The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  His friend Borshchagovsky was included on that list. From the start of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign, Simonov had been gradually distancing himself from the theatre critic, who had been singled out as one of the main leaders of the ‘anti-patriotic group’. He knew that in the end he would be forced to denounce his friend, whose career he himself had promoted. After the phone call from Malenkov, when he agreed to give the speech against the ‘anti-patriotic group’, Simonov attempted to justify himself to Borshchagovsky by explaining: ‘If I do it, it will put me in a stronger position. I will be able to help people, which at the moment is the most important thing.’ He warned him not to come to the plenum, saying to the theatre critic as he left: ‘If you come, I shall feel obliged to denounce you in even stronger terms.’ Borshchagovsky did not read the speeches or the articles in which he was named by Simonov as a ‘saboteur of the theatre’, as a ‘bourgeois enemy’ of Soviet literature and ‘literary scum’.* He had trusted Simonov – he had viewed him as a friend – and stoically claimed to understand that he was forced to ‘perform a ritual ideological dance’.

  Aleksandr Borshchagovsky, 1947

  Borshchagovsky was expelled from the Writers’ Union and the Party. He lost his job at Novyi mir and was sacked from the Red Army Theatre, where he was the head of literature. Borshchagovsky and his family – his mother, his wife and their young daughter – were kicked out of their Moscow flat. For a while, they were put up by their friends, who let them sleep on floors or stay at their dachas (they even stayed at Simonov’s dacha at Peredelkino). Borshchagovsky took repression in his stride: a survivor of the 1930s, he had learned to carry on as best he could. To make ends meet, he sold his possessions (mostly books) and borrowed money from friends, including Simonov, who gave him money, as Borshchagovsky understood, ‘to ease his own conscience’, and refused to let him pay it back.69

  Filled with guilt towards his friend, Simonov went on seeing him as often as he could between 1949 and 1953, when the ban on Borshchagovsky was finally lifted, but he never spoke to him about the speech. It seemed to Borshchagovsky that when they met, Simonov would ‘look at me in an anxious way, as if he thought he needed to explain’. In July 1950, Simonov supported the publication of The Russian Flag, Borshchagovsky’s patriotic novel set in the Crimean War. ‘The book is accomplished, serious and necessary,’ Simonov concluded in his report to the censors. ‘I am convinced that its deeply patriotic content will touch readers’ hearts… Borshchagovsky has committed serious mistakes of an anti-patriotic character, that is evident, but he has suffered and he has acknowledged his mistakes.’ The book was finally passed for publication in 1953.70

  Interviewed fifty years later, in 2003, Borshchagovsky was still stoical about the injury Simonov had done him. ‘One grows accustomed to the pain’, was all he would say. But according to his wife, in the last years of his life, he was increasingly haunted by the events of 1949.* In his memoirs he concluded that Simonov had not found the civic courage to defend his friends and fellow writers from the hardline anti-Semites in the Writers’ Union. He didn’t feel Simonov was moved by fear or that he lacked a conscience. Rather, he believed that Simonov was driven by personal ambition, and especially by a kind of political servility: he was simply too devoted to Stalin, too infatuated with the aura of his power, to adopt a more courageous stand.71

  The ‘little terror’ of the post-war years was very different from the Great Terror of 1937–8. It took place, not against the backdrop of apocalypse, when frightened people agreed to betrayals and denunciations in the desperate struggle to save their lives and families, but against the background of a relatively mundane and stable existence, when fear no longer deprived people of their moral sensibility. The repressions of the post-war years were carried out by career bureaucrats and functionaries like Simonov. These people did not have to participate in the system of repression. Simonov was probably not in danger of expulsion from the Writers’ Union, let alone arrest. Had he refused to add his voice to the denunciation of the Jews, he might at most have suffered demotion from the leadership of the Writers’ Union and dismissal as the editor of Novyi mir, although of course he may have feared much worse. But the point is, people like Simonov had a choice. They could have followed a career path that skirted the pitfalls of political responsibility, as millions of others did, albeit at the cost of losing out on privileges and material rewards. For those unable to take a public stand, there were quieter ways to avoid involvement in political decisions that compromised their moral principles. As Borshchagovsky wrote of the people who betrayed him in 1949, could easily have chosen not to speak, they could have not shown up at the Plenum of the Writers’ Union, or pretended to be ill: they were not subject to Party discipline. For Borshchagovsky, the persecutions of that period, and the behaviour of those who facilitated them, were rooted in an all-pervasive compliance with the Stalinist regime – the defining characteristic of ordinary Stalinists. As he wrote:

  The phenomenon of 1949, and not only of that year, is not explained by fear – or if so, a fear that had long before dissolved into other elements within the human soul… [more to the point is] the servility of officious hangers-on, who had so little courage and morality that they were unable even to stand up to the semi-official directives of the lowest bureaucrats.72

  There were certainly people in a similar position of responsibility to Simonov who refused to get involved in the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. The President of the Academy of Sciences, Sergei Vavilov, for example, quietly resisted intense pressure to denounce an ‘anti-patriotic group’ in the Academy and sabotaged his own bureaucracy to prevent the dismissal of Jewish scientists (his brother Nikolai, the geneticist, had been arrested in 1940 and starved to death in prison in 1943).73 In the Writers’ Union there were people such as Boris Gorbatov, the Party Secretary of the Writers’ Union Presidium and a close friend of Simonov, who refused to go along with the campaign against the Jews. A Jew himself, Gorbatov had more cause to fear than Simonov: his wife had been arrested in 1948 and sentenced to ten years for ‘foreign espionage’, while he himself was not above political suspicion (in 1937, Gorbatov had been accused of propagating ‘Trotskyist’ opinions in his first novel, Our Town, a proletarian epic about the Five Year Plan in the Donbass; although he had narrowly avoided expulsion from the Party, his brother had been arrested as a ‘Trotskyist’ and shot in 1938). Yet despite the intense pressure of the Stalinist hardliners in the Writers’ Union, who denounced him as a ‘Jewish sympathizer’ of the ‘anti-patriotic group’, Gorbatov refused to join the persecution of his fellow Jews. For this he was forced to give up all his posts in the Party and the Writers’ Union. Borshchagovsky recalls meeting him in 1949 at Simonov’s dacha in Peredelkino. Having fallen out of favour with Stalin, Gorbatov was ‘a broken man who had been driven into a corner’, but he had managed to retain his moral dignity and principles.74

  Simonov was an altogether more complex, perhaps even tragic, character. He clearly had a conscience: he was troubled and even repulsed by some aspects of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. But he lost himself in the Stalinist system. The military ethos and public-service values he inherited from the aristocracy were so closely harnessed to the moral categories and imperatives of the Soviet system that he was left with few other means to judge or regulate his own behaviour. Simonov had a hypertrophied sense of public duty and responsibility that defined his outlook on the world. ‘Without the discipline of public duty,’ Simonov once said, ‘a person cannot be a complete human being.’ He was an activist by temperament; he could never have pretended to be ill to avoid being forced to make a difficult moral choice. In Simonov’s opinion, the avoidance of public responsibility was tantamount to cowardice. He had no time for people who were prone to indecisiveness, weakness or procrastination – all of which he considered human failings. He admired people who were rational and logical. These were the moral qualities he assigned to his fictional heroes – men like himself, only more
courageous, who were able to draw the right conclusions from objective evidence and act decisively.75

  It was the elevation of duty to a supreme virtue that determined Simonov’s political obedience: he confused public virtue with submission to the Party line. He was in awe of Stalin. His post-war notebooks are filled with synopses of Stalin’s works, quotations from his speeches and lists of the leader’s phrases and ideas which he set out to learn in order to become more politically literate.76 Simonov was infatuated with Stalin’s power. He felt his presence, felt Stalin watching over him, in virtually everything he did. Stalin was his patron and protector, his teacher and his guide, his critic and confessor, and at times perhaps, in his imagination, his jailer, torturer and executioner.

  The slightest criticism from the Soviet leader was enough to reduce Simonov to a state of total misery. In 1948, Simonov’s novella Dym otechestva (‘Smoke of the Fatherland’) was savagely attacked by

  Simonov (seated third from right) at the Congress of Soviet Writers in the Belorussian Republic, Minsk, 1949

  Agitprop’s main journal (Kul’tura i zhizn’) with the personal backing of Stalin, who, concluded Simonov, ‘disliked the story intensely’. Frightened and depressed, Simonov could not understand what was wrong with the book, which was one of his own favourites. ‘When I wrote it,’ he later told a friend, ‘I thought I was fulfilling my duty to the Party… and to Stalin, who was then, two years after the end of the war, the supreme authority for me.’ The central figure in the novella is a Communist veteran of the war who returns from abroad to the Soviet Union in 1947. Believing that his duty to the nation has been done, he tries to rebuild his private life in the difficult conditions of the post-war years. The novella accurately portrayed a certain mood that was common at that time, and it was a patriotic work, full of favourable comparisons between the Soviet Union and the USA. But it did contain some straight talk, about the famine of 1946–7 in particular, which was not done at the time (it was not until the Khrushchev thaw that social problems were addressed at all by Soviet literature), and it was this that had attracted censure from the Party leadership. Simonov was shaken by the attack on his work. It coincided with the attack on Fadeyev’s novel The Young Guard (1947), which had also been initiated by Stalin, and also in the Agitprop journal, giving rise to the suspicion that the tyrant was preparing a purge of the leaders of the Writers’ Union. Desperate to understand why Stalin had disliked his work, and eager to correct it so that it would meet with his approval, Simonov went to Zhdanov for advice, but Stalin’s chief of ideology had no light to shed on the matter – Zhdanov himself liked the novella – so Simonov resolved ‘not to publish Smoke of the Fatherland again’.77

  Shortly afterwards, Simonov was called by one of Zhdanov’s secretaries, who asked him when he would be delivering his play about Kliueva and Roskin, the disgraced scientists, whom Stalin had accused of subservience towards the West. Stalin had originally proposed the idea of a novel on this subject at a meeting in the Kremlin with Fadeyev and Simonov in May 1947. There was a need, he said, for more patriotic works of fiction to expose the intelligentsia’s submission to the West. Simonov agreed but suggested that the theme was better suited to a play. At that time Simonov was still writing Smoke of the Fatherland, so he put off working on the play, a serious political commission that he felt as a burden, although he did go to Zhdanov’s offices to look at the materials on Kliueva and Roskin. Coming as it did so quickly after the attack on him by Agitprop, the call from Zhdanov’s secretary was a clear message to Simonov that Stalin would forgive him for the mistakes he had made in his novella, if he delivered the play Stalin had been waiting for. Desperate to redeem himself, in the early months of 1948 Simonov produced the first draft of Alien Shadow, a crude propaganda play about a Soviet microbiologist whose infatuation with the West leads him to betray his motherland. In a shameful act of political toadying, Simonov sent the draft to Zhdanov for his approval, and on his advice to Molotov and Stalin for their approval as well. Stalin telephoned Simonov and gave him precise instructions on how to rewrite the play. He advised Simonov to place greater emphasis on the egotism of the scientist-protagonist (Stalin: ‘he sees his research as his own personal property’) and to highlight the government’s benevolence by ending the play with the Minister of Health implementing Stalin’s orders to forgive the errant scientist and let him carry on with his research. ‘That is how I see the play,’ Stalin said. ‘You need to correct it. How you do it is your own business. Once you have corrected it, the play will be passed.’ Simonov reworked the ending of the play, making the changes suggested by Stalin, and sent him the second draft for his approval. ‘I wrote the play in agony, under duress, forcing myself to believe in the necessity of what I was doing,’ recalled Simonov. ‘I could have chosen not to write it, if only I had found the strength of character to resist this self-violation. Today, thirty years later, I am ashamed that I lacked the courage to do that.’78

  The episode ended in tragicomedy. The play was published in the journal Znamia and nominated for the Stalin Prize, along with several other plays, whose merits were considered by the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union, before being passed up to the committee of the Stalin Prize. At the meeting of the Secretariat, where Simonov was present, several of his colleagues criticized the ending of the play (the one suggested by Stalin) on the grounds that it was ‘too weak, too liberal, almost a political capitulation, to forgive the scientist rather than to punish him’. Simonov said nothing about his telephone conversation with Stalin. ‘I sat there in silence listening to my colleagues censuring Stalin’s liberalism.’ The play won the Stalin Prize.79

  Simonov was accustomed to self-criticism and self-censorship. He wrote many letters to the Soviet leadership confessing to mistakes. He drafted several stories which he then put in the drawer because he knew the censors would never pass them for publication. In 1973, Simonov was asked by the German writer Christa Wolf whether he had ever felt pressure to write what he knew to be politically acceptable. Simonov admitted to a life-long struggle between the writer and the censor in himself and even acknowledged feelings of disgust when his cowardice gained the upper hand.80

  Occasionally, the writer in Simonov did rebel against the censor, and the poet spoke up for his political conscience. In October 1946, at the height of the Zhdanovshchina, for example, Simonov wrote an angry letter to Aleksei Surkov, the editor of the journal Ogonyok, to which he had previously sent a number of poems for publication. Simonov expressed his bitter disagreement, ‘in substance and in principle’, with the petty cuts and changes Surkov had made to his work, including the removal of the names of foreigners (on ‘patriotic’ grounds) and the names of Soviet figures who had been politically disgraced. Simonov took particular exception to the cutting of a poem dedicated to his old friend David Ortenberg, who had been dismissed as the editor of the Red Army newspaper Krasnaia zvezda in 1943 after he had refused an order from the Kremlin to sack several fellow Jews from his editorial staff. Ortenberg had bravely written to the Party leadership to voice his discontent with the ‘unchecked anti-Semitism’ which he had detected in some sections of the military and in many areas of the Soviet rear. ‘I want to include this poem,’ Simonov insisted, ‘I like it as a whole. It is dedicated to a person I love, and I want it to remain as I wrote it.’81

  Perhaps Simonov attached more significance to his poem about Ortenberg as he became entangled in the literary persecution of the Soviet Jews. His conscience often troubled him, even when he was involved in the repressive measures of the Stalinist regime, and the conflict nearly broke him as a writer and a man. The physical and mental stress of his political responsibilities showed up in his changing appearance: in 1948, Simonov, aged thirty-three, seemed a young man in the prime of life; just five years later, he looked grey and middle-aged. His hands suffered from a nervous skin condition, and only heavy drinking calmed his nerves.82

  Simonov in 1948 (left) and in 1953 (right)

 
In his memoirs, composed in the last year of his life, Simonov recalls an incident that particularly troubled his conscience and brought him face to face with the realization that Stalin’s tyranny rested on the cowardly complicity of functionaries like himself. The incident occurred in 1952 at a meeting in the Kremlin to judge the Stalin Prize. It was more or less agreed to give the prize to Stepan Zlobin’s novel Stepan Razin, but Malenkov objected that Zlobin had behaved badly in the war because he had let himself be captured by the Germans. In fact, as everybody knew, Zlobin had behaved with extraordinary courage; he had even led a group of resistance fighters in the concentration camp where he was held. After Malenkov had made his statement there was a deathly hush. Stalin stood up and paced around the room, passing by the seated Politburo members and the leaders of the Writers’ Union and asking out loud, as if to himself, but also for them to consider, ‘Shall we forgive him or not?’ There was silence. Stalin continued to pace around the room and asked again, ‘Shall we forgive him or not?’ Again there was silence: no one dared to speak. Stalin went on with his pacing and asked for a third time, ‘Shall we forgive him or not?’ Finally he answered his own question: ‘Let’s forgive him.’ Everyone had understood that the fate of an innocent man had been hanging in the balance: either he would win the Stalin Prize or he would be sent to the Gulag. Though all the writers at the meeting were at least acquainted with Zlobin, no one spoke in his defence, not even when invited to do so by Stalin. As Simonov explains: ‘In our eyes it was not just a question of whether to forgive or not forgive a guilty man, but whether to speak out against a denunciation’ made by a figure as senior as Malenkov, a denunciation that had evidently been accepted as truth by Stalin, for whom the question was whether to forgive a guilty man. Looking back on this event, Simonov came to the conclusion that Stalin had always been aware of the accusations against Zlobin, and that he had himself deliberately nominated his book for the Stalin Prize so that he could stage this ‘little game’. Knowing that there would be nobody with the courage to defend Zlobin, Stalin’s aim had been to show that he, and only he, decided the fate of men.83