INTRODUCTION
353
their
struggle
to
build communism, of disorienting and demoral–
izing Soviet youth and of undermining the principles of socialist
realism by writing in a subjective and pessimistic way without
regard for the great political ideas from which the people drew
its inspiration. Zhdanov's speech was followed by a decree of the
Central Committee which ordained the strict observance of
s0-
cialist realism and announced certain practical measures to insure
that there would
be
no backsliding from it in the future.
Lenin–
grad,
one of the journals which had published offending work,
was
abolished altogether and the other,
,(,vezda,
was put under
the charge of a member of the Central Committee. The easy–
going Tikhonov, whose "fellow-traveling" past had been any–
thing but orthodox, was replaced as secretary of the Union of
Soviet Writers by the fanatical Fadeyev. The orgy of denuncia–
tion
in
the press after this decree was as bad as anything before
the war. The atmosphere of terror was reestablished and
all
the
gains made during the war were wiped out. The years that fol–
lowed were unimaginable. Literature and the arts ceased to
exist
in
any recognizable form. The cinema was almost com–
pletely destroyed. Mter the Central Committee's decree denoun–
cing, among other films, the second part of Eisenstein's
Ivan the
Terrible/
most of the studios were closed down and there was
consequently such a shortage of material for the movie houses
that several captured Nazi films, dubbed in Russian and billed
as
"new foreign films," were shown to Soviet audiences. One was
the anti-British
School of Hatred,
which had its premiere in
• Berlin in 1941. It shows the revolt of some Irish schoolboys
against their sadistic English master and it ends with the burning
of the Union Jack. Another such film,
The Last Round,
is anti–
American and it concerns the fixing of boxing-matches in New
York; the hero
is
a blond member of the master race. The show–
ing of these films occurred at a time when the West was fre-
5. Eisenstein was accused of having depicted the "progressive" praetorian
guard
(oprichnina)
of Ivan the Terrible as a band of fascist hooligans
like the Ku Klux Klan.
