Stalin and His Hangmen

Fellow Travelers Abroad and Dissent at Home

General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.

William Blake

WHY DID SOVIET WRITERS let themselves be penned in like sheep by the party shepherds and OGPU dogs? Some, a decade earlier, had proved their indomitable courage. Isaak Babel, a bespectacled Jew, had ridden with, and then written about, Cossack cavalry attacking Ukrainian gentry, Polish invaders, White Guards, and the Jews of western Russia. But even he adopted the “genre of silence.”

In 1934 a mass protest against Stalin’s apparatchiks might still have made an impact; when the survivors saw what came of their acquiescence in 1937 they must have regretted their falling in line behind Gorky and the party minions. They had betrayed the Russian peasantry, for whom the major classic Russian writers, from Pushkin to Chekhov, had made a stand. With just a few exceptions—Zabolotsky, Mandelstam— they had disowned the truth and applauded lies about the society whose conscience they were supposed to guard. Excuses can be made: the tour of the White Sea canal had confronted the conformists with writers whose integrity had made them doomed slaves digging frozen bogs. After 1929 exile was not an option. A German writer protesting against Hitler might do so from the safety of asylum in the United States; a Soviet writer against Stalin could not.

But there can be no excuse for the Western observers who attended Soviet Union of Writers’ banquets in 1934. A few quibbled, like Malraux, but none disseminated the truth about collectivization, famine, arrests, and executions. If Louis Aragon, Romain Rolland, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells had chosen to be honest, what risk would they have run? They chose to fawn on Stalin and lie with impunity. Iagoda had no trouble assembling a chorus of Stalinist flatterers from the left wing of Western writers.

For French writers, as for Gorky, Iagoda found beautiful, polyglot women. In France Romain Rolland’s fame was waning after Jean Christophe, his roman-fleuve, so Iagoda commissioned a twenty-volume Russian edition of his works and recruited the enchanting Maria Kudasheva to translate them. Rolland married Kudasheva but found Iagoda hard to like. “An enigmatic personality. A man who looks as if he is refined and cultured. . . . But his police functions inspire horror. He speaks softly to you as he calls black white and white black, and his honest eyes look at you with amazement if you begin to doubt his word,” he wrote in his diary. But he was bewitched by Stalin. Rolland’s conversations with Stalin in 1935 are on record, and the respective gullibility and cynicism are breathtaking.

Rolland: Why are twelve-year-old children now subject to adult criminal penalties?

Stalin: We discovered in our schools groups of ten to fifteen boys and girls who aimed to kill or to debauch the best pupils, the prize scholars. They drowned them in wells, inflicted stab wounds on them, terrorized them in every way. . . . We have in the Kremlin women librarians who visit the apartments of our executive comrades in the Kremlin to keep their libraries in order. It turns out that some of these librarians had been recruited by our enemies for carrying out terror. We found that these women were carrying poison, intending to poison some of our executive comrades. Of course we have arrested them, we don’t intend to shoot them, we are isolating them. . . .³⁵

Henri Barbusse, a nobler figure than Rolland, had won fame with novels on the First World War and in old age took part in the Congress of Friends of the USSR in Cologne in 1928. Barbusse interviewed Stalin three times in his Kremlin office and wrote an adulatory short biography. But Barbusse’s admiration for Trotsky worried Iagoda and for this reason on his 1932 visit to Moscow he was not even met at the station. But when celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of Gorky’s literary debut began, Stalin rose from his seat on the stage, had Barbusse brought up from the stalls and surrendered his seat to the Frenchman.

The communist poet Louis Aragon married Elza Triolet, the sister of Lili Brik, a known OGPU agent and the inamorata of Mayakovsky. Other Frenchmen were more elusive: Malraux and Gide ultimately double-crossed Stalin.

Rolland, Barbusse, and Aragon were the decoys for Europe’s intellectuals. Warier luminaries like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells asked more awkward questions. Stalin declared that handling Shaw had proved “rather more complicated” but gained his fatuous approval, which carried more weight than Rolland’s or Barbusse’s. Wells entered Stalin’s study a wise man—“This lonely, overbearing man, I thought, may be damned disagreeable, but anyhow he must have an intelligence far beyond dogmatism”—and came out three hours later none the wiser.³⁶ Stalin discovered that inviting established writers for mutual flattery was even more effective than direct propaganda.

Just a few dogs did not bark in the Soviet night. Two of Russia’s greatest poets, Mandelstam and Akhmatova, did not join the union. When Mayakovsky, who had supported the revolution so vociferously, preferred death to life in the USSR, the shock was profound. Pasternak and Mandelstam felt liberated from lies: they both wrote lyric verse again, Pasternak’s Second Birth, Mandelstam’s Armenian Cycle. To paraphrase John Cleese’s character in Clockwise, “The despair they could take; it’s the hope they couldn’t stand.”

Mandelstam sensed that in the stillness of a Moscow midnight a typewriter was always writing out denunciations. OGPU had been building up dossiers in which painters and poets with any avant-garde interests—once the darlings of the revolution—were linked to former White officers, émigrés, former gendarmes. Hitler’s views on “degenerate art” coincided with Stalin’s. The Ukrainian GPU had a dossier of 3,000 volumes named “Spring”; one of their first victims was Igor Terentiev, sent to dig the White Sea canal.³⁷ As the son of a gendarme and the brother of an émigré, he could have easily been shot. Terentiev later became a free worker on the Moscow–Volga canal; not until 1937 were capital charges pressed against him.

Probably the last year in which lyricism was even conceivable in the USSR was 1932. In Pasternak’s Second Birth, his finest book, Stalinism met a covert rebuke:

But only now is it time to say

Contrasting the comparison with the greatness of the day:

The beginning of the glorious days of Peter the Great

Were darkened by rebellions and executions.

It was also the last year in which Mandelstam saw his verse in print: the ending of his poem “Lamarck” proclaimed too loudly the end of human freedom:

Nature has stepped back from us, As if she didn’t need us, And she has put the dolichocephalic brain Like a sword back in its sheath.

And she has forgotten, left it too late To lower the drawbridge for those Who have a green grave, Red breath, supple laughter . . .

Poetry after 1932 had to be written “for the desk drawer,” or, since drawers were searched, committed to memory. Pasternak veered away from political reality. Mandelstam confronted the reality but shunned the perpetrators: he called on Bukharin but never went to meet the Politburo at Gorky’s. For Mandelstam Stalin was a malevolent god, even an alter ego, another Joseph. But the sight of the humanoids on Stalin’s Politburo was, for Mandelstam, unbearable. On the eve of the writers’ congress, he lost his liberty for the lines:

And round him is a rabble of scraggy-necked leaders, He plays with the services of half-human creatures Some whistle, some meow, some snivel, Only he alone pokes and prods.

Iagoda liked Mandelstam’s lampoon well enough to learn it by heart and recite it to Bukharin. Proletarian poets, however, dismayed him by betraying their class. The drunken Pavel Vasiliev was lucky to escape with a warning for writing in 1932 of Stalin:

Cutting thousands of thousands of nooses, you got your way to power by violence. Well what have you done, where have you pushed to, tell me, stupid seminary student! These sacred texts should be put up in lavatories . . . We swear, o our Leader, we shall strew your path with flowers And stick a wreath of laurels up your arse.³⁸

Otherwise, irreverence was to be heard only in the folk quatrains of slaves on the collective farms and in the camps.

For the Soviet literati the bitter pill was sugared. Writers who conformed got apartments, dachas, guaranteed print runs, translation into the major languages of the Soviet Union and tours to the Caucasus or Pamirs. Compliant Russians, Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, and Kazakhs lived on mutual translation, “taking in each other’s washing.” Translation, like children’s literature, for a few years became a haven: readers benefited as poets and prose writers took cover behind another writer or language. “An alien tongue will be an embryonic membrane for me,” Mandelstam put it. Stalin encouraged translation. Italian authors—the USSR saw itself, in opposition to Mussolini, as the guardian of Italian culture—were recommended. Dante, a poet under sentence of death entangled in feuds between Guelfs and Ghibellines, edified Soviet poets. Stalin had Machiavelli retranslated. Mikhail Lozinsky, Gorky’s protégé and Mandelstam’s friend, spent the 1930s translating Inferno, and completed Paradiso after a spell in the camps.

Behind the scenes OGPU was tightening its grip. Glavlit came under OGPU’s direct control and censorship became secretive.³⁹ Only six copies including one for Stalin of lists of “major withdrawals, retentions, and confiscations” of publications from bookshops and libraries were printed. Any information could count as divulging state secrets: mentioning unemployment, food shortages, grain exports, suicides, insanity, epidemics, even weather forecasts were hostile propaganda. It was forbidden to mention OGPU, the NKVD, or even the telephone number of the Registry for Births, Deaths, and Marriages. Almanacs with addresses and telephone numbers of householders in Moscow and Leningrad, published since 1923, were stopped in the early 1930s. Directory inquiries were made at a street kiosk, which took fifteen kopecks (and their names) from inquirers. The censors forbade naming cows and pigs “Commissar,” “Pravda,” “Proletarian,” “Deputy,” “Cannibal,” or “Yid.” So that animals would still come when called, Glavlit suggested phonetically similar substitutes: “Anesthetic” for “Commissar,” “Rogue” for “Pravda.”⁴⁰ The censor mutilated the classics, too: lewdness in Pushkin was “pornography.” Folktales, where heroes chose between the left road and the right road, were rewritten so that heroes now chose between a side road and a straight road.

Even accidental dissidence was to be repressed. Under Stalin, misprints were declared “sorties by the class enemy.” All over Europe misprints had been disingenuously used by typesetters to annoy authority. Queen Victoria was reported to have “pissed” over Waterloo Bridge; Nicholas II at his coronation had a “crow” put on his head, later altered to “cow.” Correction slips in Soviet books listed all mistakes and who made them. Writers or typesetters could die for one misplaced letter, as Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror suggests unforgettably. Substituting one consonant made Stalin “pisser” or “shitter” (ssalin, sralin), Stalingrad could be set to read “Stalin is a reptile” (Stalin gad). Printing “Lenin had kittens” (okotilsia) instead of “Lenin went hunting” (okhotilsia ) was punishable. Captions in newspapers were a favorite target for the censors: “Stalin by the beating-up [instead of electoral] urn”; “We must guard the life of comrade Stalin and the lives of our leaders” placed opposite “Annihilate the reptiles so that not a trace remains on Soviet land.” Translation into other languages of the Soviet Union was unreliable. “Who does not work, does not eat,” in Turkmeni became, “Who does not work, won’t bite.”

In the early 1930s the semiliterate troika of censor, propagandist, and OGPU man went through every public library, removing some 50 percent of the books, including major classics. Poetry, apart from Pushkin, Nikolai Nekrasov, and Demian Bedny, was devastated.

In 1932 publishing, book distribution, even the secondhand book trade were all placed under the control of the party’s Central Committee. Antiquarian and foreign books sold by diplomats or returning Russians were confiscated by inspectors. As enemies of the people were identified and removed, their books were destroyed and their names excised or inked out from every copy of encyclopedias; more persons were employed in censoring literature than in creating it. The political line changed frequently, so that antifascist literature, for instance, or literature on anti-Jewish pogroms, would suddenly have to be destroyed. Stalin’s Short Course (a history of the party) went through successive editions as the heroes of the revolution became unpersons. Foreign publications, on which technological institutes relied, were frequently confiscated; polyglots were arrested as spies. So few censors were left who could read English, French, or German that foreign newspapers and books were destroyed wholesale in the post office.

Prose writers suffocated under mindless censorship and complained. When in March 1930 Bulgakov complained to Stalin, his letter fell first into Iagoda’s hands. Iagoda underlined certain lines—with sympathy or disapproval, we do not know. “Fighting censorship, of whatever kind and under whatever regime, is my duty as a writer, just as calling for freedom of the press is. I am an ardent supporter of this freedom and I believe that if any writer were to try to prove that he doesn’t need it, he would be like a fish publicly declaring it doesn’t need water.” Zamiatin in desperation published his anti-utopia We abroad and protested to Stalin the following year: “The author of this letter, sentenced to the highest measure of punishment [death], turns to you with a request for this measure to be substituted by another [exile].”