The circumstances of Gumilyov’s arrest were wrapped in legend for almost seventy years. At the time, the Bolsheviks announced that Gumilyov had been part of the Petrograd Military Organization (PBO), a large underground association preparing an armed uprising against the Soviet regime. Akhmatova always insisted that there had been no such conspiracy and that Gumilyov did not take part in the anti-Soviet struggle. Once the materials of the “Gumilyov case” began to be published in the Russian press in the 1990s, the matter could be judged more objectively.
In the summer of 1921 the Petrograd Cheka made mass arrests, and only in the PBO case, according to Soviet sources, over two hundred people were detained. Grigory Zinoviev, Petrograd’s party boss, thought it was time to put some fear into the intelligentsia. They did not like Zinoviev, who had introduced a dictatorial rule that was harsh even by Bolshevik standards. They called Zinoviev “baba au rhum,” because he had taken the reins of power in Petrograd as skinny as a rail and had grown very fat over the lean revolutionary years. Also head of the Comintern, Zinoviev operated rather independent of Moscow.
It is clear now that there was no large anti-Soviet Petrograd Military Organization. That preposterous idea was fabricated by Yakov Agranov, a young Chekist and lover of belles lettres who later reminisced, “In 1921 seventy percent of the Petrograd intelligentsia had one foot in the enemy camp. We had to burn that foot!”167
Thus, the goal of the Zinoviev-Agranov campaign was preventive. The people arrested in the PBO case, including many leading representatives of Petrograd’s scientific and artistic communities, had been scared and confused during the interrogations and were forced to denounce themselves and others.
Judging by the transcripts of the interrogations, Gumilyov was an easy mark for the Cheka investigator. He naively believed that first of all, there was a “gentleman’s agreement” of sorts between him and the Soviet authorities, according to which he honestly cooperated with the Bolsheviks in the area of culture and they gave him the right to a certain freedom of thought and conscience.
Second, Gumilyov was sure that his enormous popularity in Petrograd would be a reliable shield against any provocations from the secret police. “They won’t dare touch me,” he often said. As the much more sober Vladislav Khodasevich observed, “He was extremely young at heart and maybe in mind. He always seemed a child to me.”168
In the published records of the interrogation, Gumilyov seems to admit that he had talked with friends “on political topics, bitterly condemning the suppression of personal initiative in Soviet Russia”169 and also that if there were a hypothetical anti-Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd, he “in all probability” would be able “to gather and lead a band of passers-by, using the general mood of opposition.”170 All that, even for those harsh times, was very minor stuff.
Gorky rushed to Moscow to ask Lenin for a pardon for Gumilyov. According to some very similar and probably reliable versions of the course of events, Lenin promised to talk with Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the All-Russian Cheka about releasing Gumilyov. If Gorky is to be believed, Lenin guaranteed that none of those arrested in the PBO case would be executed.
Gorky returned to Petrograd to learn that sixty of the prisoners, including Gumilyov, had already been shot, on the recommendation of the investigator, without any trial, even a Bolshevik one. With tears in his eyes, Gorky kept saying, “That Zinoviev held up Lenin’s orders.”171
An authoritative eyewitness account by the Russo-French revolutionary Victor Serge (Kibalchich), who was living in Petrograd then, says that the so-called independent decision of the Petrograd Cheka to shoot Gumilyov was actually approved in Moscow. “One comrade traveled to Moscow to ask Dzerzhinsky a question: ‘Were we entitled to shoot one of Russia’s two or three poets of the first order?’ Dzerzhinsky answered, ‘Are we entitled to make an exception of a poet and still shoot the others?’”172
There is reason to believe that Lenin’s order of pardoning Gumilyov was part of a charade designed to keep Gorky at bay and that Zinoviev’s holdup of the order had been agreed upon beforehand by Lenin.
The Bolsheviks achieved their goal. When news of the executions in the PBO case came, not only Petrograd but all of Russia shuddered in horror. Zinoviev strengthened his reputation for ruthlessness. The career of Yakov Agranov, the mastermind of the case, took off. After moving to Moscow, he became the director of the “literary subdepartment” of the secret police, a personal friend of Stalin, and a member of his secretariat. Agranov returned to the city once more in December 1934 to “investigate” Kirov’s murder—in the preparation of which he himself had probably taken an active part.
