When Jordan acknowledges this ‘doublethink’, Karkov goes on to warn him: ‘you know how dangerous it is to make jokes even in jokes.’ This ambiguity, this dualism, this ill-defined line between what you could get away with and what would get you shot, was the hallmark of the Soviet Union in the decade described by Professor Katerina Clark in her book Moscow, The Fourth Rome.

Why the ‘Fourth’ Rome? Russian Orthodox believers had long referred to Moscow as the ‘Third’ Rome, the legitimate successor to Rome itself and then Byzantium as the seat of the true church. Under Stalin, Moscow was again to be a centre of world civilisation, but a post-Christian one where, in Professor Clark’s words, culture rather than religion played the ‘central role in articulating the new belief system’ of communism. The Fourth Rome was a Marxist one.

Partly, this was a response to external threat. Soviet diplomacy of the 1930s fought to stem the influence of fascism spreading from Germany and Italy: the aptness of Clark’s title is reinforced by Mussolini’s designation of his own régime as the ‘Third’ Rome. So her book describes one side on a battlefield where cultural conflict was about to erupt into open warfare. And in the end it would be neither the Third nor the Fourth Rome, nor even Hitler’s Berlin – rebuilt as ‘Welthauptstadt Germania’ – that would emerge victorious as the new world capital, but the Big Apple.

Aleksander Mikhaylovich Gerasimov, I.V. Stalin and K.E. Voroshilov in the Kremlin (1938)

Clark elaborates on the idea, first proposed in 1936 by German thinker Walter Benjamin, that totalitarian régimes do not so much politicise art as ‘aestheticise’ politics. Much of her book is about the conduct of these aestheticised politics within the Soviet Union – like the reconstruction of Moscow as a utopian cityscape, culminating in the capital’s famed Metro system. But equally important to her argument are Soviet relations with Europe; with Germany, France, and Republican Spain – the latter the Great Cause in the international struggle against Fascism. In garnering international support for this struggle – and bringing it under their control – the Soviets cultivated a Moscow-leaning coalition of intellectuals, which she likens to the international ‘Republic of Letters’ during the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This was the background to For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway based his character ‘Karkov’ on a real person, Mikhail Koltsov, one of four missionaries for the Fourth Rome whose careers Clark uses to illustrate the centrality of culture, particularly literature, to Soviet politics and diplomacy. And Koltsov personified the ambiguity of the times: he was a journalist, publisher, spook, propagandist, and régime apologist who wrote approvingly of Stalin’s purges. In the milieu Clark describes, rather than being at odds with each other these roles were complementary; Koltsov was ‘both a Soviet functionary and a revolutionary Romantic and cosmopolitan’.

Viktor Ivanovich Govorkov, Stalin in the Kremlin Cares for Every One of Us (1940)Many will be loath to accept that such a combination was possible. To those raised on books like Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968) and Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope (1970), not to mention George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the idea that the Soviet régime could have engendered anything worth considering on its own merits goes against the grain. But Clark’s intention is ‘to tell the cultural history of the 1930s without dwelling on the purges, or on some titanic struggle between the regime and the dissidents. I do not dispute that trajectory, but rather want to incorporate it in a broader perspective.’

To do so, Clark has to persuade the reader that there was more to Stalin’s Soviet Union than just repression, dissent, and mass murder, and in this she largely succeeds. The poet Boris Pasternak, the composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, and the author Mikhail Bulgakov – scarcely the B-team – all worked in Stalin’s bloodstained utopia. While they suffered in the climate of terror – Shostakovich famously surviving only by the skin of his teeth – their endurance and the masterworks they produced refute the simple proposition that nothing good came out of the Soviet Union. And while these four great artists died of natural causes, Clark’s missionaries of the Fourth Rome weren’t all so lucky.

We tend to think of totalitarian régimes as simple organisations with black-and-white rules and predictable outcomes, but Stalin’s Soviet Union was a messy, confusing place. Caprice, it seems, and not consistency, is the hallmark of tyranny. Of Clark’s four exemplars Koltsov, having made one joke too many, in late 1938 disappeared into Stalin’s dungeons – whence the playwright and journalist Sergei Tretiakov had preceded him. Another of Clark’s agents of ‘Soviet power intent on converting their Western counterparts’ was the film director Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin (1925) embodied the revolutionary aesthetics of the early Soviet Union. Eisenstein died in 1948 of a heart attack brought on by ‘the anxieties and pressures’ – Clark tells us – of yet another ‘difficult moment in Soviet cultural history’. The only one of her four missionaries to survive Stalin was the journalist and author Ilya Ehrenburg, whose novel The Thaw (1954) gave its name to the Khrushchev period.

Like Stalin’s Soviet Union itself, Clark’s book can be a confusing place as she tracks the endless shifts in the meaning of key terms like ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘lyric’. While such topics seem innocuous, in Stalin’s time these shifts in meaning could be lethal to those who misconstrued them. But if the confusion she describes arises from her subject matter, one can’t help but think that Clark herself contributes to it. For example, she characterises Andrei Vyshinsky’s conduct of the prosecution at the Moscow show trials as tending towards ‘an even greater downplaying of particularity and a generic indiscriminateness of a degree that one might call hyperbolic antiparticularism’. Surely the word ‘generalisation’ would have done just as well?

Meanwhile, as the reader strives to keep hold of a thread of continuity in the ideological and semantic labyrinth that is Clark’s Soviet Union, they are reminded of the protean ability of art to shrug off meanings foisted on it. Take the depiction of ‘Soviet everyman’ in the giant statue Worker and Kolkhoz (collective farm) Woman by Vera Mukhina, which crowned the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. After the Exhibition, the statue was shipped to Moscow where it was re-erected, becoming the emblem of the Mosfilm film studio. It became so identified as a symbol of communist orthodoxy that, after the collapse of the USSR, parodies of the statue became the hallmark of post-Soviet rejection of the régime.

But the Kolkhoz Woman also became one source of inspiration for the Goddess of Liberty, the centrepiece of the 1989 student protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square: the communist icon became an anti-communist one. And while the Tiananmen statue was torn down, her incarnations sprang up everywhere; even today one survives on the campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong – a reminder of just how hard it is for ideologues to impose consistency on symbols.

In the end, Professor Clark’s book leaves us contemplating a paradox: bloodstained criminals though they were, the Soviet leadership took high culture seriously to a degree inconceivable among today’s politicians. Now, of course, we all indignantly condemn attempts by the state to control culture – look at the clamour over the awarding of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature to Chinese writer Mo Yan, on the grounds that he hews too closely to the Beijing line. But the obverse of that coin is the Western world’s delegation of the role of cultural arbiter to the marketplace. In a world where a video advertisement on YouTube can be hailed as high art, it’s not entirely clear that ‘free’ markets are doing a better job.