Natasha's Dance полностью

+ Even two of Stalin's own relatives by marriage, Anna Redens and Olga Allilueva, were arrested for their Jewish connections. Explaining the arrest of her two aunts to his own daughter, Stalin stud: 'They knew too much. They blabbed a lot' (S. Allilueva, Only One Year (New York, 1969), p. 154).

Chagall. The offensive was personally instigated by Stalin. He even studied linguistics, and wrote at length about it in Pravda during 1949, with the aim of denouncing the 'Jewish' theory, originally advanced by Niko Marr in the 1900s, that the Georgian language had Semitic origins.¹⁸⁹ In 1953 Stalin ordered the arrest of several Jewish doctors who worked for the Kremlin on trumped-up charges (the so-called 'Doctors' Plot') of having poisoned Zhdanov and another Politburo member, A. S. Shcherbakov.* The tirade in the press against the 'murderers in white coats' produced a wave of anti-Jewish hatred, and many Jews were evicted from their jobs and homes. Jewish scientists, scholars and artists were singled out for attacks as 'bourgeois nationalists', even if (as was so often the case) they were more Russian than Jewish. The fact that they had 'Jew' written in their Soviet passports was enough to condemn them as Zionists.+

Jewish film directors (Leonid Trauberg, Dziga Vertov, Mikhail Romm) were accused of making 'anti-Russian' films and forced out of their studios. Vasily Grossman's novel Stalingrad, based on his work as a war correspondent, was banned principally because its central character was a Russian Jew. The Black Book (first published in Jerusalem in 1980), Grossman's still-unrivalled memoir-based account of the Holocaust on Soviet soil, which he assembled for the Literary Commission of the JAFC, was never published in the Soviet Union. When Grossman started writing in the 1930s, he thought of himself as a Soviet citizen. The Revolution had brought to an end the Tsarist persecution of the Jews. But in his last novel, the epic wartime story Life and Fate (first published in Switzerland in 1980), he portrayed the Nazi and Soviet regimes, not as opposites, but as mirror images of each other. Grossman died in 1964, a quarter of a century before his

* One of these prominent doctors was Isaiah Berlin's uncle Leo, who was accused of passing Kremlin secrets to the British through his nephew on his visit to Moscow in 1945. Severely beaten, Leo attempted suicide and eventually 'confessed' to having been a spy. He was held in prison for a year and released in 1954, shortly after Stalin's death. One day, while still weak from his time in prison, he saw one of his torturers in the street ahead of him, collapsed from a heart attack and died (M. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (London, 1998), pp. 168-9).

+ All citizens of the USSR had a Soviet passport. But inside the passport there was a category that defined them by 'nationality' (ethnicity).

masterpiece was published in his native land. He had asked to be buried in a Jewish cemetery.¹⁹⁰

'I had believed that after the Soviet victory, the experience of the thirties could not ever come again, yet everything reminded me of the way things had gone then', wrote Ilya Ehrenburg (one of the few senior Jewish intellectuals to emerge unscathed from the Stalin era) in Men, Years - Life (1961-6).¹⁹¹ Coming as it did after the release of the war years, this new wave of terror must have felt in some ways more oppressive than the old; to try to survive such a thing the second time around must have been like trying to preserve one's very sanity. Ehrenburg visited Akhmatova at the Fountain House in 1947.

She was sitting in a small room where her portrait by Modigliani hung on the wall and, sad and majestic as ever, was reading Horace. Misfortunes crashed down on her like avalanches; it needed more than common fortitude to preserve such dignity, composure and pride.¹⁹²

Reading Horace was one way of keeping sane. Some writers turned to literary scholarship or, like Kornei Chukovsky, to writing children's books. Others, like Pasternak, turned to translating foreign works.