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One: Myth and Power: The Making of a Postwar Elite
- Princeton University Press
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One Myth and Power: The Making of a Postwar Elite The holy blood of this war cleansed us of the innocent blood of the dekulakized and of the blood of 1937.1 O N 2 4 A U G U S T 1942zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYWVUTSRPONMLKJIHGFED the readers ofzyxwvutsrponmlkjihgfedcbaZWVUTSRPONMLK Pravda were treated to a rather unusual literary event. With the war approaching a decisive moment, the leading newspaper of the country found the time and space to serialize a new play by the leading Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Korniichuk. There was, indeed, nothing ordinary about the play, entitled simply The Front.2 Initiated by Stalin and unmistakably reflecting real-life personalities and policies, the play instantly created major political waves.3 The Front was a direct attack on the way warfare was conducted by army commanders of the civil war generation, who were portrayed as those responsible for the Red Army's initial defeats. Simply put, they were remnants of bygone years who could not successfully confront the realities of modern warfare. The conclusion was inevitable. The civil war generation had to step aside and give way to the very people it despised most—the new cadres of professional officers who had emerged from the Soviet military academies. Plenty of motives were at hand behind the publication of the play in Pravda. One was to shift blame for the humiliating military defeats early on in the war from Stalin and the party to the military command; another was the genuine dissatisfaction with those commanders' performance, es1 Vasilii Grossman cited in Semen Lipkin, Stalingrad Vasiliia Grossmana (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1986), 15; and Zhizn' i sud'ba Vasiliia Grossmana (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 9. 2 Shortly after its serialization, The Front was staged with the best-known actors of the day cast in leading roles. The text used here is from the original edition, published by the Iskusstvo publishing house in August 1942, in pamphlet form, with a circulation of twenty thousand copies. Korniichuk wrote the play in Ukrainian, as the publishers noted on the front cover. 3 Alexander Werth related that Korniichuk, soon after the play was published, told him that he had gotten the "general idea" of the play from Stalin himself (Werth, Russia at War, 423). The earlier removal ofVoroshilov and Budennyi, both prominent civil war commanders , from their posts did not escape comparison with the events in Korniichuk's play. 4 4 CH A PTER. O N E pecially after the crushing defeats of 1941-42. In the long run, however, zyxwvutsrpon The Front had major implications for the entire Soviet polity. Intentionally or not, the play forcefully laid out a basic dilemma confronting the Soviet Union—the uneasy coexistence o f conflicting myths as the core o f its social and political legitimacy. Although The Front took aim at Red Army commanders of the civil war era, it was not the individual commanders who bore the brunt of the criticism. The play mercilessly attacked pillars of the prewar revolutionary myth, ofwhich the civil war was a major component, to such a degree that its viability was called into question. It virtually renounced the civil war as a romantically naive, irrelevant, and outdated model for the Soviet polity . The character of Ivan Gorlov, the old front commander, was a vehicle to delegitimize some cherished values of the early revolutionary era such as spontaneity, intuition, and courage as the answers to the problems of modern warfare. In the same vein, the characters in Gorlov's entourage o f lackeys serve to mock another long-held principle of class origin. "Take me, for example," exclaims one of them. "I didn't work very long in a factory, only three years and two weeks. Even I am amazed that I've managed to sustain enough proletarian instinct for the rest of my life."4 When confronted with charges of a lack of military professionalism, they immediately invoke the myth ofproletarian supremacy. So when the intelligence chief is criticized by the chief of staff of the front, he rushes to check on the latter's class origin. "Listen," he says, when he calls the party bureau, "don't you remember the file of Blagonravov, what sort of family does he come from? Origin? Aha! The son of a deacon? I see."5 Equally intriguing were the criteria of generational demarcation. The lines between the groups in The Front were not necessarily chronological. Rather, these were the different experiences of individuals and the lessons they drew that set...