Natasha's Dance

4

In 1930, at the age of thirty-seven, Mayakovsky shot himself in the communal flat in which he had lived, near the Lubianka building in Moscow, when the Briks would not have him. Suicide was a constant theme in Mayakovsky's poetry. The poem he wrote for his suicide note quotes (with minor alterations) from an untitled and unfinished poem written probably in the summer of 1929:

As they say,

a bungled story. Love's boat

smashed

against existence. And we are quits with life.

So why should we idly reproach each other

with pain and insults? To those who remain - I wish happiness.⁸⁴

The Briks explained his suicide as the 'unavoidable outcome of Mayakovsky's hyperbolic attitude to life'.⁸⁵ His transcendental hopes and expectations had crashed against the realities of life. Recent evidence has led to claims that Mayakovsky did not kill himself. Lily Brik, it has been revealed, was an agent of the NKVD, Stalin's political police, and informed it of the poet's private views. In his communal flat there was a concealed entrance through which someone could have entered Mayakovsky's room, shot the poet and escaped unnoticed by neighbours. Notes discovered in the archives of his close friend Eisenstein reveal that Mayakovsky lived in fear of arrest. 'He had to be removed - so they got rid of him,' concluded Eisenstein.⁸⁶

Suicide or murder, the significance of the poet's death was clear: there was no longer room in Soviet literature for the individualist. Mayakovsky was too rooted in the pre-revolutionary age, and his tragedy was shared by all the avant-garde who, like him, threw in their lot with the new society. The last works of Mayakovsky had been viciously attacked by the Soviet authorities. The press condemned The Bedbug (1929), a dazzling satire on Soviet manners and the new bureaucracy, with a sparkling score by Shostakovich which added to the montage by having several bands play different types of music (from classical to foxtrot) on and off the stage.⁸⁷ They said the play had failed to portray the Soviet future in heroic terms. 'We are brought to the conclusion', complained one reviewer, 'that life under socialism will be very dull in 1979' (it was, it turned out, an accurate portrayal of the Brezhnev years).⁸⁸ His next play, The Bath House, which opened in Meyerhold's theatre in Moscow just one month before the poet's death, was an awful flop, and its hilarious critique of Soviet bureaucrats again roundly condemned in the press. But the final straw was Mayakovsky's retrospective exhibition of his artwork, which he put on in Moscow in March 1930. The exhibition was consciously avoided by the artistic intelligentsia; the poet Olga Berggolts, who went to visit Mayakovsky there, recalls the sight of the 'tall man with a sad and

austere face, his arms folded behind him, as he paced the empty rooms'.⁸⁹ At an evening devoted to the exhibition, Mayakovsky said that he could no longer achieve what he had set out do - 'to laugh at things I consider wrong… and to bring the workers to great poetry, without hack writing or a deliberate lowering of standards'.⁹⁰

The activities of RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) made life impossible for non-proletarian writers and 'fellow travellers' like Mayakovsky, who disbanded LEF, the Left Front, and joined RAPP in a last desperate bid to save himself in the final few weeks of his life. Formed in 1928 as the literary wing of Stalin's Five-year Plan for industry, RAPP saw itself as the militant vanguard of a cultural revolution against the old intelligentsia. 'The one and only task of Soviet literature', its journal declared in 1930, 'is the depiction of the Five-year Plan and the class war.'⁹¹ The Five-year Plan was intended as the start of a new revolution which would transform Russia into an advanced industrialized state and deliver power to the working class. A new wave of terror began against the so-called 'bourgeois' managers in industry (that is, those who had held their jobs since 1917), and this was followed by a similar assault on 'bourgeois specialists' in the professions and the arts. Supported by the state, RAPP attacked the 'bourgeois enemies' of Soviet literature which it claimed were hidden in the left-wing avant-garde. Just five days before his death, Mayakovsky was condemned at a RAPP meeting at which his critics demanded proof that he would still be read in twenty years.⁹²

By the beginning of the 1930s, any writer with an individual voice was deemed politically suspicious. The satirists who flourished in the relatively liberal climate of the 1920s were the first to come under attack. There was Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose moral satires on the empty verbiage of the Soviet bureaucracy and the cramped conditions of communal flats were suddenly considered anti-Soviet in the new political climate of the Five-year Plan, when writers were expected to be positive and the only acceptable subject for satire were the foreign enemies of the Soviet Union. Then there was Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Gogolian satires about censorship (The Crimson Island), daily life in Moscow in the NEP (Adventures of Chichikov), Soviet xenophobia (Fatal Eggs) and his brilliant comic novel The Heart of a Dog (where a Pavlov like experimental scientist transplants the brain and sexual

organs of a dog into a human being) were not only banned from publication but forbidden to be read when passed as manuscripts from hand to hand. Finally, there was Andrei Platonov, an engineer and Utopian communist (until he was expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1926) whose own growing doubts about the human costs of the Soviet experiment were reflected in a series of extraordinary dystopian satires: The Epifan Locks (19Z7), a timely allegory on the grandiose but ultimately disastrous canal-building projects of Peter the Great; Chev-engur (also 1927), a fatal odyssey in search of the true communist society; and The Foundation Pit (1930), a nightmare vision of collectivization in which the foundation pit of a huge communal home for the local proletariat turns out to be a monumental grave for humanity. All three were condemned as 'counter-revolutionary' and banned from publication for over sixty years.

RAPP's 'class war' reached fever pitch, however, in 1929 with its organized campaign of vilification against Zamyatin and Pilnyak. Both writers had published works abroad which had been censored in the Soviet Union: Zamyatin's We appeared in Prague in 1927; and Pilnyak's Red Mahogany, a bitter commentary on the decline of the revolutionary ideals of the Soviet state, was published in Berlin in 1929. But the attack on them had a significance beyond the condemnation of particular works. Boris Pilnyak, who was chairman of the Board of the All-Russian Writers' Union and so effectively the Soviet Union's Writer Number One, was perhaps the widest read and most widely imitated serious prose writer in the country.* His persecution was an advance warning of the strict obedience and conformity which the Soviet state would demand of all its writers from the start of the first Five-year Plan.

For the Five-year Plan was not just a programme of industrialization. It was nothing less than a cultural revolution in which all the arts were called up by the state in a campaign to build a new society. According to the plan, the primary goal of the Soviet writer was to raise the workers' consciousness, to enlist them in the 'battle' for 'socialist construction' by writing books with a social content which they could

* Pilnyak's best-known novels are The Naked Year (192.1), Black Bread (1923) and Machines and Wolves (1924).

understand and relate to as positive ideals. For the militants of RAPP this could only be achieved by writers like Gorky, with his impeccably proletarian background, not by left-wing 'bourgeois' writers who were deemed no more than 'fellow travellers'. Between 1928 and 1931 some 10,000 'shock authors', literary confreres of the 'shock workers' who would lead the charge to meet the Plan, were plucked from the shop-floor and trained by RAPP to write workers' stories for the Soviet press.⁹³

Gorky was hailed as the model for this Soviet literature. In 1921, horrified by the Revolution's turn to violence and dictatorship, Gorky fled to Europe. But he could not bear the life of an exile: he was disillusioned by the rise of fascism in his adopted homeland of Italy; and he convinced himself that life in Stalin's Russia would become more bearable once the Five-year Plan had swept aside the peasant backwardness which in his view had been the cause of the Revolution's failure. From 1928 Gorky began to spend his summers in the Soviet Union and in 1931 Gorky returned home for good. The prodigal son was showered with honours: streets, buildings, farms and schools were named after him; a trilogy of films was made about his life; the Moscow Arts Theatre was renamed the Gorky Theatre; and his native city (Nizhnyi Novgorod) was renamed after him. He was also appointed head of the Writers' Union, the post previously held by Pilnyak.

Gorky had initially supported the RAPP campaign of promoting worker authors as a temporary experiment, but he quickly realized that the quality of the writing was not good. In April 1932 the Central Committee passed a resolution to abolish RAPP, together with all other independent literary groups, and placed them under the centralized control of the Writers' Union. Gorky's influence was instrumental in this sudden change of direction, but things did not quite turn out as he had planned. Gorky's intention had been two-fold: to halt the destructive 'class war' led by RAPP; and to restore to Soviet literature the aesthetic principles established by Tolstoy. In October 1932, a famous meeting attended by Stalin and other Kremlin leaders, as well as fifty writers and other functionaries, took place at Gorky's Moscow house. It was at this meeting that the doctrine of Socialist Realism was formulated, although at the time it was not clear to Gorky that it would become a regimented orthodoxy for all artists in the

Soviet Union. Gorky's understanding was that Socialist Realism would unite the critical realist traditions of nineteenth-century literature with the revolutionary romanticism of the Bolshevik tradition. It was to combine the depiction of the humble everyday reality of life in the Soviet Union with a vision of the Revolution's heroic promise. But in Stalin's version of the doctrine, as defined at the First Congress of the Writers' Union in 1934, it meant that the artist was to portray Soviet life, not as it was in reality, but as it should become:

Socialist Realism means not only knowing reality as it is, but knowing where it is moving. It is moving towards socialism, it is moving towards the victory of the international proletariat. And a work of art created by a Socialist Realist is one which shows where that conflict of contradictions is leading which the artist has seen in life and reflected in his work.⁹⁴

In this formula the artist was to produce a panegyric or iconic form of art which conformed strictly to the Party's narrative of socialist development.⁹⁵ Whereas the kinoki and other avant-garde artists of the 1920s had sought to expand their audience's vision of freedom and possibility, now artists were to fix that vision in ways strictly prescribed by the state. The new Soviet writer was no longer the creator of original works of art, but a chronicler of tales which were already contained in the Party's own folklore.⁹⁶ There was a sort of 'master plot' which Soviet writers were to use in shaping their own novels and characters. In its classic form, as set out in Gorky's early novel Mother (1906), the plot was a Bolshevik version of the Bildungsroman: the young worker hero joins the class struggle and through the tutelage of senior Party comrades he arrives at a higher consciousness, a better understanding of the world around him and the tasks ahead for the Revolution, before dying a martyr to the cause. Later novels added elements to this master plot: Dmitry Furmanov's Chapaev (1923) fixed the model of the civil war hero; while Fedor Gladkov's Cement (1925) and Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered raised the communist production worker to Promethean status, capable of conquering everything before him, even the most untamed forces of the natural world, as long as he allows the Party to direct his energies. But basically the story that the novelist could tell was strictly circumscribed by the

Party's mythic version of its own revolutionary history; even senior writers were forced to change their works if they did not adhere to this doxology.*

To the sophisticated Western reader this no doubt seems a horrible perversion of the role of literature. But it did not appear so in Stalin's Russia, where the overwhelming mass of the reading public was new to the conventions of literary fiction, and there was less awareness of the difference between the real world and the world of books. People approached literature, as they had perhaps once approached the icons or the stories of the saints, in the conviction that it held up moral truths for the guidance of their lives. The German writer Lion Feuchtwanger commented on this peculiar characteristic of the Soviet reading public when he visited Moscow in 1937:

Among Soviet people the thirst for reading is totally unimaginable. Newspapers, journals, books - all this is absorbed without quenching the thirst to the tiniest degree. Reading is one of the main activities of daily life. But for the reader in the Soviet Union there are, as it were, no clear divisions between the reality in which he lives and the world he reads about in books. The reader treats the heroes of his books as if they are actual people. He argues with them, denounces them, and he even reads realities into the events of the story and its characters.'⁷

Isaiah Berlin noted the same attitudes to literature on his visit to the Soviet Union in 1945:

The rigid censorship which, with so much else, suppressed pornography, trash and low-grade thrillers such as fill railway bookstalls in the West, served to make the response of Soviet readers and theatre audiences purer, more direct and naive than ours; I noticed that at performances of Shakespeare or Sheridan or Griboedov, members of the audience, some of them obviously country folk, were apt to react to the action on the stage or to lines spoken by the

* The most famous example is Alexander Fadeev. In 1946 he won the Stalin Prize for The Young Guard, a semi-factual novel about the underground youth organization in occupied Ukraine during the Second World War. Attacked in the press for under-rating the role of the Party leadership, Fadeev was forced to add new material to his novel. This enlarged version, published in 1951, was then hailed as a classic Socialist Realist text.

actors… with loud expressions of approval or disapproval; the excitement generated was, at times, very strong and, to a visitor from the West, both unusual and touching.⁹⁸

In the cinema the state's concern for art to play a morally didactic role was crucial to the rise of the Socialist Realist film. With the start of the Five-year Plan the Party expressed its impatience with the avant-garde directors, whose intellectual films never really drew a mass audience. Surveys showed that the Soviet public preferred foreign films, action-packed adventures or romantic comedies to the propaganda films of Vertov or Eisenstein.⁹⁹ In 1928 a Party Conference on Cinema was held at which there were louds calls for film to play a more effective role in mobilizing mass enthusiasm for the Five-year Plan and the class war. The avant-garde directors of the 1920s -Vertov, Pudovkin, Kuleshov - were all condemned as 'formalists', intellectuals who were more concerned with cinema as art than with making films that could 'be understood by the millions'.¹⁰⁰ Eisenstein's October, which had been released on the eve of the conference, was bitterly attacked for its 'formalist' preoccupation with montage, for the lack of any individual heroes in the film which made it hard for a mass audience to identify with, for the typage casting of the Lenin character (played by a worker named Nikandrov), whose woodenness did so much to offend Party sensibilities, and - of special offence to Stalin, who ordered that his image be cut out after previewing the film at the studio - for the fact that it depicted Trotsky, the military leader of the October insurrection, who had been kicked out of the Party just three months before the conference began.¹⁰¹

But there were just as many criticisms of the leadership of Sovkino, the Soviet film trust under the command of Lunacharsky's Commissariat, for failing to provide an attractive and more healthy Soviet alternative to the cheap entertainment films imported from abroad. As a propaganda weapon of the state, the Soviet cinema needed to be popular. 'Our films must be 100 percent ideologically correct and 100 percent commercially viable,' declared one Party official.¹⁰²

In 1930 Sovkino was finally disbanded, together with the independent studios which had flourished in the 1920s, and the Soviet cinema was nationalized as one vast state enterprise under the centralized

direction of Soiuzkino (Ail-Union Soviet Film Trust). Its chief apparatchik, Boris Shumiatsky, became the ultimate authority in the world of Soviet cinema (until his own arrest and execution as a 'Trotskyite' in 1938), although Stalin, who loved the cinema and frequently watched movies in his Kremlin cinema, kept a beady eye on the latest films and often intervened in their production.* Shumiatsky ran a sort of 'Soviet Hollywood', with huge production studios in Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad and Minsk reeling off a succession of smash-hit Soviet musicals, romantic comedies, war adventures and Western-modelled frontier films ('Easterns') like Chapaev (1934), Stalin's favourite film.+ Shumiatsky drew up a Five-year Plan for the cinema which called for no less than 500 films to be made in 193 2 alone. All of them were to conform to the new ideological directives, which demanded optimistic pictures about Soviet life with positive individual heroes drawn from the ranks of the proletariat. Party-controlled producers and script departments were placed in charge of the production to ensure that all this entertainment was politically correct. 'Life is getting gayer, comrades,' Stalin famously remarked. But only certain types of laughter were allowed. This was the climate to which Eisenstein returned in 1932. For the previous three years he had been abroad - a semi-dissident ambassador of the Soviet cinema. He travelled to Europe and on to Hollywood to learn about the new techniques of sound, signing up for several films he never made. He enjoyed the freedom of the West, and he was no doubt fearful of going back to Russia, where Shumiatsky's attacks on the 'formalists' were at their most extreme when directed against him. Stalin accused Eisenstein of defecting to the West. The NKVD bullied his poor mother into begging Eisenstein to return home, threatening her with some form of punishment if he failed to do so. In the first two years after his return Eisenstein had several film proposals turned

* In 1938, in the final stages of the editing of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, Stalin asked to see the rough cuts. The film-maker hurried to the Kremlin and, in his haste, left behind one reel. Stalin loved the film but, since no one dared to inform him that it was incomplete, it was released without the missing reel (J. Goodwin. Eisenstein, Cinema and History (Urbana, 1993), p. 162).

+ Stalin could apparently recite long passages of the dialogue by heart. See R. Taylor and I. Christie (eds.), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema Documents, 1896- 1939 (London, 1994), p. SX4.

down for production by Soiuzkino. He withdrew to a teaching post at the State Film School and, although he lavished praise (in his public statements) on the mediocre films that were churned out at that time, he stood firm by the films which he had made, courageously refusing to denounce himself, as he was called upon to do, at the Party's Second Conference on Cinema in 1935.¹⁰³

Under pressure to produce a film which conformed to the Socialist Realist mould, Eisenstein accepted a commission from the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) in 1935. He was to realize a film scenario that took its title, although not much else, from Turgenev's 'Bezhin Meadow', a story about peasant boys discussing supernatural signs of death which formed one of the Sketches from a Hunter's Album. The film was actually inspired by the story of Pavlik Morozov, a boy hero who, according to the version of his life propagandized by the Stalinist regime, had been murdered by the 'kulaks' of his remote Urals village after he had denounced his own father, the chairman of the village Soviet, as a kulak opponent of the Soviet campaign for collectivization.* By 1935, the Morozov cult was at its height: songs and poems, even a cantata with full orchestra and chorus, had been written about him. This no doubt persuaded Eisenstein that it was safe to make a film about him. But his conception of the film was deemed unacceptable. He turned it from a story about individuals to a conflict between types, between old and new, and, in a scene that showed the communists dismantling a church to break the resistance of the kulak saboteurs, he came dangerously close to suggesting that collectivization had been something destructive. In August 1936, with most of the film already shot, Eisenstein was ordered by Shumiatsky to rewrite the script. With the help of the writer Isaac Babel he recommenced shooting in the autumn. The church scene was cut and a speech in tribute to Stalin was added. But then, in March 1937, Shumiatsky ordered all work on the film stopped. In an article in Pravda he accused Eisenstein of depicting collectivization as an elemental conflict between good and evil, and

* In fact Morozov was murdered by the NKVD, which then executed thirty-seven kulak villagers, falsely charged with the boy's murder for propaganda purposes. For the full story, see Y. Druzhnikov, Informer 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov (New Brunswick, 1997).

denounced the film for its 'formalist' and religious character.¹⁰⁴ Eisen-stein was forced to publish a 'confession' of his mistakes in the press, although it was penned in such a way as to be read by those whose opinions mattered to him as a satirical attack on his Stalinist masters. The negatives of the film were burned - all, that is, except a few hundred stills of extraordinary photographic beauty which were found in Eisenstein's personal archive following his death in 1948.¹⁰⁵

The suppression of Bezhin Meadow was part of the continuing campaign against the artistic avant-garde. In 1934, at the First Writers' Congress, Party leader Karl Radek, a former Trotskyite who was now making up for his past errors by proving himself the good Stalinist, condemned the writings of James Joyce - a huge influence on Eisenstein and all the Soviet avant-garde. Radek described Ulysses as 'a dung heap swarming with maggots and photographed by a movie camera through a microscope'.¹⁰⁶ This no doubt held a reference to the famous maggot scene in The Battleship Potemkin, in which Eisenstein zooms in on the offending larvae by filming them through the monocle of the commanding officer. Then, in January 1936, Pravda published a diatribe against Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which had been a great success, with hundreds of performances in both Russia and the West since its premiere in Leningrad in 1934. The unsigned article, 'Chaos Instead of Music', was evidently written with the full support of the Kremlin, and evidence suggests, as it was rumoured at the time, that Andrei Zhdanov, the Party boss in Leningrad, wrote it on the personal instructions of Stalin, who, just a few days before the article appeared, had seen the opera and clearly hated it.¹⁰⁷

From the first moment, the listener is shocked by a deliberately dissonant, confused stream of sound. Fragments of melody, embryonic phrases appear - only to disappear again in the din, the grinding, and the screaming… This music… carries into the theatre… the most negative features of 'Meyerholdism' infinitely multiplied. Here we have 'leftist' confusion instead of natural, human music… The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear. Leftist distortion in opera stems from the same source as the leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science. Petty-bourgeois innovations lead to a break with real art, real science and real literature… All this is primitive and vulgar.¹⁰⁸

This was not just an attack on Shostakovich, although, to be sure, its effect on him was devastating enough that he never dared again to write an opera. It was an attack on all modernists - in painting, poetry and theatre, as well as in music. Meyerhold, in particular, who was brave and self-assured enough to speak out publicly in defence of Shostakovich and against the Party's stifling influence on art, was subjected to denunciations of a feverish intensity. He was condemned in the Soviet press as an 'alien', and even though he tried to save himself by staging the Socialist Realist classic How the Steel Was Tempered in 1937, his theatre was closed down at the beginning of the following year. Stanislavsky came to his old student's aid, inviting him to join his Opera Theatre in March 1938, although artistically the two directors were poles apart. When Stanislavsky died that summer, Meyerhold became the theatre's artistic director. But in 1939 he was arrested, tortured brutally by the NKVD to extract a 'confession', and then, in the arctic frost of early 1940, he was shot.¹⁰⁹

This renewed assault against the avant-garde involved a counterrevolution in cultural politics. As the 1930s wore on, the regime completely abandoned its commitment to the revolutionary idea of establishing a 'proletarian' or 'Soviet' form of culture that could be distinguished from the culture of the past. Instead, it promoted a return to the nationalist traditions of the nineteenth century, which it reinvented in its own distorted forms as Socialist Realism. This reassertion of the 'Russian classics' was a fundamental aspect of the Stalinist political programme, which used culture to create the illusion of stability in the age of mass upheaval over which it reigned, and which championed its version of the nationalist school in particular to counteract the influence of the 'foreign' avant-garde. In all the arts the nineteenth-century classics were now held up as the model which Soviet artists were expected to follow. Contemporary writers like Akhmatova could not find a publisher, but the complete works of Pushkin and Turgenev, Chekhov and Tolstoy (though not Dostoevsky),* were

* Dostoevsky was despised (though not read) by Lenin, who once famously dismissed his novel The Devils, which contains a devastating critique of the Russian revolutionary mentality, as a 'piece of reactionary trash'. Apart from Lunacharsky, none of the Soviet leadership favoured his retention in the literary canon, and even Gorky wanted to get rid of him. Relatively few editions of Dostoevsky's works were therefore published in

(continued)

issued in their millions as a new readership was introduced to them. Landscape painting, which had been a dying art in the 1920s, was suddenly restored as the favoured medium of Socialist Realist art, particularly scenes that illustrated the heroic mastery of the natural world by Soviet industry; all of it was styled on the landscape painters of the late nineteenth century, on Levitan or Kuindzhi or the Wanderers, with whom some of the older artists had even studied in their youth. As Ivan Gronsky once remarked (with the bluntness one might expect from the editor of Izvestiia), 'Socialist Realism is Rubens, Rembrandt and Repin put to serve the working class.'¹¹⁰

In music, too, the regime put the clock back to the nineteenth century. Glinka, Tchaikovsky and the kuchkists, who had fallen out of favour with the avant-garde composers of the 19 20s, were now held up as the model for all future music in the Soviet Union. The works of Stasov, who had espoused the cause of popular nationalist art in the nineteenth century, were now elevated to the status of scripture. Stasov's championing of art with a democratic content and progressive purpose or idea was mobilized in the 1930s as the founding argument of Socialist Realist art. His opposition to the cosmopolitanism of Diaghilev and the European avant-garde was pressed into the service of the Stalinist regime in its own campaign against the 'alien' modernists.* It was a gross distortion of the critic's views. Stasov was a Westernist. He sought to raise Russia's culture to the level of the West's, to bring it into contact as an equal with the West, and his nationalism was never exclusive of Europe's influence. But in the hands

(continued) the 1930s - about 100,000 copies of all his works were sold between 1938 and 1941, compared with about 5 million copies of Tolstoy's. It was only in the Khrushchev thaw that print runs of Dostoevsky's works were augmented. The 10-volume 1956 edition of Dostoevsky's works published to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death ran to 300,000 copies - though this was still extremely small by Soviet standards (V. Seduro, Dostoevski in Russian Literary Criticism, 1846-1956 (New York, 1957), p. 197; and same author, Dostoevski's Image inRussiaToday (Belmont, 1975),p. 379). * For example, in the foreword to the 3-volume 1952 edition of Stasov's works (V. V. Stasov, Sobranie sochinenii v 3-kh tomakh, 1847-1906 (Moscow, 1952)) the Soviet editors made the extraordinary announcement that 'the selection of materials has been determined by our attempt to show Stasov in the struggle against the cosmopolitanism of the Imperial Academy, where the prophets of 'Art for Art's sake', aestheticism, formalism and decadence in art were to be found in the nineteenth century'.

of the Soviet regime he became a Russian chauvinist, an enemy of Western influence and a prophet of the Stalinist belief in Russia's cultural superiority.

In 1937 Soviet Russia marked the centenary of Pushkin's death. The whole country was involved in festivities: small provincial theatres put on plays; schools organized special celebrations; Young Communists went on pilgrimages to places connected with the poet's life; factories organized study groups and clubs of 'Pushkinists'; collective farms held Pushkin carnivals with figures dressed as characters from Pushkin's fairy tales (and in one case, for no apparent reason, the figure of Chapaev with a machine-gun); scores of films were made about his life; libraries and theatres were established in his name; and streets and squares, theatres and museums, were renamed after the poet.¹¹¹ The boom in Pushkin publishing was staggering. Nineteen million copies of his works sold in the jubilee alone, and tens of millions of subscriptions were taken for the new edition of his complete works which had been planned for 1937 - though because of the purges and the frequent losses of staff in which they resulted it was only finished in 1949. The cult of Pushkin reached fever pitch when Pravda declared him a 'semi-divine being' and the Central Committee issued a decree in which he was heralded as the 'creator of the Russian literary language', the 'father of Russian literature' and even as 'the founder of Communism'.¹¹² In an article entitled 'Pushkin Our Comrade', the writer Andrei Platonov maintained that Pushkin had been able to foresee the October Revolution because the spirit of the Russian people had burned like a 'red hot coal' within his heart; the same spirit had flickered through the nineteenth century and flared up anew in Lenin's soul.¹¹³ As Pushkin was a truly national poet whose writing spoke to the entire people, his homeland, it was claimed by Pravda, was not the old Russia but the Soviet Union and all humanity.¹¹⁴

'Poetry is respected only in this country', Mandelstam would tell his friends in the 1930s. 'There's no place where more people are killed for it.'¹¹⁵ At the same time as it was erecting monuments to Pushkin, the Soviet regime was murdering his literary descendants. Of the 700 writers who attended the First Writers' Congress in 1934, only fifty survived to attend the Second in 1954.¹¹⁶ Stalin was capricious in his persecution of the literary fraternity. He saved Bulgakov, he cherished

Pasternak (both of whom could be construed as anti-Soviet), yet without a moment's hesitation he condemned Party hacks and left-wing writers from the ranks of RAPP. Stalin was not ignorant of cultural affairs. He read serious literature (the poet Demian Bedny hated lending books to him because he returned them with greasy fingermarks).¹¹⁷ He knew the power of poetry in Russia, and feared it. Stalin kept a jealous eye on the most talented or dangerous writers: even Gorky was placed under constant surveillance. But after 1934, when full-scale terror was unleashed, he moved towards more drastic measures of control. The turning point was the murder in 1934 of Sergei Kirov, the Party boss in Leningrad. It is probable that Kirov had been killed on Stalin's orders: he was more popular than Stalin in the Party, in favour of more moderate policies, and there had been plots to put him into power. But in any case, Stalin exploited the murder to unleash a campaign of mass terror against all the 'enemies' of Soviet power, which culminated in the show trials of the Bolshevik leaders Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936-8 and subsided only when Russia entered the Second World War in 1941. Akhmatova called the early 1930s the 'vegetarian years', meaning they were relatively harmless in comparison with the 'meat-eating' years that were to come.¹¹⁸

Mandelstam was the first to be taken. In November 1933 he had written a poem about Stalin which had been read in secret to his friends. It is the simplest, most straightforward, verse he ever wrote, a fact his widow Nadezhda would explain as demonstrating Mandel-stam's concern to make the poem comprehensible and accessible to all. 'It was, to my mind, a gesture, an act that flowed logically from the whole of his life and work… He did not want to die before stating in unambiguous terms what he thought about the things going on around us.'¹¹⁹

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,

The murderer and peasant-slayer.

His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer

And his boots gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked leaders -

Fawning half-men for him to play with.

They whinny, purr or whine

As he prates and points a finger,

One by one forging his laws, to be flung

Like horseshoes at the head, the eye or the groin.

And every killing is a treat

For the broad-chested Ossete.¹²⁰

Akhmatova was visiting the Mandelstams in Moscow in May 1934 when the secret police burst into the flat. 'The search went on all night', she wrote in a memoir about Mandelstam. 'They were looking for poetry, and walked across manuscripts that had been thrown out of the trunk. We all sat in one room. It was very quiet. On the other side of the wall, in Kirsanov's flat, a ukulele was playing… They took him away at seven in the morning.'¹²¹ During his interrogations in the Lubianka, Mandelstam made no attempt to conceal his Stalin poem (he even wrote it out for his torturers) - for which he might well have expected to be sent straight to the gulags in Siberia. Stalin's resolution, however, was to 'isolate but preserve': at this stage, the poet was more dangerous to him dead than alive.¹²² The Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin had intervened on Mandelstam's behalf, warning Stalin that 'poets are always right, history is on their side'.¹²³ And Pasternak, though obviously careful not to compromise himself, had done his best to defend Mandelstam when Stalin called him at home on the telephone.¹²⁴

The Mandelstams were exiled to Voronezh, 400 kilometres south of Moscow, returning to the Moscow region (but still barred from the capital itself) in 1937. Later that autumn, without a place to live, they visited Akhmatova in Leningrad, sleeping on the divan in her room at the Fountain House. During this last visit Akhmatova wrote a poem for Osip Mandelstam, the person whom she thought of almost as her twin. It was about the city they both loved:

Not like a European capital With the first prize for beauty -

But like stifling exile to the Yenisei,

Like a transfer to Chita,

To Ishim, to waterless Irghiz,

To renowned Atbasar,

To the outpost Svobodny,

To the corpse stench of rotting bunks -

So this city seemed to me

On that midnight, pale blue -

This city, celebrated by the first poet,

By us sinners and by you.¹²⁵

Six months later Mandelstam was re-arrested and sentenced to five years' penal labour in Kolyma, eastern Siberia - in effect a death sentence in view of his poor health. On his way there he passed the Yenisei river, the towns of Chita and Svobodny, and ended up in a camp near Vladivostok, where he died of a heart attack on 26 December 1938.

In her memoir about Mandelstam, Akhmatova recalls the final time she saw her friend, stripped of everything, on the eve of his arrest: 'For me he is not only a great poet but a great human being who, when he found out (probably from Nadya) how bad it was for me in the House on the Fontanka, told me when he was saying goodbye at the Moscow train station in Leningrad: "Annushka" [which he had never used before], always remember that my house - is yours." '¹²⁶

Mandelstam's seditious poem also played a role in the arrest of Lev Gumilev, Akhmatova's son, in 1935. Since the death of his father, in 1921, Lev had lived with relatives in the town of Bezhetsk, 250 kilometres north of Moscow, but in 1929 he moved into the Punin apartment at the Fountain House and, after several applications (all turned down on account of his 'social origins'), he was finally enrolled, in 1934, as a history student at Leningrad University. One spring evening at the Fountain House Lev recited the Mandelstam poem, which by that time he, like many people, knew by heart. But among his student friends that night was an informant of the NKVD, who came to arrest him, along with Punin, in October 1935. Akhmatova was driven to a frenzy. She rushed to Moscow and, with the help of Pasternak, who wrote personally to Stalin, secured lev's release. It

was not the first time, nor the last, that Lev would be arrested. He had never been involved in anti-Soviet agitation. Indeed, his sole crime was to be the son of Gumilev and Akhmatova; if he was arrested it was only as a hostage to secure his mother's acquiescence to the Soviet regime. The mere fact of her close relationship with Mandelstam was enough to make the authorities suspicious of her.

Akhmatova herself was being closely watched by the NKVD during 1935. Its agents followed her and photographed her visitors as they came in and out of the Fountain House, in preparation, as archives have now revealed, for her arrest.¹²⁷ Akhmatova was conscious of the danger she was in. After Lev's arrest she had burned a huge pile of her manuscripts in full expectation of another raid on the Punin apartment.¹²⁸ Like all communal blocks, the Fountain House was full of NKVD informants - not paid-up officials, but ordinary residents who were themselves afraid and wished to demonstrate their loyalty, or who bore a petty grudge against their neighbours or thought that by denouncing them they would get more living space. The cramped conditions of communal housing brought out the worst in those who suffered them. There were communal houses where everyone got along, but in general the reality of living together was a far cry from the communist ideal. Neighbours squabbled over personal property, foodstuffs that went missing from the shared kitchen, noisy lovers or music played at night, and, with everybody in a state of nervous paranoia, it did not take much for fights to turn into denunciations to the NKVD.

Lev was re-arrested in March 1938. For eight months he was held and tortured in Leningrad's Kresty jail, then sentenced to ten years' hard labour on the White Sea Canal in north-west Russia.* This was at the height of the Stalin Terror, when millions of people disappeared. For eight months Akhmatova went every day to join the long queues at the Kresty jail, now just one of Russia's many women waiting to hand in a letter or a parcel through a little window and, if it was accepted, to go away with joy at the knowledge that their loved one must be still alive. This was the background to her poetic cycle Requiem (written between 1935 and 1940; first published in Munich in 1963).

* The sentence was later changed to five years' labour in the gulag at Norilsk.

As Akhmatova explained in the short prose piece 'Instead of a Preface'

(1957)^:

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone 'recognized' me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):

'Can you describe this?'

And I answered, 'Yes I can.'

Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.¹²'

In Requiem Akhmatova became the people's voice. The poem represented a decisive moment in her artistic evolution - the moment when the lyric poet of private experience became, in the words of Requiem, the 'mouth through which a hundred million scream'.¹³⁰ The poem is intensely personal. Yet it gives voice to an anguish felt by every person who had lost someone.

This was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

And like a useless appendage, Leningrad

Swung from its prisons.

And when, senseless from torment,

Regiments of convicts marched,

And the short songs of farewell

Were sung by locomotive whistles.

The stars of death stood above us

And innocent Russia writhed

Under bloody boots

And under the tyres of the Black Marias.¹³¹

This was when Akhmatova's decision to remain in Russia began to make sense. She had shared in her people's suffering. Her poem had become a monument to it - a dirge for the dead sung in whispered incantations among friends; and in some way it redeemed that suffering.

No, not under the vault of alien skies,

And not under the shelter of alien wings -

I was with my people then,

There, where my people, unfortunately, were.¹³²