The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Mother Russia, part of the Mamaev Kurgan War Memorial complex in Volgograd

  Simonov was too much of a soldier, he had seen too much of the war’s realities, to have any part in the manipulation of its public memory. He had thought for many years about the meaning of the war and about the reasons for the Soviet victory. His thinking on the war became a sort of moral contemplation about Stalin and the Soviet system as a whole: whether it was justified to spend so many lives to win the war; and whether it was force that had spurred the people on to victory or something deeper inside them, the spiritual force of patriotism or stoical endurance, unconnected to any politics. During the last decade of his life, Simonov collected soldiers’ memoirs and testimonies. By his death, in 1979, he had amassed a large archive of memoirs, letters and several thousand hours of taped interviews.* Many of these testimonies were recorded in A Soldier Went (1975), a ‘film-poem in seven chapters’, each one reflecting on a different aspect of the soldiers’ experience, with interviews and readings from the works of Simonov. In a way that was extraordinary for its time, the film brought to life the horrors of the war and the suffering of the soldiers, who were portrayed as ordinary human beings behaving with courage and resilience in the most difficult circumstances. One of the film’s longest chapters dwells on the soldiers’ injuries, featuring an infantryman who was wounded seven times yet still marched on to Berlin. The film was a homage to the Red Army rank and file – to the courage and endurance of millions of unknown and neglected heroes who brought about the Soviet victory – by a man whose writings on the war had usually taken the perspective of the officer. According to Marina Babak, the film’s director (and Simonov’s lover at that time), there was a strong personal motive in this act of homage, because ‘Simonov felt that he had never shown sufficient courage’ in his life. ‘Simonov insisted that he should not be seen in the film at all,’ recalls Babak. ‘He said that he was unworthy to appear alongside a soldier.’32

  The film ran into trouble with the military establishment, which took exception to its gritty realism and populist conception of the war (the censors insisted on the addition of a sequence paying homage to Brezhnev as a war leader). The Brezhnev leadership regarded all attempts to commemorate the suffering of the people in the war as a challenge to the government. From the mid 1960s, many of Simonov’s writings on the war were either banned from publication or published in a censored form. His war diaries from 1941, prepared for publication as a book (A Hundred Days of War) in 1967, were turned down by the Soviet censors, despite Simonov’s personal appeal to the Party leadership (the book was finally published in 1999). The same fate befell his essays on Zhukov and his war diaries of 1941–5 (Various Days of War), which were published with major cuts in 1977.33 His documentary film If Your House Is Dear to You appeared in 1966 only after a long battle with the censors, who cut it heavily, while the film version of his novel Soldiers Are Not Born (1964), the second volume of The Living and the Dead, was so badly butchered by the Soviet censors that Simonov withdrew the title of the novel and even his own name from the final version of the film, which was screened as Retribution in 1967.

  These battles with censorship strengthened Simonov’s determination to search for the truth about the war and about the Stalinist regime. His notebooks from this time are filled with reminiscences about his encounters with Stalin, with self-interrogations about what he knew and did not know (or did not want to know) about Stalin’s crimes when he had been part of the dictator’s court. The more he learned of Stalin’s lies and murders, the more he tried to distance himself from his past.

  ‘There was a time when, although I had some doubts, I loved Stalin,’ Simonov wrote in 1966. ‘But today, knowing all the things that I know about him, I do not and cannot love him any more. If I had known then what I know now, I would not have loved him then.’34

  During the last years of his life Simonov became increasingly remorseful about his role in the Stalinist regime. As if to redeem his sins, he tried hard to promote the work of writers and artists who had been censored or repressed in Stalin’s time. Encouraged by his wife, Simonov became a private collector and champion of the Soviet avant-garde in art (he organized a major retrospective of the long-forgotten artist Vladimir Tatlin). He played a leading role in the campaign for the publication of works by Osip Mandelshtam, Kornei Chukovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov and for the Russian translation of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik. He gave money to writers who had suffered in the past – including Borshchagovsky, Vera Panova and Nadezhda Mandelshtam – and petitioned on behalf of many others for housing, jobs and readmission to the Writers’ Union.35

  In 1966, Simonov set in motion a process that culminated in the publication of Mikhail Bulgakov’s subversive masterpiece The Master and Margarita, a fantastic social satire in which the devil comes to Moscow and brings out the worst in everybody through his anarchic pranks. Impossible to publish while Stalin was alive, the manuscript had been hidden in a drawer since the writer’s death in 1940. In 1956, Simonov had been made the chairman of the commission in charge of Bulgakov’s literary estate by the writer’s widow Elena Bulgakova, who was an old acquaintance of Simonov’s mother. Simonov gave the manuscript of The Master and Margarita to Zhenia Laskina, who was then working at Moskva, a journal much in need of exciting prose to boost its falling subscription sales (upon which its standing and subsidies depended) after the ending of the literary thaw, when it had become a rather dull and quiet magazine. Simonov was doubtful that Zhenia would succeed in getting the book past the censors, who were tightening up on literature. He had even advised Elena Bulgakova to accept some cuts to get the book published. Having read the manuscript at his dacha over a weekend, Yevgeny Popovkin, Moskva’s editor, confessed to Zhenia that he was afraid to publish it, even though he knew that it would make his name. Popovkin advised Zhenia to take the manuscript to one of Moskva’s editors, a retired censor who had good connections at Glavlit, the committee in charge of literary censorship, and who, as an editor, had never had a manuscript rejected by the censors. With the help of this retired censor, Bulgakov’s manuscript was passed with relatively minor cuts and published in instalments in Moskva from November 1966. The November issue (150,000 copies) sold out overnight. There was a huge demand to subscribe to the journal for the next two years, the period it took to serialize Bulgakov’s extraordinary novel, which appeared to Soviet readers as a miracle in the oppressive atmosphere of the early Brezhnev years. Delighted by their success, Zhenia and Simonov commemorated the historical event by compiling a scapbook of all the passages that had been cut by the censor. They made three copies of the book: one for Simonov, one for Zhenia and one for Elena Bulgakova.36

  Simonov’s support for these initiatives was a public statement about his politics. By setting out to rescue suppressed works of art and literature, he was aligning himself with the liberal wing of the Soviet establishment. These efforts, which he undertook on his own initiative (he had no official position in any Soviet institution or journal), earned him the respect of many artists and writers, who made him the chairman of literary commissions and organizations like the Central House of Literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Simonov had not become a liberal in the sense of the dissidents, who were pro-Western and anti-Soviet, but like many Communist reformers in the Brezhnev era, he was open to the idea of a fundamental change in the politics and culture of the Soviet system. Simonov did not openly criticize the Brezhnev government. But privately he was opposed to many of its policies – not least to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 in order to suppress the ‘Prague Spring’ of Alexander Dubček’s reformist government. The crisis of 1968 was a major turning-point in Simonov’s political development. It radicalized him. He began to question whether it was possible or even desirable for the one-party system to survive in the stagnant form which it had developed under Brehznev’s leadership. According to his son, if Simonov had lived a few more years, he would have welcomed Gorbachev’s refor
ms:

  As a senior Party member there was only so far he could go, of course. He would have had to break his Party mould completely to come out in support of Solzhenitsyn, for example, and he could not do that. I do not know what he really thought, and what he forced himself to think in order to keep himself in check, but I know that he went on evolving politically to the end. That, for me, was his strongest quality – he never lost the capacity to change.37

  The development of Simonov’s political ideas in his final years was intimately linked to his re-examination of his past. Simonov became increasingly remorseful about his own conduct during Stalin’s reign. As he admitted his errors to himself, he grew more critical of the political system that had led him to make them. His feelings of contrition were sometimes so intense that they bordered on self-loathing, according to Lazar Lazarev, who was as close as anyone to Simonov at that time. Lazarev recalls that Simonov would castigate himself, both as a writer and as a man, at public occasions. Simonov was known for his self-deprecating irony. His friends and admirers took it to be part of his personal charm. But there were times when they must have realized that his self-criticisms came from darker impulses. At his fiftieth-birthday celebration at the Central House of Literature in 1965, an evening of speeches in praise of Simonov attended by more than 700 guests, he seemed to grow impatient with the kind things said of him. At the end of the evening, shaking visibly with emotion, he approached the microphone to deliver these extraordinary words:

  On these sorts of occasions – when someone reaches fifty years of age – of course people mainly like to recall the good things about them. I simply want to say to the people here, to my comrades who have gathered here, that I am ashamed of many of the things I have done in my life, that not everything I have done is good – I know that – and that I did not always behave according to the highest moral principles – neither the highest civic principles, nor the highest human principles. There are things in my life that I remember with dissatisfaction, occasions when I acted without sufficient willpower, without sufficient courage. I know that. And I am not saying this for the purposes, so to speak, of some sort of repentance, that is a person’s private business, but simply because, by remembering, one wants to avoid repeating the same mistakes. And I shall try not to repeat them… From now on, at whatever cost, I will not repeat the moral compromises I made.38

  These feelings of remorse intensified over time. He regretted the way that he had written about Stalin and the White Sea Canal during the 1930s. He felt remorse for his participation in the wartime propaganda of the Stalinist regime, for having gone along with Stalin’s lies about the ‘criminal behaviour’ and ‘treason’ of those Soviet generals who ordered the retreat of 1941. He felt remorse for his shameful actions in the Writers’ Union between 1946 and 1953 – years he found it ‘painful to recall’, as he wrote in an essay on Fadeyev: ‘There are many things that are hard to remember without dissembling one’s feelings, and many more that are even harder to explain.’ In the last years of his life Simonov engaged in a long struggle to understand his actions in the Writers’ Union. He interrogated his own memory and wrote several drafts of a personal account about his role in the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign, which remained locked away in his archive. Yet he never tried to defend or justify his actions in those years. Lazarev recalls an evening at Simonov’s house to celebrate his fifty-fifth birthday in 1970. Proposing a toast to the assembled guests, the writer Aleksandr Krivitsky passed around a photograph of Simonov in 1946 and said that they should drink to the words of a well-known song, ‘As he was then, so he is now’. Lazarev took exception to the implication – that Simonov remained a Stalinist – and, proposing the next toast, he said they should drink to the courage of their host, who was ‘not afraid to change and break with the past’. A heated argument began about whether Simonov had changed and whether that was a good thing or not. The next day Lazarev called Simonov to apologize. But Simonov saw nothing wrong. ‘On the contrary,’ recalls Lazarev, ‘he said that the discussion had been highly educational, because it had helped him make up his mind about himself: of course it was better when a person changed, if he changed for the better.’39

  Many of Simonov’s activities in the 1970s were driven by his need to make up for his past actions. Haunted by memories of the Stalinist attacks on Jewish writers, he led a brave campaign in defence of Lilia Brik, the muse of much of Maiakovsky’s later poetry. Brik was the subject of a violent and openly anti-Semitic attack by literary critics working for Suslov, who demanded that she should be expunged from accounts of Maiakovsky’s life to purge the memory of the great Soviet poet of all Jewish elements. Filled with regret for his attacks on Ehren-burg in 1954, Simonov organized the publication of the writer’s war journalism. The collection included an article by Simonov, written in 1944, in which he had described Ehrenburg as the best of all the war-time journalists. The book was published in 1979, not long before Simonov’s death. Simonov was in hospital when he received a copy from the publishers. He called Lazarev, who had edited the book, and told him that he was extremely happy and relieved that he had ‘made his peace’ with Ehrenburg.40

  Many people in the reformist circles of the literary intelligentsia were sceptical of Simonov’s late repentant liberalism. To them it seemed unlikely that a veteran Stalinist could reconstruct himself so radically. There was always the suspicion of hypocrisy when Simonov came out for some liberal cause. ‘Simonov the man of many faces,’ Solzhenitsyn wrote, ‘Simonov simultaneously the noble literary martyr and the esteemed conservative with access to all official quarters.’41

  There were indeed times when Simonov behaved with anything but liberal inclinations. He took part, for example, in the Kremlin’s persecution of Metropol, a literary almanac compiled and edited by Viktor Erofeev, Yevgeny Popov and Vasily Aksyonov, which was published (with ‘Moscow, 1979’ as the given place and date) by Ardis in the USA. Metropol was not a dissident publication but, as Erofeev later described it, ‘an attempt to struggle with stagnation in conditions of stagnation’. Furious at this attempt to undermine their control of the printed word, the ailing leaders of the Brezhnevite regime took revenge on the editors of Metropol. Erofeev and Popov were expelled from the Writers’ Union, while several other writers in the almanac resigned in protest from the Union or emigrated from the Soviet Union. Simonov was drawn into the campaign against Metropol by Suslov, who put pressure on him to denounce the publication as ‘anti-Soviet’. Simonov had a vested interest. His daughter Aleksandra, then aged twenty-two, was in love with the brother of Viktor Erofeev, a young art historian called Andrei, to whom she had become recently engaged. Aleksandra and Andrei had been mixing with a group of bohemian friends, all of them children of the Soviet elite (Andrei’s father was a high-ranking diplomat), who dressed like hippies and listened to rock music, then a form of dissidence. Once the literary scandal broke, Simonov resolved to end their love affair, determined to distance himself and his family from the Erofeevs, whose association with the dissidents, or circles close to them, was potentially dangerous to him. Perhaps, as Andrei thinks, he wanted Aleksandra to marry someone from a family that conformed more closely to the Soviet establishment. Perhaps he was afraid that the Metropol Affair might become more problematic (it had raised a storm of protest in the West) and that Aleksandra might suffer from the consequences of her close involvement with the Erofeevs. Fear was never absent from Simonov’s relations with the Soviet regime – even in these final years when he enjoyed the status of a major figure in the Soviet establishment and, it would seem, should have had no fears. In Suslov’s office Simonov compiled a literary report on Metropol in which he denounced not just Viktor but Andrei Erofeev as ‘anti-Soviet dissidents’. When Aleksandra was told this by Andrei, she refused to believe him, accused him of slandering her father and broke off their engagement. But later she found out that he had told the truth.42

  Simonov in 1979

  Simonov’s death from chronic bron
chitis was slow and painful. The Kremlin doctors were afraid to take responsibility for his treatment (a common problem in the Soviet Union in the decades following the Doctors’ Plot) and failed to give him the right drugs. During his last months, when he was in and out of hospital, Simonov continued to reflect on his past, to ask himself why he had not done more to help the people who had turned to him during the Stalinist terror. In some of his final notes, drafted for a play (The Four ‘I’s) which was meant to take the form of a conversation between his present self and three ‘other selves’ at various moments in the past, he put himself on trial:

  ‘So, how did you act, when someone whom you knew appeared before you and needed you to help?’

  ‘It depended. Sometimes they would call, sometimes they would write, and sometimes they would ask me directly.’

  ‘What would they ask?’

  ‘It depended. Sometimes they would ask me to intervene to help someone, they would say how good that person was. Sometimes they would write to me to say that they could not believe that somebody they knew could be guilty, that they could not believe that he had done what he was accused of – they knew him too well to believe that.’

  ‘Did people actually write that?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes. But more often they wrote that they knew it wasn’t their business, that they could not judge, that perhaps it was right, but… And then they would try to write down all the good things they knew about that person to try and help him.’

  ‘And you tried to help?’

  ‘Well, there were times when I did not reply to the letters. Twice. Once because I had never liked the person and I thought I was correct not to help a person I did not like and about whom I did not know anything. The other time I knew the person well, I had even been at the front with him and had liked him very much, but when they imprisoned him during the war, I believed that he was guilty, that he might be involved in some conspiracy, although no one spoke about such things – it was impossible to talk. He wrote to me. I didn’t reply, I didn’t help. I didn’t know what to say to him, and so I delayed. Then, when he was released, I was ashamed. All the more so, because it turned out that one of our comrades, a man I considered even weaker and more of a coward than myself, had replied to him, and had helped as many people as he could – he had sent them parcels and money.’43