The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Simonov in 1946

  Elevation to the Soviet elite led to a dramatic transformation of Simonov’s appearance. He abandoned the ‘military look’ of the war years and began to dress in elegantly tailored English suits, or more casually in turtleneck sweaters from America, a camel coat and the short-peaked cap fashionable in the post-war years. Tall and strikingly handsome, Simonov cut the figure of a European gentleman. He reclaimed many of the manners of the aristocracy into which he had been born. He was a bon viveur and generous host; he was loyal and kind to servants, especially to secretaries and chauffeurs; he opened doors for women, helped them with their coats and greeted them with a chivalrous kiss on the hand.41

  Simonov’s lifestyle, too, underwent dramatic transformation. He had several homes. There was a spacious dacha in the prestigious literary resort of Peredelkino, just outside Moscow, which he bought in 1946 from the writer Gladkov for a quarter of a million roubles, a large fortune in those days; a house in Gulripshi, a village near Sukhumi, overlooking the Black Sea, which he bought in 1949; and a large apartment on Gorky Street, in Moscow, where he lived with Valentina after 1948. The couple kept two maids, a housekeeper, a secretary and a private chauffeur for the limousine they had imported from America. The apartment was filled with elegant and expensive antiques. There were precious paintings on the walls, including one by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, which must have come from a private collection that had been confiscated by the state. The apartment was the scene of fashionable parties for the elite of Moscow’s literary and theatre world. Simonov was a keen cook and sometimes he would make elaborate meals for these parties; but more often he would call on the head chef of the nearby famous Aragvi Georgian restaurant who would bring his team of chefs to prepare a banquet in the apartment.42

  Among his staff at Novyi mir Simonov was known for his ‘seigneurial’ manner. Lydia Chukovskaia, who was in the poetry division, was struck by the youthful appearance of the new editor, who was then just thirty-one. Yet at the same time she remarked on his enormous confidence, which gave him the authority of a much older man. At work Simonov was serious and measured in his deliberations, drawing on his briar pipe, in the Stalin style, as he handed down instructions to subordinates (there were always half a dozen different pipes on Simonov’s desk). According to Chukovskaia, Simonov was arrogant and domineering in his dealings with the staff at Novyi mir. In her diary she compared the editorial offices to a nineteenth-century manor with ‘minions and lackeys’ running everywhere at the lord’s beck and call. She was especially offended by Simonov’s high-handed treatment of two poets, whom she had persuaded to submit work to Novyi mir in 1946. One was Nikolai Zabolotsky, who had just returned from eight years in a labour camp. Simonov agreed to publish one of his poems but then forced him to change some lines for political reasons. The other was Boris Pasternak, a huge figure in the Soviet literary world who was then, at the age of fifty-six, old enough to be Simonov’s father. Pasternak had asked for an advance on a poem which Simonov had accepted for publication in Novyi mir. But Simonov refused because he saw the request as a veiled threat to withdraw the poem if the advance was not paid. He told Chukovskaia that it was unethical for Pasternak to ‘threaten me, after everything that I have done for him. If I were in his position, I would not behave that way.’ To teach Pasternak a lesson Simonov decided not to publish the accepted poem after all. For Chukovskaia, herself the daughter of a writer (Kornei Chukovsky), brought up on the values of the old intelligentsia, Simonov’s behaviour was appalling, because it signalled his acceptance of the primacy of state power over the autonomy of art. ‘He [Simonov] wants to be a patron and demands gratitude,’ she wrote in her diary.

  But people don’t want charity. They want the respect which they deserve. Zabolotsky should be published, not because he spent eight years in the camps, but because his poem is good. Simonov is obliged to support Pasternak, not to do him favours, but obliged to support him, because he is in charge of poetry and, in this domain, Pasternak should be his most important responsibility… Simonov does not understand that it is his duty to Russian culture, and to the people, to give money to Pasternak. He thinks of it as a personal favour, for which Pasternak should be grateful.43

  Like all power-holders in the post-war Stalinist system, Simonov was able to exercise enormous patronage. As head of Novyi mir and deputy of the Writer’s Union, he could make or ruin the career of almost any writer in the Soviet Union. He could help people in many other ways – to get housing or a job, even to protect them from arrest – if only he was brave enough to use his influence with the authorities. That was how the system worked. Simonov was inundated with personal requests from colleagues, friends, friends of friends, casual acquaintances, soldiers he had met during the war. He could not help them all, of course, but how he chose the people he would help was revealing.

  He was very protective and kind towards his private secretary, Nina Gordon, for example, a small attractive woman in her mid-thirties, who had come to Novyi mir in 1946. Nina had previously worked for the writer Mikhail Koltsov, whose articles on the Spanish Civil War had been an inspiration to the young Simonov. Her husband, Iosif Gordon, a film editor from a noble family, had been arrested in 1937 and sentenced to five years in a labour camp near Magadan. In 1942, Iosif was released so that he could fight at the front. Nina informed Simonov about her disgraced husband when he wanted to promote her to become his personal secretary. At that point Iosif was living in exile in Riazan, where he was working as an engineer. Nina offered to decline the promotion. But Simonov would not hear of it. He even said that he would write to the MVD to help Iosif – an offer she rejected because she did not want to exploit his kindness. As it was, her employment in the offices of Novyi mir could have had unpleasant consequences for Simonov, as shown by an incident in 1948, when Iosif, who had been given permission to visit Moscow for a few days, turned up unexpectedly at the editorial offices. A journalist from the newspaper Izvestiia happened to be there and paid close attention to Iosif, who clearly had the look of an exile. The next day, Nina was called in for questioning by the journal’s Special Department, which served as the eyes and ears of the MVD (every Soviet institution had its own Special Department). Her interrogators wanted to know why Nina had concealed that she was married to a political exile, and threatened to report her for lack of vigilance. When Simonov heard about the incident he was furious. He saw it as an infringement of his editorial authority. Nina received a reprimand by the Special Department, which also issued a statement that ‘suspicious persons’ were not to be admitted to the offices, but there was no further action against her.44

  If Simonov was often kind towards people in his personal sphere and brave in helping them with the authorities, he was far less courageous when it came to people in the public sphere. Many writers turned to him for help during the repressions of the post-war years. Simonov was cautious in his response. He was helpful to some, less so to others, depending on his personal feelings, but he was always careful not to risk his own position or to raise suspicions about himself. For example, in September 1946, Simonov wrote a letter of recommendation for his old classmate from the Literary Institute, the poet Portugalov, who had applied to join the Writers’ Union. He did not mention Portugalov’s arrest (in 1937) or the years that he had suffered in the labour camps of Kolyma, referring instead to the ‘seven years that Portugalov spent in the army’ as the reason why he had not published anything, so as not to give the impression that he was pleading for a former ‘enemy of the people’. Portugalov was turned down by the Writers’ Union in 1946, but he reapplied in 1961, at the height of the Khrushchev thaw. On that occasion, Simonov was more forthcoming in his letter of recommendation, pointing to the ‘injustice of his arrest’ as the only reason why his first book of poetry, which appeared in 1960, had not come out twenty years before.45 Simonov also wrote to support the publication of the poet Iaroslav Smeliakov, a committed Communist and close friend of the Laskins, who had been arre
sted in 1934, served five years in a labour camp and fought bravely in the war, after which he served another term in the Gulag, working in a coal mine near Moscow.46 But other writers who appealed to him were not as fortunate. Simonov refused to help his old teacher at the Literary Institute, the poet Lugovskoi, who had suffered a nervous breakdown during the first battles of 1941 and spent the war years in evacuation in Tashkent. After his return to Moscow, Lugovskoi wrote to Simonov with a request for help in finding a new apartment. Lugovskoi was living with his wife in a communal apartment, but his fragile mental state required privacy. ‘I am no longer young,’ he wrote to his old pupil,

  I am a sick person. I cannot bear to live in a communal apartment, with a family of six in the next room… My nerves are constantly on edge and if I end up in a lunatic asylum it will not be surprising… It is hard to ask for help… but you are a humane person, and that encourages me to turn to you. Forgive me! I love you and am proud of you.47

  Simonov did not reply. As he saw it, Lugovskoi did not deserve help. For one thing, he already had an apartment, and worse, he had lacked courage in the war – an unforgivable crime in Simonov’s eyes.

  Simonov’s firm commitment to the Soviet ideal of military sacrifice goes some way to explain his entanglement in Stalin’s post-war campaigns of repression, starting with his involvement in the ‘Zhdanovsh-china’, the official clampdown against ‘anti-Soviet’ tendencies in the arts and sciences, which was led by Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief of ideology.

  The Zhdanovshchina had its origins in the military victory of 1945, which gave rise to a xenophobic nationalism in the Soviet leadership. Pride in the Soviet victory went hand in hand with the promotion of the USSR’s cultural and political superiority (by which the regime really meant the superiority of the Russians, who were described by Stalin as the most important group in the Soviet Union). Soviet-Russian nationalism replaced the internationalism of the pre-war years as the ruling ideology of the regime. Absurd claims were made for the achievements of Soviet science under the direction of Marxist-Leninist ideology. National pride led to the promotion of frauds and cranks like the pseudo-geneticist Trofim Lysenko, who claimed to have developed a new strain of wheat that would grow in the Arctic frost. The aeroplane, the steam engine, the radio, the incandescent bulb – there was scarely an invention or discovery that the Soviets did not claim for themselves. With the onset of the Cold War, Stalin called for iron discipline to purge all anti-patriotic – meaning pro-Western – elements in cultural affairs. He argued that historically, since the start of the eighteenth century when Peter the Great had founded St Petersburg, the intelligentsia in Russia had prostrated itself before Western – science and culture: it needed to be cured of this ‘sickness’ if the Soviet Union was to defend itself against the West.

  On Stalin’s orders, Zhdanov launched a violent campaign against Western influences in Soviet culture.* For Stalin the starting-point of this campaign was Leningrad, a European city he had never liked, whose independence from Moscow had been greatly strengthened by the war. The clampdown began on 14 August 1946, when the Central Committee published a decree censoring the journals Zvezda and Leningrad for publishing the work of two great Leningrad writers, Mikhail Zoshchenko and Anna Akhmatova. In singling out these writers for attack the Kremlin aimed to demonstrate to the Leningrad intelligentsia its subordination to the Soviet regime. Akhmatova had acquired immense moral influence during the war. Although her poetry had been rarely published in the Soviet Union since 1925, she remained for millions of Russians a living symbol of the spirit of endurance and human dignity that enabled Leningrad to survive the siege. In 1945, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who had then just arrived as First Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow, was told that in the war Akhmatova

  received an amazingly large number of letters from the front, quoting from both published and unpublished poems, for the most part circulated privately in manuscript copies; there were requests for autographs, for confirmation of the

  authenticity of texts, for expressions of the author’s attitude to this or that problem.

  Zoshchenko believed that the Central Committee decree had been passed after Stalin heard about a poetry reading by Akhmatova before a packed house at the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow. After Akhmatova finished reading, the audience erupted in applause. ‘Who organized this standing ovation?’ Stalin asked.48

  Zoshchenko was just as much a thorn in the dictator’s side. He was the last of the Soviet satirists – Maiakovsky, Zamiatin and Bulgakov had all perished – a literary tradition Stalin could not tolerate. The immediate cause of the attack on him was a children’s story, ‘Adventures of a Monkey’, published in Zvezda in 1946, in which a monkey escapes from a zoo and is trained as a human being. But in fact Stalin had been irritated by Zoshchenko’s stories for years. He recognized himself in the figure of the sentry in ‘Lenin and the Guard’ (1939), in which Zoshchenko portrayed a rude and impatient ‘southern type’ with a moustache, whom Lenin treats like a little boy.49

  As a leading member of the Writers’ Union, Simonov had little choice but to go along with this campaign. In his first issue as editor of Novyi mir he published the decree of the Central Committee alongside a transcript of a speech by Zhdanov which described Akhmatova as ‘one of the standard bearers of a hollow, empty, aristocratic salon poetry which is absolutely foreign to Soviet literature’ and (in a phrase that had been used by Soviet critics in the past) as a ‘half-nun, half-harlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer’.50

  Perhaps Simonov felt some discomfort as the persecutor of the Leningrad intelligentsia, with which his own mother’s family identified, but whatever feelings he may have had on this score, he refused to let them hold him back from what he understood as his higher duty to the state. Reflecting on these events in the last year of his life, Simonov confessed that he had gone along with the Zhdanovshchina because he believed that ‘something really needed to be done’ to counteract the ‘atmosphere of ideological relaxation’ that had taken hold of the intelligentsia. Unchecked, it would lead to ‘dangerous expectations of liberal reform’ precisely at a time when the Soviet Union needed to prepare for the intensified ideological struggle of the Cold War. This is what he argued at the time. As he put it in a letter to the Central Committee:

  On the ideological front a global struggle of unprecedented violence is being waged. And yet, despite the circumstances there are people spouting theories about a ‘breathing space’ – the idea that we should all sit around in a coffee house and talk about reform. These are mostly people, by the way, who have no need for breathing space, because they laboured very little in the war; in fact, most of them did nothing… If they want, we can give them their breathing space by stopping them from working in the field of Soviet art, but meanwhile the rest of us will go on working and fighting.51

  This contempt for intellectuals who shied away from ‘struggle’ – a long-standing view of Simonov’s – explains his hostility to Zoshchenko, in particular. With Akhmatova his attitude was different. He did not like, or even really know, her poetry, but he took exception to the violent language used by Zhdanov against her, because it seemed to him that ‘nobody should speak in such a way about a person who had suffered with the people as Akhmatova had done during the war’.* By contrast, Zoshchenko had spent the war years in evacuation in Tashkent, and according to the Soviet press, which accused the satirist of cowardice, he had fled from Leningrad to avoid fighting at the front. Simonov believed the charge of cowardice. He did not know the truth, or did not bother to discover it: that Zoshchenko, who was in his mid-forties and in poor health, had been ordered by the authorities to leave Leningrad at the beginning of the war. He judged Zoshchenko by the same harsh measure he applied to every man who did not fight, and extended it to the intellectuals who failed to recognize the need to join the ideological struggle of the Cold War. The theatre critic Aleksandr Borshchagovsky, who knew Simonov as well as anyone, p
oints out that this rush to condemn people like Zoshchenko was entirely based on prejudice. Simonov, he writes, had a tendency to

  mistrust anyone – especially an intellectual – who had spent the war years working in the rear, and had not shared in the bloody sacrifices of the soldiers at the front. This generalized suspiciousness – which was formed without the slightest effort to look deeper into the biography of each individual – did not take into account the fact that millions of people in the rear worked themselves into the ground so that millions of their comrades at the front could be armed for victory.52

  Simonov joined in the attacks on Zoshchenko but not directly in the slander against Akhmatova. When Pravda asked him to write an article condemning the two, Simonov replied that he would speak only against Zoshchenko, and the resulting article was almost wholly focused on the prose writer. However, Simonov reversed his campaign a few months later when he learned the truth about Zoshchenko’s evacuation and heard from the writer Iurii German that Zoshchenko was a courageous man, who had fought with honour in the First World War. Realizing his mistake, Simonov made some efforts to correct the situation: he recommended to Zhdanov the publication of Zoshchenko’s Partisan Tales, written in 1943, which Simonov personally edited, even though he did not think that they were very good. Zhdanov refused to read the tales, but at a meeting with Stalin, in May 1947, Simonov again brought up the issue of their publication on the grounds that Zoshchenko was in a desperate state and needed help. It was a bold and courageous step to go above Zhdanov and ask for Stalin’s help directly for a writer so disliked by the Soviet leader. Stalin told Simonov that he could print the tales on his own editorial authority, but that after they were published, he would read them and form his own opinion about Simonov’s decision to print them. As Simonov recalls, there was more than a ‘hint of a threat in Stalin’s humour’, but he went ahead with the publication of the tales, which appeared in Novyi mir in September 1947.53