Moscow, 2 January 1936. Memorandum. Strictly Confidential.
Re: GlavLit
To: OrgBuro (KomPartiya – USSR)
From: Comrade Tal (Press & Propaganda)
Upon inspecting the annual results of GlavLit, we have discovered that the efficiency of this central censorship organ is completely unsatisfactory.
As I am sure you know, GlavLit monitors the manuscripts it receives on two occasions. The first by agents attached to the publishing houses; the second at the offices of the Central Staff itself.
The Literature Department is seriously understaffed. Only the department head holds the appropriate qualifications (having attended the Institute for Soviet Professors). His subordinates are not qualified to evaluate literary fiction.
As a result of these shortcomings, sixty-nine works released by GlavLit were recently removed from libraries and reading centres and pulped. The costs to the state for this operation totalled 413,510 roubles.
In my imagination, the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs had always been a clockwork enterprise with an infallible staff. The Ministry of Truth. The only government body that was always right – because it was the only one that knew what the correct standpoint was – and which used that monopoly mercilessly against the unsuspecting Soviet citizen, and against the Soviet writer in particular.
When I probed a bit more deeply into the machinations of GlavLit, that Orwellian image proved accurate. The censor had neither face nor name. His or her identity consisted of a numbered code, accompanied by a single letter of the alphabet. There were no confrontations between the censor and the censored. Take, for example, the GlavLit agents at Moscow’s central post office. They entered the building by a back door and never went into the main hall itself; their working material (packages, letters, telegrams) was handed to them through a hatch. If in doubt, all they had to do was lift the receiver on a telephone with no dial and a messenger would arrive to take the suspect post to other ‘competent structures’.
Only after the curtain fell on the Soviet Union did some of the censors break their silence. Like the agents of the former KGB they, at least outwardly, were unremarkable, everyday people. Sitting beside them in the metro one would never have been able to tell them from other Muscovites. They solved crossword puzzles, pushed ahead of you in queues. But, deep inside, the censors considered themselves the standard-bearers of a society of illusions held upright for more than seventy years by their professionalism and dedication.
At a conference in 1993, Vladimir Solodin, deputy-chief of the Literature Department in the 1970s and 1980s, looked back on his career with GlavLit: ‘What was the central activity of GlavLit? GlavLit exercised control, both before and after publication, over every letter and image in the Soviet Union.’
Without GlavLit, Soviet totalitarianism would have been impossible. The censorship department routinely meddled in the design of driving licences, the lettering on swimming diplomas, the printed patterns on handkerchiefs, the instructions for using coffee grinders. It managed all of the Soviet Union’s paper supplies. In June 1922, Lenin had set up the Glavnoye Upravleniya po delam Literatury as part of the Ministry of Education, and gave it the task of ‘uniting all forms of censorship’.
In the early years, the office’s 326 employees barely dealt with the world of letters, simply because the number of literary works that rolled from the Soviet presses in the aftermath of the civil war could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. The GlavLit apparatus applied itself instead to tidying up government statistics and making them presentable. Thanks to the censors’ work, the figures on prostitution, criminality and vagrancy improved with each passing year, while suicide among the proletariat disappeared altogether. GlavLit did its best to eradicate feelings of dissatisfaction and danger: if a train derailed somewhere in the Siberian wilderness, if a mineshaft collapsed in the Ukraine, the censors saw to it that no one found out. The death tolls associated with earthquakes and floods were kept secret, and when there were complaints about a shortage of medicines in the pharmacies, GlavLit made sure the papers kept mum.
The censor referred to a checklist of taboos, kept up to date by regular circular. To the dismay of Maxim Gorky, then still in exile at the foot of Vesuvius, Lenin’s widow in 1926 added to that a list of hundreds of books which elicited ‘beastly or anti-social feelings’ – including the Koran, the Bible and Dostoyevsky’s noxious oeuvre. It was GlavLit’s job to physically remove these books from the libraries and make them ready for use as recycled paper.
In 1993, the sometime censor Solodin remained convinced that GlavLit had fulfilled a noble task. He quoted the first People’s Commissioner for Culture: ‘Censorship! What a terrible word! But to us, the words “rifle”, “bayonet”, “prison” or “state” are no less horrendous. They form the arsenal of the bourgeoisie. But we use the rifle, the bayonet, the prison and the state as glorious implements to destroy the old order. The same applies to censorship. No, we are not afraid to take firm action with regard to the purest of literature. For under the banner of literature, after all, and in sophisticated cultural manifestations, poison can be injected into the still-darkened souls of the burgeoning masses.’
Babel was one of the first to find out about this: from the 1926 edition of Red Cavalry onwards, scenes of plundering originally carried out by the Bolsheviks are ascribed to the enemy.
Konstantin Paustovsky needs fear no official intervention with Kara Bogaz: the book, after all, bears the seal of Maxim Gorky’s approval. GlavLit leaves the text unchanged in each subsequent edition, but rejects the illustrations. The pen and ink drawings of flamingoes and heavily laden camels in blurred outline used in the first three print runs are, upon closer inspection, ‘too impressionistic’. From the fourth edition they are replaced by illustrations clearer and more in keeping with the tastes and intellectual grasp of the masses.
Spurred on by the winds of popularity, Paustovsky receives permission to publish his ‘lyrical diary’: the notebook containing endlessly rewritten versions of The Romantics. Going by the revelations made by Dima Paustovsky shortly before his death, it would seem that the appearance of The Romantics in 1935 coincided with his parents’ divorce. The writer entrusted the task of editing this sensitive material to his wife Katya, who appeared in it herself under the name ‘Chatidze’.
‘The process of editing The Romantics represented the final contact between my parents,’ Dima wrote. At the time of the divorce he was ten years old. One senses that the family drama had a profound impact on the boy: ‘Throughout his life, my father closed himself off from matters concerning the emotions. In my younger years I was never able to go to him with the questions with which I struggled.’
Katya had discovered that the fleeting romance between her husband and the artist Valeria Vladimirovna in Georgia in 1923, which he claimed to have experienced ‘in a purely literary sense’, was rekindled ten years later. And not in a purely literary sense. In the winter of 1933, when Paustovsky encountered his former lover, she turned out to be a single mother who had left Tbilisi for Moscow, where she enjoyed a certain celebrity as an actress. Valeria’s son Sergey was in Dima’s class at school, and their parents’ chance rendezvous had taken place at some school event. Like the protagonist of The Romantics, Paustovsky found himself once again torn between the ‘child of nature’ Chatidze (his wife) and the sophisticated actress Natasha (in this case, Valeria). He took refuge in a new commission to write about the draining and dyking-in of a swampy delta along the Black Sea coast; Colchis: Land of the New Argonauts is about Soviet engineers who cultivate the stretch of coastline where the mythological Jason and his band had once searched for the Golden Fleece.
Colchis appeared in 1934 in a yearbook edited by Maxim Gorky, who – as Paustovsky remembered it – passed only one comment on the piece: ‘Geraniums are neither petit-bourgeois nor trivial; they are the favourite flower of the urban poor.’
While Gorky was dealing with Paustovsky’s drainage story, Katya was working on the final edit of The Romantics. In the text she would come across sentences such as: ‘Chatidze began to laugh and kissed me passionately, no longer the way a girl would but the way a young woman does.’ In cutting superfluous elements, Dima claimed, his mother never allowed personal grievances to play a role. She was exhausted by years of encouraging and supporting her husband. She had not yet turned forty, but her straight hair – often worn in a bun like a ballerina’s – was already showing wisps of grey. Once The Romantics had been sent to the printer, however, Katya’s pent-up grief boiled over at last: she mustered all her resolve and threw her husband out of the house. Dima stayed with her, while Konstantin moved in with Valeria and her young son.
Paustovsky’s latest literary successes, as well as the turbulence in his private life, coincide with a new, Victorian prudishness in Soviet letters. In an order issued on 26 November 1934, the censor is told that ‘explicit descriptions of sex organs, immoral behaviour or unhygienic conditions’ are no longer to be tolerated. Lusts and urges must make way for asceticism and reason; the fictional person of the Party official need not conduct a life of celibacy, but he is always to hold higher moral ground than do the masses.
This new directive has an almost inconceivable impact. It not only means that obscenities are taboo from now on, but also that they must be cut retrospectively from all Soviet publications. A resounding success such as Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, which first appeared in 1925 and has since been reissued time and time again, must be comprehensively revised. In post-1934 editions, the rough-and-ready workmen who have returned from the front to rebuild a ruined cement factory speak to each other in refined terms. Lines of dialogue like ‘Stupid bastard! Do you think with your head or with your dick?’ have become inconceivable.
During the early 1930s the GlavLit workers endure a period of squeamish uncertainty. Thoroughgoing as the Soviet censors may seem, they are themselves at the mercy of shifting and sometimes contradictory directives. The confusion only increases when Socialist Realism (‘the most progressive form of art’) supersedes the avant-garde. Contrary to its name, the avant-garde is no longer to be depicted as the vanguard of the arts. In the place of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, Gorky’s collective work Belomor is advanced as the new touchstone for the fine arts.
But, both writers and censors wonder, what exactly is Socialist Realism?
‘It is Rembrandt, Rubens and Repin in the service of the working masses,’ the editor-in-chief of Izvestia says. Other, equally vague descriptions make the rounds. Socialist Realism, according to one commentator, is ‘the art of faithfully depicting mankind: both how he is and how he should be.’
To establish clarity once and for all, Gorky summons all recognised Soviet writers and poets to Moscow in the late summer of 1934 for the inaugural meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers. The conference, which lasts for sixteen days, is held in the baroque Pillar Hall – the ballroom close to the Bolshoi Theatre where the nobility had until 1917 tripped the light fantastic.
From their seats of honour, French, Danish, American and Japanese fellow-travellers witness how the delegates rise to their feet again and again to deliver applause and sing ‘Arise, ye workers from your slumber/Arise, ye prisoners of want…’
‘Our foreign guests are currently in a time machine,’ runs the welcome. ‘They are viewing the country of the future, the foundations of a new world.’
Moscow in these years is a noisy construction site where old symbols are being replaced by new. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour has only recently been dynamited to make way for the Palace of Soviets; the salvaged marble is being reused in the new metro system. Celebrated shopping streets that converge at Red Square like the spokes of a wheel are being broadened into boulevards. Parades featuring floats or Soviet armour must be able to pass through, and so the wrecking balls flatten buildings for kilometres around.
In this half-razed metropolis smelling of mortar, the Soviet writers have decided to revamp literature as well. In seven hundred pages of minutes, clerks record the more than two hundred speeches. Beneath the chandeliers in the Pillar Hall, the air is filled with electricity. ‘We Soviet writers consider ourselves privileged to live in the most heroic age in world history,’ is how one of the six hundred delegates characterises the mood of the day.
From all corners of the country, congratulatory telegrams flow in, each producing waves of applause as it is read aloud.
Moscow’s Young Pioneers offer their own tribute: they march across the stage, beating drums and singing. A delegation of kolkhoz farmers strew flowers, while Red Army marine reservists proclaim that the writers are their ‘brothers in arms in the struggle of the working class’. Even the metro workers, who are constructing Okhotny Ryad station immediately below the Pillar Hall, put in an appearance. They surface during their lunch break to parade around the conference floor clasping their drill bits and sledgehammers.
Chairman Maxim Gorky is applauded so often and so enthusiastically that more than once he feels the need to intervene. ‘Enough, enough!’ he shouts in his famously gravelly voice.
Gorky does his best to foster a feeling of ‘us-against-the-world’. In one speech he lashes out at Western literature; James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Luigi Pirandello, none of them are worth anything, for they do not take to the barricades. ‘Western Europe’s bourgeoisie are determined to exterminate all dissenting opinion,’ Gorky warns. ‘We, on the other hand, have no bourgeoisie. Our government leaders are our teachers and friends, comrades in the fullest sense of the word.’
One of those comrades, Politburo member Andrey Zhdanov, is dispatched to the conference by Stalin himself. A thin-browed Party ideologist wearing a clipped moustache, this Kremlin adept has been appointed to expound upon the Soviet Union’s new literary doctrine. ‘Comrade Stalin has called you the “engineers of the soul”,’ Zhdanov tells the conferees. ‘But what does that mean? What responsibilities does that place upon you?’
Stalin’s messenger admonishes the Soviet writers to abandon ‘the romanticism of nonexistent heroes who temporarily divert the reader from his unhappy life and spirit him away to an imaginary world’. That is the function of art in a mordant, bourgeois world: to maintain the status quo by lulling the public to sleep. The Soviet artist, on the other hand, fine-tunes the human spirit in order that it may awaken and focus its gaze on socialism.
Zhdanov quotes from the draft statutes of the Writer’s Union to show how this ‘Socialist Realism’, the guiding principle in Soviet art, should be defined: ‘It is the authentic representation of reality against the background of the revolutionary development of the Soviet Union.’ To the audience that sounds reasonable, and when he goes on to say that novels and poems must henceforth contribute to the ‘ideological education and training of the people in accordance with the socialist principle’, no one objects either. The occasional speaker does wonder aloud what this means for creativity. ‘Is it not the engineer’s highest calling to invent something new?’ And what will happen to the talent of the writer who feels obliged to mingle with farmers or construction workers in order to portray their ‘heroic lives’?
‘I would not mind trying something like that,’ declares Yury Olesha from Odessa. ‘But it’s not my theme. I don’t have it in my blood.’
Gorky does not take umbrage at Olesha’s independent-mindedness; the Party, he claims, is not out to dictate to writers what they must do, merely to offer them the opportunity to teach each other. ‘To teach in the sense of sharing experiences. That is all. No more and no less than that.’
Amid ‘wild applause’ (the minutes say), Gorky announces that the Politburo has allocated one million roubles to a newly created literature fund, LitFond. Those funds are earmarked for the construction of a ‘writers’ laboratory’: a village of dachas in the hilly forests west of the capital, not far from the meandering Moskva. Along a network of sandy paths, twenty-four wooden two-storey houses are to be built. This settlement, Peredelkino, named after a nearby 15th-century monastery, is billed as the world’s first state-supported writers’ colony.
‘Stalin’s cherry orchard,’ the writers say, with a nod to Chekhov.
Pasternak, Babel, Pilnyak and the Polish author Bruno Jasienski are among the first of the favoured. When they move into their new dachas, the colony still reeks of resin and freshly sawn logs. To his mother in Brussels, Babel writes about the joys of country life: the timely lighting of the hearth to ward off the freezing evening air, the drawing of water from the well, the absence of telephones. On summer evenings the writers gather in their untidy gardens with their wives and children; they play volleyball or grill pork shashlik over a bed of coals. Those who do not feel like writing in the afternoon can plant fruit trees or read on the veranda. Or push a wheelbarrow full of manure, stopping at every garden fence to exchange news. The dacha has always embodied the Russian ideal of freedom; that was the case in Pushkin’s day, and that remains the case in today’s post-Communist era.
Traditionally, most dachas for the government and senior military are located in the Moskva valley, a few kilometres past Peredelkino, but the dyed-in-the-wool politician Lev Kamenev is given a house in the new writers’ colony. Gorky’s dacha, on the other hand, is located in the middle of the colony inhabited by the Party bosses. This interwovenness allows the Kremlin elite to keep an eye on each other and on the liriki. Kamenev is on good terms with many of the writers, while Gorky in turn has known the grey-haired old men from the Party’s upper ranks since before the Revolution.
The carefree life in the dachas at Peredelkino, however, turns out to be deceptive. During the very first summer, in 1935, nasty weather begins brewing on the political horizon. The writers never see Lev Kamenev and his wife Olga, Trotsky’s sister; their log cabin remains empty. Kamenev, it turns out, has been arrested during the massive round-up following the December 1934 murder of Leningrad Party leader Sergey Kirov. The newspapers soon refer to Kamenev as the instigator of the assassination. Along with another Old Bolshevik, he is said to have been plotting a ‘Trotskyite coup’ – with the bullet fired at Kirov as its starting signal.
In Pravda, Gorky demands that the real culprits be executed (‘with no heed paid to the oohs and aahs of the professional humanists’), but is convinced of Lev Kamenev’s innocence. Kamenev is Gorky’s deputy on the board of Academia, the publishing house responsible for scientific publications of socialist persuasion.
Isaak Babel, who along with his wife Antonina has been assigned the dacha next door to the Kamenevs, asks Gorky what has become of his neighbours. Gorky suspects that something has gone awry, that Stalin is suffering from ‘Caucasian suspiciousness’. He arranges a tête-à-tête with the Kremlin leader and asks him directly: why such a huge wave of arrests among old campaigners? Gorky is aware of the opposition in the highest circles to the programme of forced industrialisation, and dissatisfaction concerning the widespread famine. But to claim – as the indictment puts it – that Kamenev works for Trotsky, or even for Hitler, is taking things awfully far.
He counsels Stalin to exercise prudence: ‘Think of what your future biographers will say!’
For the first time, Gorky’s meddling backfires. Apparently he has stepped over an invisible line. In irritation, the Georgian in the Kremlin accepts no phone calls from him for months on end. In a sardonic editorial in Pravda, Gorky is referred to as a ‘weak-kneed liberal’, rather than the traditional ‘Father of Soviet Letters’. Is this a mere shot across the bows, or the opening salvo in a public smear campaign? At the zenith of his fame, Gorky feels he is powerful enough not to have to tolerate such treatment. He decides to return to Italy, in order to reconsider his rapprochement with the Soviet authorities. But Stalin is not about to surrender his prize: he refuses Gorky an exit visa.
Abruptly, the influential chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers finds himself a prisoner in his own country and in his own home, though one wonders whether he ever noticed the latter: Pyotr, his personal secretary, has been recruited by the intelligence service and sees to it that certain letters no longer reach his master. In this way he protects Gorky from ‘harmful contacts’ with the foreign intellectuals whose criticism grows ever louder as the proceedings against Kamenev and his ‘Trotskyite-terrorist cells’ assume increasingly grotesque form.
The hearings are held in the Pillar Hall, converted for the purposes of this spectacle into a huge courtroom. A British diplomat, present as an observer, is amazed by the ‘bloodthirsty tirades delivered by the prosecutors’. He notes that the ‘prosperous proletarian, the new aristocrat, like his blue-blooded predecessor, has come to this ballroom in order to be entertained’. In his view, the counsels for the prosecution blend fiction and fact: ‘They let themselves be carried away by creative pride, by the zealous accuracy with which they correct each other concerning details that exist only in their own imaginations.’
In conversations with the French writer André Malraux, Babel notes that the show trials are making a deep impression on the common people. The melodramatic, ghastly accusations, followed by the self-castigation of the accused (who, as though drugged, make the most absurd ‘confessions’), provide the worker with an identifiable enemy, a scapegoat he can blame for the maddening shortages of milk and sausage and other necessities. ‘Stalin,’ the whispered comment goes, ‘cannot give the people bread, so he gives them games instead.’
In early 1936 Babel visits the exhausted Gorky in his villa on the Crimea, where he is wintering as an alternative to Mediterranean Sorrento. The two men speak gloomily of the impending sea change in the country’s cultural policies, of which Dmitri Shostakovich looks set to become the first victim. Pravda has lambasted the composer for producing what the newspaper calls ‘a nervous, contorted and hysterical cacophony… chaos rather than music’. One phrase in the article (‘this performance could lead to a dire end’) actually seems to constitute a personal threat.
Gorky has no idea who has ordered the musician to be harassed in this way, or why. As Stalin’s adviser and confidant on cultural matters, he has not been informed, let alone consulted. The old man of Soviet letters realises he has been put out to pasture.
When Gorky returns to Moscow at last, the official line is that his health prevents him from fulfilling his duties. True enough, his tuberculosis has caused so much physical damage by 1936 that all he can do is lie in bed, sweating and panting. Stalin visits him like an old friend, as though nothing has passed between them. Doctors in white coats come and go, produce preparations from their Gladstone bags and administer powders and tonics, but all the patient can do is gasp pitifully for air.
Writing has become impossible, and so he dictates his final words: ‘End of story, end of hero, end of author.’
His powers of speech desert him too, but he continues to read the newspapers, even if only for half an hour each day. To guard against the 68-year-old writer becoming overwrought on his deathbed, GlavLit prepares doctored editions of Pravda intended exclusively for Gorky. All potentially disturbing reports are carefully excised from this one-copy print run. This proves no mean feat: until now, all of GlavLit’s experience and expertise has been aimed at fooling the masses, not a single individual. It is as though the censorship organ is being put to the supreme test: can GlavLit also work to order?
The official editor seconded to Pravda puts in long hours. First he must read all the copy. Are there shocking reports? Veiled formulations which might be too much for Gorky’s weak heart? And if so, is there other news with which this can be replaced? A typesetter waits in readiness to lay out the special page; in the early hours, after the standard edition has been printed, no one is allowed to go home until that page has rolled from the presses and been folded into a presentable Gorky edition. One such custom-edited edition has been preserved: an article about Gorky’s impending death on the front page of the national edition has been substituted in his personal Pravda with an article of equal length about favourable projections for the coming harvest.
And so Aleksey Peshkov the Bitter dies on 18 June 1936 – holding in his hand a lie packaged as the Truth.
The summer of Gorky’s state cremation is exceptionally warm. The immurement of his urn in the Kremlin wall – witnessed by 800,000 Muscovites – takes place on the first day of dacha season. Those apparatchiks who have not left for the Black Sea coast seek refreshment along the Moskva. A ban on fishing and boating has been imposed for the first time, but everyone goes for a swim instead. On 19 August, only a few dozen kilometres as the crow flies from the picnics and amusement, Lev Kamenev is brought before the court in the Pillar Hall and condemned to death. His wife Olga and their two sons are sentenced to hard labour in separate camps.
LitFond calls a meeting to discuss a new function for the empty dacha at Peredelkino, and decides to convert the house into a guest residence for visiting writers and poets.
In the spring of 2001, when I visited, I found the Kamenevs’ sturdy log cabin perched on the lip of a gaping pit. The sandy path beside the green fence was shored up with slabs of concrete and blocked by a white barrier. I was shocked by what I saw: in the heart of Peredelkino – a cultural-historical monument by common consent – five villas were being built on a recently cleared plot. It was a Sunday, but the colony was swarming with Uzbeks and other labourers hefting fifty-kilo sacks of cement from the back of a lorry.
‘OrgKomStroy Building Here,’ I read on the contractor’s sign. Behind the mirrored glass of a nearby hut, I thought I saw a foreman.
‘What exactly is OrgKomStroy building here?’ I posed my question through a metal air vent and must have sounded annoyed, if not downright indignant.
A man’s voice came from behind the blue-tinted pane in which I could see only my own reflection: ‘Try looking around: kotidzhyi.’
I looked up at the work in progress. Of course: cottages! Cottages were the country houses of the New Russians. They had nothing in common with life in the dachas. Not simply because these cottages were built of stone rather than creaking wood, or because the rickety garden fences had been replaced by metal garage doors with electronic control panels. Nor was it the difference in size (five dachas would fit in a single cottage). No, what distinguished the cottage from the dacha was the mentality of the owner. The nouveaux riches allowed their children to play on the closely clipped lawn under video surveillance, for fear of kidnappings and extortion. They kept no dogs that barked when strangers entered the garden, but thugs with blatant pistol bulges under their jackets. Cottages were built in the Dallas or Dynasty style, invariably with illegally acquired (sometimes public) funds; they favoured expensive cars and even more expensive women. They were gruesome little fortresses, grimly fenced in, sometimes complete with mediaeval battlements. In the 1990s, at the loveliest spots along the roads out of Moscow, cottages had multiplied miraculously. A careful observer would have noted plenty of half-finished constructions among them. In such cases the prospective cottage owner had either gone bankrupt or, often enough, fallen victim to a reprisal within the cottage-owners’ social circles.
I turned back to my Peredelkino map, a sheet of paper showing which writer had lived where. This was Vishnevsky Lane, was it not? And plot number 3, wasn’t that the one opposite the hut? A cement mixer stood there now on a levelled patch of ground. ‘What happened to Babel’s dacha?’ I shouted through the air vent.
The invisible figure inside said he didn’t know the people who used to live here, he’d only had this job for a year.
‘Isaak Babel,’ I insisted. ‘The writer. His dacha must have been over there.’
The cubicle reacted in annoyance: ‘There is a dacha over there!’
And, lo and behold, fifty metres further along, hidden behind a metal fence, I saw the outlines of a little wooden house with a veranda. But it was clearly not Babel’s, his dacha had been taller, with a steeper roof and a dovecote at the top. Although there was no one home, slippers made from old car tyres were lined up in front of the door; apparently this was where the Uzbek labourers slept. My map had been correct: Babel had lived in the middle of the levelled construction site; not a single plank or nail of his dacha had survived. The idea that neither the foremen nor the Uzbeks had any regard for what had happened here, simply because the name Babel meant nothing to them, left me depressed.
The creator of the immortal tales of Odessa had been one of the last they came for, in 1939, when the wave of terror was already past its peak. In the early hours of 16 May, a ‘black marusha’ containing two NKVD officers left the Lubyanka. The intelligence service did not employ vans with barred windows for its more chic arrests, but a Chaika with cloth or leather upholstery. The two men first dragged Babel’s wife, Antonina Pirozhkova, a tunnel-construction engineer, from her bed in Moscow. They drove with her out of town, along the motorway to Minsk and turned left at the exit to Peredelkino. When the sedan turned onto the sandy track leading past Lev Kamenev’s former dacha, Babel was still asleep.
Antonina entered through the kitchen, the two agents following her. ‘At the door to Babel’s bedroom I stopped and wavered,’ she wrote later in At His Side. ‘One of the men gestured to me to knock on the door. I knocked and heard Babel’s voice: “Who’s there?” – “Me.” He pulled on some clothes and opened the door. The two men pushed me aside and walked straight up to Babel. “Hands up!” they ordered, then they frisked him. […] We had to go into the other room, my room; we sat beside each other there and held hands.’
What she did not know – but the NKVD did – was that Babel, during a visit to Berlin, had started an affair with the wife of the chief of the intelligence service. Barely three weeks after Babel was whisked off to the Lubyanka, and more than six months before his execution, LitFond submitted a request to the NKVD: they asked whether ‘the sealed dacha temporarily allotted to the writer Babel’ could be freed for use by the next candidate in line.
Like Babel (a Jew with connections in France and Belgium), Pilnyak (a Volga German) sees his arrest coming from a long way off. The flamboyant Pilnyak is not even surprised to find himself the first of all Peredelkino writers to be spirited away in 1937.
If anyone has exposed himself to suspicion, after all, it is he: Boris Vogau ‘Pilnyak’ has travelled abroad extensively, visited Japan on two occasions and, during a trip to California, paid for by the Hearst publishing concern, allowed himself to be contracted by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood. He is the only resident of Peredelkino to own an American-bought Ford. GlavLit and the intelligence service have been monitoring him since the 1920s, and although his hydraulic-engineering novel The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea made up for earlier indiscretions, Pilnyak has been plagued ever since by the image of the untrustworthy sycophant. He has friends all the way to the Kremlin, but in these times they offer no protection whatsoever. On the contrary: those who have flown too close to the glowing sun of power fall to the purges by the score, dragging others down with them.
During the sweltering summer of 1936, Stalin sends a telegram from the resort town of Sochi on the Soviet Riviera. In it he orders the discharge of secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, stage director of the show trials of Kamenev and his accomplices. The reason: Yagoda is said to have started ‘four years too late’ with tracing and eliminating anti-Soviet terrorist cells. His fall prompts a far-reaching reorganisation of the nation’s intelligence services, top-down and bottom-up. Regardless of the medals they wear, the secret agents disappear one by one into a man-eating machine of their own design. Yagoda, along with Gorky’s private secretary Pyotr, are now themselves interrogated, tortured and condemned, in particular for the murder of Maxim Gorky, whose end they had purportedly hastened with the help of the physicians in their sterile coats.
While the Pillar Hall is once again being transformed into a judicial arena, Stalin records his speech about the USSR’s new constitution on gramophone at Melodiya Studios outside Moscow. He continues to acquire disciples at home and abroad, who insist that the Soviet system constitutes the ultimate rule of law. The French poet Louis Aragon wonders aloud whether ‘the new Stalinist constitution does not deserve pride of place among the costly treasures of human culture, even ahead of the noble works of Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Goethe and Pushkin’. He speaks of ‘glorious pages dealing with the labour and joy of 160 million people’. Along with the introduction of the new constitution, Stalin announces that the USSR has passed through the stages prescribed by Marx and that now, in this momentous year of 1936, has become the first country in the world to achieve a state of true socialism. A celebration is called for. The Kremlin leader orders gigantic placards, each bearing a single letter of the alphabet, to be affixed to the wall of the GUM department store, opposite Lenin’s mausoleum. The proletarians charged with the task work at a frenzied pace, and when they are done the sign reads: LIFE HAS BECOME MORE CHEERFUL.
GlavLit is busier than ever. Not that more manuscripts are being submitted, but the organ has been assigned an additional task: removing from circulation all works praising those government officials and generals who – having been unmasked as ‘pariah dogs’ or ‘accursed reptiles’ or ‘ruthless bandits’ – are now in the dock. Yagoda, for instance. A painting showing the opening of the Belomor Canal portrays him – with his square little moustache and bald head – on the forecastle of the steamship Anyokhin… standing beside no less a figure than Stalin. To avoid having to order a new painting, GlavLit brings in a restorer who expertly covers the former comrade in a layer of oil paint. But Yagoda, already convicted and executed, is not about to allow himself to be censored out of history that easily. As the ‘Monster of the Lubyanka’ he had made an almost ineradicable mark on Soviet life; it was due in part to his efforts that Gorky was convinced to return from exile in 1928. In Belomor, Gorky in turn portrayed Yagoda as a hero. Both the special edition intended for the Seventh Party Congress and the mass-market edition for the general public mention the secret service chief by name. He, after all, was awarded the Order of Lenin for his supervision of the excavation work and his re-education activities. GlavLit is confronted with a dilemma: they must either scrap Yagoda and ‘his guardians of the Revolution’ from the record, or ban Belomor completely.
They decide to ban the book. In the spring of 1937, therefore, the collectively laid cornerstone of the new Soviet literature, the very foundation of Socialist Realism, disappears from libraries and bookshops. The hefty tome, forerunner of an entire shelf of hydro-literature since its publication three years earlier, vanishes without a ripple.
Boris Pilnyak realises that his participation in the Belomor excursion no longer speaks in his favour. His only consolation is that twelve other Belomor veterans live at Peredelkino as well. Is it wise to keep a copy in their homes? The answer is no. Once GlavLit has blacklisted a title, its possession becomes illegal the very same day. Such a formality one is better off not ignoring: a copy of Belomor found during a search, after all, implies that its owner worked covertly for Yagoda and the rest of his fifth column.
Pilnyak lives in a state of constant agitation. ‘Anyone can be accused of Trotskyism at any moment,’ he tells a poet friend. ‘Anyone who doesn’t agree with Pravda’s main editorial is a Trotskyite. You and I, too, are Trotskyites.’
Pilnyak writes his final novel. Not for the public at large, but ‘for the bottom drawer’. Or, to be more precise, for a strongbox buried in the garden of his dacha. The book describes the revolutionary period 1905–1917, and bears the title The Salt Shed. Whenever he has finished a few pages, he hides them in the box, whose exact location is known only to Kira, his Georgian wife. Even his neighbours, Boris and Zinaida Pasternak, know nothing of his secret.
In 2001, the dachas of both the Pilnyaks and the Pasternaks seemed on the verge of collapse. From what had been the sandy track, covered in asphalt now, it was obvious that what they needed was not a dab of paint, but a radical renovation. The two gardens had become overgrown patches of woodland, and where they met a path of trodden peat dust led through an opening in the metal fence.
On the asphalt behind me a bus came shuddering to a stop. A woman in a beret climbed down and took a few steps in my direction. When I saw that she was about to open the garden gate, I spoke to her. There could be no doubt: Svetlana Semyonova lived with her husband and children on the ground floor of Boris Pilnyak’s writer’s cottage. The soul of hospitality, she insisted that I come in… the house, however, was such a mess… if I would please be so kind as to ignore that…
Svetlana Semyonova’s house was, indeed, a terrible mess. When I asked whether she was a writer, she nodded enthusiastically. ‘My husband and I rent this house from LitFond.’
Did LitFond still exist?
‘It certainly does! They act like an exclusive estate agency, with a list of the very best properties.’
It was hard to absorb Svetlana’s torrent of words while taking a good look at the interior. I discovered a few details (the mahogany ceiling, the spacious, U-shaped veranda) that demonstrated this must once have been an elite dacha. But proof positive of the prestigious status of Soviet writers, Svetlana said, was the gas tank in the boiler room. ‘Installed in 1935. Imagine that: central heating in 1935, while the rest of Russia was still living in the Middle Ages.’
I asked whether she had found any of Pilnyak’s personal effects in the house. She thought about it for a moment, then held up a finger and gestured to me to follow her outside. Crossing a plank bridge, she led me to a marshy spot covered in butterbur. Or at least I thought it was butterbur. But Svetlana shook her head: no, this was something else. The fantastical leaves of this plant were even larger, at least a metre across. ‘My husband and I call it “elephant ear”, because we don’t know what it is either. Pilnyak brought it back from one of his journeys – it’s something exotic from Japan.’
I recalled the box containing The Salt Shed, which may once have been hidden just here beneath the ‘elephant ear’. Kira had dug up the almost-completed typescript in the 1950s, after she was released from a women’s camp in Kazakhstan. She had been sentenced to ten years’ labour for being the ‘wife of an enemy of the people’.
Her neighbour, Zinaida Pasternak, had witnessed the arrest. In her memoirs she says the two writers’ families often visited each other. That is what they are doing on 27 October 1937, the day Boris and Kira Pilnyak celebrate their son’s third birthday. The Pasternaks arrive late in the afternoon to extend their best wishes. They have barely sat down at the table when a black marusha pulls up at the house. ‘A soldier got out,’ Zinaida writes. ‘An acquaintance of Pilnyak’s apparently; they were on first-name terms. The soldier’s name was Sergey, and he apologised to Kira and the guests; he had to take the man of the house to town for “certain matters”, but he would be gone for no longer than two hours.’
The morning after the interrupted birthday party, Kira comes running up the garden path, pale with fright. ‘She stammered something about Boris being arrested and their house being searched all night. Kira couldn’t get over the fact that Sergey, who had actually addressed her husband by his first name, hadn’t shown him the orders for his arrest. The coward, she said, had lied to her husband to get him to go along.’
From their bedroom window the Pasternaks can see the shed where the NKVD is storing the writer’s confiscated effects. That includes Pilnyak’s typewriter, a Corona, later to be admitted as ‘incriminating evidence’ during the trial.
Immediately after the charges (spying for Japan, plotting of terrorist activities) are read to him, the prisoner asks for and receives a sheet of paper. On it he writes: ‘I have been asked whether the NKVD was right to arrest me, and my answer is: yes, they were right.’
Pilnyak refuses to believe, however, that he is about to meet his end. ‘My life and actions show that I was a counter-revolutionary, an enemy of the existing civil order and of the current government…’ By accusing himself he takes a great deal of work off the hands of the NKVD interrogators. ‘After my first stay in Japan, I allowed myself to be recruited as a Japanese agent and have performed acts of espionage.’
This ‘confession’ dates from his first day of interrogation, 2 November 1937, and has been preserved in a blue folder marked: ‘Case-14488. Pilnyak-Vogau, Boris Andreyevich.’ As the synchrony of history would have it, it is in that very same week that two of the northern Gulag camps (Belomor and Solovki) are disbanded. The remaining population of 11,000 souls, about whom no personal dossiers exist, only a list of names, disappear naked and with a bullet in the back of the head into shallow graves in the forests of Karelia.
‘Should this arrest prove purely a lesson to me,’ Pilnyak concludes his plea, ‘in other words, should I be allowed to live, then I shall consider this a miraculous lesson to draw upon by living as an honest man for the rest of my days.’
But Pilnyak does not get off the hook that easily. During subsequent interrogations he is grilled about the nature of his subversive activities, and about the involvement of other writers. Caught up in the ecstasy of his confession, Pilnyak speaks of his ‘Trotskyite deeds’. By way of example, he cites the story ‘Tse-Che-O’ written in collaboration with Andrey Platonov. The subversive aspect of that story, Pilnyak admits, is their suggestion that ‘the locomotive of state will not reach the final station marked “Socialism”, because the brake of bureaucracy has caused the wheels to melt’.
On 20 April 1938, Case 14488 goes to court. The trial lasts from 17.45 to 18.00 hours. ‘Do you admit your guilt?’ Judge Ulrikh demands.
‘Yes, fully,’ Pilnyak replies.
And does the accused wish to make a final statement?
He does. ‘My imprisonment has made me a quite different person. I want to live and work. I would like to have paper of my own on which to write something useful for the Soviet people.’
But Judge Ulrikh (as always) will not be swayed, and sentences Boris Vogau Pilnyak, writer, to the ‘ultimate sanction’. With a few resounding blows of the gavel he declares the sentence ‘irrevocable’ and orders its ‘immediate implementation’.
According to a signed order in the blue folder, NKVD lieutenant Syevelev carried out the execution the very next morning.
Now GlavLit swings into action as well. Pilnyak has any number of titles to his name: from the novel of the Revolution, The Naked Year, from 1920, to more recent publications including Listen to the March of History and The Future Belongs to Socialism, the Future Belongs to the Soviet Union, the Future Belongs to Us! From Vladivostok to Murmansk, they must be withdrawn from libraries and destroyed. With The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea, which has already been translated, Gorky’s hydraulic engineering series loses yet another title, but so it goes.
LitFond settles the final detail: in 1938 the Pilnyaks’ dacha is awarded to more loyal talent.
Unlike GlavLit, which did not deal in goods or services, Lit-Fond outlived the Soviet Union by adopting a market-oriented course. In 1993, Svetlana Semyonova and her husband had been able to rent the ground floor under the still-subsidised allocation system.
‘If we had waited another two years,’ Svetlana explained, ‘Lit-Fond would have charged the new commercial rates. And those are prohibitive for Russian writers.’
I asked whether, while walking around her garden, she had ever wondered exactly where Pilnyak had buried his strongbox? Had she ever felt the urge to start digging, in the hope of finding other treasures that may have been left behind?
‘Oh no!’ Svetlana burst out laughing, then reached up to adjust her beret. ‘I wouldn’t dare.’
‘Wouldn’t dare?’ I marvelled. But it was her garden, wasn’t it?
Things were not that simple. The tenant of Pilnyak’s dacha explained that, although the entire plot went with the house, she could make no claim on the ground itself. ‘Come, let me show you something.’ We walked along a hedge of royal fern, past a child’s swing hanging from a branch, a half-hidden picnic table.
‘Have you seen the new kotidzhyi, up behind here?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They remind me of cruise ships: big and ugly.’
‘And luxurious,’ Svetlana added. ‘Do you have any idea what a four-hundred-square-metre plot of land costs in Peredelkino these days? Fourteen thousand dollars!’ She paused at a recently ploughed-up corner of her garden. The ground was harrowed by tyre tracks. Here and there lay the copper-coloured remains of uprooted ferns. The fence had been flattened, and the first construction materials were already sitting beneath a sheet of black plastic.
‘LitFond,’ Svetlana said resignedly. ‘We have no idea what they’re planning to build. But my husband and I have decided not to ask, let alone complain.’
‘Why not?’ I asked naively.
Svetlana stared at the muddy tracks. How could she explain? ‘Pilnyak was murdered because he was a nuisance to the Soviet leaders,’ she said at last. ‘But these days you can get shot for a lot less than that.’
Of the some forty-odd authors to whom Stalin had raised his glass at Gorky’s villa in October 1932, eleven did not survive the purges. Among them was Georgi Nikiforov, the bold writer who had proposed not to drink another toast to Comrade Stalin’s health.
During the period 1937–39, the idyll of Peredelkino was disturbed seven times by the arrival of NKVD special squads. For the Pole Bruno Jasienski, once received so enthusiastically after being deported from France for communist agitation, there was apparently no room within the Soviet literary constellation. The fact that he was the only foreigner to be awarded a dacha in the writers’ colony made no difference to the intelligence service. After his execution, his novel Man Changes His Skin, about the construction of irrigation channels along the Amu Darya, was banned for being subversive literature – less than four years after it was published.
And so Gorky’s hydraulic engineering library continued to dwindle. Even the most recent contribution, From Crime to Labour, concerning the building of the Moscow–Volga Canal, was swept into oblivion, along with its author, Leopold Averbakh. The warning issued by Andrey Platonov in The Epifan Locks, that large-scale waterworks elicited large-scale terror, proved correct. But the fact that Platonov did not possess a Lit-Fond dacha – he was not even a member of the Union of Soviet Writers – did not cause him to be overlooked by the NKVD. In May 1938, uniformed men turned his apartment upside down. It was not the writer himself, however, they took into custody but his 15-year-old son, Platon. Because an air rifle was found during the search, the boy was accused of being one of the ringleaders of a terrorist youth gang. His case was heard, and he was sentenced to ten years’ forced labour in the nickel mines at Norilsk. Father Andrey wrote a desperate letter to the NKVD (‘the confiscated air rifle belonged to me, not to my son’), but no one was interested in arguments like that.
And what about Paustovsky?
As long as Gorky was around, Paustovsky felt safe. In 1936, despite his close call over the filming of Kara Bogaz, he dared to agitate publicly against the censor: ‘A writer must write in order to live, the way other people must eat. But we are faced with a treacherous choice: either to write what is expected of us, or to write for the desk drawer.’ In early 1936 these sentences could be published in Gorky’s magazine Our Achievements, but they were not reprinted in later anthologies and special editions.
Characteristic of the rapidly approaching cold front is the ending of Story of a Life. Paustovsky abruptly breaks off his six-part memoirs at the year 1935. There is a final meeting with Gorky, they talk about botany and the difference between writing prose and poetry, and the scene at their parting is almost Biblical: ‘He [Gorky] placed his big hand on my shoulder and patted it. Keep up the good work! Live on as you have begun.’ Paustovsky is forty-three and has another thirty years to live. Yet after 1936 he never committed any more memories to paper. Not even in diary form, ‘for the desk drawer’.
After Gorky’s death, Paustovsky maintains a low profile. In late 1937, corresponding privately with his editor, the Estonian Genrikh Eichler, at the Young Guard publishing house, he writes: ‘Although my work meets with great good fortune, I feel dejected.’ What is worrying him is the public campaign against Pasternak, whose poems are said to be riddled with ‘formalism’ and ‘obscurity’. ‘In this country it seems to be the bastards who inspire confidence,’ are the words with which Paustovsky ends his letter.
Eichler does not reply: someone has reported him as being a spy for Hitler, a German masquerading as an Estonian, and he has been banished to a penal camp on Kazakhstan’s Hunger Steppe.
Paustovsky must have been horrified. A similar loss, after all, had befallen him earlier that year. His colleague Sergey Budantsev had asked him to contribute to a hydraulic-engineering book entitled The Great Waterways of the Soviet Union. Paustovsky replied: he would be pleased to provide a chapter, but the timing was problematic. If he delivered his text in April 1937, would that be soon enough? That letter never received a reply either: Budantsev had been banished to Chukotka Peninsula on the Bering Strait.
For Paustovsky, the terror comes one step closer with the arrest of Boris Shumyatsky, the Minister of Cinematographic Affairs who spirited away the film reels of The Black Maw.
Things being as they are, he does not dare to decline any official commissions. He knuckles down conscientiously, therefore, to writing a book about Marshal Blyukher: a publication with which the Red Army plans to pay tribute to one of its greatest living heroes. Paustovsky has barely begun, however, when Blyukher’s name suddenly appears in the newspapers: on 11 June 1937, Pravda reports on the court martial in which he has personally signed the death warrants of seven fellow field marshals and generals. Must Paustovsky include this fact in his biographical sketch? And if so, should it be cited as the most recent of Blyukher’s heroic deeds, or should he mention it only in passing?
In this case, it is comforting to him to know that GlavLit will review the text prior to publication. The publisher, Politizdat, is, after all, a stickler for detail. Paustovsky pilots his text safely past the rocks, and in the spring of 1938 Marshal Blyukher is honoured with the appearance of a serious biography by an established writer. But six months later Pravda reports that Blyukher too has been unmasked as a spy. Worried friends contact Paustovsky as soon as they hear the news: ‘Now they’ll be coming for you, too!’
With Valeria, whom he married in 1937, he hurriedly leaves Moscow for the forests of Meshora, where he plans to lie low until all this has blown over. GlavLit organises a search-and-destroy mission for copies of the Blyukher biography, which must not be allowed to become a cult book commemorating this disgraced military leader. But on this occasion no one thinks of hunting down the biographer as well.
In 1939, the terror ebbs away, the final victims being those who Stalin feels took part too fanatically in the purges.
But GlavLit does not slacken the reins. In fact, a new directive in 1939 states that a close watch is now to be kept on all carrier pigeons (and their keepers).
An internal report dealing with GlavLit’s achievements in 1938–39 has been preserved. During that period, the document states, the central censorship organ retrieved 7,806 ‘politically damaging’ works, written by 1,860 different writers. An additional 4,512 titles were recycled, being of ‘absolutely no value to the Soviet reader’. In total, this involved the pulping of 24,138,799 books.