Since Shostakovich, broken by clashes with the authorities and gravely ill, was writing mostly contemplative, darkly elegiac music of a requiem nature, like his Fifteenth Quartet or his final work, the Sonata for Viola and Piano with its enigmatic quotation from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, the most visible representative for urban music was Rodion Shchedrin, nicknamed “Cosmonaut” by his colleagues for his nimbleness. His ballets The Little Humpbacked Horse, Carmen Suite, Anna Karenina (based on Tolstoy), and The Seagull (based on Chekhov), essentially vehicles for his wife, the brilliant prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, were staged at the Bolshoi with great success.

Shchedrin was suspicious of Sviridov’s nationalistic position. Sviridov, on the other hand, referred to Shchedrin as the “Rasputin of Soviet music,”27 insisting that the urbanists’ music “was sick with soullessness: it doesn’t matter if it is simple or complex, primitive or sophisticated, our [Edison] Denisov, Shchedrin, and [Alexandra] Pakhmutova are equally lacking spirituality.”28 (The insult was in equating the avant-garde works of Denisov and Shchedrin with Pakhmutova’s popular, quasi-official songs.)

Sviridov considered Soviet musical life a dead-end alley where “clever careerism and grandiose money-grubbing”29 reigned. According to Sviridov, a clique from the Composers’ Union board had “divided up” the country’s main musical stages among them as their private fiefdoms: the Bolshoi Theater was Shchedrin’s “personal property,” Tikhon Khrennikov had the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theater all to himself, and Leningrader Andrei Petrov basically ran the Maryinsky Theater.30

But Sviridov praised the conductors Kirill Kondrashin and Yevgeny Svetlanov, champions of Russian classics both in the Bolshoi Theater and on the philharmonic stage. (Svetlanov recorded a major anthology of Russian symphonic music, which included all twenty-seven symphonies by his favorite, Nikolai Myaskovsky.) Sviridov was less enthusiastic about the work of the great St. Petersburg conductor Mravinsky, reproaching him for “excessive” interest in Western music: Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, and Hindemith. Mravinsky was also probably the best interpreter at the time of émigré Stravinsky’s late works.

The Soviets since Stalin’s day had considered their performing arts as the most successful areas of the “cultural front.” Of course, there were problems there, too, especially with émigrés. Chaliapin, the most popular Russian classical artist of the twentieth century, died in 1938 in Parisian exile, an implacable foe of the Communist regime. His memoirs, Soul and Masks, could not be published in full in the Soviet Union until perestroika because of its anti-Bolshevik statements.

The greatest Russian pianist, Rachmaninoff, also emigrated. Another titan of Russian piano, Vladimir Horowitz, lived in New York, a fact that Soviets found annoying, as well. But new Soviet piano lions, the best of whom had been students of Genrikh Neihaus—Richter and Gilels—took the West by storm when regular cultural contacts were established after Stalin’s death. The Soviet violinists Oistrakh and Kogan and the cellist Rostropovich were just as much a sensation in New York (where they were applauded by such Russian émigrés as Yascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, and Gregor Piatigorsky).

Outwardly the musicians appeared to be loyal Soviet citizens, and Gilels, Oistrakh, and Kogan even joined the Party. Privately, however, they expressed their dissatisfaction with the government’s too strict cultural policy, but Rostropovich was the only one to air his complaints publicly. After he defended Solzhenitsyn (and even let him live in his dacha), Rostropovich was forced out of the country with his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, in 1974, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship by a special decree in 1978.

Ten years before that, the winner of the 1962 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition, Vladimir Ashkenazy, moved to the West. So did the creator of the first Soviet chamber orchestra, Rudolf Barshai. In 1979 a new popular chamber group, Moscow Virtuosi, was founded by the young violinist Vladimir Spivakov, and a few years later the Moscow Soloists (headed by violist Yuri Bashmet) appeared. A new generation of talented musicians, the conductors Yuri Temirkanov, Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev, and the pianist Mikhail Pletnev, had more creative freedom.

Ballet, which along with music was traditionally considered the most successful export of Soviet culture, still caused the Party functionaries to keep looking over their shoulders at the émigrés. Even before the revolution a number of the greatest stars of the Russian ballet settled abroad: Anna Pavlova, Nijinsky, Karsavina, and the pioneer of plotless ballet, the choreographer Fokine. Diaghilev’s ballet had Russian roots, but it was a solidly based Western business by the time it achieved world fame. It started the meteoric Western careers of two new choreographic geniuses—Léonide Massine and Georgy Balanchivadze, whose name the impresario simplified to George Balanchine.

Soviet ballet, which like the opera was under the personal patronage of Stalin (continuing the Russian imperial tradition in this sphere), managed to come up with a new generation of great performers, too: the dazzling ballerinas trained in Leningrad by Agrippina Vaganova—Marina Semenova, Galina Ulanova, and Natalya Dudinskaya—and the extraordinary Moscow dancers Plisetskaya, Vladimir Vasilyev, and his wife, Ekaterina Maximova. The innovations of such masters of choreography as the avant-garde Kasyan Goleizovsky and Fedor Lopukhov and the more traditionally inclined Vassily Vainonen, Rostislav Zakharov, and Mikhail Lavrovsky (Romeo and Juliet) were transformed by Yuri Grigorovich into a new monumental style, of which Spartacus was the most successful example. Leningrader Boris Eifman continued the experimental tradition of choreographer Leonid Yakobson.

Just when the international reputation of Soviet ballet was at its peak, it was badly shaken by a series of sensational defections: Rudolf Nureyev, Natalya Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov stayed in the West. The dramatic fates of these celebrated dancers, who became the darlings of the Western media, served as yet more proof that in the cultural cold war, even an abstract art like classical ballet would inevitably be used as a political weapon.

In that sense, it was a symbolic gesture in 1979 when the American authorities stopped the departure from JFK Airport of a Soviet plane returning to Moscow carrying the wife of Alexander Godunov, premier dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, who had just asked for political asylum in the United States. President Jimmy Carter and General Secretary Brezhnev were personally involved in this incident, which naturally got world coverage. Joseph Brodsky, in those tense days acting as interpreter for the fugitive dancer, described the drama of Godunov and his wife, separated by political circumstances, as the “Romeo and Juliet of the twentieth century.”31


A major headache for the Soviet authorities was caused by unofficial art that functioned outside the state cultural paradigm. It appeared at the juncture of visual art and poetry toward the end of the 1940s. In that bleak time, when socialist realism seemed omnipresent, strange “standoffish people with a tough individual streak,”32 as they were later characterized by one of them, the abstract artist Vladimir Nemukhin, moved into action on the margins of orthodox culture.

After the war against Hitler, some members of the Moscow artistic elite got the impression, as one observer put it, that the Iron Curtain was “badly rusted.” “We managed to get a gulp of air after the victory, especially we school kids…even in Moscow beer halls you could hear the poetry of Esenin, Gumilev, Mandelstam from people who had known the poets personally, or at least, seen them.”33 All those poets were banned at the time.

Timidly, cultural traditions and connections destroyed by the Great Terror were re-established by the emerging cultural underground. In art this was primarily the domain of the small groups of young students of surviving old masters, like Vladimir Favorsky, Robert Falk, and Pavel Filonov. In Moscow the center of attraction was Malevich’s former pupil Yevgeny Kropivnitsky, although he did not insist on his teacher’s stark Suprematism as the mandatory dogma for his own students.

Kropivnitsky and his wife and daughter, also artists, moved to the barracks settlement of Lianozovo outside Moscow, where in the 1940s Oskar Rabin, who had become Kropivnitsky’s son-in-law, joined his group; this was the first unofficial art movement in the postwar Soviet Union, and it became known as the Lianozovo Circle.

The survival of the Lianozovo Circle is one of the mysteries of Soviet cultural life in that period. Its members were marginal artists who somehow managed not to dissolve in the mainstream flow of official art. Moreover, in a strict system that denied outsiders the right to cultural activity, they fenced off a small private area for themselves where the authorities did not venture. Visitors from Moscow began frequenting the Lianozovians: there were celebrities like Ehrenburg and Konstantin Paustovsky, the liberal prose writer and idol of the Soviet intelligentsia, but also young artists and poets and curious guests. Later, foreign diplomats and tourists came, too, although officially they were not allowed to travel outside Moscow city limits: another mystery.

The Lianozovo circle included abstract, expressionist, and neoprimitivist artists. Not everyone was pleased by their work—the conceptual artist Viktor Pivovarov later admitted: “I thought the paintings of the Kropivnitskys pathetically dilettante homegrown provincialism.”34 But people were attracted and surprised by the independent lifestyle of that bizarre artistic colony right under the allegedly all-seeing eyes of the secret police.

The artists were joined by underground poets—Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir, Vsevolod Nekrasov—also colorful characters who wrote brutal, experimental verse that could never be submitted to Soviet publications. Kholin, wiry and with an equine face, was a captain in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but was demoted for an ugly fight and sentenced to exile near Lianozovo, where he met the Kropivnitsky family. He started writing short, grim poems that were reminiscent of the banned work of the Soviet Dadaists of the 1920s and 1930s—Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, and Nikolai Oleinikov, who were destroyed by Stalin.

Kholin’s nascent underground fame grew and soon the former street kid with nothing but a brief time in military school for an education, a drunkard and a womanizer, became one of the leaders of a new movement in Russian poetry, known as “barracks writing.” Like many people, Kholin lived in shanty-like barracks, where each tiny room (without plumbing and with a public outhouse) sheltered a large family.

The underground poets read their works in those barracks rooms and also in Moscow apartments. They were fed by the “patrons of the arts” of the period like the pianist Richter and the poet Pasternak; the latter usually stuffed an “honorarium” into a performing poet’s coat pocket (amusingly, it was in strict accordance with the number of poems read). These were the first tentative hints at a developing system of private funding, as opposed to state financing.

But when the enterprising dissident Alexander Ginzburg began distributing the poems in typed anthologies (the samizdat journal Syntaxis, four issues in 1959–1960) he was imprisoned; in the logocentric Soviet Union, words were considered by far the most dangerous ideological instrument. The authorities traditionally regarded samizdat as an evil to be ruthlessly uprooted. One of the last highly publicized cultural-political cases of the Brezhnev era was Metropol, a samizdat literary almanac compiled in 1979 by a group of writers headed by Aksyonov; for this attack on the state monopoly, one boss of the Writers’ Union called Aksyonov a CIA agent and another recommended applying wartime laws to the overly independent writer—that is, put him up against the wall. In 1980, Aksyonov wisely chose to leave for the West, which at the time suited both sides.


The underground artists, who were watched as closely as their literary brothers, managed to find themselves a more comfortable niche, nevertheless. One of them thought it was because Khrushchev considered avant-garde artists “run-of-the-mill swindlers, something akin to fleas under a shirt,”35 so they were not squeezed until they jumped out too boldly onto the surface.

The first big news on Soviet nonconformist art came in 1960 from Life magazine, with the sensational headline “The Art of Russia…That Nobody Sees,” a long report in which along with the paintings of the classics of the avant-garde, like Kandinsky, were reproductions of works by the new unofficial artists. (After that, they were also called “the second Russian avant-garde.”)

Soviet private collectors began buying the watercolors by Anatoli Zverev, featured in Life. Self-taught, Zverev discovered Tachisme art (splattering paint on canvas) at the 1957 International Youth Festival in Moscow, where it was demonstrated by a visiting American artist, and he applied the technique in his still lifes and portraits, quickly developing a “mad creator” persona: he drank heavily, brawled, and showed off, while still managing to produce up to ten gouaches and watercolors a day.

When Zverev worked, it was a real show: he would come to someone’s luxurious home, toss sheets of paper on the floor and then spatter paint on them, holding several brushes at a time. Cigarette dangling from his mouth, dancing a jig, Zverev growled and cursed, imitating a shaman, as he covered the papers with new color splashes and strokes, the final ones being his famous initials, AZ. His portraits, amazingly, bore quite a resemblance to the sitter, and it is not surprising that collectors (dentists, lawyers, engineers) picked them up by the bunch, since in the beginning they went for a trifle: three rubles apiece.

The big-time Soviet collectors, even those who, like the legendary Georgy Costakis, were already collecting Tatlin, Rodchenko, and Lubov Popova, did not pay attention to the second avant-garde until the West did. The sudden attention of the foreign press turned the underground artists into tourist destinations, along with the Kremlin and the Moscow metro, and their exotically grimy cellars were visited by foreign businessmen, journalists, and Western diplomats.

Dip-Art (art for diplomats and other foreigners) burgeoned in the early 1960s, changing the position of unofficial culture. Private enterprise until then had existed quietly on the sidelines, where a few legal private dentists and tailors toiled. Culture, on the other hand, as an important part of ideology, was a total state monopoly.

Since the relevant documents are still classified, we can only guess why the ubiquitous secret police looked the other way as the Moscow Dip-Art scene (followed by Leningrad) expanded and flourished. It is a fact that this unofficial guild, which at its peak had at least several dozen participants (probably around two hundred people), gradually turned into a tempting alternative to the state system of rewarding artists.

The underground Dip-Art market grew more orderly and prices rose, evolving from primitive barter, when the artist traded a painting for a bottle of whiskey or a pair of jeans, to significant (by Moscow standards) sums in hard currency.

Outstanding among the first serious Western buyers was the American economics professor Norton Dodge, who wanted to create an exhaustive collection of Soviet nonconformist art. Traveling regularly to the Soviet Union, the stocky, mustachioed, walrus-like Dodge brought out around fifteen hundred works by underground artists, which became the basis of his permanent collection at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The collection, now numbering approximately twenty thousand works by hundreds of artists, may be regarded as definitive.

Dodge began his purchases with Lianozovo artists, then added the works of the hyperbolic figurativists Vladimir Veisberg and Oleg Tselkov; the neoprimitivist Vladimir Yakovlev; the metaphysical surrealist Vladimir Yankilevsky; the abstract artists Eduard Shteinberg and Lydia Masterkova; the conceptualist Ilya Kabakov; and artists from the conceptual camp who differed in approach, like Erik Bulatov, Oleg Vassiliev, and Grisha Bruskin; the inventors of Sots-Art, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid; and artists working in the same vein, Alexander Kosolapov, Leonid Sokov, and Vagrich Bakhchanyan. Perhaps the best works of these artists are in the Zimmerli Museum.


Some Dip-Artists became well off, converting their hard currency and ruble earnings into cars, dachas, and co-op apartments. The boldest and most determined of them, like Oscar Rabin, started having one-man shows in the West with the help of foreign diplomats and Russophile gallery owners. This led Rabin, a born activist and leader, to the idea of a show of nonconformist art in Moscow, outdoors, like Paris exhibitions on the banks of the Seine.

Rabin’s idea, when he first proposed it in 1969, was dismissed by his fellow artists. But by 1974, the underground artists felt confident enough to try it. They gathered on September 15, a Sunday, in a vacant lot for a happening, which they called “The First Autumn Painting Exhibition in the Open Air.”

This was intended as a rather modest action, with perhaps a dozen participants, including Rabin and his wife and son, Komar and Melamid, and the Leningrad artist Yevgeny Rukhin. The overzealous authorities, intending to teach the disorderly artists a lesson, turned it into a symbolic event with international resonance.

When the artists began setting up their works on folding aluminum tripods, they were attacked by young toughs who had been waiting for them; they grabbed the paintings, broke them and tossed them into parked dump trucks. Some canvases were burned on the spot. The attackers beat up anyone who resisted, and finally unleashed several bulldozers and street-washing trucks, whose icy streams of water completed the destruction.

Rabin jumped in the path of a bulldozer to rescue a painting. Several Western correspondents, who had been invited to the happening by the artists, were also beaten up. The result was a series of Western reports with headlines like “Soviet Officials Use Force to Break Up Art Show. Painters, Newsmen Roughed Up in Turbulent Public Confrontation” and “Art Under the Bulldozers.”

This altercation created friction between the secret police and the Party. As General Filipp Bobkov, chief of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, created by Andropov in 1967 for “countering ideological diversions by the enemy,” that is, supervision of culture, described it in his memoirs (which were published in post-Soviet times), the “absurd decision” to use bulldozers against paintings was not made by the KGB and those were not its brawny thugs punching artists in a Moscow empty lot. According to Bobkov, the initiative came from the local Party; KGB agents hurried out to save the paintings. The general, “stunned,” as he described himself, told them: “Take care of the artists!”36

Alas, the paternal concern of the secret police for the avant-garde was too late, and the world media picked up the scandal. “To tell the truth, there was nothing we could say in justification,” the KGB general lamented. “Our enemies were given a very wide field this way, and they used the platform for a new, thoroughly prepared attack. Disregarding cost, they helped ‘banned’ artists in every way possible to get abroad, thereby killing two birds with one stone; first, it started a new wave in the press: talented artists cannot work in the USSR and they flee abroad; and second, they had made a certain calculation: the artists who benefited would try to repay their patrons by participating in the Cold War. Their calculation turned out to be correct.”37

The KGB general’s dismay is understandable, considering the time, money, and effort the secret services spent on keeping unofficial culture under control. Even Bobkov admitted it: “The KGB should not have tried to act as arbiter in the rivalry among schools of art. However, there were circumstances that forced us to appear sometimes on that arena.”38

The general is being too modest. One of the prominent nonconformist artists maintained: “The old-fashioned, populous spy network entangled the underground, and colleagues in the arts readily denounced one another in order to hang on at the Dip-Art trough and earn as much as possible.”39

The sphere of intensive interest for the KGB included not only the avant-garde, but such realist artists of a nationalistic bent as Ilya Glazunov, whose house in Moscow was a gathering place for Soviet and foreign dignitaries, diplomats, and correspondents. The writer Leonid Borodin, a close friend of the artist, wrote: “Undoubtedly, the appropriate agencies could not leave this oasis of socializing unattended, and everyone there understood that.”40

According to Borodin, the parties at Glazunov’s house were “a permanent object of rumor, gossip, suspicion, and accusations. And not without reason.”41 In that sense, the Glazunov circle could be seen as a microcosm of the elite of Soviet culture, existing with the morbid sense that it was in a bell jar of constant surveillance and interference from the KGB. (This sense has been confirmed by declassified documents, which are now being published less frequently and more selectively than in the early post-Soviet years.)


It was not easy living and working in that paranoid atmosphere. Everyone suspected everyone else of collaboration with the KGB, and that heavy fog of mutual distrust (probably quite beneficial for the secret police) was used to settle personal scores, when “the most reliable way to smear a rival was by calling him a KGB agent…. For some people such defamation ended in tragedy. But of course, real agents did exist.”42

In the post-Soviet years intellectuals began making public admissions of having been forced to work with the KGB. We must assume that the number of these (self) exposés will grow, and we will find that the KGB used the most unexpected people. One surprise came in the memoirs of Stalin-era KGB boss Pavel Sudoplatov, published in the second half of the 1990s: the poet Boris Sadovskoy, who died in Moscow in 1952 and was known to family and close friends as a monarchist and implacable foe of the Soviet regime, had been recruited by Soviet counterintelligence back in the war years.43

It was also astonishing to read in Sudoplatov’s book that the composer Lev Knipper, nephew of Chekhov’s wife, had been enlisted by the secret services to assassinate Hitler should the Führer appear in Nazi-occupied Moscow.44 Knipper, author of twenty symphonies (and the popular song “Polyushko-Pole”), was an impeccable gentleman of the old school. Knipper killing anyone? It seemed impossible. A similar surprise (and even shock) for old émigrés in NewYork was the mention in one of historian Dmitri Volkogonov’s books that the Russian musicologist Alexis Kall, a friend of Stravinsky’s and his secretary for a while, sent reports to Moscow from Los Angeles on the political situation in the émigré milieu.45

Andropov was proud that the KGB was implementing a “very cautious and flexible policy” toward the intellectuals. After the “bulldozer show,” an agent came to the leader of the rebel artists, Rabin, with a message that “a bad peace is better than a good quarrel.” A compromise was reached and the KGB “with great difficulty”(as General Bobkov recalled) got the Moscow Party officials to give permission for a large show of nonconformist art in Izmailovo Park for September 29, 1974.46

Perhaps the KGB did see this move as “cautious and flexible,” but in Moscow in 1974 the exhibition in Izmailovo Park was perceived as a capitulation by the authorities. On a warm sunny day, on a huge green meadow, more than fifty artists showed hundreds of their works to thousands of Muscovites, dazzled by the spectacle. The attendees will never forget the rare atmosphere of an unsanctioned public festival, a people’s celebration with an opposition undertone. The Izmailovo show was simultaneously an important cultural gesture, a picnic, and a demonstration—a breath of freedom and a harbinger of the changes that took place more than a decade later.


In the meantime, the KGB continued using the carrot and stick approach with unofficial art. On one hand, several “permitted” exhibitions by avant-garde artists took place, on the other, so did a series of searches, arrests, and “accidental” beatings. As the artist Kabakov recalled, “We were always under the threat of arrest or exile…. Icravenly refused when Oskar Rabin invited me to participate in the famous bulldozer exhibition.”47 Kabakov explained further: “Fear as a state of mind persisted in every second of our life, in every action, and like coffee and milk, that is, in any possible combination, there was not a word or deed that was not diluted by a certain dose of fear.”48

Kabakov and his friends in conceptualist nonconformist art—the poets Prigov and Lev Rubinshtein, the prose writer Vladimir Sorokin—held the idea, unusual for Russian culture, that the artist need not participate in public life, “defend anything, speak out against anything.”49 According to Prigov, this was also “a great art—not falling into public scandals or provoking them…. Increasing tension did not lead to anything good. Therefore it was a very complex policy dealing with the authorities…. Our goal was to expand our zone of freedom little by little. It was not a sociopolitical or even an existential strategy, it was rather an aesthetic one.”50

Paradoxically, a position of nonengagement on the part of the Soviet postmodern artists created additional problems for the KGB because it blurred the borders between permitted and not permitted. The nonconformist artists and poets were not openly anti-Soviet, yet the KGB felt it necessary to give them “prophylactic” talks every now and then: “They began calling us in a lot in the late 1970s, when they had put away all the dissidents, and the water level dropped sharply. That is, now the heads were visible of people who were not involved in politics or in any social protests at all.”51

In Leningrad, the KGB gathered the avant-garde writers into a special association, the literary Club-81, “so they wouldn’t have to drag themselves out to the outskirts to our readings,”52 as one of the participants deduced. They herded them into the organization by various means: “some were intimidated, others persuaded, given promises. One woman poet…managed to get the ceiling of her room whitewashed in exchange.”53 Also in Leningrad, the first officially published almanac of underground literature, Krug [The Circle], appeared in 1985 under the “paternal supervision” of the KGB. (The Leningrad KGB had clearly learned from the negative fallout of the Metropol affair in Moscow in 1979.)

The secret police started to herd artists under the aegis of various quasi-official “covers.” One of their plans was to supervise Dip-Art and the underground art market. The Soviets were always looking for new ways of adding revenues in hard currency. In 1971, KGB chairman Andropov suggested “studying the question of the possibility and conditions for selling modernist works created in our country to foreign consumers.”54 An active role in the organization of some exhibitions of unofficial Soviet artists in the West was played by Victor Louis-Levin, the Moscow correspondent of the London Evening News known for his close KGB ties, who also tried to sell manuscripts by Solzhenitsyn and Svetlana Allilueva, Stalin’s daughter, and videotape of Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner, in exile in Gorky, being examined by physicians.

As prices in the West grew, nonconformist art became ever more acceptable for the Soviet authorities, comparable in hard-currency revenue with tours by the Bolshoi Ballet or the Igor Moiseyev Ensemble of Folk Dance. Mutually beneficial deals had been worked out in music and ballet with Western impresarios like Sol Hurok. Now the Ministry of Culture agreed to the auction run by Sotheby’s in Moscow in 1988, where the heated bidding brought in sensational prices—for example, Grisha Bruskin’s Fundamental Lexicon went for $412,000. The auction marked the emergence of the unofficial underground of Soviet art onto the open global art market—a step that some veterans of the underground ruefully considered “commercial and political.”


Chapter Fifteen

Sergei Paradjanov stunned the audience at the New York Film Festival in 1988 when he announced that he wanted to film Gorbachev in the role of Hamlet. Some in the audience ascribed the statement to the director’s well-known eccentricity.

But in November 1991, when Alexander Yakovlev was in New York, I asked him what he considered the main character trait of Gorbachev, who by then had lost his title of President of the USSR, and the country to boot. His reply was brief: “Hamletism.” Yakovlev knew what he was talking about: that cunning fellow with prickly eyes was Gorbachev’s leading liberal advisor. He was the polar opposite of the former chief ideologist of the USSR, Mikhail Suslov, the éminence grise of the Brezhnev era who had become a member of the Politburo under Stalin and died in 1982 still a Stalinist hard-liner.

Yakovlev changed rapidly, starting out with a solid career in the Party as a former military hero with a peasant background, a nondrinking, hardworking, and commonsensical man. When he was thirty-five, Yakovlev came to New York and spent two years in graduate school at Columbia University. Then he was the Soviet ambassador to Canada for ten years. Those experiences influenced him strongly. (The KGB even accused Yakovlev of being recruited by the American intelligence services, but Gorbachev ignored that report.)

It was in Canada, which Gorbachev visited in 1983 as a member of a Soviet delegation, where he became friends with Yakovlev, sensing that they shared the same ideas. In 1985, as the new leader of the Soviet Union embarking on a reform program of perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev assigned Yakovlev to bring in the intelligentsia, for he saw that without its active support the country would be slow to change. Thus, Yakovlev became the Party patron of the liberals, even though he was not quite comfortable in that role at first, sometimes displaying the very Hamletism (that is, indecision and fear of change) for which he later rebuked Gorbachev.

Gorbachev’s aim was socialism with a human face. He first thought he could achieve it relying only on Party cadres. But encountering fierce resistance to his reforms within the Party, Gorbachev decided to use cultural forces as a battering ram. As his aides attest, his plans regarding the intelligentsia were thoroughly pragmatic, even cynical: it was to service, theoretically and in practice, the new course of comparatively greater freedom of speech and limited relaxation of economic and political restrictions, reminiscent of Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s.

The liberal Soviet intelligentsia responded to the call enthusiastically, describing themselves as the contractors of perestroika (which literally means “reconstruction”). For the first time in many years they felt needed by the state and they began attacking Gorbachev’s opponents at meetings, in the press, on television—especially since the conservatives had long been their personal oppressors.

The liberals had good reason to see Gorbachev as their patron. He had begun to realize that the stubborn and influential conservatives, recovered from their original shock, would use the first opportunity to get rid of him, as Brezhnev and his friends had done to Khrushchev. He met with writers in 1986, and Anatoly Ivanov, a Hero of Socialist Labor and author of the patriotic potboilers Shadows Vanish at Noon and Eternal Call, demanded that the Politburo restore ideological order, condemning the out-of-control liberals the way Stalin and Zhdanov had handled Akhmatova and Zoshchenko in 1946. Gorbachev was staggered. “Where do people like that come from? They’re like wood lice.”1

Learning that the head of the Writers’ Union, Georgy Markov, also a Hero of Socialist Labor, had managed to get his works printed in twenty-seven publishing houses in 1985 alone (and, as it turned out, had 14 million rubles in his savings account), Gorbachev was outraged. “Talentless, senile old men. They praise themselves. They offer their own candidacies for awards. They give themselves prizes and titles.”2

Responding to my question in 2003 on which contemporary poets influenced his worldview, Gorbachev named Okudzhava, Yevtushenko, and Voznesensky. A response like that from Brezhnev or even Andropov would have been impossible. At the urging of Gorbachev and Yakovlev, administrators were replaced in the “creative” unions of writers, artists, and filmmakers, and new people appeared as heads of the leading newspapers and magazines. The weeklies Ogonek and Moskovskie Novosti [Moscow News] took a particularly aggressive pro-Gorbachev stand, printing increasingly bold muckraking and anti-Stalinist materials. They were sold out instantly; people lined up at the newsstands at six in the morning to pick up an issue of these suddenly liberal publications.

Journals and then book publishers unleashed an avalanche of previously unavailable literature. It began with the publication of poems by Gumilev, executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921, and then came other banned masterpieces—Akhmatova’s Requiem, Platonov’s The Foundation Pit and Chevengur, Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart, Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and, finally, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. (These were reprints of Western Russian-language editions. Possession of these books just a short time before could have led to a prison-camp term.)

As the list of officially rehabilitated figures once considered “enemies” (Bukharin, Trotsky, even Nicholas II) expanded in the political sphere, the cultural gates opened more widely, too: the Russian avant-garde was rehabilitated—Kandinsky, Chagall, Malevich, Tatlin, Filonov, and the Russian Dadaist writers Kharms, Oleinikov, and Alexander Vvedensky.

After that, conveniently deceased émigré writers, from Zinaida Hippius and Khodasevich to Yevgeny Zamyatin and Nabokov, and religious philosophers Berdyaev, Lev Shestov, Semyon Frank, and Ivan Ilyin were published in the USSR. The genius of Stravinsky and Balanchine was recognized in full. And then came the turn of living émigrés: Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Rostropovich and the writers Aksyonov, Voinovich, Sinyavsky, Maximov, Brodsky, and to top the list, Solzhenitsyn. A popular witticism of the time was, “Today reading is more interesting than living.”

In hindsight, it might appear that this was a spontaneous, unstoppable flow. In fact, the “process went” (to use Gorbachev’s favorite expression) in fits and starts, with the fear that liberalization could cease at any moment. Some people joked, “What will we do when perestroika and glasnost stop? We’ll read old magazines and newspapers, if they’re not confiscated.”

The long-awaited leaps toward greater freedom were interrupted by sudden halts, and almost every publication of an important, previously banned work involved a tense behind-the-scenes struggle. The law on freedom of the press and the repeal of censorship was not passed until 1990.



An example of this struggle was the dramatic fate of Children of the Arbat, a novel by the popular writer Anatoli Rybakov: it is well documented, for the author and his widow both wrote memoirs3 and Rybakov told me a lot himself.

Rybakov, a Stalin Prize laureate (despite having been exiled to Siberia in the 1930s for being a former Trotskyite), completed Children of the Arbat, an epic narrative about the Great Terror in which Stalin is a central character and is depicted as a devious tyrant, in 1966. He immediately offered it to Tvardovsky for his liberal journal, Novy Mir; the editor had a high regard for the novel, quite bold for those days, and planned to publish it the following year, in 1967. But the censors blocked Children of the Arbat and the manuscript remained in the author’s desk for twenty years.

Throughout the Brezhnev era, Rybakov, a persistent and energetic former soldier, tried to get the book into print, without avail. The situation should have changed with Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, but that was not the case at all: the Stalin theme continued to be a minefield. Under Brezhnev and Andropov, the Party bureaucrats told Rybakov that a novel like his about Stalin would be published only “when our entire generation is gone from this life.” Under Gorbachev they demanded huge changes and cuts: “Stalin is shown in a one-sided way.”

Stubborn Rybakov resisted in every way he could, gathering reviews of support of the novel from sixty famous writers, film actors, and directors. It was an old defense technique, but it was more effective in the glasnost era. Gorbachev recalled it grumpily in his memoirs: “The manuscript had been read by dozens of people who began showering the Central Committee with letters and reviews, calling it the ‘novel of the century.’ It became a public event before it was published.”4

In the new political situation, Gorbachev had to take that into account, even though he stressed that Rybakov’s book “did not impress us much” artistically. (Khrushchev read Children of the Arbat in manuscript in 1969 when he was retired, and he also criticized the Stalin episodes.)

The manuscript of Children of the Arbat became a litmus test for determining a person’s political position. Tatiana Rybakov recorded a characteristic exchange. The poet Bella Akhmadulina: “If I wake up tomorrow and see that the journal with Rybakov’s novel is out, I will say: that means the Soviet regime is over!” Her former husband, Yevtushenko, countered: “And I, on the contrary, will say: The Soviet regime is stronger and triumphant!” Yet he wrote the first letter of support for the book’s publication.

In the end, the fate of Children of the Arbat was decided at the highest political level. At a Politburo meeting on October 27, 1986, the leading conservative Yegor Ligachev attacked the novel: “The meaning of this enormous manuscript of 1,500 pages boils down to denouncing Stalin and all our prewar policies…. Clearly, such a novel cannot be published, even though Rybakov is threatening to send it abroad.” Gorbachev, as befits Hamlet, continued vacillating. “If we start exposing ourselves, acknowledging our mistakes, that would be the most expensive and most desired present for our enemy.”5

Gorbachev’s advisor, Yakovlev, even though less blinkered than his boss, still could not decide, either: having read it over several nights (the novel made a powerful impression on him), Yakovlev felt that the writer was wrong to treat Stalin “with prejudice.” He recalled the three-hour conversation he had with Rybakov at his Central Committee office: “He responded to all my cautious comments on the book with ferocious objections, he reacted sharply, with blatant challenge…he rejected my right as a member of the Politburo to make any criticisms at all to a writer.”6

Rybakov had the foresight to bring along a compilation of the letters in support for his novel to this audience with Yakovlev: “These are not simply raves, this is the mindset of the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia cannot abide Stalin.” The roles had changed: no longer was the Party functionary pressuring the writer, but the writer, in the name of the cultural elite, was pressuring the functionary. Yakovlev knew that Gorbachev needed the support of those people and he surrendered: “It must be published, since we’ve taken the course for the freedom of creativity.”7

When the journal Druzhba Narodov [Friendship of the Peoples] announced it would be printing Children of the Arbat, its subscription went from 100,000 to over 1,000,000. The total print run for the book, which came out in the Soviet Union in 1987 as a hardcover, was 10.5 million copies; Children of the Arbat was published in fifty-two countries, became an international best seller and a political signal of the Soviet leadership’s intentions. In the United States, Rybakov’s picture appeared (along with Stalin) on the cover of Time magazine, and President Reagan, speaking in Moscow in 1988, announced, “We applaud Gorbachev for bringing Sakharov back to Moscow from exile and for publishing Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat.8 Thus the story of Children of the Arbat became one of the last examples of the huge importance of literature in political life during the Soviet era.


It seemed that the Soviet state had ideologized society to the limit. The irony was that after Stalin’s death, politics was evaporating from the surface of cultural life. It was replaced by moribund official rituals, while the real political debate moved to the kitchens of the intelligentsia. The main requirement of the Brezhnev era was not to rock the boat. Even the orthodox Andropov complained that there were a lot of Communists but no Bolsheviks (meaning that people joined the Party pro forma, as a way to get ahead, but without conviction).

Under Gorbachev, the real discussions suddenly became public. The spectrum of political views among the cultural elite turned out to be unexpectedly broad—from monarchism to anarchism. Neopaganism and neofascism, appearing from out of nowhere, flourished like wild-flowers, and Black Hundred and anti-Semitic views became fashionable. Conspiracy theories about the suicides of Esenin and Mayakovsky spread: some thought they were murdered, either by the Soviet secret police or by Jews or by both.

The cultural and political situation grew more complex: in the past, the central dichotomy had been “Soviet v. anti-Soviet.” Now, there were also the “conservative-liberal” and “Slavophile-Westernizer” divides as well. For the first time there was a dizzying array of variants of these positions: one could position oneself as an anti-Soviet conservative or a Slavophile avant-gardist.

As Gorbachev relaxed Party control, a vacuum was created in cultural power, and elite groups tried to grab as much territory as they could. The division into spheres of power went on everywhere: literature, art, music, film, and even that icon of Russian culture, the Moscow Art Theater.

Founded in 1898 by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko as the “theater of Chekhov,” the legendary company was driven before the revolution by Stanislavsky’s motto: “Be neither revolutionary nor Black Hundred.” This allowed MAT to remain above the fray and win a respect and an almost sacral authority among the intelligentsia.

After the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin became MAT’s patron, regularly attending its performances. This assured the theater a privileged position and funding, but it destroyed its former independence. Yet some of MAT’s Soviet productions were as refined as the legendary works of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. One milestone was the premiere of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play about the Civil War, The Days of the Turbins (based on his novel The White Guards), in 1926.

A direct connection to the Chekhov line of the old Art Theater was seen in this production. It was perceived, as The Seagull had been in its day, as the company’s political and social manifesto, and audiences saw Chekhovian traits in the characters of Bulgakov’s play, noble idealistic officers who defended the doomed “White idea” from the victorious Bolsheviks.

The Days of the Turbins at MAT had a difficult history. The public adored the play, it was sold out, but the orthodox critics were vicious. Stalin, by then the highest cultural arbiter of the land, was drawn to the play and saw it at least fifteen times; scenes from the production appeared in his dreams, he confessed.

In 1929, Stalin wrote about The Days of the Turbins: “The main impression that the audience is left with is an impression that is beneficial for Bolsheviks: ‘if even people like the Turbins are forced to put away arms and bow to the will of the people, admitting their cause is completely lost, that means the Bolsheviks are unbeatable, and you can’t do anything with them, the Bolsheviks.’ The Days of the Turbins is a demonstration of the crushing power of Bolshevism,” he concluded.9

Despite that, Stalin’s attitude toward Bulgakov was unpredictable: sometimes he encouraged the writer, sometimes he punished him. Stalin would not reply to Bulgakov’s letters, but once he telephoned him. The writer, anti-Soviet at heart and a sober, ironic person, nevertheless got drawn into this cat-and-mouse game to the extent that it became one of the central themes of his work, reflected in his exquisite novel about Molière and his patron Louis XIV (a very transparent parallel), a fine play on the same theme, Cabal of Hypocrites, and his phantasmagoric novel The Master and Margarita, his final statement and one of the peaks of twentieth-century Russian prose. One of the main characters of the novel, Woland, a Lucifer-like figure, enters into a complex relationship (not unlike the one between Stalin and Bulgakov) with the Master, a writer.

The Master and Margarita was not published in Bulgakov’s lifetime, nor did he succeed in staging his last play, Batum (about Stalin’s youth), which was written at the request of the Art Theater. The theater awaited Batum like manna from heaven and they were elated by the manuscript, which the author delivered in 1939. But Stalin told Nemirovich-Danchenko that while he considered Bulgakov’s work “very good,” it should not be staged: “All children and youths are the same. Do not put on a play about the young Stalin.”10

This was a mortal blow for the vulnerable Bulgakov, and he died soon afterward at the age of forty-eight. As for the Moscow Art Theater…well, it had survived the death of Chekhov, the battle with Gorky, even the arguments, alienation, and then enmity (hidden from outsiders) of its two great founders, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. MAT continued presenting The Days of the Turbins right up until the war in 1941 (almost a thousand performances), when the sets were lost in a fire during an air raid.


The Art Theater was awarded the title “Academic” by the state in 1920, which conferred substantial privileges. In 1923, Stalin added the name “Gorky” to the company. Russian émigrés were outraged, recalling how in 1904, Nemirovich-Danchenko publicly told Chekhov, “This company, Anton, is yours!” The émigrés could not resign themselves to the idea that those days when you could say fairly openly what you thought were gone forever; in the new reality, Stanislavsky, who had always disliked Gorky for his pro-Bolshevik sentiments, now had to address the writer in the name of the Gorky MAT this way: “From now on we will work together on Soviet theater, which alone can support theater perishing all over the world.”11

Stanislavsky was more or less sincere at least about “theater perishing all over the world.” Traveling to Europe for treatment (Stalin generously allotting hard currency for that), Stanislavsky became convinced that culture there was in free fall: “Hitler broke them all up. There is no theater.” While in the Soviet Union, thanks to Stalin, not only was MAT declared the best and exemplary collective that all others should emulate, but his cherished Method of training actors was officially proclaimed The Only True Method, with all the concomitant consequences.

Stanislavsky was clearly pleased: “In places that in tsarist Russia were barren fields, impenetrable tundras and backwaters, now life is thriving, art is blossoming, and they are studying my Method.”12 For all that, Stanislavsky, who died in 1938 with every possible prize and honor under his belt, being made one of the first People’s Artists and receiving the Lenin Order, had not crossed the threshold of the MAT in the last years of his life, citing declining health.

Locking himself in his Moscow mansion like a medieval monk, Stanislavsky doggedly worked on his Method, which spread all over the world in approximate retellings and versions and was received as if it were the Holy Grail by many actors; in particular, in the United States, students of the Method, which had been adapted by Michael Chekhov (nephew of the great writer and a former student of Stanislavsky) and Lee Strasberg, included Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Anthony Quinn, and then Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and even Marilyn Monroe.

Stalin made MAT and the Bolshoi his official court institutions that could not be criticized (except on his own orders). No wonder that MAT ossified and after the deaths of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko gradually turned into an empty shell. During the 1950s and 1960s, when audiences fought to get into Oleg Efremov’s Sovremennik Theater and Lyubimov’s Theater on the Taganka, obtaining tickets for MAT was not at all difficult. Tourists made up most of the audience.

Even high officials realized it, and in 1970 a special decision of the Secretariat of the Central Committee appointed Efremov to shore up MAT, which seriously weakened the Sovremennik but did not return MAT to its former glory. Efremov, a talented actor and fine director, who often went off on Karamazovian drinking binges, remained artistic director of MAT until his death in 2000, trying to renew it as best he could. Still, he was obliged to produce officially approved works like Steel Workers or The Party Committee Meeting with lines like: “As they justly pointed out to us at the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress…”

The low point of the new MAT came with the infamous production of a play about Lenin called Thus We Will Win! in March 1982, which was attended by Brezhnev and an entourage of Politburo members. In the government box, furbished specially for Stalin, the general secretary sat surrounded by three future Soviet leaders: Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Gorbachev.

Brezhnev was very ill (he died in November of that year) and had trouble both hearing and comprehending; in a loud voice, he kept asking his comrades, “Is that Lenin? Shouldn’t we greet him?” It was a great embarrassment. The audience laughed openly at what was going on in the box and on the stage, and the sorry episode became a symbol of the situation not only at the Moscow Art Theater but in the USSR as well.

On April 30, 1983, just a bit over three years later, Gorbachev, now the new ruler of the country, returned for a performance at MAT. He had been general secretary less than two months, and he clearly wanted to send a signal to the capital’s intelligentsia: he chose to attend Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (in Efremov’s staging) rather than one of the “Party” plays. A week later he telephoned the director.

Efremov naturally remembered Stalin’s phone calls to Pasternak and Bulgakov, which were part of the MAT lore, for it was after the ruler’s condescending conversation with Bulgakov that the writer was hastily given a job as assistant director at MAT. Neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev repeated Stalin’s gambit. As a Party member, Efremov considered a call from his new boss, Gorbachev, a signal event; embarrassed by the sweat that appeared on his brow during the call, Efremov paraphrased Chekhov to explain apologetically to his assistant: “It is hard to squeeze the slave out of oneself.”13

Gorbachev told Efremov that his production of Uncle Vanya was a “feast for the spirit.” However, in Russian his words “pir dukha” could easily sound like a rude criticism, perdukha, which basically means “a big fart.” The director tensed up, but when he realized that Gorbachev had meant no insult, he asked for an audience with the general secretary. In response, Efremov heard “historic words” from the leader, which were probably the reason he had called in the first place: “Let me get the flywheel going first.”14

They got the flywheel going so fast that the whole state flew apart. In the process, MAT broke up, among many other things small and big. Under Stalin, or even later, the division of MAT was unimaginable, although Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko had seriously considered it when they were feuding. (That hostility was depicted with a satirical edge by Bulgakov in his unfinished masterpiece, Theatrical Novel.)

In 1986, when Efremov realized that he would not be able to handle the overgrown and contentious company (more than 150 actors alone, of which Efremov used only three dozen or so in his productions), he presented his half-baked idea of dividing the MAT troupe into two parts. The authorities unexpectedly gave him the go-ahead: it was in accord with the new spirit of total perestroika.

The more conservative group of actors, headed by the theater’s prima donna Tatyana Doronina, rebelled. MAT did not survive the attempted reform from within and collapsed; on its ruins two totally separate troupes formed in 1987: MAT in Kamergersky Alley, under the direction of Efremov, and MAT on Tverskoi Boulevard, where Doronina ruled. In 1989, Efremov’s theater added Chekhov to its name, while Doronina’s company kept the Gorky name, given by Stalin. The lines were drawn.

In 1998, the centenary of the Moscow Art Theater was celebrated with pomp. The festivities, accompanied by heavy nostalgia for the olden days when MAT had been the pride and cultural symbol of the country, were one more excuse for the endless squabbling between the proponents and the opponents of political and economic reforms in Russia.

In an interview, Doronina readily agreed with the remark of a conservative journalist that the destruction of MAT was a conspiracy and the model for the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union: “The entire collective of MAT stood for unity. And this unity should not have been destroyed. Just as our country should not have been destroyed. But there were people at the theater and in the state who took advantage of our nonresistance, our Christian meekness—and got their dividends. The schism of the theater was planned, just as the collapse of the country was planned and rehearsed.”15


Conspiracy theories explaining perestroika and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union as an evil plan executed by the West’s “fifth column” abounded among radical conservatives. The writer Alexander Zinoviev, a former dissident, spent many years living abroad where, he said, he was in contact with Western intelligence agencies, and he claimed that “Gorbachev’s rise to power was not simply the result of the country’s internal development. It was the result of intervention from outside. It was a grand subversive operation on the part of the West. Back in 1984, people who were actively working on destroying our country told me: ‘Wait a year and our man will be on the Russian throne.’ And so they’ve put their man on the Russian throne. Without the West, Gorbachev would have never reached that position.”16

Zinoviev and his supporters called Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and other reformers “Soviet Judases” in the pay of the CIA, a view that was not shared by everyone in the ultraconservative camp. But Zinoviev went even further: since the Gorbachev reforms were implemented “before the eyes of the people, with its connivance and even approval,” the writer branded the whole country as the “traitor nation.”17

Valentin Rasputin, one of the respected leaders of “village” prose, was horrified by what he considered the evil mutation of the cultural landscape in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union: the uncontrolled breeding of rock groups, playing music that caused “dangerous changes in the blood” the proliferation of beauty contests; the formerly banned sex scenes now common in Soviet films and even the appearance of homosexuals in television programs, who, Rasputin reminded his audience, were still, thank God, illegal in the Soviet Union. All this, he insisted, was part of a planned program “to corrupt minds and souls.”18

The transformations in the country, which for many decades had been isolated from the influence of Western mass culture, really could be seen as quite radical. Particularly annoying for the archconservatives was the ubiquitous presence of innumerable rock groups, finally let off the leash.

In Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, rock music existed underground, and under the watchful eye of the KGB: it was considered ideologically harmful, replacing jazz, which had become respectable even in the eyes of the Party bureaucrats (it was said that Andropov was a jazz aficionado). Young people by now preferred disco music and then rock to jazz, and in big cities almost every building had its own amateur group that imitated Western models, especially the Beatles.

Some reasonable minds in the KGB understood they were unlikely to eradicate this mass underground movement and therefore tried to control it. In Moscow, Leningrad, and a few other large cities, the KGB—as an experiment in the 1970s—permitted several rock festivals to take place and rock clubs to be organized, the one in Leningrad becoming the most famous.19

The first popular domestic rock groups with original Russian-language repertoire appeared: in Moscow Mashina Vremeni, led by Andrei Makarevich, and in Leningrad, Akvarium, whose leader, Boris Grebenshchikov, was called the Soviet Bob Dylan, even though he preferred to be compared to David Bowie.

These and other early rock groups (DDT, created by Yuri Shevchuk in Ufa, Nautilus Pompilius from Sverdlovsk, Auktsion from Leningrad, and Zvuki Mu from Moscow) existed in a parallel reality, on the edge of permitted and forbidden, legal and illegal. Makarevich, Grebenshchikov, and Shevchuk wrote songs that could be called proto-perestroika, like “The Turn,” a hit from Mashina Vremeni that back in 1979 told people in allegorical terms not to fear extreme shifts in the country’s life.

During perestroika, the frightened conservatives imagined that this music they so hated enveloped them; Rasputin declared that rock had a “destructive influence on the psyche” and fumed, “The news on television has rock music, music class in kindergarten has rock, the classics are given in a rock version, plays are given rock scores.”20

For “villagers” like Rasputin, even more unacceptable was the sudden ubiquity of the new androgynous pop stars like Valery Leontyev or the openly homosexual theater productions by Roman Viktyuk, as well as the tolerance of works that used to be considered experimental. Many authors of such works, who had moved from the shadows to the center of attention, were women (the writers Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Ludmila Ulitskaya, the poets Elena Shvarts and Olga Sedakova, the film director Kira Muratova, the artists Natalya Nesterova and Tatyana Nazarenko, the composers Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina), and this only added to the traditionalists’ discomfort. This was new and powerful women’s art, a vivid continuation of the “Amazons” of the Russian avant-garde at the turn of the century, and there were people who could not stomach it.

The conservative camp of Russian culture, sensing a threat to its existence (or at least its well-being), panicked and moved even closer to the opponents of the Gorbachev reforms. On July 23, 1991, they published “A Word to the People” in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, and it became the anti-reform manifesto.

Composed by writer Alexander Prokhanov and signed by him and other foes of liberalization like the writers Rasputin and Yuri Bondarev, “A Word to the People” called for ousting the traitors from power and replacing them with patriotic leaders: “Let’s wake up and come to our senses, arise old and young for the country. Let’s say ‘No!’ to the destroyers and occupiers. Let’s put an end to our retreat…. We are starting a popular movement, calling into our ranks those who have recognized the terrible adversity that has befallen our country.”

The critic Vladimir Bondarenko, who shared their views, called these people “flaming reactionaries.” Their alarmist slogans were supposed to provide ideological cover for the coup planned by the counterreformers. On the night of August 18, 1991, the conspirators declared martial law and pushed Gorbachev aside. They brought tanks into the capital, assuming that this display of military might would scare off the populace, but it quickly became obvious that the putsch had failed. Thousands of Muscovites gathered at the House of Soviets of the Russian Federation (known as the White House) to demonstrate their support for charismatic Boris Yeltsin, who headed the resistance to the coup.

The conspirators’ tanks did not dare storm the White House, and the troops loyal to Yeltsin arrested the putsch leaders three days later. The Soviet Union fell apart, and its president, Gorbachev, turned over his authority to Yeltsin. Soviet Communism collapsed after seventy-four years. “The empire ended, history ended, life ended—it didn’t matter what came next. It didn’t matter in what order firebrands and shards would come flying or at what speed,” wrote Andrei Bitov.21

A cultural artifact of that historic moment is the poem Yevgeny Yevtushenko declaimed on the morning of August 20 from the balcony of the White House to the crowd of two hundred thousand defenders of democracy, in which he compared the White House to a “wounded marble swan of freedom.” It was, according to Yevtushenko, his “very best bad poem.”22


Gorbachev was better educated than Khrushchev or Brezhnev, but less well read than Stalin or Andropov. Yeltsin’s cultural worldview was apparently much narrower than Gorbachev’s. It’s unlikely that Yeltsin could have recited a Lermontov poem extemporaneously or do chitchat about the latest play or novel, like Gorbachev. But Yeltsin could act as a battering ram at dramatic moments, which sometimes helped and often hindered the cause.

The liberal wing of the Soviet cultural elite, which had bet on Gorbachev, recoiled from its idol as soon as it became clear that the reforms were stuck, and followed Yeltsin as the more decisive leader. Yeltsin, even though he had been formed like Gorbachev in the depths of the Party nomenklatura, was initially more democratic and more accessible and appeared to be more pliable: Russian intellectuals assumed that he could be eventually shaped into a “good” ruler for Russia. And why not: after all, Yeltsin spoke respectfully to them, using the formal pronoun “Vy” and their name and patronymic, unlike Gorbachev, who used the familiar “ty” with everyone (a bad Party habit).

Yeltsin seemed to appreciate the imagination of his new liberal advisors, but unlike Gorbachev, he did not see high culture as his useful ally. In breaking the Soviet system, Yeltsin rejected its cultural policies as well. The new president must have considered (not without reason) all those thousands of writers, poets, artists, and musicians who, as members of the “creative” unions, had been supported by the Communist state, as wastrels and spongers, living off the people.

The Soviet cultural apparatus had been in place since the Stalin era, around sixty years. It was well oiled by state subsidies and controlled from top to bottom. Stalin knew why he needed high culture and he managed it with carrot and stick. The Soviet leaders after him did not have his clarity on the issue, but they followed in his wake—however, using the stick less and counting more on the edifying nature of carrots. Under Gorbachev the stick had turned into a twig that no one feared, and the intellectuals wanted to take over the allocation of carrots: this was their golden opportunity.

When the Soviet regime fell, the totalitarian stick vanished completely, but so did the carrots. The state-sponsored film industry withered; the circulation numbers of the traditional “thick” literary journals, which had climbed astronomically under Gorbachev, declined sharply; the publication of poetry and prose also fell; the only source of income for symphony orchestras and ballet troupes were foreign tours; thousands of Russian musicians and dancers moved to the West, since the borders were open for the first time in decades. New Russian stars like the singer Dmitri Khvorostovsky, pianist Yevgeny Kissin, and violinist Maxim Vengerov settled in Europe. Many people in Russia and the West had expected an immediate flowering of culture after the fall of the Communist regime. Almost the complete opposite occurred.


The catastrophic drying up of the cultural flow took place amid general impoverishment caused by the radical turn toward a market economy by the Yeltsin team. Prices rose thirty times over, salaries and pensions were paid irregularly, and savings became worthless. The silent dissatisfaction of the masses was used by the parliament leadership, which had turned into a center of opposition to Yeltsin; in the fall of 1993, parliament tried to overthrow him. As it had been during the failed coup of 1991, the sympathies of the intelligentsia were divided: the president was supported by those who wanted the reforms to continue, while the “flaming reactionaries” inspired the conservative parliament. Both sides thought their opponents were dragging Russia into an abyss.

Subsequent events brought the final splash of participation by the cultural elite in Russia’s political life in the twentieth century. There was a whiff of civil war in the air, which both sides feared even as they realized that things were heading toward armed confrontation. The embattled sides needed ideological cover, which could be supplied only by the intellectuals. The reactionaries heated up rhetoric about Yeltsin’s “criminally cosmopolitan regime” that was destroying Russian culture and the state. The reformers called on the president to deal forcefully with the “fascist” opponents.

Manifestos from both sides exacerbated the situation, but Yeltsin’s tanks had the last word on October 4, 1993, firing on the opposition White House, which was then taken by storm. This confrontation between president and parliament ended in Yeltsin’s victory, but the fact that there were many casualties, including civilians, shocked the country.

Yeltsin found determined supporters here, too, including influential ones like Academician Dmitri Likhachev and the poets Akhmadulina and Okudzhava. Yeltsin’s firing on the White House united Communists with former dissidents like Zinoviev and Maximov against him. Sinyavsky complained bitterly, “Today the most horrible thing is happening: my old enemies are starting to tell the truth sometimes, and my own tribe of Russian intelligentsia, instead of creating some sort of opposition to Yeltsin and somehow correcting the mistakes of Yeltsin’s rule, is once again hailing every move of the regime and supporting its harsh measures. All that has happened before. That is how the Soviet regime began.”23

Among the defenders of the White House were the writers Alexander Prokhanov and Eduard Limonov. Only the bizarre zigzags of post-Soviet politics could have brought such disparate personalities together. Prokhanov, back in the Brezhnev era, burst onto the scene with his novel A Tree in the Center of Kabul (about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), which earned him a prize from the Defense Ministry and the nickname “Nightingale of the General Staff.” Continuing to describe in a flowery, quasi-expressionist style events in hot spots around the globe (novels set in Cambodia, Mozambique, Nicaragua), Prokhanov quickly moved up the ladder, becoming secretary of the board of the Writers’ Union.

Limonov, on the contrary, was always marginal. He started out as a sophisticated avant-garde poet, known in Moscow’s bohemian circles also as someone who could sew a pair of durable jeans inexpensively. With many other nonconformists, Limonov ended up in the United States in the mid-1970s, and in 1979 published his first novel, It’s Me, Eddie, which created a brouhaha in émigré circles with its sexual episodes, unusually frank for Russian literature (including the homosexual encounter between the novel’s autobiographical hero and a black New Yorker in Central Park) and its free use of previously unprintable language.

In his New York years, he stood out in the rough-and-tumble Russian bohemian crowd with his neatness, punctuality, and reliability. Those qualities helped him get a job as butler in a millionaire’s house. But, behind the polished servant’s mask there lurked the adventurer and the neurotic mind of a Russian Louis Céline without the anti-Semitism. The artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan, a friend of Limonov’s, recalled the writer’s three suicide attempts (the first when he was still in school), all caused by failed love affairs.24 Today, Limonov claims to have “iron mental health,” but back then, it was a different story.

Like the experienced tailor he was, Limonov recut his personal myth many times. People who knew him in his youth say he was a mama’s boy, while Limonov’s nostalgic autobiographical prose (Teenager Savenko, Young Scoundrel, and We Had a Great Epoch) depicts him as an adroit and fearless gang leader. Limonov’s father was an officer in the NKVD (KGB), but the young writer positioned himself among Moscow dissidents as staunchly anti-Soviet. When he immigrated, he tried to become a cosmopolitan author in the United States and later in France. Then, to the astonishment of his New York and Paris acquaintances, he declared himself a Russian patriot par excellence.

The biggest somersault came in the post-Soviet era, when Limonov moved back to Moscow, where in 1994 he founded the radical National-Bolshevik Party with the proclaimed goal of uniting extreme right and extreme left (in Limonov’s terminology, “fascists” and “anarchists”) to fight against democracy and the “new world order,” which he described as the “total despotism of the U.S.A. and the European Community over the world.”25

In 2001, Limonov was arrested and in 2003 he was sentenced to four years in prison on charges of illegally procuring firearms, but he was released on probation a month later. Limonov learned of the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11 while in prison, and the news “made him exult,” because America “is a country of violence, dictating its will to everyone. It deserved to be punished.”26

Over the two years in prison, Limonov wrote eight books, including his utopian manifesto, Another Russia: Outline of the Future, in which he proclaimed the collapse of the old Russian culture and presented his ideas of new, nomadic Russia. Now, Limonov said, “a writer’s glory no longer excites me. My literary talent has received world recognition. Now I want my political gift to be recognized.”27


The low-circulation opposition newspapers where Prokhanov and Limonov published their passionate anti-Yeltsin appeals were shut down by presidential decree after the White House capitulated on October 4, 1993, under the pressure of pro-Yeltsin troops. The reactionaries spoke of violation of freedom of the press. However, many of these publications reopened, but they continued to be unpopular: none of the opposition ideologists had national authority.

There was probably only one man at that time who did: Solzhenitsyn. People were waiting to hear his opinion of the traumatic events that shook the nation. But Solzhenitsyn, who had lived twelve and a half years in the West by then and had announced that he was planning to return to Russia, spoke unusually briefly and impassively, characterizing the clash of October 3–4 as a “completely unavoidable and expected stage in our tortuous and long path for freedom from Communism.”28

Perhaps Solzhenitsyn was being cautious so as to retain room for political maneuver. He had just completed the major work of his life, the ten-volume historical epic The Red Wheel, planned when he was an eighteen-year-old student. His idea was to describe the February 1917 revolution, which brought down the tsar and opened the way for the eventual Bolshevik victory, which he always considered the most significant and fateful event in Russia’s history, changing the destiny of the country and the world.

Solzhenitsyn explained the symbolism of the title this way: “Revolution is an enormous cosmic Wheel, like a galaxy…that begins unfolding—and all the people, including the ones that started it turning, become grains of sand. And they die there in multitudes.”29 In order to describe the causes of revolution, Solzhenitsyn also tackled World War I and its roots, concentrating on four “knots”: August 1914, October 1916, March 1917, and April 1917.

This historic canvas of colossal scope (Solzhenitsyn worked on it for a solid eighteen years) presented complex narrative problems, which the author attempted to solve by compressing enormous documentary material through various devices: there are psychological profiles of political leaders of the period (the portraits of Lenin and Nicholas II are outstanding), chronicles of events, documents (letters, telegrams, leaflets), and ample quotations from newspapers.

It is all painstakingly organized, particularly with the help of rhythmically active prose. Solzhenitsyn manipulates the narrative rhythm, constantly changing it, juxtaposing contrasting sections and small episodes. This is musical prose, comparable not to War and Peace, as it sometimes is, but to the operas of Mussorgsky or Rimsky-Korsakov.

When I wrote to Solzhenitsyn in 1985 about this (in connection with October 1916), he replied: “You felt it very correctly: frankly, my favorite ‘literature’ teacher is Beethoven, I somehow always hear him when I write.”30The Red Wheel, contrary to the popular perception of Solzhenitsyn as a heavily didactic writer, has no central hero to express the author’s point of view—it is dialogical (to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s terminology), or even symphonic.

Solzhenitsyn clearly wanted to give the reader a maximum amount of “objective” information to consider: hence the stress on describing real events instead of love triangles, so beloved in the novel genre. Trying to comprehend what led Russia to revolution, which he considered a national tragedy, Solzhenitsyn came to the conclusion that “everyone was at fault, including the ordinary people, who easily fell for the cheap infection, the cheap trick, and rushed to loot, to kill, rushed to join the bloody dance. But the guiltiest of all, of course, were those in charge.”31

This point of view precluded the acceptance of The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn’s life work, both among liberals, who still considered the February revolution an important milestone in the failed history of democracy in Russia, and among conservatives, who thought that all the country’s woes were caused by outsiders, Jews being the main culprits.

Solzhenitsyn’s relations with the Western political elite were not very good. He was always a fierce opponent of détente with the Soviet Union. Feeling that Western compromises would inevitably lead to catastrophe, Solzhenitsyn came up with an astonishing thesis that “World War III has already taken place and it ended with the defeat of the West.”32

With this polemical slogan, the writer thrust himself into the very center of American political debate. His moral capital in the West was substantial at the time, and Solzhenitsyn decided to use it to make a difference in US foreign policy. His 1973 “Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” an ambitious program of reforms for Communist Russia, was never answered. Apparently, he expected US politicians to heed his advice more readily. He was mistaken.

The West did exploit Solzhenitsyn to the hilt in the Cold War. But the writer wanted to be more than an ideological weapon in someone else’s hands. He aspired to a position of real political power, without getting American citizenship first. (Congress had discussed making him an honorary citizen but then quietly dropped the idea.)

There were many European and American politicians, especially conservatives, who listened to Solzhenitsyn attentively. In 1976 the election platform of the Republican Party included a reference to Solzhenitsyn as a great beacon of human valor and morality. But when it came to real actions, the Americans were very cautious.

No American president—not Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton—met with Solzhenitsyn; they were not ready for even this symbolic gesture. Reagan did invite Solzhenitsyn to visit the White House in 1982 as part of a large group of other Soviet dissidents, some of them the writer’s implacable foes, which made it unacceptable for Solzhenitsyn; the press reported that the reason the president was not eager to meet separately with Solzhenitsyn was that the writer allegedly was a “symbol of extreme Russian nationalism.”

The real reason for American wariness of Solzhenitsyn was that they did not see any real alternative to negotiating with the Soviet Union, while the writer denounced such dealings as useless and even harmful. In the eyes of Western pragmatists, Solzhenitsyn was acting beyond his area of competence.

When he attacked the Soviet Union and its gulag, it was perceived as a truthful account by a fearless eyewitness and a great writer. But in his interviews and speeches, the most famous being the Harvard graduation address in 1978, Solzhenitsyn started criticizing the West, offering his profoundly conservative advice, and the attitude toward him changed markedly.

The Western press began referring to Solzhenitsyn as an outsider, an old-fashioned moralist, anti-Semite, monarchist, and religious fanatic, and even compared him to the Ayatollah Khomeini. (Many of these arguments came from recent immigrants from Russia; Solzhenitsyn tried to counter them, but in vain.) He repaid the Western press (and more broadly, Western culture as a whole) in kind, accusing it of arrogance, cynicism, irresponsibility, and immorality.

In the end, the gap between the writer and many of the Western intellectuals who had put in a lot of effort to publicize Solzhenitsyn as an international prophet, the new Leo Tolstoy, widened dramatically. By the time perestroika had begun in the Soviet Union, the peak of Solzhenitsyn’s influence in the West was behind him.


Back home, however, Solzhenitsyn’s reputation was higher than ever. Gorbachev was wary of him but was forced by public opinion to appear better disposed toward the writer, and in the fall of 1989 the Politburo gave permission to publish The Gulag Archipelago in the journal Novy Mir, where Tvardovsky had printed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962.

The subscription to Novy Mir instantly rose to 2,710,000. Sergei Zalygin, the editor, hurried to declare 1990 “the year of Solzhenitsyn,” proudly stating: “This concentration on a single author has perhaps not been known in any literature before and will not be known again.”33

Fourteen years before that moment, in the West, Solzhenitsyn had predicted that if his Gulag Archipelago were widely distributed in the Soviet Union, “things would get very tough for the Communist ideology in a very short time.” As it happened, Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work became widely available to Soviet readers at a time when that ideology was already crumbling. That is why it is difficult to assess accurately the degree to which Archipelago’s publication (it sold a hundred thousand copies in book form in 1990, too) helped Yeltsin’s victory and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn imagined Soviet readers to still be the way he had known them many years earlier, when every important book was pored over by the public, read thoroughly and thoughtfully and then discussed heatedly. In the new reality, readers were bombarded by formerly banned and “subversive” books and were restless and inattentive. In addition, the pitched battle in politics, covered round the clock by television, also distracted even the most fervent book lovers.

Solzhenitsyn’s long stay in exile was an obstacle as well. The loss of contact was bilateral. The writer had spent his eighteen years in Vermont in great isolation, working up to fourteen hours a day. In all those years, he came to the phone only a few times, he claimed; the connection with the outside world was maintained by his indefatigable wife, Natalya.

Neither Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana nor even Gorky, when he was on Capri, lived in such isolation. Therefore, they had a better idea of the evolution of their Russian audience. Also, both understood how the capitalist press worked (Gorky had been a reporter in his youth) and how to use it.

Eighty-year-old Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana readily received correspondents even from tabloids, if he felt he needed to express his position on a current issue, and he did not take offense at their pushiness. But Solzhenitsyn stopped giving interviews in 1983, explaining huffily, “I realized that no one was asking for my criticism and that I was wasting my time, which is precious to me, on nothing. I decided: enough, from now on I will concentrate only on my literary work.”34

Solzhenitsyn’s political manifestos in the Soviet period had one serious flaw: there was no clear addressee. Solzhenitsyn as polemicist worked in one genre, appeals urbi et orbi. His statements could have a powerful public resonance when they appeared (also leaving potentially fascinating material for future historians), but their immediate practical effect usually remained nil. That was the fate of Solzhenitsyn’s famous texts “Letter to the Soviet Leaders”(1973) and “Live Not By Lies!”(1974).

A similar fate befell his next important manifesto, Rebuilding Russia [in Russian, How Shall We Organize Russia?], when he finally decided to break his silence for the first time in the years of perestroika. He finished the long article in the summer of 1990 and immediately responded to the invitation of Prime Minister of Russia Ivan Silayev to come to Moscow (he declined then, feeling it was premature) by asking him to publish his latest manifesto in a large edition.

His not-so-subtle hint was picked up instantly and Rebuilding Russia was printed simultaneously in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta, with a total circulation of twenty-seven million. Solzhenitsyn’s manifesto could be purchased at any newspaper kiosk in the land for a few kopecks. The writer later admitted that he “had never dreamed” of something like that. For the government, which still had direct control of the leading publications, it was a generous gesture, which, as it became clear, obliged it to nothing.

The ideas Solzhenitsyn expressed in Rebuilding Russia were radical for the times: he proposed liquidating the Communist Party, getting rid of the KGB, moving to a market economy, and privatizing land. His main point was immediately disbanding the Soviet Union, giving independence to the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Instead of the Soviet empire, the author proposed creating a new Russian Union that would include Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia, as well as the northern regions of Kazakhstan, settled by Russians.

The implementation of these ideas would be in the hands of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, but none of its leading factions supported Solzhenitsyn’s proposals in the fall of 1990—they did not suit Gorbachev, who was trying to preserve the Soviet Union, nor the political elites of Ukraine, Belorussia, or Kazakhstan. Solzhenitsyn’s article was rejected almost without discussion by both Communists and democrats.

Gorbachev announced then that the ideas of “the great writer were unacceptable,” since Solzhenitsyn “was all in the past.” The suggestion of obsolescence was prompted by the deliberately archaic style of Solzhenitsyn’s text, which, as one reader put it, “makes you think Solzhenitsyn is addressing our great-grandfathers in 1913.”35

His opponents called Rebuilding Russia a retrospective utopia. Anti-Solzhenitsyn demonstrations were organized in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and newspapers with his article and his pictures were burned.

Solzhenitsyn had made a tactical error once again: instead of trying to influence concrete political leaders or deputies of the Supreme Soviet, he addressed himself to the people in general, the abstract masses, which, he felt, would read his work and in some mysterious way implement all his suggestions (there were more than two hundred in Rebuilding Russia).

But his manifesto did not interest the mass reader at all: it seemed too long, boring, and affected. He chose not to formulate his ideas in a simple, clear, and effective slogan-like style, preferring to use a highfalutin vocabulary. This was the conflict between Solzhenitsyn the writer and Solzhenitsyn the politician, in which the former won to the detriment of the message. Solzhenitsyn never did acknowledge this, explaining away the failure of his proposals by the fact that “first Gorbachev suppressed them, forbidding discussion…and then many people, busy with daily life and sitting by the television, as was fashionable then—they kept watching and watching the deputies give speeches, waiting for something to happen there—they missed these ideas…this means that the country at that time had not matured enough for those thoughts.”36


When in his opinion Russia had matured enough for his thoughts, Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland. It took place in May 1994, and his popularity and prestige in Russia was still incredibly high. He was even asked to run for president (he refused) and some people seriously thought that if he wanted, Solzhenitsyn could become a new Russian tsar.

But Solzhenitsyn did not want the burden of power or the responsibility, although he did not refuse the right to influence policy at first: “I, for as long as I have the strength, will try to help the people with my words, written and spoken. For we are in a crisis.”

From all appearances, Solzhenitsyn had only a vague idea of his part in the solution of that crisis. He did not want to join any existing movement in Russia or start his own party: “I am against parties in general. There are heavenly creations—nation, family—but a party…I not only have never belonged to any party—I reject on principle creating parties and a party system.”37 Still, he maintained that “morality must not only influence the hearts of politicians, but it must have a certain advisory function. Not legislative, not executive power, but simply an advisory influence.”38

That position on the eve of his return to Russia was yet another modification of his old idea that “a great writer is like a second government.” The model here for Solzhenitsyn was Leo Tolstoy, with his attempt to influence politics by the force of his colossal moral authority.

But when Solzhenitsyn gave a long speech televised live on October 28, 1994, to the parliament, the event was not reminiscent of Tolstoy, who avoided solemn meetings with the powers-that-be, but of Gorky’s pomp-filled return in 1928 to Stalinist Moscow from Italy.

For all the outward similarity, the substantive difference was great. Stalin, who was by then the dictator of the Soviet Union, saw in Gorky a potential powerful ally. The cultural programs of Stalin and Gorky did not always correspond, but the ruler and the writer demonstrated their solidarity to the world, each secretly hoping to use the other for his own goals. In exchange for Gorky’s public approval of his policies, Stalin conferred on him the unprecedented power of influencing the country’s cultural transformation.

Precisely because Boris Yeltsin was no Stalin, Solzhenitsyn could not have played the role of Gorky with him, even if he had wanted to. Yeltsin did not even have the dictatorial powers of Khrushchev. Without Khrushchev’s sanction, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich could not have appeared in the Soviet Union of that time. It is unlikely that Brezhnev actually read anything by Solzhenitsyn; Andropov definitely did, and hated it. Gorbachev’s aide recorded Gorbachev’s passionate reaction in January 1989 to Solzhenitsyn’s “Lenin in Zurich”(a chapter from August 1914); the ruler recounted what he had read at length and with emotion: “Strong stuff! Angry, but talented!”39

While in power, Yeltsin could not be suspected of a passion for reading, but he was the first leader of Russia to publicly demonstrate his respect for Solzhenitsyn. According to his press secretary, Yeltsin considered few of his contemporaries his equal, but he valued the power of moral authority, and so he was quite anxious before his first meeting with Solzhenitsyn face-to-face on November 16, 1994.40

By that time, Yeltsin permitted himself to meet even high-ranking guests while tipsy. But the president sensed that this would not do for Solzhenitsyn, who while not a teetotaler, did not approve of alcohol. Hard-drinking Viktor Nekrasov, author of the war classic In the Trenches of Stalingrad, recalled the time that Solzhenitsyn invited him over for a talk “about the future of Russian literature,” which turned into a half-hour monologue on the evils of drink: “When will you stop drinking? You’re not a writer anymore, you’re a writer plus a bottle of vodka.”41

The president’s aides tried to encourage him: “Who is Solzhenitsyn, anyway? He’s not a classic, no Tolstoy. And everyone is sick of him. So, he suffered from totalitarianism, yes, he knows history. But there are thousands like him! And there is only one of you.”42 Yeltsin’s foes tried to pit Solzhenitsyn against him when the meeting was announced. “Will Solzhenitsyn settle for the pathetic role of private confidant to an obstinate drunken fool who is consciously and ruthlessly destroying our common home, Russia?”43

Yeltsin decided not to tease the bull and appeared for the meeting as sober as a judge and surprisingly well prepared. The conversation (without any witnesses) lasted more than four hours, and apparently went well—despite the obvious political disagreements—since both participants ended up having a drink, to the president’s great relief. When a journalist asked Solzhenitsyn to comment on his visit, the writer remarked: “He’s very Russian.” And added, “Too Russian.”44

Despite the temporary cease-fire, Solzhenitsyn’s influence on real politics remained a phantom in Russia, as well. His “historic” speech at the parliament in 1994 was received sourly: the members of the government and a good half of the deputies did not show up, the audience reacted wanly and applauded sparingly (mostly the Communists). Some of the younger deputies laughed openly during his speech: the familiar moaning about “our woes and our wounds” did not touch them.

Relations between Solzhenitsyn and Yeltsin quickly deteriorated. At first the authorities gave the writer a platform for his views: in April 1995 on ORT, national Channel One, Solzhenitsyn began his talk show, in which he criticized the parliament, the Russian electoral system, grumbled about the horrible situation in the villages and attacked the government for its war in Chechnya.

His television appearances were not particularly popular, but they did irritate the authorities, who waited six months (there had been twelve fifteen-minute broadcasts in that period) and then blocked the writer’s access to television with a lame excuse about “low ratings”(while everyone knew that ratings were manipulated in Moscow). A commentator noted sarcastically: “Imagine Leo Tolstoy bringing an article to a magazine, and hearing, ‘Sorry, Count, your rating is too low! We’re going to put a page of police jokes in your slot.’”45

The unceremonious canning of Solzhenitsyn’s program, which pleased some, was seen as a sad symbol of the era by others. It signaled major changes in the country’s cultural situation. It was becoming ever clearer that the old Russian logocentrism, with its idolization of the word and its magical properties, was waning.

That great Russian tradition had had its high points. One was Solzhenitsyn’s heroic resistance to the Soviet political system in the 1960s–1970s. In 1978, Maximov, then editor of the leading émigré journal Kontinent and no apologist for Solzhenitsyn, summarized the general perception of the writer’s importance: “You can accept Solzhenitsyn or not, listen to him or not, love him or hate him, but the tragic era in which we live is passing under his sign and without any consideration of our wants will be named for him.”46


Maximov’s statement seemed more indisputable then than it did some twenty years later. In 1991, a revolution took place in Russia, whether you consider it for better or worse. The émigré philosopher Georgy Fedotov, watching the tectonic shifts in Stalinist Russia from Paris in 1938, said with a sigh: “No nation comes out of a revolutionary catastrophe in the same shape that it went into it. An entire historic epoch, with its experience, tradition, and culture, is crossed out. A new page of life is turned over.”47 Among the causes for radical cultural changes in the 1930s, Fedotov listed the people’s loss of religious faith and the quick absorption by the masses “of civilization at its most superficial: Marxism, Darwinism, technology.”48

By the end of the twentieth century, a somewhat similar situation had developed in Russia: the hollow pyramid of Communist ideology had collapsed, and the country embarked on a new, dizzying spiral of Westernization, which in many ways turned out to be a mixed blessing. The Soviet censors had diligently sifted the cultural product coming from the West. Now, a huge flow of bad American movies, bland pop music, and pulp fiction rushed into the country. At the same time, the state made severe cuts in financing national theaters, serious films, opera, ballet, and symphony orchestras.

Literature in particular lost ground, after playing such a visible role in perestroika. The Soviet Union used to call itself “the most reading country in the world.” In contemporary Russia, as in the entire world, people read less and less, therefore print runs for books, the traditional “thick” journals, and highbrow periodicals were falling. The public idols were no longer writers and poets but pop musicians, film actors, and television celebrities, as it is everywhere else.

One of the last serious authors who made his way into the pantheon of cultural heroes was the eccentric Venedikt Erofeyev, who in his popular novella “Moscow-Petushki”(which had circulated in manuscript for years in the USSR and was at last published in 1988, only two years before his death at fifty-one) created an autobiographical image of an alcoholic and tramp traveling the commuter train from Moscow to the end of the line, Petushki, that resonated with pages from Dostoevsky and Rozanov. Erofeyev, an erudite and subtle stylist in the surrealistic vein, managed, as had Sergei Dovlatov who died the same year, to intrigue the reader, creating a memorable image of an ordinary guy, who with the help of a bottle of vodka turns into an existentialist philosopher commenting acidly on Soviet absurdity.

As Russian literature in the 1990s ceded its former central role, poetry in particular lost its former public significance, becoming, in the wry observation of critic Viktor Toporov, a marginal occupation within a marginal profession: “One poet has written several thousand poems but still is famous only for screaming like a banshee. Another reads from catalogue cards, cursing under his breath, which due to his profoundly intellectual appearance creates a comic impression. A third composes one mediocre poem a year—and is proud. A fourth tells boring stories in a booming voice, hoping they pass for poetry.”49

These lampoon portraits of prominent contemporary poets (respectively, Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinshtein, Sergei Gandlevsky, and Yevgeny Rein) were manifestly unfair, but they reflected the marginal status of the poets, which the writers themselves recognized, using it to justify their position as observers rather than participants and certainly not arbiters of public life.

Gandlevsky (a serious poet who in fact does write very little) admitted, “With the years, I came to terms with the notion that I do not belong to the same civilization as nine-tenths of my countrymen. This narrows my ambitions. You understand as a writer: you are not the spokesperson of those people.”50 Paradoxically, Gandlevsky connects his refusal to take a public stand to the same Soviet experience that produced the larger-than-life figures of Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, stressing “the danger of overestimating the importance of one’s message, a supergoal, becoming a missionary—pride always finds a loophole: we may have ended up in a puddle, but at least it’s the deepest one in the world.”51

The postmodernist Prigov also rejected the traditional great claims made by Russian writers: “The intelligentsia fought for the minds of the masses. I don’t do that. I only fight for my personal spot in the cultural marketplace.”52

With Russian culture atomized along the Western model, writers focused on finding comfortable genre or stylistic niches. Vladimir Sorokin brilliantly parodied the classic unhurried Russian novel and the placid socialist realist industrial fables (“boy meets girl and tractor”), exploding the traditional schemes with scenes of wild sex and sadism. (The pioneer in this field was Yuri Mamleyev, the grandfather of the contemporary Russian literary mysticism.)

The disturbing sex descriptions were particularly shocking when Sorokin read them aloud, being a quiet, pleasant-looking man with a stutter. Another prose writer, Viktor Pelevin, first cultivated an image as a homegrown eccentric (walking around Moscow in a gorilla mask), then became a recluse in the manner of Thomas Pynchon (refusing to give interviews or have his photograph taken, communicating only by email), while writing stylish science fiction in the manner of Philip K. Dick. He claimed, like Prigov, that he wrote not to lead his readers anywhere but rather to entertain himself.

Broader audiences were addressed by Edvard Radzinsky, the author of popular historical novels and plays, by Grigory Chkhartishvili, a Japan scholar, who under the pseudonym B. Akunin was the first to offer a cycle of “retro” detective novels, based on popular British models, but with a whiff of Dostoevsky, and by the much less pretentious (and therefore even more popular) authors of contemporary police procedurals and chick lit like Darya Dontsova, Alexandra Marinina, and Maria Arbatova.

The Soviet and even the post-Soviet value systems became irrelevant. When a group of influential critics was asked to name the most important works of the 1990s at the end of the decade, Sorokin got as many votes as Solzhenitsyn (two), and Gandlevsky was even with Brodsky (both got four votes). The leaders among poets were the slick parodist Timur Kibirov and the philosophical ironist Lev Losev, and among prose writers, Pelevin came right behind Makanin and Georgy Vladimov, whose historical novel about Nazi collaborator Andrei Vlasov, hanged in 1945 on Stalin’s orders, was the literary sensation of 1994.


On December 31, 1999, on the eve of the twenty-first century and the third millennium (a date to which many at the time attributed mystical significance), Yeltsin appeared with a televised address to announce to the stunned nation that he was retiring early and handing the presidency to Vladimir Putin, forty-seven, a previously little-known former KGB officer who became head of the Federal Security Service in 1998 and in August 1999 was named prime minister.

Yeltsin’s departure, which had been secretly prepared for a long time but came as a total surprise to the country, drew a line under an entire era. During his turbulent administration, Russia came dangerously close to an economic crash and political collapse. Yeltsin confessed: “I am tired and the country is tired of me.”53 Solzhenitsyn summarized it all in 2000 even more forcefully: “There is nothing left that had not been ruined or embezzled.”54

Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachev, truly did want to end the Communist regime in Russia. But like Gorbachev, he often improvised, with disastrous results. Masses of people were impoverished and disillusioned in the concepts of democracy and the market economy. The crash of liberal ideals led to words like “democrap” and “piratization.” In the new ideological vacuum, as it had been at the turn of the century, bearded (and shaven) intellectuals diligently set about finding national identity, the elusive “Russian idea.”

Early in perestroika the philosophical works of the great fumbler Berdyaev, who died in exile in France in 1948, became fashionable. His book The Russian Idea, written during World War II, defined the main trait of the Slavic soul as religious Messianism: “The Russian nation was not a nation of culture primarily, as were the nations of Western Europe, it was more a nation of revelations and inspiration, it knew no measure and easily fell into extremism.”55 But Berdyaev with his essays on Russian ambivalence always looked suspiciously cosmopolitan to nationalists.

Some of them now made historian Lev Gumilev (1912–1992) their new idol. The son of two famous poets—Nikolai Gumilev, who was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921, and Akhmatova—he was a complex, truly tragic figure. I met him in 1966, after Akhmatova’s death. As a young violin student at Leningrad Conservatory, I was asked to select music for the memorial service at the Writers’ Union. I suggested Bach, knowing how much she loved his music. Gumilev, who resembled Picasso and rolled his Rs, countered aggressively: “No, only Russian Orthodox composers!” As a compromise I played Prokofiev’s First Violin Sonata; naturally, neither Gumilev nor I could have known then that the Eurasianist composer was a follower of Christian Science.

Lev Gumilev was arrested four times—as he and most people presumed, because of the anti-Soviet stance of his parents—and he spent a total of fourteen years in prisons and camps, during which time he developed an original theory of ethnogenesis, according to which the biological dominant in the development of a nation was its passionarnost’ (“passionarity”), which he explained as a heightened drive to exploits and self-sacrifice, created by the influence of the biosphere.

Gumilev liked to boast that the idea of passionarity (“like all ideas of genius,” he would add with a chuckle) came to him in the camp. According to him, “every ethnos appears as the result of a certain explosion of passionarity, then, gradually losing it, enters a period of inertia, which ends eventually with the ethnos breaking down.”56 He defined the lifespan of an ethnos as approximately fifteen hundred years, and contemporary Russia, he suggested, was close to the inertia phase, which would give her in the near future “three hundred years of a golden autumn, an era of harvest, when the ethnos leaves behind a unique culture for coming generations.”57

This comforting idea, popular in the post-Communist chaos, had Eurasianist roots. Gumilev positioned Russia between Europe and Asia, in a role of uniting force, and insisted that Russia had always been on good terms with the Turks and Mongols: he believed that the Mongol invasions in the eighth century and later were not the historical disasters textbooks made them out to be. This made some traditionalists call Gumilev a Russophobe, but on the other hand, it was useful for the influential opponents of closer ties with the West. They repeated Gumilev’s casual phrase that the “Turks and Mongols can be sincere friends, while the English, French, and Germans, I am certain, can only be cunning exploiters.”58

Contemporary Eurasianists call for the creation of a new empire on the ruins of the Soviet Union, with Russia at its center. The United States is the great Satan for the neo-Eurasianists, and they see the mission of the Russian people as stopping the American-sponsored expansion of the Western liberal model of economic and cultural development.59 They propose creating new geopolitical axes: Moscow–Beijing, Moscow–Dehli, and Moscow–Tehran, and also uniting with the Arab world. Consequently, they argue, Russia’s cultural priorities must be Eastern, not Western.


For Solzhenitsyn, the idea of building a new global empire headed by Russia was always alien, despite the widespread perceptions to the contrary. “The grandeur of a nation is in the high level of its inner development, not the external,” he wrote. Solzhenitsyn dismissed the neo-Eurasianists as “good-for-nothing theoreticians.”60 But he, too, perceived American cultural expansion into Russia as a clear and present danger.

In his 1998 book, Russia Collapsing, which can be seen as the final manifesto and spiritual testament of the octogenarian writer, Solzhenitsyn passionately warned that the twenty-first century could become “the last century for Russians” because of the looming demographic catastrophe (he pointed out that Russia’s population was decreasing by a million a year) and the degradation of the national character: “We are facing irreversible loss of the spiritual traditions, roots, and organic nature of our life,” which he defined as the “whole of our faith, soul, and character, our continent in the world cultural structure.”61

At the time, few people paid attention to Solzhenitsyn’s desperate warning about the national cultural crisis, which he considered more terrible than any political or economic failures. Solzhenitsyn was still seen as an important figure, but one that belonged to the past, to the eras of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. At the end of the century in Russia, he was seen by some as a tragic patriarch, a Russian King Lear.

Other observers also found theatrical comparisons but of a more skeptical nature—for them, Solzhenitsyn was a great director and actor who had a successful run in the show called Struggle Against Communism playing prophet and ascetic moralist. The essayist Boris Paramonov, who had visited Solzhenitsyn in Vermont, even suggested that “if Solzhenitsyn is going to play a role now, let it be a role that coincides as much as possible with his real image as diligent homeowner, who lives in a house of plenty. Those are the images he must project in Russia now, those are the ideals to present, instead of talking about morality, repentance, and salvation through suffering.”62

As he had in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn isolated himself in his estate in Troitse-Lykovo outside Moscow, coming into the capital rarely, and as he had lived in exile in the United States, not coming to the telephone. Age took its toll on the writer, whose enviable stamina for many years had allowed him to work tirelessly and without days off. A stroke disabled Solzhenitsyn’s left arm. It became difficult for him to get up, to walk, to receive visitors. This curtailed his contacts with the outside world even more and increased the perception that he was an isolated, lonely, and tragic figure.

The sense that “time is out of joint” was increased by the general decline of “high” culture, painful for the intelligentsia. Public opinion polls suggested the rapid deterioration of the influence of intellectuals on the masses. Solzhenitsyn was the only writer still named regularly as a moral compass and cultural leader, even though the number of his loyal fans had decreased drastically. The other moral models mentioned were Andrei Sakharov (who died in 1989) and Dmitri Likhachev (who died in 1999), an expert on ancient Russian culture.

Tellingly, in the last years of the century, this short list of cultural icons included the actor and director Nikita Mikhalkov, a member of a controversial clan. His father, Sergei, a popular children’s poet and a three-time Stalin Prize winner, was the author of the lyrics approved by Stalin for the Soviet anthem in 1943 and who then reworked them in 2000 at the request of President Putin; his brother, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, a film director, worked successfully both in the Soviet Union and in the United States (The First Teacher, his debut in 1965, was Eurasianist in spirit; The Story of Asya Klyachina, Who Loved but Did Not Get Married, with Iya Savvina’s unforgettable performance as the lame country girl, was banned in 1967 and released only eleven years later; and in Hollywood, Runaway Train, with screenplay by Akira Kurosawa).

The writer Leonid Borodin suggested, with tongue only partially in cheek, that “the unparalleled endurance of the Mikhalkov clan is nothing less than a signal of Russia’s ‘unsinkability,’ even if the country were to be in the worst possible state both in spirit and in flesh,”63 announcing that “were our people on the level of a monarchist worldview, I personally would have nothing against a Mikhalkov dynasty: Russia’s age-long goal has been to stupefy the world.”64

Nikita Mikhalkov, who considers himself an enlightened conservative, also prefers a constitutional monarchy for Russia, maintaining that a monarchy “is the only way for our country, no matter how loud the liberals laugh,”65 but demurs when asked if he means a return of the Romanov dynasty.66

In such films as Oblomov (with Oleg Tabakov in the eponymous role) and The Barber of Siberia (where the director pointedly appeared as Tsar Alexander III), Mikhalkov consistently presents a nostalgic view of the sweet life of old Russia.

Tall, charmingly mustachioed, and terrifically charismatic, Mikhalkov cuts a prominent political figure, chairing for many years the post-Soviet Filmmakers’ Union of Russia and the Russian (formerly Soviet) Cultural Foundation, created by the late first lady Raisa Gorbachev. Back then the foundation, with enormous funding and actually an alternative to the staid Ministry of Culture, was headed by the more authoritative academician Dmitri Likhachev. Mikhalkov’s proclaimed goals are modest: to support cultural life in the provinces, where he believes the true Russian spirit still lives, uncorrupted by Western influences.

His popularity is not due so much to his public profile (he is criticized fiercely by many for his moves in that area) but to his movie work: three of his films were nominated for the Oscar: the Chekhovian pastiche Black Eyes in 1988; the Eurasianist manifesto East of Eden in 1993; and the anti-Stalin melodrama Burnt by the Sun, which won the award for best foreign film in 1995. This impressive thriller, once again strangely imbued with Chekhovian nostalgia, nevertheless pales as a cinematic depiction of the horrors of the Stalin era in comparison to Alexei Guerman’s masterpiece, Khrustalev! Bring the Car! (1998), a brutal black and white phantasmagoria about the twilight days of the Stalin regime.

Guerman’s film, which passed unnoticed in the West, was perhaps equal to the best works of Eisenstein or Tarkovsky, summarizing the entire post-perestroika period of Russian film. Guerman rejected nostalgia for the Soviet past, but that past—horrible for some but still attractive for many others—permeates his Khrustalev like a nightmare from which you can’t wake up.

In Khrustalev, Guerman poses the eternal Russian question: is Russia capable of freeing itself from the vestiges of totalitarianism while overcoming the allure of anarchy? And what will happen with its national identity? In cinematic form, Guerman paraphrased Solzhenitsyn’s anxious statement that “our highest and most important goal is to preserve our nation, which is totally exhausted, to maintain its physical existence, its moral existence, its culture, and its traditions.”67

Another important artistic commentary on Solzhenitsyn’s message was The Russian Ark, a cinematographic tour-de-force by Tarkovsky’s protégé Alexander Sokurov, in preproduction for four years but shot in one day, December 23, 2001. It is a melancholy, poetic meditation on the zigzags of Russian culture and state in the last three hundred years, compressed into ninety minutes and shot in the halls of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in a single, continuous take.

Reserved and almost tongue-tied, Sokurov—the polar opposite of the high-strung and voluble Guerman—has always argued that culture meant more for Russia than for any other nation. One of the film’s characters maintains that the authorities only want to have acorns from the oak: they don’t care if the cultural oak is dead or alive. But if the oak were to fall, any and all authority will perish with it. Sokurov also describes The Russian Ark as a film about the meeting of Russia and the West after the end of the Cold War. “The West should regret that it treats Russia with such cold indifference and arrogance.”

Sokurov’s philosophy (in the West he is best known for his trilogy about twentieth-century political leaders—Lenin, Hitler, and Emperor Hirohito of Japan) is expressed in the final words of The Russian Ark: “We will sail forever and we will live forever.” That idea at the end of the twentieth century, an era of national catastrophes and unheard-of upheavals, sums up the subconscious fears and hopes of the majority of Russians, both the common people and the cultural elite. The country faces grave cultural and demographic challenges that threaten its very existence. There are no easy answers. Once again, as it was at the start of the twentieth century, Russia—anxious, brooding, enigmatic—is at a crossroads, choosing its way.


NOTES

Introduction

1. To see reviews of a typical work in that sense, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes: The Times Literary Supplement, October 5, 2002; Lynn Garafola, Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance (Middletown, CT, 2005), p. ix.

2. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, V kruge pervom [First Circle] (New York, 1968), p. 320.

3. Solomon Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim [Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky](Moscow, 1998), p. 198.

4. See David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford, 2003).

5. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bodalsia telenok s dubom: ocherki literaturnoi zhizni [The Calf Butted the Oak: Sketches of a Literary Life] (Paris, 1975), p. 314.

6. Abram Efros, Profili [Profiles] (Moscow, 1930), p. 75.

Part One: THE GATHERING STORM

Chapter One

1. Maxim Gorky, Literaturnye portrety [Literary Portraits] (Moscow, 1983), p. 175.

2. Quoted in: Russkaia literatura kontsa XIX–nachala XX v., 1908–1917 [Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: 1908–1917] (Moscow, 1972), p. 467.

3. Quoted in: L. N. Tolstoi v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov [L. N. Tolstoy in reminiscences of his contemporaries], in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1978), p. 458.

4. V. I. Lenin o literature [V. I. Lenin on literature] (Moscow, 1971), p. 108.

5. Gorky, Literaturnye portrety, p. 204.

6. Viktor Shklovsky, Khod konya. Sbornik statei [Knight’s move: collected articles] (Moscow and Berlin, 1921), pp. 117–118.

7. Viktor Shklovsky in conversation with the author.

8. Quoted in: Semen Pozoiskii, Istoriia otlucheniia L’va Tolstogo ot tserkvi [History of Leo Tolstoy’s excommunication] (Moscow, 1979), p. 82.

9. Lev Tolstoi i russkie tsari [Leo Tolstoy and the Russian tsars] (Moscow, 1995), pp. 106–107.

10. A. Suvorin, Dnevnik [Diary] (Moscow, 1992), p. 316.

11. Boris Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik. Marshrut v bessmertie [My diary. Route to immortality] (Moscow, 2001), p. 108.

12. Lenin o literature, p. 104.

13. Novoe vremia, November 16, 1910.

14. I. A. Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], in nine volumes, vol. 9 (Moscow, 1967), p. 207.

15. Ibid., p. 63.

16. Literaturnoe nasledstvo [Literary heritage], vol. 72: Gor’kii i Leonid Andreev. Neizdannaia perepiska [Gorky and Leonid Andreyev, unpublished correspondence] (Moscow, 1965), p. 217.

17. A. P. Chekhov, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], in twelve volumes, vol. 12 (Moscow, 1957), pp. 49–50.

18. Quoted in: Chekhov i Lev Tolstoi (Moscow, 1980), pp. 144–145.

19. Quoted in: Bunin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 9, p. 207.

20. Quoted in: A. Anikst, Teoriia dramy v Rossii ot Pushkina do Chekhova [The theory of drama in Russia from Pushkin to Chekhov] (Moscow, 1972), p. 571.

21. Alexander Blok, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], in eight volumes, vol. 8 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1963), p. 281.

22. Osip Mandelstam, Sochineniia [Works], in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1990), p. 302.

23. Teatral’naia gazeta, May 28, 1905.

24. Quoted in: I. Vinogradskaia, Zhizn’i tvorchestvo K. S. Stanislavskogo. Letopis’ [Life and works of K. S. Stanislavsky: chronicle], in four volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1971), p. 341.

25. Quoted in: Gorky, Literaturnye portrety, pp. 137–138.

26. V. V. Vorovskii, Estetika. Literatura. Iskusstvo [Aesthetics, literature, art] (Moscow, 1975), pp. 406–407.

27. Ibid., p. 277.

28. Chekhov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 12, pp. 318, 308.

29. Quoted in: Russkaia literatura kontsa XIX–nachala XX v., 1901–1907 [Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: 1901–1907] (Moscow, 1971), p. 360.

30. Quoted in: Perepiska A. P. Chekhova [Correspondence of A. P. Chekhov] in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1984), p. 356.

31. Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, April 9, 1903.

32. Birzhevye vedomosti, April 6, 1903.

33. Perepiska Chekhova, vol. 2, p. 274.

34. V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Izbrannye pis’ma [Selected letters], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1979), pp. 318–319.

35. Quoted in: Il’ia Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn’. Vospominaniia [People, years, life: reminiscences], in three volumes, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1990), p. 81.

36. Quoted in: A. Turkov, A. P. Chekhov i ego vremia [A. P. Chekhov and his time] (Moscow, 1980), p. 379.

37. Chekhov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 12, p. 557.

38. Quoted in: Turkov, Chekhov, p. 389.

39. Rus’, April 3, 1904.

40. K. S. Stanislavsky, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], in eight volumes, vol. 7 (Moscow, 1960), p. 227.

41. Ibid., p. 307.

42. Quoted in: Vinogradskaia, Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo Stanislavskogo, vol. 1, p. 537.

43. Novyi put’, 1 (1904), p. 254.

44. Novosti, March 27, 1905.

45. Quoted in: A. V. Ossovskii, Muzykal’no-kriticheskie stat’i [Musical criticism articles] (Leningrad, 1971), p. 82.

46. I. F. Stravinsky, Perepiska s russkimi korrespondentami. Materialy k biografii [Correspondence with Russian correspondents: materials for a biography], vol. 1 (Moscow, 1998), p. 152.


Chapter Two

1. Quoted in: Vadim Kozhinov, Rossiia. Vek XX-i (1901–1939) [Russia: 20th century (1901–1939)] (Moscow, 1999), p. 22.

2. V.V. Shul’gin, “Chto nam v nikh ne nravitsia….Ob antisemitizme v Rossii [“What we don’t like about them is….” On anti-Semitism in Russia] (Moscow, 1992), p. 47.

3. Ibid., p. 45.

4. V.V. Rozanov, Sredi khudozhnikov [Among artists] (Moscow, 1994), p. 398.

5. V. V. Rozanov, Mysli o literature [Thoughts on literature] (Moscow, 1989), pp. 394–395.

6. Quoted in: Alexander Etkind, Khlyst [Sekty, literatura i revolutsiia] [khlyst (sects, literature, and revolution)] (Moscow, 1998), p. 10.

7. Alexandre Benois, Moi vospominaniia [My reminiscences], in five volumes, vols. 4–5 (Moscow, 1980), p. 291.

8. Mikhail Vrubel, Perepiska. Vospominaniia o khudozhnike [Correspondence, reminiscences about the artist] (Leningrad, 1976), p. 293.

9. Ibid., p. 295.

10. Alexander Blok, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], in eight volumes, vol. 5 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1962), p. 435.

11. B. Eikhenbaum, O literature. Raboty raznykh let [On literature: works of various years] (Moscow, 1987), p. 355.

12. Yu. N. Tynianov, Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino [Poetics, history of literature, film](Moscow, 1977), pp. 118–119.

13. Quoted in: Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Bol’naia Rossiia [Ailing Russia] (Leningrad, 1991), p. 221.

14. Mandelstam, Sochineniia, vol. 2, p. 157.

15. Apollon, 11 (1910), p. 3.

16. Quoted in: I. V. Nest’ev, Vek nyneshnii i vek minuvshii. Stat’i o muzyke [The present century and the past century: articles on music] (Moscow, 1986), p. 102.

17. Quoted in: Yu. D. Engel’, Glazami sovremmennika [Through the eyes of a contemporary] (Moscow, 1971), pp. 216–217.

18. Anna Akhmatova in conversation with the author.

19. S. Lifar, Diagilev (St. Petersburg, 1993), p. 51.

20. Sergei Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo (Sergei Diaghilev and Russian art), in two volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1982), p. 309.

21. Ibid., p. 26.

22. Peterburgskii listok, May 12, 1907.

23. Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, Pis’ma. Stat’i, zametki, interv’iu. Vstrechi i besedy s Kustodievym. Vospominaniia o khudozhnike [Letters, articles, notes, interviews. Meetings and conversations with Kustodiev. Reminiscences about the artist] (Leningrad, 1967), p. 115.

24. Diagilev i russkoe iskusstvo, vol. 2, p. 80.

25. Ibid., p. 85.

26. Novyi put’, 4 (1904), p. 243.

27. Le Matin, May 19, 1908.

28. F. I. Chaliapin, Maska i dusha. Moi sorok let na teatrakh [Mask and soul: my forty years in the theater] (Paris, 1932), p. 289.

29. A. V. Lunacharsky, V mire muzyki. Stat’i i rechi [In the world of music: articles and speeches] (Moscow, 1958), p. 343.

30. Ibid., pp. 343–344.

31. Ibid., p. 345.

32. Kirill Kondrashin in conversation with the author.

33. Neva, 6 (1989), pp. 145–146, 158–159.

34. Ibid., p. 146.

35. Fedor Lopukhov in conversation with the author.

36. Benois, Moi vospominaniia, vols. 4–5, p. 530.

37. Quoted in: Vaslav Nijinsky, Chuvstva. Tetradi [Feelings: notebooks] (Moscow, 2000), p. 151.

38. Quoted in: E. Poliakova, Nikolai Rerikh (Moscow, 1985), p. 172.

39. Utro Rossii, August 17, 1914.

40. Zavety, 6 (1912), p. 67.

41. Quoted in: I. Stravinskii-publitsist i sobesednik [I. Stravinsky, columnist and interlocutor] (Moscow, 1988), p. 22.

42. Ibid.

43. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, p. 11.

44. Ibid., p. 10.

45. A. N. Benois, Moi dnevnik [My Diary] (Moscow, 2003), p. 75.

46. Ibid., p. 107.

47. A. Blok, Dnevnik [Diary] (Moscow, 1989), p. 210.

48. Benois, Moi dnevnik, p. 228.

Part Two: A TIME OF CATASTROPHES

Chapter Three

1. A. V. Lunacharsky, Ob izobrazitel’nom iskusstve [On fine arts], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1967), p. 129.

2. Ibid.

3. Na literaturnom postu, 22–23 (1927), p. 18.

4. Novaia zhizn’, November 10, 1917.

5. Benois, Moi dnevnik, p. 273.

6. A. Rylov, Vospominaniia [Reminiscences] (Leningrad, 1977), p. 193.

7. Ibid.

8. Iskusstvo kommuny, December 7, 1918.

9. Natan Altman in conversation with the author.

10. Alexander Blok, Zapisnye knihzki. 1901–1920 [Notebooks: 1901–1920] (Moscow, 1965), p. 429.

11. Kazimir Malevich, Chernyi kvadrat [Black square] (St. Petersburg, 2001), p. 49.

12. Quoted in: A. Fevral’skii, Pervaia sovetskaia p’esa. “Misteriia-buff” V. V. Maiakovskogo [The first Soviet play: V.V. Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe] (Moscow, 1971), p. 70.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Zhizn’ iskusstva, November 11, 1918.

16. Petrogradskaia Pravda, November 21, 1918.

17. Quoted in: Alexander Gladkov, Teatr: Vospominaniia i razmyshleniia [The theater: reminiscences and considerations] (Moscow, 1980), p. 308.

18. V. E. Meierkhol’d, Perepiska. 1896–1939 [Correspondence: 1896–1939] (Moscow, 1976), p. 29.

19. Ibid.

20. Gladkov, Teatr, p. 306.

21. Georgy Chulkov, Gody stranstvii [Years of Wandering] (Moscow, 1930), p. 221.

22. Blok, Dnevniki, p. 248.

23. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 89: Aleksandr Blok. Pis’ma k zhene [Alexander Blok: letters to his wife] (Moscow, 1978), p. 256.

24. Blok, Dnevnik, p. 199.

25. Ibid, p. 173.

26. Gladkov, Teatr, p. 307.

27. Quoted in: K. Rudnitskii, Rezhisser Meierkhol’d [Meyerhold the director] (Moscow, 1969), p. 237.

28. Ibid., p. 244.

29. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, Memuary [Memoirs], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1997), p. 220.

30. Quoted in: K. Rudnitskii, Meierkhol’d [Meyerhold] (Moscow, 1971), p. 285.

31. Gorky, Literaturnye portrety, p. 45.

32. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 65.

33. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 80: V. I. Lenin i A. V. Lunacharskii. Perepiska, doklady, dokumenty [V. I. Lenin and A. V. Lunacharsky: correspondence, reports, documents] (Moscow, 1971), p. 717.

34. Ibid., p. 718.

35. Benedikt Livshits, Polutoraglazyi strelets. Stikhotvoreniia. Perevody. Vospominaniia [The one-and-a-half-eyed archer. Poems, translations, reminiscences] (Leningrad, 1989), p. 413.

36. Alisa Koonen, Stranitsy zhizni [Pages of a life] (Moscow, 1985), p. 222.

37. Efros, Profili, p. 228.

38. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), p. 99.

39. Alexander Rodchenko, Opyty dlia budushchego. Dnevniki. Stat’i. Pis’ma. Zapiski [Experiments for the future: diaries, articles, letters, notes] (Moscow, 1996), p. 60.

40. Ibid.


Chapter Four

1. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia [The regime and the artistic intelligentsia] (Moscow, 1999), p. 21.

2. Ibid., p. 28.

3. See: Vasilii Stavitskii, Za kulisami tainykh sobytii [Behind the scenes of secret events] (Moscow, 2004), pp. 5–7.

4. Lenin o literature, p. 242.

5. A. V. Lunacharsky, Vospominaniia i vpechatleniia [Reminiscences and impressions] (Moscow, 1968), p. 192.

6. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 80, p. 313.

7. Lunacharsky, Vospominaniia i vpechatleniia, p. 195.

8. Pravda, September 19, 1922.

9. Ibid.

10. Krasnaia nov’, 1 (1924), p. 179.

11. Pechat’ i revolutsiia, 3 (1925), p. 10.

12. Quoted in: N. N. Primochkina, Pisatel’i vlast’ [The writer and the regime] (Moscow, 1998), pp. 42–43.

13. Gorky, Literaturnye portrety, p. 27.

14. D. S. Mirsky, Uncollected Writings on Russian Literature (Berkeley, 1989), p. 213.

15. Sergei Esenin, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], in five volumes, vol. 5 (Moscow, 1962), p. 13.

16. Gorky, Literaturnye portrety, p. 296.

17. Esenin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4, p. 266.

18. Ibid., p. 265.

19. Pravda, January 12, 1927.

20. Ivanov-Razumnik, Pisatel’skie sud’by. Tiurmy i ssylki [Writers’ destinies. Prisons and exile] (Moscow, 2004), p. 47.

21. I.V. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 12 (Moscow, 1952), p. 146.

22. Quoted in: Vitalii Shentalinskii, Raby svobody. V literaturnykh arkhivakh KGB [Slaves of freedom: in the literary archives of the KGB] (Moscow, 1995), p. 268.

23. Ibid.

24. Quoted in: Nikolai Kluyev, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Verse and narrative poems] (Leningrad, 1977), p. 61.

25. K. Chukovsky, Dnevnik 1930–1969 [Diary 1930–1969] (Moscow, 1994), p. 9.

26. Ibid.

27. Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, p. 38.

28. Mirsky, Uncollected Writings, p. 204.

29. Valentin Kataev, Almaznyi moi venets [My diamond crown] (Moscow, 1981), p. 242.

30. Mirsky, Uncollected Writings, p. 110.

31. Quoted in: Lazar Fleishman, Boris Pasternak v tridtsatye gody [Boris Pasternak in the 1930s] (Jerusalem, 1984), p. 145.

32. Emma Gershtein, Memuary (Memoirs) (St. Petersburg, 1998), p. 51.

33. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia [Reminiscences] (New York, 1970), p. 35.

34. Quoted in: Nikita Zabolotskii, Zhizn’ N. A. Zabolotskogo [Life of N. A. Zabolotsky](Moscow, 1998), p. 215.

35. Ibid., p. 216.

36. Ibid., p. 567.

37. Ibid., p. 281.

38. V. Kaverin, Epilog. Memuary [Epilogue: memoirs] (Moscow, 1989), p. 281.


Chapter Five

1. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia, p. 739.

2. Ibid., pp. 110, 112.

3. Quoted in: Evgenii Gromov, Stalin: vlast’ i iskusstvo [Stalin: power and art] (Moscow, 1998), p. 113.

4. Quoted in: Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Lingvistika. Sb. k 70-letiu Viacheslava Vsevolodovicha Ivanova [Poetics, history of literature, linguistics: a collection for the 70th birthday of Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov] (Moscow, 1994), p. 184.

5. Maxim Gorky, Nesvoevremennye mysli. Zametki o revoliutsii i kul’ture [Untimely thoughts: notes on revolution and culture] (Moscow, 1990), p. 151.

6. Ibid.

7. Quoted in: Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin, in two volumes, volume 2 (Moscow, 1994), p. 184.

8. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 3, p. 386.

9. Ibid.

10. Konstantin Fedin, Sobraniie sochinenii [Collected works], in ten volumes, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1973), p. 41.

11. Vesy, 4 (1905), p. 50.

12. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 6, p. 92.

13. Gorky, Nesvoevremennye mysli, p. 136.

14. Vladislav Khodasevich, Belyi koridor: Vospominaniia. Izbrannaia proza [White corridor: reminiscences and selected prose], in two volumes, vol. 1 (New York, 1982), p. 265.

15. Gorky, Nesvoevremennye mysli, p. 257.

16. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia, p. 138.

17. Ibid., p. 125.

18. Ibid., p. 107.

19. Ibid., p. 104.

20. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 6, p. 188.

21. Ibid., pp. 187–188.

22. N. Punin, O Tatline [On Tatlin] (Moscow, 1994), p. 21.

23. Valentina Khodasevich, Portrety slovami [Portraits in words] (Moscow, 1987), p. 155.

24. Rodchenko, Opyty dlia budushchego, p. 235.

25. Ibid., p. 282.

26. Grigory Alexandrov in conversation with the author.

27. Sergei Eisenstein, Izbrannye proizvedeniia [Selected works], in six volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1964), p. 55.

28. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete collected works], in thirteen volumes, vol. 12 (Moscow, 1959), pp. 358–359.

29. Ibid., p. 95.

30. Boris Pasternak, Vozdushnye puti. Proza raznykh let [Aerial ways: prose of various years] (Moscow, 1982), p. 452.

31. Pravda, December 5, 1935.

32. Quoted in: Lenin, O literature, p. 226.

33. Ibid.

34. Alexander Gladkov, Pozdnie vechera. Vospominaniia, stat’i, zametki [Late evenings: reminiscences, articles, notes] (Moscow, 1986), p. 261.


Chapter Six

1. Kratkaiia literaturnaiia entsiklopediia [Short encyclopedia of literature], vol. 8 (Moscow, 1975), p. 57.

2. More on this in: Solomon Volkov, Shostakovich i Stalin: khudozhnik i tsar’ [Shostakovich and Stalin: artist and tsar] (Moscow, 2004), pp. 252–261; Shostakovich and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the Brutal Dictator (New York, 2004), pp. 102–106.

3. Pravda, January 28, 1936.

4. Pravda, February 13, 1936.

5. More on this in Volkov, Shostakovich i Stalin, pp. 358–360; Volkov, Shostakovich and Stalin, pp. 153–154.

6. Lev Trotsky, Stalin, in two volumes, vol. 2 (Vermont, 1985), p. 211.

7. Quoted in: Ilya Ehrenbug, Ludi, gody, zhizn’. Vospominaniia [People, years, life: reminiscences], in three volumes, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1990), p. 211.

8. Voprosy literatury, 3 (1989), p. 221.

9. Ibid.

10. D. Merezhkovsky, Ne mir, no mech [Not peace, but the sword] (Kharkov and Moscow, 2000), p. 330.

11. Ibid., p. 576.

12. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 70: Gor’kii i sovetskie pisateli. Neizdannaia perepiska [Gorky and Soviet writers: unpublished correspondence] (Moscow, 1963), p. 568.

13. Novyi mir, 9 (1997), p. 188.

14. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 84: Ivan Bunin, book 2 (Moscow, 1973), p. 7.

15. Ibid., p. 34.

16. Ivan Bunin, Velikii durman. Neizvestnye stranitsy [Great delirium: unknown pages] (Moscow, 1997), p. 152.

17. Marina Tsvetayeva, Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works] in seven volumes, vol. 6 (Moscow, 1995), p. 407.

18. Boris Eikhenbaum, O literature [On literature] (Moscow, 1987), p. 440.

19. Vladislav Khodasevich, Koleblemyi trenozhnik. Izbrannoe [Unstable tripod: selected works] (Moscow, 1991), p. 362.

20. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 84, book 2, p. 375.

21. Quoted in: Oleg Mikhailov, Zhizn’ Bunina [Life of Bunin] (Moscow, 2001), p. 387.

22. Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, December 8, 1901.

23. Galina Kuznetsova, Grasskii dnevnik [Grasse diary] (Moscow, 1995), p. 201.

24. Ibid., p. 210.

25. Ustami Buninykh [In the words of the Bunins], in three volumes, vol. 2 (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1981), p. 256.

26. Kuznetsova, Grasskii dnevnik, p. 293.

27. Bunin, Velikii durman, p. 168.

28. Ustami Buninykh, p. 290.

29. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 40 (1999), p. 276.

30. Quoted in: Viktor Fradkin, Delo Kol’tsova [Koltsov case] (Moscow, 2002), p. 227.

31. Ibid., p. 211.

32. Ehrenburg, Ludi, gody, zhizn’, vol. 2, p. 53.

33. Oleg Platonov, Gosudartstvennaia izmena. Zagovor protiv Rossii [State treason: the conspiracy against Russia] (Moscow, 2004), p. 9.

34. Istoriia Rossii. XX vek [History of Russia: twentieth century] (Moscow, 2000), p. 386.

35. Teatral’naia zhizn’, 5 (1989), p. 3.

Part Three: RENDEZVOUS WITH STALIN

Chapter Seven

1. Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia, vol. 7, p. 93.

2. Voprosy literatury, 2 (1989), p. 148.

3. Pravda, March 16, 1941.

4. Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia, p. 156.

5. Pervii Vsesoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei. Stenograficheskii otchet [First all-Union congress of Soviet writers: stenographic transcript] (Moscow, 1934), p. 10.

6. A. Lunacharsky, Iskusstvo kak vid chelovecheskogo povedeniia [Art as an aspect of human behavior] (Moscow, 1931), p. 15.

7. Antonina Pirozhkova, Sem’ let s Babelem [Seven years with Babel] (New York, 2001), p. 46.

8. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Publitsistika [Articles], in three volumes, vol. 2 (Yaroslavl, 1996), p. 186.

9. Quoted in: Valentin Osipov, Tainaia zhizn’ Mikhaila Sholokhova…Dokumental’naia khronika bez legend [The secret life of Mikhail Sholokhov…documentary chronicle without legends] (Moscow, 1995), p. 40.

10. For more on Sholokhov’s recollection of meeting Stalin, see: Osipov, Tainaia zhizn’, pp. 38–40; Ivan Zhukov, Ruka sud’by. Pravda i lozh’o Mikhaile Sholokhove i Aleksandre Fadeeve [Hand of fate: the truth and the lies about Mikhail Sholokhov and Alexander Fadeyev] (Moscow, 1994), p. 224.

11. Quoted in: Osipov, Tainaia zhizn’, p. 224.

12. Pisatel’ i vozhd’. Perepiska M. A. Sholokhova s I. V. Stalinym. 1931–1950 gody. Sbornik dokumentov iz lichnogo arkhiva I. V. Stalina [Writer and leader: correspondence between M. A. Sholokhov and I.V. Stalin, 1931–1950. Collection of documents from Stalin’s personal archives] (Moscow, 1997), p. 17.

13. This and subsequent quotations from Sholokhov’s letters from Pisatel’ i vozhd’, pp. 24, 29, 49, 58, 68, 102–103.

14. Lili Brik in conversation with the author; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia, p. 342.

15. See B. V. Sokolov, Narkomy strakha [People’s commissars of fear] (Moscow, 2001), p. 107.

16. Quoted in: Vitalii Shentalinskii, Donos na Sokrata [Denunciation of Socrates] (Moscow, 2001), p. 422.

17. Mikhail Romm, Kak v kino. Ustnye rasskazy [Like in the movies: oral tales] (Nizhny Novgorod, 2003), p. 136.

18. See Istochnik, 5 (1995), pp. 156–158.

19. See Znamia, 12 (1996), p. 164.


Chapter Eight

1. Pasternak, Vozdushnye puti, p. 452.

2. Ibid.

3. Georgii Efron, Dnevniki [Diaries], in two volumes, vol. 1 (Moscow, 2004), pp. 179–180.

4. Quoted in: Irma Kudrova, Gibel’ Mariny Tsvetaevoi [Death of Marina Tsvetayeva] (Moscow, 1995), p. 269.

5. Shentalinskii, Donos na Sokrata, p. 276.

6. Quoted in: Kudrova, Gibel’Tsvetaevoi, p. 276.

7. Georgii Adamovich, Somneniia i nadezhdy [Doubts and hopes] (Moscow, 2002), p. 311.

8. Quoted in: Kudrova, Gibel’Tsvetaevoi, p. 258.

9. Efron, Dnevniki, vol. 2, pp. 51–52.

10. Ibid., p. 109.

11. Pavel Filonov, Dnevnik [Diary] (St. Petersburg, 2000), p. 343.

12. Ibid., pp. 316–317.

13. Ibid., p. 310.

14. Quoted in: Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, Blokadnaia kniga [Blockade book] (Leningrad, 1989), pp. 32–33.

15. Panorama iskusstv, issue 11 (Moscow, 1988), p. 125.

16. Ehrenburg, Ludi, gody, zhizn’, vol. 2, p. 242.

17. Joseph Brodsky in conversation with the author.

18. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 70, p. 313.

19. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia, p. 150.

20. For Sutyrin’s recollections, see Andrei Platonov: Vospominaniia sovremennikov. Materialy k biografii [Andrei Platonov: reminiscences of contemporaries. Materials for a biography] (Moscow, 1994), pp. 270–271.

21. Shentalinskii, Raby svobody, pp. 283–284.

22. Ibid., p. 293.

23. Platonov: Vospominaniia sovremennikov, p. 69.

24. Znamia, 6 (2002), p. 159.

25. Platonov: Vospominaniia sovremennikov, p. 85.

26. Pravda, July 8, 1943.

27. Literaturnaia gazeta, January 4, 1947.

28. Platonov: Vospominaniia sovremennikov, p. 84.


Chapter Nine

1. See http://idf.ru/15/doc.shtml

2. Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 84, book 1, pp. 53–54.

3. M. Iof’ev, Profili iskusstva [Profiles of art] (Moscow, 1965), p. 205.

4. Znamia, 7 (2004), p. 153.

5. Moskovskie Novosti, September 24, 2004.

6. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia, p. 583.

7. Milovan Djilas, Besedy so Stalinym [Conversations with Stalin] (Moscow, 2002), p. 119.

8. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia, p. 491.

9. Ibid., p. 488.

10. Den’ poezii [Poetry day] (Leningrad, 1967), p. 169.

11. Istochnik, I (1999), p. 77.

12. Anna Akhmatova v zapisiakh Duvakina [Anna Akhmatova in the notes of Duvakin] (Moscow, 1999), pp. 312, 330.

13. Anna Akhmatova, Requiem (Moscow, 1989), p. 294.

14. D. L. Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory [Writers and censors] (Moscow, 1994), p. 47.

15. Ibid., p. 48.

16. Anna Akhmatova in conversation with the author.

17. Anna Akhmatova in conversation with the author.

18. “Literaturnyi front.” Istoriia politicheskoi tsenzury 1932–1946 g. [“The literary front”: the history of political censorship 1932–1946] (Moscow, 1994), p. 53.

19. Solomon Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim [Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky] (Moscow, 1946), p. 13.

20. Ibid., p. 7.

21. Cited in Akhmatova, Requiem, p. 174.

22. Doklad t. Zhdanova o zhurnalakh “Zvezda” i “Leningrad” [Comrade Zhdanov’s report on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad ] (Moscow, 1946), p. 13.

23. Ibid., p. 7.

24. Druzhba Narodov, 3 (1988), p. 174.

25. Anna Akhmatova in conversation with the author.

26. Prokof’ev o Prokof’eve. Stat’i i interv’u [Prokofiev on Prokofiev: articles and interviews] (Moscow, 1991), p. 220.

27. Sergei Prokofiev, Dnevnik. 1907–1933 [Diary: 1907–1933], part 2 (Paris, 2002), p. 292.

Part Four: THAWS AND FREEZES

Chapter Ten

1. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Volchii pasport [Wolf’s passport] (Moscow, 1998), p. 81.

2. Armen Medvedev, Territoriia kino [Cinema territory] (Moscow, 2001), p. 41.

3. Yevtushenko, Volchii pasport, p. 435.

4. Vassily Aksyonov, V poiskakh grustnogo bebi [In Search of Melancholy Baby] (New York, 1987), p. 20.

5. G. V. Aleksandrov, Epokha i kino [The era and film] (Moscow, 1976), p. 107.

6. Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo [Works of Joseph Brodsky], vol. 6 (Moscow, 2000), p. 16.

7. Aksyonov, V poiskakh grustnogo bebi, p. 20.

8. Joseph Brodsky in conversation with the author.

9. Dmitrii Shepilov, Neprimknuvshii [The nonjoiner] (Moscow, 2001), pp. 232–234.

10. Ibid., p. 234.

11. Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington, KY, 2000), p. 9.

12. Ibid., p. 11.

13. Muzyka i zhizn’. Muzyka i muzykanty Leningrada [Music and life: music and the musicians of Leningrad] (Leningrad and Moscow, 1972), p. 127.

14. Kirill Kondrashin in conversation with the author.

15. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York, 1999), p. 142.

16. The New York Times, December 25, 1977.

17. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ne umirai prezhde smerti [Don’t die before your death] (New York, 1993), pp. 496–497.

18. Lubyanka: organy VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD-KGB. 1917–1991. Spravochnik [Lubyanka: the agencies VChK-OGPU-NKVD-MGB-MVD-KGB, 1917–1991: a directory] (Moscow, 2003), p. 718.

19. Shepilov, Neprimknuvshii, p. 69.

20. Andrei Voznesensky, Na virtual’nom vetru [In a virtual wind] (Moscow, 1998), p. 79.

21. Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalina na XX s’ezde KPSS. Dokumenty [Khrushchev’s speech on the cult of personality of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress: documents] (Moscow, 2002), p. 97.

22. Voznesensky, Na virtual’nom vetru, p. 242.

23. Russkie sovetskie pisateli. Poety. Biobibliograficheskii ukazatel’ [Russian Soviet writers: poets—biobibliographical directory], vol. 7 (Moscow, 1984), p. 347; see also: Kratkaia literaturnaia entsyklopediia [Short literary encyclopedia], vol. 2 (Moscow, 1964), p. 866.

24. Yuri Nagibin, Dnevnik [Diary] (Moscow, 1996), pp. 272–273.

25. Yevtushenko, Volchii pasport, p. 90.

26. Ibid., p. 83.

27. Anna Akhmatova in conversation with the author.

28. Literaturnaia gazeta, March 19, 1953.

29. Kogda fil’m okonchen. Govoriat rezhisery “Mosfil’ma” [When the film is finished: talking with Mosfilm directors] (Moscow, 1964), p. 116.

30. Lidia Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi [Notes about Anna Akhmatova], vol. 3 (Moscow, 1997), p. 419.

31. Vladimir Lakshin, “Novy mir” vo vremena Khrushcheva [Novy mir in the Khrushchev era] (Moscow, 1991), p. 153.

32. Konstantin Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia. Razmyshleniia o I.V. Staline [Through the eyes of a man of my generation: thoughts on I. V. Stalin] (Moscow, 1990), p. 159.


Chapter Eleven

1. Nikolai Bukharin, Revolutsiia i kul’tura. Stat’i i vystupleniia 1923–1936 godov [Revolution and culture: articles and speeches of 1923–1936] (Moscow, 1993), pp. 218–268.

2. N. Vil’mont, O Borise Pasternake. Vospominaniia i mysli [About Boris Pasternak: reminiscences and thoughts] (Moscow, 1999), p. 218; Zoya Maslenikova, Portret Boris a Pasternaka [Portrait of Boris Pasternak] (Moscow, 1995), pp. 86–87; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vospominaniia [Reminiscences] (New York, 1970), pp. 152–156; Emma Gershtein, Memuary [Memoirs] (St. Petersburg, 1998), pp. 330–332; Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions (New York, 1981), pp. 181–182.

3. V krugu Zhivago. Pasternakovskii sbornik [In Zhivago’s circle: a Pasternak anthology] (Stanford, 2000), p. 63.

4. Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, p. 275.

5. Ibid.

6. Lidia Ginzburg, Literatura v poiskakh real’nosti [Literature in search of reality] (Leningrad, 1987), p. 318.

7. Alexander Fadeyev, Pis’ma i dokumenty [Letters and documents] (Moscow, 2001), p. 286.

8. Boris Pasternak, Perepiska s Ol’goi Freidenberg [Correspondence with Olga Freidenberg] (New York and London, 1981), p. 267.

9. Czeslaw Milosz, Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), p. 80.

10. Olga Ivinskaya, V plenu vremeni. Gody s Borisom Pasternakom [In the thrall of time: years with Boris Pasternak] (Paris, 1978), p. 113.

11. Quoted in: V. Kaverin, Epilog: memuary [Epilogue: memoirs] (Moscow, 1989), p. 514.

12. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia, p. 146.

13. Komsomol’skaia Pravda, October 30, 1958.

14. Vladimir Semichastny, Bespokoinoe serdtse [Turbulent heart] (Moscow, 2002), pp. 72–73. Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, casts doubt on Semichastny’s account: see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York and London, 2003), p. 744.

15. Pravda, November 2 and November 6, 1958.

16. Quoted in: E. Pasternak, Boris Pasternak. Biografia [Boris Pasternak: a biography] (Moscow, 1997), p. 712.

17. Kaverin, Epilog, p. 374.

18. Semichastny, Bespokoinoe serdtse, p. 74.

19. “A za mnoiu shum pogoni…Boris Pasternak i vlast’. Dokumenty. 1956–1972 [“Behind me the chase…” Boris Pasternak and the regime: documents, 1956–1972] (Moscow, 2001), p. 221.

20. Medvedev, Territoriia kino, p. 112.

21. “A za mnoiu shum pogoni…” p. 255.

22. Osipov, Tainaia zhizn’, p. 339.

23. A. V. Blum, Sovetskaia tsenzura v epokhu total’nogo kontrolia. 1929–1953 [Soviet censorship in the era of total control, 1929–1953] (St. Petersburg, 2000), p. 192.

24. Quoted in: Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, 1991), p. 371.

25. Quoted in: Boris Pasternak and His Times (Berkeley, 1989), p. 169.

26. Max Hayward, Writers in Russia: 1917–1918 (San Diego, New York, and London, 1983), p. l.

27. Solzhenitsyn. Publitsistika [Solzhenitsyn: articles], vol. 2, p. 44.

28. Ibid., p. 184.

29. Boyd, Nabokov, p. 656.

30. Valentina Chemberdzhi, V dome muzyka zhila [Music lived in the house] (Moscow, 2002), p. 230.

31. Lakshin, “Novy mir,” p. 75.

32. Ibid., p. 84.

33. Ernst Neizvestny, Govorit Neizvestnyi [Neizvestny speaks] (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1984), pp. 13–14.

34. Romm, Kak v kino, p. 185.

35. Sergei Khrushchev, Pensioner soyuznogo znacheniia [Federal pensioner] (Moscow, 1991), p. 362.

36. Voznesensky, Na virtual’nom vetru, p. 78.

37. Ibid., pp. 79–81.

38. Ibid., p. 85.

39. Romm, Kak v kino, p. 203.

40. Ibid., p. 214.


Chapter Twelve

1. Marianna Volkova and Solomon Volkov, Iurii Liubimov v Amerike [Yuri Lyubimov in America] (New York, 1993), p. 122.

2. Ibid.

3. Quoted in: Yuri Lyubimov, Rasskazy starogo trepacha [Tales of an old blowhard] (Moscow, 2001), pp. 261–262.

4. Voznesensky, Na virtual’nom vetru, p. 133.

5. Quoted in: Pavel Leonidov, Vladimir Vysotskii i drugie [Vladimir Vysotsky and others] (New York, 1983), p. 158.

6. Quoted in: Georgii Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy [Man of the system] (Moscow, 2002), p. 208.

7. Alexander Volodin, Tak nespokoino na dushe [I Feel Such Unease] (St. Petersburg, 1993), p. 55.

8. Ibid., p. 28.

9. Ibid., p. 57.

10. Yuri Lyubimov in conversation with the author.

11. Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy, p. 356.

12. A. M. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva [From Kollontai to Gorbachev] (Moscow, 1994), p. 118.

13. Dmitrii Volkogonov, Sem’ vozhdei [Seven leaders], vol. 2 (Moscow, 1996), p. 73.

14. Quoted in: Mark Altshuller and Elena Dryzhakova, Put’ otrecheniia. Russkaia literatura 1953–1968 [Path of renunciation: Russian literature 1953–1968] (New Jersey, 1985), p. 333.

15. Vladimir Voinovich, Portret na fone mifa [Portrait on a background of myth] (Moscow, 2002), p. 52.

16. Lidia Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2 (Paris, 1980), p. 449.

17. Voinovich, Portret na fone mifa, p. 44.

18. Solzhenitsyn, Bodalsia telenok s dubom, p. 316.

19. Kremlevskii samosud. Sekretnye dokumenty Politburo o pisatele A. Solzhenitsyne [Kremlin lynching; secret Politburo documents about the writer A. Solzhenitsyn] (Moscow, 1994), p. 133.

20. Ibid., pp. 353, 439.

21. Ibid., pp. 352–353.

Part Five: A TIME OF CHANGES

Chapter Thirteen

1. Dmitrii Volkogonov, Lenin. Politicheskii portret v dvukh knigakh [Lenin: a political portrait in two books], vol. 2 (Moscow, 1994), p. 186.

2. Ibid., p. 191.

3. Ibid., pp. 191–192.

4. Yakov Gordin in conversation with the author.

5. Kremlevskii samosud, p. 491.

6. Alfred Schnittke in conversation with the author.

7. Nikolai Boldyrev, Stalker, ili trudy i dni Andreia Tarkovskogo [Stalker, or the works and days of Andrei Tarkovsky] (Chelyabinsk, 2002), pp. 95–96.

8. Maya Turovskya, Pamiati tekushchego mgnoveniia [In memoriam of the current moment] (Moscow, 1987), pp. 230–231.

9. Ibid., p. 137.

10. Solomon Volkov, Istoriia kul’tury Sankt-Peterburga s osnovaniia do nashikh dnei [Cultural history of St. Petersburg from its founding to our times] (Moscow, 2001), p. 457.

11. Quoted in: Literaturnaia gazeta, May 5, 1993.

12. Quoted in: Yakov Gordin, Pereklichka vo mrake. Iosif Brodskii i ego sobesedniki [Calling out in the dark: Joseph Brodsky and his interlocutors] (St. Petersburg, 2000), p. 219.

13. Quoted in: Boldyrev, Stalker, p. 162.

14. Quoted in: Literaturnaia gazeta, March 8, 1995.

15. Andrei Konchalovsky, Nizkie istiny [Base truths] (Moscow, 1998), p. 115.

16. Vassily Aksyonov in conversation with the author.

17. Joseph Brodsky in conversation with the author.

18. Quoted in: Boldyrev, Stalker, p. 309.

19. Ibid., p. 336.

20. Besedy s Al’fredom Shnitke [Conversations with Alfred Schnittke] (Moscow, 1994), p. 233.

21. See Moskovskie novosti, October 1, 2004.

22. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 285: Russian Writers Since 1980 (Farmington Hills, MI), p. 28.

23. Literaturnaia gazeta, May 5, 1993.

24. Ibid.

25. Leonard Bernstein in conversation with the author.

26. Znamia, 11 (2000), p. 154.


Chapter Fourteen

1. Mikhail Gorbachev, Zhizn’i reformy [Life and reforms], vol. 1 (Moscow, 1995), p. 265.

2. Volkogonov, Lenin, vol. 2, pp. 198–200.

3. Volkogonov, Sem’ vozhdei, vol. 2, p. 413.

4. Solzhenitsyn, Publitsistika, vol. 2, p. 556.

5. Ibid., p. 563.

6. Ibid., p. 554.

7. Vassily Aksyonov, Desiatiletie klevety (radiodnevnik pisatelia) [Decade of lies (a writer’s radio diary)] (Moscow, 2004), p. 235.

8. Ibid., p. 236.

9. Lubyanka, p. 727.

10. Ibid.

11. Solzhenitsyn, Publitsistika, vol. 2, pp. 564, 567–568.

12. Ibid., p. 567.

13. Ibid., p. 568.

14. I. I. Artamonov, Oruzhie obrechennykh (sistemnyi analiz ideologicheskoi diversii) [Weapons of the doomed (systematic analysis of ideological sabotage)] (Minsk, 1981), p. 166.

15. Valery Konovalov, Vek “Svobody” ne slykhat’. Zapiski veterana kholodnoi voiny [Haven’t heard “Liberty” in ages: notes of a Cold War veteran] (Moscow, 2003), p. 5.

16. Lubyanka, p. 728.

17. The New York Times Book Review, May 11, 1980.

18. Volkov, Dialogi s Brodskim, p. 564.

19. A. I. Solzhenitsyn, Na vozvrate dykhaniia. Izbrannaia publitsistika [Breathing again: selected articles] (Moscow, 2004), pp. 305, 315.

20. Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), Puteshestvie na Chernuyu rechku i drugie proizvedeniia [Journey to Black River and other works] (Moscow, 1999), p. 346.

21. Joseph Brodsky in conversation with the author.

22. Solzhenitsyn, Na vozvrate dykhaniia, p. 311.

23. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia, p. 116.

24. Yevgeny Yevtushenko in conversation with the author.

25. Quoted in: Novoye Russkoye Slovo, August 27, 2005.

26. Yuri i Ol’ga Trifonovy vspominaiut [Yuri and Olga Trifonov recall] (Moscow, 2003), p. 26.

27. Georgii Sviridov in conversation with the author.

28. Georgii Sviridov, Muzyka kak sud’ba [Music as destiny] (Moscow, 2002), p. 231.

29. Ibid., p. 438.

30. Ibid., p. 437–438.

31. More on this episode in: Volkov, Dialogi s Brodskim, pp. 182–188.

32. Argumenti i fakty, 2005, No. 4 (international edition).

33. Quoted in: Vladislav Kulakov, Poeziia kak fakt [Poetry as a fact] (Moscow, 1999), pp. 352–353.

34. Viktor Pivovarov, Vlublennyi agent [Agent in love] (Moscow, 2001), p. 50.

35. Valentin Vorobyov, Vrag naroda. Vospominaniia khudozhnika [Enemy of the people: reminiscences of an artist] (Moscow, 2005), p. 175.

36. Filipp Bobkov, KGB i vlast’ [The KGB and the regime] (Moscow, 2003), p. 297.

37. Ibid., p. 299.

38. Ibid., p. 298.

39. Vorobyov, Vrag naroda, p. 274.

40. Leonid Borodin, Bez vybora. Avtobiograficheskoe povestvovanie [Without a choice: an autobiographical account] (Moscow, 2003), p. 192.

41. Ibid., p. 190.

42. Novoye Russkoye Slovo, May 15–16, 2004.

43. Pavel Sudoplatov, Spetsoperatsii [Special Operations] (Moscow, 2002), p. 243.

44. Ibid., pp. 210–211.

45. Volkogonov, Lenin, vol. 2, p. 192.

46. Bobkov, KGB i vlast’, p. 300.

47. Ilya Kabakov and Boris Grois, Dialogi (1990–1994) [Dialogues (1990–1994)] (Moscow, 1999), p. 62.

48. Ilya Kabakov, 60-e–70-e…Zapiski o neofitsial’noi zhizni v Moskve [60s–70s…Notes about unofficial life in Moscow] (Vienna, 1999), p. 206.

49. Kabakov and Grois, Dialogi, p. 62.

50. Irina Balabanova, Govorit Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov [Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov speaks] (Moscow, 2001), pp. 11–13.

51. Ibid., p. 16.

52. Novoye Russkoye Slovo, May 15–16, 2004.

53. Ibid.

54. Quoted in: Vorobyov, Vrag naroda, p. 488.


Chapter Fifteen

1. A. S. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym [Six years with Gorbachev] (Moscow, 1993), p. 98.

2. Ibid., pp. 95–96.

3. Anatoli Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie [Memoir novel] (Moscow, 1997); Tatiana Rybakova, “Schastlivaia ty, Tania!” [“You’re lucky, Tania!”] (Moscow, 2005).

4. Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, vol. 1, p. 322.

5. Quoted in: Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie, pp. 335–336.

6. Alexander Yakovlev, Omut pamiati [Vortex of memory] (Moscow, 2001), p. 260.

7. Anatoli Rybakov in conversation with the author.

8. Quoted in: Tatiana Rybakova, “Schastlivaia ty, Tania!” p. 352.

9. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 11, p. 328.

10. Quoted in: Vladimir Lakshin, Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i (Moscow, 2004), p. 480.

11. Quoted in: I. Vinogradskaya, Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo K. S. Stanislavskogo, Letopis’ v chetyrekh tomakh [Life and work of K. S. Stanislavsky: chronicle in 4 volumes] (Moscow, 1976), p. 291.

12. Quoted in: Anatoli Smeliansky, Ukhodiashchaia natura [Departing nature] (Moscow, 2002), p. 12.

13. Ibid., p. 480.

14. Oleg Efremov in conversation with the author.

15. Quoted in: Vladimir Bondarenko, Plamennye reaktsionery. Tri lika russkogo patriotizma [Flaming reactionaries: three faces of Russian patriotism] (Moscow, 2003), p. 667.

16. Ibid., p. 51.

17. Alexander Zinoviev, Gibel’ russkogo kommunizma [Death of Russian Communism] (Moscow, 2001), p. 91.

18. Sovetskaia kul’tura, May 27, 1989.

19. Boris Grebenshchikov in conversation with the author.

20. Sovetskaia kul’tura, May 27, 1989.

21. Andrei Bitov, Oglashennye [Possessed] (St. Petersburg, 1995), p. 364.

22. Yevtushenko, Ne umirai prezhde smerti, p. 412.

23. Nezavisimaia gazeta, October 13, 1993.

24. Vagrich Bakhchanyan in conversation with the author.

25. Eduard Limonov, Anatomia geroia [Anatomy of a hero] (Smolensk, 1998), p. 55.

26. Moskovskie novosti, September 16, 2003.

27. Ibid.

28. Russkaia mysl’, October 28, 1993.

29. Solzhenitsyn, Publitsistika, vol. 3, p. 324.

30. Letter from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the author, October 10, 1985, Volkov archives.

31. Solzhenitsyn, Publitsistika, vol. 3, pp. 264–265.

32. Solzhenitsyn, Publitsistika, vol. 1, p. 226.

33. Novyi mir, 1 (1990), p. 223.

34. Solzhenitsyn, Publitsistika, vol. 3, p. 341.

35. Eduard Limonov, Limonov protiv Zhirinovskogo [Limonov versus Zhirinovsky] (Moscow, 1994), p. 127.

36. Ogonek, 27–28 (1994), p. 22.

37. Ibid.

38. Novoye Russkoye Slovo, September 24, 1993.

39. Cherniayev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, pp. 277–278.

40. Vyacheslav Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom [Novel with a president] (Moscow, 1997), p. 339.

41. Mikhail Kozakov, Risunki na peske [Drawings in the sand] (Tel-Aviv, 1993), p. 254.

42. Kostikov, Roman s prezidentom, p. 339.

43. Nash Sovremennik, 11–12 (1998), p. 185.

44. Quoted in: Zhores Medvedev, Roy Medvedev, Solzhenitsyn i Sakharov. Dva proroka [Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov: two prophets] (Moscow, 2004), p. 213.

45. Sintaksis, 36 (1998), p. 149.

46. Kontinent, 18 (1978), p. 345.

47. G. P. Fedotov, Sud’ba i grekhi Rossii. Izbrannye stat’i po filosofii russkoi istorii i kul’tury [Fate and sins of Russia: selected articles on the philosophy of Russian history and culture], vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1992), p. 167.

48. Ibid.

49. Viktor Toporov, Pokhorony Gullivera v strane liliputov [Gulliver’s funeral in the land of Lilliputians] (St. Petersburg and Moscow, 2002), pp. 180–181.

50. Sergei Gandlevsky, Poeticheskaija kukhnia [Poetic kitchen] (St. Petersburg, 1998), pp. 68–69.

51. Ibid., p. 57.

52. Dmitri Prigov and Sergei Shapoval, Portretnaya galereia D. A. P. [D. A. P. portrait gallery] (Moscow, 2003), p. 92.

53. Boris Yeltsin, Prezidentskii marafon [Presidential marathon] (Moscow, 2000), p. 127.

54. Sovetskaia Rossiia, May 16, 2000.

55. O Rossii i russkoi filosofskoi kul’ture [About Russia and Russian philosophical culture] (Moscow, 1990), p. 44.

56. L. N. Gumilev, Ritmy Evrazii [Rhythms of Eurasia] (Moscow, 1993), p. 24.

57. L. N. Gumilev, Ot Rusi do Rossii [From Rus to Russia] (St. Petersburg, 1992), p. 250.

58. Gumilev, Ritmy Evrazii, p. 31.

59. Alexander Dugin, Proekt “Evraziia” [Project Eurasia] (Moscow, 2004), p. 349.

60. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rossiia v obvale [Russia collapsing] (Moscow, 1998), p. 149.

61. Ibid., pp. 159, 175–176.

62. Segodnya, September 7, 1993.

63. Borodin, Bez vybora, p. 403.

64. Ibid., p. 404.

65. Chaika, 21 (2005), p. 27.

66. Ibid.

67. Solzhenitsyn, Na vozvrate dykhaniia, p. 519.


A Note About the Author


Solomon Volkov is the award-winning author of several notable books about Russian culture, including St. Petersburg: A Cultural History and Shostakovich and Stalin, published worldwide. After moving to the United States from the Soviet Union, he became a cultural commentator at the Voice of America and then Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, broadcasting to the USSR (and later, Russia), discussing contemporary artistic developments in his former homeland. He lives in New York City with his wife, Marianna, a pianist and photographer.


A Note About the Translator


The prizewinning translator Antonina W. Bouis is known for her work with contemporary Russian literature. She and her husband, Jean-Claude, live in New York City and travel to Russia regularly.


ALSO BY SOLOMON VOLKOV

Shostakovich and Stalin

Conversations with Joseph Brodsky

St. Petersburg: A Cultural History

From Russia to the West: The Musical Memoirs and Reminiscences of Nathan Milstein

Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky: Conversations with Balanchine on His Life, Ballet and Music

Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich


THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK


PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF


Translation copyright © 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.


All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.


www.aaknopf.com


This translation is from an unpublished manuscript by Solomon Volkov, copyright © by Solomon Volkov.


Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Volkov, Solomon.


The magical chorus : a history of Russian culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn / by Solomon Volkov; translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis.—1st ed.


p. cm.


“This is a Borzoi book.”


Includes bibliographical references.


eISBN: 978-0-307-26877-8


1. Russian literature—20th century—Political aspects. 2. Politics and literature—Soviet Union. 3. Arts, Russian—20th century—Political aspects. 4. Russia (Federation)—Civilization—20th century. 5. Soviet Union—Civilization. I. Bouis, Antonina W. II. Title.


PG3026.P64V65 2008


891.709'358—dc22 2007034204


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