The Whisperers
Page 72
One woman told me that it made no difference that I had returned, that it changed nothing, because I had been a bastard then, and I was a bastard now… She said that I should have been shot. One of the men – the one who had always been a provocateur, and a stupid one at that – took me to his home and in the entrance showed me a large bundle of paper. It was the sort of consignment that was sometimes sold in the big shops. He said: ‘If you want some, help yourself. Perhaps now’s the time to start your printing press.’ I laughed it off, but it sent a shiver down my spine. I thought of telling him that the paper was of no use for a printing press because it was cut too small, but I said nothing.63
Ibragim Izmail-Zade was a senior professor of medicine and a departmental head at the Institute of Medicine in Baku at the time of his arrest, in 1938, on charges of belonging to an ‘anti-Soviet group of Azerbaijani nationalists’. After his release from the Kolyma camps, he returned to Baku, where he took up a junior position in the same institute. Instead of the cutting-edge research he had done in the 1930s, he was now employed in routine clinical work. During the trial of M. D. Bagirov, the former Party boss of Azerbaijan, in 1955, Ibragim appeared as a witness for the prosecution, in which capacity he was allowed to look at his own file from 1938, when Bagirov had led the terror campaign in Baku. Ibragim discovered that he had been denounced by his favourite student, who had since gone on to become the head of his department at the institute. While Ibragim was in Kolyma, the former student had often visited his wife and daughter, who treated him as a member of the family. The old student was noticeably cooler in his behaviour after Ibragim’s return, rarely coming to the house, and never in the evening, when he would have been obliged to eat or drink with him. After his discovery of the denunciation, Ibragim and his family were forced to see the former student several times, and while they never spoke to him about his actions, it was clear that the Izmail-Zades now knew of the betrayal. One day the political director of the institute appeared at the Izmail-Zade house. He wanted Ibragim to sign a document stating that his family had no grievance against the former student, and that they would remain on friendly terms. Ibragim refused to sign. He had to be restrained from throwing the official out on the street. According to his daughter, Ibragim was crushed by the betrayal. He felt humiliated at being forced to work beneath someone who, he felt, was hardly qualified. Being asked to sign the document had been the final straw.64
In 1953, Kolia Kuzmin, the former leader of the Komsomol in Obukhovo, who had denounced the Golovins as ‘kulaks’ during the collectivization campaign of 1930, came to live in Pestovo, the small town near Vologda, where the Golovins had settled after their return from exile in Siberia. Before his denunciation of the Golovins, Kolia had often been a guest in their house. He had even been employed in the leather workshop of Nikolai Golovin, who had taken pity on the teenage boy, because he came from the poorest family in the village. Nikolai and his wife Yevdokiia were religious believers. When Kolia came to visit them shortly after Stalin’s death and asked for their forgiveness, not just for his denunciation but for his part in the murder of Nikolai’s brother, they not only forgave him but invited him to come and live with them in Pestovo. Their daughter Antonina, who was then working as a doctor in Kolpino, near Leningrad, took exception to her parents’ generosity and tried to persuade them to change their minds. ‘He killed Ivan [Nikolai’s brother] and destroyed our family. How can one forgive a man for that?’ she reasoned. But Yevdokiia believed that ‘a truly Christian person should forgive his enemies’. Kolia settled in a house next door to the Golovins. He was ashamed of his actions in the past and tried to make amends by running errands for the Golovins. On Saturdays he would go with Nikolai to the public baths; on Sundays he would go with both of them to church. In 1955, Yevdokiia died, followed three years later by Nikolai, and in 1970 by Kolia Kuzmin. They are all buried in the same churchyard in Pestovo.65
Many former prisoners were surprisingly forgiving towards the people who had informed on them. This inclination to forgive was seldom rooted in religious attitudes, as it was with the Golovins, but it was often based on the understanding, which was shared by everyone who had experienced the prisons and the camps of the Gulag system, that virtually any citizen, no matter how good they might be in normal circumstances, could be turned into an informer by pressure from the NKVD. The journalist Irina Sherbakova recalls a meeting of the Moscow Memorial Society (established to represent the victims of repression) during the late 1980s:
one woman, who had been arrested in about 1939, said to me in a completely calm voice: ‘Over there is the man who informed on me.’ And she greeted him quite normally. Catching my perplexed expression, she explained: ‘Of course we were just eighteen then, his parents were Old Bolsheviks who were repressed, and they [the NKVD] tried to recruit me too. And of course he himself was repressed later on.’ I felt that what she said was motivated, not by a lack of concern for the past or a desire to forget it, but by the realization of the shameful things the system had done to people.66
That realization was certainly more likely to develop in the 1980s, when painful memories had perhaps softened over time, and the victims of repression, informed by history, had arrived at a more objective understanding of the Soviet system. But the tendency to refrain from the condemnation of individuals was already noted in the 1950s, when Soviet émigrés, apparently, were not hostile to ordinary Party functionaries, because they understood that they were really powerless and perhaps themselves victims of the same system.67
Not surprisingly, the return of Stalin’s prisoners provoked great fear in the people who had helped to send them to the camps. ‘All the murderers, provocateurs and informers had one feature in common,’ recalls Nadezhda Mandelshtam: they never thought that their victims might return one day:
They thought that everybody sent to the next world or to the camps had been eliminated once and for all. It never entered their heads that these ghosts might rise up and call their grave-diggers to account. During the period of rehabilitations, therefore, they were utterly panic-stricken. They thought that time had gone into reverse and that those they had dubbed ‘camp dust’ had suddenly once more taken on flesh and reassumed their names. They were seized by terror.
One ‘wretched woman informer’ was constantly summoned to the Prosecutor’s office to retract testimony she had given against the living and the dead. After every session, recalls Mandelshtam, she would run to the families of those she had denounced and plead, ‘as God was her witness’, that she had ‘never said anything bad’ about them, and that ‘her only reason for going to the Prosecutor’s office now was to say good things about all the dead people so they would be cleared as soon as possible’. Mandelshtam concluded that
the woman had never had anything remotely resembling a conscience, but this was more than she could stand, and she had a stroke that left her paralysed. She must at some moment have got so scared that she really believed these rehabilitations were serious and that all the slanderers and other minions might be brought to trial.68
Mandelshtam also tells the story of a senior MVD official in Tashkent who was pensioned off after Stalin’s death but ‘occasionally summoned to interviews with former victims who had by some miracle survived and returned from the camps’. The man could not stand it and hanged himself. Mandelshtam was able to read a draft of the suicide letter he addressed to the Central Committee. The official wrote that he had always worked hard for the Party, and that it had never crossed his mind
that he might have been serving not the people, but ‘some kind of Bonapartism’. He tried to put the blame on others: on the people he had interrogated for signing all kinds of bogus confessions, thereby misleading the officials in charge of their cases; on the officials sent from Moscow with instructions concerning ‘simplified interrogration procedures’ and demands that the quotas be fulfilled; and, last but not least, on the informers who volunteered the denunciations which forced the secret police to act
against so many people.
The death of the MVD official was hushed up. He had named too many functionaries and informers before his suicide. But his daughter was determined to get even ‘with those who had caused her father’s death’. As Mandelshtam noted:
Her anger was directed against the ones who had stirred up this nightmarish business. ‘They should have shown some consideration for the people in official positions at the time! They didn’t start all this, they were just carrying out orders.’69
Another one of Stalin’s henchmen to commit suicide was Aleksandr Fadeyev, the alcoholic leader of the Writers’ Union, who was removed from that post in 1954. Fadeyev had been suffering from depression for a long time, but Stalin’s death completely unhinged him. ‘My illness is not in my liver,’ he wrote to a fellow Union member, ‘it is in my mind.’ Fadeyev confessed to Simonov that he was ‘bankrupt’ as a writer. He gave up working on his last novel, a Socialist Realist tale about the Party’s struggle against industrial sabotage, which made use of materials from the 1930s trials, after he had realized, as he explained to several friends, that its moral import was completely wrong: there had been no industrial sabotage. Fadeyev was overcome by feelings of remorse for his part in the repression of writers during his leadership of the Writers’ Union. ‘I was such a scoundrel,’ he wrote to Chukovsky. He was particularly remorseful about his old friend Iogann Altman, who died in 1955, two years after his release from jail. Fadeyev had denounced Altman during the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign and had done nothing to save his friend when he was arrested and imprisoned in 1949. After Altman’s death, Fadeyev went on a drinking binge. He confessed to a friend that he had sanctioned the arrest of many writers he had known were innocent.70
After 1953, Fadeyev attempted to redeem himself by petitioning the authorities for the release and rehabilitation of writers who had been sent to the labour camps. He wrote to Malenkov and Khrushchev, calling on the Party to loosen its ideological control of the cultural sphere, but he was ignored and then removed from his leadership position. By 1956, Fadeyev had become an isolated figure, widely denounced as an unreconstructed Stalinist by the literary intelligentsia, which knew nothing of his later efforts on behalf of repressed writers. Just before he shot himself, on 13 May 1956, Fadeyev wrote a letter to the Central Committee which remained hidden in the Party archives until 1990:
I see no possibility of living any longer, because the cause of [Soviet] art, to which I gave my life, has been destroyed by the arrogant and ignorant leadership of the Party… Our best writers have been exterminated or died before their time because of the criminal connivance of those in power… As a writer, my own life has lost all sense, and it is with joy, with a sense of liberation from this vile existence, where the soul is crushed by malice, lies and slander, that I depart this life.71
Fadeyev was broken by the conflict between being a good Communist and being a good human being. He was by nature a kind person, as many of his victims recognized, but his conscience, his identity and in the end his will to live were gradually destroyed by the compromises and accommodations he had made in his many years of service to the Stalinist regime.72
Despite Fadeyev’s pessimism about the state of literature, Soviet writers played a leading role in the beginning of the thaw. As the regime ceased to exercise a direct veto over writers, literature became the focus for a new emphasis on the individual and private life, and on the rejection of the meddling interference of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Soviet writers moved away from the public themes and heroes of Socialist Realism and strove to portray real people in their domestic and social context. The most daring work of fiction in those years, Ehrenburg’s The Thaw (1954), was deliberately provocative, as if it were a test to see how far it was possible to go in the new climate. The novel tells the story of a despotic factory boss, a ‘little Stalin’, who becomes increasingly corrupt and inhumane, stealing money assigned for workers’ housing to invest in the factory, as he struggles to fulfil the production quotas of the Five Year Plan. The boss’s wife cannot bear to stay with such a heartless man, and the spring thaw, which promises a new and better life, gives her the courage to leave him. In the political climate of 1954, when the thaw had only just begun, it was too early for Soviet readers to discuss the novel’s anti-Stalinism, which was not obvious in any case. Instead they concentrated on the novel’s other theme, the independence of the artist, which was contained in its sub-plot about a painter. The artist churns out works to order by the state and lives comfortably as a consequence, but he recognizes his own mediocrity compared with other painters whose art has not been compromised by service to the system.
The publication of The Thaw split the Soviet literary world. Liberal journals such as Novyi mir, where the novel was first published, hoped it would mark the start of a new era, when writers could at last be honest and sincere, when they would return to their true role of shaping private sensibilities rather than reflecting the interests of the regime. In a discussion of his work at a Moscow library in 1954, Ehrenburg maintained that the purpose of art was to express the ‘culture of emotions’ and help the ‘individual understand his fellow human beings’.73 Alarmed by all this liberal talk, conservatives in the Soviet establishment began to organize a series of attacks on the liberal writers of the thaw. In August 1954, they secured the dismissal of Tvardovsky, the ‘kulak’ son and poet, from the post of editor of Novyi mir. The task of criticizing Ehrenburg fell to Simonov, who replaced Tvardovsky as the editor of Novyi mir. Simonov was chosen because he was regarded as a moderate conservative, and therefore more authoritative than Stalinist hardliners such as Sofronov. In two long articles in Literaturnaia gazeta Simonov attacked The Thaw, arguing that its portrayal of Soviet Russia was too dark and that the conclusion of its sub-plot was simplistic: it was possible, Simonov argued, to be a good artist and to serve the state.74
Simonov remained in the Stalinist camp until 1956, when he began to embrace the spirit of reform. Like many people who had lived in Stalin’s shadow, Simonov was confused and disoriented by the leader’s death. At first, it was far from clear which way Kremlin politics would go: a return to the Terror was quite plausible. In this climate of uncertainty it was not unreasonable for people in positions such as Simonov’s to play it safe by sticking to the political ground they had occupied before Stalin died. ‘In those years,’ recalls Simonov, ‘my attitude to Stalin kept changing. I wavered between various emotions and points of view.’ For much of 1953, his main feeling was a ‘profound sense of grief at the loss of a great man’, which led Simonov to write a startling eulogy in Literaturnaia gazeta (‘The Sacred Duty of the Writer’) in which he argued that it was ‘the highest task of Soviet literature to portray the greatness and the genius of the immortal Stalin for all nations and all future generations’. The article enraged Khrushchev, who insisted on Simonov’s removal from the newspaper’s staff. Simonov remained loyal to his Stalinist origins throughout 1954, placing a portrait of Stalin on his desk. It was a picture he particularly liked: Stalin gazing on that monument to Gulag labour, the Volga–Don Canal. During Stalin’s lifetime, Simonov had never hung a portrait of the ruler in his office or his house. He did so now because he was repulsed by the ‘turncoats’ and ‘careerists’ who had proclaimed their love for the Soviet leader when he was alive but renounced him as soon as he was dead. ‘It was not Stalinism that inspired me [to display the photograph],’ recalls Simonov, ‘but something closer to the noble or intelligentsia idea of honour.’ This same refusal to renounce his past led Simonov, in 1955, to include in a collection of his verse a truly awful ‘Ode to Stalin’ that he had written in 1943 but not published, in which he praised the Soviet leader as the greatest human being in the whole of history.75
Simonov with his son Aleksei, 1954
Simonov followed his critique of Ehrenburg with a series of attacks on other writers in the vanguard of the liberal thaw. In a major Pravda article, in July 1954, Simonov decried the literary reject
ion of the traditions of Socialist Realism and the growing trend towards satire, singling out for criticism the Ukrainian dramatist Aleksandr Korneichuk for abandoning the theatre’s responsibility, as Simonov defined it, ‘to teach the Soviet people how to love and cherish the Soviet system’.76
As the editor of Novyi mir, Simonov was also critical of Vladimir Dudintsev’s explosive novel Not by Bread Alone, submitted to the journal for publication in serial form. The novel tells the story of an inventor, a physics teacher dedicated to the betterment of life in the Soviet Union, whose creativity is stifled and destroyed by the petty corruption and inefficiency of Soviet officialdom. Simonov forced Dudintsev to tone down his attack on the bureaucracy, fearing that the novel might raise doubts about the system as a whole, before he published it in Novyi mir in 1956. Despite the changes demanded by Simonov, the book was still hailed by the reformers as a battering ram against the establishment. The first public discussion of the novel drew so many people to the Writers’ Union, with students climbing water-pipes to listen to the debate from the windows on the second floor, that mounted police had to be called in to disperse the crowds.77
Simonov was also responsible for Novyi mir’s crucial decision not to publish Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. In September 1956, he wrote to Pasternak on behalf of the journal’s editorial board, outlining their political objections to his novel, an epic human drama set against the backdrop of the Revolution and the Civil War. The letter was used and prominently cited by the Soviet leadership in 1958 during its campaign to force Pasternak to turn down the award of the Nobel Prize.* Simonov had a very low opinion of the novel, ‘a vile and spiteful work of philistinism and in places simply anti-Soviet’, as he described it in a letter to his son. Simonov took the view that in posing the central question of his novel – whether the Russian intelligentsia had made the right decision to accept the October Revolution of 1917 – Pasternak had set things up so that it could only be answered in the negative: that by deciding to go along with the Bolsheviks, the intelligentsia had betrayed their duty to the Russian people, to Russian culture and humanity. In Simonov’s opinion, not only did this bias make the novel anti-Soviet; it was also an insult to a whole generation of professionals, to people like his mother and his stepfather, who had remained in Soviet Russia and worked for the Bolsheviks, not out of political choice, but because they were Russian patriots first and foremost.78