I think the attack against Akhmatova and Zoshchenko was not concerned so much with them in particular. . Stalin was always suspicious of Leningrad, a feeling that he had retained since the ’20s. . I thought then ‘Why Akhmatova, who hadn’t emigrated, who gave so many poetry readings during the war?’. . It was a way of putting the intelligentsia in their place, of showing them that the tasks before them were just as clear as ever.23
The blow fell on 15 August, in the form of a resolution by the Party’s Central Committee. Akhmatova’s work was condemned as ‘empty and frivolous. . permeated by the scent of pessimism and decay’, Zoshchenko’s as ‘putrid, vulgar nonsense’, liable to lead astray Soviet youth. Both displayed ‘cringing servility towards the bourgeois culture of the West’. One of two Leningrad magazines that published them was closed down, and the other put under the editorship of a Central Committee propaganda chief. A week later Zhdanov flew to Leningrad to anathematise the pair in person, in a speech to the Writers’ Union. As the significance of his words (he described Akhmatova as ‘half whore, half nun’ and Zoshchenko as ‘a trivial petit-bourgeois. . oozing anti-Soviet poison’) sank in, the audience froze into silence — ‘congealing’, as one of its members put it, ‘over the course of three hours into a solid white lump’.24 One woman tried to leave the hall, but was prevented from doing so and sat down again at the back. There were no other protesters and a vote to expel Akhmatova and Zoshchenko from the Union was passed unanimously. The meeting ended at one o’clock in the morning, the assembled writers filing silently out into the warm summer’s night. ‘Just as silently’, remembered one, ‘we passed along the straight avenue to the empty square, and silently went off in late trolley-buses. Everything was unexpected and incomprehensible.’25 Akhmatova herself, magnificently contemptuous, claimed to have been unaware of the resolution’s existence until she saw it printed on a sheet of slimy newspaper from which she had just unwrapped some fish. Simonov’s interpretation of the affair is borne out by the fact that despite Zhdanov’s blood-curdling rhetoric neither she nor Zoshchenko was arrested, but both were reduced instead to their old pre-war existence of secrecy and penury, burning notebooks and living off the kindness of friends. One of the few brave enough not to drop Akhmatova was the much younger Olga Berggolts, who in consequence lost her position on the board of the Writers’ Union.
In August 1948 Kremlin politics were upended by Zhdanov’s death (without outside help) from a heart attack. Malenkov and Beria immediately began to reassert themselves, broadening the highly publicised crackdown on the Leningrad intelligentsia into a secret purge of Zhdanov’s protégés at the Kremlin and the whole Leningrad Party.
What became known as the ‘Leningrad Affair’ began in February 1948, with the dismissals from their posts of Zhdanov’s wartime deputy Aleksei Kuznetsov, who had followed him to Moscow and been given oversight of the NKVD, of ‘Mayor’ Popkov, who had taken over as Leningrad’s First Party Secretary, and of Nikolai Voznesensky, a clever young economist who had ridden on Zhdanov’s coat-tails to become head of the State Planning Commission. ‘The Politburo considers’, ran a secret resolution, that ‘Comrades Kuznetsov. . and Popkov have [demonstrated] a sick, un-Bolshevik deviation, expressed in demagogic overtures to the Leningrad organisation, unfair criticism of the Central Committee. . and in attempts to present themselves as the special defenders of Leningrad’s interests.’26
