergei Eisenstein as a genius all over the world, with the coordinated publications of the American and British press.
Sergei Eisenstein + Grigory Alexandrov were of course not able to carry this “ingenuity” attributed to them by this band. The films they made in the following years (Oktober, Generalnaya Liniya) became a fiasco and removed to storage too. Despite these failures, Stalin “rewarded” them by sending them to a long trip abroad. The pretex for this journey was for learning about the newly developed sound film techniques.
The timing of their trip abroad
After leaving Moscow in August of 1929, they had spent some time wandering around Europe. They then went to the US and then to Mexica. After their failures there, they are called back by Stalin’s personal telegram in 1933.
We are still far from giving a definitive explanation for the true mission of this four-year overseas trip. But we have enough data making us able to ask the right questions.
In some sources, it is said that they were sent abroad to learn new techniques of sound cinema. We of course reject this bullshit. This can not be the reason (or the sole reason) for their four years of traveling.
Keeping in mind that they are a team doing everything they do by political orders, the first thing we need to look at is that in what political conjuncture they were sent abroad. Then we have to look at their personal relationships.
The dates of their trip overlap with the 1928-1932 First Five-Year Plan, in which Stalin consolidated his power and liquidated a major part of his opponents.
NEP is on the table, socialism is in the drama
Now let’s open a parenthesis to understand the big picture on the way to enaction of the First Five-Year Plan. Official history describes the Bolshevik Revolution as follows:
“(1) The authentic popular uprising coming together with the genius leadership of Lenin and the readyness of the Bolshevik party, the old regime had been turned down;
(2) a path of enthusiasm towards communism opens up; but a temporary capitalist free market economy had to be implemented to compensate the destruction of the civil war (NEP);
(3) then getting immediately back to the original project, a long-term socialist project had been created to make the transition to communism possible;
(4) then something went wrong, personal ambitions, especially the misfortunes originated from Stalin’s personality, diverted the course of events from their authentic lanes. The socialist project on the road to communism ends up in fascism.”
In our opinion, the most critical deception of this fairy tale is the discourse (2) above:
The NEP was not a policy designed for a temporary period, it was the only agenda of Leninism and Trotskyism.
When we read history in this direction, we can see that the transition to the step (3) could have only been achieved after the Great Purge. Hence the discourse (4) is anachronistic. The Bolsheviks had already seen that they could not have saved the sinking ship so they began to quarrel each other since 1923, long before Stalin took power.
Only two years after the NEP entered into force – in 1923 – the situation in the country becomes no longer manageable. The peasant does not have the skills and time to market their product as they are engaged in farming their land. Zemstvo organisations which limit the power of large landowners and agricultural cooperatives that had previously been established by the time of Stolypin-Witte reforms, which directly communicate the problems and demands of the paesantry to the central authority had been abolished by the Bolsheviks. The peasantry was left subject to the conditions of market economy. The price of agricultural products decreased continuously (scissors crisis).
Let’s go back a little bit to better understand how NEP destroyed Stolypin-Witte achievements: by law enacted in 1890, the activity of large landowners in Zemstvo was restrained as the decisions taken in these organisations should go into effect with the approval of the city governor. Moscow simultaneously embarked large-scale educational, cultural development projects in the countryside. The agricultural cooperatives undertook the functions of obshchina watching the interests of the paesantry in the previous serf period. The Stolypin-Witte reforms abolished the serfdom transferring the obsolete functions of obshchinas to new institutions, that is, the peasants were made landowners in a legal / institutional framework that protects them. The land reform was also accompanied by a great educational and cultural mobilization.
The NEP policies formed their intermediary parasite classes in the space left by these former abolished institutions: a class of merchants called “NEPmen“, a very fast enriching class, was born. Along with this, the landlords (big paesantry) grew faster by gathering the soil of small paesantry. The privileges granted to foreign capital left the rural economy vulnerable to global capitalism, through an intermediary merchant class. This created a demand pressure in increasing the productivity and re-enslavement in agriculture (in our previous article “Goose foot is different”, we gave examples of slavery regimes coming out in the peripheral geographies anexed to core capitalist countries suck like in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in Russia, Ivan the Terrible’s enslaving the Tatars). The rising discontent manifested itself with protests and strikes.
The point reached in only 5 years after 1917 was behind 1861.
The three committees and the lost letter
Discussions on how to deal with these problems began to disintegrate the Bolshevik gang. The level and consequences of the debates that began in 1923, shows that the Bolsheviks have never had a horizon beyond the NEP.
In the face of the crisis, the state apparatus first showed a rational reflex: in September 1923 three separate committees were set up to examine and report the dynamics of the crisis in macroeconomic, financial and political perspectives. The first reaction to the establishment of these commissions came from Trotsky: Trotsky sent a secret letter to the Politburo and the Central Committee on October 8, 1923, protesting the establishment of these three committees. This letter of Trotsky was never published as a whole. However, some of the leaking parts of the letter and another letter of similar content that was called as “Declaration of 46“, sent again to the Politburo and Central Committee by some Trotskyists, let us understand what Trotsky wrote in his letter.
One of the three committees was tasked with investigating the quarrels and corruption among politicians. The secret service (Cheka) chief Dzerzhinsky was brought to this committee. Dzerzhinsky, who came from an aristocratic family, made a very successful war since 1918 (civil war years), against British spies in St Petersburg in deciphering and preventing them to infiltrate into the army and the state.
We can not find any trace that Dzerzhinsky took a direct position against Trotsky. However, we are guessing that the main fear of Trotsky in writing this letter against founding these three commissions was Dzerzhinsky. Because the attitudes of these two personalities were radically different from each other during the civil war: while Trotsky was pursuing a policy to dissolve the state apparatus, breaking the rural / urban bond despite the food crisis and hunger, Dzerzhinsky was working on gathering the state back together.
The “state” statement we use here may confuse reader’s mind. A (so-called) revolution happened, the entire ruling elite of the monarchy was liquidated … so which state are we talking about? However, even if you destroy all the living elements of state structure, the state will still not be destroyed. Because the techniques of problem solving remain the same as people’s call and application for the solution of every social / economic problem they face remain the same too. The bottom-end of this mechanism is food security. No matter how subject positions are completely changed or re-designed, the functions and reflexes of institutional positions in the new state remain more or less the same.
There is only one way to destroy the state up until it can not be renewed again, that is to break the city / village bond thouroughly till to the point where starvation makes people to eat each other…
In 1918, Trotsky was about to achieve this, should a last minute obstacle wouldn’t have stopped him.
Stalin’s obsession: food security
It is rarely known what Stalin did during the civil war years. Volgograd deserves more the name “Stalingrad” by Stalin’s Tsaritsyn Operation (suburb of Volgograd) in 1918, rather than the epic defense in World War II. Hunger started in the cities. The major grain source areas were under the control of the Entente States and Ukrainian separationists in the West and South fronts. The Archangel Operation of Entente States blocked the way of supply from the East (Siberia) too. Under these conditions, the only way to feed Moscow and St. Petersburg was through the Volga River. The only way to contain the growing hunger was to deliver southern Russian grains to the cities and Volgograd should be secured for this purpose. Trotsky was sending incoherent orders to send the Red Army to other directions. Stalin threw his orders to trash bin and rushed to Tsaritsyn with his militias. He took the town under control, loaded the grains and initiated food supply. Contrary to what is known, the first conflict between Trotsky and Stalin began with the 1918 Tsaritsyn Operation and not after 1924. These facts even leak out in the accounts of Trotskyist authors such as Isaac Deutscher.
Now let’s look at the background of this 1923 dated Trotsky’s disappeared letter and the Trotskyist’s “Declaration of 46”. When reading Trotsky’s texts, one must look at what Trotsky avoid to say rather than what he says, then look for the true purpose he disguises behind his long theoretical chatter, in the face of concrete problems. In these letters we see that Trotsky was encouraging a lack of solution rather than proposing a concrete solution to the NEP crisis. The letter begins by a long discourse identifying the current situation. Then it mentions the importance of in-party democracy and objects bureaucratization telling that it contradicts to revolutionary spirit, avoiding suggesting a concrete solution. This statement eventually comes into saying: “Do not set up any commission or anything, do not intervene, just let everyone do whatever in the local and don’t meddle!”. Plenty of commentaries the signatories put under their signatures in the “Declaration of 46” indicates that even the signatories were not convinced why this nonsensical letter was written for.
After these two letters, the support behind Trotsky declines rapidly and his career begins to decline steadily. He is first removed from the Ministry of Defense (January 1925). In early 1926 he formed a partnership called the “United Opposition” with Kamenev and Zinoviev. Contrary to the connotation of the term, this movement was again lacking mass support.
On July 20, 1926, Dzerzhinsky suffered a heart attack and died. But before his death, we think that Dzerzhinsky had already revealed and reported facts about Trotsky. One can see the Stalin’s comfort and the other’s worry from their faces at the funeral:
In October 1926, Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo. In October 1927, he was expelled from the Central Committee too. In November 1927, the “United Opposition” organized a protest march in The Red Square, which was also attended by Krupskaya. There was no participation from public, they remained on their own in the Square. Then Trotsky was fired from the country and his escape which ended up in the house of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera began.
Upon the death of Dzerzhinsky Menzhinsky was brought to the head of the secret service. Menzhinsky comes from an aristocratic family like Dzerzhinsky. It is said that he speaks 10 languages and that was fluent in all languages he speaks. An important thing to note with Menzhinsky was that he stood in the same block against Lenin, with names like Anatoli Lunacharsky , Alexander Bogdanov (the founder of Proletkult), Mikhail Pokrovsky, Grigory Aleksinsky, Martyn Liadov, prior to 1917, especially during 1916 while Lenin was sabotating the Grimm’s peace plan.
Menzhinsky published an anonymous article in 1916 claiming that Lenin was a manipulated agent.
Debate on Proletkult
Proletkult, founded by Bogdanov, gets criticism from two different fronts. Both Stalin and Trotsky were against Proletkult. But the reasons for their opposition were different.
Proletkult claims to create the proletarian art instead of bourgeois art. But in doing so, it is a topic of historical research which members of Proletkult had rigorously advocated the total and physical destruction of the former cultural heritage of Russian Empire.
Trotsky is against bourgeois art, but he also opposes the idea that it may be a proletarian art. For this, he asserts that the aim of the revolution was to create a classless society and therefore it was not necessary to seek for a proletarian class art. Trotsky rejects all kind of formalism in art. Defends the destruction of bourgeois art. He says that the only criterion the artist must adhere shall be the commitment to revolution and social responsibility. Apart from these two criteria, he says that the artist must work independently and totally freed from all forms.
We of course should leave these words which sound nice, aside, to investigate what was going on in Trotsky’s mind. If you expand a concept to cover everything, you lose the meaning of that concept. The ultimate point of Trotsky’s advocation of the so-called “free art” was indeed the complete destruction of art.
Stalin likes the art that both Proletkult and Trotsky labeled as “bourgeois art” and he does not identify it as “bourgeois art.” According to Stalin, art is universal. With correct state politics, art can be freed from the monopoly of the bourgeois class, and can be made public. Stalin advocates the establishment of state-owned education and infrastructure that will enable people to access art.
When we look at the stages of the debates that went on Proletkult, we see first that the Trotskyists first conflicted with the Proletkult and that in this struggle Lenin took place (near his death) beside Trotsky and thus the Proletkult was abolished. The dates of this battle on Proletkult correspond to the dates in which the NEP (scissors) crisis we had been discussed and the three commissions were established to look for a solution (1923 – 1924).
Trotsky’s reaction to three commissions and to Proletkult were alike: he is against corporate planning both in the economic and cultural fields.
Until this stage Stalin had not yet appeared on the front. The apparent struggle seems to be a romantic-doctrinal contradiction, a relatively innocent fight between socialists (as compared to what would happen later), as described in official “socialist” history.
We, however, understand this initial Proletkult X Trotsky conflict (1918-1923) as Trotsky’s worry and attempt to build his defensive strategy against Stalin, who had already “blacklisted” him since 1918. Trying to figure out what is going on in the struggle we have to leave aside the pages filled by theoretical chatter and investigate practical and real contradictions in which actors struggle to survive.
The relationship between cultural politics and economic policy in Russia has always been much more intertwined than people thought. Menzhinsky, who became the new chief of the secret service in 1926 upon the death of Dzerzhinsky, stood in the side of Bogdanov + Lunacharsky block against Lenin in 1916. But he was against Proletkult. We think that Menzhinsky was against Proletkult because he was close to the art doctrine of Stalin, and thus his real enemy was Trotsky. The actors’ affiliation to different art doctrines became an indicator for their true tendency in politics and economy.
Shakhty Case
In the mid-April of 1928, 50 Russian, 3 German, engineer, technician and manager were arrested in the Shakhty region of Rostov Oblast. There were constant mining accidents in the area where many coal mines are located and the production is well below the planned level. These arrests, which were the first major operations of Menzhinsky, were run by the regional chief Yefim Georgievich Yevdomikov. Yevdomikov explained that the suspects committed economic sabotage by getting technical information from the mine’s ex-owners living abroad. At the end of the trials in May and June, many defendants remained free, some were sentenced to imprisonment for 1 to 3 years. 5 were shot to death, and 6 who were convicted were then released with a special amnesty.
This trial was announced in the whole Russia via the press and radio, and many children coming from bourgeois origin families were declared as “class-alien” and expelled from their schools. In addition, many teaching staff were also expelled.
At the time of this operation, Eisenstein was shooting the film Generalnaya Liniya (the name of the film was initially “The Old and The New”). The film was not approved and was removed to the storage by authorities. The sending of Eisenstein + Alexandrov team abroad also corresponds the very beginning of the Shakhty prosecutions. It was a well known fact that Eisenstein comes from a bourgeois family and his parents were enemies to the revolution. His father, a famous architect, fled to Berlin, his mother who was from a very wealthy family owning a transport company moved to France. While his film which was defined as “faulty ideology” was thrown to the stock room and the lives of masses were darkened with the pretext that they belonged to bourgeois families, Eisenstein + Alexandrov team was awarded in being sent to a long trip abroad.
Bringing the cameraman Tisse along with them they go first to Berlin to join the premiere of the same film (“The General Line”). The film, which was thrown to the stock in the Soviets, became very popular in Berlin. The group traveled in Europe for a while, then moved to the US, and their last stop in this four-year trip abroad was Mexico, where they burned 61km of negatives which they could not turn into a film for Upton Sinclair’s project. In 1933 they were called back by Stalin’s personal telegram and returned home.
One must see here the weirdness in the course of events. While Stalin had initiated the first Five Years Plan and his first Purge, he told them: “Hey guys, you go a little bit.”
Then when he finished, he said, “Come on now!”
And none of the “experts”, academics, scholars, who have written hundreds of thousands of pages of bullshit on Eisenstein could think to deal with that conundrum so far.
The period which Eisenstein + Alexandrov team spent abroad overlaps to the First Five Years Plan and the “Cultural Revolution” project that Stalin had initiated in 1929. The RAPP (Rossiyskaya Assotsiatsiya Proletarskikh Pisateley – Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) was also founded (instead of Proletkult that was abolished in 1923) in that period of time. This period also corresponds to the first Purge in which Stalin had fully liquidated NEP remains like large landlords (large farmers that are transforming into local feudals) and parasitic merchants (NEPmen), to entrench the collectivisation of agriculture (Kulak).
This collectivisation project (Kolkhoz) that was initiated in 1929, was Stalin’s second big endeavour to settle food security in the country after his Tsaritsyn Operation in 1918. It meets great resistance. Feudals (Kulak) hide or burn products, kill animals. Rigorous laws were enacted against such actions. Vyacheslav Molotov was assigned to follow the program in the field. It is estimated that around 5 million villagers had been displaced within the framework of the program and one and a half million villagers had died. When arrived in 1933, the new Kolkhoz system was on the run.
The Bezhin Meadow, or The Bezhin Trap?
Having called them back in 1933, Stalin ordered again a new film to Eisenstein + Alexandrov team which was again on Kolkhoz project. The script of this film project wasn’t however as simple as the previous one, the Generalnaya Liniya. Having been derived from a true story, it was like a test: A small peasant child reports his father who burns the grains instead of delivering them to Kolkhoz, to law enforcement officers. The father is prosecuted and condemned. Uncles torture and kill the kid.
The film could not have been finished in two years and eventually the project was aborted on March 17, 1937. The common narrative on The Bezhin Meadow explains the miscarriage of the project by Stalin’s intervention into the screenplay, that is, the political intervention that spoils Eisenstein’s “supreme” art. These assertions gird at people’s mind. The order comes from Stalin; Eisenstein and his team are already a team that make propaganda movies with orders. In such a context, evaluating the abortion of the project as the artwork spoit by politics, is nonsensical.
We explain the fact that the project couldn’t have been finalised by the flounder of the Trotskyist intellectual circle around Eisenstein in the face of the questions below:
Was the child a hero or a traitor? Is it permissible to delate the father and thus to betray family values for the sake of law? Does the family come first, or does the society come first?
Soyuzkino (State Institute of Cinematography) director Boris Shumyatsky and the screenwriter Isaak Babel could not have put their own signatures under the clear message that Stalin aimed for the film. What’s more, Eisenstein got rid meddling into the controversies with using the pretext of doing “art for art” and continuosly including confusing symbolic elements into the screenplay. The project began functionning as a trap/indicator measuring Shumyatsky’s and Babel’s adherence to the new Kolkhoz regime.
The date on which the project was aborted (March 17, 1937) corresponds to the date of Stalin’s last great liquidation of the remaining Trotskyists. Boris Shumyatsky, Isaak Babel and Meyerhold, who have been in the Trotskyist circle around Eisenstein since Proletkult days, were arrested in the following months and were shot respectively on July 29, 1938; January 27, 1940 and February 2, 1940.
The charges were about committing British and Japanese espionage. It was a known fact that in 1906-1907 (during the Russo-Japanese War) Shumyatsky had organised an uprise in Vladivostok, in the Russian Pacific Navy and then conflicted Stalin during the last years of the Civil War (1921-1922) for supporting Mongolian and Buryat separatism.
Fierce discussions on the script came out. Different versions of the scenario were produced. Some of these versions loaded religious themes into the murder of the young child. Eisenstein said that film was representing Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son Isaak. Tension rose between Shumyatsky and Eisenstein. Conflicts continued even after the abortion of the project: Shumyatsky blamed Eisenstein for avoiding in giving clear messages and posing artistic pomposity. Eisenstein then published a letter admitting his fault as an answer to Shumyatsky. Shumyatsky was then, however, arrested and shot in the coming months, while Eisenstein was rewarded with a new film order: “Alexander Nevsky”, a film that was just used to give diplomatic messages to the West before the upcoming Worl War.
This story, which reveals a typical example of the relationship between art and politics, demonstrates how a certain piece of art that is marketed as a product of ingenuity was indeed fully a product of social engineering. The name “Sergei Eisenstein” was nothing but a label affixed to a side of the dress after it had been sewn and finished, and thousands of pages of books, theses and articles had been written on the myth created by this label. This case sets an example for the modern age version of medieval scholasticism. The “clergy” of this ideological apparatus is the so-called “leftist” and “secular” art circles. Having sanded the varnish to look at the real Sergei Eisenstein we are, however, faced of with a bitter irony of history: a boneless guy who even peaches against his mates in Stalin’s terror.
Bibliography
- Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928 – 1932”, January 1974, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol 9, no 1, p. 33-52
- Eugene Lyons, “Assignment in Utopia – 1937”, 2nd Edition, Transaction Publishers, 1991
- Notes on Soviet Show Trials, https://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/HIS242/Notes/ShowTrials.html
- Stephan Kotkin, “Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878 – 1928”, Penguin Press, New York, 2014
- Roy Medvedev, “Let History Judge”, Columbia University Press, 1989
- James William Crowl, “Angels in Stalin’s Paradise”, University Press of America, 1982
- H.W.Wilson, “World Film Directors 1890 – 1945”, Vol 1, H.W.Wilson Co., New York, 1987, p. 291-292