Paranoia Trumps True Love

February 15, 1947 decree outlaws marriage to foreigners

Leonid Zorin’s marvelous 1967 play, Warsaw Melody, begins in December 1946, when Victor, the male protagonist, meets a Polish voice student named Helen at the Moscow Conservatory. The two are immediately drawn to one another and a month later are dreaming of marriage. But then, on February 15, 1947, Stalin issues a decree prohibiting marriage to foreigners. Although Victor promises Helen he will “think of something,” he is, of course, powerless. The couple parts ways. Victor goes to work in Krasnodar and Helen returns to Warsaw.

When Mikhail Ulyanov and Yulia Borisova first performed these roles at the Vakhtangov Theater in the late sixties, the audience watched with baited breath as the young lovers’ hopes for happiness slowly evaporated. The Soviet authorities claimed they only had the public’s best interest at heart and were concerned, for example, that “in unfamiliar surroundings abroad, Soviet women do not feel comfortable and are subjected to discrimination.”

The marriage ban was just one tiny piece of the vast and terrible mosaic of the Cold War. The Soviet people had developed several illusions over the course of the struggle to defeat Nazi Germany. Some even hoped that after victory the government would finally stop seeing spies and saboteurs in every corner, every workplace, every family. The war showed who the true enemy had been – the fascists – and many of the countries that had previously been branded “imperialist” turned out to actually be the Soviet Union’s “friends” and allies. In the spring of 1945, Soviet and American troops embraced when they met at the Elbe. Wasn’t friendship with the West sure to flourish now?

As we know, that is not how things turned out. The iron curtain divided Europe, and former allies and friends became irreconcilable enemies. In the Soviet Union, everything associated with the West wound up prohibited. Thousands of returning soldiers who had, without a second thought, told their friends and relatives how well people live in the West, wound up in labor camps, accused of spreading lies and falsehoods harmful to Soviet reality. Emigrants who joyously returned to Soviet Russia after the war mostly found themselves behind bars, guilty of having left their socialist motherland in the first place. However, the decision to arrest them must certainly also have been influenced by the fact that they would have even more to say about life in the “rotten West” than the returning soldiers.

Foreign films, books, and paintings were suddenly nowhere to be found. Foreign classics were still available, but nobody dared to publish contemporary writers, with the possible exception of members of the American Communist Party writing about rampant racism in capitalist society, for example.

Paintings by Van Gogh and Gauguin were hidden away in museum storerooms, since they did not fit the Socialist Realist mold and were too foreign in spirit. The Bolshevik internationalism of the twenties and thirties was a thing of the past. Even the song The International was banned.

There was, of course, a reason for all this. On top of all the other sources of Cold War antagonism and rivalry, with every year Comrade Stalin increasingly fancied himself to be not so much a communist leader, but something akin to a Russian emperor. This explains why suddenly, in the middle of the war, the government started to collaborate with the Orthodox Church (which did nothing to stop the continuing arrest of priests), and, just as suddenly, the military ranks and shoulder straps of the “old regime” returned, despite being associated up to that point with the Whites. It also explains why, at a banquet celebrating victory over fascism, Stalin proposed a toast to the victors – the Russian people. Russian, not Soviet.

The times were changing. The horrible campaign that began in 1948 against “cosmopolitanism” was just around the corner. This word, which actually relates to the idea of being a citizen of the world rather than a particular country, was now code for “toadyism toward the West,” a charge that doomed many prominent Russian cultural figures. Mischief makers, who even in the darkest days never stopped cracking jokes, decided that, in order to eliminate non-Russian words from the lexicon, henceforth a univermag (department store) should be dubbed a “shop of all possible goods,” that a koktail-kholl (cocktail lounge, the likes of which nobody had actually seen) should be called a “pig hut,” and boks (boxing) should be renamed “mug-beating.”* But in general, with every month it was less and less a laughing matter. Many people recall from those days the horror they felt at the mere sight of a foreigner. Anna Akhmatova is reputed to have claimed that all the horrors of the Cold War began with a nocturnal visit to her apartment by the renowned English literary scholar Isaiah Berlin. A totalitarian regime combined with a completely closed country and nationalist tendencies to boot – it is hard to think of anything more terrifying.

The terror penetrated people’s souls and lodged there for many years. In Zorin’s Warsaw Melody, Victor travels to Warsaw ten years later, in 1957. The Khrushchev era was right around the corner, prisoners were being released from the camps, the decree banning marriages to foreigners had been revoked, and in Moscow crowds were clamoring to get into a movie theater showing a week of French cinema. The 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students brought flocks of foreigners to the USSR. None of these events are brought directly into the play, but the audience knew that the times were easier, if only because now a Soviet citizen could travel abroad on business.

Still, when Victor and Helen meet again and realize that they still love one another, the play’s protagonist cannot summon the courage to spend even one night with his beloved. He knows that if he fails to return to the hotel the other members of the delegation will immediately notice and inform on him. And so they part, to meet again in another ten years, this time in Moscow, where they say goodbye, forever: a dramatic encapsulation of the millions of personal tragedies that was the Cold War.

* “Shop of all possible goods”: «лавка всевозможных товаров»; “pig-hut” «ерш-изба»; “mug-beating”: «мордобитие».