Millions of people living in the devastated, hungry country repeated and memorized the formulas of these Party resolutions, as if they were magic spells, with frightening numbness at thousands of meetings. A contemporary recalled, “Life went from meeting to meeting, from campaign to campaign, and each was more total, all-encompassing, more ruthless and ridiculous, than the last. The atmosphere of guilt was heightened, a general and individual guilt that could never be expiated.”6
Stalin relied more and more on nationalism and isolationism. In 1947 he invited to the Kremlin the film director Sergei Eisenstein and his favorite actor, Leningrader Nikolai Cherkasov, celebrated for his roles as Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible in Eisenstein’s eponymous films. The conversation turned to Russian history, and Stalin expressed the opinion that Peter the Great had opened the gates of Russia too wide and that too many Germans and other foreigners had come in. “The wisdom of Ivan the Terrible consisted in standing on a national point of view and not letting foreigners into his country.” Two and a half months later Stalin repeated these thoughts to a group of writers, saying that Peter began the “obsolete tradition of kowtowing before shitty foreigners.”7 Stalin announced that this attitude toward Western culture had infected all of the contemporary Soviet intelligentsia. “They lack a proper sense of Soviet patriotism.”
The obscurantist ideas of the aging, paranoid leader were perceived as directives to immediate and energetic action. In all areas of Soviet life, the struggle against “cosmopolitanism” began. Leningrad was singled out yet again: Stalin considered the city, the direct descendant of Peter the Great’s Petersburg, the source of the contagion. All ties with the West, real or imaginary, were to be axed.
Ridiculous things happened. Edison Street disappeared; the Nord Café was renamed the Sever (North); Camembert became “snack cheese,” and French bread Moscow bread. But much more important were the human aspects of this Stalinist ideological campaign. Thousands of people were fired, and many were arrested. With a creak and a clang, an iron curtain fell between the Soviet Union and the West.
Nikolai Punin, art historian and critic, was arrested and sent to Siberia where he died. The arrest was preceded by a series of attacks in official speeches and newspaper articles that accused Punin of “openly propagandizing decadence, the perverted art of the West and such representatives of it as Cézanne, Van Gogh, and others. These extreme formalists are called geniuses, great artists by the cosmopolitanizing gourmand Punin.” Once the newspapers added Punin to the list of “sworn enemies of Soviet culture,” his fate was sealed. Friends begged him to leave Leningrad quickly. “I’m no rabbit to be running around Russia,” he replied. When Akhmatova learned of Punin’s death in the camps in 1953, she wrote a poem to his memory:
In 1949 Grigory Gukovsky, a forty-nine-year-old specialist in Pushkin and Gogol and a leading Leningrad literary historian, was arrested; he died in prison soon after. Other Leningrad scholars—Boris Tomashevsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, and Boris Eikhenbaum—were not allowed to teach or publish. At meetings they were denounced for “bourgeois cosmopolitanism” and “kowtowing to the West.” After one such meeting Eikhenbaum noted in his diary, “You need incredible health and iron nerves.” Another eyewitness, recently back from the war, confessed to a friend, “I led my squad to attack. It was scary. But this is worse.”8
Eikhenbaum was then one of the most notable intellectual figures of Leningrad. He had great authority even in prerevolutionary Petersburg, and Nikolai Gumilyov had tempted him to head acmeism as theoretician of the movement. Instead Eikhenbaum became a leader with Shklovsky and Tynyanov of the Opoyaz, an innovative group studying literature as the sum of “formal devices.” He also devoted a lot of time to Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy, and in 1923 he wrote the first major study of Akhmatova’s poetry. Ever ready with an ironic comment, the small and elegant Eikhenbaum (whom Shklovsky called the marquis), flawlessly dressed in blinding white collar, was a fixture at the Leningrad Philharmonic.
