(Confusion.) I am one. (Noise.) Then hear this: My authornis oppressed. He is frightened. I will show kindnessnto anyone who forewarns me of whatever danger imperilsnhim. (To Moliere.) Weak as we are, we’ll find a way tonrout them, you and I. (Aloud.) The ban is lifted. Younmay stage Tartuffe.n”To find the time to telephone a writer while preparing for anPart)’ Congress!” an antiquarian book collector recorded in hisndiary in 1930: “Just shows that he is a big man who can take onnall the little people.” “I shall return to Russia,” wrote EvgenynZamyatin to Stalin in 1931, “when it becomes possible to servenbig literature without having to serve little people.” With suitablenfanfare, Zamyatin’s passport for foreign travel was validatednand the lucky favorite went abroad. That same year, Gorky returnednfrom Sorrento, followed by Dmitry Sviatopolk-Mirsky,nSergei Prokofiev, Marina Tsvetaeva, and millions of newly optimisticnWliite emitters. Pasternak ditched his Jewish first wife,nmarried an Orthodox Chrishan, and published a collecfion ofnpoems entitled Second Birth.n”I love you. King!” exulted Bulgakov’s alter ego, who was actuallynjust his plain old ego, the same ego that exulted in Pasternak,nand in Meyerhold, and in Gorky . . . They were beingnavenged! Wlien Stalin’s cultural manifesto of April 1932, Resolutionnon the Restructuring of Literary and Arts Organizations,nwas finally unveiled in all its glor)’, just before Easter, intellectualsnhugged and wept in the street, greeting one another withn”Christ is risen!” Meyerhold hung a framed copy of the manifestonin his bedroom, the way a Catholic would a crucifix.n”With one stroke of the pen,” comments the distinguished literarynhistorian Lazar Fleishman, Stalin’s perestroika “drovenfrom the literary arena those who only yesterday had seemednthe omnipotent arbiters of writers’ destinies. The dimension ofnthe euphoria that seized Soviet writers in the summer and autumnnof 1932 had no precedent.”nThose who suppose that it was easy to seduce the Russian intelligentsia,nfor the simple reason that the intelligentsia isnalways easily seduced, should bear in mind that our Lord, SunnKing, and Great White Avenger—publicly known, more modestly,nas our leader, teacher, and friend—was striking simultaneouslynat almost all other social groups, from politicians to engineersnto scientists, and enjoyed a similar success in everyninstance. Of course, by now, blood had begun to flow—firstndrops, then rivulets, then rivers. By 1937, oceans. But is it notnsignificant that, as late as 1938, Bulgakov was still writing a playnentitied T/ie Shepherd, in which young Stalin is transparentiynidentified with Christ?nIf Bulgakov had only hung in there for another five years, it isnpossible that his telephone would have rung again, Septembern1943 being a moment in Russian histor’ in some ways as pivotalnas April 1932. It was then that Stalin finally cast his weary eyenin the direction of the Russian Orthodox Church, mindfiil thatnhe would need Christianity for his next restructuring, a final solutionnthat would sweep away the last vestiges of Judeo-MasonicnBolshevism. Between 1943 and 1953, Stalin opened overn20,000 (yes, twent)> thousand) churches and several religiousnacademies that would keep the country in priests. But then hendied, and as a squabbling oligarchy returned to the Kremlin, hisnmaster plan for a totalitarian Byzantium fell into disrepair. Thenfirst thing Khrushchev did was to shut down all those damnnchurches.nIt was Khrushchev, of course, who launched the phrasen”Cult of Personality” on an unsuspecting West, and, for nearlyna half-century since his not-at-all-secret Secret Speech to thenTwentieth Party Congress, tiiat winged phrase has been a greatnboon to Western political scientists generally and Sovietologistsnin particular. Though not a genius of power maximization likenStalin, Khrushchev was no fool. His contribution to what cannotnbut emerge one day as the totalitarian Byzantium of Stalin’sndreams—“a common European home from the Atlantic to thenUrals” is the modern way of expressing it—remains misunderstood,nlargely thanks to the intellectual efforts of those same Sovietologistsnwhom he had tricked like small children with hisn”de-Stalinization” canard.nWhat is irrational about cheeringnon an omnipotence that, whilenturning all of one’s countrymen intonslaves, is likely to mete out its superior,ninscrutable, and deadly justice to annincomparably greater number of thosenone loathes than of those onencontentedly tolerates?nKhrushchev peddled the myth of the Cult of Personality becausenit suited Khrushchev’s political aims. The West boughtnthe myth of the Cult of Personalit)’, manufactured in the samenfactory of cliches that produced the mustachioed Hitier familiarnto us all—foaming at the mouth in a psychotic rage—becausenthe West was shopping for a palliative. Here was the out, thenback door, the loophole it had sought to buy, at the price of allntruth and logic, to deliver its cockamamie historiography fromnthe steel vice of Plato’s political axiom. Because if Stalin, andnfor that matter Hitier, were not unhinged maniacs but masternmanipulators of their people’s rational desires, and ultimatelynbeloved avengers of their people’s bruised egos, where does thatnleave the world of today—a world just as full of bruised egos?nDo not tell me that a writer rejected by Talk would not votenfor a political leader who would see to it that he got a personalnletter of apology from Tina Brown. Do not tell me that a fellownof the Hoover Institution would not like to receive a telephonencall from Vladimir Putin, asking him about the weather in California.nDo not tell me that an Oxford don would not sell hisndignit)’ for a bottle of mediocre claret. Well, then, remembernthe stor)’ of the Russian intelligentsia, and bear in mind that thenday will come when there are little notes, and telephone calls,nand even bottles of wine for each and ever)’ one of you out therenfrom your leader, teacher, and friend, so that you may call himnthe happiest of men and bless his name.nDo not tell me about the Cult of Personality. The only cultnthere has ever been is the cult of ourselves. nnnJUNE 2001/1 5n