I later learned more about Agranov in the early 1970s from Lilya Brik, the mistress of the late Mayakovsky. Agranov was Mayakovsky’s personal patron and political control. When Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, Agranov was the first to read the poet’s suicide note. He wanted to make sure there were no anti-Soviet statements in it. But faithful service to Stalin did not save Agranov: in 1938 he and his wife were shot on his boss’s orders. Zinoviev had been shot in 1936. One Soviet source maintains that when he was led from his cell to his place of execution, he laughed hysterically.173
Gumilyov, according to the stories circulating in Petrograd in those days, died in the manner appropriate to his image of the fearless Russian officer: smiling, with a cigarette held in his lips. His death, at the age of thirty-five, became legendary instantly. It was because of Gumilyov that the PBO case was not forgotten in the long chain of mass executions by the Bolsheviks. Along with Blok’s untimely demise, Gumilyov’s execution marked a sharp break in the relations of the intellectuals with the Soviet regime. In Russia the poet had always been a symbolic figure. The attitude of the authorities toward poets signaled the regime’s position on issues of culture, tradition, and human rights.
The policy of Lenin’s government toward Blok and Gumilyov, for all the extraordinariness of the situation, was nevertheless characteristic. All the methods for dealing with the cultural elite later to be witnessed in the Soviet Union were already in place. The intellectuals were pushed firmly onto the path of serving the regime. They were given opportunities to educate the masses, but under the strict control of the Communist Party. Loyalty was generously rewarded, while deviation from the “correct” line was punished with greater and greater ruthlessness.
As long as the Bolsheviks did not feel totally in control, they pretended to acknowledge the cultural elite’s right to ideological neutrality. But that relative tolerance quickly vanished, and then they demanded absolute fidelity from the intellectuals.
Gumilyov, by honestly responding to the Cheka investigator’s questions, was re-creating—probably consciously although perhaps not—a famous moment of Russian cultural history. Pushkin, recalled from exile by Nicholas I in 1826 after the rebellion of the Decembrists had been quashed, told the emperor frankly that he would have joined the revolutionaries had he been in Petersburg on the day of the uprising.
As we know, Nicholas I pardoned Pushkin and favored him. The emperor appreciated the poet’s honesty because he was comfortably certain of his own authority. A charitable gesture toward the famous poet would simply underscore the fact.
Gumilyov’s mistake, which cost him his life, was in thinking the Bolsheviks were somehow descendants of the imperial Russian government, even though he himself was a monarchist and anti-Communist. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, believed their rule to be scarcely legitimate; thus a show of charity would be taken for weakness. They could play cat and mouse with the poet, but any overt disobedience on his part had to be punished. Using Blok and Gumilyov as examples, the Bolsheviks showed that they regarded artists as their serfs.
It is telling that this first archetypal scenario of the relationship between the Soviet regime and intellectuals was played out in Petrograd. The city had been the stage of confrontation and cooperation between the authorities and the cultural elite for over two hundred years. In that time the autocracy weakened gradually and the intellectuals had grown in power and independence. The Bolsheviks set the destruction of that independence as their goal.
By punishing Gumilyov and Blok, the quintessential Petersburg poets, the Bolsheviks were consciously destroying the equilibrium in the capital between the state authority and the cultural elite that had been created during prerevolutionary times. In effect, they abrogated the old rules and replaced them with new ones. At the same time the city’s reputation as the cultural capital of Russia was also under attack.
Petrograd was dealt an irreparable blow politically and economically when Lenin moved the government to Moscow. Now the Petrograd culture had to be cut down a peg. In that sense Moscow’s wishes coincided with Zinoviev’s desire to teach the disloyal Petrograd intelligentsia a lesson.
All this had a profound effect on the Petersburg mythos but in direct contradiction to the Bolsheviks’ intent. Petrograd parted rather easily with political hegemony, but it refused to relinquish its cultural preeminence. Sprinkled with fresh blood, the Petersburg mythos took on a new life. From the very start, Akhmatova played an exceptional role in that complex and painful process.
