Natasha's Dance полностью

Through the peripeteia of the past And the years of war and poverty Silently I came to recognize The inimitable features of Russia

Overcoming my feelings of love I observed in worship Old women, residents Students and locksmiths¹³⁶

As the German armies crossed the Soviet border, on 22 June 1941, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Foreign Minister, gave a radio address in which he spoke of the impending 'patriotic war for homeland, honour and freedom'.¹³⁷ The next day the main Soviet army newspaper, Kras-naia zvezda, referred to it as a 'holy war'.¹³⁸ Communism was conspicuously absent from Soviet propaganda in the war. It was fought in the name of Russia, of the 'family of peoples' in the Soviet Union, of Pan-Slav brotherhood, or in the name of Stalin, but never in the name of the communist system. To mobilize support, the Stalinist regime even embraced the Russian Church, whose patriotic message was more likely to persuade a rural population that was still recovering from the disastrous effects of collectivization. In 1943, a patriarch was elected for the first time since 1917; a theological academy and several seminaries were re-opened; and after years of persecution the parish churches were allowed to restore something of their spiritual life.¹³⁹ The regime glorified the military heroes of Russian history - Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoi, Kuzma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov - all of whom were summoned as an inspiration for the nation's self-defence. Films were made about their lives, military orders were created in their names. History became the story of great leaders rather than the charting of the class struggle.

Russia's artists enjoyed a new freedom and responsibility in the war years. Poets who had been regarded with disfavour or banned from publication by the Soviet regime suddenly began to receive letters from the soldiers at the front. Throughout the years of the Terror they had never been forgotten by their readers; nor, it would seem, had they ever really lost their spiritual authority. In 1945, Isaiah Berlin, on a visit to Russia, was told that

the poetry of Blok, Bryusov, Sologub, Esenin, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, was widely read, learnt by heart and quoted by soldiers and officers and even political commissars. Akhmatova and Pasternak, who had for a long time lived in a kind of internal exile, received an amazingly large number of letters from the front, quoting from both published and unpublished poems, for the most part circulated privately in manuscript copies; there were requests for autographs, for confirmation of the authenticity of texts, for expressions of the author's attitude to this or that problem.¹⁴⁰

Zoshchenko received about 6,000 letters in one year. Many of them came from readers who said they often thought of suicide and looked to him for spiritual help.¹⁴¹ In the end the moral value of such writers could not fail to impress itself on the Party's bureaucrats, and conditions for these artists gradually improved. Akhmatova was allowed to publish a collection of her early lyrics, From Six Books. Huge queues formed to buy it on the day when it appeared, in a small edition of just 10,000 copies, in the summer of 1940, whereupon the Leningrad authorities took fright and, on the orders of Party Secretary Andrei Zhdanov, had the book withdrawn from circulation.¹⁴²

In her patriotic poem 'Courage' (published in the Soviet press in February 1942) Akhmatova presented the war as a defence of the 'Russian word' - and the poem gave courage to the millions of soldiers who went into battle with its words on their lips:

We know what lies in balance at this moment, And what is happening right now. The hour for courage strikes upon our clocks, And courage will not desert us. We're not frightened by a hail of lead, We're not bitter without a roof overhead -And we will preserve you, Russian speech, Mighty Russian word! We will transmit you to our grandchildren Free and pure and rescued from captivity Forever!¹⁴³

In the first months of the war Akhmatova joined the Civil Defence in Leningrad. 'I remember her near the old iron railings of the House on the Fontanka', wrote the poet Olga Berggolts. 'Her face severe and angry, a gas mask strapped over her shoulder, she took her turn on the fire watch like a regular soldier.'¹⁴⁴ As the German armies circled in on Leningrad, Berggolts's husband, the literary critic Georgy Makogonenko, turned to Akhmatova to raise the spirits of the city by talking to its people in a radio broadcast. For years her poetry had been forbidden by the Soviet authorities. Yet, as the critic explained later, the very name Akhmatova was so synonymous with the spirit of the city that even Zhdanov was