Clark, Katerina. Moscow, The Fourth Rome

Clark, Katerina. Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Agenda of Katerina Clark (Yale University) is to examine the development of Soviet culture in the late 1930s from the perspective of Moscow cultural elites, shifting a focus from the repressive policy of Stalinism as the contemporaneous cultural focus to the production of cultural meanings in the wider context of European culture. As Clark puts it, “this book seeks to chart the evolution of Soviet culure without circumscribing its account with an intellectual iron curtain” (8). She argues that Soviet leaders aspired to build a world culture (hence Fourth Rome) on the basis of socialist culture, and therefore Stalin took responsibility for the ultimate regulator of cultural affairs. She therefore regards the Soviet Union as an aesthetic state where the aesthetic and the political were intrinsically interconnected to form new cultural forms that people used to “sustain and elaborate their social and cultural unity” (12). Stalinist Russia as an aesthetic state focused on “literary texts” (13). Moscow as the “paradigm” of Soviet beauty. Appropriation of West European culture to create a new cultural center. While the agenda in urban and cultural politics of the 1920s was to “purify” the space, in the 1930s it changed to “the enhancement of space and the hierarchization of both space and time in a chronotope” (27).

The first chapter focuses on intellectual “cross-fertilization” between Sergey Tretyakov and a number of European intellectuals, in particular, Walter Benjamin and Bertold Brecht.  In chapter 2, she discusses the Bolshevik obsession with the written word, esp. sacralisation of Stalin through his relationship to writing (as author). A comparison between Moscow and sacred (Stalin’s) text: “…the “new” Moscow occupied a place that was homologous with Stalin’s (or, more broadly, the leadership’s) place vis-à-vis the populace at large, and, ooking more broadly, in relation to the entire world (a “Rome”). Moscow was to be both an exemplary text in its own right and the site where all authoritative texts could be generated” (94).

In chapter 3 Clark looks at the architectural thinking behind the redesign of Moscow during the 1930s, arguing that new architecture served to embody and transmit narratives of power (including, in particular, the narrative of historical progress, in which Communism was the heyday of the humanity). She also contemplates in detail on the connection between ideology and aesthetics. “Moscow represents achieved socialism, an ideal city, and the hero of a novel functions as an emissary, binding Moscow and the provinces, imperfect space. His reaching Moscow intimates that the Soviet Union is on track to its destination in communism” (123). Chapter 4 explores how these attempts placed Moscow not only in the center of the Soviet space, but (as envisioned by Soviet leaders) in the center of transnational world of Soviet Communism. She focuses, in particular, on the cultural production by her protagonists, Ehrenburg, Tretyakov and Koltsov, describing it as a process of dialogue with European lefts, and on German émigrés (after the Nazis’ takeover of power in 1933). The next chapter (5. World literature/world culture and the era of popular front) looks at the shift of Soviet transnationalism from Berlin to France. An increased number of Western names in Soviet culture of that time (e.g., 1935 – the year of Shakespeare, as Clark puts it).

Chapter 6 looks at the period of the Great Terror, which led to intensified state control over all forms of artistic and literary production. Clark interprets this through a metaphor of a paradigm shift, from a Soviet incarnation of Enlightenment to a Soviet incarnation of Romanticism. She then writes of purges as having elements of theater and theatricality (“to tear off masks” as one of dominant metaphors of the Great Terror) and compares them with Stanislavsky’s writings. When it comes to show trials – perhaps, yes, but the praxis of the Great Terror as such? Chapter 7 deals with the Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War on the level of cultural production, both by Soviet and Western authors. In Chapter 8, Clark offers her interpretation of the soviet culture of the late 1930s as a search for the sublime that had to create the Soviet audience in terms of awe, pride and similar emotions. In Chapter 9, she develops this idea by discussing a final shift (1937 to 1941) from internationalism to Soviet patriotism, which she, in particular, develops taking the case of an encrypted Erasmus-Machiavelli dialogue in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (cosmopolitanism vs. hegemony).