This cruel sentence of a young man who already had heart trouble infuriated many Leningrad intellectuals. A secret KGB report informed the Party which writers had called Brodsky’s trial illegal, that Kornei Chukovsky and Dmitri Shostakovich were among those who rose to Brodsky’s defense, and that in artistic circles the Brodsky case was considered a “turn back to 1937.”45
The worries of Soviet intellectuals, based on years of bitter experience with the authorities, were not unfounded. After Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, the new leader of the Communist Party, the sly Nikita Khrushchev, renounced many of the excesses of his ruthless predecessor and at first steered a course toward liberalization of political and cultural life. This policy became known as the Thaw. Mass arrests on the Stalinist scale were ended. Many victims of the Great Terror were rehabilitated; those who had survived were released from the camps. After a long hiatus Russia was beginning, albeit feebly, to reestablish cultural contacts with the West, and a certain—a very limited—deviation was permitted from the total conformity enforced by Stalin.
But the liberal experiments of the down-to-earth Khrushchev were erratic at best and turned out to be short-lived. He soon began to tighten the screws impatiently, wanting the intellectuals to toe the Party line. In late 1963 Khrushchev attacked a group of famous Soviet writers and artists in crude and abusive language. Brodsky’s trial was symptomatic of the tightening. And many feared that it was only a prelude to a harsher repression.
There is evidence that Khrushchev, who had a deep distrust of intellectuals, was planning just that, but in October 1964 he was unexpectedly removed from power by his Party colleagues, who had tired of his endless reshuffling of the political apparat, his unpredictable policy zigzags, and his uncontrollable outbursts. The new Party leader was the imposing Leonid Brezhnev, whose chief goal was to rock the ship of state as little as possible. The “stagnation period” had begun.
Under Khrushchev and then Brezhnev, Leningrad became even more a second-rate city. Of course, it remained an important industrial and scientific center with a stress on military production. Its population increased from slightly over a half million people in 1944 to four and a half million in the 1970s. But where culture was concerned, the various Party bosses were interested only in maintaining the status quo. It was no accident that the first major post-Stalinist trial of a writer (Brodsky’s trial) took place in Leningrad. The city had a particularly reactionary local climate, one conducive to conflict between the authorities and the resident intellectual elite.
In Moscow it was easier for poets with liberal leanings to gain official publication or to find a large audience. These young poets thus had something to lose and hence were more easily manipulated by the authorities. So a public game of cat-and-mouse ensued: a writer would release a nonconformist work, then was censured by the government for so doing; in order to smooth relations, he would write several more acceptable works; he could then regain popularity with another liberal work.
The Leningrad authorities were less willing to play this game; local artists thus had fewer temptations than their Moscow contemporaries.46 Also, they had the towering moral model of Anna Akhmatova, the only living representative of the Silver Age.
The poet Yevgeny Rein brought his friend Brodsky to visit Akhmatova at her dacha in Komarovo, near Leningrad, in the summer of 1961.47 At first Akhmatova did not make any special impression on the cocky Brodsky. “It was only one fine day as I was returning from Akhmatova’s house in a crowded commuter train that I realized—you know, it’s as if the scales fell away—with whom, or actually with what, I was dealing,” Brodsky later confessed. “I recalled something she said or the turn of her head—and suddenly everything fell into place. After that it wasn’t that I became a frequent visitor, but I did see Akhmatova fairly regularly. And I even rented a dacha in Komarovo one winter. Then we saw each other literally every day. It wasn’t a question of literature at all, but a purely personal and—dare I say it?—mutual attraction.”48
By the time he met Akhmatova, Brodsky, who was born in Leningrad in 1940, had led a colorful life, especially for an urban Jewish young man. Like other residents of Leningrad, he and his mother had nearly starved during the blockade (his father, who served in the navy, took part in breaking it). One of Brodsky’s most vivid childhood memories was of his first white bread roll. “I am standing on a chair and eating it, and my adult relatives are watching me.”49
