“S

talin was in a jovial mood,” Charles de Gaulle recalled in his memoirs, “He had the morbid habit of terrorizing people by asking, ‘Haven’t you been arrested yet?’ or ‘Haven’t you been shot yet?’…Stalin laughed, adding that ‘People call me a monster, but as you see I even make a joke of it. So I’m not so horrible after all.’[1] Even when he was presenting a good face, Josef Stalin could not help but threaten, bully, and kid about the extent of his power. His control extended to every facet of Soviet life due to the Party’s exclusive control of production, government, and eventually even ideas.

In 1922, Vladimir Lenin appointed Joseph Stalin the General Secretary of the Communist Party.[2] The position made Stalin the most influential member of the Party. Through expert political maneuvering, brutality toward the populace who expressed anti-Soviet outlooks, and the banishment or execution of his political enemies, Stalin became the uncontested head of the Soviet Union. The anti-factionalism measures put in place by Lenin during the New Economic Policy allowed Stalin to remove anyone who went against his policies.

In a world dominated by such ubiquitous social pressures, artists could not help but deal with the state of their society. The Russian intelligentsia frequently used its artistic gifts to offer political commentary through their work. Whether in literature, painting, theatre, or cinema, all artists felt an overwhelming need to respond to the oppression put forward by Stalin’s government. The fate of those who did not respond to this pressure is displayed in Eugenia Ginzburg’s book Journey into the Whirlwind. She was caught up in Stalin’s Terror due to her unwillingness to compromise her values as many of the Party intelligentsia did. She refused to play into the game of self-recrimination and therefore was unwittingly provoking Stalin’s policies. Others chose to express their views on the regime through art. Fyodor Gladkov participated in the early stages of the Socialist Realist movement and wrote his novel Cement to both portray a Communist future and inspire his readers to work towards it. Sergei Eisenstein also favored socialist goals but became entangled in the political games involved with making art. He decided to portray the uncertainty and turmoil as an aesthetic style in his movies Ivan the Terrible: Part I and Part II. Mikhail Bulgakov, on the other hand, detested the policies of the Communists and derided their ideological foundation in his novel Heart of a Dog. While each artist took different views on the validity of the Communist regime, each was forced by political and personal factors to focus primarily on society. Artists were forced to respond creatively to tyranny alone in order to survive, whether by choice or force. The one intelligentsia who ignored the factors around her, Ginzburg, watched as Stalin’s tyranny ruined her life.

Ginzburg’s Poetry and the Logic of Power

On February 15, 1937, Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg was first held at the Black Lake Street detention center. She was charged with “belonging to a secret terrorist organization among the editorial staff”[3] of her Kazan newspaper. She was held in her native province for two months, followed by two years of “solitary confinement” outside Moscow. After being shipped by train to Vladivostok in the Far East, she was sent to Siberia. Over this twenty-year ordeal, she starved, nearly died several times, and found herself among thousands of other Communists and intellectuals who could not figure out why they were charged. Her one direct reference to her sentence was at her trial: “No doubt they [the judges] had a quota, and were anxious to overfulfill it if they could.”[4] Ginzburg came to rely upon her poetry to preserve her sanity and glimpse tiny rays of hope in her plight. When she first had a roommate, she admits, “I used to recite poetry to her for six hours a day…”[5]

So why did Stalin’s government pick her in its “quotas?” What was her crime? Ginzburg refused to surrender her ideological convictions and participate in self-criticism. Stalin feared the conservative and reactionary tendencies of the Russian people, so he attempted to institute a new, socialist ethic devoid of any trace of the old. To do this, he needed to remove anyone with historical knowledge, direct experience in social reform, and even those who carried out his purges so he would appear to be the only source of Soviet dogma and conscience. Stalin did this by creating an environment where intellectuals would willingly lie and thereby offer evidence to their guilt. Ginzburg’s poetry was the double-edged sword that grieved through her denial of wrongdoing and gave her inspiration to survive.

Stalin attempted to create political unity by modifying his country’s history to make way for a new, socialist era. His Terror was a confrontation between his socialist government and anyone bringing old ideas: bourgeoisie, outsiders and reactionary elements in his own nation. In explaining the industrialization process, Stalin said, “If one wants to build a new house, one saves up money and cuts down consumption for a while…This is all the truer when it is a matter of building an entirely new human society.”[6] In his First Five-Year Plan, Stalin attempted to crush the reactionary elements in the countryside through the collectivization process. He described this process as the “necessary links in the single continuous chain which is called the offensive of socialism against capitalism.”[7] Stalin perceived that any remnants of capitalist values put true socialism at risk. Thus, the relaxed attitude of workers in factories needed to be “readjusted.” He even attempted to rehabilitate old Soviet leaders. D.L. Brandenberger and A.M. Dubrovsky discussed Stalin’s interest in reintroducing pre-Revolutionary history when they wrote, “[H]istory—particularly Russian and Soviet—was to catch people’s imagination and promote a unified sense of identity.”[8] Stalin’s use of nationalist heroes would paint them in a new light as forerunners to Communism. The common people would love it because of the use of “easily understandable paradigm of heroes and villains.”[9] His largest obstacle, however, was not the uneducated, who he knew could instinctively be bullied and lead.

Stalin needed the explicit trust of the Communist Party and other intelligentsia to help him shape Russia into an all-new power. Anyone who was not allied with him was suspect for their beliefs. Stalin believed that anyone could be a potential enemy of socialism without knowing it; he implied that his opponents were latent terrorists or “enemies of the state.” Even Party members who idolized him were not exempt. Ginzburg spoke of her fellow inmate Olga, who wrote a poem for Stalin. No amount of argument could convince her Stalin was to blame for her imprisonment.[10] Although Stalin could not pursue his opponents directly for their subconscious desires, this, as Ginzburg noted, was the main target of the purges. She wrote, “Whether you had committed a crime or, out of inadvertence or lack of vigilance, ‘added grist’ to the criminal’s mill, you were equally guilty. Even if you had not the slightest idea of what was going on, it was the same.”[11] Stalin lumped latent counter-revolutionaries with those he deemed harmful; factionalists, spies (foreigners), and other “terrorists.” He told the French writer Rolland in 1935 “that 100 people whom the Government sentenced to death did not have, from a juridical point of view, any direct connection with the murders. Stalin added, however, that they were sent…by enemies of the Soviet Union and were armed to commit terrorist acts against the leaders…In order to forestall their evil deeds, ‘we had to assume the unpleasant duty of shooting these gentlemen. Such simply is the logic of power.’[12]

Stalin’s logic was that those with latent reactionary beliefs would eventually become his enemies. The ensuing preemptive measure took out his past enemies, his present ones (the minority), and most of his future ones. He did this by forcing his own expelled party members to accept his outlandish accusations. Kuromiya notes, “[Bukharin’s] public admission that they had degenerated into terrorist and fascist served Stalin’s purpose of discrediting his enemies in the most damning fashion.”[13] Stain capitalized on the public’s fear of intellectuals and specialists. He saw how they “proved widely unpopular on the shop floor, leading to the ubiquitous phenomenon of ‘specialist-baiting[.]’”[14] Stalin, like other dictators, exaggerated the fears of his population in order to accomplish his goal—a new society.

Ginzburg was targeted as a media specialist and as a teacher. Paradoxically, her education swept her into the Terror but gave her the tools to mentally survive. For instance, during an interview, she wrote, “Yes, I was driven to such despair that I asked him plain questions, dictated by common sense. This was the height of bad form, for we were all supposed to pretend that syllogisms invented by sadists reflected the normal processes of the human mind.”[15] Her education made her realize the ludicrous nature of the situation, but that very knowledge only made her more suspect when revealed. Ginzburg began to question her beliefs and politics as she observed the systematic purges. Faithfulness to the party did not matter, for it only brought people into worse situations. Yezhov, the Commisar-General who ran the prisons and was called ‘the nation’s favored son’[16] was even replaced when his personality cult began to rival Stalin’s. Her poetry, however, became her tie to outside humanity after her familiar contacts were gone. She wrote, “So what was left? Poetry…only poetry…my own and other people’s.”[17] Her knowledge of the wives of the Decembrists -another link to what Stalin saw as heretical- it gave her courage during her march to Vladivostok. She wrote, “No, these were no longer just lines in an anthology-they expressed the longing of all seventy-six of us.”[18] Poetry gave her the impetus to go on, compared to her former suicidal urges when she was expelled from the Party. Ginzburg put it succinctly when she wrote, “If only [Pasternak] could have know how much his poem helped me to endure, and to make sense of prison, of my sentence, of the murderers with frozen codfish eyes.”[19] Without this literary tie, she would have been left adrift in the Terror.

Another argument would have it that other prisoners also contributed to Ginzburg’s well-being in prison. She shows that compassion saved her several times when doctors saw how poorly her health fared.[20] She also speaks of the social bond of prisoners (such as the Social Revolutionaries) that allowed them to survive within the prison system[21] as well as a dehumanized view of the torturers. Ginzburg recalls, “…those who did these things were not human beings.”[22] However, the fact that she was unjustly sentenced by her own Party removed any political loyalty which kept her going (like other Russian intelligentsia who wrote on their experiences). Without her previous ideology to protect her sanity, she turned to poetry to unite her with fellow prisoners. “No, these were no longer just lines in an anthology-they expressed the longing of all seventy-six of us.”[23] Without the common idealization of the Decembrist’s wives, for example, the disparate women in the coach would not have had a common historical comparison. Ginzburg herself admits, though, that during solitary confinement she was a better person due to the literature she had available. She says, “I was far kinder, more intelligent and perceptive than at any period in the rest of my life.”[24] Her relationship with inmates vacillated; one woman at Magadan named Tamara shows Ginzburg how soulless some inmates became. Blok’s poetry also reminded her that the camps (with their greater diversity of prisoners) helped contribute to this “spiritual death.”[25] The prisoners could not be counted upon to aid her.

The Terror was meant to sweep away old conventions of Russian society; Stalin therefore wanted all intellectuals to submit to his plan or be removed. Marx did not leave a clear idea of what socialism would be. Stalin took it to be a complete purge of all leaden elements of the capitalist societies which still lingered in the culture. Thus, to fulfill socialism’s true function, he decided to start the culture over from scratch. The educated were suspect in the 1930’s if they did not admit to wrongdoing. Pursuing the educated also made Stalin more popular in the eyes of the masses, who were already disenfranchised due to their own uprooting. Ginzburg was subjugated to this like so many others, but it was literary knowledge which showed her how to remain sane. She did not claim to be anything other than Communist, but she did write, “[T]he most unorthodox thoughts passed through my mind-about how thin the line is between high principles and blinkered intolerance, and also how relative are all human system and ideologies and how absolute the tortures which human beings inflict on one another.”[26] Strangely enough, Stalin got his wish with Ginzburg; she was relieved of any cultural blindness that her previous ideology prevented.

Cement: A Socialist Realist Vision

One of our cultural biases needs to be addressed before considering Fyodor Gladkov and Stalin’s relationship. Socialist realism is frequently lampooned and relegated to the status of a political doctrine rather than an art form. John Gassner describes socialist realist theatre in broad terms as “humdrum,” “a narrow style fostered by intimidation,” and “utilitarian.”[27] Alla Efimova also remarks on this prejudice: “Traditionally described by the term ‘propaganda,’ this art is seen, especially in the West, as dry, lifeless, and didactic.”[28] Soviet artists, however, were not interested in only the government’s use of their work. They had a definite, aesthetic reaction they wished to create in their audience. Efimova describes the goal as “an artistic replication of real sensations or sensations of the real (physical).”[29] Many of the Soviet artists' aesthetic goals were not to control people but to evoke the feeling of real life in order to show their art depicting possible events. The political reasons for accepting socialist realism stemmed from the artists’ adoption of this stylistic objective. While Gladkov’s novel Cement became the basis for official socialist realism in literature, the movement existed before Gladkov utilized it as a rough style for his work. Efimova describes the history and use of the style by Stalin: “Rather, [Socialist realism] was used to legitimate a set of aesthetic preferences in literature and visual arts that were gaining popular support for a number of years preceding the First Congress of Soviet Writers [in 1934]. Furthermore, the doctrine as well as the practice of its enforcement intentionally left room for private decipherment (this is precisely what made individual artists vulnerable to accusations of ideological dereliction).”[30]

This meant that socialist realism was a style individual artists used before becoming accepted. It also allowed Stalin’s government to arbitrarily enforce certain stylistic regulations if they deemed a work of art or literature unfit for public use. Gladkov embraced the inspirational philosophy of socialist realism in order show a possible Communist future in literature.

In the opening chapter of Gladkov’s Cement, the protagonist, Gleb Chumalov, returns to his hometown after three years in the Red Army. What he expects is the lively, productive factory of his past, now in the hands of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” He finds quite the opposite. Gladkov writes, “He knew only one thing: that here was a gigantic tomb, a place of desolation and destruction…. And this tomb horrified him and he knew not what to do.”[31] The factory, Gleb’s home and the site of his family and work, was left untended as the Communists preferred to raise goats and make pipe lighters.[32] Gleb’s conflict throughout the novel is to energize them into action. Gladkov wrote his novel to bring this industrial ideal to life for his readers and inspire them to move past their difficulties. Gleb found it hard to adjust to his life and the new standards of behavior with his wife and the new government. The capitalist world, with its old morals and customs, had been upturned and a new, socialist paradigm needed establishing. He found it difficult to adjust to the new egalitarian relationships in home life and in government. Gladkov wrote Cement to support Communism by bringing about an industrial economy. Stalin saw the fervour Gladkov exhibited in the novel and wished to make all literary works as pro-communist as Gladkov. Therefore, Stalin made Cement his template for socialist realism in order to further his policies in economics and social control.

Gladkov wanted to continue the revolution into economic life: his goal was a metamorphosis of old ways into a new “Communist” life through his aesthetic style. He fought in the civil war in Kuban as a Communist.[33] Gladkov’s objective in Cement seemed to be to tap into the revolutionary spirit and apply it to the undisciplined production that many felt during the New Economic Policy. Biographer Hiroaki Kuromiya noted that even Stalin and other leaders looked back fondly on the Civil War as “‘a great heroic period’ and occasionally expressed their deep-seated anger at the prosaic life under the NEP.”[34] As a member of the intelligentsia and a dedicated Communist, Gladkov aspired to spur on the Party’s agenda and especially Stalin’s policies. Eugenia Ginzburg described his devotion to Stalin as “religious fervor.”[35] His fervor explains why he permitted frequent revisions to Cement over the years so it would be acceptable to new literary standards. Gleb’s main purpose in the story is to show the audience Marx’s main dictate and Gladkov’s view—man is what he creates: “Our hands aren’t meant for goats and pigs, but for something else. We know this: As our hands are so are our souls and our minds…What is this new economic policy? It means hit the devil in the jaw with a great effort at reconstruction. Cement is a mighty building material. With cement we’re going to have a great building-up of the Republic. We are cement, Comrades: the working class.”[36]

Without economic production to unite them under a cause, Gladkov’s characters were weak individuals who could accomplish nothing by themselves. As they joined together through Gleb’s enthusiastic struggle to restart the factory, their numbers made progress possible.

Stalin wanted an industrial revival to become the focus of his domestic policy. His ideals seemed to mirror Gladkov’s own. Stalin saw Cement as a perfect example of upholding the new government and portraying how the nation could mobilize under a communist cause. He wanted to maximize Russia’s industrial capabilities as quickly as possible, so that their enemies would not have time to catch them off-guard. Kuromiya describes, “Stalin [speaking] of Russian history as one of ‘continual beatings owing to backwardness’… [Stalin said] ‘We are fifty to one hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do this, or they will crush us.”[37] Stalin needed to convince the country that Russia could accomplish such prodigious goals even if the task seemed impossible. Gladkov has Lukhava explicate this sentiment of unaccustomed change to Gleb: “We’re going to fight by all possible means. Do not forget this will be a real struggle, calling for all our strength. And don’t forget that the time may seem inopportune. It’s a fight for the future, and therefore appears Utopian and absurd. Of course we’d know that only by audacity and strength can the future be made present. So let’s get down to work.”[38]

Gladkov’s characters supported Stalin’s policies explicitly; he used this feature of the novel as a socialist realistic standard for future literary works. Stalin used Cement as the model for his official literary style since Gladkov’s world fit well into the spirit of revolutionary activity and fervor. Shidky remarks to Gleb, “The main thing, Chumalov, is not to forget that you are above everything a Communist. All our reconstruction isn’t worth a damn unless it’s burned in the red fire of revolution. Remember this and keep a sharp look-out.”[39] Shidky’s remarks also seem to bolster Stalin’s purges of minorities with ties to nationalist groups or other reactionary forces. The language is concise and Gladkov’s characters explicitly state the themes, which made the story accessible to all readers. Serge, for instance, describes to a young girl on a boat, “We are people of merciless action, and our thoughts and our feelings belong to that which one calls necessity: the inevitable and incontrovertible truth of history.” [40] Here Gladkov extols the necessity of the October Revolution and implies the Communists’ victory was destined. While Stalin kept most of Cement’s structural aspects, some details of the story needed amending. The current policies of the 1930s had to be set so future workers would see no discrepancy between Stalin’s vision and Gladkov’s original. Gleb directly supports the main Party policy, although Stalin had to inevitably change the references to NEP from Gleb’s economic invigoration.[41] The ending carries the joy of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in its unity and Gleb’s intoxication with being part of the people. Gladkov explains, “He needed nothing. What was his life, an infinitesimal speck in this ocean of human lives? …He had no words, no life apart from this tumultuous mass.”[42] Stalin’s purges worked along similar psychological conditions. Bulgakov, for example, stated the accusations provided against him were false but he would gladly sacrifice his life for communism.[43] Stalin found Gladkov’s work supported his policies and promoted an ideal of a Soviet life like his own.

One problem associated with classifying Cement as socialist realism is the portrayal of its heroes. While Gleb is the protagonist and considered heroic, there are several places where his former, capitalist-bound idea of family collide with the new reality of society. Dasha comments, “You’re a Communist, it’s true. But you are also a brute man, needing a woman to be a slave to you, for you to bed with. You’re a good solider, but in ordinary life you’re a bad Communist!”[44] As she and Gleb progress through the plot, however, the actions drive them together again with a newfound equality and mutual respect. Gladkov describes Gleb’s feelings to Dasha: “He could not speak to her anymore like a master…This was no ordinary woman standing before him now, but a human being, equal to him in strength-one who has taken upon her shoulders all other burden of the past years.”[45] Gleb, indeed, is nearly overshadowed by Dasha in dedication to the Party ideals. Yet she too leaves Nurka—her only remaining family—with the children’s house where she dies. Dasha’s guilt over her lack of maternal nurturing is subdued in later editions. Stalin’s insistence on happy endings and a firm emphasis on stable marriages kept other children in fiction from dying like Nurka. Xenia Gasiorowska comments that “Modern women do not have to face Dasha’s heartbreaking choice between motherhood and social service.” [46] Both she and Gleb are redeemed by realizing each other as equals and recognizing the changes in their circumstances. With her daughter’s death, Dasha fails as a mother but makes up for it in political zeal. Both she and Gleb struggled to serve the revolution in any way they could.

Stalin also saw Gladkov’s novel as supporting his political policies. The drive for industrialization that becomes Gleb’s goal in life matches Stalin’s model worker. When Gladkov’s characters reach obstacles in the plot, his treatment of the story suggests that the problems originated from enemies of socialism. The characters that serve as unscrupulous counterpoints to the heroes suggest political corruption was rampant in the government structure. The case of Badin being able to steal freely from the food department and force himself on Polia seems to contradict the heroic idealization needed in later socialist realistic pieces. By allowing a high-ranking Party member in the story to be corrupt, however, Stalin allowed an artistic notion that corruption ran rampant in the bureaucracy created by the old guard. When the time came for his purges of party intellectuals, therefore, the public would consider the notion that even paragons of Bolshevik virtue could be hidden enemies. In the novel, Shibis attests to this sentiment: “The foe is mean, cunning and difficult to catch. We must forge a new strategy. It’s impossible to win just by indignation and revolt… In this case we have radically to change ourselves, harden ourselves, fortify the Bolshevik in ourselves for a long, lingering siege. The romance of the tumultuous battle-fronts is finished. We want no romance now.”[47]

Thus, Stalin used Gladkov’s Cement to ‘set the stage’ for his show trials and purges.

Both Stalin and Gladkov wanted to keep the revolution going before the social customs of previous years began to change life to a conservative, stable pace. Gladkov strove to portray the zeal of the masses’ unrest in the early days of the revolution in a new, economic progression for Russia. Stalin saw the corruption and backwardness of certain characters as the impediments to social progress which drove him to his purges. Kuromiya remarks that getting “peasant households on a socialist footing [was like] ‘raising the ocean.’”[48] Thus, he not only found validations of his economic policies but the necessity for forcing sweeping arrests and trials.

A Director’s Hidden Vision – Eisenstein and Ivan the Terrible

Sergei Eisenstein was also a favored member of the artistic intelligentsia who Stalin favored, although his work did not always fit into the Soviet leader's plans. His work before Stalin's rise to power came under attack as the regime change lead to a stricter environment in artistic expression. Historian Ron Briley describes the situation Eisenstein faced: “Shumyatsky (who would himself be purged and killed in 1938) termed Eisenstein's theories of montage inaccessible to the masses and, thus, elitist, while the director's years outside the Soviet Union had produced in him a taste for the exotic…and left him out of touch with the Soviet people.”[49]

Quickly coming under fire, Eisenstein followed the example of many Party members and engaged in self-criticism in order to stay alive (both politically and literally). Briley also suggests that Stalin's love for the cinema kept Eisenstein in close association with the dictator—"Thus even while his film projects were grounded, Eisenstein was allowed to maintain his position as a teacher and lecturer at the Technical School of Cinematography."[50] Stalin's love of film and his respect for Eisenstein's artistic skills brought about his proposal for Ivan the Terrible.

Eisenstein’s vision of Ivan the Terrible was meant to be a public veneration of the Russian tsar and a part of Stalin’s plan to rehabilitate former Russian heroes. Stalin’s project not only was meant to offer the tsar as a positive historical figure but as a positive comparison to the Soviet leader. However, Eisenstein managed to work two contrasting, parallel interpretations into his artistic vision for the movies. He hid the nonconforming elements of Ivan the Terrible beneath a tragic style of socialist realism (primary narrative) to escape the censors and include his own artistic vision (hidden narrative) of the production. Stalin did not notice the questionable content because Eisenstein’s vision of Ivan’s struggle in Ivan the Terrible: Part I aligned with Stalin’s struggle for control of the Soviet Union. Part I was almost exclusively about unification, intrigue against the tsar, and progressive ideals. Ivan the Terrible: Part II differs from Stalin’s vision because Eisenstein wished to portray the morally ambiguous portions of Ivan’s reign. Stalin might never have been aware of the hidden narrative, but because his goals for the film were not carried through into Part II, he saw the rest of the film as socially subversive. Eisenstein snuck past the socialist realist conventions and would have subverted the system if Stalin had not blocked Ivan the Terrible: Part II personally.

Stalin’s proposal for the film arouse from his refurbishing Russian history for the new Soviet era. He wanted Ivan’s reign taught in order to portray him as a nationalist hero[51] in accord with Russia’s destiny to become a centralized state. Joan Neuberger mentions a Russian proverb: “Ignore the past and you lose an eye, forget the past and you lose both eyes.”[52] While Stalin wished to usher in a new era free of past capitalist restraints and historical traditions, he had to build upon the foundation of feudal and capitalist histories. By retelling Ivan’s story in the cinema, he could disseminate his version quickly and –hopefully- to popular acclaim. However, Stalin also wanted to compare himself to Ivan and show his own superiority in history. Hiroaki Kuromiya quotes Stalin saying, “One of Ivan the Terrible’s errors was that he failed to knife through five large feudal families… [He] executed someone and then he felt sorry and prayed for a long time. God hindered him in this matter. Tsar Ivan should have been even more resolute.”[53] Stalin also commented that Ivan “expressed too much doubt about his course of action…the only problem with the historical Ivan was that he had put to death too few Boyars.”[54] After seeing the film, Neuberger also quotes Stalin as remarking that Ivan was not ruthless enough to accomplish his many reforms.[55] In each case, Stalin wished to portray Ivan as a forerunner of Communism’s policies. Stalin’s legacy was compared to Ivan’s when Eisenstein published the script. Neuberger writes, “[Eisenstein] had the script published in Russia’s premier literary journal, Novyi mir, and he tried to make careful choices about which state pressures to give in to.”[56] However, this public display of the process was his strategy to alleviate fears that he would upset the censors.

Eisenstein’s greatest accomplishment during the filming process was to hide a criticism of the Stalinist government within the approved material. Neuberger explains, “Eisenstein’s ability to survive was based on his mastery of the coded languages and masks of public discourse in the 1930’s and his willingness to accommodate state mandates in order to keep making films.”[57] By releasing the script after it was approved by the censors (with revisions), he presented a socialist realist façade. Later, he ignored many of the revisions and banned topics by removing explicit references to them in the script.[58] Eisenstein also wrote articles in the press praising Stalin’s government for allowing freedom of expression while other artists were unwilling to ingratiate themselves to the regime’s censors.[59] However, this public policy cost Eisenstein his political conscience in order to take a risk with his artistic aspirations. Briley quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to describe the feeling of other intelligentsia toward Eisenstein: "His fellow prisoner begs to differ, observing that the true mark of greatness lies on the moral plane with truth, and Eisenstein, in service of his master Stalin, failed to pass the test."[60] Gassner mirrors this sentiment in his description of tyranny in theatre: “But sooner or later, the theatre must pay for such security with a complete sacrifice of integrity and freedom.”[61] Eisenstein seems to express similar sentiments about the ethicalness of following socialist realist conventions against his conscience. Neuberger quotes him directly when he writes, “it is tempting to just write it out in a realist framework. But then the guilt of not sticking my neck out?!”[62] She attests to the unique accomplishment of the films: “We are forced to think hard while watching the film, an uncommon challenge in the Stalinist theater…Eisenstein compels us to question our assumptions about power, personality, kinship and responsibility, about the lines between good and evil, progressive and reactionary, real and imaginary, and to suggest ways in which seeming contradictions overlap.”[63]

Her statement of Eisenstein’s feats contrasts vividly with the introduction to Ivan the Terrible Part I. Eisenstein said he intended to portray the tsar as a consolidator of opinion and power, but throughout the film Ivan becomes a continuously isolated ruler with many enemies ranging from close associates to random assassins. He even indirectly describes the blurring of truth through the dilemma of accepting two versions of reality. The film’s hidden narrative brings the public and private, social and personal world of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign into its aesthetic style. Eisenstein lived through the terror of artist turning on fellow artist and wished to show the “unpredictable, arbitrary power” that flourished in both Stalin and Ivan’s reigns.[64] Neuberger especially contrasts his style with that of socialist realism in “Ivan’s emphatic contrariness, its very strangeness, asserted the artist’s right to ask hard questions instead of offering consoling solutions.”[65] Eisenstein used the comparison of Ivan and Stalin to support and criticize both.

Eisenstein’s artistic vision—the “unity of opposites”—allowed for his primary narrative and the Aesopian hidden narrative to coexist within his vision for Ivan. His “vision” encompassed not only the direction and symbolism inherent in his script, but also the physical blocking of the scenes to portray the themes and motifs. Neuberger justifies this idea: “Themes connected with Ivan’s conscience were less pronounced in the absence of the cathedral settings and religious objects that surround much of the action.”[66] The religious motifs are a good example of this world created in the two realities. The Archangel Michael on the ceiling of Ivan’s palace contains the secular meanings of moral concepts and sins personified,[67] which suggest Ivan’s quest for unity of Russia is heavenly-sanctioned. The angel also invokes apocalypse and brings focus to the amoral nature of Ivan as the head of the Russian State. Neuberger describes the image as “elongated, fragmented, and impossible to see all in one shot.”[68] By comparing Ivan and Stalin, therefore, this image implies that Stalin’s own great vision, “The Russian State,” is just as fleeting and indiscernible as the angel watching over its creation with Ivan. This duality shows how the primary narrative and hidden narrative can be expressed when the viewer knows where to find each set of meanings.

Eisenstein’s use of eyes is used in the two movies to feature the control of the state and the blind political conviction of tyranny. Eyes take precedence as dual associations of knowledge and ignorance throughout the works. Neuberger describes how eyes are associated with enemies of the state and with Ivan’s most loyal followers: “Kurbsky hides his disloyalty behind one eye, Maliuta is blind to Ivan’s flaws…”[69]