On Stalin’s orders, Zhdanov gave two speeches in Leningrad to Party and literary elites, who were forced to attend. He repeated Stalin’s directives but added touches of his own. The result was both insulting and illiterate. About Akhmatova: “The range of her poetry is pathetically limited—the poetry of a crazed lady, chasing back and forth between boudoir and chapel…. Neither nun nor whore, or rather, both whore and nun, whose lust is mixed with prayer.” Zoshchenko was characterized as “an unprincipled and conscienceless literary hooligan” and a “scoundrel of literature,” who “is used to mocking Soviet life, Soviet mores, and Soviet people, covering that mockery with a mask of silly entertainment and inappropriate humor … depicting people and himself as vile, lustful animals.”
A writer present at Zhdanov’s speech recalled, “The audience grew silent, frozen, petrified, until it had turned in the course of three hours into a solid white lump.” One young woman writer grew faint. She tried to leave the hall, but two armed guards blocked her path: it was forbidden to leave before Zhdanov. And he was still shouting: “On what basis do you permit Zoshchenko to stroll around the gardens and parks of Leningrad literature? Why does the Party of Leningrad and its writers’ organization allow these shameful facts?!”
For the Leningrad intelligentsia gathered in the room, this outburst was totally unexpected. After enduring war and blockade, they had hoped for a thaw. They thought that Leningraders’ sufferings gave them the right to expect lenient treatment from Stalin. But they were once again threatened with repression.
It was obvious that Stalin would not rest until he had destroyed the Petersburg remnant within Leningrad. That was the only explanation for Zhdanov’s statement:
Leningrad should not be a haven for all kinds of slimy literary rogues who want to exploit Leningrad for their own goals. Zoshchenko, Akhmatova, and their like do not hold Soviet Leningrad dear. They want to see it as the personification of another sociopolitical order and of another ideology. Old Petersburg, the Bronze Horseman, as an image of that old Petersburg—that is what is before their eyes. But we love Soviet Leningrad, Leningrad as the progressive center of Soviet culture.5
The meeting ended after midnight. Several hundred people left silently. No one even whispered. A huge question mark hung over each of them and over the city.
As it turned out, Stalin put off a new strike against the Party and bureaucratic elite of Leningrad for several years, until Zhdanov left the scene. A loyal satrap, the short and plump Zhdanov, whose puffy face sported a dandified mustache, had headed the Leningrad Party organization for ten years after Kirov’s death in 1934. Transferred in 1944 to Moscow, he continued to supervise Leningrad. For organizing its defense during the war, Zhdanov received high honors from Stalin and the rank of major general, but his national and world fame (including an appearance on the cover of
Stalin observed Zhdanov’s growing celebrity with increasing irritation; Zhdanov’s sudden death in August 1948 was thus suspicious. (Stalin later attributed Zhdanov’s death to the “sabotage” of his doctors.) By mid-1948, though, Stalin had already begun preparing to liquidate Zhdanov’s former Leningrad aides and protégés, about two hundred people in all. They were all arrested in 1949, charged with various state crimes, tortured, and executed.
Yet again, Leningrad and its leadership had become national pariahs. Numerous arrests and firings followed, and former Leningraders were hunted down nationwide. In essence, they were accused of creating a criminal “Leningrad sect,” which plotted to restore Leningrad’s cultural and economic preeminence, including returning to the city its status as capital of the nation. This mass action of repression and persecution came to be known as the Leningrad affair.
But while alive, Zhdanov was Stalin’s point man in the campaign to completely subdue Soviet culture. After Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were denounced, a series of aggressive Party resolutions attacked theater critics, filmmakers, and “composers hewing a formalistic, antipeople line,” the last of whom included Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Aram Khachaturian. Though each resolution seemed to be passed for a specific reason, the press and radio immediately absolutized and generalized them as new Communist commandments.
