PARIS — It was June 1935 and Romain Rolland, a noted French author, had just had a long interview in Moscow with Stalin. The next day, Aleksandr Arossev, a Soviet official who had acted as Mr. Rolland’s guide and translator, dashed off an obsequious note to his all-powerful boss, telling him what a hit he had been.
“Romain Rolland, to be honest, was personally charmed by you,” Mr. Arossev wrote in a letter to Stalin dated June 29, 1935. “He said so several times, that he hadn’t expected it, and never would have imagined Stalin in such a way.”
The note, annotated by Stalin with a red pencil — “for my archives ” — was on display, with a 21-page original transcript of Mr. Rolland’s interview, at a recent exhibition in Paris titled “Intelligentsia.” The collection of original documents tracing the tortuous links between French and Russian intellectuals during the Soviet era included the original 1974 decree that sent the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into exile and stripped him of his passport.
The exhibition told multiple tales of blind idealism and harsh awakenings, the result of the hypnotic power of Communism and the cynical brutality of the Soviet regime.
It also described how cultural figures were manipulated for political purposes, a familiar story that has a weird, albeit silly, echo today in the red-carpet treatment given to the French actor Gérard Depardieu by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Mr. Depardieu’s antics in Russia have become a seemingly endless source of jokes and cartoons, chewed over by politicians and pundits who speculate about his motives — pique, depression or tax evasion — in accepting a hastily issued Russian passport. (Russian bloggers claim a widely circulated picture of Mr. Depardieu and Mr. Putin was taken in 2007.) His appearance in the region of Mordovia, where kerchiefed women tied a belt around his ample peasant smock, added a folkloric touch.
Mr. Depardieu was offered, in rapid succession, the post of culture minister of Mordovia, a job at a theater in the Siberian city of Tyumen, the title of “Honorary Urdmurt” by another Russian region and an invitation by the Russian Communist Party to join its ranks.
For his part, he fully embraced the welcome, praising the “beautiful and soulful people” of Russia and “its great democracy.” In a barely veiled reference to his public quarrel with the French prime minister, who called his complaints about a proposed 75 percent tax rate “pathetic,” Mr. Depardieu praised Russia’s magnanimity. “Here, there is no pettiness,” he said. “There are only grand sentiments.”
There was also a personal note. “I really love your president,” Mr. Depardieu said, “and it is mutual.”
He was charmed, just like Mr. Rolland.
This is in no way meant to put Mr. Depardieu in the same category as Mr. Rolland, a pacifist and admirer of Mohandas K. Gandhi who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915; nor to compare Mr. Putin with Stalin.
It does, however, provide another example of cultural diplomacy used as propaganda.
“Culture is an axis of diplomacy that was practiced by any number of autocratic regimes, Hitler as well as Stalin,” said Lorraine de Meaux, one of the two curators of the “Intelligentsia” exhibition at the École des Beaux Arts, which closed last week.
She laughed at the mention of the Depardieu case, which she described as “funny and unique,” but not irrelevant. “If he accepts the job of culture minister of Mordovia, maybe he can help in uncovering the history of the prison camps in that region,” she said.
Certainly, the Putin regime has milked the episode for all it’s worth. Mr. Depardieu is well known in Russia (he has appeared in advertisements for a Russian bank and for a brand of ketchup), and his effusive letter lauding the Russian soul was read on the country’s main national television channel.
Russian officials have even suggested that Mr. Depardieu’s flight toward Russia’s flat income tax rate of 13 percent may start a trend. “The distinctiveness of our tax system is poorly known about in the West,” a deputy prime minister, Dmitri O. Rogozin, wrote on Twitter. “When they know about it, we can expect a massive migration of rich Europeans to Russia.”
Or not. Mr. Depardieu received his new passport at a time when Mr. Putin, reacting to criticism of Russia’s human rights record, particularly in the United States, was beginning a campaign to curb outside influences on the country. There have been a slew of bills in Parliament that would, for example, limit the number of foreign films in Russian movie theaters, or ban foreigners — even those with Russian passports — from criticizing the government on television.
As Mr. Rolland discovered, it does not take long for a charming demeanor to turn sour. After his interview at the Kremlin, he repeatedly tried to contact Stalin to get permission to print it.
Mr. Rolland’s letters became ever more urgent as reports of abuses by the Soviet regime increased in number and intensity. By 1937, he was pleading on behalf of figures like Nikolai Bukharin, a Bolshevik revolutionary who was executed soon after. In another letter, he protested the arrest of Mr. Arossev, the very man who had told Stalin what a charmer Mr. Rolland had found him to be.
Mr. Rolland never received Stalin’s permission to publish the transcript of the 1935 interview. Two years later, he still hadn’t received a reply.
Letter from Europe: In Russia, Culture as an Axis of Propaganda
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Letter from Europe: In Russia, Culture as an Axis of Propaganda
