FALSE IDOLS WITH GOOD TASTE

One can be brutally critical about many aspects of Soviet life, and rightly so, but there have also been many good things and great things about the USSR, which, in all fairness, cannot be taken away from that period of Russian history and which stand in sharp contrast to the revolting picture presented by the post-Soviet era especially during the Yeltsin decade.
One of the things which grieve me about modern Russia is the apparent murder of good taste among the bad excesses of the vulgar pop culture of the nouveaux riches, who rose during the Yeltsin era, and now seem to be refusing either to go away, or adjust themselves to what used to be Russia’s hallmark achievement in the years past, remarkably, during those Soviet years--her elitist culture, her impeccably good aesthetic taste for the highest class culture that the world has ever produced.
Thinking of the terrible early years of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and of its aftermath, it’s hard not to wonder how it was possible for the Russian nation, having lived through that hair-raising experience, not to have coarsened up amid the destruction and slaughter on a wholesale scale, but to continue to hold on to her acute aesthetic refinement to the point that it would become clear that, even stripped of her vital possessions and bare essentials, one possession she would not part with for any price, even if it were for a glass of water and a crumb of bread when dying of thirst and hunger, was her glorious culture, the backbone on which new flesh would eventually grow, after the old flesh had been torn off by the extreme violence of yet another one of her ‘transitional’ periods, in which destruction was always the first step of a national re-Creation.
There was a very popular Soviet story of how Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, that brutal, amoral, unscrupulous and manipulative desperado responsible for the deaths of many thousands of Russian heroes and patriots and for the flight of countless others to the West, almost wept, as he was listening to a performance of Beethoven’s piano sonata #23, the Appassionata. “I know nothing better than the Appassionata,” he allegedly said, and I have no doubt that the story is true. Even “false idols” in Russia have been endowed with good taste!
Needless to say, the extraordinary thing about this story is not that Comrade Lenin was actually listening to Beethoven and commentING on his music so passionately, but that this curious fact had become a propaganda showpiece, as this otherwise false idol’s approval of Beethoven’s masterpiece would serve the lofty purpose of cultivating elitist taste among even the least aesthetically-inclined Soviet citizens, just because it was a matter of State policy.