That terror was like the black plague attacking the Soviet Union, infecting more and more strata of society, who came to be branded “enemies of the people.” The country was caught up in a madness of denunciations, mutual accusations, and self-incriminations extracted under torture. Leningrad was singled out for specially ruthless treatment: Stalin hoped to destroy the city’s oppositional spirit once and for all.
The Great Terror in Leningrad was described by an impassioned witness, Yevgeny Shvarts:
A storm broke, swirling everything around it, and it was impossible to guess who would be killed by the next bolt of lightning. And no one ran and no one hid. A man who knows he is guilty knows how to behave: a criminal gets a false passport and flees to another city. But the future enemies of the people stood without moving, awaiting the blow of the terrible Antichrist brand. They sensed blood, like bulls in a slaughterhouse, they sensed it, but the ‘enemy of the people’ brand kills without selection, anyone at all—and they all stood there, obediently, like bulls waiting for the blow. How can you run if you know you’re not guilty? How do you behave during interrogations? And people died, in a nightmare, confessing to unheard of crimes: espionage, terror, sabotage. And they vanished without a trace, and after them were sent their wives and children, entire families.114
It was hard to find a family in Leningrad that was not affected in some way by the terror. Its horrible shadow reached Akhmatova: in 1935, at the height of the repressions following the Kirov case, they arrested her son by Gumilyov, Lev, and her husband at the time, Nikolai Punin. Both had been arrested before and were already “marked”: Gumilyov, as the son of an “enemy of the people” executed in 1921, and Punin as an influential theoretician of the avant-garde in art and one of the leading figures in Leningrad’s cultural life. On the advice of friends, Akhmatova wrote a short letter to Stalin himself, pleading for the release of her son and husband. It ended with the entreaty, “Help, Iosif Vissarionovich!” A few days later Lev and Punin were home.
In 1938 Lev Gumilyov was arrested again. Among the other absurd charges was the following. Akhmatova was allegedly inciting her son to avenge his father’s death by killing Andrei Zhdanov, the new Party boss of Leningrad installed by Stalin to replace Kirov. New interrogations and beatings followed, but Lev did not sign any of the confessions they tried to force out of him, even though many people who could not withstand the torture “assembly line,” as it was called, incriminated not only themselves but their friends and relatives.
Zabolotsky, arrested also in 1938, later described the behavior of his cellmates in a Leningrad prison: “Here you could observe all forms of despair, all manifestations of cold hopelessness, convulsive hysterical merriment, and cynical disregard of everything in the world, including one’s own fate.” The atmosphere changed dramatically at night, when the multistoried prison was illuminated by lights and the army of investigators set about its ruthless “work” in its innumerable offices: “The enormous stone courtyard of the building, onto which opened the windows of the offices, would gradually be filled with the groans and heart-rending screams of people being beaten. The whole cell shuddered, as if an electric current had run through it, and mute horror appeared once again in the eyes of the prisoners.”
Lev Gumilyov was condemned to be shot. It is not known whether a new appeal, sent by Akhmatova to Stalin, had any effect or whether other circumstances were involved, but his sentence was commuted to exile in Siberia, where he was fated to spend fourteen years in prison and labor camps.
During the more than seventeen months that Gumilyov was imprisoned in Leningrad, Akhmatova spent hundreds of hours in prison lines. The women of Leningrad, who formed most of the long queues by the prison wall, were trying to learn at least something about the fate of their arrested relatives and to deliver food parcels to them. The exhausted Akhmatova, almost fifty years old then, her face ashen, was noticed by many people in the lines, even though in her worn old coat and crumpled hat she must have been hard to recognize.
One of the tensest moments when Akhmatova was turning over a parcel for her son was later described by her neighbor in that horrible line: “It was her turn, she came up to the crevice of a window—inside were insignia and an unapproachable dummy; softly, almost without opening her mouth, she said the required: ‘Akhmatova for Gumilyov.’”115 Akhmatova recalled that a woman who stood behind her burst into tears at hearing her name.
