The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  In August 1957, the Laskin family celebrated the golden wedding anniversary of Samuil and Berta with a banquet in a Moscow restaurant. The festivities were organized by Samuil’s nephew, the writer Boris Laskin, who was well known as a humourist and satirist. The printed invitations and decorations in the restaurant were a lampoon of Soviet propaganda, with slogans such as ‘50 Years of Happiness – An Easy Burden!’ and ‘Your Family Union is a School of Communism!’ Simonov joined in the celebrations and even contributed to the costs, despite his usual disapproval of jokes ridiculing Soviet power. Simonov had good relations with the Laskin family after 1956. He remained friends with Zhenia, helped her with money, often took her advice on literary affairs and advanced her career as an editor at the pro-thaw journal Moskva by sending her the manuscripts of poetry and prose that came his way.* There was perhaps an element of guilt in Simonov’s attentiveness towards his former wife. As he embraced the spirit of the thaw, he must have been troubled by the moral contrast between Zhenia – a fearless champion of samizdat who helped to publish censored writers – and his own role in the Soviet literary establishment. At Zhenia’s fiftieth birthday celebrations in 1964, an evening with family and friends at Zhenia’s new apartment near the Airport Metro station in northern Moscow, some of these writers recited poems they had composed for her. The mood was warm and humorous, full of tenderness and love for Zhenia. Simonov made an awkward speech that went on far too long. He was visibly uncomfortable talking about Zhenia in a room full of writers who admired her for her moral courage and generosity, her willingness to help other people regardless of the dangers to herself. Simonov was rescued by his seven-year-old daughter Aleksandra, who walked into the room and ran towards him. He grabbed hold of her and asked her to ‘congratulate her auntie Zhenia – quickly!’ Aleksandra took hold of the microphone: ‘Dear auntie Zhenia, happy fiftieth birthday, and tell Alyosha [Aleksei] to shave his beard!’22

  For Aleksei the thaw marked the start of a new relationship with Simonov. In 1956, the sixteen-year-old boy wrote a letter to his father in which he spoke about their previous estrangement when he had lived with Valentina, and about his hope that they might become closer in the years ahead:

  I believe in you, not just as a father but as a good, intelligent and honourable man, as an old friend. This belief is a source of strength for me, and, if it helps you, even just a bit, then I am happy. Remember that your son, although very young and not very strong, will always support you… We have rarely talked about your private life – only once I think… I never felt at home in your house – it wasn’t anything obvious but when you were ‘away’ there were conversations that were difficult for me. I avoided going to your house when you were not there. My relations with Masha were also difficult – I could not accept her as a sister… None of that is important any more. Now I feel that things will be different. It is good that you are calmer, happier. I am sure that I will be friends with your new wife – my feelings for her are already very warm. We will become closer, Father, and I will not be just a guest in your house.23

  In the summer of 1956, at the age of sixteen, Aleksei finished school and, encouraged by his father, joined a scientific expedition to the remote region of Iakutsk in eastern Siberia. For Aleksei the expedition was all about proving himself as a man, in the image of his father, who had left school and gone to work at a similar age. ‘Tell Father that I will not let him down,’ Aleksei wrote to his mother Zhenia in his first letter home. In his letters to his father Aleksei compared the expedition to Simonov’s own ‘university of life’ in the factories of the First Five Year Plan. His father responded with a tenderness and informality that Aleksei had never seen from him before. In one letter, which Aleksei would treasure all his life, Simonov wrote:

  It is customary in these letters for a father to give advice to his son. Generally I don’t like to do this – but one piece of advice I will give you before you go off for the winter. You no doubt have heard, or can imagine from what I have written on the subject, that I was not guilty of cowardice during the war. Here is what I want to say to you: I did what I had to do, according to my understanding of human dignity and my own pride as a man, but remember, if you now have the satisfaction of having a living and healthy father, not just a tombstone or a memory, it is because I never took stupid risks. I was very attentive, restrained and careful in all situations where there was a real danger, although I never ran away from it. It should be clear why I am writing this to you…

  And now, my friend, I must run to the Writers’ Union and tell the young writers how they should and should not write – and you meanwhile feel free to put in any missing punctuation marks and correct my grammatical mistakes. Yes?

  I kiss you, my sweet one, and squeeze your paw. Father. 31 August 1956.24

  In September, Simonov joined Aleksei in Iakutsk for three days. He enjoyed the primitive conditions and comradeship of the expedition, which reminded him of life during the war (‘He is very pleased that he can still go hiking with a rucksack on his back,’ Zhenia explained to Aleksei). For the first time in his life, he sat with his son, drank with him by the camp fire and talked openly about his life, about politics and about his hopes for the future. Isolated in literary society, Simonov now found a soul-mate and a loyal supporter in his son. ‘He is very pleased with you in all respects,’ Zhenia wrote to Aleksei after seeing Simonov on his return. ‘He is pleased with the way you have turned out, physically and spiritually, and with the way that you are seen by your contemporaries.’ As for Aleksei, he had never known his father so happy and excited: ‘He was full of the Twentieth Congress, of his new family, his daughter, his new house, and his new novel, The Living and the Dead. It seemed to him that he could turn over a new leaf and live his life in a different way.’ During those three days in Iakutsk Aleksei fell in love with Simonov. The ideal father he had pictured all these years had finally materialized, and Aleksei flourished; his new connection with his father gave him a sense of independence and maturity. In his letters from Iakutsk, Aleksei explained to Simonov his ideas on literature and life, and asked for his advice, man to man. ‘I have great hopes for our forthcoming meeting,’ he wrote to him in February 1957. ‘There is so much I must tell you, so much to ask you, which I cannot put in a letter.’25

  Aleksei’s closeness with his father was short-lived. The intimacy they had achieved in Iakutsk could not be repeated in Moscow, where Simonov had no time for his son. Politics divided them. Aleksei was swept along by the democratic spirit of the thaw, towards which his father remained sceptical, if not totally opposed. Aleksei was too young, politically too immature, to mount an articulate opposition to his father’s politics. He had no real thoughts, for example, on the Kremlin’s bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, when his father had supported sending in the tanks to crush the anti-Soviet demonstrators in Budapest. Yet there was in Aleksei an element of latent protest and dissent, which was perhaps connected to the history of the Laskin family. In 1956, Aleksei applied for his first passport. In the section where every Soviet citizen was required to register his ethnic origin, he was determined to write down Jewish, even though he had the right to register as Russian, the nationality of his father’s family, which would make his life much easier. It took the concerted efforts of all the Laskins – and the insistence of Samuil and Berta in particular – to talk him out of it. For Aleksei, identifying with his Jewish origins was a conscious act of political dissent from the values of the Soviet regime. His views on other matters displayed the same attitude. Aleksei was repulsed by the falsity and hypocrisy of the Komsomol. He was deeply impressed by Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, a blistering attack on Soviet officialdom, and wrote to its author to tell him that it was a work of genius that was badly needed for the country’s political reform. He signed the letter with his grandfather’s name (‘Aleksei Ivanishev’) rather than his father’s, so as to avoid the connection being made with Simonov, who had criticized the novel for giving ri
se to anti-Soviet sentiments, and had forced Dudintsev to tone down its assault on the bureaucracy before printing it in Novyi mir. Simonov was far more cautious than his son towards the reformist spirit of the thaw. ‘If one steps back for a minute and looks at the country and the spirit of the people,’ he wrote to Aleksei in February 1957, ‘one can say without exaggeration that we have travelled an enormous distance since 1953. But when some writer considers it his duty to stir up unnecessary rebellion, then I have no sympathy for him.’26

  Simonov’s own de-Stalinization progressed very slowly. The revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress had both excited and shaken him, and it took a while for him to come to terms with them. For Simonov the crucial moral test of the Stalinist regime remained its conduct in the war. It was while working on his great war novel, The Living and the Dead (1959), that Simonov began to grapple with the central moral question raised by the war: the regime’s appalling waste of human life. The novel deals with many of the issues that had been excluded from the public discourse on the war: the devastating effect of the Terror on the military command; the chaos and confusion that overwhelmed the country in the first weeks of the war; the climate of mistrust and the incompetence of the officers which cost so many innocent young lives. Drawing on his diaries and memories of the war, Simonov retells the story of the fighting through a series of vivid scenes where officers and men struggle to make sense of events and carry out their duty in the face of all these obstacles. He shows how people were changed by their experience in the war, becoming more determined and united against the enemy, and implies that this human spirit was the fundamental cause of the Soviet victory. Simonov had always seen the leadership of Stalin as a crucial factor in the war. But in The Living and the Dead he began to reassess Stalin’s role and moved towards the populist conception – which he would develop in his final years – that it was the Soviet people who had won the war and that they had done so in spite of Stalin’s leadership. As Simonov suggests, the chaos and mistrust that Stalin’s reign of terror had fostered in the army led directly to the military catastrophe of 1941; only the patriotic spirit and initiative of ordinary people like the heroes in his book had reversed the crisis and turned disaster into victory. Simonov had touched on some of these ideas in his diaries of 1941–5, which he filled with observations of the war. He had discussed them with his friends, including the writer Lazar Lazarev, before 1953. But as Simonov himself confessed at a literary evening in the Frunze Military Academy in 1960, he had ‘lacked sufficient civic courage’ to publish these ideas while Stalin was still alive.27

  Throughout his life Simonov retained an emotional attachment to Stalin’s memory. His own personal history and identity were too closely bound up with the regime to reject the legacy of Stalin root and branch. For this reason, Simonov could never quite bring himself to embrace wholeheartedly the Khrushchev thaw, which seemed to him a betrayal of Stalin as a man and a leader, and as a betrayal of his own past. He could not deny Stalin any more than he could deny himself. Even at the height of the Khrushchev thaw, Simonov held firm to many of the dogmas of the Stalinist dictatorship. He took a hardline position on the Hungarian crisis of 1956. ‘Several thousand people were killed in the events in Hungary,’ Simonov wrote to Aleksei from Calcutta in 1957, ‘but the British spilled more blood during the partition of India, and not in the interests of the people [the motive of the Soviet actions in Budapest, according to Simonov] but simply to stir up religious hatred and rebellions.’28

  After 1956, Simonov was seen by liberal reformers as an unreconstructed Stalinist, and by the old Stalinists as a dangerous liberal, but in fact throughout the Khrushchev years he was a moderate conservative. He recognized Stalin’s mistakes and saw the need for limited political reform, but he continued to defend the Soviet system that Stalin had created in the 1930s and 1940s as the only solid basis for the progress of humanity. ‘We have made mistakes on the road to Communism,’ he wrote to Aleksei, ‘but the acknowledgement of our mistakes should not lead us to waver for a moment in our conviction that our Communist principles are correct.’29

  When Brezhnev came to power, in 1964, Simonov’s moderate conservatism found official favour, as Khrushchev’s policies of de-Stalinization were gradually reversed and the Kremlin opposed any real political reform in the Soviet Union or the other countries of the Warsaw Pact. From the mid-1960s, Simonov emerged as an elder statesman in the Soviet literary establishment. His books were widely published and made standard reading in Soviet schools and universities; he frequently appeared in the Soviet media; he travelled round the world as the official face of Soviet literature; and even by the standards of the Soviet elite, he enjoyed a privileged lifestyle.

  Aleksei and Konstantin Simonov, 1967

  On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet victory in 1945, 9 May 1970, Simonov gave an interview to the newspaper Socialist Industry in which he clarified his position on Soviet history since the end of the war:

  I have spent a lot of time studying the history of the Great Patriotic War and I know a lot more now than I did when the war had just ended. Of course, a lot has changed in my understanding. But my main feeling, which you get when you travel round the country and see the building going on today, when you see what has been done and what is being done, is that our cause in those times was just. However hard it was, however many lives were lost, our people did what needed to be done during the war. If they had failed in that difficult endeavour, our country would not be what it is today, there would be no other socialist countries, no world struggle for freedom and independence from colonial rule. All of that was made possible only by our victory.30

  For people of Simonov’s generation the war was the defining event of their lives. Born around the time of the Revolution of 1917, this generation reached maturity in the 1930s, when basic values were reshaped by the Stalinist regime, and moved towards retirement in the Brezhnev period. From the vantage point of the 1960s and 1970s, these people recalled the war years nostalgically as the high-point of their youth. It was a time of comradeship, of shared responsibilities and suffering, when ‘people became better human beings’ because they had to help and trust one another; a time when their lives had greater purpose and meaning because, it seemed to them, their individual contribution to the war campaign had made a difference to the destiny of the nation. These veterans recalled the war as a period of great collective achievement, when people like themselves made enormous sacrifices for victory. They looked back at 1945 as an almost sacred time-space in Soviet history and memory. In the words of the war veteran and writer Kondratiev:

  For our generation the war was the most important event in our lives, the most important. That is what we think today. So we are not prepared to belittle in any way the great achievement of our people in those terrifying, difficult and unforgettable years. The memory of all our fallen soldiers is too sacred, our patriotic feelings are too pure and deep for that.31

  The commemoration of the Great Patriotic War served as a reminder of the success of the Soviet system. In the eyes of its loyal citizens, including Simonov, the victory of 1945 justified the Soviet regime and everything it had accomplished after 1917. But the popular memory of the war – in which it was recalled as a people’s war – also represented a potential challenge to the Soviet dictatorship. The war had been a period of ‘spontaneous de-Stalinization’, when, more than at any other time, the Soviet people had been forced to take reponsibility for their own actions and organize themselves for the war effort, often in the absence of effective leadership or control by the Party. As the post-war regime feared, the collective memory of this freedom and initiative could become dangerous if it gave rise to ideas of political reform.

  For many years the memory of the war was downplayed in the public culture of the Soviet regime. Until 1965, Victory Day was not even an official Soviet holiday, and it was left to veterans’ groups to organize their own celebrations and parades. Publications on the war were tightly censo
red, and war novels politically controlled.* Wartime newspapers were withdrawn from public libraries. After 1956, there was a partial relaxation of these controls on the memory of the war. Memoirs by war veterans appeared in print. Writers who had fought in the war as young men published stories and novels drawing on their own experience to portray the reality of the soldiers’ war – the ‘truth of the trenches’ (okopnaia pravda) as it was often termed – which functioned as a moral counter-balance to the propaganda version of the war.† But these publications were pushing at the boundaries of what was permitted by the Khrushchev thaw: the Party was prepared to blame Stalin for the military setbacks but not to challenge the official narrative of the war as a triumph of Communist discipline and leadership. In 1962, Grossman was told by Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo chief of ideology, that his war novel Life and Fate, which had been seized by the KGB after its submission to the journal Znamia, could not be published for at least 200 years (it was first published in Russia in 1988).

  The memory of the war was even more tightly controlled by the Brezhnevite regime, which used the commemoration of the Soviet victory to create a powerful display of public loyalty and political legitimacy for itself. In 1965, Victory Day became an official Soviet holiday, celebrated with enormous pomp by the entire Party leadership and featuring a military parade on Red Square. A new Museum of the Armed Forces was opened for the anniversary; its vast display of memorabilia elevated the remembrance of the war to the level of a cult. Two years later, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was erected near the Kremlin Wall, quickly becoming a sacred site for the Soviet state and a place of ritual homage for Soviet brides and grooms. In Volgograd (previously Stalingrad) a monumental site of mourning was completed in 1967. At its centre stood a vast sword-bearing Mother Russia, the tallest statue in the world at 52 metres high. It was at this time that the endlessly repeated statistic of ‘ 20 million dead’ entered Soviet propaganda as a messianic symbol of the Soviet Union’s unique sacrifice for the liberation of the world.