What to Die For

Stalin said: . . . These people, devoid of conscience and honor, people with a morale of beasts, have the impudence to call for the destruction of the great Russian nation, the nation of Plekhanov, of Lenin, of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Glinka and Tchaikovsky, Gorki, Chekhov, Sechenov and Pavlov, Repin and Surikov, Suvarov and Kutuzov. . . .

With these names of Russian men who are dead and yet alive, Joseph Stalin reached to the heart of his nation. Familiar names summon understanding from shared remembrance; great names sometimes evoke greatness. Joseph Stalin wanted to remind his people what it is to be a Russian.

Russian men and women, who always hope for what they need and never seem to get it, would understand why even the name of holy Lenin followed Plekhanov's. Some say that in the square called Kazansky in Leningrad there are still echoes of the wild, terrifying shouts of Lenin's teacher, the philosopher Plekhanov, on the occasion of the first Russian popular demonstration in 1876.

Belinsky, the literary critic, wrote the letter castigating the old, then reactionary Gogol which for young Russians ever since has been a sort of declaration of faith in freedom. Chernyshevsky was the one who began as a literary critic but eventually went to Siberia for his classic revolutionary answer to the question What Is To Be Done?

Pushkin, who wanted to be a Byron and died in a bourgeois duel, uncovered Russia's deepest melancholy in Boris Godunov, its worst superficialities in Eugene One gin. Tolstoy need not have written the great length of War & Peace to portray the best Russia; his typical common Russian, the soldier Karatasv, stands "an unfathomable, rounded-off and everlasting personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth." Glinka's Ruslan and Liudmila sang the gay folk tunes; Tchaikovsky's Pathetique caught in single chords all the national sadness.

Gorki, son of an upholsterer, himself a worker in the railway shops of Tiflis, wrote of tramps and social outcasts with the familiarity of a man who was one. A city took his name. Chekhov made heroes and heroines of people who suffered. Sechenov and Pavlov, the greatest Russian physiologists, tried to analyze suffering and end it.

The artists Repin and Surikov fixed in oil a sense of Russian gusto: Repin's Reply of the Cossacks to the Sultan curses in color. General Suvarov, who slaughtered the Turks at Ismail and the Poles at Warsaw, showed that in war a Russian can be ruthless. General Kutuzov, who lured Napoleon to his fate, showed that he can be shrewd.

Joseph Stalin spoke to Russians. To Britons and Americans in London last week another Russian spoke:

A theater audience sat clapping hands. The audience had stood while a phonograph played God Save the King (sometimes called America) and the Internationale, then watched a play called Distant Point by a Russian author named Alexander Afinogenov. The play was about a Red Army general, dying of cancer of the lung, talking to villagers in Siberia, persuading them that they must prepare themselves for invasion.

While the applause went on, Actor Edmund Willard, still in the uniform of the general, stepped out from behind the curtain and raised a hand for silence.

"We have received news," he said, "of the death in a Moscow air raid of the Soviet author of this play." Then, from the play itself, he quoted an epitaph for which any man ought to be glad to die:

"We all have one distant point, a world in which men shall live their lives in freedom and happiness. We all think of that, live for that to the very last second of the last hour. And when death comes--why we'll die alive."

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