María Teresa León in Moscow

License Creative Commons

Andreu Navarra

María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti travelled to the Soviet Union to attend the Congress of Soviet Writers, held in Moscow from 17 August to 1 September 1934. As Ángeles Ezama, editor of El viaje a Rusia de 1934 by María Teresa León (Renacimiento, 2019), reminds us, the International Organisation of Revolutionary Writers (MORP) was effectively a front for the Communist International, or Comintern. Its Spanish branch, after an unsuccessful first attempt promoted by Felipe Fernández Armesto in 1931, was finally established in 1932. Among those who joined were the prose writers César Arconada and Joaquín Arderíus, the poet Emilio Prados, the journalist Rosario del Olmo, the jurist, historian and politician Wenceslao Roces—future translator of Hegel—and the intriguing Isidoro Acevedo, who would die in the USSR in 1952 after having presided over the International Red Aid.

The association proved short-lived, undoubtedly due to the lack of backing from the Moscow-based MORP. It was not until 1933, following María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti’s first return from the Soviet Union, that the AEAR (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists) was founded, acting as the Spanish branch of the MORP and closely tied to its official publication, Octubre.

León published eight articles on her experience in the Heraldo de Madrid between 31 August and 1 December 1934. These chronicles combine staggering propaganda with more grounded, verifiable observations. In her 31 August piece, one of the most focused on the Congress itself, León links a blatant exaggeration with a more plausible detail: “In seventeen years, more has been produced and written than in a whole century under the Tsars. In the factories there are talks, posters, information about the Congress”. It is plainly evident that literature in revolutionary years paled beside the legacy of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov or Turgenev, rendering the hyperbole self-evident; and yet, the latter claim rings true. We know, for example, of Julio Matheu (1908–1985), a Spanish communist in exile, who was able to make a name for himself as a poet through the literary club of his factory.

At the event, the couple held lively conversations with Gorky, Fadeev—founder of the MOPR—Vera Inber, Babel, Ehrenburg, Leonov and many others. The political nature of the gathering emerged swiftly: “The secretary reads out the names of the honorary presidium: Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Kalinin, Ordzhonikidze, Bubnov, Andreyev, Thälmann, Dimitrov, Gorky, Kuibyshev, Kirov. Stalin’s inner circle in full. Some of them had less than four years left to live”. Then Zhdanov spoke: “We must search, like engineers, for the technique of the art of writing. It is not enough to feel; one must know how to express. One must draw upon historical experience and, with one’s own style, express the era in which one lives as art… Zhdanov is forceful. He speaks, fist raised, like at a political rally. One feels he is hammering the ideas into writers’ foreheads. At the end, they applaud him, grateful for his precise, rhetoric-free words”. All as it should be.

Later, gathered at Gorky’s house, the more complex aesthetics of Pasternak were celebrated, and the need for stylistic freedom proclaimed—only to conclude, inevitably, that such freedom naturally leads to socialist realism. It is worth remembering that Zhdanov would become the chief architect of this revolutionary aesthetic, one he later used to attack figures like Shostakovich and Eisenstein. León and Alberti were put up in the luxurious Metropol Hotel, an Art Nouveau behemoth in stark contrast to the modest Lux Hotel, which housed the political staff.

León’s chronicles become all the more vivid and compelling once they leave Moscow. Here her prose shines with swift strokes, shrewd associations, and sharp visual cues: “Women pass us crabs and watermelons through the windows. There’s a sea breeze. Rostov sheds its bloated merchant houses and, in the new fashion, builds sanatoria, housing, sports fields for its cobblers. In Rostov, beside the delicate current of the Cossack river, there’s a major footwear industry”. The inevitable comparisons with Spain arise: “Three days of flatlands give you the right to see a mere mound as a mountain. I was determined to find the first hill enormous. If these plains yield millions of tonnes of wheat, they are not beautiful like Castile, mended and Franciscan, with its blood showing through, alive with light and shadow. The Russian plains are black and vast, black and unending. They make you thirsty. The Soviet writers travelling with us speak of the mountains like the Dutch, savouring every mention”.

In the Caucasus, León marvelled at the tallest peaks in Europe (Mount Elbrus, 5,633 metres), surprised to find them round rather than jagged. Her article on the region, published in the Heraldo de Madrid on 23 October 1934, is especially valuable for its detailed description of a kolkhoz—a collectivised peasant community. It is arguably the most interesting piece in the series: “Armed with only a superficial idea of dates and figures, we set off to visit the Andreev kolkhoz. We go alone with Olga Tretyakova, now our angelic translator. The Ford jolts and scratches against the maize. We ford rivers. We climb hills. Groups of men and women tear the stalks from the maize and clear the fields. These are work brigades. A kolkhoz (a collective farming economy) is divided into brigades. Sixty men form a brigade. When they go out to plough or sow, they split into small groups of five or six under a work leader. To make life viable during these tasks, farmhouses are built near the fields. We visit one. It has dormitories for men and women, a room for children, and family quarters. We are shown how they live now”.

Everything is cheerful, musical, idyllic, hygienic. Needless to say, there is no mention of the thousands of families who refused (and continued to refuse) to abandon their ancestral homes, nor of dekulakisation, crop confiscations, or the devastating famines of 1932–1933. It is clear the writers are being shown only what is meant to be seen. But let us continue: “The Andreev kolkhoz comprises 312 families, totalling 1,200 people. They cultivate 2,400 hectares, of which 1,400 are wheat. Each family is entitled to a house and a cow, chickens, pigs, ducks and a small orchard, in addition to communal assets. In this kolkhoz, 60 families already have two cows; the rest, one. They cannot own horses, as there are only 600, needed for agricultural work. They have no tractor yet. We see the houses. They are white adobe, with straw or red-tiled roofs. In front, a large square for the animals. In small outbuildings: kitchens, stables, henhouses. The beds are very clean”. Guitars, caps, sailor hats for the children… Then come the postcard-like scenes: “In this rural garden, some young women in charge of forty children play the accordion so the children can dance. The accordion strikes up a sharp, monotonous rhythm that echoes across the Caucasus with its clapping. A barefoot child dances. The tips of his toes spring as if on flowers”.

The León-Alberti couple left the USSR by sea from Odessa, which León describes with notable precision. They sailed on the Italian ship Aventino, stopping at Constanța (Romania), Varna and Burgas (Bulgaria), and Istanbul, before arriving in Naples. At each stop, León draws a sharp political contrast between the country they have just left and those now receiving them—contrasts that highlight the looming threat of fascism: “Romania keeps Ovid’s memory alive in Constanța. A square bears the poet’s name, his statue bored amid provincial cafés. I do not know whether this monument was one of Mussolini’s gifts to cities once touched by Rome’s imperial foot, which, in his nostalgically imperialist imagination, he now embraces as part of his dreams of conquest. Recently he gifted the Spanish city of Tarragona a statue of Julius Caesar. No doubt, while Trajan Romanised this land, now destined to add a new oil-producing region to Europe’s discordant whole, he did not think of the wretched men we now see squatting at the doorways. And yet, it is with these men in mind that Mussolini dreams of solving unemployment by assembling an army of conquerors. Romania, for its part, seems untroubled by having a fascist government”. In reality, the Iron Guard, Romania’s violently antisemitic movement, outlawed by a liberal cabinet in 1933, would not take power until 1940, unleashing one of the most ferocious episodes of Holocaust collaboration.

Swastika-emblazoned ships moor in the Black Sea ports. The contrast grows starker as the travellers disembark in Istanbul. Here, León’s most human notes are reserved for the most crushed and destitute of figures. Her portrait of a poor, wandering character she encounters in the city streets is not without genuine pathos: “The postcard vendor has not moved throughout this entire conversation. He is poor; simply a poor Jew; he has no money for export. He remains here in Istanbul, among the gilded mosques, roaming the alleyways tangled with vines. He will never reach Pera, the wealthy quarter, where the poorly dressed are turned away. He will never cry: ‘Long live Mustafa Kemal!’ No one has ever cared for him, or for his dreams”. León and Alberti were pleasantly surprised to be able to converse in Spanish with Bulgarian and Turkish Sephardim.

In an article devoted to Stalin, published on 22 April 1937, María Teresa León would write of Soviet society: “After sacrifice and suffering, with the arrival of a comfortable life in the world’s most prosperous and promising country, the people living it are the most joyful comrades. The human factor, as comrade Stalin has requested, is the most precious capital they possess”. There is not a single stain on this new society. In her articles, the author notes no flaws, entertains no doubts. The 1936 Soviet Constitution appears the culmination of all democratic aspirations. As travel writing, León’s chronicles are little more than propaganda. Their value lies in their archetypal nature: by the mid-1930s, ideological polarisation left no middle ground—it seemed one had to be either communist or fascist. This was the material being fed to militant workers from 1934 onwards, in Octubre and a myriad of pamphlets and graphic publications. Those who arrived in the USSR after the fall of the Spanish Republic had to be carefully prepared for the brutal collision with reality.

It has even been claimed that Rafael Alberti never truly visited the USSR, but only an ideological, abstract, and ultimately unreal version of it. León and Alberti would return to the socialist homeland at least nine times: in 1932, 1934, 1937, 1955, 1956, 1964, 1965, 1966 and 1967.

In 1934 alone, 78,999 people were sentenced for “counterrevolutionary crimes”, of whom 2,056 were executed. A total of 59,451 prisoners were deported to forced labour camps across Siberia and Central Asia. This was the grim reality behind the idyllic visions presented to foreign guests. And 1934 was considered a relatively “mild” year. In 1933, 239,664 political prisoners were arrested through extrajudicial processes, 2,154 of them executed, and 138,903 sent to the Gulag. The numbers were even higher in 1935: 267,076 sentenced, 1,229 executed, and 185,846 deported. According to historian Moshe Lewin—cautious with figures and staunchly opposed to unsourced exaggeration—this amounts to a chilling total for just three years: approximately 600,000 arbitrarily sentenced, around 5,000 executed, and some 400,000 reduced to slave labour in lumber camps and railway projects in sub-zero temperatures, often with insufficient food (The Soviet Century, Crítica, p. 491).

These figures still pale before the horrors of 1937: 790,671 sentenced, 353,074 executed and 429,311 deported; or 1938: 554,258 sentenced, 328,618 executed and 205,509 deported to the Gulag. The man to take charge of these operations was none other than Minister Molotov, the very same who had raised a toast with León and Alberti at Gorky’s Moscow residence.

It is worth concluding with the note that in 1956, when she learned of some of Stalin’s crimes, María Teresa León expressed genuine dismay, and left written record of her rejection.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons