NATASHA

by Orlando Figes

  The long-term plan of Soviet policy was to channel these 'folk cultures' into higher forms of art on the lines set out (or so it was believed) by the Russian nationalists of the nineteenth century. Russian composers were assigned by Moscow to the Central Asian and

  Caucasion republics to set up 'national operas' and symphonic

  traditions in places where there had been none before. The European opera house and concert hall arrived in Alma Ata and Tashkent, in Bukhara and Samarkand, as pillars of this imported Soviet-Russian culture; and soon they were filled with the strange sound of a wholly artificial 'national music' which was based on native tribal melodies notated in the European style then placed in the musical framework of the Russian national movement of the nineteenth century.

  The Russian composer Reinhold Gliere (the composition teacher of the young Prokofiev) wrote the first 'national opera' of Azerbaijan, mixing old Azeri melodies with European forms and harmonies. Gliere also composed the first Uzbek opera, Gulsara (1937), an epic Soviet tale of women's liberation from the old patriarchal way of life, with Uzbek folk tunes harmonized and orchestrated in the style of Berlioz. The Kirghiz opera was established by two Muscovites (Vladimir Vla-sov and Vladimir Fere) who orchestrated Kirghiz melodies (notated by the Kirghizian Abdilas Maldybaev) in their own imaginary Kirghiz national style with lots of raw and open harmonies. The Russian founder of the Kazakh national opera, Evgeny Brusilovsky, continued writing Kazakh opera until the 1950s, long after a new generation of native-born composers had emerged from the conservatory in Alma Ata. The campaign against the 'formalists' encouraged many composers to flee Moscow and Petersburg for the relatively liberal atmosphere of these remote republics. Alexander Mosolov, perhaps better known as a composer of experimental music in the 1920s, moved via the gulag to Turkmenistan, where he remained until his death in 1973, a composer of national Turkmen music in the style of Borodin. Maximilian Steinberg, Stravinsky's closest rival in St Petersburg in the 1900s and teacher to the leading avant-garde composers (including Shostakovich) in the early 1920s, ended his career as People's Artist of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.185

  As the Cold War became more intense, and Stalin's own paranoic fear of 'internal enemies' and 'spies' increased, his regime's suspicions of all foreign influence turned to hatred of the Jews. This anti-Semitism was thinly veiled by Soviet (that is, Russian) patriotic rhetoric, but there was no mistaking that the victims of the vicious inquisition against 'cosmopolitanism' were predominantly Jewish. In January 1948, the well-known Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of

  the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC), was killed by state security troops. The assassination was carried out on the strict personal instructions of Stalin, who, three days before the brutal killing, had summoned all the members of the Politburo, denounced Mikhoels in a fit of rage and, in a way that suggests that this was to be a symbolic murder,* specified that 'Mikhoels must be struck on the head with an axe, wrapped up in a wet quilted jacket and run over by a truck'.186

  The murder of Mikhoels was linked to the arrest of several dozen leading Jews accused of taking part in an American-Zionist conspiracy organized by the JAFC against the Soviet Union.+ The JAFC had been established on Stalin's orders in 1941 to mobilize Jewish support abroad for the Soviet war campaign. It received enthusiastic support from the left-wing Jewish community in Palestine, so much so that Stalin even thought he might turn the new state of Israel into the main sphere of Soviet influence in the Middle East. But Israel's growing links with the USA after 1948 unleashed Stalin's lifelong hatred of the Jews.187 The JAFC was abolished, its members all arrested and accused of plotting to turn the Crimea into an American-Zionist base for an attack on the Soviet Union. Thousands of Jews were forcibly evicted from the regions around Moscow and despatched as 'rootless parasites' to the Siberian wilderness, where a special 'Jewish Autonomous Region' had been established in Birobidzhan: it was a sort of Soviet version of Hitler's Madagascar, where the Nazis had once thought to export the Jews. In November 1948 the Central Committee decided that all the Jews in the Soviet Union would have to be resettled in Siberia.188

  In the cultural sphere the 'ugly distortions' of the avant-garde were put down to the influence of Jews like Eisenstein, Mandelstam,

  * Stalin's father had been murdered by an axe wrapped in a quilted jacket; and his likely killer, an Armenian criminal who had worked with Stalin for the Tsarist secret police in Tiflis in the 1900s, was killed on Stalin's orders, sixteen years later in 1922,, when he was run over by a truck (R. Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life (London, 2001), pp. 38-43).

  + Even two of Stalin's own relatives by marriage, Anna Redens and Olga Allilueva, were arrested for their Jewish connections. Explaining the arrest of her two aunts to his own daughter, Stalin stud: 'They knew too much. They blabbed a lot' (S. Allilueva, Only One Year (New York, 1969), p. 154).

  Chagall. The offensive was personally instigated by Stalin. He even studied linguistics, and wrote at length about it in Pravda during 1949, with the aim of denouncing the 'Jewish' theory, originally advanced by Niko Marr in the 1900s, that the Georgian language had Semitic origins.189 In 1953 Stalin ordered the arrest of several Jewish doctors who worked for the Kremlin on trumped-up charges (the so-called 'Doctors' Plot') of having poisoned Zhdanov and another Politburo member, A. S. Shcherbakov.* The tirade in the press against the 'murderers in white coats' produced a wave of anti-Jewish hatred, and many Jews were evicted from their jobs and homes. Jewish scientists, scholars and artists were singled out for attacks as 'bourgeois nationalists', even if (as was so often the case) they were more Russian than Jewish. The fact that they had 'Jew' written in their Soviet passports was enough to condemn them as Zionists.+

  Jewish film directors (Leonid Trauberg, Dziga Vertov, Mikhail Romm) were accused of making 'anti-Russian' films and forced out of their studios. Vasily Grossman's novel Stalingrad, based on his work as a war correspondent, was banned principally because its central character was a Russian Jew. The Black Book (first published in Jerusalem in 1980), Grossman's still-unrivalled memoir-based account of the Holocaust on Soviet soil, which he assembled for the Literary Commission of the JAFC, was never published in the Soviet Union. When Grossman started writing in the 1930s, he thought of himself as a Soviet citizen. The Revolution had brought to an end the Tsarist persecution of the Jews. But in his last novel, the epic wartime story Life and Fate (first published in Switzerland in 1980), he portrayed the Nazi and Soviet regimes, not as opposites, but as mirror images of each other. Grossman died in 1964, a quarter of a century before his

  * One of these prominent doctors was Isaiah Berlin's uncle Leo, who was accused of passing Kremlin secrets to the British through his nephew on his visit to Moscow in 1945. Severely beaten, Leo attempted suicide and eventually 'confessed' to having been a spy. He was held in prison for a year and released in 1954, shortly after Stalin's death. One day, while still weak from his time in prison, he saw one of his torturers in the street ahead of him, collapsed from a heart attack and died (M. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998), pp. 168-9).

  + All citizens of the USSR had a Soviet passport. But inside the passport there was a category that defined them by 'nationality' (ethnicity).

  masterpiece was published in his native land. He had asked to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.190

  'I had believed that after the Soviet victory, the experience of the thirties could not ever come again, yet everything reminded me of the way things had gone then', wrote Ilya Ehrenburg (one of the few senior Jewish intellectuals to emerge unscathed from the Stalin era) in Men, Years - Life (1961-6).191 Coming as it did after the release of the war years, this new wave of terror must have felt in some ways more oppressive than the old; to try to survive such a thing the second time around must have been like trying to preserve one's very sanity. Ehrenburg visited Akhmatova at the Fountain House in 1947.

  She was sitting in a small room where her portrait by Modigl
iani hung on the wall and, sad and majestic as ever, was reading Horace. Misfortunes crashed down on her like avalanches; it needed more than common fortitude to preserve such dignity, composure and pride.192

  Reading Horace was one way of keeping sane. Some writers turned to literary scholarship or, like Kornei Chukovsky, to writing children's books. Others, like Pasternak, turned to translating foreign works.

  Pasternak's Russian translations of Shakespeare are works of real artistic beauty, if not entirely true to the original. He was Stalin's favourite poet, far too precious to arrest. His love of Georgia and translations of Georgian poetry endeared him to the Soviet leader. But even though he lived amid all the creature comforts of a Moscow gentleman, Pasternak was made to suffer from the Terror in a different way. He bore the guilt for the suffering of those writers whom he could not help through his influence. He was tortured by the notion that his mere survival somehow proved that he was less than honour-able as a man - let alone as a great writer in that Russian tradition which took its moral values from the Decembrists. Isaiah Berlin, who met Pasternak on several occasions in 1945, recalled that he kept returning to this point, and went to absurd lengths to deny that he was capable of [some squalid compromise with the authorities] of which no one who knew him could begin to conceive him to be guilty'.193

  Pasternak refused to attend the meeting of the Writers' Union at which Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were denounced. For this he was expelled from the Union's board. He went to see Akhmatova. He gave her money, which may have led to the attack on him in Pravda as 'alien' and 'remote from Soviet reality'.194 After all his optimism in the war Pasternak was crushed by the return to the old regime of cruelty and lies. He withdrew from the public scene and worked on what he now regarded as his final message to the world: his great novel Doctor Zhivago. Set amidst the horrific chaos of the Russian Revolution and the civil war, it is no coincidence that the novel's central theme is the importance of preserving the old intelligentsia, represented by Zhivago. In many ways the hero's younger brother, the strange figure called Evgraf, who has some influence with the revolutionaries and often helps his brother out of dire straits by making calls to the right people, is the very type of saviour figure that Pasternak himself would have liked to have been. Pasternak regarded the novel as his greatest work (much more important than his poetry), his testament in prose, and he was determined that it should be read by the widest possible audience. His decision to publish it abroad, after it was delayed and then turned down by the journal Novyi mir, was his final act of rebellion against the bullying of the Soviet regime.*

  Shostakovich found another way to save his sanity. In 1948 he was dismissed from his teaching posts at the conservatories in Moscow and Leningrad - his pupils were also forced to repent for having studied with the 'formalist'. Fearing for his family, Shostakovich admitted his 'mistakes' at a Congress of Composers in April: he promised to write music which 'the People' could enjoy and understand. For a while, Shostakovich contemplated suicide. His works were banned from the concert repertoire. But, as in former times, he found a refuge and an outlet in the cinema. Between 1948 and 1953, Shostakovich wrote the music for no less than seven films.195 'It allows me to eat', he wrote to his friend Isaak Glickman, 'but it causes me extreme fatigue.'196 He

  * Smuggled out of Russia and first published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago became an international bestseller, and Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1958, but under pressure from the Writers' Union, and a storm of nationalist abuse against him in the Soviet press, he was forced to refuse the prize. Pasternak died in 1960.

  told fellow composers that it was 'unpleasant' work, to be done 'only in the event of extreme poverty'.197 Shostakovich needed all the money he could earn from this hack work. But he also had to show that he was taking part in the 'creative life of the Party'. Five of the film scores he composed in these years were awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize, and two of his songs from Alexandrov's Meeting on the Elbe (1948) became hits, with enormous record sales. The composer's own political rehabilitation and a modicum of material comfort for his family were secured.

  Yet all the time Shostakovich was writing secret music 'for the drawer'. Some of it was musical lampoon, like Rayok, or The Peep Show, a cantata satire on the Zhdanov era, with music set to the pompous speeches of the Soviet leaders, which finally received its premiere in Washington in 1989.* More than any other artist, Shostakovich laughed (inside) to save his sanity: that was why he so loved the writings of Gogol and Zoshchenko. But most of the music which he composed at this time was deeply personal, especially that music with a Jewish theme. Shostakovich identified with the suffering of the Jews. To some extent he even assumed a Jewish identity - choosing to express himself as a composer in a Jewish idiom and incorporating Jewish melodies in his compositions. What Shostakovich liked about the music of the Jews, as he himself explained in a revealing interview, was its 'ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations. Why does a man strike up a jolly song? Because he feels sad at heart.'198 But using Jewish music was a moral statement, too: it was the protest of an artist who had always been opposed to fascism in all its forms.

  Shostakovich first used Jewish themes in the finale of the Second Piano Trio (1944), dedicated to his closest friend, the musicologist Ivan Sollertinsky, who had died in February 1944. It was composed just as the reports were coming in of the Red Army's capture of the Nazi death camps at Majdanek, Belzec and Treblinka. As Stalin

  * It is not entirely clear when Shostakovich wrote Rayok. Sketches of it seem to date from 1948, but with the constant threat of a house search, it seems unlikely that he would have dared to compose the full score until after Stalin's death (see further M. Yakubov, 'Shostakovich's Anti-formalist Rayok: A History of the Work's Composition and Its Musical and Literary Sources', in R. Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context (Oxford, 1000), pp. 135-58).

  initiated his own campaign against the Jews, Shostakovich voiced his protest by adopting Jewish themes in many of his works: the song cycle From Jewish Poetry (1948), courageously performed at private concerts in his flat at the height of the Doctors' Plot; the Thirteenth Symphony (1962), the 'Babi Yar' with its requiem, the words composed by the poet Yevtushenko, for the Jews of Kiev who were murdered by the Nazis in 1941; and virtually all the string quartets from No. 3 (in 1946) to the unforgettable No. 8 (in 1961). The official dedication of the Eighth Quartet was 'To the Victims of Fascism', but, as Shostakovich told his daughter, it was really 'dedicated to myself'.199 The Eighth Quartet was Shostakovich's musical autobiography - a tragic summing up of his whole life and the life of his nation in the Stalinist era. Throughout this intensely personal work, which is full of self-quotation, the same four notes recur (D-E flat-C-B) which, in the German system of musical notation, make up four letters of the composer's name (D-S-C-H). The four notes are like a dirge. They fall like tears. In the fourth and final movement the grief becomes unbearable as these four notes are symbolically combined with the workers' revolutionary funeral lament, 'Tortured by a Cruel Bondage', which Shostakovich sings here for himself.

  7

  On 4 October 1957 the first beeps from space were heard as Sputnik I made its pioneering flight. A few weeks later, just in time for the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, the dog Laika ventured into space in Sputnik II. With this one small step, it suddenly appeared that the Soviet Union had leaped ahead of the Western world in science and technology. Khrushchev made the most of the success, claiming that it heralded the triumph of the communist idea. The next year a red flag was planted on the surface of the moon, and then, in April 1961, Yury Gagarin became the first man to leave the earth's atmosphere.

  The Soviet system was defined by its belief in science and technology. After 1945 the regime made a huge investment in the scientific establishment, promoting not just nuclear physics and other disciplines that

  were useful to the military but academic sciences and mathematics, too. The state made science
a top priority, elevating scientists to a status on a par with that of senior industrial managers and Party officials. The whole Marxist core of the system's ideology was an optimistic faith in the power of man's reason to banish human suffering and master the forces of the universe. The Soviet regime had been founded on the sort of futuristic visions imagined by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, whose writings were more popular in Russia than in any other country of the world. Wells was one of the first Western writers to visit Soviet Russia, in 1919, and even then, in the midst of the country's devastation from civil war, he found Lenin in the Kremlin dreaming about journeys into space.200

  Russia had its own prodigious range of science fiction which, unlike that of the West, formed part of its mainstream literature from the very start. Science fiction served as an arena for Utopian blueprints of the future society, such as the 'Fourth Dream' in Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (1862), from which Lenin drew his communist ideals. It was a testing ground for the big moral ideas of Russian literature - as in Dostoevsky's science-fiction tale, 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man' (1877), in which the vision of salvation through scientific and material progress advanced by Chernyshevsky is dispelled in a dream of Utopia on a perfect twin of earth: the cosmic paradise soons breaks down into a society of masters and slaves, and the narrator wakes up from his dream to see that the only true salvation is through Christian love of one's fellow human beings.