Stalin: A Biography полностью

Such artistic works of distinction as were created in the 1930s — with very few exceptions — came into being despite him. The works of Anna Akhmatova, who composed her wonderful elegiac cycle of poems Requiem in 1935–40, were banned from the press. (Only in the Second World War, when her verses were useful for raising public morale, did Stalin somewhat relent.)¹⁶ That masterpiece of Russian prose, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, remained in his desk drawer at his death and was not published in full in the Soviet Union until 1975. Stalin even terrorised the genius of mid-century Russian classical music Dmitri Shostakovich, who was denounced for writing pieces which nobody could whistle. Shostakovich was constrained to ‘confess’ his errors; indeed his Fifth Symphony in 1937 became known as ‘A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism’. Music, however, was less harshly treated than the other arts. Terrified though he had been, Shostakovich went on writing and having his symphonies performed. Just a few fine literary pieces were printed. Among them were Sholokhov’s two novels and some of Andrei Platonov’s short stories. But generally Stalin’s rule spread a blight over the already damaged artistic environment of the USSR.

The Great Terror of 1937–8 was to scare most intellectuals into cooperating overtly with the state or else just keeping their heads down. Just a very few of them challenged authority. Osip Mandelshtam in 1934 read out an anti-Stalin poem to a private soirée:¹⁷

The last line reproduced the (unproved) rumour that Stalin was of Ossetian ancestry.

The listeners that evening included an informer, and the poet was arrested. Even Stalin, though, was unsure what to do with him. His instinct was to execute him; but instead he telephoned another great poet, Boris Pasternak, and asked whether Mandelshtam’s was a truly wonderful talent. Pasternak was in acute embarrassment: if he said yes, he too might be arrested; but to say no would be to condemn his friend and rival to the Gulag. Pasternak gave an equivocal answer, prompting Stalin to comment sarcastically: ‘If I had a poet friend who was in trouble, I’d throw myself at a wall to save him!’¹⁸ Mandelshtam was sent to the Gulag in 1938. The list of fine artists who were shot or incarcerated is depressingly long. More great intellectuals perished in the 1930s than survived. Isaak Babel, writer of wonderful short stories about the Red cavalry in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920, was a victim. So was the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerkhold. Even Mikhail Bulgakov, whose plays had pleased Stalin in the 1920s, was ushered into the pits of depression. He perished a broken man in freedom in 1940. Anna Akhmatova suffered despite never being arrested: her son Lev was taken by the police in her place. Unlike Bulgakov, she endured her situation with lasting fortitude.

The repression came also to scholarship and the natural sciences. Among the victims of the show trials in 1929–31 were historians such as Sergei Platonov who were accused of Russian nationalist activity. Yevgeni Tarle, who later became one of Stalin’s favourite historians, was locked up. Literary criticism was another dangerous scholarly area. Although Stalin enlisted nineteenth-century poetry and prose in his programme for cultural revolution, he was not going to permit the publication of unorthodox interpretations. Scientific teaching and research were also persecuted whenever he saw them as a threat to the regime. The list of outstanding figures who were repressed is a long one. It included the biologist Nikolai Vavilov, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev and the physicist Lev Landau.