The Magical Chorus

Akhmatova was condemned in a special Resolution of the Central Committee of the Party on August 21, 1946, which proclaimed that her poetry “brings harm to bringing up our youth and therefore cannot be tolerated in Soviet literature,” and the Stalinist spokesman Zhdanov announced that Akhmatova “is either a nun or a whore, or rather a whore and nun who combines depravity with prayer.”²²

Zhdanov’s pogrom-like denunciations of Akhmatova (and Zoshchenko, who was subjected to state ostracism at the same time) became touchstones for Soviet cultural policy for the next eight years, and they were not disavowed formally until 1988, in Gorbachev’s time. Those of us who studied in the Stalin years were obligated to quote them by heart in school and university, intoning, for instance, that Zoshchenko in his works depicts “people and himself as vile lascivious animals, who have neither shame nor conscience.”²³

Stalin, who considered himself master of half the world (and actually was that in the postwar years, for once China joined the Soviet bloc in 1949, the “socialist camp” was almost a billion people), apparently pictured the ideal Soviet Union as a permanent military camp, where he would keep tightening the loosened cultural screws. For Stalin, Zoshchenko and Akhmatova themselves meant absolutely zero: all they were just pawns in a global ideological game. But for Akhmatova and Zoshchenko these persecutions (even though they were not arrested) skewed their lives. They both fought it, using different behavioral strategies.

Zoshchenko, a former tsarist officer with awards for valor, tried to defend his dignity, writing to Stalin: “It is very difficult for me to appear in your eyes as a literary rascal, a base person, or a man who worked for landowners and bankers. That is a mistake. I assure you.”²⁴ Akhmatova in 1952 was forced to publish a pro-Stalin cycle of poems in an attempt to lessen the burden of her son, arrested yet again. No one blamed her for it, then or now.

Akhmatova, who died on March 5, 1966 (thirteen years to the day after Stalin), managed to create an image of herself for future generations as a fierce and uncompromising opponent of Stalin—the ancient Greek prophet Cassandra, through whom spoke History itself. Her image as “empress in exile,” extraordinary for the times, was obviously calculated and honed in the smallest details.

Shostakovich in his later years took an anti-Stalinist position similar to Akhmatova’s, although he did not project as imposing a presence in person (and who else could?). Neurotic and twitchy, looking like a frightened schoolboy with his round eyeglasses and cowlick, Shostakovich nevertheless had unparalleled inner discipline and enormous confidence in his creative power, which helped him to withstand Stalin’s personal attacks in 1936 and later in 1948.

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony can be read as a coded narrative about the years of the Great Terror, parallel to Akhmatova’s Requiem, and his Seventh Symphony echoes Akhmatova’s patriotic and memorial poems of the war years. It is no accident that she felt great affinity for him. She had wanted Shostakovich to set her Requiem to music.²⁵

Akhmatova and Shostakovich had no illusions about the nature of the Stalinist regime, they simply rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s when it was demanded. Prokofiev, Shostakovich’s senior colleague and rival, was also attacked by the party in 1948, but his reaction to Zhdanov’s rebukes for “formalism” and music that was “anti-people” was more like Zoshchenko’s in an attempt to maintain personal dignity and decorum.

Prokofiev tried with utmost seriousness to explain to his Communist vilifiers the difficulties of writing easily accessible music: “You need particular care in composing a simple melody not to turn it into something cheap, saccharine, or imitative.”²⁶ Zhdanov demanded a complete break with the West, while the former émigré Prokofiev, who still had many friends and admirers in the West, responded with explanations of the subtleties of his aesthetic differences with Wagner or Arnold Schoenberg.

The resemblance of Prokofiev and Zoshchenko could be gleaned in the parallel arc of their creative development (from stylistic excesses of the early oeuvre to the rather forced, pallid simplicity of the late works) and similarities of their personal problems. Beneath their impenetrable “business” mask, both hid an eternal infantilism and profound insecurity; both were tormented by neuroses and weak hearts, which they tried to cure with self-treatment. They both wanted to deal with their organism “scientifically” and it turned into an idée fixe: Zoshchenko wrote an autobiographical book of Freudian self-analysis, which he wanted to call The Keys of Happiness and considered the most important work of his life; Prokofiev, as it became known after his diaries were published for the first time in 2002, turned to Christian Science, which he had joined in Paris in 1924.

Christian Science teaches that illness must be overcome not through medication but spiritual influence. There is an entry in the composer’s diary when he was reading Science and Health, by the sect’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy: “If I refuse medications but wear eyeglasses, that is a contradiction and lack of conscientiousness. I’ve decided to take them off. My glasses are not strong and I can manage without them anyway.”²⁷

After the Bolshevik revolution, the ambitious Prokofiev left Petrograd for the United States, to have a world career as a composer and pianist, even though Cultural Commissar Lunacharsky, who admired him, tried to talk him out of emigrating when he signed permission for him to leave. At first things went well in the West for Prokofiev, but by the early 1930s he sensed that he would not beat Stravinsky as a composer or Rachmaninoff as a pianist. They were the musical pillars of Russian émigrés. And therefore Prokofiev, assuming that he had no rivals back home (he did not consider young Shostakovich a real threat), decided to return to the Soviet Union in 1936, at the height of the Great Terror.

We will never know how much the principles of Christian Science helped Prokofiev adjust to the realities of Soviet life, but in 1936–1938 he composed some of his greatest works: the operas War and Peace (after Tolstoy) and Betrothal in a Monastery (after Sheridan’s The Duenna), the ballet Cinderella, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, and his three best piano sonatas, the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. Other works, overtly tied to the Stalin era, are also masterpieces: the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October (with texts by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin), the Alexander Nevsky Cantata (from the score for Eisenstein’s film), Hail for Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, and the opera Semyon Kotko. It is no accident that of all the Soviet composers, Prokofiev received the most Stalin Prizes—six (Myaskovsky and Shostakovich got five each, Khachaturian four, and the popular songwriter Isaak Dunaevsky two).

Some of Prokofiev’s later works are unjustly dismissed as compromised and primitive by some today: the Winter Bonfire Suite (1949), the On Guard for Peace Oratorio (1950), and the Seventh Symphony, which was completed and performed in 1952. It may be that my perception of this music is influenced by the peculiar atmosphere of the last years of Stalin’s rule.

I was in school in Riga, the capital of Soviet Latvia, but even in that most “Western” part of the Soviet Union, the cultural situation was palpably stagnant and oppressive. Prokofiev’s late music seemed like a gulp of pure and fresh water. I had started reading early, at four, and I had skipped picture books and devoured almost immediately the daily newspapers and mainstream Soviet literature, often in the cheap mass editions of Roman-Gazeta.

Many of those books, popular with adults and teenagers alike, were based on true stories: Chapaev (1923) by Dmitri Furmanov, on which the famous film was based, was about the legendary Red commander who died in the Civil War; How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934) was the autobiographical novel of the blind and paralyzed Nikolai Ostrovsky about his exploits in battles with the White Army and in the early Soviet construction sites; Tale of a Real Man (1946) by Boris Polevoy was in the same key, about a military pilot who continued to fly after his legs were amputated; and The Young Guard (1945) by Alexander Fadeyev described heroic deeds of young guerrillas executed by the Germans during World War II.

Tellingly, these propaganda works, written in a very entertaining way and therefore consumed as adventure stories by many, were primarily about martyr heroes or war cripples. This was a topical issue for the devastated country, where it would be hard to find a family without a loss. My father returned from the front with an amputated leg, and so I was particularly moved by Polevoy’s description of the amputee pilot’s struggle to return to aviation.

This story also touched the outwardly cynical Prokofiev, who used Polevoy’s book as the basis for his last opera, Tale of a Real Man (1948). Though simple and sincere, the Soviet musical bureaucrats, intimidated by the incessant noise about Prokofiev’s “formalism,” did not dare produce it. It was not performed publicly until 1960.

Stalin regarded Soviet culture as a huge hose for brainwashing his subjects before what he considered the inevitable Third World War, in the course of which Communism would at last conquer the whole world. He was a firm believer in the Communist idea and moved toward its final implementation disregarding all losses, while making only occasional tactical concessions.

The Russian cultural elite had already grown weary of Stalin’s ruthless and inhumane methods by the late 1930s. The war against Hitler, even though at some point it put the very existence of the Soviet state at risk, added nationalist fire to the cooling boiler of Communist ideals. But the endless circumstance of combat readiness, hysterical vigilance, and ridiculously exaggerated xenophobia could not continue. In that corrosive atmosphere, any unexpected quiet or lyrical work, like Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony, seemed like manna from heaven.

Stalin continued pulling on the ideological levers, provoking new campaigns and drives. He seemed to be trying things out—should he use anti-Semitism as a weapon? Or the tried-and-true espionage and sabotage scare? Or a truly strange method—a national discussion on linguistics? All these actions were actually implemented and added to an already surreal situation.

Where would it have led—to yet another bloodbath in the Soviet Union? A global nuclear catastrophe? Or did Stalin, as some historians now contend, not want either but was simply trying to outmaneuver his real and imaginary opponents inside and outside the country?

It is doubtful that we will be able to ever reach final conclusions on this, because when Stalin died on March 5, 1953 (officially, of brain hemorrhage), he left no political will and had not shared his plans with any of his comrades—apparently he did not trust any of them.

I remember the fear and horror I felt when on the dark and damp morning of March 6 as I was getting ready for school I heard the radio announcer speak slowly and with bathos: “Last night, at nine twenty p.m., our dear and beloved leader passed away without regaining consciousness.” I did not know then that on the same day, and also from brain hemorrhage, Prokofiev had died. The composer was weak and the tension that was in the air in the last days of Stalin’s life had apparently hastened his end.

In those chaotic days the significance of the deaths of the ruler and the composer seemed incomparable; no one thought of Prokofiev except his closest friends, and it was difficult to scrape up flowers for his coffin because all the flowers and wreaths in Moscow had been requisitioned for Stalin’s funeral. But in 1963, on the tenth anniversary of Prokofiev’s demise, marked after the official condemnation of the “cult of personality” of Stalin, there were jokes circulating that apparently Stalin was an insignificant political figure in the era of Prokofiev.

The following decades altered that value balance, too, as it turned out to be equally politically motivated. Apparently that balance will be continually shifting, reflecting the inevitable changes and vacillations in the comparative evaluation of Stalin and Prokofiev. It reminds us of the dialectical intertwining of politics and culture.

Chapter Ten

Before Stalin’s funeral, which took place in Moscow on March 9, 1953, the coffin with his body went on display at the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions. For several days, in relays, the best Soviet symphonic orchestras and soloists played during the viewing. The musicians included David Oistrakh, the violinist, and Sviatoslav Richter—the pianist was flown in from Tbilisi by special plane, and he was the only passenger, the rest of the plane filled with flowers sent to the capital for the funeral.

Richter later maintained that he had hated Stalin even then. There is no reason to doubt him: his father, a Russian German, was executed in June 1941 on charges of espionage for the Nazis. In 1941, his teacher Genrikh Neihaus (another of his students was Emil Gilels) was arrested as anti-Soviet and a “defeatist” (he was also of German descent) and kept almost nine months in solitary confinement in the notorious Lubyanka Prison. But in 1950, the thirty-five-year-old Richter accepted the Stalin Prize, as had other recipients—Oistrakh (he received it in 1943), Gilels (1946), conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky (1946), and twenty-four-year-old cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1951).

The prizes for these artists, which reflected Stalin’s belief that classical music was an effective propaganda tool, symbolized the importance of musical performers in official Soviet culture. As Stalin saw it, classical composers in the interpretation of these talented musicians were mobilized to serve Marxist ideology, and the performers were turned into ideal representatives of the socialist camp: they possessed formidable musical technique (paralleling Stalin’s policy of industrialization of the USSR), were optimistic, and civic-minded (as they were depicted in the media), and were happy to travel at the beck and call of the Party and state to the farthest reaches of Central Asia, the Far East, or Siberia to play for the worker and peasant masses there thirsting for high culture (as the media reports trumpeted).

The real picture was rather different. Yes, the state gave its best musicians significant privileges, but saw them as no better than celebrity slaves, obliged to service any official occasion, be it a performance in a regional election campaign headquarters, a factory lunch break (concerts by symphony orchestras, those mobile Potemkin villages, were particularly awkward for the musicians and the forced audience of weary laborers), before and after various political speeches, or at funerals, like Stalin’s, where Richter and Oistrakh and the other musicians were not allowed to leave the Hall of Columns for several days and nights, kept there on dry rations.

While the musicians were under lock and key at the Hall of Columns, in their breaks watching the endless procession of Muscovites come to pay their final respects to the leader, the last bloody drama of the Stalin era played out in the streets. Thousands of people tried to make their way to the bier. The young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko found himself in that crowd and later recalled, “It was a horrific, fantastic sight. The people who poured into that flow from behind kept pushing and pushing. The crowd turned into a terrifying vortex.”¹

The tragedy that had occurred in Moscow fifty-seven years earlier was repeated. In 1896, during the coronation of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, several thousand people were crushed to death in the crowds. The difference was that this time the catastrophe was not in suburban Khodynka field, but in the center of Moscow, and yet the tragedy was hushed up completely. Still, some witnesses paradoxically sensed that “even in that terrible, tragic surge of Muscovites there was some passion of nascent freedom.”²

Yevtushenko also maintained that at that moment he “thought of the man we were burying for the first time with hatred.” That must have been a seismic shift for the poet who just the previous year in his first book of poetry, Scouts of the Future, called Stalin “my best friend in the world,” and had responded to the anti-Semitic campaign of 1953 against the “killer doctors” this way: “None of the killers will be forgotten. They will not leave without paying. Gorky may have been killed by others, I think, it’s the same ones now.”³

(In 1989, a wiser Yevtushenko included that troubling episode in his perestroika-era film, Stalin’s Funeral, adding the commonsense advice that he himself had followed rarely: “Let future poets be more careful when they start writing ‘civic poetry.’”

The impetus for the shift in the mindset of the capital’s intelligentsia is usually considered to be the Moscow International Festival of Youth and Students in 1957 (which the pianist Maria Yudina dubbed “mass derailment”) and the sensationally successful American Exhibition at Sokolniki in 1958. But there is reason to suppose that the ideological crack in postwar Soviet society, which had seemed fairly monolithic to the majority of Western observers, appeared earlier, somewhere in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Stalin used his endless brainwashing in an attempt to patch the holes that appeared in the Soviet ideological space after World War II and the return of the Red Army from Europe. In terms of the Soviet masses, Stalin succeeded rather well, but the Western virus lay hidden but alive, at—of all places—the very top of Soviet society.

The writer Vassily Aksyonov described a youth party in 1952 at the home of an important Soviet diplomat that he, a nineteen-year-old provincial student, was lucky enough to attend. The American Victrola played jazz records by Louis Armstrong, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole. The young stilyagi (as the over-the-top admirers of American fashion and pop culture were called in the hostile press articles; they called themselves shtatniki, from shtaty, “the States”), in fashionable Western-made jackets with huge padded shoulders, pegged black trousers, and thick-soled shoes, sipped whiskey and smoked Camels. The daughter of a big KGB boss danced with Aksyonov and stunned him straight off: “I hate the Soviet Union and love the United States of America!” Aksyonov observed, “The stilyagi could be called the first Soviet dissidents.”⁴

Such luxuries as American cigarettes, whiskey, and records in postwar Soviet Union were available only to the super elite. But even in that period of tight self-isolation, when in Churchill’s memorable phrase an iron curtain fell across Europe, dividing the Soviet and American spheres of influence, American culture managed to infiltrate the Soviet masses, too. Most strangely, that American cultural intervention came about from Stalin’s initiative permitting mass exhibition of Western films from the “trophy fund,” that is, films that were wartime booty or were gifts from the Allies.

This was intended to make money and also entertain the people: after the war domestic production of films diminished rapidly—seventeen films were made in 1948 and only five in 1952. So, thanks to Stalin’s permission, Soviet audiences could see, among other films, John Ford’s Stagecoach (renamed The Trip Will Be Dangerous) and under the title A Soldier’s Fate in America, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives. A special Politburo resolution called for “necessary editorial corrections” to be made in each film and anti-American introductory texts and commentaries were added.

It is amazing that Stalin took this step. He knew better than most the propaganda value of film. Back in 1928, he had spoken of it in a conversation with Eisenstein: “Abroad there are very few books with Communist content. Our books are almost not read at all there, because they do not know Russian. But Soviet films are watched with interest by everyone and they understand everything.”⁵

Stalin always bore in mind the influence on progressive Western intellectuals of the films of Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Dziga Vertov—that is why he respected these directors. Then why did he not consider the possible results of showing “trophy films” in the USSR? Perhaps he had overestimated the sanitizing effect of Soviet censorship. The consequences were quite significant.

Joseph Brodsky described the liberating effect of the American films: “They were presented to us as entertaining stories, but we perceived them as a sermon on individualism.”⁶ Aksyonov confirms that: “For us it was a window into the outside world from Stalin’s smelly den.”⁷

I knew people who watched The Roaring Twenties thirty or more times, eagerly memorizing every detail of the American way of life: clothing, hairstyles, manners. The greatest popularity was enjoyed by four films of the Tarzan series in the early 1950s; Brodsky’s paradoxical opinion is that they promoted de-Stalinization more than Khrushchev’s subsequent anti-Stalin speech at the Twentieth Communist Party Congress or even the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. “It was the first film in which we saw natural life. And long hair.”⁸

Rebels throughout the Soviet Union grew their hair long like Tarzan, and his famous cry was heard in backyards and even school corridors. Teachers, obeying orders, tried to quell this and other enthusiasms for “American fashion” by what means they could, including expulsion from college, which could ruin a person’s permanent record forever. Along with the media campaign against the stilyagi (they were denounced in films, radio, and newspapers and mocked in nasty cartoons in satirical magazines), this created tension among young people.

Could Stalin’s miscalculation with the Western films be explained partially by the dictator’s desire to prepare Soviet people for the decisive battle with the Americans? The films would have served as an inoculation against the Western “contagion.” Privately, Stalin spoke frankly: “Our propaganda is badly done, it’s a mush instead of propaganda…. The Americans refute Marxism, they slander us, they try to debunk us…. We must expose them. We must familiarize the people with the ideology of the enemies, criticize that ideology, and that will arm our cadres.”⁹

Trying to tighten the screws again, Stalin started a xenophobic cultural campaign. But at the same time, he understood that the Soviet Union now had to compete with the United States on the international cultural arena: “We are now dealing not only with domestic policy but world policy. Americans want to subordinate everything to themselves. But Americans are not respected in any capital. We must expand the worldview of our people in Pravda and Party magazines, we must have a broader horizon, we are a world power.”¹⁰

The Communists had always relied heavily on international ideological propaganda. The role played by the Communist International (Comintern), created on Lenin’s initiative in 1919, and its cultural emissary in Europe and the United States, Willy Münzenberg, is well known today. It was Münzenberg who used his international network of pro-Soviet film clubs to promote Battleship Potemkin and other revolutionary films in the West. Stalin used technical innovations for these goals: on his orders in 1929, Moscow International Radio was created, the first state broadcast of its kind in the world, which with time became a powerful propaganda center.

Americans had a traditional aversion to the use of state-sponsored propaganda abroad, even though during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson established the Committee for Public Information. That experience was used later for organizing the Voice of America after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When the war was over, some congressmen wondered why American taxpayers had to continue to pay for international radio.

Those doubts vanished with the onset of the Cold War. On May 6, 1948, John Foster Dulles expressed the feelings of the American political elite faced with the world expansion of Communist ideas: “For the first time since the threat of Islam a thousand years ago, Western civilization is on the defensive.”¹¹ Two years later, President Harry Truman stressed the importance of the propaganda aspect in standing up to the Soviet Union: “This is a struggle, above all else, for the minds of men. Propaganda is one of the most powerful weapons the Communists have in this struggle.”¹²

The doctrine of “containment,” elaborated by George F. Kennan, was adopted as the instrument of American policy toward the Communist bloc. Kennan later stressed that he had meant political and ideological containment of Soviet expansion. Projected into the sphere of cultural counterpropaganda, this doctrine was quite successful.

Jazz, one of the most important manifestations of American culture, was used right away as a propaganda weapon. Charles Bohlen, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, had noticed the popularity of Voice of America jazz programs in Moscow and at his suggestion in 1955 the station began a special project, Music USA, devoted to jazz. The theme music of the show, hosted in a soothing baritone by Buffalo native Willis Conover, who became the idol of several generations of shtatniki, was Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.”

By that time, production of radios that could receive shortwave transmissions from the United States and other Western countries was banned in the Soviet Union, but many homes still had prewar or trophy radios; besides which, Conover’s shows were in English, so they were jammed less than the Russian-language news on Voice of America. (The jamming of Western radio transmissions, which involved building powerful stations all over the USSR, cost the Soviet government a pretty penny.)

Conover’s programs gave audiences their first taste of the music of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman and became an underground encyclopedia of jazz for Soviet youth. The business of recording “music on bones” was born: X-ray films were used as recording material and these homemade records of jazz and later of rock and roll were sold on the black market, inspiring budding jazz musicians all over the Soviet Union.

The Americans did not forget about “high” culture, either. Knowing the Russians’ penchant for classical music (Stalin began sponsoring participation of Soviet musicians in international competitions in the 1930s), the best American symphony orchestras were sent to the USSR—the Boston in 1956, the Philadelphia in 1958. The twenty-five-year-old Canadian pianist Glenn Gould appeared in Moscow and Leningrad in 1957 with eye-opening programs (besides Bach, he played the modernist works of Paul Hindemith and Anton von Webern, banned in the USSR then), and for many stunned professionals, as one of them put it, life was divided into pre-Gould and post-Gould.¹³

The culmination of the musical duel between the two superpowers (the violinist Oistrakh and the pianist Gilels made triumphant debuts at Carnegie Hall in 1955 and the pianist Richter in 1960) was the sensational victory by Van Cliburn, twenty-three, at the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow in 1958. Tall, gawky, with a dreamy gaze, the infinitely charming pianist whom Muscovites dubbed with a loving diminutive, “Vanechka,” instantly won over the audiences (women in particular). More importantly, Cliburn also won over the competition jury, chaired by Gilels, which consisted of such authoritative Russian musicians as the great interpreter of Scriabin, Vladimir Sofronitsky, who sensed a fellow romantic in Cliburn, and the musical patriarch Alexander Goldenveizer, favorite musician and chess partner of Leo Tolstoy. Goldenveizer compared Cliburn to the young Rachmaninoff.

When the prizes were decided, the Soviet members of the jury had to get Nikita Khrushchev’s secret approval before crowning Van Cliburn.¹⁴ The young American’s victory at the competition, which had been covered on a daily basis by The New York Times, was front-page news all over the world. Being a political sensation, the victory also had a major impact on Russian cultural life.

For the first time, Russian musical émigrés were acknowledged: after all, Cliburn’s teacher at the Juilliard School in New York was Rosina Lhevinne, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory. Cliburn popularized the émigré composer Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. This paved the way for the triumphant tours of the USSR by Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet in 1962, when the Soviet establishment had to welcome and hail the former émigrés, by now trendsetters of international high modernism.

Another important American program that expanded the cultural horizons and influenced the worldview of the Soviet elite was the publication of books in Russian. Several American publishing houses were established for that purpose with subsidies from government and private sources; among them, Chekhov Press in New York, which printed Russian-language volumes by Bunin, Remizov, Zamyatin, Tsvetaeva, and Nabokov, and had a Ford Foundation grant of $523,000.¹⁵ According to The New York Times, at least a thousand titles were sponsored,¹⁶ covering a wide range from translations of poetry and essays by T. S. Eliot, to the collected oeuvres of Gumilev and Mandelstam, and works by Pasternak, Akhmatova, Zabolotsky, and Klyuev.

The absence of ideological preference is remarkable. The most varied movements are represented: traditional and experimental prose, Acmeism, Dadaism, neo-peasant poetry. Anti-Sovietism was not the main criterion, as might be expected (for example, Zabolotsky’s neoprimitivist poems would be hard to call “anti-Soviet”); rather, the predominant desire was to return into circulation within the Soviet Union the works of authors who were banned for one reason or another.

Books by Russian authors that were published in the West were called tamizdat (“published there” like samizdat, “self-published”) in the Soviet Union. In Russia (brought by foreign tourists, Soviet seamen, and Soviet citizens who traveled abroad in official delegations), these books were worth their weight in gold. They were copied by typewriter or hand (there were no accessible copying machines in the USSR in those days); this expanded the range of samizdat, for many years one of the main reservoirs of intellectual opposition.

Gradually the cultural space inside the Soviet Union, especially in big cities, was filled with books in Russian published in the West. You could come across them in the most unexpected places, belonging to the most unexpected people.

I remember being at a birthday party for the daughter of an important cultural bureaucrat in Moscow in the early 1970s; taking a furtive look at his impressive home library, I reached for a volume, accidentally bringing down an avalanche of books that revealed, tucked behind them, a recent Western edition of Gorky’s Untimely Thoughts, a collection of his anti-Bolshevik articles, which had not been reprinted in Russia since 1918 and was well hidden in Soviet libraries in “special archives.” I quickly started putting back the books, simultaneously feverishly flipping through the precious volume of Gorky. I read as much as I could and it changed my perceptions of the writer.

In 1972, Yevtushenko tried to bring in a large number of tamizdat books when returning to Moscow from a trip to the United States. Since Soviet customs agents were most interested in cultural contraband, every attempt to bring it in was a risky undertaking, punishable by the full extent of the law. There were times when Yevtushenko (like many other, less famous travelers) got away with it, but this time the poet was caught.

The confiscated books included works by the Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Bukharin, killed by Stalin; poetry by Gumilev, shot by the Bolsheviks, and Mandelstam, who died in the camps; philosophical studies by members of the Russian “religious renaissance,” Berdyaev and Shestov; the prose of the émigré Nabokov and Cursed Days, the anti-Bolshevik diary of the first Russian Nobel laureate, Bunin. Along with the books, they confiscated Yevtushenko’s photographs taken with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

The poet was required to write an explanation, in which, describing himself later as a “clever and rather nimble Mowgli of the Soviet jungles,” he declared: “During my trips abroad with the goal of propagandizing the ideas of our Homeland, I sometimes feel myself ideologically unarmed in the struggle with our enemies, for I am not familiar with the primary sources on which they base their shameless hatred. It is impossible to get many of these primary sources in the USSR, even in the special archives of the Lenin Library. That is why I brought in these books—not for distribution but in order to raise my ideological vigilance.”¹⁷

Amazingly, after such a demarche and after an audience with General Filipp Bobkov, head of the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, in charge of cultural exchange with the West, the poet got back almost all of the confiscated books.

The KGB was harder on less famous and less connected Soviet intellectuals. The Criminal Code had, in Solzhenitsyn’s sarcastic definition, “the majestic, mighty, fruitful, multibranched, variegated, all-encompassing article Fifty-Eight,” which threatened harsh punishment for so-called “counterrevolutionary, anti-Soviet activity.” Paragraph 10 of this article called for severe punishment for “propaganda or agitation containing a call for the overthrow, undermining, or weakening of the Soviet regime…and equally for the distribution or preparation or possession of literature of such content.”

This paragraph was interpreted extremely expansively: according to Solzhenitsyn, almost any idea, spoken or written, could in the Soviet years fall under the notorious article 58. Everyone knew of some person or other who ended up in the camps for books and manuscripts of an “anti-Soviet” content found during a search. Tragic curiosities abounded. In Riga, in the early 1950s, a friend of my father’s was sent to seven years in the camps for possession of the books The Turbulent Life of Lazik Roitshvanets and In Protochny Alley, published in the 1920s. The sentence described both books as anti-Soviet, but did not name the author, with good reason: he was Ilya Ehrenburg, winner of two Stalin Prizes, who at that time represented Riga as deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.

During all the years of the Soviet regime, even under Gorbachev, a book of suspicious content, especially if published in the West, found during a search could ruin a person’s life. That is why people who lent each other tamizdat and samizdat literature (often these books were borrowed overnight and read by the whole family and close friends as well) had to use conspiracy methods, often quite clumsy, like the following telephone conversation: “Have you eaten the pie I gave you yesterday?” “Yes.” “And your wife, too?” “Yes, she has.” “Well then, pass the pie to Nikolai, he wants to taste it, too.”

That the Soviet secret police took stopping the flow of undesirable books from the West seriously and how widely it opened its nets to do so can be seen from a recently declassified report from Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, to Leonid Brezhnev on May 6, 1968, where he proudly reported that in a year “in the international mail channels more than 114 thousand letters and packages with anti-Soviet and politically harmful literature were confiscated.”¹⁸

That enormous flow of “politically harmful” materials included quite a few copies of the secret speech made by Nikita Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25, 1956. The speech, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” was the first exposé of Stalin’s crimes coming from the ruling party, and therefore it was a sensational event both in the Soviet Union and in the West, reported by The New York Times and other newspapers. Inside the Soviet Union, Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech was read to party members at first, then classified until 1989.

Stocky, round-headed, and bald, Khrushchev was a politician to the core, hard to pin down, sly, stubborn, and most importantly, inordinately energetic. Compared to Lenin and Stalin, he was uneducated.¹⁹ Khrushchev’s numerous and often very long speeches were chaotic improvisations, as he would get carried away. Like a poet, he was borne on the wings of his own eloquence. At the end of his life, Khrushchev dictated memoirs that were meant to fix the author’s progressive image in the minds of posterity. (Later the poet Andrei Voznesensky would note dryly: “Khrushchev delights me as a stylist.”)²⁰

The peak of Khrushchev’s career was his anti-Stalin speech, prepared as usual by a group of advisors. But there are quite a few vivid details in that oration that were obviously introduced by Khrushchev himself. It was Khrushchev who first quoted some of Stalin’s memorable phrases, for example, Stalin’s statement on how he would deal with the rebellious leader of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito: “Here, I wiggle my pinky and there is no Tito.” In his “secret” speech, Khrushchev sarcastically added: “Those ‘pinky wiggles’ cost us a lot.”²¹

Khrushchev generated some truly poetic ideas. On his orders, Stalin’s mummy was removed from the mausoleum on Red Square, the virgin soil in Kazakhstan was plowed up, and the first man was sent into space. Khrushchev’s political slogans were also of a literary bent, straight out of science fiction: “Today’s generation of Soviet people will live under Communism!” “Catch up to and surpass the U.S.A. in production of meat, butter, and milk per capita!” and the infamous remark addressed to the Unites States—“We will bury you.”

No contemporary writer could ever compete with such proclamations, which literally made the world freeze in fear. But a group of young Russian poets nevertheless managed to rise above the political clutter. Yevtushenko, Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, and Bulat Okudzhava became widely popular.

The most famous of them was the tall, rangy, loud, and inexhaustible Yevtushenko; according to his own calculations, he has appeared in ninety-four countries, and his poetry has been translated into seventy-two languages. People everywhere—in Russia, France, the United States, Israel—knew that in 1961 Yevtushenko published the poem “Babi Yar,” about Jews killed by the Nazis in Ukraine during World War II. This poem was also perceived as a condemnation of Soviet anti-Semitism.

Yevtushenko became the poetic chronicler of political change in the Soviet Union, sometimes running ahead (which would make the government crack down on him, inevitably leading to a surge in his popularity at home and in the West), sometimes falling behind (which made just the opposite happen). Khrushchev was an unpredictable captain, and on his ship people were thrown left and then right, their heads spinning. Yevtushenko had the gift for simple, accessible, and effective poetic slogans expressing the essence of the bewildering changes.

Voznesensky once said that Yevtushenko had created a special genre—“poetic journalism.”²² Thousands of people attended his readings, and with his comrades Yevtushenko filled enormous soccer stadiums with standing-room crowds of admirers. The old Bolshevik and Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan said in amazement that it was the first time he ever saw people standing in line not for meat or sugar but for poetry.

Alexander Tvardovsky often said that real poems were ones memorized by people who were not interested in poetry. If we accept Tvardovsky’s criterion, then any anthology of twentieth-century Russian poetry, however selective, will include a dozen or so poems by Yevtushenko and Voznesensky.

Voznesensky was the more experimental, resembling his idol Pasternak and also the early Mayakovsky, with striking, often shocking imagery and elaborate rhyme schemes. He became the most easily translatable modern Russian poet because his poetic approach was largely visual, with a strong surrealistic bent, and thus more accessible to Western intellectuals.

Yevtushenko’s self-fashioning followed the long Russian literary tradition from Blok through Esenin and Mayakovsky down to Akhmatova, the great master of self-creation. In the very first line of his official Soviet biography—“Yevgeny Yevtushenko was born July 18, 1933, at Zima Junction, Irkutsk Region”²³—there are at least three deviations from the facts. Yevtushenko’s father’s surname was Gangnus, he was born a year earlier, in 1932, and not at Zima Junction, but at a different Siberian village, Nizhneudinsk.

On the disparity in the date Yevtushenko’s explanations are rather vague, but the rest is not hard to figure out. A famous Russian poet, as Yevtushenko expected to be from an early age, could not have a German-sounding surname or be born in a place with an unpoetic name. He used his mother’s surname, and he squeezed everything possible out of the romantic-sounding Zima (Winter) Junction, including a very long poem.

Yevtushenko paraded around in shiny imported suits, multicolored caps, and bright ties, while the more stylish Voznesensky wore white ascots, coquettishly tied in a knot. And red-haired Akhmadulina astonished her audiences with her exotic looks: a delicate oval face “from Botticelli’s brush” and slanted eyes of a “Siamese cat,” as her first husband, Yevtushenko, described her.

Akhmadulina read her polished poems in a flirtatious and rather mannered way, never failing to impress her public, not as big as those of her friends, since her works were more refined and distanced from current events. Not everyone was enchanted, as evinced in a bitter entry in the diary of her second husband, the writer Yuri Nagibin: “Akhmadulina is cruel, devious, vengeful, and not at all sentimental, even though she is brilliant at playing touching helplessness…. Bella is as cold as ice, she loves no one but—not even herself—but the impression she makes.”²⁴

Akhmadulina and her friends were not anti-Soviet poets (her mother, according to Yevtushenko, was high up in the KGB).²⁵ As Yevtushenko recalled, in the early 1950s among student friends, someone said, “The revolution is dead and its corpse stinks.” Young Akhmadulina, her eyes sparkling angrily, exclaimed, “You should be ashamed of yourself! The revolution is not dead. The revolution is sick. We have to help the revolution.”²⁶

Yevtushenko admitted that even after he came to hate Stalin, he continued to idealize Lenin, who was an idol for him until the start of perestroika. He gladly glorified Castro’s Cuba in his poetry (and wrote the screenplay for Mikhail Kalatozov’s propaganda film I Am Cuba) and had no difficulty writing sloganeering poems on any propagandistic topic. Robert Rozhdestvensky and many other young writers worked in the same vein in the mid-1950s, when the period known as the Thaw became a time for them of a brief but turbulent affair with the regime.

It may seem that at first, Khrushchev had to sympathize with the idealistic young poets, for he needed potent allies in the intelligentsia in his tightrope walk of de-Stalinization. His support, followed by sudden violent attacks, helped to make them world famous. Still, in Russia, not everyone was impressed.

Akhmatova had a skeptical attitude toward the “stadium poets.” In private conversation she called Yevtushenko Mayakovsky’s epigone “but without his genius” she compared Voznesensky with Igor Severyanin, a popular turn-of-the-century poet (“the same tastelessness and cheap blasphemy”); and in connection with Akhmadulina unexpectedly cited the mannered poems of Mikhail Kuzmin, who died forgotten in 1936.²⁷

Khrushchev tried to form his own cultural elite. Fadeyev, the once talented writer made into the overseer of Soviet literature by Stalin, he removed from power. Now, after the publication of Fadeyev’s panicky letters to Khrushchev in 1953, it is clear that it was the new ruler’s markedly cold attitude toward the writer, and not at all Fadeyev’s pangs of conscience over his role in the Stalinist repressions of his colleagues, as was previously thought, that pushed Fadeyev to his unexpected suicide in 1956 at the age of fifty-four.

Khrushchev also got rid of another Stalin favorite, Fadeyev’s deputy Konstantin Simonov, six-time winner of the Stalin Prize and author of the celebrated wartime poem “Wait for Me.” The new Soviet leader had been infuriated by Simonov’s directive that appeared in Literaturnaya Gazeta shortly after Stalin’s death: “The most important, the loftiest goal placed before Soviet literature is to capture in all its majesty and in all fullness for contemporaries and future generations the image of the greatest genius of all times and all nations—the immortal Stalin.”²⁸ (Much later, the mortally ill Simonov would dictate perhaps the best memoirs of meetings with Stalin.)

Khrushchev interrupted the career of yet another Stalin protégé, Alexander Gerasimov, president of the Academy of Arts of the USSR and four-time laureate of the Stalin Prize. Gerasimov’s audience with Khrushchev, during which the artist tried to persuade him that de-Stalinization was a mistake, ended in a scandal: the temperamental Gerasimov stalked out of Khrushchev’s office and slammed the door. Gerasimov was ordered to submit his resignation; that night he drank a whole bottle of vodka and almost died of a heart attack.

The ubiquitous paintings of Stalin were sent into museum warehouses; but on others, especially those where the ruler was depicted next to Lenin, artists painted over Stalin with other figures and the works continued to be exhibited and reproduced, eliciting knowing smirks.

Under Khrushchev’s aegis, an adventurous theater was founded in Moscow—the Sovremennik [Contemporary], headed by the young and gifted Oleg Efremov. The actors of the theater, whose productions were always sold out, especially after the premiere of Yevgeny Shvarts’s slyly satiric The Naked King, called themselves “children of 1956,” that is, the momentous year of the anti-Stalinist Twentieth Party Congress and also of their theater’s birth. Khrushchev’s benevolence was in contrast to Stalin, who shut down the experimental Chamber Theater of the great Alexander Tairov in 1949.

The cultural policy of the Soviet state changed in another important area, too. In 1951, only three feature films—Unforgettable 1919, Admiral Ushakov, and The Composer Glinka—were in production at Mosfilm, the country’s main studio.²⁹ This was the result of the elderly Stalin’s crazy idea that if he made only a few movies but with the best cadres and under his own supervision, they would all be masterpieces. When all three directors calamitously fell sick at the same time, work at Mosfilm came to a complete halt; bats moved into the dark pavilions.

By contrast, by 1960 annual production had grown to more than a hundred feature films. They included two movies about World War II that won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival: Kalatozov’s lyrical The Cranes Are Flying, starring the unforgettable Tatyana Samoilova and Alexei Batalov, and the moving Ballad of a Soldier by Grigory Chukhrai, for many years the calling card of new Soviet cinema in the West. For the first time since the classic era of the avant-garde—Eisenstein et al.—authoritative Western critics were writing about Soviet films with respect.

Akhmatova liked to say, “I’m a Khrushchevian.”³⁰ She was grateful to Khrushchev for the return of millions from the camps, including her son, Lev Gumilev, who had spent almost fourteen years there. Yet Khrushchev never did allow the publication of Akhmatova’s anti-Stalin poem Requiem, which had to wait until 1987 to appear.

Khrushchev disliked Akhmatova, although for different reasons than Fadeyev or Simonov: for him she was a representative of the prerevolutionary “reactionary literary swamp” (in Zhdanov’s term). Instead, Khrushchev placed Alexander Tvardovsky in the role of the country’s first poet. Mayakovsky was too “futurist” for Khrushchev, while Tvardovsky, basking in the fame of his wartime narrative poem about the exploits of the soldier Terkin and with his Party membership and position as deputy of the Supreme Soviet, seemed like a dependable ally. Even his “peasant” looks—Tvardovsky was tall, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, with dignified but plain manners and speech—suited Khrushchev.

The poet could not get Terkin in the Other World (a satirical sequel) into print for many years, but after Tvardovsky read it to Khrushchev at his dacha at Pitsunda on the Black Sea (and the author recalled that Khrushchev “sometimes laughed out loud, peasant-style”),³¹ the Soviet leader gave personal permission for publication. In 1958, Khrushchev made Tvardovsky head of the important literary journal Novy Mir, which under his direction gradually turned into the most liberal publication in the land.

But over the course of his years in power (1953–1964), Khrushchev never did learn how to handle the artistic intelligentsia. Even Stalin, much better read than Khrushchev and a better psychologist, took years to start understanding how to talk to the creative elite and still died in doubt: which worked better—carrot or stick?

Certainly Stalin was ruthless toward his own people and other nations. He did not spare his intelligentsia as a class, but his attitude toward the cultural elite was outwardly friendlier than that of Lenin, which is sometimes explained by the fact that Stalin, a less educated man than Lenin, felt more respect for people of culture. According to reminiscences, Stalin (despite later ideas of him to the contrary) almost never shouted at cultural figures, and when he was angry, he actually lowered his voice. Simonov, who had heard many stories of how cruel and coarse Stalin could be, say, with military men, stressed that the ruler “was never once boorish” to writers.³²

Having dethroned Stalin politically, Khrushchev liked to state, right up to the moment he was deposed, that in culture he remained a Stalinist (even though that was not quite true). So why did Khrushchev not emulate Stalin’s outward caution and respect for the cultural elite? Because he had decided that the best way to rein in people in the arts was to threaten them publicly, humiliating them and shouting at them? Apparently, Khrushchev tried to hide his lack of confidence, and this led to his continual showing off and constant reminder that he—and he alone—was the leader of the Communist Party and the state, and therefore entitled to be the top expert in all fields, including culture.

The list of spectacular failures that were rooted in Khrushchev’s inferiority complex is long—from his attempt to make corn the monoculture, which caused him to be a laughingstock all over the country, to his provocative placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba that put the world on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. In culture, one of Khrushchev’s greatest disasters came in the wake of the Nobel Prize for Literature for Boris Pasternak in 1958.

Chapter Eleven

As discussed, the Nobel Prize in Literature became an idée fixe of the Soviet leadership in 1933, when the prize went to the émigré Bunin instead of Maxim Gorky, Stalin’s close friend. Bunin’s prize made such an impression on Stalin that he considered inviting the hard-line anti-Soviet writer to come back to the Soviet Union permanently. He sent Simonov to Paris in the summer of 1946 to feel out seventy-five-year-old Bunin about the possibility. With his characteristic independence and unpredictability, Bunin made a harsh anti-Soviet speech soon afterward, and the question of the laureate’s return to Moscow was taken off the agenda.

When they learned in 1946 that Pasternak was a nominee for the prize, the Soviet leadership became agitated. The news from Stockholm could have been worse. For example, the émigré philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev appeared on the list of candidates both before and after the war. The Nobel going for a second time to an émigré would have seemed like a catastrophe in Moscow.

Still, the Soviet favorite was Sholokhov, not Pasternak. Literaturnaya Gazeta hastened to print the premature news of Sholokhov’s nomination in 1946. In the absence of Gorky and Alexei Tolstoy, who died in 1945, Sholokhov was Stalin’s number one Soviet writer.

On the contrary, Pasternak, often a hermetic, elliptical, baroque poet, was at the time an inconvenient candidate, even though back in the 1920s, he wrote well-received long narrative poems about the revolution, Nineteen Five and Lieutenant Schmidt. Pasternak was also among the first to sing the praises of Lenin and Stalin in verse, and the poems were actually very good. That is why the Bolshevik Bukharin, in his speech at the First Congress of the Writers’ Union in 1934, praised Pasternak as “one of the most remarkable masters of verse of our times, stringing onto his creativity not only an entire line of lyrical pearls but also a series of profoundly sincere revolutionary works.”¹

At the same congress, which was supervised by Stalin, Pasternak was seated at the presidium in the Hall of Columns next to Gorky, and he was selected for an important symbolic gesture—to receive in the name of all Soviet writers a gift from the workers’ delegation—a large portrait of Stalin. At the time Stalin even considered making Pasternak one of the leaders of the Writers’ Union. Debates continue to this day whether or not Pasternak had actually met Stalin, and if so, how many times. A voluminous secondary literature resulted from Stalin’s famous telephone call to Pasternak in response to his efforts in defense of the poet Mandelstam, who was arrested in 1934.² Stalin met Pasternak’s concerns halfway that time (even though in the end it did not save Mandelstam). Pasternak also intervened on behalf of other prisoners: his letter to Stalin helped secure the release in 1935 of Akhmatova’s husband, Punin, and her son, Lev Gumilev.

In 2000, the transcript was published of Pasternak’s talk at a discussion after Pravda’s denunciations of “formalism” in 1936, with notes in Stalin’s hand; the many passages Stalin underlined suggest that the poet’s unusually independent statements (in particular, Pasternak said, to general laughter and applause: “If it is absolutely necessary to shout in newspaper articles, can they at least shout in different voices? That will make things more understandable, because when they shout in one voice, nothing is clear. Perhaps, it is possible not to shout at all—that would be quite wonderful”)³ may have influenced Stalin’s reluctant decision to end the pogrom of the “formalists,” including Shostakovich.

Bearing in mind that Pasternak’s overly complex poetry and early prose were hardly to Stalin’s literary tastes, which were primarily (although not exclusively, lest we forget the Futurist Mayakovsky) for the Russian classics, these were quite significant signs of attention from the ruler, all the more surprising in view of Pasternak’s moodiness and seeming “lack of discipline.” One would think that Stalin, who valued total obedience and predictability, would have found Pasternak rather irritating. Obviously, that was not the case.

Akhmatova observed with irony-tinged admiration that Pasternak “is endowed with a kind of eternal childhood.” For all his preference for discipline, perhaps Stalin was also attracted by Pasternak’s “infantile” behavior, since his exotic appearance—dusky Bedouin face, burning eyes, impulsive movements—corresponded to the traditional image of a poet. Imitating his idols, Scriabin and Blok, Pasternak consciously cultivated the image of an artist “not of this world”(even though he was a very practical person who knew not only how to get his fees, but also how to mound potatoes in his garden) and probably sensed which buttons to push in his relationship with Stalin.

This is evident in Pasternak’s letter to Stalin written in late 1935, soon after the ruler disappointed his expectations and proclaimed that the “best, the most talented poet of our Soviet era” was Mayakovsky, not Pasternak. Paradoxically, Pasternak thanked Stalin for the verdict: “In recent times, under the influence of the West, I have been made too much of, given exaggerated significance (I even grew ill as a result): they began to suppose I had a serious artistic power. Now, after you have put Mayakovsky in first place, this suspicion is removed from me and with a light heart I can live and work as before, in modest quiet, with the unexpected and mysterious moments without which I would not love life.”⁴

This epistolary move was quite bold (what if Stalin suspected he was being meek out of pride and punished him?), but in this case the poet calculated correctly, and the ruler appreciated his modesty. That Stalin approved of the letter is evident from his written notation to put it in his personal archive, where only what he considered the most valuable and historically important papers were kept.

The letter is in the style of an enamored flirtatious high school girl: “I am tormented that I did not follow my first desire…. Should I have been bolder and without thinking too long, followed my first impulse?…I wrote to you the first time…obeying something secret that, beyond all that is understandable and shared by everyone, ties me to you.” And in conclusion: “In the name of that mystery, your fervently loving and devoted B. Pasternak.”⁵

Just as personal was his poem dedicated to Stalin and first published in the New Year’s 1936 issue of the government newspaper Izvestiya, in which Pasternak described Stalin as the “genius of action.” It wasn’t an act of servility, for Pasternak eschewed servility all his life. He was apparently truly fascinated by Stalin.

Commenting on this enchantment, the clear-headed Lydia Ginzburg drew a parallel with young Hegel, who declared upon seeing Napoleon that an absolute spirit had ridden into the city on a white horse. Ginzburg stated that a certain part of the Soviet (and Western) cultural elite perceived Stalin in that Hegelian key as “world and historical genius.”⁶

Pasternak, for one, retained this attitude toward Stalin even after the ruler’s death, as can be seen in his letter to Fadeyev dated March 14, 1953. In it, Pasternak gives Stalin his due as one of the elect who “travel to the end past all forms of petty pity for individual reasons to a common goal”—the establishment of a new social order in which world evil “would be unthinkable.”⁷

Because of Pasternak’s romantic “cult of personality” of Stalin (as Sholokhov, Pasternak’s rival in the competition for the Nobel Prize, later observed, “Yes, there was a cult, but there was also a personality”), the poet never became an ardent admirer of Khrushchev the way Akhmatova did.

Pasternak had been circling prose for a while, and in late 1945 he began work on Doctor Zhivago, an epic novel about the path of the Russian intelligentsia in the twentieth century, which he completed ten years later. He understood from the beginning that the novel was “not intended for current publication.”⁸

Pasternak meant the Soviet censors, who clearly would not accept an untrammeled narrative, without regard to Party demands, about the causes and meaning of the Russian revolution and the horrors of the Civil War, a narrative imbued with the author’s openly Christian philosophy.

He considered Doctor Zhivago his most important work. He tried to achieve, in his own words, “unheard-of simplicity.” Here Pasternak’s ideal was, of course, Leo Tolstoy, in parallel to whom Pasternak renounced his own early complex and modernist works. Sometimes the connection between Pasternak and Tolstoy is denied since Doctor Zhivago is not a “realistic” novel as Tolstoy understood it. That is true, but the overall ideological influence of the late Tolstoy on Pasternak is indisputable.

Pasternak’s father, a well-known artist, worked with Tolstoy in 1898 on illustrations for his novel Resurrection. Tolstoy considered Leonid Pasternak’s portraits of him the most successful. The Pasternak house revered Tolstoy and that left a profound mark on the poet. In order to bring himself closer to the great writer, Pasternak in his later years even made up a story about seeing Tolstoy when he was four.

Following the late Tolstoy, Pasternak rejected the innovations of modern art and sought to write Doctor Zhivago in the manner of a Christian parable “understood in a new way,” as he put it. Pasternak probably envisioned some kind of Christian revival similar to what happened under Tolstoy’s influence at the turn of the century. This was noted in the West, and Czeslaw Milosz considered the novel a rare example of truly Christian literature.⁹

Tolstoy’s departure from Yasnaya Polyana in 1910 and his dramatic death made him a model for Pasternak of a great person who went beyond cultural frontiers to produce an example of Jesus-like sacrifice. Of course, Pasternak was not an equal of Tolstoy’s nor did he have his position and authority in Russia or abroad; still, in writing Doctor Zhivago he took a rather bold step that could be compared to Tolstoy’s struggle against censorship in tsarist Russia.

Pasternak not only wrote a wholly independent novel, but he sent it to the West for publication, bypassing official channels—an act that required more personal courage than Tolstoy’s behavior. The count was protected by his world fame and his social position from physical repression. Pasternak could not have felt insured against such danger: too many of his close friends had been destroyed by the Soviet regime, and in 1949 his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya (the prototype for Lara in Doctor Zhivago), was arrested and given a five-year sentence in the camps. During her interrogation, the investigator told Ivinskaya that Pasternak “has been a British spy for a long time.”¹⁰

Pasternak’s decision to smuggle Doctor Zhivago abroad broke the rules of permitted behavior set by the state for a Soviet writer. His confrontation with the Soviet authorities turned into an international scandal in 1958, when two years after its publication in the West, Pasternak was given the Nobel Prize “for his important achievements both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.”

The Swedish Academy clearly signaled that it was anointing Pasternak as a successor of Leo Tolstoy (correcting once again, as in the case with Bunin, its injustice toward the author of War and Peace). The mention of Pasternak the poet was in this case a fig leaf, and it fooled no one. In the old days, the tsarist government created censorship barriers for Tolstoy, and the Holy Synod excommunicated him from the Church. Now the Soviet authorities swiftly orchestrated Pasternak’s expulsion from the Writers’ Union.

On the wave of the worldwide publicity surrounding the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West and the Nobel Prize, the anti-Pasternak actions in the Soviet Union outraged intellectuals in democratic countries. But the Soviet regime had almost no choice. Giving the most prestigious cultural prize to a comparatively little-known author, and for a novel that was still not published in the Soviet Union, could only be seen as a hostile anti-Soviet move, which one official compared to a “literary atom bomb.”¹¹

Khrushchev added heat to the campaign against Pasternak in his inimitable way. There was nothing personal in his relationship with Pasternak, unlike Stalin. For him, Pasternak did not have the authority of Sholokhov, Tvardovsky, or even Alexander Korneichuk, a mediocre playwright but a Khrushchev favorite. It goes without saying that Khrushchev had not read Pasternak’s poetry, much less his novel, and who would expect an extremely busy leader of a superpower to have the time to do so?

Stalin might have read Doctor Zhivago, as he did dozens of other novels by Soviet writers; there are reliable sources confirming his interest in current literature. As stated Simonov, who attended many discussions of literary works nominated for the Stalin Prize at which Stalin was present, “everything that was in the least bit controversial and caused disagreement, he had read. It was quite obvious each time I attended these meetings.”¹²

Khrushchev was briefed on the matter (as world leaders usually are) with a few typed pages with selected quotations from Doctor Zhivago; for him, they just proved the novel’s presumed anti-Soviet attitude. That was quite enough for Khrushchev. He used Pasternak in his attempt to scare Russian writers who might see the smuggling of Doctor Zhivago into the West and its subsequent triumph as a tempting precedent.

The anti-Pasternak campaign was organized in the worst Stalin traditions: denunciations in Pravda and other newspapers; publication of angry letters from “ordinary Soviet workers,” who had not read the book; hastily convened meetings of Pasternak’s colleagues, at which fine poets like Vladimir Soloukhin, Leonid Martynov, and Boris Slutsky were forced to censure an author they respected. Slutsky, who in his brutal, prose-like poems had created an image for himself of courageous soldier and truth-lover, was so tormented by his anti-Pasternak speech that he later lost his mind.

On October 29, 1958, at the plenum of the Central Committee of the Young Communist League, dedicated to the Komsomol’s fortieth anniversary, its head, Vladimir Semichastny, attacked Pasternak before an audience of 14,000 people, including Khrushchev and other Party leaders. Semichastny first called Pasternak a “mangy sheep” who pleased the enemies of the Soviet Union with “his slanderous so-called work.” Then Semichastny (who became head of the KGB in 1961) added that “this man went and spat in the face of the people.” And he concluded with “If you compare Pasternak to a pig, a pig would not do what he did” because a pig “never shits where it eats.”¹³ Khrushchev applauded demonstratively.

News of that speech drove Pasternak to the brink of suicide. It has recently come to light that the real author of Semichastny’s insults was Khrushchev, who had called in the Komsomol leader the night before and dictated the lines about the mangy sheep and the pig, which Semichastny described as a “typically Khrushchevian, deliberately crude, unceremonious scolding.”¹⁴

Pasternak responded to the state insult with a poem in which he wrote that he could not stand seeing those “porcine mugs” in the newspapers anymore. This was an obvious attack on Khrushchev, with more in the poem:

The cult of personality is stripped of its majesty,

But the cult of noisy phrases is in force

And the cult of pettiness and impersonality

Has increased perhaps a hundredfold.

This poem was not published then, but Pravda ran two tortured letters of repentance, one of them addressed to Khrushchev, in which Pasternak announced his “voluntary refusal” of the Nobel Prize and admitted the mistake of Doctor Zhivago.¹⁵ I remember the depressing impact of the letters even though they were clearly written under duress.

In the meantime, pressure on Pasternak kept increasing. Public humiliation was not enough for Khrushchev, he wanted the writer on his knees. The excuse for a new push was the publication in The Daily Mail of a translation of Pasternak’s poem “The Nobel Prize,” smuggled out by a British journalist:

Like a beast in a pen, I’m cut off

From my friends, freedom, the sun,

But the hunters are gaining ground.

I’ve nowhere else to run.

Pasternak was called in for questioning at the office of the General Prosecutor of the USSR, where he was threatened with arrest for “activity, consciously and deliberately intended to harm Soviet society.” This was qualified by the General Prosecutor as a “particularly dangerous state crime,” which, by law, could be punishable by death.

It’s unlikely that Khrushchev intended to have Pasternak executed, but he did think it acceptable to terrorize the sixty-eight-year-old poet without even replying to his letters. This total failure of communication with the new ruler dispirited Pasternak, who complained bitterly, “Even the terrible and cruel Stalin did not think it beneath him to grant my requests about prisoners and on his own initiative called me to discuss them.”¹⁶

For Pasternak, the only escape from the horror he so powerfully expressed in the poem “The Nobel Prize” was, it seems, death, which came on May 30, 1960. But even his funeral on June 2 in Peredelkino, a writers’ colony near Moscow, was turned into yet another political confrontation. As Veniamin Kaverin noted, “I had read Briusov on Tolstoy’s funeral, and I was amazed by the similarity with Pasternak’s burial. The same sense of the total breach between government and people.”¹⁷

Valery Briusov wrote in 1910 that the tsarist authorities, in trying to avoid antigovernment demonstrations, had done everything possible to strip the farewell to Tolstoy of its national significance. Several thousand people accompanied Tolstoy’s coffin in Yasnaya Polyana to its final resting place—in Briusov’s opinion, “an infinitesimal number.” Fifty years later, around two thousand came to Pasternak’s grave, but in the present conditions that number seemed huge and unprecedented—this became the first mass unofficial funeral ceremony in Soviet history.

Tolstoy’s death was the main topic for the Russian press then, but this time, besides a minuscule notice about the death of “Literary Fund member” Pasternak, nothing seeped into the Soviet newspapers. But word of mouth went into action, and the solemn and worshipful crowd in Peredelkino symbolized the birth of public opinion and the rudiments of civil society in the Soviet Union.

For the first time the intelligentsia was not afraid of either the secret police or the foreign correspondents: both groups photographed and filmed the event, each for its own goals, and that was symbolic, too. Pasternak’s funeral, like Tolstoy’s, had turned into a media show, but this time it happened—also a first in Soviet history—thanks to the efforts of the Western side, which eagerly sought and magnified the tiniest signs of dissidence in the Soviet monolith.

As the former KGB chief Semichastny complained in 2002: “This was an attempt of the Western intelligence services to publicize one of our first dissidents…. The seed took. Several years passed and the ‘baton’ was picked up by such laureates of the Nobel Prize as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Joseph Brodsky.”¹⁸

The Central Committee of the Communist Party received intelligence information that copies of Doctor Zhivago, published in Russian in the West, “will be offered to Soviet tourists, various experts and seamen traveling abroad, and will be smuggled into the Soviet Union via ‘existing channels.’”¹⁹ When the Soviet delegation arrived in Vienna for the pro-Communist World Festival of Youth and Students in 1959, they had been instructed about possible “provocations” and were panicked to discover their tour bus literally stuffed with paperback copies of the novel. Their experienced KGB sitters gave them practical advice: “Take them, read them, but don’t even try to bring them home.”²⁰

Doctor Zhivago was not published in the Soviet Union until Gorbachev’s glasnost; in 1988, Novy Mir printed it in two million copies, giving rise to a small industry of scholarly studies. But it did not become a truly popular work, even though Pasternak had intended it to be accessible to unsophisticated readers. In survey after survey, the Russian public names Master and Margarita by Bulgakov and The Quiet Don by Sholokhov as the best Russian novels of the century, not Doctor Zhivago.

In 1965, Sholokhov at last received the Nobel Prize, seven years after Doctor Zhivago. Many years of political maneuvering preceded the award. The first time Sholokhov was actually nominated was in 1947, but the committee then rejected his candidacy, because while The Quiet Don was “juicy and colorful,” it wanted to wait for the publication of Sholokhov’s announced work-in-progress on the war, They Fought for the Homeland (which was never completed).

Sholokhov was a favorite of Stalin and then of Khrushchev, and the leadership continued lobbying on his behalf. In the meantime, Sholokhov made a move to strengthen his reputation in Stockholm. When he went to France in 1959, Sholokhov, once again displaying his independence of character, supported the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the USSR, even though he called it an “unpolished, shapeless” work (an opinion shared, among others, by Akhmatova and Nabokov). That unorthodox statement caused an almost apoplectic reaction in the corridors of the Kremlin as “contradicting our interests.”²¹

In October 1965, when Sholokhov, then sixty, got the news that he had been selected, he was hunting deep in the woods of the Urals. His first phone call was not home, but to Moscow, to the Central Committee, for permission to accept the award. Only after he received the official word did Sholokhov send a telegram to Stockholm to confirm that he would appear at the awards ceremony. There is a memorandum in the Central Committee archives about giving Sholokhov a subsidy of $3,000 for the purchase of a tailcoat and “to equip the persons accompanying him,”²² the loan to be repaid from his Nobel Prize winnings.

It is hard to imagine the other longtime Russian pretender to the Nobel Prize, the elegant, restrained, and proud Vladimir Nabokov, in a similar humiliating situation. The aristocratically punctilious Nabokov, in the 1960s considered the preeminent contemporary writer by many in the West, where he lived, never did receive that highest literary accolade, joining Chekhov, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Platonov among the overlooked. For many years the Nobel committee was scandalized by Nabokov’s most famous work, Lolita (1958), about the forbidden love of Humbert Humbert, a forty-year-old professor, for the twelve-year-old “nymphet” (a word invented by Nabokov). Despite his ironic attitude toward fame, Nabokov was deeply hurt by this. He had positioned himself as the most innovative Russian prose writer since Bely, busily experimenting with narrative, while combining precise, acutely observed, details with a markedly phantasmagoric and parodic form.

Nabokov’s surrealism increased gradually, from his Russian-language novel The Gift (1937–38, arguably his best work), which shocked the émigré community with its mockery of nineteenth-century liberal icon Nikolai Chernyshevsky, to his late pyrotechnical English-language works Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969). All that time, Nabokov was eyeing the Nobel.

His Western biographers tend to underestimate the symbolic value of the Nobel Prize for a Russian émigré. The fact that the first Russian to get the prize in 1933 was his fellow émigré Bunin, with whom he had a complex relationship of master and ambitious younger colleague, must have encouraged Nabokov, because it evinced the pull of stylistically refined prose for the international literary arbiters.

Both Lenin and Stalin had been well informed about Nabokov’s father, a prominent prerevolutionary politician of a liberal bent (he was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by an extremist monarchist). Nabokov fils came to the attention of Lenin and other Politburo members in 1923 in the Soviet censors’ “secret bulletin” with the firm conclusion: “Hostile to the Soviet regime.”²³ Since that first notice, Nabokov’s works published in the West were included on the Soviet blacklists, as was most of Russian émigré literature.

Nabokov remained hostile to the Soviet regime throughout his life, both in his writing and his teaching at Cornell University. This unwavering hostility (unlike that of some other émigré luminaries, like Rachmaninoff or Bunin) was one of the reasons that kept him from appreciating Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, where the Bolshevik revolution and its leader, Lenin, were depicted as a legitimate phenomenon: a position unacceptable for Nabokov. He dismissed Doctor Zhivago as “a sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, and trite coincidences.”²⁴

Nabokov had started out as a poet and continued writing poetry (it was nice, but in Brodsky’s stern opinion, “second-rate”) all his life, and Pasternak’s baroque poetic style was alien to him. He ridiculed Pasternak even in 1927: “His verse is fleshy, goitrous, with bulging eyes: as if his muse suffered from exothalmic goiter…. And even his syntax is perverted.”²⁵ That is, Nabokov disdained the early Pasternak for excessive avant-gardism and the later writing, on the contrary, for primitivism.

Pasternak’s ode addressed to Stalin and published in Izvestiya in 1936, his prominent role in the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, and his subsequent appearance at the pro-Soviet International Writers’ Congress in Paris, would hardly have disposed the anti-Communist Nabokov toward the poet. This was at the root of the bizarre theory Nabokov shared privately, that the scandal surrounding the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West was planned by the Soviets for a single goal: to guarantee the commercial success of the novel so that the hard currency earnings could be used to finance Communist propaganda abroad.

Nabokov’s ideological and stylistic disagreements with Pasternak were amplified by personal motives. Interestingly, Pasternak knew or guessed that it was so: in 1956 he told a visitor from Great Britain that Nabokov envied him.²⁶ Scholars who deny the very possibility of envy (“And what was there to envy?”) forget how marginalized culturally the émigré Nabokov must have felt in comparison to Pasternak, who was declared the country’s leading poet in 1934 by the Bolshevik Bukharin.

And what could Nabokov have felt in 1958, when Lolita, which had at last reached the top of American best-seller lists, was knocked from its perch by Doctor Zhivago, which he hated so much (and which he felt was supported by the Soviet government) and which was propelled to the top of the list by the news of the Nobel Prize? In addition, Nabokov knew that many critics watching this unprecedented battle between two novels by Russian authors in the Western arena preferred Doctor Zhivago as the more worthy, “noble” work with Christian values.

This was not only the opinion in Russian émigré circles, which Nabokov quite understandably felt should be supporting a fellow exile, but to his great dismay, his best American friend, the influential critic Edmund Wilson, had ignored Lolita but praised Doctor Zhivago to the skies in his notable review in The New Yorker.

The Communist leadership always considered the Swedish Academy an anti-Soviet institution. However, there is no doubt that it was Nabokov’s uncompromising anticommunism (which extended not only to Stalin but Lenin, which in those years was considered extremist by many Western intellectuals), together with his vulnerable position as an émigré, that made his candidacy “inconvenient” for the Nobel Prize. The semipornographic reputation of Lolita was a mere excuse for the Swedish academicians.

That is why they were not moved even by the passionate letter supporting Nabokov’s candidacy from Moscow, sent by Solzhenitsyn, who had just received the Nobel Prize in 1970. The letter, in which Solzhenitsyn hails Nabokov as a writer with a “blinding literary gift, precisely the kind we call genius,”²⁷ is very curious. Solzhenitsyn praised Nabokov’s novels, written both in Russian and in English, for their refined wordplay and brilliant composition while feeling little sympathy for high modernism, whose great representative Nabokov was.

Solzhenitsyn was sour about the Nobel Prize going to The Quiet Don (ironically, a work that was much closer to him stylistically): “It was a very dreary and hurt feeling in our community when we saw that Sholokhov won the prize for that very book”²⁸—yet another example of how aesthetic judgment is subjugated to politics.

Even classic modernism, a milestone of which was Bely’s Petersburg (1914), a phantasmagoric novel much admired by Nabokov, is still not considered mainstream literature in Russia. That may be one of the reasons that Nabokov’s surrealistic novels (eight in Russian, including the tour de force The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading, and eight in English) have not entered the popular canon, even after they were finally published in Russia. (The first step came in 1987, when an excerpt from the “chess” novel Luzhin’s Defense appeared in the weekly Chess in the USSR.)

The Nabokovian tradition is still little absorbed in Russia. Exceptions are Andrei Bitov’s novel Pushkin House (even though the author always insisted that he wrote this book before reading Nabokov) and the works of Sasha Sokolov, whose A School for Fools was hailed by Nabokov as “an enchanting, tragic, and touching book.”²⁹

Khrushchev, who was one of Stalin’s henchmen in repression, no longer desired to—or perhaps no longer could—act as his ruthless boss once did. Hence his anti-Stalinist speech and attempts at a Thaw. But he still wanted to maintain strict discipline. Any whiff of liberalism made Khrushchev nervous. He feared it would weaken the country in its struggle with the West, and suspected that the main sources of dangerous liberal ideas were the writers, poets, composers, and artists.

Unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was no fan of high culture, and his relationship with these people was colored by the inferiority complex of a poorly educated man. These prejudices, multiplied by Khrushchev’s growing high-handedness, as he gradually freed himself of Stalin’s humiliating superiority and became more comfortable as leader of the Communist world, were an emotional powder keg, ready to explode at any moment. All it needed was a match.

Many historians continue to assert that the match was always lit by others, that every time Khrushchev exploded (and there were many), it was the result of the sinister intrigues of his advisors, conservative writers and artists. Khrushchev, like all leaders of the Soviet state, including Stalin before him and Brezhnev after, was first of all a professional politician who did not trust anyone fully besides himself and who made all final decisions personally. It is doubtful that anyone could manipulate Khrushchev. But he skillfully simulated spontaneity and impulsiveness in his skirmishes with the intelligentsia.

The first time Khrushchev “lost it” publicly was during a meeting with writers at the Central Committee on May 13, 1957, when after a two-hour rambling speech he shouted at an elderly literary grande dame, Marietta Shaginyan, whose dogged questions about why meat was not available in the stores set him off (he was planning to announce in ten days’ time his intention to surpass America in the production of meat, butter, and milk). At the second meeting with the cultural elite, on May 19, 1957, at a state dacha near Moscow, Khrushchev picked another woman as his main target, the poet Margarita Aliger.

Eyewitnesses describe him attacking the tiny, frail Aliger “with all the fire of an enraged drunk muzhik,” yelling that she was a traitor. “When Aliger meekly disagreed, Khrushchev howled that she couldn’t be an enemy, she was just a little bump in the road that he spat on, stomped on, and it was gone. Aliger burst into tears.”³⁰

Those present at this humiliating scene were terrified and sure that Aliger and the other writers Khrushchev had attacked that day would be arrested the very next morning. Even though arrests did not follow, we can assume that fear was exactly the effect the wily leader had wanted.

Khrushchev consciously built his political and cultural strategy in imitation of Stalin as a series of unpredictable zigzags: that was his brand tactics. He kept announcing that he was a Stalinist in cultural policy, then he would complain about the Stalinists who could not tolerate his struggle against Stalin’s cult of personality, and then he would attack anti-Stalinist literature. The intelligentsia had to keep guessing what his intentions were. From time to time, he would produce some disorienting surprises.

One such mind-boggling bombshell was the highly publicized publication in November 1962 in Novy Mir (editor-in-chief, Alexander Tvardovsky) of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the stunning novella about the Stalin concentration camps by a forty-four-year-old math schoolteacher from provincial Ryazan and a former prisoner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was the first work on this banned topic printed in a Soviet magazine, and it would not have appeared without Khrushchev’s personal approval. At the urging of Tvardovsky, whom he respected, Khrushchev decided to allow this novella to be published as the final chord of his anti-Stalin campaign, which had climaxed on October 31, 1961, with the removal of Stalin’s embalmed body from the mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, where it had been placed with Lenin’s mummy in 1953.

Solzhenitsyn’s story had been read aloud to Khrushchev by his aide in September 1962 while he was on vacation, and he liked it very much—it suited his current political plans. Khrushchev’s unexpected verdict was: “This is a life-affirming work. I’ll say even more—it’s a Party work.” And he added significantly that at the moment Solzhenitsyn’s novella could be “useful.”³¹

A few days after the magazine came out, there was a scheduled plenary session of the Central Committee, which brought the Party elite from all over the country. The Kremlin requested over two thousand copies of the magazine with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for the delegates. Tvardovsky, who participated in the plenum’s work, recalled that when he saw the light blue cover of the magazine all over the auditorium of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, his heart beat wildly.³²

For Tvardovsky this was the high point of his sixteen-year tenure as head of Novy Mir, which in the Khrushchev era had become the center of the liberal forces in Russian literature. Three-time winner of the Stalin Prize (and under Khrushchev, the Lenin Prize), Tvardovsky underwent a remarkable evolution from loyal believer to protector of oppositionist voices, like Vladimir Voinovich and Georgy Vladimov. Tvardovsky was most proud of his discovery of Solzhenitsyn, especially dear to him because of his strong Russian roots, keen understanding of peasant psychology, traditional writing style, and stern character.

I was eighteen then, and I remember the general shock caused by One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, both because it had been published at all and for its enormous artistic power. Its first readers encountered narrative mastery, amazing in a literary debut: without melodrama or stress, with deliberate restraint it told the story of just “one day,” and far from the worst, in the life of one of the millions of Soviet prisoners, the peasant Ivan Shukhov, depicted through his peasant perceptions, his colorful but natural language, which elicited associations with Tolstoy’s prose. This publication created in the intelligentsia a sense of unprecedented euphoria, which lasted, alas, just over a week.

On December 1, 1962, Khrushchev with his retinue of associates and sycophants made an unexpected visit to an exhibition at the Manege near Red Square that was dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow Artists’ Union. Khrushchev was expected at the moment to support liberal trends in art, but instead he attacked the paintings he saw there by the patriarchs of Russian modernism, like Pavel Kuznetsov and Robert Falk, calling them “dog shit.” He was particularly infuriated by the works of young Moscow avant-garde painters, mostly pupils of Eli Belyutin, which had been hastily delivered to the Manege the night before his visit, which later gave rise to completely understandable suppositions that Khrushchev’s allegedly spontaneous reaction had been planned.

Just before that, in October, Khrushchev had had to back down in a confrontation with John F. Kennedy, removing the Soviet missiles in Cuba that were aimed at the Unites States. He was concerned that his reputation as a strong leader had suffered, and he wanted to show that he had the reins of power firmly in hand. The attack at the Manege was to be one of the proofs of his strength.

It became the stage for his famous discussion with Ernst Neizvestny, whose expressionistic sculpture of a woman prompted the Soviet leader to shout that if Neizvestny depicted women this way, he was a “fag,” and “we give ten years for that.” In response the stocky thirty-seven-year-old sculptor, a brave former soldier, demanded that they bring him a girl so he could prove otherwise. Khrushchev burst out laughing, but the KGB person who accompanied him threatened Neizvestny that rude talk with the boss could land him in a uranium mine.

Neizvestny tried arguing with Khrushchev, mentioning that Pablo Picasso was Communist, but the premier interrupted him: “I am Communist number one in the world, and I don’t like your works,” adding, “Don’t you understand that all foreigners are enemies?”³³

Neizvestny seemed like such a convenient target that Khrushchev continued mocking him two weeks later, on December 17, at a meeting of the Soviet leadership with the cultural elite at the House of Receptions in Lenin Hills, where he said publicly to the sculptor: “Here’s what your art looks like: now if a man got into a toilet, got inside the bowl, and then looked up at what was above him if someone sat down on the seat, that would be your work!”³⁴

It might be considered an irony of fate that when Khrushchev died in 1971, his headstone at the prestigious Novodevichy Cemetery was made by none other than Neizvestny. Even though the sculptor maintained that the commission had been in Khrushchev’s will, in fact it was not: the decision was made by the Khrushchev family, and it hesitated between Neizvestny and Zurab Tsereteli, another rising star of the period in monumental sculpture. But Tsereteli got cold feet over the politically hazardous project.³⁵

Now Neizvestny’s most famous work, the headstone—a bronze head of Khrushchev on a background of intersecting chunks of white marble and black granite—symbolized in the sculptor’s mind the struggle between the progressive and the reactionary in the Soviet leader’s personality and work. It is possible that later generations will see one or the other as dominant.

Khrushchev’s effectiveness was severely undermined in his last years in the Kremlin, and that was due in great part to his conflicts with the cultural elite: it set the tone, gradually inculcating the idea that Khrushchev was too unstable and unpredictable—in short, dangerous. This is clear from the reminiscences of filmmaker Mikhail Romm, in many ways a typical figure in Soviet culture. Romm was among the first laureates of the Stalin Prize for two of his quality films about Lenin, and then Stalin gave him three more awards for his anti-American propaganda films, also not badly done. In 1962, Romm made the classic Thaw film about a young scientist, Nine Days of One Year, and later, Ordinary Fascism, a documentary based on Nazi newsreels, whose hidden anti-Stalinist parallels were eagerly read by Soviet intellectuals adept at understanding Aesopian language.

Romm started out as an ardent Khrushchevian. Even the young avant-garde poet Voznesensky admitted that then he considered Khrushchev “our hope.”³⁶ The faith of Romm, Voznesensky, and many other cultural liberals was finally shattered on March 7, 1963, at another meeting of the Soviet leader with cultural figures, this time at the Kremlin. The irate premier created a scene that stunned everyone there. Khrushchev swore, yelled that for the enemy “we don’t have a thaw but a fierce frost,” “I’m for war in art,” and “Mister Voznesensky, get out of our country, get out!”³⁷

Voznesensky recalled that when Khrushchev screamed at him: “Agent! Agent!” he thought, “Well, he’s calling in the agents, they’ll take me away.” Ilya Ehrenburg, who was in the audience and had been yelled at by Khrushchev, too, later asked the young poet, “How did you bear it? Anyone in your place could have had a heart attack…. You could have begged for mercy, fallen to your knees, and that would have been understandable.”³⁸

Yevtushenko, whose anti-Stalinist poem “The Heirs of Stalin” had appeared in Pravda some four months earlier, with Khrushchev’s personal sanction, also admitted later, “It was pretty scary.” As Romm remembered, Khrushchev frightened everyone when he suddenly asked menacingly, “What, do you think we’ve forgotten how to arrest people?”³⁹

According to Romm, “After that surrealistic shouting, everything was topsy-turvy” for the guests at the Kremlin; many members of the elite who had previously been loyal to Khrushchev began to wonder whether this man could lead such an enormous country: “At some point his brakes failed, he went off the rails…. You could easily destroy all of Russia that way.”⁴⁰

Chapter Twelve

Khrushchev was ousted in October 1964 by his former acolytes inside the Party and replaced as leader of the country by Leonid Brezhnev, heavy-browed, tall, and friendly. He had a reputation as an experienced and reliable apparatchik, unlikely to improvise or heat up passions, and the news was greeted with relief and hope by many intellectuals. Even people who owed Khrushchev a lot personally, like Tvardovsky, Yevtushenko, and Solzhenitsyn, had grown weary of his policy zigzags.

In that sense Yuri Lyubimov’s position was typical. A famous actor who was in the signal film of the Stalin era, Cossacks of the Kuban (1950, directed by Ivan Pyryev), Lyubimov received the Stalin Prize in 1952, and in 1964 unexpectedly (for everyone, probably himself included) became head of the experimental, politically bold Theater on the Taganka. Lyubimov admitted to me, “Well, without Khrushchev there wouldn’t be a Taganka.”¹ But the debut production, Bertolt Brecht’s Good Person of Szechwan, already had a sarcastic poke at Khrushchev—the characters mispronounced “principles” in imitation of the Soviet leader.

Lyubimov went on: “Someone snitched that we were making fun of the leader. I was called in. That was my first explanation before the authorities, by the way. I was just starting out, and so I was very arrogant. So I said, ‘Do you know who talks like that? Pretty illiterate people, that’s who…. Let him learn to speak Russian properly!’”² Lyubimov, with his amazing sensitivity to political currents and flair for publicity (he liked to say that “If there’s no scandal around the theater, it’s no theater”), staked everything and won: while the authorities mulled over the proper punishment for the suddenly obstinate director, Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev, who remained well disposed toward the Taganka.

Lyubimov was always balancing on the edge between allowed and forbidden, often crossing the line. Using the long-suppressed and almost forgotten devices of the Russian avant-garde theater, Lyubimov created a politically charged theater with wide appeal. His enemies kept saying that he was merely an imitator of Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Tairov, and Meyerhold: “We’ve been through that.” Lyubimov’s ready reply was: “Been through! You mean, you walked past it! You’re stuck in the swamp of realism!”

Lyubimov was always something of an enigma, his jovial mask of a “wastrel” hiding a will of iron and endless ambition. For many years, he was considered an orthodox Communist (he even worked for a while as master of ceremonies in the dance ensemble of the NKVD, whose patron was the chief of secret police Lavrenti Beria) and a loyal follower of the Stanislavsky Method, and at the age of forty-five he suddenly threw off all that baggage. How did it happen? Lyubimov never bothered to explain.

His productions at the Taganka combined into one motley but effective whole Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Vakhtangov’s expressionist miseen-scene, and Tairov’s songs and pantomime meshed with circus, shadow theater, moving sets, and snatches of avant-garde music. The complex theatrical score that Lyubimov had in his head like an inspired conductor unfolded before astounded audiences, unused to such art, helping to deliver the dissident subtext that existed in almost every work he produced, be it a staging of John Reed’s reportage about the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, a montage of poems dear to Lyubimov’s heart (by Voznesensky, Mayakovsky, or Yevtushenko), or an unorthodox Hamlet in Pasternak’s translation.

The audiences took delight in unearthing all the director’s hints. The authorities also understood that Lyubimov was playing cat and mouse with them, but how could they catch him out? They certainly tried. For instance, at the deliberations by the Moscow Culture Administration’s acceptance committee over Lyubimov’s production about Mayakovsky, the cultural bureaucrats were outraged that in the play Lenin “criticized the poet. And Lenin’s text is disrespectfully pronounced through a window above which hangs the letter M, like over a toilet.”³

Whenever the threat of a ban for “incorrect associations” hung over a production, Lyubimov managed to get through to the top, including Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, and often they supported the director—to some extent. Since open political discussion was impossible, Lyubimov’s theater had turned into an influential public forum, comparable to the early Moscow Art Theater of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko or Meyerhold’s revolutionary theater.

The play Anti-Worlds was based on the poetry of Voznesensky and was performed almost a thousand times at the Taganka. The poet recalled that he had looked around at one of Lyubimov’s premieres and saw “sitting in close proximity the out-of-favor Academician Sakharov, dissidents, Politburo member Dmitri Polyansky, a cosmonaut, an underground millionaire, a liberal Party apparatchik, social lionesses, and students rustling pages of samizdat.”⁴ Voznesensky maintained that many of the ideas of perestroika were born at Lyubimov’s theater. It may be an exaggeration, but not a wild one.

The Taganka Theater’s influence on a mass audience was increased many times over by the enormous popularity of its young leading actor, Vladimir Vysotsky. His fame, comparable only to Chaliapin’s before the revolution, was not for his theater roles (even though he was an impressive Hamlet) but his songs, which he performed to his own guitar accompaniment, and of which there were several hundred.

Vysotsky, with his older contemporaries Bulat Okudzhava and Alexander Galich, created the phenomenon of magnitizdat (bootleg copies of banned music, on the analogy of samizdat) when the USSR began manufacturing tape recorders in the 1960s. The domestic unofficial chansonniers, who had no records and were not played on radio, much less television, and were only berated in the newspapers, were known as “bards,” and hundreds of thousands of copies of their songs circulated throughout the Soviet Union. Some of them had more in common with their French brethren, for instance, the delicate and slightly sentimental Okudzhava, who continued the old tradition of Russian Gypsy romance and the best of Vertinsky on contemporary material, while Vysotsky was much more of a Soviet phenomenon.

Okudzhava had served in the front lines and he sang of war and love like a true Russian officer, with a shade of aristocratic nostalgia (even though he had joined the Party in 1956, in the period of Thaw hopes). Despite his dandyish mustache, he was no fop, nor did he drink much, unlike Galich and Vysotsky, who were alcoholics and drug users. But Galich was distinguished by a noble mien, unlike Okudzhava and Vysotsky, who seemed quite ordinary when not performing in their jackets with upturned collars, sometimes resembling sparrows with their feathers fluffed.

But once they had a guitar in their hands, Okudzhava and Vysotsky were instantly transformed. I heard both frequently, and every time I marveled at the metamorphosis: quiet Okudzhava, seemingly created for intimate singing in small cellars, held large audiences in sway with his sorrowful ballads; Vysotsky turned into a hoarsely shouting rock star with twisted mouth, sweaty brow, and taut neck tendons who could conquer the most reluctant audience.

The incredible fame of Vysotsky, Okudzhava, Galich, and a few other Russian bards never crossed beyond the borders of the Russian-language world. I remember persuading the New York Times rock critic to attend a Vysotsky concert in New York—he was baffled, finding the music and the performance primitive and the energy affected.

Okudzhava, with his refined balance between the slightly surreal lyrics and lilting melodies, made a better impression on the Western audiences. Still, he and the more political Galich remained purely Russian phenomena, and in the nation’s collective consciousness, their best songs continue to resonate powerfully. Like Vertinsky’s chansons, they are the diary of the twentieth-century Russian soul.

In the last third of the century Vysotsky was more popular in Russia than the Beatles and Elvis Presley combined. His songs were about athletes, soldiers, and criminals, and because of that many of his fans wrongly believed that Vysotsky had fought in a penal battalion and served time in a prison camp. He avoided openly political themes, unlike Galich, who was forced out of the country for his anti-Sovietism.

Galich’s songs about winos, waitresses, prostitutes, and minor clerks continued the satirical tradition of Zoshchenko’s stories, his characters having a lower social status and vocabulary than those in Okudzhava’s songs. Vysotsky descended even lower, into the criminal underworld.

Prison-camp songs were popular in Russia back at the turn of the century. The new impulse for their dissemination came, paradoxically, from the lofty stage of the Moscow Art Theater’s 1902 production of Gorky’s Lower Depths, where a prison song, “The Sun Rises and Sets,” was performed; afterward, thousands of gramophone records of this ballad were played in every corner of the empire.

In the Soviet period, the folklore of the criminal milieu went underground until the post-Stalin amnesties that freed huge numbers of inmates who injected prison camp culture into daily life. Vysotsky moved it to the center of the national discourse, even though officially it did not exist. He did it with the utmost conviction and seriousness, without a hint of condescension or commercialization, and that brought him widespread admiration, even as his songs made The Lower Depths look like nursery school.

Vysotsky, Okudzhava, and Galich outraged and delighted people on the left and the right. I remember the composer Vassily Solovyov-Sedoy, whose many hits include the ever-popular “Moscow Nights,” frothing at the mouth as he denounced Vysotsky as an immoral author who corrupted Soviet youth. Okudzhava was also seen by the authorities as an individualist, dangerous for Soviet morality, and Galich as openly anti-Soviet, but Vysotsky’s message bordered on anarchy. The official poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky was direct: “Make no mistake: that’s not a guitar in his hands but a terrible weapon.”⁵

That is why the death and funeral of Vysotsky at age forty-two in 1980—he was destroyed by alcohol and drugs—turned into a political event on a national scale, comparable to the funerals of Leo Tolstoy, Esenin, and Pasternak. Despite the total information vacuum, tens of thousands of people bearing flowers and guitars and playing the singer’s tapes came to the Taganka Theater, where the coffin was arranged for a viewing. People wept. The theater canceled the performance of Hamlet, starring Vysotsky, and offered money back to ticket-holders; no one returned a single ticket. Busloads of police pulled up to the square in front of the theater. Tension ran high. It is a miracle that there was no fatal crush like the one during Stalin’s funeral.

July 28, 1980, will be one of those milestones in Russian history marking the division, mutual lack of understanding, and deeply rooted distrust between the masses and the Soviet regime in the post-Khrushchev era. The fact that even after his death Vysotsky did not get recognition as a national singer, even though everyone from Siberian workers to Politburo members hummed his songs, evinced the immobile and ossified nature of the official ideology and cultural policy.

The myth about Brezhnev is that he was a mediocre politician pushed around by his aides and advisors. That image was basically the result of efforts by Khrushchev’s team, who tried to spin a new historical narrative in the years of Gorbachev’s glasnost: revenge for the defeat of their old boss. It is unlikely that Brezhnev was less of a master politician than Khrushchev, otherwise he would not have lasted eighteen years in power (seven more than Khrushchev).

Brezhnev was not stupider than Khrushchev, but he was significantly more cautious and guarded. After Khrushchev’s removal, the question of expanding cultural freedom was debated in an inner Party circle, and Brezhnev expressed his sympathy for the idea, adding that it was embarrassing to see Khrushchev yelling at artists and writers. The ladies’ man Brezhnev was particularly upset at the ruthless treatment of the poet Margarita Aliger.

Brezhnev announced then that he wanted to establish “confidential relations” with the intelligentsia.⁶ In 1964, a new film appeared in Soviet film theaters by the young director Elem Klimov. Welcome, or No Admittance was a sharp satire on Soviet society, depicted as a Pioneer summer camp, where the children are brainwashed, driving out all traces of independence, and turned into tiny mean-spirited robots.

The film was topical, because it was seen as a mockery of Khrushchev (the director of the camp, comically arrogant, kept trying to push corn on everyone, as did the former Soviet leader). The talented Klimov managed to catch the wave of change, because his father held a high position in the Party apparatus. At the time, the joke about him was: “It’s handy to be a lefty when you have support from the right.”

But his next comedy, Adventures of a Dentist, created serious problems for him with the authorities. It was an allegory about the place of talent in the Soviet Union, with a screenplay by Alexander Volodin, perhaps the most Chekhovian Russian playwright of the second half of the century.

Volodin, a strange, shy, and hard-drinking man who seemed to come out of a Chekhov story, went into film because his plays—Factory Girl and Big Sister—were attacked as “slander of Soviet life.” His play Five Evenings (and I still remember Georgi Tovstonogov’s 1959 deeply moving production at the Leningrad Bolshoi Dramatic Theater) was characterized as “spiteful barking from an alleyway,” and the main charge against his popular The Appointment, produced by Efremov at the Sovremennik Theater, was that it “hammered a wedge between the people and the government.”⁷

Misfortune followed Volodin in his move to film: the censors were reluctant to release Adventures of a Dentist because, allegedly, “everything in the film is upside down. In our society the individual is responsible to the society, but you have the society responsible before the individual.”⁸ With the help of his mentor, Mikhail Romm (and his father’s connections), Klimov managed to get the film approved, but it was shown in very few theaters and hushed up. Klimov made no more comedies. In the West he would be known subsequently for his epic narrative about the fall of the Russian monarchy, Agony, and the violent antiwar film, Come and See.

Volodin once wrote perceptively about the Theater on Taganka: “Lyubimov hated the authorities and he did not hide it…. But he dressed his anger in such festive, fantastically inventive theatrical clothes that sometimes even the authorities wanted to think that his allusions were not to them.”⁹ In 1968, when Lyubimov was fired and expelled from the Party for yet another “slanderous” production, he wrote a letter to Brezhnev, who responded with the resolution, “Let him work,” thereby reprieving the death sentence given to the theater by Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva. As Lyubimov recalled, he was also immediately reinstated in the Party: “Sorry, we got overexcited.”¹⁰

According to his aides, Brezhnev unlike Stalin had no great love for fiction or nonfiction, limiting his reading to newspapers and popular magazines, and his preferred films were nature documentaries. He was bored by serious feature films, although he liked, and shed a tear over, Andrei Smirnov’s Belorussian Station (1971), a sentimental story of four former soldiers, which premiered Okudzhava’s song “We Won’t Stand for the Price,” one of the best about World War II.

But Brezhnev could astound his entourage when he was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party by reciting a long poem by Symbolist classic Dmitri Merezhkovsky, or the poems of Esenin.¹¹ These works had been banned under Stalin, but as a young man Brezhnev had dreamed of becoming an actor and had performed with one of the many amateur theater groups popular in the early years of the revolution—whence his unorthodox poetic interests. Until his illness, Brezhnev liked to affect people emotionally. Once, in a moment of frankness, he told an aide that he considered his charm an important political tool.¹²

The culmination of Brezhnev’s artistic ambitions was the publication in 1978 of his memoir trilogy: Small Land, Resurrection, and Virgin Soil. Naturally, the books were written by literary ghosts, paid by state funds—there is nothing unusual about that or the fact that despite their more than modest literary qualities, Brezhnev’s books were published in printings of millions: after all, these were the memoirs of the leader of one of the two superpowers.

But his works, besides being made mandatory reading for the public and Party members especially, were praised as unsurpassed masterpieces in numerous reviews by leading writers, were given the Lenin Prize for literature, and their author was accepted into the Writers’ Union with membership card No. 1. Films were hastily made based on the memoirs, plays written and oratorios composed; at the Tretyakov Gallery, the finest museum of Russian art, Small Land, a large painting by Dmitri Nalbandyan, a Soviet court painter since the Stalin days, depicted Brezhnev as one of the main heroes of World War II.

A popular joke of the time had Brezhnev telephoning members of the Politburo to get their opinions of his books; they, naturally, were unanimous in their praise, and Brezhnev then wondered, “Everyone likes them. Maybe I should read them, too?” There is a transcript of a Politburo meeting on April 13, 1978, when Brezhnev, speaking of the publication of the first part of his memoirs, says that in meeting with leading officials, military men, and other comrades he was told that his books are extremely useful in bringing up the people.¹³

Brezhnev probably also enjoyed the fact his work had finally upstaged Khrushchev, whose “illegal” memoirs were published to great publicity in the West in 1970–1974 and declared “forgeries” in the Soviet Union. (Khrushchev’s memoirs, like Brezhnev’s, were taped and edited by others.)

Despite Brezhnev’s personal benevolence, softheartedness, and even sentimentality, culture came under increasing pressure in his regime. The signals from above were mixed, like Khrushchev’s. In the same month, September 1965, Leningrad poet Joseph Brodsky was released early from his exile in the North, where he had been sentenced in the last year of Khrushchev’s rule to five years of forced labor for “parasitism”(fighting which was one of Khrushchev’s favorite ideas), and the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested. Their crime was the publication in the West of anti-Soviet satirical prose. They apparently used Pasternak as a model, but unlike him, they hid behind the pseudonyms Abram Terts and Nikolai Arzhak, which the KGB eventually uncovered.

Pasternak had only been threatened with arrest and trial, but the authorities decided to go ahead with Sinyavsky and Daniel. Brezhnev with Petr Demichev, then ideology secretary of the Central Committee, made a special visit to Konstantin Fedin, head of the Writers’ Union, for approval of these sanctions, reminiscent of Stalin’s repression. Fedin, once a talented prose writer and favorite of Gorky’s, had become totally ossified over the years, and it goes without saying that, flattered by the attention, he approved.

Under Brezhnev, cultural issues moved mostly into the supervision of apparatchiks; the general secretary rarely interfered in cultural affairs, usually only when he wanted to give an award to a favorite film actor.

The day-to-day work in the area was left to Furtseva (Minister of Culture between 1960 and 1974) and Demichev (Minister of Culture 1974 to 1986). The conservative Demichev was rather colorless; there were many colorful but unsubstantiated stories about Furtseva, a strong personality: that she had been Khrushchev’s mistress, that she was an alcoholic, that she had slit her wrists after a Party demotion in 1961, and that she committed suicide by taking cyanide in 1974.

The work of both ministers was supervised and controlled in many ways by two much more influential figures—Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, who was in charge of ideology since the Khrushchev years and known as the Party’s gray cardinal for his backstage machinations, and Andropov, who headed the KGB for fifteen years and became the country’s leader after Brezhnev’s death in 1982.

Tall, thin, and pale, Suslov was a Party ascetic, who dressed modestly and wore old-fashioned galoshes until his death in 1982. Andropov, who ostensibly loved jazz, whiskey, and Jacqueline Susann novels, was smart and personable. The two seemed polar opposites. But they were similar in believing in Communism and the primacy of Party ideology over culture and behaved accordingly. The decision to arrest and try Sinyavsky and Daniel had been prepared by these men, who felt that the intelligentsia was getting out of hand again and needed to be brought to heel. And once again, it led to unexpected results.

The arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel itself was a warning, as the authorities had intended; at that moment people seriously feared that the two writers might be executed for their “subversive” works, already translated into many languages. It soon became clear that accused were no longer tortured behind bars, they were not beaten during questioning, and apparently they were in no danger of a death sentence. The trial was going to be open. This reflected the new tactics of the regime, intended to prove the guilt of Sinyavsky and Daniel strictly within the post-Stalinist “socialist legality” so that both Soviet intellectuals and the liberal West would be satisfied.

The defendants, Sinyavsky, of medium height, bearded, and cross-eyed, and Daniel, stoop-shouldered, black-haired, and charmingly talkative, did not repent. They quickly earned the sympathy of the skeptical Western journalists who flocked around the Moscow courthouse. Foreigners were not admitted into the courtroom, but when the defendants’ wives came out during recess, they were ready to talk openly and give interviews to the Western press—for the first time in Soviet history.

Close contact was thus forged between Soviet cultural dissidents and the Western media. It was a historic breakthrough, which led directly to the daily dramatic reports on the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial on radio stations that broadcast to the Soviet Union.

The names of the disobedient writers became widely known; I remember a friend bringing an hour-long compilation he had taped of reports from Voice of America, the BBC, and Deutsche Welle to my dormitory at Leningrad Conservatory. We had the chance to hear the witty writings of the banned authors, because the radio broadcast excerpts from them.

Following the trial on a transistor radio in his village “hide-out” near Obninsk, Solzhenitsyn was working on Gulag Archipelago, which he defined as “an experiment in literary investigation” of the Soviet camp system. In his diary he noted that the “progressive West” had previously forgiven the Soviet Union for its cruel treatment of writers, but this time was upset over Sinyavsky and Daniel—“a sign of the times.” The West was outraged by the sentence: seven years in hard-regime camps for Sinyavsky and five for Daniel.

But in the Soviet Union there were notables who were not ashamed to hail it; Sholokhov famously declared: “If those guys with black consciences had been caught in the memorable twenties, when trials did not depend on the strictly defined articles of the Criminal Code but were ‘based on revolutionary righteousness,’ oh, those werewolves wouldn’t have gotten off so easily! But here, you see, there are complaints about the ‘severity’ of the sentence.”¹⁴

Western radio stations carried news of a letter in defense of Sinyavsky and Daniel signed by sixty-two Soviet writers. Solzhenitsyn did not join them: “It is not fitting for a Russian writer to seek fame abroad.”(That was how Maria Rozanova, Sinyavsky’s wife, conveyed his explanation to me.) But by that time, Solzhenitsyn had, albeit with “bated heartbeat,” smuggled out the manuscript of his novel The First Circle, and in 1968–1969 this novel and the other, Cancer Ward, which Solzhenitsyn could not get published in the USSR, either, came out in the West.

The appearance of these “polyphonic” (his term) works about the Stalin era suddenly made Solzhenitsyn, who had just turned fifty, a real candidate for the Nobel Prize. The action of The First Circle took place in a secret research institute for prisoner scientists, a sharashka, and Cancer Ward was set in a hospital—both autobiographical and at the same time symbolic.

Solzhenitsyn had proved to the Western cognoscenti that he was not a one-work wonder whose fame rested only on the political sensation caused by One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Now there was a mature master working in the best traditions of the great Russian novel and holding an independent position vis-à-vis the hostile Communist establishment.

The belligerent Soviet empire armed with nuclear weapons seemed a mysterious and ominous monolith to the West, so the smallest manifestations of contrary thought within Soviet society were regarded with lively interest. Even the timid desire for liberalization among Soviet intellectuals was hailed by their Western colleagues, because it gave them hope of moving the Soviet Union toward greater transparency and “normalcy.” The post-Stalinist Communist leadership had offered the slogan of “peaceful coexistence” for socialism and capitalism, but still forcefully rejected coexistence in ideology, which increased the jitters in Europe and America about the reliability and stability of détente between East and West.

Hence, the arrival of a figure like Solzhenitsyn on the Soviet cultural scene was a gift for the West. Solzhenitsyn combined several attractive qualities: an enormous talent who presented the bitter truth about Soviet life, he wrote not from secondhand accounts but as a fearless eye-witness using his own tragic experience as an inmate in a Stalin concentration camp. His future adversary, the satirist Vladimir Voinovich, summed up the perception of Solzhenitsyn at that time: “He writes beautifully, his behavior is valorous, his judgments independent, he does not bow down to authority or fold before danger, he is always prepared to sacrifice himself.”¹⁵

The tall, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed Solzhenitsyn, with his memorable Nordic face, made a powerful impression. Akhmatova, not given to raptures, was astounded after he visited her: “Fresh, smart, young, merry. We had forgotten that such people exist. His eyes were like precious stones.” She concluded solemnly: “A bearer of light.”¹⁶

According to Voinovich, that was when photos of Solzhenitsyn began appearing on bookshelves of liberal Muscovites, moving aside pictures of previous idols Pasternak and Hemingway. “Solzhenitsyn was persecuted and in great danger, so every holder of his portrait was not only expressing his admiration for him but also demonstrating his own courage.”¹⁷

Solzhenitsyn, along with Andrei Sakharov, was the undisputed leader of Soviet dissidents, undermining the authority of the state. This gave rise to the Solzhenitsyn legend, which was created simultaneously by various sides: the writer himself; the authorities, who only strengthened his reputation by persecuting him; the growing circle of his supporters and admirers inside the country; and the Western media. Voinovich said, “In those days, whatever Western station you could tune to, Solzhenitsyn was the main story.”

The legend acquired its final form when Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1970: the culmination of at least a quarter century of stubborn, one might even say fanatical, pursuit of that goal. He had first thought about getting the Nobel when he was a prisoner in the camps and heard of its existence, before he had published a single line. That must be a unique example in the prize’s history.

We know about the passions that consumed Solzhenitsyn, because he described them in his remarkable autobiographical book The Oak and the Calf. Probably no other Nobel laureate has revealed his emotions and his strategy that frankly. Solzhenitsyn had decided to go for it from the start: “Something in the spirit of our country, totally political: that is what I need for my future Breakthrough.” The Nobel was to become a weapon in Solzhenitsyn’s hands.

Even as a provincial math teacher in 1958, Solzhenitsyn was passionate about Pasternak. Sitting in Ryazan, Solzhenitsyn imagined Pasternak traveling from Moscow to Stockholm and making a fiery anti-Soviet speech that “would change the entire world.”

Given his temperament and prison savvy, Solzhenitsyn could not imagine that Pasternak would take a pass and refuse both the prize and the opportunity to burst onto the political stage. “I measured him by my goals, by my standards—and I cringed in shame for him…. No, we were hopeless!”¹⁸ Solzhenitsyn decided on a strategy of active lobbying, which succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams: the Swedish Academy crowned the writer a mere eight years after his very first publication—an unprecedented event in the annals of the Nobel Prize.

Solzhenitsyn received it “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” This accolade underscored the view that Solzhenitsyn was working in the Tolstoyan tradition—the one that the Swedish Academy had found unacceptable at the dawn of the century. Subsequently, the Swedes evaluated Bunin, Gorky, Pasternak, Sholokhov, and Nabokov in terms of their adherence to the Tolstoyan line: the writers who were deemed to be close to it were rewarded, the others rejected. While the recognition of Sholokhov was seen by many as a concession to Soviet pressure, the Swedes particularly appreciated Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn for their Christian values.

Soviet reaction to Solzhenitsyn’s award was totally predictable: in its top secret memorandum sent to the Central Committee, the KGB reported that “with this act the West has paid for Solzhenitsyn’s ‘political contributions.’”¹⁹

Through diplomatic channels, the Kremlin began pressuring the Swedish government to distance itself from the decision of the Swedish Academy; this time, the politicians held firm. As mentioned before, Solzhenitsyn observed: “Even though the Swedish Academy was always being accused of politics, it was our barking voices that made any other assessment impossible.”

Andropov, by then chairman of the KGB, was the first to bring up the idea of “pushing out” Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union, which was then bandied about for the next three and a half years at Politburo meetings run by Brezhnev. The transcripts of these meetings, declassified in 1994 by Boris Yeltsin, make for entertaining reading, and it makes clear that the Politburo and Solzhenitsyn belonged on different planets.

In his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” which Solzhenitsyn sent to Brezhnev on September 5, 1973, he proposed an ambitious program to save the country from what he saw as the looming catastrophes: war with Communist China and a global economic crisis due to a depletion of natural resources or overproduction. As a means of avoiding these mortal dangers, Solzhenitsyn recommended discarding Marxist ideology and the policy of excessive industrialization and returning to traditional values.

“Letter to the Soviet Leaders” is an amazing document: the first and probably the most impressive realization of Solzhenitsyn’s maxim that the writer is a second government. Concise but saturated with information and clearly formulated global ideas, this memorandum could be the result of many years of study by some think tank, with the difference that Solzhenitsyn’s text, presented in a compact form with urgency and passion, is also dynamic prose comparable to the antigovernmental declarations of Leo Tolstoy. (Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 appeal “Live Not By Lies!” belongs to the Tolstoyan line, as well, being a call to ideological disobedience, directly oriented on Tolstoy’s comparable ideas at the turn of the century.)

The eschatological prophecy of “Letter to the Leaders” has not yet come to pass, although at the time and subsequently, similar ideas were the subject of lively debate among the world intellectual elite. But Brezhnev and his colleagues would not consider discussing Solzhenitsyn’s proposals, seeing nothing but “delirium” in his appeal.

In a separate letter to Brezhnev, Solzhenitsyn expressed the hope that the ruler, “as a simple Russian man with a lot of common sense,” could accept his conclusions. And here Solzhenitsyn was wrong: for Brezhnev and his cohort, the writer was not a legitimate opponent but simply the “scum of society,” by chance elevated by Khrushchev, whom they hated.

Andropov took a particularly intransigent position toward Solzhenitsyn. Rumors (probably originating in the KGB) made Andropov out to be a tolerant and quite progressive person. His dealings with the dissidents showed he was nothing of the sort. In his speeches at the Politburo and in his memoranda, Andropov insisted that by remaining in the Soviet Union as an “internal émigré,” a useful position for him, Solzhenitsyn was turning into an opposition leader. In a special personal letter to Brezhnev dated February 7, 1974, Andropov expressed his concern that Solzhenitsyn’s ideas in his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders” were spreading among workers and students, while earlier at a Politburo meeting he warned that the writer could find support among tens of thousands of “hostile elements” inside the Soviet Union.²⁰ After the KGB found and confiscated the manuscript of his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago, which the writer had been carefully hiding, Andropov’s anti-Solzhenitsyn rhetoric turned hysterical.

The work, written in 1964–1968, was unprecedented in scope, completeness, and vividness of description of the system of Soviet camps. Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead (1860–1862) and Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island (1893–1895) were remarkable books, and they dramatically brought to the attention of the Russian public the failures of the penitentiary system. But they did not have the great political impact of Solzhenitsyn’s work.

Only a future history, detailed and objective, documenting the creation of The Gulag Archipelago will be able to explain how Solzhenitsyn’s many years of labor on this monumental opus, which used not only his own camp experiences but the reminiscences, stories, and letters of at least another two hundred people, had gone unnoticed by the “all-seeing and all-hearing” KGB, which only caught on, according to declassified documents, in August 1973.

When the KGB did learn of the work, Andropov’s reaction was: “The Gulag Archipelago is not a work of art, but a political document. This is dangerous.” His opinion was supported by Brezhnev. “This is a crude anti-Soviet lampoon…. the hooligan Solzhenitsyn has gotten out of hand…He has attacked the holy of holies, Lenin, our Soviet system, everything that we hold dear.”²¹

After vacillating for a rather long time, Brezhnev at last sanctioned Solzhenitsyn’s arrest. On February 12, 1974, the writer was charged with treason and taken to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, where he had already spent 1945 and 1946. Solzhenitsyn, as he later recalled, was prepared for the worst—even execution. But unexpectedly for him and the Western media, which had speedily covered the sensational news of his arrest, he was released the next day, stripped of his Soviet citizenship by special decree, and placed on a charter flight to Frankfurt-am-Main. (As it was later revealed, this came as the result of secret negotiations between cunning Andropov and German chancellor Willy Brandt.)

From West Germany, Solzhenitsyn went to Zurich and then to the United States, where he settled with his family in the small town of Cavendish, Vermont. This was the start of the twenty-year exile of the most famous and influential Russian writer of the late twentieth century.

Chapter Thirteen

The authorities were sure that they were making a clever move in the cultural cold war by expelling Solzhenitsyn from the USSR. Brezhnev and Andropov obviously borrowed the idea of forcing political opponents out of the country from Lenin, who in 1922 had a large group of prominent intellectuals forcibly sent to the West, announcing, “We will purge Russia for a long time.”¹

Lenin’s ideas were always considered the highest form of wisdom in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, besides which, in this given situation, from a purely political point of view, Lenin’s solution was not at all stupid. The Russian antirevolutionary émigrés never managed to organize themselves into an effective political force.

General Dmitri Volkogonov studied the Soviet secret archives that were opened for him (and remain closed to this day for others), containing the innumerable reports by Bolshevik agents from Paris, Berlin, and other Western capitals and he concluded that the Soviet secret police succeeded in neutralizing the émigré community by “doing everything possible to ‘corrupt’ it through discrediting, bribing people to spy, and pitting factions against one another.”²

According to Volkogonov, there was close surveillance on almost every famous Russian émigré: “Numerous special dossiers were kept to record every notable public step of the person, his statements and moods.”³ In the archives of the Foreign Directorate of OGPU, Volkogonov found reports on the writers, poets, and philosophers who had settled in the West—Zinaida Hippius and Merezhkovsky, Balmont, Mark Aldanov, Nabokov, Berdyaev, Georgy Fedotov, and many others. They even kept watch over the composer Igor Stravinsky and the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, the former mistress of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II.

Andropov, who valued the early Bolshevik experience and had carefully studied the secret dossiers and the history of the KGB, which he headed, had apparently been eager to apply the Leninist methods of fighting ideological foes. When the West increased pressure on the USSR in the early 1970s about free emigration, the Soviet leadership decided to make some concessions, but placed the process under tight control.

Indeed, they permitted only Jewish and German emigration, which might not seem much. But for the first time in many years, thousands of people started leaving the Soviet Union on their own volition and legally. The majority of them belonged to the educated classes.

Among those who ended up in the West one way or another in the following years were a number of major cultural figures who “disturbed the peace” and whom the authorities decided to get rid of: the poets Joseph Brodsky and Alexander Galich; the writers Vladimir Maximov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Viktor Nekrasov, Vassily Aksyonov, Vladimir Voinovich, and Georgy Vladimov; the musicians Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, and Rudolf Barshai; the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny; and the artists Oskar Rabin, Mikhail Chemiakin, and Oleg Tselkov.

Some cultural stars defected: the dancers Rudolf Nureyev, Natalya Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Alexander Godunov; the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy; the conductors Kirill Kondrashin and Maxim Shostakovich; the film director Andrei Tarkovsky; and head of the Moscow Theater on the Taganka Yuri Lyubimov.

Apparently the Soviets believed that once these irritants found themselves abroad and the first wave of heightened media interest in them subsided, they would lose their authority, which was based on being insiders, and their influence would come to naught, both in the Soviet Union and in the West.

The Soviets based their prognosis on the experience of the earlier waves of immigration: the “White,” after the revolution, and the “displaced persons,” after World War II. Even though they were much more numerous, they eventually dissolved into the countries where they settled and by the 1970s no longer posed a threat to the Soviet regime and Party ideology.

Moreover, the Communist apparatchiks developed quite cordial relations with some of the émigrés of the first two waves; they were permitted to come as tourists and even on business to the homeland, a privilege that the new immigrants could not even dream about. The departure of the latter was seen by everyone—the regime, the immigrants, and their relatives and friends who stayed behind—as “permanent” exile. When one of the friends seeing off Brodsky said, “Till we meet again,” the customs guards corrected him: “It’s ‘good-bye.’”⁴

Solzhenitsyn may have been the only one to repeat stubbornly that he was certain of his return to Russia. The first volume of his Gulag Archipelago, published in the West in 1973, became an international best seller and was a powerful political statement that opened the eyes of the world to the repressive nature of the Soviet regime.

Some say that The Gulag Archipelago was not the first description of the Communist camp system to appear in the West, but that Solzhenitsyn was helped by felicitous timing: by the early 1970s the Western intellectual community was becoming disillusioned with the Communist experiment. In this case it would be difficult to distinguish the cause from the effect: did the change in the political climate make possible the rapturous reception for Solzhenitsyn and his writing, or did his work and activities accomplish an ideological breakthrough unseen since Tolstoy’s time?

Some of his critics, like Voinovich, deny the literary value of The Gulag Archipelago. One can argue about the artistic merits of any politically motivated work, even Dostoevsky’s The Devils or Tolstoy’s Resurrection. The Gulag Archipelago belongs to a select company of landmark books, whose overwhelming effect on contemporaries depends as much on their strong artistic qualities (Solzhenitsyn used new, dense, expressive language and a new type of quasi-realistic narrative that was noted even by Brodsky, who was not a great admirer of Solzhenitsyn) as on the author’s powerful personality and the special political circumstances in which the book appears.

In memoranda to the Central Committee after Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion, the KGB concluded with obviously premature glee that the noise around the writer’s expulsion and publication of volume one of The Gulag Archipelago was quieting down and “the opinion is more frequently expressed that Solzhenitsyn as an émigré will have a very difficult time preserving ‘the glory of a great writer.’”⁵

Andropov’s agency had overestimated the perspicacity and effectiveness of its methods of combatting dissent. True, the exile of Solzhenitsyn and other prominent dissidents and emigration in general had let off some steam from Soviet society. But this was a short-term effect; in the long run, moving all those people abroad had created the worst threat possible for a totalitarian system—a cultural alternative.

For a long time the authorities could label any manifestation of cultural independence “anti-Soviet.” This tactic intimidated people from sympathizing with nonconformist ideas, and it worked domestically and in the West.

The émigrés hastened the process of transforming the binary opposition “Soviet/anti-Soviet” into a ternary system with a new element, “non-Soviet.” This development, which began inconspicuously back in the mid-1950s, gave rise to several important figures, among them the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, the poet Joseph Brodsky, and the composer Alfred Schnittke.

The three are rarely grouped together, yet they had much in common, beyond the obvious differences. As far as I know, they had never collaborated, although Schnittke (who wrote scores for dozens of films and worked with the best directors of Tarkovsky’s generation—Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, Elem Klimov, Larissa Shepitko, and Alexander Mitta) once used Brodsky poems as a sort of phonetic layer in his short piano cycle “Aphorisms”(1990).

It is interesting that all three were “infected” by the West from childhood, by its culture and lifestyle, even though their family backgrounds differed. The oldest was Tarkovsky, born in 1932; Schnittke was two years younger, and Brodsky, eight. But Tarkovsky and Brodsky both were stilyagi: they loved to wear elegant Western clothes (even though they didn’t have the money for it) and sit in fashionable cafés, sipping cocktails and listening to Western music, primarily jazz (later they both developed a love of Bach and Haydn).

Their longing for the West was influenced by literature and movies. (Brodsky always spoke of his admiration for American films, especially the Tarzan series.) Only Schnittke got to spend some time as a youth in the real Europe: in 1946 his father, a military interpreter and Party member, was sent to Vienna, where he worked for two years on a propaganda newspaper published in the Soviet occupation zone. Vienna had a magical effect on the provincial twelve-year-old boy from the Volga, and he described this as the “best time” of his life.⁶

Of the three, only Alfred was a diligent student; he was in the top of his class in grade school, music school, and the Moscow Conservatory, where he, like his classmate Sofia Gubaidulina, won the Stalin scholarship (a high honor indeed). Tarkovsky, rather short and with a chip on his shoulder, was a bad student and a troublemaker; red-haired and importunate Brodsky dropped out in eighth grade, where his formal education ended. Tarkovsky and Brodsky both found work in geological expeditions, wandering around the Siberian taiga. The expeditions attracted déclassé elements, hoboes, and adventurers, but also future poets. For Tarkovsky this period was “the best memory” of his life, as he later insisted; Brodsky recalled his geological work (they were searching for uranium) rather skeptically.

Cultural education in the USSR from the purely professional point of view was always highly effective, despite the required courses on Marxism-Leninism, which, in fact, talented students were permitted to ignore. The conservatories, still based on solid, prerevolutionary traditions, were particularly good. They graduated highly skilled performers, the best of which easily won the most prestigious international competitions. They also gave thorough grounding for composers. If a student demonstrated talent, the road to the Composers’ Union, which conferred substantial privileges, was open.

The same held for the Moscow All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). The Moscow Literary Institute, which prepared (as it does to this day) diploma-bearing writers, poets, and translators, was more hard-line. But even there, a “good fairy” could help out a student: in 1952, at the height of Stalinism, the Literary Institute accepted Yevtushenko, even though he had been expelled from school (on charges of vandalism and hooliganism) and did not have the required diploma.

Brodsky did not have influential mentors like Yevtushenko did; the way to the Literary Institute was closed to him. He became an auto-didact. But Tarkovsky and Schnittke received the best professional education, and for free.

There is a legend that in 1954 when the venerable Mikhail Romm went “upstairs” for approval for the freshmen he had selected for his course on directing, he was told that two of the candidates would not be accepted at VGIK: Tarkovsky and Vassily Shukshin, who became a film actor, director, and writer, and the best-known representative of the “village” school in Russian culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

A secretive Siberian peasant, Shukshin showed up for the oral admissions examinations in a striped navy shirt (he had just been demobilized), and he did not please the high cinema board with his alleged lack of education (“He’s a total ignoramus, he doesn’t even know who Leo Tolstoy is!”). The dandified Tarkovsky, on the contrary, struck them as being “too smart.”⁷ But Romm knew how to get what he wanted, and both the stilyaga Tarkovsky and Shukshin, who proudly showed off his calluses, were accepted (and disliked each other instantly), going to the top of their class at VGIK.

Tarkovsky, like Schnittke, graduated from his school with honors. Tarkovsky was immediately hired as a director at Mosfilm, and Schnittke, after graduate school, went on to teach at the Moscow Conservatory. Schnittke was also accepted at the Composers’ Union, and started moving up the ladder there: he became a member of the board and was even groomed to become one of the secretaries, an important bureaucratic position.

Yet the first performed works by Schnittke—Violin Concerto No. 1 and the Nagasaki Oratorio (about the Japanese city hit by U.S. atom bomb)—while basically well received (Shostakovich and Georgy Sviridov were among his admirers), did not cause the sensation created by Tarkovsky’s first full-length film, Ivan’s Childhood, made on a shoestring budget in five months in 1961.

Introducing Ivan’s Childhood to its first audience at Dom Kino, the Cinematographer Union’s club in Moscow, Tarkovsky’s visibly nervous teacher Romm said, “Friends, today you will see something extraordinary, nothing like this has appeared on our screens before.” The influential critic Maya Turovskaya recalled, “Two hours later we came out of the theater—agitated, bewildered, still not knowing whether to berate the filmmaker for that confusion or to set aside our usual perceptions and accept the strange world that had appeared and vanished on the screen.”⁸

In Tarkovsky’s hands, the banal plot (a teenage army scout heroically sacrifices himself during World War II) was transformed into an existential parable, receiving high praise from Jean-Paul Sartre and in 1962 winning the Gold Lion of St. Mark at the Venice Film Festival. Venice made Tarkovsky famous at thirty.

The black-and-white Ivan’s Childhood, which subtly blurs the lines between reality, dream, and memory, is arguably Tarkovsky’s most perfect work. But his most famous film is Andrei Rublev, an epic narrative of more than three hours about the great monk icon painter of the fifteenth century. No one had attempted a project as ambitious as this since Eisenstein’s day, but Tarkovsky was then the darling of the cinematographic establishment, so they gave him what he needed, 1,250,000 rubles.

Rublev, like Ivan’s Childhood, was made in record time—filming began in mid-1965 and ended in November, and despite the later legend, the bureaucrats accepted it with a cheer. The film was headed for Cannes when, as Tarkovsky told it, a denunciation from the influential film director Sergei Gerasimov led the Party culture curator Demichev to bring back Rublev from customs at Sheremetyevo Airport. Thus began Tarkovsky’s misfortunes.

Tarkovsky was not an admirer of Eisenstein. His idols were Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, and Akira Kurosawa. Their influence on Rublev is evident, but the unconscious resemblance to Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible is remarkable: both directors focus on the tragedy of an outstanding personality, with the historical events as mere background.

Eisenstein was intrigued by the philosophy of power, Tarkovsky by the mysteries of creativity. His painter monk, naturally, is autobiographical, and Tarkovsky can be seen in some of the film’s other characters, as well. This is particularly true in the episode of the bell casting, the best in the film, when the young apprentice desperately takes on the leadership of a whole army of adult subordinates—an allegory for filmmaking—and using only his intuition, against all expectation, creates his masterpiece—a bell with a marvelous peal that unites the Russian nation, increasing the prestige of the prince and stunning the imagination of foreigners (an obvious parallel with the unexpected success of Ivan’s Childhood).

The bell episode shows that Tarkovsky had no intention of fighting his Soviet masters. He wanted to serve Russia and glorify her. That is why the director was so stung by the demands to cut and re-edit Andrei Rublev, which was suddenly declared to be anti-Russian and unpatriotic. He was also accused of animal cruelty: during the filming of the Tatar attack on a Russian city, a horse was thrown from a belfry and a cow was burned alive (Tarkovsky always denied the latter, while arguing that the horse was going to be slaughtered, anyway).

Tarkovsky resisted in every way he could. In the end, the authorities put Rublev on the shelf for five and a half years, stating: “The film works against us, against the people, history, and the Party’s cultural policy.”⁹ The Soviet audience only heard rumors about Rublev, but the film was sold to France, where Tarkovsky’s Western fans organized its showing out of competition in Cannes. It was a sensation (a banned film!) and won the Fipressi Prize.

The Soviet authorities pushed Tarkovsky away with their own hands, turning him into an international cultural hero in the Western press. Once again, they found themselves in a ridiculous situation, as they were accustomed to using the ideological cudgel that worked more or less inside the country but was useless against foreign public opinion.

The Iron Curtain was becoming more permeable, the Western media were more aggressive in reporting the harassment of Soviet cultural figures, and all that information seeped back into the USSR, leading to unexpected results.

The ossified Leningrad authorities embarrassed themselves when they put Brodsky on trial in 1964, charging the twenty-three-year-old with “malicious parasitism.” They meant that at the moment Brodsky was not holding down any official job. This was prosecuted under a law passed on Khrushchev’s initiative, as the Leningrad authorities were clumsily trying to show fealty to their Moscow boss.

It was intended to be a show trial, and indeed it was, but not as planned: it turned Brodsky, little known even in his own city, the author of complex, often sorrowful, but never political poems, into a symbol at home and abroad of the coercion of independent poetry by an ignorant and repressive apparatus.

Frida Vigdorova, a journalist, managed to make secret notes of the trial and smuggle them abroad. She artfully shaped the real questions and answers of the judge and the defendant into a parable play on the resistance of a lone genius against the cruel system (a dramatic version was later performed on the BBC).

The harsh sentence—“exile Brodsky to a remote region for five years with mandatory labor”—was the final touch. Akhmatova, Brodsky’s mentor and great master of self-creation, clucked ironically: “What a biography they’re creating for our red-haired one! It’s as if he hired someone to do it.”¹⁰ The “martyr” biographical context magnified the resonance of Brodsky’s sometimes elliptical poetry.

The Brodsky affair elicited a storm of outrage, which yet again came as a total surprise to the slow-witted Soviet authorities. Shostakovich, Akhmatova, the critic Chukovsky, and the poet Samuil Marshak all appealed on his behalf, but they were “homegrown” celebrities, and the Party functionaries ignored them.

It was a different story when they got a letter in 1965 from Jean-Paul Sartre, at the time an influential friend of the Soviet Union. Sartre hinted that the new leadership (Khrushchev had been sent off into retirement) could show generosity toward the young poet to avoid being suspected of “hostility toward the intelligentsia and of anti-Semitism”¹¹ (which in fact was the main charge in the Western media).

The authorities yielded, releasing Brodsky early, but that did not reduce tensions, and in 1972, Brodsky left the country, pushed out by the KGB. He wrote a letter to Brezhnev that was obviously meant to be historic: “Ceasing to be a citizen of the USSR, I do not cease being a Russian poet. I believe that I will return; poets always return: in the flesh or on paper.”¹²

The friends (and even enemies) of Brodsky and Tarkovsky always characterized them, with delight or condemnation, as maximalists who behaved freely in an unfree society. In the beginning their differences with the Soviet state were, to use Andrei Sinyavsky’s formula, stylistic rather than ideological: different language, a rare preference for brutal and pessimistic imagery, and an unwarranted tendency to philosophize. But in that unusual style, the authorities sensed an ideological threat and reacted accordingly.

Both Brodsky and Tarkovsky wrote letters “upstairs,” trying to speak to the leaders as equals, like two high-ranking negotiating sides, but the rulers merely filed the letters, considering them pretentious babble from immature young men. Yet both Brodsky and Tarkovsky were consciously creating the appearance of a dialogue between artist and state, fitting themselves into an old Russian tradition.

In Brodsky’s case, it is clear that he had studied Pasternak’s letter to Khrushchev. The difference is also obvious. Pasternak appealed to Khrushchev, hoping to defuse the tense situation that arose over the Nobel Prize. Brodsky’s letter to Brezhnev is a different matter. This is a purely rhetorical gesture, a page of writing that was intended from the start to be included in a future academic collection of the author’s works. In that sense, Brodsky, who did not borrow Akhmatova’s stylistics or aesthetics (he was more influenced by Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, and Boris Slutsky), turned out to be her best student in the field of self-mythologizing.

Tarkovsky was no less adept than Brodsky at creating his own legend. When he began keeping a diary in 1970, he called it his Martyrology, that is, a list of suffering and persecutions. Of course, Tarkovsky like Brodsky had sufficient material: the officials of the State Committee on Cinematography sucked a bucket of blood out of the director, continually finding fault with his screenplays and his finished films (as happened with Andrei Rublev, which was not released in the Soviet Union until 1971, almost six years after it was made). But on the other hand, Fedor Ermash, chairman of the Cinema Committee, allowed Tarkovsky in 1977 to start over on his almost completed Stalker (in form, science fiction, in content, a Christian parable), writing off the expenses (300,000 rubles) for the material that Tarkovsky did not like and wanted to reshoot.

In his Martyrology, Tarkovsky demonized Ermash, creating a grotesque image of a Soviet culture boss whose only goal was to humiliate and trample the filmmaker. But there is evidence that Ermash sympathized with Tarkovsky and often supported him, while Tarkovsky had snit fits and behaved rather aggressively. A friend of Tarkovsky’s, the Polish film director Krzysztof Zanussi, thought that no American producer would let Tarkovsky get away with such behavior, and used to tell him: “You would never have been allowed to make your Rublev in the West.”¹³

But Tarkovsky felt stifled and hindered in the Soviet Union. According to his calculations, in more than twenty years of work in Soviet film, he was “unemployed” almost seventeen years. That is shaky arithmetic—in those years he made five major films (besides Ivan’s Childhood and Rublev, there were Solaris, The Mirror, and Stalker)—but it helped Tarkovsky cement his image as a suffering and persecuted artist.

Tarkovsky’s imagining that he could have made many more films is probably self-delusion. He spent several years preparing for each movie (except the spontaneous Ivan’s Childhood), thoroughly planning each scene and detail, and then during filming trying to re-create exactly not only the outward appearance but the spiritual essence of pictures he had imagined: this was the source of the meditative, contemplative nature of his works, oversaturated with intuitive visual gestures. Every Tarkovsky film is “one-of-a-kind,” they could never have come off a conveyor belt.

Tarkovsky’s other misapprehension was thinking that his hermetic, autobiographical works could have had box office success if not for the sabotage by the State Cinematography Committee, which allegedly did not release enough copies of the films or give them the proper publicity. In fact, the circulation of Ivan’s Childhood, Tarkovsky’s first full-length feature, was quite impressive—fifteen hundred copies. True, The Mirror played in only seventy-two houses. But Ivan’s Childhood, for all its refinement, is his most accessible work while the subtle, almost plotless Mirror, an extended cinematographic Freudian self-analysis, was unlikely to become popular with a mass audience under the best of circumstances.

On the contrary, the dissident reputation of Tarkovsky’s films increased their appeal in the Soviet Union. When they were shown, the theaters were full: forbidden fruit is sweet. The same effect worked for the intellectual and baroque poetry of Brodsky; after the Russian-language Western radio broadcasts about his trial, numerous typewritten copies of his poems began circulating in samizdat.

The greatest success of Schnittke’s avant-garde music came in 1983, when his long-banned Faust Cantata at last was performed at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. The premiere was in doubt until the last second, the concert hall was surrounded by police on horseback, and a large crowd waited outside, with people begging for tickets blocks away. Here, the excitement was fueled by the rumor that the contralto part of Mephistopheles in Schnittke’s philosophical work was to be performed by the biggest pop star of the Soviet Union, the wild redhead Alla Pugacheva. Pugacheva, scared off by the music or the authorities, did not sing in the Faust Cantata, but the scandalous atmosphere helped to put Schnittke on the national cultural map.

Brodsky started trying on the exile’s toga early. At the age of twenty, he wrote poetry with references to the fate of Ovid, and in 1962, he wrote: “Thank God that I am left without a homeland on this earth.” The pose of exile, fugitive, or émigré ideally suited Brodsky’s poetics; one of its central themes from the start was alienation, separation, emotional and philosophical distance. Later, Schnittke would speak of the same feeling: “There is no home for me on this earth, I understand that.”¹⁴

On the other hand, Tarkovsky’s works were always firmly rooted in Russia. Is there a more national film than Andrei Rublev? (Schnittke approached the Orthodox intensity of Rublev in his four instrumental Hymns, composed in 1974–1979, one of which is based on the traditional church Trisagion chant.)

But Rublev was criticized for being an “anti-Russian” film both by the Soviet cultural bureaucrats and Solzhenitsyn (joined in this by the ultranationalist artist Ilya Glazunov). They all must have felt something profoundly antipathetic in the film. What was it?

The film director Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, who had worked with Tarkovsky on the screenplays for Ivan’s Childhood and Rublev, recalled how their trip to Venice in 1962 turned their lives around: “I will never forget that sense of lightness, joy, light, music, holiday. All my subsequent ideological waverings and unpatriotic behavior came from there.”¹⁵ Aksyonov confirmed that even though at first no one from the artistic generation of the sixties thought about emigrating, internally many of them were prepared for it because of their “openness to the world.”¹⁶

The idea that he could go abroad and make movies there was first formulated by Tarkovsky in his diaries in 1974, when Brodsky had been living in the United States for two years. The Martyrology makes clear that Tarkovsky always fell into a deep depression after a bout with the cinema bosses. Meanwhile, his new admirers in Italy were offering him work in the West, promising creative freedom, fame, and money—the last was not unimportant to the director, who was always complaining about being without funds.

(Brodsky, who had been rather stoic about his poverty in Leningrad, focused on financial problems in conversations with friends in America, where his salary as a college professor should have guaranteed him a comfortable existence. His worries over income must have stemmed from his late marriage and birth of a daughter—now he had to care not only for himself, but a family: “I have two girls on my hands,” he would say.)¹⁷

When Tarkovsky finally ended up in the West, it did not happen as traumatically as it had for Brodsky: the Soviet authorities officially sent the director to work on his film Nostalghia in Italy. When he completed it, Tarkovsky did not return to Moscow, even though he commented ominously in his Martyrology: “I am lost. I can’t live in Russia, but I can’t live here, either…”¹⁸

Tarkovsky had always insisted that he was not a dissident, he had never attacked the regime in his films, because political issues did not interest him as an artist. But when he called a press conference in Milan in 1984 and publicly renounced his Soviet citizenship, it was an openly political move that the KGB qualified as “treason to the Homeland in the form of refusal to return from abroad and abetting a foreign state in implementing hostile activity against the USSR.”¹⁹ His films were banned in the Soviet Union and his name disappeared from the press and even from books on cinema.

After Nostalghia (which came out in 1983), Tarkovsky made only the Bergmanesque Sacrifice, in Sweden, where he was well liked and where Bergman praised him highly. (So came to pass the prophecy Tarkovsky heard at a séance in his youth from the spirit of the late Pasternak that he would make only seven films, “but good ones.”) Some consider Sacrifice the peak of Tarkovsky’s spiritual journey, while others deplore it as self-indulgent and too slow, verging on self-parody.

The film director Alexander Sokurov, a protégé of Tarkovsky, thought that the master had been on the brink of unheard-of artistic discoveries. But in 1985, while editing Sacrifice, Tarkovsky learned that he had lung cancer. He died in a Paris hospital on December 29, 1986. Until the end, when he was heavily sedated by morphine, he had hoped to survive.

Tarkovsky’s death was especially painful for the Russian émigré community. Another exile, Yuri Lyubimov (he renounced his Soviet citizenship at the same press conference in Milan with Tarkovsky), was in Washington, D.C., staging Crime and Punishment, based on the Dostoevsky novel. With his friend, the writer Aksyonov, he had a service said for Tarkovsky in a local Russian Orthodox church. In Paris, where Tarkovsky’s funeral was held at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Mstislav Rostropovich played Bach, so beloved by Tarkovsky, on his cello right on the church steps: a fitting ritual gesture, of which Rostropovich was a master.

Tarkovsky was buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Genevièvedes-Bois in a Parisian suburb. At that time, political changes began in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985. Dying, Tarkovsky learned from friends that his previously banned films were at last being shown in Moscow. The news did not please him; the director bitterly saw this as the start of a political struggle for his legacy.

The attempt by the Soviets to appropriate Tarkovsky culminated in 1990, when the director was posthumously given the country’s highest award, the Lenin Prize. Not accidentally, the 1990 Lenin Prize was also offered to Schnittke, who was living in Germany by then: it was an olive branch extended by the state, which had only eighteen months to live.

Schnittke was surprised to learn that the Soviet authorities were intending to award the Lenin Prize for his Concerto for Mixed Chorus, one of his most religious works; he had converted to Catholicism in 1983, at the age of forty-eight. This gave him an excuse for refusing the now unwanted sign of attention; in his letter to the Committee on the Lenin Prizes, he noted, not without irony, that Lenin was an atheist and therefore accepting the award “would be a manifestation of an unprincipled attitude toward both Lenin and Christianity.”²⁰

They say that Schnittke had still vacillated: after all, why not accept the Lenin Prize, as had done in their time (to name only musicians) Shostakovich, Mravinsky, Gilels, Oistrakh, Richter, and Rostropovich, for whom the highest Soviet cultural award (like the Stalin Prize before it) was a form of protection?²¹

Was Schnittke morally superior to these great artists? It’s doubtful he presumed so. The new historical paradigm helped the composer. So did his financial situation; no longer dependent on the Soviet state (all his commissions came from the West by then), he could afford to take the high road.

Material support from the West also helped Tarkovsky and Brodsky. According to the American Dictionary of Literary Biography, the publication of Brodsky’s first book in Russian (which came out in the United States in 1965) was sponsored by the CIA.²² His next book, A Halt in the Desert, was published in 1970 by the New York Chekhov Publishing House, created especially to support nonconformist authors from the Soviet Union.

In America Brodsky got a tenured professorship and also received several prestigious American awards, the most important financially being the MacArthur Foundation “genius award” in 1981 (around $150,000). Brodsky used to joke that being a Russian poet, English-language essayist, and American citizen he held the best of all possible positions in life.

The high point of Brodsky’s Westernization was the announcement that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1987. Solzhenitsyn had warned after his own Nobel that if the Soviet Union “did not wake up,” the next Swedish prize to a Russian writer would be turned into a huge international political scandal, too. Solzhenitsyn could have been using a crystal ball, but the Gorbachev perestroika changed a few things.

At first, the old Soviet scenario was followed. A secret memorandum from the Culture Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to the leadership, using language that was indistinguishable from the reaction to Solzhenitsyn’s award, described Brodsky’s Nobel Prize as “a political action inspired by certain circles in the West. Its goal is to cast a shadow on Soviet policy, on the solution of humanitarian issues in the Soviet Union, to undermine the growing sympathy of the public and primarily of the artistic intelligentsia in the West toward our country.”(Gorbachev saw this document, as evinced by his notation: “Agree.”)²³

But simultaneously another note was heard, reflecting the new policy of appropriating the émigrés whose views, not anti-Soviet, but merely non-Soviet, made them potential allies. That is why the KGB, also concerned with Brodsky’s Nobel, in its secret analysis, characterized it as an attempt “to discredit our policy of open dialogue with noted loyal representatives of the creative intelligentsia who left the USSR for various reasons, and also to use every method possible to hinder the process of returning by certain intellectuals who have realized their misapprehensions and mistakes.”²⁴

Another secret memorandum emphasized that Brodsky in his public statements “shows restraint,” stresses his being part of Russian culture, and refrains from anti-Soviet sloganeering. As a result, it was decided—on the highest level—in order “to deprive anti-Soviet propaganda of its main arguments and to neutralize the participation in it of Brodsky himself,”²⁵ to allow Novy Mir (which still retained a reputation as a liberal journal left over from Tvardovsky’s day) to print several of Brodsky’s poems. That was perhaps the first publication in a Soviet journal in almost sixty years of poems by an émigré who still lived abroad.

In the course of the next few years, numerous volumes of Brodsky’s poems were published in the Soviet Union with huge print runs. My collection of “Brodskiana” includes his book Nazidanie [Exhortation], printed in 1990 in Leningrad and Minsk in an edition of 200,000 copies, which sold out instantly and went into a second printing. For Brodsky’s esoteric poetry, that was a fantastic amount. His popularity brought his fellow poets in Leningrad—Dmitri Bobyshev, Yevgeny Rein, and Anatoly Naiman, who with him made up the “magical chorus” of Akhmatova’s students in the 1960s—into the limelight.

Brodsky’s poetry, especially the late works, showed a certain emotional aloofness, as did the oeuvres of Schnittke and Tarkovsky. There was an icy demeanor in Brodsky’s last poems, making them even more difficult than Schnittke’s postmodern works, in which at least the images of evil are more often than not represented by vulgar, albeit vivid and memorable, music. (As Leonard Bernstein once quipped, “If I hear a tango, foxtrot, or waltz in a Schnittke work, I like it very much, but if I don’t, then I’m not so enchanted.”²⁵)

When the ban was lifted in the Soviet Union on performing Schnittke’s polystylistic compositions (that is, combining musical idioms of various eras—from baroque to atonal and dodecaphonic—in the same work), at first audiences literally pushed their way into concert halls and hung from the rafters. The Russian intelligentsia canonized Schnittke, as it had Tarkovsky and Brodsky.

Still, relatively few truly understood and appreciated the work of these new idols. People were buying not the cultural product itself, but the story behind it. They were attracted by the tragic nimbus around the heads of these “non-Soviet” heroes. Their lives were the stuff of legends: they had been attacked by the mighty state, forcing them to flee to distant shores, where they did not get lost but were celebrated for their exploits and then died prematurely far from home.

Of the three, the best candidate for secular saint would be Schnittke, who in person was like Sakharov, just as gentle, calm, attentive, and decent. No excesses here.

Brodsky and Tarkovsky, on the other hand, could drink a lot; the latter once polished off nineteen bottles of cognac in three days with a friend. The perceptive Tvardovsky noted after meeting the young Brodsky in his office at Novy Mir: “A rather repulsive fellow, basically, but definitely talented, perhaps more than Yevtushenko and Voznesensky taken together.”²⁶ Many contemporaries were put off by the arrogance, alleged cruelty, and dictatorial demeanor of Brodsky and Tarkovsky, as well as their priapic appetites. Schnittke could never be reproached for anything of the kind.

The martyr image was helped by the relatively early deaths of Tarkovsky (at fifty-four) and Brodsky (at fifty-five, of a heart attack), and Schnittke’s series of strokes, the last and fourth on July 4, 1998 (the composer died on August 3, at the age of sixty-three). The strokes gradually turned Schnittke into an invalid. He was half-paralyzed after mid-1994, unable to speak, his right leg and arm immobilized. But he continued writing music, with his left hand. The media reported this, and it made Schnittke seem even more heroic.

For comparison: neither Mandelstam nor Tsvetaeva were legendary personalities in their lifetime for any sizable audience; nor did they become cultural icons right after their tragic deaths, which were not publicized. Esenin’s mythological status was assured by the unprecedented and persistent popularity of his love lyrics and secured by his suicide, which was widely discussed in the Soviet press. Mayakovsky was celebrated by the state on Stalin’s orders.

The newness of the instantaneous deification of Tarkovsky, Brodsky, and Schnittke in contemporary Russia right after their deaths was that they were promoted (at least in part for political reasons) in the West. All three had been supported by a wide-ranging network of prestigious commissions, prizes, grants, and international festivals that were thoroughly covered by the Western media.

The irony lies in the fact that the influence of this trio on the current cultural process in the West is rather limited. Tarkovsky, Brodsky, and Schnittke have what is usually referred to as cult status, and they have their great fans, particularly Schnittke, whose music is played and recorded all over the world (the conductors Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Kurt Masur, the violinist Gidon Kremer, and the Kronos Quartet). But their works are perceived as concluding chapters rather than the start of something new. For today’s fast-changing, global, and multi-cultural situation, the artistic legacy of Tarkovsky, Brodsky, and Schnittke seems too static, hierarchic, and eurocentric.

Chapter Fourteen

The rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in April 1985 is often described as the start of a totally new era in the country’s life. It is true that after the final years of Brezhnev, who had fallen into senility and died in 1982, and the brief sojourns in the Kremlin of Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko (both died after long illnesses), the appearance on the political scene of the dynamic Gorbachev seemed to herald significant changes.

But that sense of historic shift increased in hindsight, when the true meaning of Gorbachev’s leadership became apparent. Back in 1985, no one could have predicted what the seemingly routine change of general secretaries of the Communist Party, even for a younger and more energetic one, could portend.

“The country cannot go on this way.” The famous words Gorbachev allegedly uttered to his wife, Raisa, on the eve of his election, sound apocryphal.¹ Gorbachev had not shown himself to be a bold reformer at that point. Even after he took over, he was a traditional Party big shot, as can be seen from some of his cultural interventions.

In 1983, while one of the secretaries of the Central Committee, he brought to the attention of the Secretariat the “ideologically harmful” play by a young author, Ludmila Razumovskaya’s Dear Elena Sergeyevna, depicting “problem” schoolchildren. The play had already been shown in several theaters to thousands of viewers and had received mostly good reviews. But someone had denounced it to the Party leadership, and Gorbachev performed a ritual whipping of the suddenly popular young playwright.

Indignantly reading the lines of one of the characters from the play (“Come on, pop, what ideals are you talking about, there aren’t any now, come on, can you name just one?”), Gorbachev fumed: “Just this speech should have alerted any Soviet person, much less a cultural worker or a censor. We must state that there has been a lack of supervision and an absence of political vigilance…. How long are we Communists going to be ashamed of defending our Party positions and our Communist morality?”² One could argue that at that time it was mimicry, with Gorbachev just pretending. But in late June 1989, four years after he became the country’s leader (perestroika was at its height), Gorbachev summoned the Politburo to discuss the urgent problem of the publication in the USSR of the exile Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The transcript shows: Gorbachev agreed to the publication only under pressure of his more liberal colleagues Alexander Yakovlev and Edvard Shevardnadze.

At that meeting, Gorbachev sided with the arch-conservative Yegor Ligachev in denouncing Solzhenitsyn: “I don’t think he will ever be our unconditional friend and perestroika supporter.” When he saw that the majority was on Solzhenitsyn’s side, he gave up, saying to Ligachev: “Well, are we the only ones left? I guess I’ll have to read the book.”³

Gorbachev is often called the father of perestroika. However, it did not spring from his forehead like Athena from the head of Zeus. The roots of the changes, including cultural ones, can be found in the Brezhnev era, which had been dubbed the time of stagnation.

Specifically, it was in the last ten years of Brezhnev’s administration that emigration to the West was permitted, thus creating for the first time in many years an alternative paradigm of Russian culture. This occurred in great part because the new third wave of emigration was largely embraced by the Western media.

Contact and interaction between Western journalists and the previous émigrés had not developed. Solzhenitsyn mentioned it in his 1981 interview on NBC television: “In the 1930s, at the most terrible time of the Stalin terror, when Stalin destroyed many millions of people, at that time your main newspapers were proclaiming the Soviet Union as the country of world justice.”⁴

Solzhenitsyn then insisted that if in those years the West had focused its propaganda on the Soviet Union, the global situation might have changed. The Soviet citizen, the writer said, exists in an information vacuum and is continually brainwashed by his own government: “That is why radio broadcasts from abroad are so important—he can get information about himself and what is happening to us.”⁵

By the time of this interview, the West had been broadcasting to the Soviet Union for more than thirty years. Solzhenitsyn recalled that when he was released from prison camp in 1953, he used his first wages to buy a radio receiver and then “listened continually”(his words) to all Western broadcasts in Russian, trying to catch snatches of information that broke through the Soviets’ powerful jamming: “I learned so well, that even if I missed half a sentence, I could construe it from the few words I got.”⁶ Dissidents inside the country were the first Soviet citizens to break the barrier of silence and mutual distrust with the West. They were followed by a significant number of cultural figures who left the country, giving a new impulse to Western broadcasting in Russia. Viktor Nekrasov, Aksyonov, Voinovich, and other popular writers and artists appeared regularly on Voice of America, Radio Liberty, the BBC, and Deutsche Welle. They spoke to their huge audience of fans, starting a confidential dialogue that helped dismantle cultural obstacles. This genre of frank and intimate conversation was new to Soviet listeners.

The broadcasts created new stars, like the writer Sergei Dovlatov, who moved to New York from Leningrad in 1979. In the Soviet Union, almost none of his prose got into print, while in the United States his works were published one after another, first in Russian and then in the most prestigious American publishing houses. Even The New Yorker, which of the Russian émigrés had previously printed only Nabokov and Brodsky, published ten of Dovlatov’s ironic short stories, which described the tragicomic adventures of Soviet “little people.” At The New Yorker, Dovlatov was justly considered a writer in the Chekhovian tradition, but they must have also sensed his connection with American prose: while in the Soviet Union, he had been influenced by Hemingway.

Dovlatov had an adventurous life: very tall, dark, and handsome, resembling the actor Omar Sharif, he was drafted into the army and served as a guard at a labor camp in the north, then worked as a guide, journalist, and black marketeer. He drank a lot and brawled often, but in the meantime absorbing the ideas of liberalism and individualism, which were debated in the narrow circle of intellectuals that he entered. Brodsky was part of that crowd, and he later remarked that he and his friends back in the Soviet Union were in a certain sense “more American” than many actual ones.

Dovlatov, who had an innate journalistic talent and temperament, put his ideas into action in New York in 1980, founding the Russian-language weekly Novy Amerikanets [New American]. It did not last for long (the usual lack of funds), but it became a milestone in the history of free Russian journalism, primarily for its rejection of the obsolete methods of party polemics that Soviet émigrés continued to use out of habit in the West.

A born editor, Dovlatov, together with the young literary critics Peter Vail and Alexander Genis, purged his weekly from dogmatic and crude anti-Sovietism, which he found just as revolting as the pro-Soviet sermons in the media back in Russia. Dovlatov said with a shrug: “Fanatics have amazingly similar arguments, whether they’re pro or contra.” When a writer offered to cover the opening of a flower show “from an anti-communist position,” Dovlatov replied, “Write it without any positions.” His unorthodox stance upset many conservative émigrés and he was even accused of being a KGB agent.

After Novy Amerikanets, Dovlatov found himself at the New York bureau of Radio Liberty, where the essayist Boris Paramonov was already working. Vail and Genis soon followed. A small group of like-minded people formed at the bureau, which I later joined.

Those were happy days. The Liberty offices at 1775 Broadway were dominated by the gigantic, exotic figure of Dovlatov, who dropped sarcastic jokes and memorable bon mots; it was impossible to resist his charm, even if you did not agree with him. His radio scripts made him famous in the Soviet Union. His prose came harder to him; he wrote slowly, meticulously shaping every sentence. Even though he insisted that he was only a storyteller, he strove for an unreachable perfection, collapsing into frequent alcoholic binges. He died of a heart attack after one in August 1990, ten days before his forty-ninth birthday. After his death, the Dovlatov circle at Radio Liberty inevitably fell apart.

Aksyonov gave an ironic account of the effect of Western broadcasts on the life of the Soviet elite. At the writers’ colonies, resorts for the privileged “creative workers,” if you walked down the hallway in the evening “you couldn’t help hearing from almost every room the twitter of transatlantic swallows. After listening, the writers came out into the fresh air to exchange news.”⁷ According to Aksyonov, “The persistent and active existence of some alternative lifted the spirits in the society of a permanent bad mood.”⁸ Yet, the broadcasts with their persistent prodemocratic and proliberal message annoyed a lot of people.

The negative reaction of the Communist leadership was predictable: the very existence of Western radio voices addressed to the Soviet Union was seen as a real threat. The boss of the Soviet secret services, Andropov, speaking at a Central Committee Plenum on April 27, 1973, indignantly quoted an American supervisor at Radio Liberty who told a KGB source: “We can’t take over the Kremlin, but we can bring up people who can, and we can prepare the conditions that will make it possible.”⁹

Andropov maintained that the alternative cultural figures promoted by Western radio, like Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, “no matter how loudly they shout about them, are nothing but the dregs of society who do not make weather. But since the Western ideologues have nothing better, they have to fuss over these rejects.”¹⁰ At the same time, Solzhenitsyn, who had moved to the United States by then, complained that American radio “for several years banned quoting Solzhenitsyn,” stopped broadcasting The Gulag Archipelago to Russia, and instead wasted precious time on “an incredible amount of piffle” like jazz and pop music. “Even worse, they find time to broadcast a ‘hobby’ show…. That’s completely horrible!”¹¹

Solzhenitsyn’s opinion amazingly matched the official Soviet line when he warned that the Western broadcasts will “cause revulsion, nothing but indignation, in the Soviet listener, who will turn off the radio and never listen again.”¹²

There was another point on which Solzhenitsyn’s complaints coincided with that of the Soviet authorities. The writer was unhappy that “news about the Jewish émigrés from the Soviet Union is given incommensurable space.”¹³ In 1981, the same year that Solzhenitsyn made these remarks in an NBC interview, Ivan Artamonov’s book Weapon of the Doomed (A Systemic Analysis of Ideological Diversion) was published in the Soviet Union. It explained that in the United States “Zionists controlled half the radio stations (including Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe) and magazines, and three-fourths of all foreign bureaus of American newspapers, magazines, and press agencies.”¹⁴

This attitude toward Radio Liberty and other Western radio stations as organizations under Jewish control and oriented “on the breakup and total destruction of Russia as a state and Russians as a nation”¹⁵ survived the fall of the Soviet regime with its propaganda myths and continues to dominate the discourse in Russian nationalist cultural circles today.

In the speech cited earlier, Andropov assured the Party leadership: “The KGB is implementing an entire complex of measures to suppress various forms of ideological diversion, to break up foreign ideological centers and to compromise them.”¹⁶ Until the secret archives are open, it would be difficult to gauge the involvement of the Soviet secret agencies in fanning divisions among new émigrés. The fact is, there were plenty of conflicts based on political, aesthetic, and simply personal disagreements.

The two Russian Nobel laureates in literature did not get along in exile. Solzhenitsyn rebuked Brodsky in The New York Times Book Review for his poetic vocabulary being limited to urban intelligentsia usage and lacking deep folk roots.¹⁷ Brodsky, when I brought up Solzhenitsyn in a conversation, merely shrugged: “Well, I don’t feel like talking about that gentleman.”¹⁸ Solzhenitsyn also questioned in print Sinyavsky’s Christianity, calling him “the main Aesthete.”¹⁹ Sinyavsky responded with a swipe at Solzhenitsyn: “This all smells too much of Tartuffe, blasphemy, and the anti-Christ.”²⁰

Voinovich published his satirical novel Moscow 2042, which included a funny caricature of Solzhenitsyn, called Sim Simych Karnavalov in the book. Solzhenitsyn, who was already called the “Russian Ayatollah Khomeini” by some liberal observers, took umbrage: Voinovich, he claimed, had depicted him unfairly as a “terribly scary leader of looming Russian nationalism.” Aksyonov, in his novel Say Cheese!, took a jab at Brodsky and complained to everyone that Brodsky tried to prevent the American publication of Aksyonov’s masterpiece, the novel The Burn, which Brodsky, in turn, described as “written with a mop.”²¹ Sinyavsky called the influential émigré journal Kontinent, which was edited by Vladimir Maximov in France (and published with American money), “the Paris regional Party committee.” Maximov told everyone that Sinyavsky collaborated with the KGB. And so on, and so forth.

If the KGB took pleasure in these intra-émigré arguments, it was in vain. Such open disagreements did not have a seriously detrimental effect on the émigrés’ authority, either inside the Soviet Union, or in the West, where every faction had influential allies and patrons, who considered political debate a normal and healthy democratic process. Solzhenitsyn, who was not a big fan of “our pluralists,” had to admit: “Their influence in the West is incomparable to the influence of all previous emigrations from Russia.”²²

So somewhere in Soviet Party think tanks, people began to realize that it would be good to have their own, controlled cultural “loyal opposition.” Interestingly, the first person to propose this idea was none other than Stalin, back in 1947 in a conversation with a select group of writers, when he said that the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta should be bolder and sharper than the official line on some issues: “It is quite possible that we will sometimes criticize Literaturnaya Gazeta for this, but it should not fear this.”²³ (Simonov, who wrote down Stalin’s words, remembered the chuckle with which he said them.) As a result Literaturnaya Gazeta for many decades functioned as Stalin had suggested: as a controlled place for the intelligentsia to blow off steam.

Apparently the similar role of “throwing stones in the permitted direction” was to be allotted to Novy Mir, but its editor, Tvardovsky, grew too independent, slipping out of the Party’s control, and was eventually ousted from his position. In the meantime two notable groups appeared in literature, partially sharing the line of Novy Mir and in some ways diverging from it—the “villagers” and the “urbanists.”

Among the most outstanding “villagers” who focused attention on the fates of villages destroyed by collectivization and war were Fedor Abramov, Vassily Shukshin, Boris Mozhaev, Viktor Astafyev, Vassily Belov, and Valentin Rasputin. Some of them were close to Tvardovsky, also a peasant poet, but the “villagers” were more conservative and anti-Western.

In the 1960s and 1970s this group, which stressed patriarchal values and idealized the contemporary Russian peasantry, was quite popular, being a powerful alternative to “industrial” literature with its cardboard characters and primitive plots. The villagers’ prose was sincere, alive, and its heroes, usually simple but noble peasants, expressed themselves in juicy language. Their characters were presented as true representatives of the Russian people, unlike the innumerable “positive” Party functionaries that populated the dreary works of state-commissioned literature.

Alas, this talented prose, which played such a vital role in reviving the landscape of Soviet culture, barely reached the Western reader. Yevtushenko once tried to interest an American publisher in Rasputin’s works. The publisher was excited at first, but faded when he realized it wasn’t “that Rasputin.”²⁴

Solzhenitsyn explained the lack of success in the West of the village writers who were dear to him in spirit and style by the fact that their themes and language were incomprehensible to Westerners; that may be so. But his own story “Matryona’s House,” paradigmatic for village prose, nevertheless was integrated into the world cultural discourse, which does not in fact reject stylistic exotica outright.

Some works of writers in the rival “urban” group, particularly the prose of Yuri Trifonov and Vladimir Makanin, did find an opening in the Western book market, especially in Europe. Dying before the advent of perestroika at the age of fifty-five in 1981, the formidable Trifonov described the drab lives of the urban intelligentsia that would be most enthusiastic about the changes that came in the Gorbachev years—the moderately liberal middle class that balanced precariously between conformity and hidden opposition.

A writer in the Chekhov mode, Trifonov amazingly managed to get a Stalin Prize in 1951, even though his father had been executed in 1937 as an enemy of the people. Some of the other urban writers—Okudzhava, Aksyonov—were also children of Soviet luminaries who were repressed in the 1930s. Anatoli Rybakov, who won the Stalin Prize the year before Trifonov, had even spent time in Siberian exile before the war.

These black marks in their résumés did not keep the urbanists from taking a visible spot in censored Soviet literature, even if they got their feathers clipped every time they tried to go beyond the proscribed limits of plot and stylistic canon. Nevertheless, every important work by an urban writer elicited great interest among readers and lively discussion in the Soviet press. In that sense they competed successfully with the village writers.

Both camps carefully distanced themselves from émigré literature. The villagers acted out of conviction, because they had always considered the writers who eventually moved to the West to be alien and false. Trifonov, on the other hand, had been friends with many of the future émigrés, and he was forced in statements that appeared in print to cluck, “These writers are of course in a very bad way, because a Russian writer must live in Russia.”²⁵ At the same time, in private conversations, he spoke harshly of the Soviet regime: “I think that the corpse will rot for a long time, although perhaps we will live to see the end of it.”²⁶

Music had its own “urbanists” and “villagers.” The leader of the latter was the composer Georgy Sviridov, an important, complex figure: his Oratorio Pathétique using Mayakovsky’s revolutionary poems received the Lenin Prize in 1960; but a discerning listener could find in the music nostalgic feelings for prerevolutionary Russia. Sviridov also had a Stalin Prize, but at the same time, he almost single-handedly revived the Russian choral tradition, introducing palpably archaic and religious subtexts (mostly using poetry by Esenin, who was Mayakovsky’s antagonist). In this Sviridov was helped by the prominent choir conductors Alexander Yurlov and Vladimir Minin.