Many Armenian writers were shot. The poet Gurgen Maari, who survived, tells how “I was arrested at night on 9 August 1936. I was not surprised. A month previously the First Secretary of the C.C. of the Armenian Communist Party, Agasi Khandzhyan, had tragically perished. The atmosphere in the House of Writers was very oppressive.”67
He was in solitary confinement for many months without even being allowed out for exercise. It was not until two years after his arrest that he was “tried”:
The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union is in session. I confess to terrorist acts, to the wish to separate Armenia from the Soviet Union and unite her to the imperialist camp. I intended to kill Beria….
The court was a closed one, the trial lasted three minutes…. I was condemned to ten years’ deprivation of liberty. Once again Sianos [a jailer, formerly in the same orphange as Maari] accompanies me. This time to the cell for sentenced prisoners.
“How many did you get?” he asked in a whisper.
“Ten years.”
“Thank God. You’ve got off lightly.”
“Ten years,” I repeat.
“For the third night running, when they’ve taken people out, they’ve shot them,” he whispers….
The forty people in his cell included two architects, three writers, four engineers, and one People’s Commissar; all the rest were Government employees and Party workers. The opinion of the pessimists was that their prison sentences were just for the sake of form and that they would be shot in any case. However, “in the autumn of 1938 we were crammed into lorries one night and—covered with tarpaulin like forbidden goods—were taken to the station. It was empty at the station, there was not a living soul—only troops.”
For six months, the prisoners lived in the Vologda city jail. Then they were taken to Krasnoyarsk, where “a large army of prisoners composed of representatives of many of the peoples of the Soviet Union swarmed. Inhabitants of Central Asia stood out particularly in their bright national costumes.”
A medical examination determined who was to be sent on to Norilsk in the Arctic. It was then, for the second time in three years, that Maari managed to see himself in a mirror. He could hardly recognize himself. At the Siblag (“Siberian” Prison Camp) in Norilsk, he made friends with Egert, once a famous film actor. He was marched with 200 others to another camp; most of the 200 died later. Maari himself was there until 1947. He briefly describes two camp commandants: one hated “intelligent swine” and sent them to do the heaviest work; the other, who liked books, eased his lot a good deal.
Released in 1947, Maari was not permitted to publish anything under his own name as his civic rights had not been restored, and in 1948 he was rearrested. This time, the cell was full of troops returning from German captivity. In 1948 and 1949, he was incarcerated in nine prisons in nine towns. He and his fellows were then classed as “exiles for life.”
The Ukrainian creative intelligentsia, as we have seen, had been struck down on a vast scale every year since 1930.68 The Ukrainian poets perished in their majority for “nationalist” reasons: sixteen, starting with Vlyzko in 1934, are namea as executed or dying in camps between then and 1942—almost all at Solovetsk, though a few were in Kolyma. A group of neo-classicist poets, Mykola Zerov, Pavlo Fylypovych, and others, was tried in Kiev in January 1936 for nationalism, terrorism, and espionage. One temporary survivor, the poet Mykhalo Dray-Khamara, got a five-year Special Board sentence on 28 March 1936, but seems to have died in camp in 1938 or 1939.69
There seems to have beeen another Ukrainian writers’ case in October 1937. At any rate, A. S. Mikhailyuk is given as dying on 23 October and M. V. Semenko on 24 October 1937—a case perhaps associated with that of Ukrainian Politburo member V. I. Porayko, later to be denounced as a prominent fascist, shot on 25 October. Two more Ukrainian writers of note, M. G. Yoganson and G. 0. Kovalenko, perished on 27 and 28 October 1937, respectively; and two more, Slisarenko and P. P. Fylypovich, on 3 November. Yet another concentration of Ukrainians is to be found on 12 to 14 January 1938, with the writer N. Filyansky and the old revolutionaries S. D. Visochenko and A. K. Serbichenko.
And so it was in all the non-Russian Republics. Their men of literature were almost automatically regarded as bourgeois nationalists, since, of course, they had been working in the national traditions of their own languages. In Byelorussia (see here) most of the leading writers were shot. In Kazakhstan, the death dates of almost all the main figures are given as 1937 to 1939.70
