Symphony for the City of the Dead

by M. T. Anderson

  It did no good.

  The court tried Meyerhold in secret. There was no defense lawyer. No witnesses were allowed. He was found guilty.

  The next day, he was taken down to the cellar. There was a killing room there. The floor was concrete and slanted so it could be easily hosed down. He was met by an executioner in a leather butcher’s apron.

  When he was dead, his body was cremated. The remains were thrown in a ditch marked “Common Grave Number One — unclaimed ashes 1930–42 inclusive.”

  If there is one mercy to Meyerhold’s death, it is that he probably heard no news from outside.

  A few months after he was arrested, during his period of torture, his wife, Zinaida Raikh, was called and told to return to Moscow because she might be able to get word about him. She stayed at their old apartment. That night, two thugs climbed up onto the apartment balcony. They broke in and found Raikh in the living room. In happier days, Shostakovich, sitting in this room, had rolled his eyes at the doting love talk of Meyerhold and Raikh as they cooed and called each other geniuses.

  The murderers grabbed Raikh. She began screaming for help. They stabbed her seventeen times with a knife.

  The maid, hearing shouts, ran into the room. The men grabbed the maid and beat her unconscious. She collapsed.

  One of the killers ran back to the balcony and leaped off. The other ran out the door of the apartment and galloped down the steps. Raikh’s blood was smeared on the wall of the stairwell.

  Outside, the murderers ran to a black car waiting at the corner. They drove off into the night.

  Raikh was dead by the time someone got her to a hospital. The attack was savage. Both of her eyes had been gouged out.

  According to Russian superstition, the last thing a dying man sees is imprinted on the eyes. Apparently, the killers wanted to erase any record of who they were.

  At this time, even the unseeing eyes of the unspeaking dead had to be silenced.

  Here, supposedly, is Dmitri Shostakovich’s epitaph on Vsevolod Meyerhold and Zinaida Raikh:

  Meyerhold loved her madly. I had never seen anything like it. It’s hard to imagine that such a love could exist in our day. There was something ominous about it — and it did end badly.

  It makes you think: the best way to hold on to something is to pay no attention to it. The things you love too much perish. You have to treat everything with irony, especially the things you hold dear. There’s more of a chance then that they’ll survive.

  When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the one who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator.

  Vsevolod Meyerhold came as close as anyone to achieving this. It is important to know of the full horror of his sacrifice.

  It is easy for us all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering.

  Party members were purged. Futurist painters were purged. Leningrad factory bosses were purged. Train operators were purged — so many that one railway line had no one left working on it. When the NKVD had finished purging other groups, then Stalin purged the NKVD itself. He decided they were getting too powerful. He had the head of the NKVD replaced, tried, and shot. About twenty thousand secret-police officers were rounded up and exiled or executed. Some officers, knowing all too well what happened when people were imprisoned, shot themselves or threw themselves out of their office windows before they could be arrested. No one was safe.

  Scientists who taught strict Darwinian evolution were purged because genetic inheritance didn’t always sit well with Stalin’s notions of social change. This crippled Soviet science for decades.

  Historians were purged. Diplomats were purged.

  Collective farmers were purged because during the harvest, the crops were crawling with ticks. The regime claimed that the ticks had been spread by antirevolutionary masterminds. Meteorologists were purged; supposedly, their weather predictions were wrong because they were trying to sabotage Soviet agriculture.

  Stalin purged the other Soviet Republics in the USSR ruthlessly, too. The government of Ukraine was replaced entirely. The government of the Tatar Republic was completely liquidated.

  “Better too far than not far enough,” exclaimed NKVD head Yezhov before his own arrest. “Beat, destroy without sorting out.”

  In July 1937, Stalin ordered arrest quotas for each region in the USSR. He didn’t provide names of people to be arrested; he provided numbers. According to this schedule, a total of 259,450 people had to be arrested and sentenced to slave labor in the camps; 72,950 had to be shot. It did not matter who they were; all that mattered was that each region fulfilled its quota. Members of Stalin’s Politburo spread out across the country to oversee the bloody harvest.

  The only way to save oneself and one’s family was to admit guilt and give names of other “coconspirators.” People blurted out the names of their personal enemies, past lovers, people who’d told jokes at Stalin’s expense. In this way, the pool of suspects snowballed, grew. Before long, half the USSR’s urban population was listed in the NKVD’s records of possible anti-people saboteurs.

  To conceal the unimaginable reach of the purges, victims were driven through the streets in trucks marked MEAT and VEGETABLES. At night, they were taken to remote killing fields outside the cities. They were never seen again.

  Stalin was not merely trying to remove political enemies. He was not merely trying to terrorize the country into submission. He was trying to break down all social structure that did not emanate from him, and to create a new people, no longer Homo sapiens, but Homo sovieticus, the New Man of Communism. “Everything that divides the many from each other, that fosters the illusion of the individual importance of man, especially the ‘soul,’ hinders this higher evolution, and must consequently be destroyed,” wrote a horrified onlooker. “Only the ‘collective man,’ freed from the evil of the soul, mechanically united by external interests with all others, is strong. To him alone belongs the empire of the future; only he will be able to reign therein ‘in the millennium.’”

  Even the family as a unit was breaking down. Shostakovich watched the accusations rapidly spread farther and farther, tearing families apart. “Son denounced father, wife informed on husband,” he remembered miserably. “The papers were full of announcements like ‘I, So-and-so, announce that I have nothing to do with my father, enemy of the people So-and-so. I broke off with him ten years ago.’ Everyone had grown accustomed to such announcements, they didn’t even pay attention. So you broke off with him. It was like reading, ‘Selling my furniture,’ or ‘French lessons, also manicure, pedicure, and electrolysis.’”

  One boy who supposedly denounced his father to the government for forging documents was killed by his uncles because of it. This child, Pavlik Morozov, became a famous Communist martyr. Children all across the country read his story and were told that they should follow his example and turn their parents in.

  Parents could not even talk freely in front of their own kids.

  When one little boy saw his father dragged off by the secret police, he immediately assumed the man was guilty. “Look what those enemies of the people are like,” he sobbed, heartbroken. “Some of them even pretend to be fathers.”

  A friend of the Shostakoviches, writing in her diary about the exile of Shostakovich’s sister Maria and her husband, and about the execution of countless others:

  The nausea rises to my throat when I hear how calmly people can say it: He was shot, someone else was shot, shot, shot. The word is always in the air, it resonates through the air. People pronounce the words completely calmly, as though saying, “He went to the theater.” I think that the real meaning of the word doesn’t reach our consciousness — all we hear is the sound. . . .

  God forgive the living and give rest to the dead.

  The final touch of ghastly cruelty in the midst of this bloodshed was the infantile humor of Stalin and his band of merry psychopaths. They delighted in their gam
es like children. They played pranks on one another. The head of the NKVD threw the minister of foreign trade’s hat up into the trees; he shoved rotten tomatoes into the man’s suits so they exploded wetly like blood. At state banquets, Stalin flirted with ladies by throwing pellets of bread and orange peel at their heads. His favorite NKVD interrogators would entertain his giggling court by acting out the groveling of famous prisoners. “Oh, Comrade Stalin will save me — call Comrade Stalin,” they would whimper, crawling on the floor.

  Stalin roared with laughter until he cried.

  (Life is getting better, comrades! Life is getting merrier!)

  Life was becoming more like the ultramodern stories and music of the dead 1920s, like Shostakovich’s own forbidden score to the Fourth Symphony: violent, arbitrary, absurd, and devilishly dreamlike. One innocent prisoner protested, “I am a victim of an Enemy’s lies. Sometimes I think this is a silly dream.” It was not unusual for innocents dragged before the NKVD to look around themselves, startled, and say they felt like they must have fallen into some kind of nightmare.

  When Shostakovich drank with friends, he would raise his glass in a toast: “Here’s to life not getting any ‘merrier.’”

  One day Shostakovich went to visit a friend. When he got there, his friend was gone. The man had disappeared. A family of strangers was living in the apartment. No one could tell him what had happened to his friend.

  Everything the man owned had been thrown out onto the street.

  As he watched people vanish, Shostakovich was sure that he would be next. He packed a suitcase with extra clothes and warm underwear and left it by the door. Eventually he started sleeping on the landing outside his apartment.

  He did not want Nina and the baby to be disturbed when, inevitably, the NKVD came for him.

  Shostakovich hoped that his friendship with Red Army marshal Tukhachevsky would keep him safe until the purges were over. Unfortunately, Tukhachevsky had made many enemies in the regime.

  Tukhachevsky was a brilliant military thinker. He wanted to modernize the Red Amy so it would be prepared in case of a war with Germany. Like the rest of the country, he was watching the rise of the Nazis warily. He predicted that Hitler would soon try to attack Germany’s neighbors and snatch territory. Gently, he began discussions with officials in England, France, and Poland about the idea of forming an alliance to contain the Germans. He also tried to prepare the Red Army technologically so it would be ready for the onslaught. He wrote a book, The Future War, discussing the prospects of modern conflict and how the USSR should prepare for it. He was a strong proponent of tank warfare and the air force.

  This did not always make him popular among the Red Army high command. Several of Stalin’s closest military advisers had been cavalrymen in the First World War. They believed that the horse was always going to be the most important military device. “What the hell do we need rocket artillery for?” one of them protested. “The main thing is the horse-drawn gun.” They believed that tanks were overrated.

  Stalin himself was worried that Tukhachevsky and his supporters in the Red Army might become too powerful and challenge the regime. Stalin had already purged the Communist Party. The Red Army was the one organization left that could still topple him. Accordingly, Stalin set out to destroy Marshal Tukhachevsky.

  He quietly instructed the NKVD to create a case against the marshal — something damning that would prove that Tukhachevsky was already plotting the government’s downfall. The NKVD, in strictest secrecy, began to make inquiries. As Lavrentii Beria, the wartime head of the NKVD, later admitted to his son, “Tukhachevsky had done nothing against Stalin and the party, or at least nothing that would justify his arrest.” Evidence of a conspiracy would have to be forged.

  What followed must be one of the most bizarre stories in the history of espionage.

  In France, there lived a Russian refugee named Nikolai Skoblin. He was a double or perhaps triple agent. He worked for both the Soviets and the Germans. He himself wanted to see Stalin and the Communists overthrown.

  Oddly, both the Germans and the NKVD knew that he was a double agent. The NKVD sent someone to explain to him that they were very interested in any evidence that might prove that Tukhachevsky was secretly a German spy. Skoblin agreed to look into it.

  The NKVD didn’t trust him, so they arranged to have him watched. With the kind of grotesque, Tintin-esque whimsy that somehow always dogs espionage like a puppy hot on the heels of a murderous thug, they ordered two spies to stake out Skoblin’s house: one named Ivan, Son of Pantelei, and the other named Pantelei, Son of Ivan. One wore a monocle. They usually worked as sandwich-board men, stumping up and down the boulevards of Paris wearing giant signs advertising cheap dinners at restaurants, wine included.

  Skoblin, closely monitored by Ivan and Pantelei, contacted the German secret service. He suggested that, one way or another, it might be in Hitler’s interest to discover proof that Marshal Tukhachevsky had long been in the pay of Germany.

  Late in 1936, Adolf Hitler met with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi Security Squadron (SS), and they discussed the Tukhachevsky situation. They both agreed that the liquidation of Tukhachevsky and his supporters would be of great use. It would cripple the Red Army. Hitler was already making long-range plans to eventually invade the Soviet Union. He was happy to provide the falsified evidence Skoblin requested.

  Through the staged capture of a spy and some dubious submarine plans, Skoblin “leaked” the word that Tukhachevsky was a German agent. Soon, the president of Czechoslovakia had heard rumors that Tukhachevsky was planning to overthrow the Russian government and welcome a German invasion. The president was anxious about the rise of the Nazis. He quickly passed the information on to Stalin. He could not have known that Stalin was the one who had originally seeded this story.

  Meanwhile, the Germans had set about forging a set of fake letters from Tukhachevsky to various German generals. They took Tukhachevsky’s signature off some military correspondence of the 1920s. They had an engraver copy the marshal’s handwriting. They produced a whole string of letters going back ten years, in which Tukhachevsky regularly sent the Germans top-secret reports about the Red Army’s troop deployment, their equipment, their strategic ideas, and their production capabilities. Then the SS sent word to the head of the NKVD that this clutch of treasonous letters was for sale for half a million German Deutschmarks. Stalin agreed to buy.

  The transfer happened at a meeting between NKVD agents, SS agents, and Skoblin, the double or perhaps triple agent. The Germans handed over their parcel of forged letters. The NKVD handed over the money. It seems likely that Stalin knew perfectly well that the letters were counterfeit. That was okay; so was the stack of bills he used to pay for them.

  With these documents in hand, Stalin made his next move against Russia’s most exceptional military genius.

  On May 10, 1937, Tukhachevsky received word that he was being removed from his job as deputy commissar of defense and being given the command of a distant, provincial region, the Volga Military District. He must have known that this signaled Stalin’s displeasure. Friends who saw him at this time said he did not look well.

  On May 20, Marshal Tukhachevsky got on a train to travel to his new provincial post, in Kuibyshev. He shut himself in his sleeping berth and went to bed. The train rumbled into the night.

  When he woke, the train was not moving. Everything was silent.

  Tukhachevsky got up and looked out the window. He found himself in the middle of a great forest. Tracks stretched into the distance. There was a pile of lumber on a platform. Nothing else.

  He went into the other compartments on the train car. They were empty. No one was there. His carriage had been decoupled; the rest of the train was gone. It seemed he was alone in the silent woodland.

  When he opened the door to the train carriage, he saw that there were NKVD agents standing guard.

  “Where are we?” he demanded.

  The officer answ
ered, “At the halt called ‘The Bandits.’ Your carriage was detached by order of the Commissar-General for Security. I don’t know how long it will remain here. Anyway we’ve got four days’ supplies.”

  Tukhachevsky must have known the end had come. He was probably surprised when he was not murdered immediately.

  Instead, an engine pulled up a day later, and on May 23, Tukhachevsky was taken back to Moscow and deposited there, now under guard. He was taken to prison, where he soon found himself surrounded by all his supporters, except one who had committed suicide when the agents went to arrest him.

  Tukhachevsky was allowed to see his wife once more. He was not allowed to see his daughter, and never said good-bye to her.

  Shortly thereafter, he was handed over to the head of the NKVD for questioning.

  The complete records of his interrogation remain in the state archives. Several of the pages are speckled brown with blood spattered from a falling body.

  At around this time, Shostakovich got an order to meet with an investigator at “the Big House,” the NKVD’s grim, modernist headquarters in Leningrad by the river Neva.

  Shostakovich went as commanded. He was always punctual. He did not know what the conversation was going to be about. The investigator invited him to sit down, then began the interview by asking chatty questions: “What are you working on now? How are your professional affairs?” And then: “Are you acquainted with Marshal Tukhachevsky?”

  Shostakovich admitted, “Yes, I know him.”

  “Tell me, how and when did you make his acquaintance?”

  Shostakovich told him that they had met after a concert and that sometimes they played music together.

  “And who else was present at these gatherings?”

  “Only members of the family circle.”

  “Any politicians there, by chance?”

  “No, no politicians.”

  “And what did you talk about?”

  “About music.”

  “And politics?”