The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Careerist motives also played a role. They were certainly a factor for Avdeyenko, an unknown writer of proletarian origins when he joined the trip to the White Sea Canal, although only two years later, in 1935, his first novel was critically acclaimed in the Soviet press. ‘The trip is how I got to the top and my life took off,’ Avdeyenko later acknowledged. ‘A shock worker called to literature! In one action I joined the ranks of writers worthy of high honour in the Soviet pantheon.’ Avdeyenko became a regular contributor to Perekovka – the in-house OGPU (NKVD) journal of the labour camps at the White Sea Canal – where he wrote in praise of penal labour as a form of human reforging.87

  Konstantin Simonov was another ‘proletarian writer’ to make his name through the White Sea Canal. In 1933, he was working as a mechanic – one of the hundreds of technicians under the command of Boris Babitsky – at the Mezhrabpomfilm studios. Simonov and the other mechanics would spend their lunch-breaks watching Pudovkin and Golovnia at work on the film set of The Deserter (an experience which, he claimed, awoke his interest in the arts). ‘In those years,’ recalls Simonov, ‘I had no proper education, but I read a lot of books, history books in particular, and for the first time in my life I tried to write.’ Inspired by the propaganda of the White Sea Canal, Simonov ‘filled a notebook with bad poems’ about the reforging of the penal labourers which somehow came to the attention of Goslitizdat (the State Publishing House) and OGPU. Extracts from one of these poems, ‘The White Sea Canal’, were published in a collection of poetry by young Soviet writers in 1933. On the back of this success, in April 1934 Simonov applied to Goslitizdat for permission to visit the canal and collect materials about the reforging of its convict labourers for a collection of poetry in praise of the labour camps. Goslitizdat approved the trip and paid for Simonov to spend a month at the Medvezhegorsk labour camp on the White Sea Canal, where he was employed as a journalist by Perekovka. He lived in the barracks with a team of prisoners, who did not take the nineteen-year-old poet very seriously (‘they laughed at me when I told them I was writing a poem about the White Sea Canal’). For this reason, it seemed to Simonov, the prisoners ‘were relatively natural with me’.88

  By the early summer of 1934, the construction of the White Sea Canal had been largely completed. The labourers observed by Simonov were engaged in building roads and installations – relatively easy tasks compared with the heavy manual digging of the main canal in 1931–3, when tens of thousands died. As the project came to an end, the camp administration rewarded labourers with bonuses, honours and medals. It also granted early release orders to some of the petty criminals who made up the workforce on the part of the canal visited by Simonov. The main aim of these rewards was to fulfil the myth of perekovka. They gave the prisoners an incentive to work hard and reform themselves (or give the impression that they were reformed) in order to gain their freedom or material advantages. Simonov was taken in. He was young and innocent. As he recalled in his memoirs, he returned from the White Sea Canal ‘ready to write new poetry about the reforging of people through labour’:

  Even though I had not been there long, I was convinced that I had seen with my own eyes how that reforging was actually taking place – as I believed it should – for what else but labour can redeem a person’s sins in a society such as ours?

  Simonov was particularly impressed by a story he had been told about an engineer, a close associate of the Provisional Government (‘practically the last commandant of the Winter Palace’),

  who was sentenced to eight if not ten years under Article 58 and worked so well in his capacity as an engineer on the White Sea Canal that he was released after just three years; he then worked voluntarily as the chief engineer on a construction site connected to the Moscow–Volga Canal. That kind of story was reinforced by my own impressions from my journey.*

  In reality, the willingness of certain specialists to go on working in the Gulag system after their release was seldom the result of reforging. But Simonov believed that what he saw at the White Sea Canal matched the stories he had heard or had read in the Soviet press. ‘In my perception,’ Simonov recalled in his memoirs, ‘the White Sea Canal was not just about the construction of a canal, but a humanitarian school for the reconstruction of bad people into good, of common criminals into builders of the Five Year Plan.’89

  For Simonov – a nobleman involved in the reconstruction of his own identity as a ‘proletarian writer’ – the idea of perekovka had a special resonance. In his memoirs Simonov recounts how he perceived the reforging of the ‘kulaks’ and ‘bourgeois saboteurs’ as ‘highly promising for society’, and as an inspiration for himself, because it showed ‘the possibility of burying the past and moving on to a new path’. The reforging of the former oppositionists at the Seventeenth Party Congress (the ‘congress of victors’) in 1934 was another inspiration to the young writer, as he strove to make a career for himself in an artistic sphere that was so tightly supervised by the Party. At that congress several Party leaders who had been opposed to Stalin’s extreme policies (Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky, Piatakov and others) were allowed to speak. They recanted their old positions and heaped praise on Stalin in the name of Party unity, and they were received in a manner that suggested that the Party leadership had rehabilitated them. Simonov took comfort from their example. As he saw it, the reception of the repentant oppositionists proved that the Party was a place where people like himself might receive forgiveness for their past. Simonov understood that his own reforging would depend on the reconstruction of his political personality. Like the former oppositionists, he had to show that he was a worthy Communist by renouncing his own past. His writings on the White Sea Canal were the means to that end. After he returned from the canal Simonov applied for a second time to join the Komsomol. On the previous occasion, following the arrest of his stepfather in 1931, he had been advised to withdraw his application. But this time he was invited to join. This acceptance was a ‘huge relief’ for Simonov. In his memoirs he remembers 1934 as the high-point of his hopes in the future:

  I cannot speak for other people of my age, but for me 1934 was the year of brightest hope in all my youth. There was a sense that the country had come through a difficult period and that, although problems still remained, life was becoming easier, in both spiritual and material terms. I was happy to be taking part in the building of this new life… The correctness of Stalin, who was leading the industrialization of the country and achieving great success, seemed indisputable to me. As I saw it, he was right to argue with his opponents and to show that they were wrong.90

  In the summer of 1934, shortly after his return, Simonov wrote a poem, ‘Horizon’, about the reforging of a criminal in the labour camps. The poem was heavily edited – and in places censored – by the Cultural-Educational Department of OGPU, which concluded that the poem was very badly written (‘pretentious’, ‘clumsy’, ‘cacophonous’, ‘mechanical’ and ‘sentimentalized’) but worthy of publication for its propaganda value nonetheless.91 ‘Horizon’ was reworked by Simonov and eventually published as ‘Pavel Chyorny’ in 1938. In later years Simonov would look back at this poem ‘with feelings of horror’. He insisted on excluding it from all collections of his published works.92 But the poem was the making of Simonov’s career. It demonstrated his ability to turn out poetry that could be used by the Stalinist regime. Simonov was encouraged to apply to the Gorky Literary Institute. He was even given a recommendation by his political patrons in Goslitizdat and the Cultural-Educational Department of OGPU.93

  Located in the former Herzen palace on the Tver Boulevard, the Literary Institute was opened in 1933 to encourage writers from the working class (until 1936 it was called the Workers’ Evening Literary University). Classes took place in the evening, which allowed Simonov to continue with his job at Mezhrabpomfilm and supplement his 200 rouble grant. Most of the students at the Literary Institute were not from the working class at all. They had been born to noble or bourgeois familie
s and, like Simonov, had qualified for entry to the institute by going through a factory school or by working in a factory. Half the students were members of the Komsomol or the Party. The institute was a cosmopolitan place, with writers from twenty-seven different nationalities.94 Among the many Jewish students were two young women who would become Simonov’s first wives: Natalia Tipot, the daughter of a well-known variety theatre-man, who married Simonov in 1935; and Zhenia Laskina, the youngest daughter of the ruined NEPman Samuil Laskin, who joined the institute in 1936 and married Simonov in 1939.

  By his own admission Simonov had no special affinity for literature. It was a career he pursued because of his spoilt biography. ‘If it were not for my noble origins,’ he had told Natalia, ‘I would not have been interested in literature at all, only in politics and history.’95 Nor was Simonov considered to be among the most talented students at the Literary Institute (in 1936 he was ranked seventh in a list of excellence headed by the poet Margarita Aliger). But he was known as a conscientious student who was well organized (he carefully planned out the time he spent on working, reading, even socializing) and always punctual in completing his tasks. His fellow students nicknamed Simonov the ‘iron bottom’ because he worked so hard. ‘He just sat down and wrote and wrote,’ recalls the poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky (who came in second on the list of excellence). Aliger remembers Simonov as someone who stood out as a leader from the start. Usually dressed in a leather jacket, like the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, or in a jacket, shirt and tie, Simonov distanced himself from the bohemian culture of the other students at the institute, spending his spare time in Komsomol activities or writing book reviews rather than in playing billiards. Not surprisingly, he was held in

  Simonov in 1936

  high regard by the administration of the institute, which saw him as a Party loyalist and entrusted him with many tasks (in 1937 he would play a leading role in the denunciation of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ within the institute). Simonov was serious and censorious, more like a literary bureaucrat than a young poet. ‘Not having written my own book,’ he recalled in 1945,

  I wrote many critical reviews of books written by others. I was very strict and impatient, which just goes to show that the most crudely negative reviews of a book are always written by reviewers who have not succeeded or could not succeed in writing such a book themselves.96

  As a poet at the institute, Simonov was learning how to write for his political superiors. The theme of perekovka, which became a commonplace of the Socialist Realist tradition in the 1930s, reappeared in several of his early poems, which returned to the subject of the White Sea Canal. But increasingly his poetry was shaped by the hopes of the Five Year Plans and by the heroic theme of struggle epitomized by the Spanish Civil War. Here Simonov was deeply influenced by his poetry teacher, Vladimir Lugovskoi (1901–57), a charismatic figure to the young poets at the institute, whose room was filled with swords and guns, memorabilia from his fighting days in the Russian Civil War and the last campaign against the Basmachi Muslim rebels in Central Asia in 1931. Simonov explored the theme of masculinity and heroic courage in poems like ‘The General’, which was inspired by the death of the Hungarian Communist Mate Zalka (also known as General Lukach) in the Spanish Civil War. For Simonov, who took his basic values from the military ethos of his stepfather, the bravery and self-sacrifice of fighters such as Zalka were not just ‘wonderful human qualities’ but ‘virtues of the first necessity’ in a world engulfed by the struggle between socialism and Fascism. As Simonov explained to a foreign journalist in 1960, ‘we young Communists of the 1930s hated with a passion anyone who showed signs of complacency by imagining that our future victory would be easy and bloodless’. This was a generation immersed in the notion of struggle – a generation that lived in readiness for war. Recalling his student years, Simonov was speaking for a whole epoch when he wrote in 1973:

  The Literary Institute opened the same year the Nazis came to power. All our years of study were overshadowed by the sense of an impending war with Fascism. These were years when it was impossible to think of literature and one’s path in it without thinking how, sooner or later, we too would be forced to play a part – whether with a pen or a rifle in our hands was not yet clear – in this looming struggle with Fascism.

  On 1 January 1936, Simonov had his first poem published in Izvestiia, ‘New Year’s Toast’. It was an early sign of the favour with which the young poet – then just twenty years of age – would come to be regarded by the Party leadership. In the poem, Simonov conjured up the idea of a final struggle between light and dark:

  Friends, today we stand on high alert!

  Wolves encircle our Republic!

  So we raises our glasses,

  And drink in silence

  To those who stand by the machine-gun,

  To those whose only friend is the rifle,

  To everyone who knows the verb ‘to fight’,

  A sad verb that we need to know.

  To those who can leave a silent room

  And walk into the unknown fire… 97

  At the same time as Simonov was making his career, his three Obolensky aunts were languishing in exile in Orenburg, a city on the eastern Volga steppes 1,500 kilometres south-east of Moscow, having been expelled from Leningrad in the repressions that followed the murder of Kirov. Simonov was fond of his three aunts. He had written to them regularly since he was a child. Liudmila, the eldest of his mother’s three sisters, had married an artillery captain from a family of Russified Germans, Maximilian Tideman. His death in the First World War had left Liudmila and her three children stranded in Riazan, where Maximilian’s regiment had been based. After returning to Petrograd in 1922, Liudmila worked as a teacher in a school for handicapped children. By the time of her arrest, in 1935, her three children had grown up. Two went with her to Orenburg, but her eldest son remained in Leningrad, where he was highly valued as a manager at the Red Triangle Factory, which helped to protect him from arrest. Daria, or ‘Dolly’, the middle sister, was severely handicapped, the left side of her body deformed and paralysed, which made it hard for her to move. Personal misfortune had turned her into a cantankerous old maid. Dogmatically religious, she made no secret of her hatred of the Soviet regime and clung to the traditions of the aristocracy. In 1927, Dolly came to visit Aleksandra in Riazan. There were constant arguments about religion which, claims Simonov, led him to become an atheist (although in his later letters to his aunts Simonov continued to express religious sentiments). Simonov visited Dolly in Leningrad on several occasions, but he thought of it as a duty call. He much preferred Sonia, his third and youngest aunt, with whom he often stayed in Leningrad. Sonia was a plump woman with a ‘round face and a kind smile’ which reflected, as Simonov recalls, ‘her simple good nature and openness’. Unlike Dolly, Sonia adapted to the Soviet system, although her manners, values and beliefs retained traces of the nineteenth-century culture of the aristocracy. Trained as a teacher, she worked as a librarian and lived alone in a large room in a communal apartment. But she was not bitter or unhappy with her lot. On the contrary, Simonov recalls her as the liveliest and most fun of all his aunts. Not having children of her own, she loved to have her nephews and her nieces stay with her. She had a soft spot for Konstantin, her youngest nephew, whose interest in books she helped to stimulate. ‘My dear, darling Kiriushonchik,’ she wrote to Simonov, ‘I hope that you grow up to become useful and a comfort to us all, who love you so dearly. I hope that you will always have enough to eat, as we had in olden times.’98

  The last time Simonov saw Sonia was in the autumn of 1933, when he stayed with her in Leningrad. He wrote his first poems in her room. In February 1935, Sonia was exiled with Liudmila and Dolly to Orenburg. Simonov recalls his mother’s reaction when she found out, in Moscow, that her ‘three sisters had been sent into exile, along with many other people she had known since her childhood in St Petersburg’.

  She sat there in tears with the letters [she had just r
eceived from Orenburg], and suddenly she said: ‘If I had returned then with Liulia [Liudmila] from Riazan to Petrograd, I would be together with them now, of course.’ I remember being shocked by the way she said these words. She spoke with some sort of guilt that she was not with them, that she had somehow managed to escape the ordeal that afflicted her sisters. Then she asked my stepfather: ‘Maybe, we will be exiled from here?’ When she said ‘we’ she was not talking about the family; she meant herself, her origins, the Obolensky clan.99

  Simonov does not explain why he was so shocked. Perhaps he was surprised by his mother’s expression of guilt. But there was something else besides. Simonov had been brought up to think of himself as a ‘Soviet person’. Even the arrest of his stepfather had failed to shake him from this view. On the contrary, it had reinforced his striving to fashion for himself a proletarian identity. All his efforts to recast himself, first as an engineer and then as a ‘proletarian writer’, had strengthened his identification with the Soviet system. But his mother’s response to the arrest of his aunts – which was, it seems, the first time that he had heard her identify herself as a ‘social alien’ in Soviet terms – forced him to confront reality.

  Simonov’s mother and stepfather sent monthly packages of food and clothes to Orenburg, and he himself put aside a part of his own earnings to help with these parcels. In 1936, Aleksandra visited her three sisters. As Simonov recalls, she was afraid that she might not return (many people feared that they would be arrested if they visited their exiled relatives). Simonov’s stepfather, always practical, thought it would be better if she did not go, because if she was arrested it would be even harder to help her three sisters. But Aleksandra insisted on going, because, as she said, ‘if she did not, she would cease to be herself’. On her return from Orenburg, Aleksandra was ‘exhausted, sad, worn out from the long journey and the terrible conditions there’, recalls Simonov, ‘but she was not without hope for the future… because she thought that nothing worse could happen to them now’.100