The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  You cannot understand what a joy it was for all of us, but especially for Mama and Papa. It makes it easier for them to wait. Papa was trembling and could not say a word for the first minute. I cannot tell you how happy they are to have heard your voice… Aleksei – he has grown up so much that you would not recognize him – he was very nervous when he spoke to you, that’s why his voice sounded strange. He said something stupid about shaving and then got depressed because of it.

  In 1952, Zhenia went to stay with Sonia in Vorkuta. It was part of the relaxation of the Gulag system to allow relatives to visit prisoners. Zhenia was one of the first visitors to Vorkuta. On the night before her departure she asked Simonov to come to the house at Zubov Square. Aleksei overheard his parents’ conversation. Zhenia was afraid that she might be arrested in the labour camp (it was a common fear of relatives) and she wanted Simonov to give a solemn promise that, should anything happen to her, he would let their son remain with Samuil and Berta until she returned. Zhenia was generally a diplomat in life. She had an extraordinary capacity for getting on with people of all kinds, without judging them, but on this matter she was adamant – it was a question of principle: Aleksei was not to live with Simonov.

  Zhenia (left) and Sonia at Vorkuta, 1952

  Zhenia never asked Simonov for anything for herself. In 1951, she had been sacked from her radio job, as part of a general purge of Jews in radio. For a long time she could not find work. She applied to dozens of literary magazines and newspapers and sent along articles she hoped they might publish, but she did not turn to Simonov. For Sonia, though, she would do it. Much of Zhenia’s energy at the time was taken up with the appeal for Sonia’s release. She wrote to all the relevant authorities: to the Military Tribunal that had sentenced Sonia; to the Military Procurator responsible for the review of its cases; she even wrote to the editor of Pravda in the hope that justice would be done. Finally, Zhenia appealed to Simonov. Over a period of six months, she met him several times, hoping to get information and advice. Simonov was unwilling to become involved, as Zhenia wrote to Sonia:

  You cannot imagine how Kostia [Simonov] has changed. Nothing remains of the person we once knew. In the past few years I have seen him very little, and never for more than a few minutes, so I’m struck all the more – as you would be too – by his new personality… It is not just a question of his getting older (he is still comparatively young), nor of his becoming wiser with experience or as a result of his exalted position and prosperity. No, it is something else entirely… Kostia promised to get us the information we need. I thought it was worth waiting for because the information was likely to be reliable, but he still hasn’t done it. No doubt he is too busy… He could have done more but – God go with him – let him live his quiet and comfortable life. I have simply stopped respecting him.

  In Simonov’s defence there was probably not a lot that he could have done, even had he chosen to intervene on Sonia’s behalf. Certainly that was the view taken by the rest of the Laskin family, who continued to treat him with affection and esteem. On the rare occasions when they saw him, they never raised the question of Sonia’s release. ‘We knew that he was close to Stalin and that he could have had a word with him,’ Fania explains, ‘but none of us ever brought that up – we just couldn’t allow ourselves to do it.’95

  In any case, by this time Simonov had become so entangled in the Stalinist campaigns against the Jews that he would have put himself in a difficult position if he had tried to act for the Laskins. When Simonov took charge of the literary newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta, in 1950, he had been instructed by the Kremlin to bring it into line with its own position in the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign. The previous editor had been too soft, and Stalin was depending on Simonov to turn the influential newspaper into the vanguard of the Party’s ‘struggle against alien bourgeois elements’ in Soviet culture. On taking over as its editor, Simonov dismissed eleven members of the paper’s staff (all of them Jews) for ‘poor work and political mistakes’. Under his control the newspaper regularly published articles and editorials whose anti-Semitism was only thinly disguised by the ‘ideological struggle’ with ‘comopolitanism’ and ‘servility towards the West’. Having been a ‘moderate’ in the early stages of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, Simonov, it seems, was becoming one of its hardliners. He maintained this position right until the end of the Stalinist regime. On 24 March 1953, more than two weeks after Stalin’s death, Simonov wrote on behalf of the Secretariat of the Writers’ Union to the Central Committee with a list of names of Jewish writers who needed to be purged (as ‘dead-weight’) from the Writers’ Union. Even later, he wrote to insist on the purge of his old friend and war comrade Aleksandr Krivitsky, the editor of the international section of Literaturnaia gazeta, because of ‘certain biographical facts’, as he put it in his denunciation to the Central Committee, not least Krivitsky’s lack of vigilance against Jewish nationalists.96

  Vigilance was exactly what Simonov was trying to display. Under growing pressure from a series of attacks by anti-Semites who, it seemed, had the support of the Kremlin, Simonov reacted as he always had: he frantically tried to demonstrate his loyalty. The campaign against Simonov began in 1951 with a public argument about the use of pseudonyms by Jewish writers. At a meeting to discuss the Stalin Prize, Stalin asked why the writer Orest Maltsev did not use his Jewish name (Rovinsky) and proposed that anyone using a Russian pseudonym should henceforth be required to include his Jewish name in brackets on all official forms.* This had been official custom during tsarist times, when Jews and revolutionaries were seen as practically synonymous, but after 1917 the practice had been dropped because it was considered anti-Semitic. The use of pseudonyms was widely discussed in the Soviet press, starting in 1949, with hardliners urging the return to the system of identifying Jewish names. In February 1951, an article appeared in Komsomolskaia pravda by Mikhail Bubennov (‘Are Literary Pseudonyms Still Necessary?’). It was a nasty article, openly anti-Semitic in character, in which Bubennov taunted Jewish writers for adopting pseudonyms and accused them, ‘chameleon-like’, of ‘hiding from society’. As the editor of Literaturnaia gazeta, Simonov responded to the article, claiming that the use of pseudonyms was a private matter and citing laws from the 1920s that gave writers the right to adopt them. He signed off the article as ‘Konstantin (Kirill) Simonov’. It was a courageous argument. Komsomolskaia pravda then came out with a defence of Bubennov by no less a person than Mikhail Sholokhov, the celebrated author of Quiet Flows the Don. Simonov was doubtful that Sholokhov had really written it. He wanted to call him and ask him, man to man, what sort of pressure had been placed on him, but then thought better of it. Instead he wrote a second article in Literaturnaia gazeta, accusing Sholokhov and the Bubennov campaign of ‘cheap sensationalism’ and claiming that he would not write another word about the controversy.97

  Thousands of other people did. The controversy produced an avalanche of letter-writing to the press. Some people wrote in support of Simonov – many of them Jews, others choosing to remain anonymous. But most correspondents agreed with Bubennov, either because in their view there was no need for any pseudonyms in the Soviet Union, where ‘everyone is equal regardless of their race’, or because they thought the Jews had something to conceal. Many of the letters were violently anti-Semitic and accused Simonov of ‘acting as defender of the Jews’.98

  By this stage a whispering campaign had started against Simonov. It was rumoured that he was a Jew. Towards the end of 1952, Simonov was approached by Aleksei Surkov, a leading member of the Writers’ Union and an opponent of the anti-Semitic campaign. Surkov told him that during the past year he had been involved in a number of discussions with senior bureaucrats from the Central Committee about a series of denunciations claiming that Simonov was a ‘secret Jew’. Some people said that his real name was Simanovich, that he was the son of a Jewish craftsman on the estate of ‘Countess Obolenskaia’, who had adopted him; others that he was the son a bapt
ized Jew from St Petersburg. They all pointed to his ‘Jewish looks’ and to the fact that he used a pseudonym (Konstantin instead of Kirill). Simonov’s initial reaction was to dismiss all these rumours as ridiculous: his mother was a princess, not a countess, and she had no estate. But the Simanovich story found its way into a threatening denunciation by a veteran member of the Party, Vladimir Orlov, who accused Simonov of promoting Jews to the editorial staff of Literaturnaia gazeta in order to transform the newspaper into a ‘Zionist organization’. The threat loomed larger in January 1953, when Surkov visited Simonov again and told him he had been approached by the writer Vladimir Kruzhkov, who claimed to have evidence of a literary group in Moscow with connections to Jewish nationalists throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: according to Kruzhkov, the leader of this group was Simonov. Surkov was taking a huge personal risk by telling Simonov, because he had been sworn by Kruzhkov not to say a word. ‘There are some bastards digging around under you,’ Surkov warned. ‘They’re digging your grave.’99

  The anti-Jewish campaign reached its climax around this time. The final episode was the absurd Doctors’ Plot. The plot had its origins in 1948, when Lydia Timashuk, a doctor in the Kremlin Hospital who also worked for the MGB, wrote to Stalin two days before Zhdanov’s death, claiming that his doctors had failed to recognize the gravity of his condition. The letter was ignored and filed away, but three years later it was used by Stalin to accuse the Kremlin doctors of belonging to a ‘Zionist conspiracy’ to murder Zhdanov and the rest of the Soviet leadership. None of the doctors who had treated Zhdanov was Jewish, so Stalin had to find a way to link his death with Zionists. The fabrication of the plot hinged on the confession beaten out of Dr Iakov Etinger, a leading diagnostician, who had been arrested in November 1950 for uttering anti-Soviet thoughts to relatives and friends. Etinger confessed that he was a Jewish nationalist and that he had the protection of Viktor Abakumov, the head of the MGB. After the arrest of Abakumov, in July 1951, hundreds of doctors and MGB officials were arrested and tortured into making confessions, as Stalin concocted a huge international conspiracy that linked Soviet Jews in the medical profession, the Leningrad Party organization, the MGB and the Red Army to Israel and the USA. The country seemed to be returning to the atmosphere of 1937 with the Jews in the role of the ‘enemies of the people’. In December 1952, Stalin told a meeting of the Central Committee that ‘every Jew is a potential spy for the United States’, thus making the entire Jewish people the target of his terror. Thousands of Jews were arrested, expelled from jobs and homes, and deported as ‘rootless parasites’ from the major cities to remote regions of the Soviet Union. Stalin ordered the construction of a vast network of new labour camps in the Far East, where all the Jews would be sent. Throughout the Soviet Union people cursed the Jews. Patients refused to visit Jewish doctors, who were hounded out of practice and, in many cases, forced to work as labourers. Rumours spread of doctors killing babies in their wards. Pregnant mothers stayed away from hospitals. People wrote to the press calling on the Soviet authorities to ‘clear out’ the ‘parasites’, to ‘exile them from the big cities, where there are so many of these swine’.100

  And then at the height of this hysteria, Stalin died.

  5

  Stalin had suffered a stroke and lay unconscious for five days before he died on 5 March 1953. He might have been saved if doctors had been called on the first day, but amidst the panic of the Doctors’ Plot none of Stalin’s inner circle dared take the initiative. Stalin’s own doctor was tortured for saying he should rest. If Stalin awoke from his coma to find doctors by his bed, he might consider the act of calling them a sign of disloyalty.101 It is a fitting irony that Stalin’s death was hastened by his politics.

  On the evening Stalin died, Simonov was in the Kremlin for a general meeting of the Soviet leadership: 300 members of the Supreme Soviet and the Central Committee. Everybody was aware of the grave situation, and most of the delegates had turned up early in the Sverdlov Hall. ‘We all knew each other,’ recalls Simonov, ‘we recognized each other and had met many times through our work.’

  We sat there, shoulder to shoulder, we looked at each other, but no one said a word. Nobody asked anything of anybody else. It seems to me that no one even felt the need to talk. Until the start [of the session] there was such a silence in the hall that, if I had not sat there for forty minutes myself, I would not believe that it was possible for three hundred people to sit so close to each other without making a sound.

  At last the Presidium members arrived* and announced that Stalin was dying. Simonov had the strong impression that, with the exception of Molotov, the other members of this inner circle were relieved by the news: it was visible on their faces and audible in their voices.102

  From the Kremlin Simonov went to the Pravda offices, where he was with the editor when the call came informing him of Stalin’s death. Although he had been expecting it, the news was a shock. ‘Something shuddered inside me,’ Simonov recalls. ‘Some part of my life had ended. Something new and unknown had begun.’ At that moment he felt a sudden need to record his thoughts in poetry: he did not know if he could write, but he was certain he couldn’t do anything else. He went home and began:

  I wrote the first two lines and suddenly, unexpectedly, I burst into tears. I could deny it now, because I don’t like tears, neither mine nor anybody else’s, but only those tears properly conveyed the shock I had experienced. I did not cry out of sorrow, nor out of pity for the deceased: these were not sentimental tears, they were the tears that result from shock. A revolution had happened, and its impact was so enormous that it had to be expressed in something physical, in this case in the convulsive weeping that seized hold of me for several minutes.

  Speaking later with his fellow writers, Simonov discovered that they had felt the same. Many followed his example, penning heartfelt eulogies on Stalin’s death. The sense of shock and grief, it seems, affected people who had experienced Stalin’s reign in widely different ways. On the night after Stalin died, Simonov wrote:

  There are no words to communicate

  All the unbearable pain and sorrow,

  There are no words to narrate

  How we mourn for you, comrade Stalin!

  Tvardovsky, the ‘kulak’ son who had renounced his family in the 1930s, wrote:

  In this hour of great sorrow

  I cannot find the words,

  To express fully All our people’s loss…

  Even Olga Berggolts, who spent two years in prison during the Great Terror, wrote a mournful poem to her torturer:

  The heart bleeds…

  Our own, our dear one!

  Holding your head in its arms,

  The nation weeps for You.103

  Stalin’s death was announced to the public on 6 March. Until the funeral, three days later, his body lay in state in the Hall of Columns near Red Square. Huge crowds came to pay their respects. The centre of the capital was mobbed by mourners, who had travelled to Moscow from all corners of the Soviet Union; hundreds of people were killed in the crush. Simonov was among those chosen to stand guard over Stalin’s body. He had a unique opportunity to observe the reactions of ordinary people as they filed past. He noted in his diary on 16 March:

  Stalin’s body lies in state

  I do not know how to give an accurate description of the scene – or even how to put it into words.Not every body cried, not every body sobbed, but somehowe very body showed some deep emotion. I could sense a kind of spiritual convulsion inside every person filing past at the very moment they first saw Stalin in his coffin.104

  This ‘spiritual convulsion’ was felt across the Soviet Union. Mark Laskin, who had no reason to love Stalin, broke down in tears when he heard the news. Surprised by his own emotional reaction, he thought it might have to do with the overwhelming role Stalin had played in his life:

  I had spent my entire adult life in Stalin’s shadow – I was sixteen when Lenin died in 1924 – and all my th
oughts had been shaped by the presence of Stalin. I waited on his words. All my questions were addressed to him, and he gave all the answers, laconically, precisely, without room for doubt.105

  For people of Laskin’s age, or younger, Stalin was their moral reference-point. Their grief was a natural reaction to the disorientation they were bound to feel upon his death, almost regardless of their experience in Stalin’s reign.

  Some victims of the Terror even felt genuine sorrow on Stalin’s death. When Zinaida Bushueva heard the news, she burst into tears, although her husband had been arrested in 1937, and she had spent the best years of her life in the ALZhIR labour camp. Her daughter Angelina recalls her mother coming home that day:

  They were all crying, my mother and my sister and my grandmother. My grandmother said that it would have been better if she had died instead of him. She was four years older than Stalin. She loved him. She often wrote to him. She believed that it was Stalin who had allowed her to write to her daughter [in the labour camp] so that she could reunite the family… ‘It would be better if I had died and he had lived,’ my grandmother kept saying. I didn’t contradict her – I loved Stalin too. But today [in 2003] I would say to her: ‘Granny, what on earth are you saying?’ She herself had suffered so much. Her daughter had been arrested. Her grandchildren had been sent to orphanages. Her son-in-law had been shot. Even her own husband had been persecuted for being a priest… Yet she was prepared to lay down her life to save Stalin.106