Power Corrupts

I share this with Joseph Stalin: a great appreciation for the musical genius of Maria Yudina. And I share this with Maria: a deep loathing of Stalin.

Maria never made a secret of her disgust and hatred of the Soviet regime. She let Stalin know, at great personal peril. He preserved her life and kept her safe because of her enormous talent. Also, she was never really a threat to his power.

The story might be apocryphal, but it is true enough and the film captures her spirit well. It also brilliantly shows the wild jockeying for power that follows Stalin’s death, with fantastic portrayals of all the important figures from this period: Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrentiy Beria, Vyacheslav Molotov, Andrey Andreyev, Georgy Zhukov. It also serves as an excellent guide to what actually happened in those strange months that led to Beria’s execution and the rise of Khrushchev to become General Secretary.

There is enough real history here to justly calling this film nonfiction. For example, it is rather obvious that Stalin’s inner circle was thrilled to hear that the great man would soon kick the bucket. They waited a full day before calling a doctor because they had to meet in committee to make a decision. Plus there was another problem, again drawn from real life: Stalin had already ordered the death of nearly every competent doctor in Moscow, so there wasn’t anyone left to treat him.

If one is interested in learning the cold, hard fact of a murderous regime, one can and should read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gruesome work “The Gulag Archipelago.”

For the more faint of heart, the film is hugely important if only to draw attention to this terrible history, and perhaps get a new generation interested in the truth about Soviet communism. It created a blood path, dictatorship, poverty, and fantastic amounts of human suffering. It’s remarkable that anyone could, following this experience, proclaim an attachment to socialism given that this was the most spectacular experience in history that took place under the rubric of the ideas of Marxism.

Now, you could watch all this come down and observe that these are all very bad people doing bad things. The question, however, might be turned around: what would you do under these conditions? Maybe you would be heroic and guarantee your martyrdom. Many people in history have taken this heroic route. But not even the most rigorous traditions of morality and spiritually have required heroism. Most stop short of mandating that in favor of merely not doing evil.

If you see this around you enough—the way that envy puts a target on the forehead of the successful, the way friendship and loyalty evaporate in the face of palpable threats to position and power, the cravenness of the human personality when faced with the prospect of material deprivation, the shocking lacking of concern that people can demonstrate for high ideals in practice, regardless of what they otherwise preach—and you can develop a pretty dark outlook on life. Anyone can be a practitioner of betrayal and evil; anyone can be a victim.

At the same time, the preservation of civilization is bound up with a culture of respect for truth, human rights, the hope for justice, and the good of all. It’s not just under Soviet communism where these ideals are destroyed. They can disappear without notice even in seemingly civilized settings: church, business, family, and friendship networks.

It’s an appalling realization to discover just how ephemeral the notion of morality truly is in practice. Your best friend could be secretly conspiring to destroy you; the recipients of your benefaction will knife you if conditions are right; your successes could be the very occasion of your undoing in the face of jealousy and envy; a person’s ambition unchecked by principle can lead to grotesque injustice against you. You cannot really know the true character of anyone who has never been put to the test: what evil are you willing to practice in order to maintain your living standard or save your life?

Let’s return to the brilliant Maria Yudina. She focused on personal and artistic excellence. She never compromised. She fought Stalin at every step with profound courage and tenacity. She suffered enormously but kept her dignity. She left an amazing artistic legacy. Somehow she got through the worst of times, stayed alive, and thrived.

Maria’s life shows us that not even the worst institutions can crush a soul that is indefatigably dedicated to truth and integrity as first principles.