The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia by Maureen Perrie (review)

Abstract

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1071 potential readership: those teaching and studying film history and Russian film, for whom the publication of this work will surely be a great boon. Queen Mary, University of London Jeremy Hicks The Cult of Ivan the Terrrible in Stalin'sRussia. By Maureen Perrie. Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2001. xv + 255pp. ?47-5?- ISBN 0-333-65684-9. In the perestroika period, when once again there was a review of Russian and Soviet history, Russia was jokingly called the country with 'an unpredictable past'. Meanwhile , the transformations of Russian history were quite predictable both in the Soviet and in the post-Soviet epoch. The circumstance that in the Stalin era, parallel to the formation of the Stalin cult we see the unprecedented progress of a cult of Ivan the Terrible, was not, of course, a chance occurrence. In contrast to the cults of Peter the Great or Alexander Nevskii, the cult of Ivan the Terrible was in Russian historio? graphy a reasonably new phenomenon and consequently required an unusual degree of 'ideological maintenance'. The novelty of Perrie's book I see in the fact that she has concentrated her attention not so much on the reasons for the cult of Ivan the Terrible (which are well known), but on its structure and engineering. The book consists of three sections. The firstgives a wide historiographic context for the Stalinization of Russian history in the 1930s and 1940s (the confirmation of patriotism, the justification of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the annexation of the Baltic states, the threat from the east, the 'Great Patriotic War'). The second section is devoted to the Stalinization of Ivan the Terrible himself from firststeps in the mid-i930S (the struggle against the Pokrovskii school) to the total rewriting of Russian history in the Zhdanov era. Finally, in the third section, three artistic repre? sentations of Ivan are considered: in V. Kostylev's novel, in Aleksei Tolstoi's plays, and in Sergey Eisenstein's film. The structure of the book?from the general to the particular?has its logic: it not only offers the material to the reader in a consistent fashion, but also represents a miniature model ofthe very structure ofa political myth. The material used?including interesting archival material?has allowed the author to create a captivating historical narrative. In fact, the historiography of the Stalin era had no tradition concerning the cult of Ivan the Terrible and in many respects it embraced the topic in a revolutionary way. The absence of a foundation in tradition resulted in the cult of Ivan the Terrible appearing as the most advanced historical cult of the Stalin period, since it was built up almost from scratch and therefore brought forthan extensive body of literature. Here the author entered an area not only of pure politics and representation, but also of social traumatism and the collective uncon? scious. Certainly, when the cult of Ivan the Terrible was created, reasons of political pragmatism dominated, but, first,the function of this cult was not just historical al? lusion; second, when we deal with a complete cult as a product of political mythology, inevitably questions ofwider scope arise: forexample, to what extent the social frustration ofthe epoch of Stalin's terrorwas projected onto the image of Ivan the Terrible; or to what degree this cult, created by the authorities, was focused on concealment, and to what degree?on the contrary?on disclosingthe terroristnature of Stalinism. The most productive way ofsearching out the answers to these questions is certainly offeredthrough representations in art. It is in them that those subconscious pulses are latent, which are hardly read (if at all) in officialhistoriography. However, the analyses of the three creative texts, it seems to me, fall short of a deep artistic interpretation. The author approaches them chiefly as a historian coming to historical documents, but they (and this particularly concerns Eisenstein's film) are firstof all works of art, and have a long tradition of analysis and interpretation (it is strange, for example, 1072 Reviews that there is practically no reference to the huge?above all Western?literature on Eisenstein's film). Despite that, Perrie's book undoubtedly represents an important contribution...