It is normally creative artists--not party hacks or politicians--who can best discern and describe the Zeitgeist.
Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is considered by many to have been the greatest composer of the Twentieth Century. He died in 1975, but his sardonic observations as an alert, intelligent, naturally skeptical creative artist trying to survive in Stalin's police state seem to offer some startling reflections of our own time and place: "Amerika," 2007.
Below the break are a few still resonating themes from Shostakovich's posthumously published memoir (as told to Solomon Volkov), Testimony (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1979). There may well be as much Volkov as Shostakovich in this Testimony, but many Russians who knew Shostakovich well, including his son Maxim and also noted cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, considered the overall content of Testimony to be authentic.
A little déjà vu with Sunday brunch, anyone?
On what Shostakovich had heard and read as a child about the abotive Revolution of 1905, sparked by the Russian Empire's disastrous, lost war with Japan:
I think that it was a turning point--the people stopped believing in the Tsar. The Russian people are always like that--they believe and they believe, and suddenly they stop. And the ones the people no longer believe in come to a bad end.
On his Eleventh Symphony, which dealt with:
...contemporary themes, even though it's called 1905. It's about the people, who have stopped believing when the cup of evil has run over.
On illusions:
In 'King Lear' the important thing, as I see it, is the shattering of the miserable Lear's illusions. No, not shattering; shattering comes all at once and it's over, that wouldn't make it tragedy, it wouldn't be interesting. But watching his illusions slowly, gradually crumbling--that's another thing. That's a painful, morbid process.
On history as a constantly re-enacted farce, often enabled by the willfully ignorant:
You don't find it funny anymore. But people around you are laughing, the young people who are seeing this vulgar show for the first time. It's pointless trying to explain anything to them, they won't understand anyway. You seek out spectators of your own age; they know, they understand, and you can talk to them. But there aren't any; they have died. And the ones who survived are hopelessly stupid, and that's probably why they survived. Or they pretend to be stupid, which also helps.
I will never believe that there are only idiots everywhere. They must be wearing masks---a survival tactic that permits you to maintain a minimal decency. Now everyone says, 'We didn't know, we didn't understand. We believed Stalin. We were tricked, ah, how cruelly we were tricked.'
I feel anger at such people. Who was it who didn't understand, who was tricked? An illiterate old milkmaid? The deaf-mute who shined shoes on Ligovsky Prospect? No, they seemed to be educated people--writers, composers, actors. The people who applauded the Fifth Symphony. I'll never believe that a man who understood nothing could feel for the Fifth Symphony. Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about.
Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony was composed in 1937 and was first performed that November in Leningrad, which had been especially hard hit by Stalin's political show trials and purges. Many in the audience wept upon hearing it, and the crowd gave a forty minute standing ovation at its conclusion.
On the lust for power:
Isn't the lust for power a perversion? At the moment when the lust for power arises in you, you're a lost man. I am suspicious of every candidate for leadership. I had enough disillusionment in my misty youth.
And so, having satisfied his perverted desires, the man becomes a leader, and now the perversions continue, because power has to be defended, defended against madmen like yourself. For even if there are no such enemies, you have to invent them, because otherwise you can't flex your muscles completely, you can't oppress people completely, making the blood spurt. And without that, what pleasure is there in power? Oh, very little.
On self-proclaimed messiahs:
One man cannot teach or change all the other people in the world, no one has succeeded at that, even Jesus Christ couldn't say that He did. No one's made that world record, especially not in our troubled and rather nervous times. Experiments in saving all mankind at one fell swoop seem awfully dubious now.
But in my not so very long life I've come across sick people who were convinced that they were called to set mankind on the right path, and if not mankind in its entirety, at least, then, their own countrymen. I don't know, maybe I was lucky, because I personally saw two saviours of the world; two such personages. These were, as they say, patented saviours; I also saw some five candidates for the job....
All right, let's leave the candidates aside. The patented saviours had a lot in common. You couldn't contradict either, and both were quick to vilify you in rather uncontrolled language if they were ut of sorts. And most important, both had total contempt for the very people they were planning to save....
Oh yes, I forgot another trait common to these above-mentioned but not named leaders: their false religiosity.
In this passage Shostakovich is referring to dissident writer and religious zealot Alexander Solzhenitsyn on the one hand and to Joseph Stalin on the other. Shostakovich considered Solzhenitsyn's sanctimony to be a self-serving public relations pose to seek recognition as a modern Russian saint. As for Stalin's professed devotion to communist ideology, Shostakovich believed:
Tyrants and executioners have no ideology, they only have a fanatical lust for power. Yet it's that fanaticism which confuses people for some reason.
On Soviet notions of family values:
Then the law on sexual segregation in schools. Boys and girls separated, in order to maintain morality, and so that they wouldn't ask teachers stupid questions about 'things' and 'holes.'
When the Dresden Museum exhibition was in Moscow, schoolchildren didn't see it, because it was restricted to those over sixteen to protect that Soviet family. Otherwise the children might see some naked women, by Veronese or Titian. And they would become incorrigible and move on to really dangerous behaviour.
One thing leads to the next. They cover plaster figures with bathing suits and cut out kissing scenes from films, and watch out, artist, if you plan to exhibit a nude. You'll be showered with threatening letters, and not all of them from above. The simple folk will be incensed, saying that the depiction of naked women is contrary to our simple, Soviet, worker-peasant point of view.
One simple man wrote a really wonderful rebuke of such shamelessness in the representational arts. He wrote: 'Such depictions arouse extraordinary lust and lead to the destruction of united family life.' He ended with, 'The artist should be put on trial for such immoral decay!' This isn't something that Zoshchenko or I invented, it actually happened.
(Zoshchenko, a close friend of Shostakovich, was a writer much admired for his satirical short stories.)
On Stalin's inner circle:
Stalin was surrounded by coarse, profoundly ignorant people, who read nothing, who were interested in nothing.
On his reasons for relating his memoirs (to Solomon Volkov):
...I'm not a historian. I just want to tell what I know well--too well. And I know that when all the necessary research is completed, when all the facts are gathered, and when they are confirmed by the necessary documents, the people who were responsible for these evil deeds will have to answer for them, if only before their descendants.
If I didn't believe in that completely, life wouldn't be worth living.
If we in the blogosphere did not believe in that completely, we could not summon the will to scrutinize the world's news and events critically, post our own diaries, and read the insights of others at a refuge like Daily Kos. But will any of us really benefit as a result? The current alternative, the Democratic Party's leadership, has proved largely to be either feckless or complicit. So are we really thinking, scribbling, and documenting mainly for the benefit of our children, or perhaps of our children's children--rather than for ourselves?
True, most of us in today's Amerika do not have to worry about the secret police interrogations, forced labor camps, and executions that supported Stalin's brand of authoritarian rule. But who needs such crude Twentieth Century methods when a Twenty-first Century national security state ruled by a relentless "unitary executive" can employ modern means of surveillance and control? Amerika's Big Brother can deploy automated wiretapping of voice and data communications, warrantless national security letters, governmental scrutiny of proprietary commercial databases, and sophisticated data-mining techniques to monitor and screen the entire population for potentially "subversive" actions and even for the potential "thought crimes" described by George Orwell.
The promotion of high levels of personal debt, the dismantling of organized labor, and the constant drumbeat of prolefeed ("the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses") produced by a handful of mass media conglomerates combine to engender a docile general population. The neocon and corporatist ideologues strive for the same goal as Orwell's Ministry of Truth and Thought Police: the self-administered discipline of crimestop:
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical..., and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
The Bush/Cheney soft authoritarian apparatus is not as brutal as was Stalin's apparatus, but surveillance and contol in Amerika are far more technically advanced, comprehensive, and, ultimately, perhaps even more effective.
With our Sunday brunch finished and coffee cup drained, we can return to our own contemporary tragi-comic opera. The names of the cast members may be different, but the key themes of our score seem eerily familiar to those experienced by Dmitri Shostakovich, Twentieth Century composer and observer.
But maybe, just maybe, the general public in Amerika, especially those portions who are politically aware, will turn out not to be as credulous and manipulable as the rulers and managers of the neocon/corporatist surveillance state expect.
By 1989, a mere fourteen years after Shostakovich's death, the general publics throughout the Soviet Bloc proved themselves to be politically aware and utterly dismissive of the official propaganda. Credulity died, and an entire empire collapsed.
Officers and troops refused orders to fire on crowds. Even the secret police could no longer stomach their official roles, and in Leipzig, East Germany, Stasi operatives assigned to disrupt candlelight vigils and marches at Nikolaikirche, where J.S. Bach had often performed and conducted his transcendent music 250 years before, ended up joining the demonstrators. Within days the Berlin wall had been torn down. Democracies were born throughout the Soviet Bloc, and many survive to this day.
Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell's greatest novel, walks through the streets of London and overhears a broken-down old man telling his wife:
'We didn't ought to 'ave trusted 'em. I said so, Ma, didn't I? That's what comes of trusting 'em. I said so all along. We didn't ought to 'ave trusted the buggers.'
--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
When will credulity die in Amerika?
When will the general public come to its senses and spit out the spoon-fed prolefeed?