The Great Terror

10

ON THE CULTURAL FRONT

Mandelshtam always said that they always knew what they were doing: the aim was to destroy not only people, but the intellect itself.

Nadezhda Mandelshtam

The Russian intelligentsia had for over a century been the traditional repository of the ideas of resistance to despotism and, above all, to thought control. It was natural that the Purge struck at it with particular force. The Communists not only took seriously the whole principle of right and wrong ideas, and the necessity of crushing the latter, but also increasingly developed theories of form and method within the arts and sciences, so that someone otherwise an orthodox Party man in every way could yet hold opinions in biology or dramatic production which would lead directly to his fall.

In Soviet conditions, the academic world overlapped that of government to a larger degree than was then common elsewhere. The economists had been involved in the State Planning Commission, and had mostly been purged in the early 1930s. But in other spheres, too, such as foreign affairs and culture, there was a considerable overlap. We hear of a “professor” in the Foreign Affairs Commissariat appealing to Molotov to intercede for his father, arrested through what he took to be a misunderstanding. Molotov minuted, “To Yezhov: Can it be that this professor is still in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and not in the NKVD?” Whereupon the writer of the letter was unlawfully arrested.¹

During March, April, and May 1937, articles appeared attacking deviation in history and economics, and among the “cadres” of literature. A special article by Molotov sharpened the tone of the campaign.²

Historians were particularly vulnerable. The whole school of Party historians which had followed Pokrovsky were arrested. They were often labeled terrorists. In fact, it is extraordinary how many of the leading terrorist bands were headed by historians. Sokolnikov mentioned in the most natural way at his trial that “arrests had begun among the historians.”³ Prigozhin, one of the leading terrorist executives of the group then before the court, was a historian. So were Karev, Zeidel, Anishev, Vanag, Zaks-Gladnev, Piontkovsky, and Friedland, named at the 1936 and 1937 Trials as active terrorists. Friedland is mentioned by Radek as leading a terror group actually “consisting of historians”: this “we, among ourselves, called the ‘historical or hysterical’ group.”⁴ Professors were a convenient class of suspect because they were in a position to recruit plausible terrorists in the persons of students—also a much-arrested class. It was said in evidence at the 1937 Trial, as a normal thing, that the terrorist organization in Siberia sought its cadres “chiefly among the young people in the universities.”⁵

Friedland and the others were Party historians and automatically involved in controversy. But the non-Party academic world was also in a difficult position. While the man in the street could cease to talk a great deal, the professors were bound to continue giving lectures before public audiences which inevitably contained informers on the alert for anything which could possibly be interpreted as “hostile.” (Colleagues, too, might be serving the police. A successful and erudite professor in Dniepropetrovsk, who had matters in his past which the NKVD used against him, is described as a most efficient agent provocateur.)⁶

A professor of ancient history, Konstantin Shteppa, first lost favor as a result of describing Joan of Arc as high-strung. Joan had been treated in a hostile fashion or ignored until the mid-1930s, but with the coming of the Popular Front in France she had been referred to as a heroine of a national resistance movement, so that the professor’s remarks deviated from the Party line. After considerable trouble about this, he was again censured for a reference to the legend of Midas in an unfortunate context. Then, speaking of ancient and Christian demonology, he happened to remark that country people are always backward. Unfortunately, Trotsky, like many others, had expressed the same thought. Finally, in dealing with the Donatist movement in North Africa, at the time of the Roman Empire, he had shown that it was in part a national as well as a peasant rebellion, thus becoming a bourgeois nationalist. At this time, in 1937, his friends and colleagues were being arrested on a large scale.

I was naturally sorry for my friends, but I was not only sorry for them. I was also afraid of them. After all, they could say things about conversations we had had, in which we had not always expressed the orthodox view. There had been nothing criminal in these conversations; they had contained no attacks on the Soviet power. But the trivial criticisms and grumbles and expressions of resentment and disappointment which occurred in every conversation forced every Soviet citizen to feel guilty.⁷

Then came the suicide of Lyubchenko and his wife, N. Krupenik. Unfortunately, the wife had been a university lecturer, and the whole staff of Kiev University naturally became high-grade suspects. A vast network of bourgeois nationalists in the universities and cultural agencies came to light. Nevertheless, the professor was not arrested until March 1938. After a severe interrogation for fifty days, by a series of thirteen “magistrates,” he was charged with complicity in an attempt to assassinate Kossior. The fall of Kossior led to the withdrawal of this charge in his and many other cases, and for it was substituted espionage for Japan. This was based on the following facts: the professor had for some time been head of the “Byzantological” Committee of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. The term then came to be regarded as reactionary and was replaced by “Near East.” This connection with the “East” was regarded as adequate for at least some suspicion of sympathy with, and espionage for, a country a good deal farther east. It was shown that the professor had lectured on Alexander the Great and Hannibal to senior Red Army officers. This had given him contact with the Army and therefore the opportunity to carry out espionage. It was then proved that he had actually met foreigners in the person of Professor Hrozny, the great specialist in Hittite history, who had “recruited” him through another Byzantologist who had lectured in the Soviet Far East, thus getting very near Japan. Finally, an indirect contact was found with a professor in Odessa who had actually met the Japanese Consul there. The reports passed through this espionage link to Tokyo consisted of remarks about the “political morale” of the Army, and here a genuine fact was established in that the accused had once told a colleague that some senior officers had confused Napoleon III with Napoleon I, and Alexander the Great with Caesar.⁸

When things became easier, after Yezhov’s fall, some of the surviving academics withdrew their confessions, the charges began to be toned down, and eventually, in the early autumn of 1939, the professor was released. He was lucky. Others were still going, from V. G. Sorin, of the Institute of Red Professors, repressed as an enemy of the people in 1939, who died in prison or camp in 1944,⁹ down to non-Party lecturers. (Sorin is said to have been willing to supply Stalin with suitable texts, but “he drew the line at inventing texts and falsifying quotations.”)¹⁰ At the February–March 1937 plenum, Zhdanov had complained that of the 183 members of the Institute of Red Professors, 32 had been arrested between 1933 and 1936, and 53 more had more recently been found to be enemies of the people.¹¹

At a Party meeting in a university, where a member was denounced with the approval of the chair, it sometimes happened that a supporter would rise and ask for proof of the charges against his colleague. The makers of such demands were invariably denounced for counter-revolutionary attitudes, always silenced, and often arrested. At a meeting of the Kiev Academy of Sciences, for example, someone denounced Professor Kopershinsky. Another Communist scientist, Kaminsky (not the Minister of Health), remarked, “Where class instinct speaks, proof is unnecessary.” He, too, was later arrested. The Secretary of the Academy was publicly accused in the local press of having demanded proof about a similar denunciation.¹² He was one of the thirteen successive Secretaries of the Academy between 1921 and 1938, all of whom were arrested. (Of the seven Principals of Kiev University in the same period, six were arrested and one died a natural death.)¹³

In the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences, too, a “center for the espionage work of enemies of the people” was discovered, including most of those in leading positions—thirty-seven names are listed for eight institutes.¹⁴

The Academy of Sciences covers a wide range of disciplines. But we should note that the purge was violent not only among Byzantologists and so on, whom a technologically minded State can perhaps do without at a pinch, but also among scientists proper. The physicist Weissberg describes the situation at the Kharkov Physics Institute:

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Our Institute is one of the most important of its kind in Europe. In fact there is probably no other institute with so many different and well-equipped laboratories. The Soviet Government has spared no expense. Our leading scientists were partly trained abroad. They were constantly being sent to leading physicists all over the world at Government expense to supplement their knowledge and experience. Our Institute had eight departments each headed by a capable man. And what’s the situation now? The head of the laboratory for crystallography, Obremov, is under arrest, and so is the head of the low-temperature laboratory, Shubnikov. The head of the second low-temperature laboratory, Ruhemann, has been deported. The head of the laboratory for atom-splitting, Leipunsky, is under arrest, and so are the head of the Röntgen department, Gorsky, the head of the department for theoretical physics, Landau, and the head of the experimental low-temperature station, myself. As far as I know, Slutski, the head of the ultra-short-wave department, is the only one still at work.

‘Amongst those arrested is the founder of the Institute, Professor Obremov—its first director; Professor Leipunsky, member of the Academy of Sciences and later again director of the Institute; Professor Lev Davidovich Landau, the leading theoretical physicist in the Soviet Union.fn1 Landau had already been forced out of the Institute by the G.P.U., and he went to Moscow to work with Professor Kapitza. I supervised the building of our low-temperature experimental station, but before it could be put into operation I was arrested. My successor was Komarov. He has also been arrested. Who is to carry on?

‘… You need five years to train an engineer, and even then the Government had a very great deal of trouble before it could get suitable engineers for its new factories. But a capable physicist needs from ten to fifteen years’ training.’¹⁵

Matvei Bronshtein, a brilliant young physicist, was married to the writer Lydia Chukovskaya. He was arrested, and shot on 18 February 1938. She then wrote the story “Sofia Petrovna” (which only appeared in Russia in 1988, in the Leningrad magazine Neva). She had actually read it to Anna Akhmatova and eight others, who agreed that it could not be kept in the flat of the “wife of an enemy of the people.” And the NKVD, in fact, soon heard rumors and searched her place. A friend took it, but died in the siege of Leningrad. Before dying, however, he dragged himself to his sister’s to give her the manuscript to keep. After the war, the sister kept it, by arrangement with Chukovskaya, until she died in 1956. Then, after the dead woman’s belongings were dispersed, Chukovskaya finally found it in the bottom of a dust-covered wastepaper basket. Few such documents (for the story is factual) survive. It might have been published in Khrushchev’s time, but she refused to change a word.¹⁶

The purge also extended into the more technical sciences. For example, Academician Berg writes:

Thereafter there came difficult times: 1937, the loss of one’s close friends. Soon I too was arrested on a basis of a ridiculous and stupid denunciation. I spent precisely 900 days in prison. I was let out shortly before the war. During these years radio-technology suffered an enormous loss. Institutes and laboratories were closed down and people disappeared.’¹⁷

Sergei Korolev, the unique genius behind the Soviet early space program, was sent to Kolyma, but eventually brought to the NKVD prison aviation group KOSOS near the Yauza River. He had been told that “our country doesn’t need your fireworks. Or maybe you’re making rockets for an attempt on the life of our leader?” He was contemptuous of the regime, and fully expected to be shot.¹⁸

The aircraft designer A. N. Tupolev was arrested on 21 October 1937. He was kept standing “for many hours on end. Since I am a heavy man it was rather tough.”¹⁹ But on the advice of Muklevich, who was one of his cell mates, he confessed before worse befell him.²⁰ (His wife was also arrested.)²¹

The charge was of having sold plans to the Germans for use on the Messerschmidt 109.²² (The aviator Levanevsky had a couple of years earlier denounced him to Stalin as a wrecker.) In November 1938, Tupolev withdrew some of his testimony, and in the following years asserted his innocence in several appeals. He finally only got a ten-year sentence. He was later (foreign policy having changed) accused of being a French spy, but was in fact released in 1941. He had meanwhile worked, with other scientists, in one of the NKVD’s prisoner research units, of the type described in The First Circle.²³

Another aircraft designer, Chaikovsky, was also arrested. His wife, arrested too, was one day given her clothes, taken to a manicurist and hairdresser, and told she was to meet her husband, but must not let him know that she, too, was in jail. He was reassured, and told her that he could now do the technical work they were giving him in the Lubyanka with an easy mind. However, he seems to have been shot later,²⁴ as were most of the leading figures in the aircraft industry.²⁵

Generally speaking, the sciences in some way connected with policy or ideology fared worst. Sciences impinging on agriculture fared badly on both counts. The Meteorological Office was violently purged as early as 1933, for failing to predict weather harmful to the crops.²⁶ In part on similar grounds, astronomers connected with sunspot research fared badly. The Solar Service had in fact been set up in 1931 to help predict long-range weather patterns, with the usual imperfect results, though there were also charges of un-Marxist theories of sunspot development.²⁷ But astronomy in general suffered a devastating purge, conducted by the Stalinist pseudo-astronomer Ter-Oganezov. This started in early 1936, and soon the press was attacking the great Pul’kovo Observatory, which had in its earlier days been known as “the astronomical capital of the world.” The distinguished astronomer B. V. Numerov, arrested in November, admitted after severe beatings that he had organized a counter-revolutionary astronomers’ group for espionage, terror, and wrecking. It had “drawn a significant number of scientific workers into its orbit.”

In all, about twenty-seven astronomers, mostly leading figures, disappeared between 1936 and 1938. Work at Pul’kovo almost ceased, and the observatories at Tashkent and elsewhere also suffered severely. Russian astronomy, which had led the world, was devastated.²⁸ It is curious to recall that Stalin’s own first job was at an observatory.

Biology was, of course, a particularly sensitive field. With the rise of Lysenko in the early 1930s, a fierce “ideological” struggle commenced. Already in 1932, G. A. Levitsky and N. P. Avdoulov, cytologists, were arrested, but were later released. Other biologists were arrested about the same time.

In December 1936, the more prominent Professor I. J. Agol was arrested on charges of Trotskyism and was executed. Professor S. G. Levit, Head of the Medico-Genetic Institute, was expelled from the Party on the grounds that his biological views were pro-Nazi. (The People’s Commissar for Health, G. M. Kaminsky, was also criticized for defending him.)²⁹ Levit was arrested in about May 1937 and died in prison. A number of other prominent biologists, such as Levitsky, Karpechenko, and Govorov, also perished, as did the celebrated N. M. Tulaikov, Director of the Cereals Institute, who was arrested in 1937 and died in 1938 in one of the White Sea labor camps. The botanist A. Yanata was shot, on 8 June 1938, for having proposed chemicals to destroy weeds, contrary to the urging of Lysenkoites.³⁰ Max Levin, former head of the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic, seems also to have perished in his biological rather than his political capacity³¹

In this field, as in the political, the lesser figures were arrested first, and the net thus closed round their superiors. The biggest game was Academician N. I. Vavilov, the great geneticist, Lenin’s favorite. He had given up his position as head of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1935 to A. I. Muralov, until then Deputy Commissar for Agriculture. Muralov was arrested on 4 July 1937 and succeeded by Professor G. K. Meister. Meister was, in turn, arrested at the beginning of 1938, and Lysenko took the job after a squalid and deadly intrigue.

Vavilov himself was in trouble early in 1940 for some argument about the right agricultural policy to pursue in the parts annexed from Finland. An open quarrel with Lysenko followed. In August, he was touring the Ukraine. While in Cernauti, he was suddenly recalled to Moscow, and arrested on 6 August. The files on his case (to which leading biologists were given access after the fall of Lysenko in 1964) contain a letter from Beria to Molotov as Politburo member in charge of science, requesting permission for this arrest. Vavilov was under interrogation for eleven months and was questioned over a hundred times. He was tried on 9 July 1941 by the Military Collegium on charges of Rightist conspiracy, espionage for England, and other matters. He was sentenced to death.

The veteran biologist D. N. Pryanishnikov, together with Vavilov’s physicist brother, had interviews with Beria and Molotov to try to have him released, but without success. Pryanishnikov also seems to have intervened through Beria’s wife to try to get better prison conditions for his old colleague, and he even had the extraordinary temerity to nominate Vavilov for a Stalin Prize in 1941.

Vavilov was now held in Saratov prison. He introduced himself to his cell mates: “You see before you, talking of the past, Academician Vavilov, but now, according to the opinion of the investigators, nothing but dung.” Held in the condemned cell, a windowless underground block, without any exercise, for nearly a year, he was almost saved by his election in 1942 as a Fellow of the Royal Society in London, and his sentence was commuted to twenty years. But it was too late. Dystrophy had gone too far; he was a “goner” and died on 26 January 1943. His wife and son had been evacuated from Leningrad to Saratov in 1942 and lived all this time within a few miles of the prison where he was dying. But they were informed that he was in Moscow and did not learn of his presence.³²

The triumph of Lysenkoism was the most extraordinary of all the indications of the intellectual degeneracy of the Party mind which had followed on Stalin’s replacement of the intellectual section of the apparatus by his own creatures, such as Mitin and Mekhlis, in the early 1930s. The villain of the piece from this point of view was the charlatan I. I. Prezent, who established the orthodoxy of the Lysenko line by a complex and superficially sophisticated manipulation of the Marxist phraseology. To do justice to Zhdanov, he at least was never wholly taken in by Lysenko, and the final destruction of Soviet biology was only accomplished in 1948, as part and parcel of his own political defeat and death. But meanwhile, impressive verbalization, backed by vicious intrigue, secured Lysenko’s position of supremacy even if not yet of monopoly.

Another field in which a wholly erroneous doctrine was declared orthodox was linguistics. By the late 1920s, the teachings of N. Marr, who held that all language derives from the four sounds rosh, sal, ber, and yon, became accepted as the Marxist line. It is a view otherwise universally dismissed. As a result, old professors first were exiled, later had their books withdrawn, and in 1937 and 1938 were usually arrested. A major case was that of Professor E. D. Polivanov, a friend of Mayakovsky, arrested in 1937 and shot on 25 January 1938.³³ (Stalin abandoned Marrism in 1950, censuring its adherents for having bullied the antiMarrites.)

This was followed by the “Dictionary Affair,” about which little is known except that the French writer Romain Rolland managed to get the sentences commuted to imprisonment.³⁴

But the heaviest toll of all seems to have been among the writers. They were threatened from two directions. A theory of correct aesthetic method was imposed on them, and at the same time the content of their works was subject to intense scrutiny. It emerged in the 1950s that of the 700 writers who met at the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, only 50 survived to see the second in 1954.³⁵ A recent estimate is that 90 percent of the membership was repressed.³⁶ After the XXth Party Congress in 1956, it was confidentially admitted that “there were more than 600 writers who were guilty of no crime, and whom the Union [of Writers] obediently left to their fate in the prisons and camps.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, telling of this, adds that in reality “the list is still longer.”³⁷ And the Soviet researcher Eduard Beltov has lately revealed that he has long collected a list of a number of writers verified as dead in the repressions—though this also includes the post-1938 purges. He has the names of “nearly 1,300.” But he adds that this is incomplete, that Vasil Bykov, in his capacity as a deputy in the Byelorussian Supreme Soviet, recently applied to that body’s Presidium for information on several dozen Byelorussian writers who disappeared at this time, and that the local “law enforcement authorities” had “no information” about eighteen of those names.³⁸ In the country as a whole, about 150 litterateurs, including some 75 members of the Union of Soviet Writers, could not be traced at all. In all, the organ of the Union now tells us, some 2,000 literary figures were repressed, of whom about 1,500 met their deaths in prison or camp.³⁹

In connection with the Zinoviev Trial in August 1936, a series of hysterical articles in Literaturnaya gazeta attacked Trotskyite writers. They had infiltrated the Writers’ Union apparatus. Numbers of well-known authors were denounced, including I. I. Kataev (who had allegedly received Trotskyite “directives” in 1928, sent money to Trotskyites then in internal exile, and “retained his ties with Trotsky”), Tarasov-Rodionov (who also “for years had ties with class enemies”), and Galina Serebryakova, married in turn to Sokolnikov and Serebryakov; she survived years in camp, but the others did not. At the same time, the periodical attacked scores of other “enemy” writers throughout the Soviet Union.⁴⁰

The spring of 1937, in part in connection with Yagoda’s fall, saw the end of the former Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), which had bullied the writing community from an extreme Marxist position in the early 1930s before being repudiated by Stalin in 1932 in favor of Socialist Realism. L. L. Averbakh, its leading figure, was a relative of Yagoda by marriage and was denounced as a Trotskyite and arrested in mid-April,⁴¹’ together with the playwright V. Kirshon⁴² (a delegate to the XVIIth Party Congress), who was eventually shot in the political–military massacre at the end of July 1938. Dmitry Mirsky, a prince who had fought in the White Army, had been converted to Communism while in exile in England, and had returned to the USSR, was now referred to by Literaturnaya gazeta as “that filthy Wrangelist and White Guard officer.”⁴³ The leading Polish Communist poet, Bruno Jasienski, was also denounced in connection with the RAPPists. At his first interrogation in the Lefortovo, the examiners seized him by his shoulders and stamped on his feet.⁴⁴ He was, of course, accused as a Polish spy—in connection with the case of T. F. Dombal (shot on 4 December 1938). He was given a fifteen-year sentence as such, but also as a French spy. A friend met him in the Vtoraya Rechka camp near Vladivostok, now barely recognizable from sickness, hunger, and exhaustion, but denied entry to the hospital, though he was apparently admitted before he died in 1939.⁴⁵

There were certain definite grudges to be paid off. Isaak Babel, Russia’s finest short-story writer, had served in Budenny’s Cavalry Army in the Civil War and the Polish Campaign, and in 1924 published his extraordinary collection of Civil War stories, Konarmiia. Budenny had protested vigorously as each vignette forming the book came out. He regarded the ruthlessly clear-eyed stories as a slander, preferring the hack heroics of the ordinary correspondents. Gorky, recognizing Babel’s very different talent, had protected him.

Babel wrote of the Revolution, “It’s eaten with gunpowder and the very best blood is poured over it.” It was Babel who at the Writers’ Congress of 1934 had spoken of the “heroism of silence,” a phrase and an activity to be condemned bitterly as a sign of alienation from the regime. Babel knew Yezhov’s wife. Although he knew it was unwise, he sometimes went to see her to “find a key to the puzzle.” He gathered that whatever Yezhov’s role, it was not at the bottom of it.⁴⁶ He ceased to be published in 1937 and at the end of May 1939 was arrested in his dacha at the writers’ settlement at Peredelkino. He is said to have resisted arrest and was shot on 27 January 1940, a week before Meyerhold, whose case was connected with his.⁴⁷

Babel, in addition to offending a minor figure like Budenny and bringing into disrepute the First Cavalry Army, from which Stalin was now drawing an inadequate substitute for a High Command, is said to have made a rash joke about the General Secretary. But his offense was small compared with that of Boris Pilnyak, another talent to have arisen from the Revolution. His Naked Year, about a provincial town in 1919, is a most extraordinary representation, in which the struggle for bare existence brings out the excess, the eccentricity, of the range of Russian character.

As early as the 1920s, Pilnyak had become involved in one of the most obscure and doubtful crimes attributed to Stalin. In the spring of 1924, Frunze was appointed Deputy Commissar for War—and in practice took over control of the Army, with little resistance from Trotsky, before Trotsky’s actual removal in 1925. He seems to have sympathized mainly with the Zinoviev–Kamenev group. In the late summer of 1925, he fell ill, and died on 31 October of that year. The rumor in Moscow was that he had been ordered by the Central Committee—that is, in effect, by Stalin—to undergo an operation which in fact killed him. If Frunze had died in 1936 or 1937, the existence of such a rumor would have been perfectly natural. The significant thing is that it circulated at so early a date—at a time, that is, when Stalin had not given any precedents.

Later Soviet books on Frunze have been notably touchy on the point. One biography⁴⁸ elaborates at some length about doctors who said that an operation was really necessary, and who tended him through his last illness. This is a book by one of those military historians who have elsewhere been so frankly hostile to Stalin’s acts against the generals. Unless (as is, of course, quite possible) other interventions took place on its publication, one tends to think that exculpation from such a source shows that Stalin is really believed not guilty by some of those who would be anxious to know.

The most extraordinary thing is that the rumor was given public circulation. On its basis, Pilnyak, hitherto an almost entirely nonpolitical writer (who had said that he knew nothing of politics and not being a Communist could not write like one), produced his Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, subtitled Murder of the Army Commander. The hero, Gavrilov, is described as a well-known Red Army leader who returns to Moscow on orders and reads in the papers that he has come back for an operation. He has had stomach ulcers, but is now fully recovered. He goes to see a man described as the most important of the “three who lead” the Party, who orders him to have the operation. The doctors examine him, and report that an operation is necessary, but afterwards in private conversation say that it is not. The operation is performed, and he dies of an overdose of chloroform. The story has a very sinister and gloomy tone. It was about to be printed in Novyy mir, but the issue was confiscated and the editors admitted in the following number that accepting it had been a mistake, and printed letters describing it as “a malicious slander of our Party.” In the circumstances then prevailing, there were many copies circulating, and the story was printed in 1927 in Sofia.

It is clear, indeed, that no one with any political sense would have written a story like The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, and it seems likely that Pilnyak was put up to it by some friend more deeply involved in the struggles of the time. But no more was said about the matter for the moment.

In 1929, Pilnyak was President of the All-Russian Union of Writers, a genuine association then resisting the maneuvers of RAPP to enforce ideological and bureaucratic control of the writers. (Mayakovsky’s suicide in 1930 is now attributed, in part, to persecution by officials of RAPP.)⁴⁹ In the face of opposition from all the best writers, and to a large degree from Maxim Gorky too, the RAPPists failed in their task, and, as we saw, later lost favor and were themselves purged. But this did not save the non-RAPP writers.

Pilnyak’s last effective work, Mahogany, served as a pretext for action against him. It was published in Germany as a preliminary to its coming out in Russia, then a common practice for copyright reasons. But it was then denounced as anti-Soviet and its publication abroad alleged to be a White Guard provocation. Pilnyak was now in great trouble and ready to submit to any ruling. Zamyatin, chairman of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union, was also under attack; his We (on which Orwell was to draw for 1984) had been published abroad in much the same circumstances as Pilnyak’s Mahogany. He boldly demanded to be allowed to leave the country, refused to retract, and exposed the whole mechanism which literary persecution was already setting in motion, mild though its actions were compared with later developments. He said that the Moscow branch had passed its resolution “without hearing any defense: first there was a condemnation and only then an investigation. I imagine that no court in the world has ever heard of such a procedure.” He added that he could not belong to an organization that behaved like this and resigned his membership in the Union. Finally, Maxim Gorky interceded for both Pilnyak and Zamyatin in Izvestiya:

… We have got into the stupid habit of raising people up into high positions only to cast them down into the mud and the dust. I need not quote examples of this absurd and cruel treatment of people, because such examples are known to everybody. I am reminded of the way in which petty thieves were lynched in 1917–18. These dramas were generally the work of obyvateli [obtuse philistines] and one is reminded of them every time one sees with what delight people throw themselves on to a man who has made a mistake, in order to take his place.⁵⁰

Pilnyak was “allowed” to settle down to write pro-Soviet literature, while Zamyatin’s boldness was rewarded by permission to leave the country. Zamyatin was one of the few trained Marxists among Soviet writers, and on this account he had rejected Bolshevism, which was welcomed in a vague and romantic fashion by Futurists like Mayakovsky—at a time, indeed, when the Futurists of Italy were showing a similar romanticism toward the other new and dynamic movement, Fascism.

Pilnyak worked at a conformist novel, The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea. Yezhov personally oversaw the production, listing fifty-odd passages for amendment. Pilnyak became deeply depressed, and told Victor Serge, “There isn’t a single thinking adult in this country who hasn’t thought that he might get shot.”⁵¹ (But he had the courage to intervene when Serge was arrested in 1933.) In May 1937, he was attacked flatly for “counter-revolutionary writing,”⁵² and was arrested on 28 October 1937.⁵³ It has now been stated in Moscow that he was shot in April 1938 (and not at the later date given in reference books for the past twenty years).⁵⁴ The charge, or one of the charges, was of being a Japanese spy—he had actually visited Japan.⁵⁵ His wife, the actress Kira Andronikova, mother of his three-year-old son, Boris, was sentenced to eight years.⁵⁶

Other prose writers of mark who perished include Pantaleimon Romanov, author of Three Pairs of Silk Stockings; Artyom Vesyoly; and S. Tretyakov, author of Roar China. Mikhail Koltsov, of Pravda, under suspicion as an agent of Lord Beaverbrook,⁵⁷ was arrested on 12 December 1938. Sentenced by Ulrikh on 1 February 1940 to ten years without the right of correspondence,⁵⁸ he was shot at once. Others who were arrested but survived include Yuri Olesha and Ostap Vyshnia. Vyshnia, accused of planning to assassinate Postyshev and others, was released in 1943, and had to write deriding those abroad who had protested at his supposed liquidation.

Poetry in the USSR was already a dangerous trade. Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova’s former husband, had been shot as a counter-revolutionary, on Agranov’s orders, in August 1921, the month which also saw the death of Alexander Blok, long past his brief enthusiasm for the Red Guard, from anemia due to malnutrition. Yesenin had committed suicide in 1925, and Mayakovsky in 1930.

And now many of the best surviving poets in Russia were destroyed.

The poet Vladimir Smirenski (Andrei Skorbny) had been given ten years as early as 1931, for participation in a group which had discussed politics almost entirely in relation to art.⁵⁹ We do not know the charges against most of the poets who now went to their deaths. It seems that they were seldom accused of poetic crimes as such, though a case is reported of a young poetess arrested for writing a “hymn to freedom” which was construed as “preparation for terrorism,” and sentenced to eight years in the Karaganda camps.⁶⁰ There is no information about the eventual charges against such men as Nikolai Klyuev, Yesenin’s disciple, whose best poem, his “Lament” for his friend and teacher, sighs, “If I could only touch peace.” He had already in the 1920s spent three days in the Leningrad OGPU’s steam room,⁶¹ and been released. He was again arrested in 1933 for “kulak agitation” and counter-revolutionary verses and was exiled to Arctic Narym. Gorky managed to have him moved to the far more tolerable Tomsk, but he was eventually rearrested and is reported dying in a prison train and being buried at some Siberian halt.⁶²

The poet Pavel Vasiliev is said to have defended Bukharin as “a man of the highest nobility and the conscience of peasant Russia” at the time of his denunciation at the Pyatakov Trial, and to have damned the writers then signing the routine attacks on him as “pornographic scrawls on the margins of Russian literature.”⁶³ On 7 February 1937 he left his wife, Elena, to go to a barbershop for a shave, accompanied by his host’s son.

Some minutes later the boy returned.

“Lena, they’ve arrested Pavel….”

… In all the prisons they answered alike, to the question: “Is there a Vasiliev amongst those arrested?”

“No, Vasiliev, Pavel Nikolaevich, is not listed.”

Months went by. Some woman instructed her:

“Prepare a parcel. He’ll be in the place where they accept it.”

It was true—the parcel was accepted in one of the prisons. Moreover they said that she could come again on 16 July.

On 16 July the person on duty said: “He’s been transferred to another place.”

And twenty years later, petitioning for her husband’s posthumous rehabilitation, Elena Aleksandrovna discovered that it was precisely on 16 July that Pavel Vasiliev ceased to be.⁶⁴

The leading Georgian poet, Yashvili, killed himself with a shotgun on 22 July 1937⁶⁵ as the result of the arrest of other Georgian literary figures, in particular his friend and equal the poet Titsian Tabidze.⁶⁶ In Boris Pasternak’s Letters to Georgian Friends, we read of the Russian poet’s brave and devoted attempts to help and console Tabidze’s family after his disappearance, until his wife was finally informed of his execution (on 16 December 1937) when he was rehabilitated seventeen years later.

Many Armenian writers were shot. The poet Gurgen Maari, who survived, tells how “I was arrested at night on 9 August 1936. I was not surprised. A month previously the First Secretary of the C.C. of the Armenian Communist Party, Agasi Khandzhyan, had tragically perished. The atmosphere in the House of Writers was very oppressive.”⁶⁷

He was in solitary confinement for many months without even being allowed out for exercise. It was not until two years after his arrest that he was “tried”:

The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union is in session. I confess to terrorist acts, to the wish to separate Armenia from the Soviet Union and unite her to the imperialist camp. I intended to kill Beria….

The court was a closed one, the trial lasted three minutes…. I was condemned to ten years’ deprivation of liberty. Once again Sianos [a jailer, formerly in the same orphange as Maari] accompanies me. This time to the cell for sentenced prisoners.

“How many did you get?” he asked in a whisper.

“Ten years.”

“Thank God. You’ve got off lightly.”

“Ten years,” I repeat.

“For the third night running, when they’ve taken people out, they’ve shot them,” he whispers….

The forty people in his cell included two architects, three writers, four engineers, and one People’s Commissar; all the rest were Government employees and Party workers. The opinion of the pessimists was that their prison sentences were just for the sake of form and that they would be shot in any case. However, “in the autumn of 1938 we were crammed into lorries one night and—covered with tarpaulin like forbidden goods—were taken to the station. It was empty at the station, there was not a living soul—only troops.”

For six months, the prisoners lived in the Vologda city jail. Then they were taken to Krasnoyarsk, where “a large army of prisoners composed of representatives of many of the peoples of the Soviet Union swarmed. Inhabitants of Central Asia stood out particularly in their bright national costumes.”

A medical examination determined who was to be sent on to Norilsk in the Arctic. It was then, for the second time in three years, that Maari managed to see himself in a mirror. He could hardly recognize himself. At the Siblag (“Siberian” Prison Camp) in Norilsk, he made friends with Egert, once a famous film actor. He was marched with 200 others to another camp; most of the 200 died later. Maari himself was there until 1947. He briefly describes two camp commandants: one hated “intelligent swine” and sent them to do the heaviest work; the other, who liked books, eased his lot a good deal.

Released in 1947, Maari was not permitted to publish anything under his own name as his civic rights had not been restored, and in 1948 he was rearrested. This time, the cell was full of troops returning from German captivity. In 1948 and 1949, he was incarcerated in nine prisons in nine towns. He and his fellows were then classed as “exiles for life.”

The Ukrainian creative intelligentsia, as we have seen, had been struck down on a vast scale every year since 1930.⁶⁸ The Ukrainian poets perished in their majority for “nationalist” reasons: sixteen, starting with Vlyzko in 1934, are namea as executed or dying in camps between then and 1942—almost all at Solovetsk, though a few were in Kolyma. A group of neo-classicist poets, Mykola Zerov, Pavlo Fylypovych, and others, was tried in Kiev in January 1936 for nationalism, terrorism, and espionage. One temporary survivor, the poet Mykhalo Dray-Khamara, got a five-year Special Board sentence on 28 March 1936, but seems to have died in camp in 1938 or 1939.⁶⁹

There seems to have beeen another Ukrainian writers’ case in October 1937. At any rate, A. S. Mikhailyuk is given as dying on 23 October and M. V. Semenko on 24 October 1937—a case perhaps associated with that of Ukrainian Politburo member V. I. Porayko, later to be denounced as a prominent fascist, shot on 25 October. Two more Ukrainian writers of note, M. G. Yoganson and G. 0. Kovalenko, perished on 27 and 28 October 1937, respectively; and two more, Slisarenko and P. P. Fylypovich, on 3 November. Yet another concentration of Ukrainians is to be found on 12 to 14 January 1938, with the writer N. Filyansky and the old revolutionaries S. D. Visochenko and A. K. Serbichenko.

And so it was in all the non-Russian Republics. Their men of literature were almost automatically regarded as bourgeois nationalists, since, of course, they had been working in the national traditions of their own languages. In Byelorussia (see here) most of the leading writers were shot. In Kazakhstan, the death dates of almost all the main figures are given as 1937 to 1939.⁷⁰

The mean viciousness of such campaigns can be seen in speech after speech and periodical after periodical. It is at random that we quote from an attack in Revolyutsiya i natsional’nosti⁷¹ on a Russian–Upper Mari dictionary by the alleged “bourgeois nationalist SR” Epin, who had omitted words like dekulakization, opportunism, kolkhoznik, and the like, though “in order to mask his wrecking policies” included a few revolutionary words in a section at the end on “new terms.” He had also omitted the names of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov from his dictionary. This was all called “counter-revolutionary.”

The Leningrad poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, who exalted a starling’s song against “the tambourines and kettledrums of history,” was arrested on 19 March 1938 “on a faked political accusation.”⁷² A “counter-revolutionary writers’ organization” had been “uncovered” in Leningrad (though its alleged leading members, Nikolai Tikhonov and Konstantine Fedin in Moscow, were never arrested). Those implicated in what was also called the “Pereval Case,” after the magazine in which they had collaborated, included the poets Benedikt Livshits and Boris Kornilov, who were shot in the autumn of 1938; Elena Tager, a short-story writer, who spent ten years in labor camp; and at least five others (all of whom were shot or died in camp). Connections were also made with poets elsewheree in the USSR, like the Georgian Tabidze and D. I. Kharms.

Zabolotsky was interrogated for four days without a break, and tortured. (One of the charges was that a poem of his was a satire on collectivization.) On his return to his cell, he tried to barricade himself in and fought the warders who came for him. He was then beaten even more severely and taken in a state of collapse to the prison psychiatric hospital, where he was held for two weeks, first in a violent, then in a quiet ward. On recovery, he was literally pushed into a common cell designed for twelve or fifteen, which now held seventy or eighty, and sometimes a hundred prisoners. “People could lie down only on their side, jammed tight against each other, and even then not all at once, but in two shifts.” (Such arrangements had been “worked out by generations of prisoners … who had gradually passed on their acquired skills to newcomers.”) At night, the cell was pervaded by “dumb terror” at the screams as “the hundreds of sergeants, lieutenants, and captains of State Security, together with their assistants got down to their routine tasks” in the main Liteyni prison. Meanwhile, several Soviet writers are reported as coming to Zabolotsky’s defense, and, together with his failure to confess, this seems to have led to the removal of his name from the list of major plotters. He was later transferred to a two-man cell in the Kresty, now inhabited by ten. In September or early October, he was sentenced by the Special Board to eight years. On 8 November, he was sent to Sverdlovsk, and on 5 December started a sixty-day train journey in a forty-man railway wagon, suffering the usual horrors, and ended up at Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur, at hard labor in the notorious Bamlag. For part of the time, he is reported employed in the camp draftsman’s office, which may have saved his life. He was released in 1944 and returned from exile in 1946; his sentence was annulled in 1951. However, his health had been undermined, and he was an invalid until his death seven years later.⁷³

The beautiful poet Marina Tsvetaeva had gone abroad soon after the Revolution to join her husband, the literary critic Sergei Efron, who had fought in the White Army. She had written of the “deadly days of October.” In the 1930s, her husband was recruited by Soviet agents and joined a Soviet-supported movement for the return of émigrés to Russia. He was one of the first to be allowed back by the Soviet authorities, and he disappeared without trace soon after his arrival. Their daughter went from Paris to seek him and also disappeared. (He had been executed, while the girl was to spend sixteen years in prison camps.)⁷⁴ In 1939, Marina Tsvetaeva followed them. On 31 August 1941, worn out by long suffering, she committed suicide in the provincial town of Yelabug.⁷⁵

Her scintillating poetry became widely known and circulated in manuscript. But in spite of its influence and popularity in literary circles, it was not to be published until 1957. Much of it had to wait longer, in particular a cycle of romantic lyrics connected with the tragedy of the White Army:

Where are the swans?

The swans have left.

Where are the ravens?

The ravens have stayed.

Even in 1957, the publication of a short selection of her most harmless verses was soon called “a gross political error.”⁷⁶

Another talent of the first rank, Osip Mandelshtam, was a sick man, with a nervous complaint. In 1934, he was called in to the NKVD on an order signed by Yagoda himself, interrogated the whole night, and then sent to prison. He had written an epigram on Stalin. Pasternak is reported to have pleaded for him with Bukharin, a sign of Pasternak’s naïveté. (It seems to have been now that Stalin rang up Pasternak and asked if Mandelshtam was a good poet.) Other writers went to Yenukidze, still influential. At this time, when the Terror had not got into its stride, such interventions may have been helpful. In any case, the poet was sentenced merely to three years’ exile at Cherdyn, a small town near Solikamsk, for “conspiracy.” He attempted suicide, and his wife appealed to the Central Committee.

Mandelshtam was transferred to Voronezh, a tolerable provincial town. He was able to return to Moscow in May 1937, but could not get permission to remain. On 2 May 1938 he was again arrested, taken to the Butyrka, and sentenced by the Special Board to five years’ forced labor in the Far East on 2 August 1938. Sent off by train on 9 September, he arrived on 13 October at the Vtoraya Rechka Transit Camp, from which prisoners were sent on to Kolyma. But he seems to have become half-demented, and was rejected from the transports. In his calmer moments, he sometimes recited poetry to his fellow prisoners, and once he was told that a line of his had been scratched on the wall of a death cell at the Lefortovo: “Am I real and will death really come?” When he heard this, he cheered up and for some days was much calmer. He suffered from the cold in his tattered leather coat, and seems to have got little food, dying, apparently of hunger, on 26 December 1938.⁷⁷ He had written of his times:

But your spine has been smashed,

My beautiful, pitiful era,

And with an inane smile

You look back, cruel and weak,

Like a beast that has once been supple, At the tracks of your own paws.

As with other citizens in all these arrests, the blind chance of “objective characteristics” prevailed. In December 1937, so Ehrenburg tells us, his son-in-law Boris Lapin tried to account for various arrests of intellectuals: “Pilnyak has been to Japan; Tretyakov often met foreign writers; Pavel Vasilyev drank and talked too much; Bruno Jasienski was a Pole…. Artyom Vesyoly had at one time been a member of the Pereval literary group; the wife of the painter Shukhayev was acquainted with the nephew of Gogoberidze….”⁷⁸

Writers sometimes intervened for their colleagues, occasionally with partial or eventual success. Tikhonov, Kaverin, Zoshchenko, Lozinsky, Tyanova, Shklovsky, and Chukovsky are named as doing so for Zabolotsky, Vygodsky, and others.

But there were denouncers as well as victims, cowards and bullies as well as brave men in the literary world, as elsewhere. When Pasternak was refusing to sign the authors’ circular applauding the killing of the generals—only to escape because the organizers added his name anyway—Yakov Elsberg, the author of several books about Herzen, Shchedrin, and others, who had formerly been Kamenev’s secretary, now embarked on a course of deletion to remove the taint of this association, denouncing his former RAPP associates and others. Another, N. V. Lesyuchevsky, denounced Zabolotsky, Livshits, Komilov, and the other Leningraders. He was still alive and was feebly defending himself in 1988.⁷⁹

During the “Thaw” of 1962, the Moscow writers’ organization managed to secure the expulsion of Elsberg on a charge of having informed in the 1930s. The equally notorious case of Lesyuchevsky was raised, then shelved. But when the organization fell briefly into the hands of a liberal leadership at the end of that year, the members voted once more to reopen the case, again abortively.⁸⁰ Such men lasted, indeed, while an honest Stalinist like Fadeyev, who had tried to save some of his political enemies, committed suicide in 1956 on the exposure of his patron.

Besides mere police spies, there were men who had simply sold out to Stalin, like Alexei Tolstoy, who wrote that “Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin was a typical potential Trotskyite” and made a career as a regime hack. There were others who just accepted the killing of their colleagues. Surkov remarked long after the rehabilitations, “I have seen my friends, writers, disappear before my eyes, but at the time I believed it necessary, demanded by the Revolution.”⁸¹

In fact, the whole cultural world was under attack. Plots were discovered everywhere—for example, among the staff of the Hermitage Museum.⁸² The public arts suffered almost equally. The composer N. S. Zhelayev had been a friend of Tukhachevsky, and when he was arrested even the NKVD men were astonished to find that he had not yet taken down a picture of the late Marshal.⁸³ The conductor E. Mikoladze was shot in 1937.⁸⁴ Many actors are reported in the camps—such as Shirin, sent to labor camp for saying, “Don’t feed us Soviet straw; let’s play the classics.”⁸⁵ Well-known actresses like 0. Shcherbinskaya (an ex-wife of Pilnyak) and Z. Smirnova followed them.⁸⁶ Actresses and ballerinas are frequently mentioned in the camp literature: a typical arrest was under Article 58, Section 6, of a ballerina who attended a dinner arranged by foreign admirers.⁸⁷

The celebrated Natalia Sats, creator of the Moscow Children’s Theater, had been Tukhachevsky’s wife, and was arrested in 1937 and sent to Rybinsk camp. She is reported there at several dates in the 1940s, but survived and was eventually released.

But the greatest victim in the theater was Vsevolod Meyerhold. At the beginning of 1938, a short decree announced the “liquidation” of the Meyerhold Theater as “alien to Soviet art.” It added that the question of Meyerhold’s further work in the theater was being “studied.”⁸⁸

On 15 June 1939 Meyerhold was invited to make a public self-criticism at a meeting of producers presided over by Vyshinsky—himself, as the artist Yuri Annenkov remarks, a well-known producer of dramas of a certain type.⁸⁹ Meyer-hold retracted, but also (in one account) counterattacked:

The pitiful and wretched thing that pretends to the title of the theater of socialist realism has nothing in common with art…. People in the arts searched, erred, and frequently stumbled and turned aside, but they really created—sometimes badly and sometimes splendidly. Where once there were the best theaters in the world, now—by your leave—everything is gloomily well regulated, averagely arithmetical, stupefying, and murderous in its lack of talent. Is that your aim? If it is—oh!—you have done something monstrous! In hunting down formalism, you have eliminated art!⁹⁰

Meyerhold was arrested afew days later. He was severely tortured, and wrotein an appeal to Vyshinsky that fortunately the interrogator Rodos had only broken his left arm so that he could still use a pen. Rodos, he added, had also urinated in his mouth.⁹¹ He was shot on 2 February 1940.⁹² His wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, who had formerly been married to Yesenin, was found dead in their flat after his arrest, with, reportedly, her eyes cut out and seventeen knife wounds. Only documents were missing, and there was no police investigation.⁹³ Her death was thought of by prisoners to be intended as a general threat to wives.⁹⁴

Meyerhold’s theater had predeceased him. The disappearance of anyone led also to the disappearance, or reassignment, of his artifacts. On the arrest of the sculptor Kratko, all his works disappeared from the galleries. When A. N. Tupolev was arrested, the “ANT” types of plane were rechristened. One prisoner reports a physicist who had with four collaborators completed a paper and lectured on it at the Academy of Sciences. The paper appeared in the scientific journals under the name of the two collaborators who had not been arrested.⁹⁵ Unorthodox works simply vanished into the files of the NKVD, where any that have not been destroyed still lie, with Gorky’s last notebooks and Marina Tsvetaeva’s last poems.

Nor have we dealt with the more general effect of actions such as those described in reducing what had been a lively culture to a terrified level of almost unrelieved conformism. We have only been able to give a few illustrations of the way in which the Purge hit the creative minds of Russia—half a dozen stories and a handful of names, including the greatest in the country. A Georgian paper in the Khrushchev era asked rhetorically, “How many eminent writers, poets, artists, scholars and engineers perished in Georgia, repressed illegally, subjected to torture, exiled or shot?”⁹⁶ The same might be said of the USSR as a whole, where, as a more recent Soviet article puts it, “There came about a tragic, unthinkable annihilation of culture, science, the best part of the intelligentsia….”⁹⁷ The few cases we have spoken of, and briefly, must stand for a holocaust of the things of the spirit.